In the technology world, big companies that buy smaller ones often will map out dozens of potential acquisition targets.

Why shouldn’t the start-ups and their investors be able to size up the potential buyers?

Now they can. Investment banker Terence Kawaja, who previously published the somewhat-infamous charts showing how 1,240 companies in online advertising connect to each other, this time ginned up a “strategic buyer” chart of the 160 largest “relevant buyers of digital media start-ups,” arranged by their propensity for striking deals, among other attributes. (Click here to go to Mr. Kawaja’s website and download the chart, or scroll down to view it.)

Northeast Ohio is home to an emerging bioscience industry that includes hundreds of locations and supports more than 21,000 jobs, a new report released this week states.

Well-established companies such as Mentor-based Steris Corp., along with younger and growing companies such as Cleveland HeartLab, are all part of the expanding industry that now includes more than 700 locations in Northeast Ohio, according to BioOhio, a non-profit organization based in Columbus that promotes the bioscience sector. 

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., which Gov. Scott Walker has tasked with reviving investment-capital legislation for the 2013 session of the state Legislature, has determined three reasons this year’s proposed legislation failed.

Ryan Murray, Walker’s former deputy chief of staff who was named WEDC chief operating officer by the governor in July, was to present a memo Thursday to the quasi-public development agency’s board citing the following:

• There was no consensus in the stakeholder community behind a single proposal;

Congress’s two tax-writing committees, the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, held a joint hearing Thursday to discuss capital gains taxes and how they might be reformed.

Like what you see? Click here to sign up for Accounting Today's daily newsletter to get the latest news and behind the scenes commentary you won't find anywhere else. Currently capital gains are taxed at a maximum of 15 percent, compared to the top rate of 35 percent on ordinary income. Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the process of reforming the nation’s tax system must include a comprehensive review of the rates on capital gains to find a level that sparks broad-based growth, creates jobs and strengthens the economy.

With VCs like Sequoia and Nexus Ventures pouring money into India’s startup scene, it was only a matter of time before those focused on early-stage funding would follow. Today, GSF India, in partnership with some 30 other investors including Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, announced a new initiative called GSF Accelerator. Set to take off this October, GSF Accelerator will be mentoring and offering seed funding of reportedly up to $550,000 to 12 tech startups across Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, four in each city.

“There is no reason that Indian entrepreneurs cannot create the next Instagram, or the next Twitter, or the next Inmobi,” says Rajesh Sawhney, the founder of GSF India and former president of Reliance Entertainment. GSF also operates GSF Superangels, an existing network of Indian entrepreneurs who mentor startups and will also be involved in this effort.

No question about it… they’re very good at what they do. But they don’t take well to orders, especially those to carry out inspection work in oily or dangerous environments, or in any kind of harsh environment, for that matter. Still, they’re one of the fastest and most maneuverable creatures on the planet, having extraordinary abilities at both high and low speeds due to their streamlined bodies and a finely tuned muscular/sensory/control system.

This impressive creature is the humble tuna fish.

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is funding the development of an unmanned underwater vehicle designed to resemble a tuna, called the BIOSwimmer™. Why the tuna? Because the tuna has a natural body framework ideal for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), solving some of the propulsion and maneuverability problems that plague conventional UUVs.

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program stimulates technological innovation in the private sector by strengthening the role of small business concerns in meeting Federal research and development needs, increasing the commercial application of federally supported research results, and fostering and encouraging participation by socially and economically disadvantaged and women-owned small businesses.

A series of webinars will be held to answer questions about the current Phase I solicitation (NSF 12-605, due date of December 3, 2012) and the submission process.

If you want to strengthen your abdominal muscles, you can do sit-ups. Tone your upper body? Push-ups. To flex your intellectual muscles, however, or boost your children's academic performance, the answer is less clear. An exercise to stretch memory, tighten attention and increase intelligence could improve children's chances of coasting comfortably through life—and give adults a leg up as well.

The very notion flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Most people presume that no matter how hard they work, they are not going to get any smarter. Some subjects in our research laboratory, though, have increased their IQ scores after training their brain for as little as three weeks. The improvement can be significant enough that, anecdotally at least, a few participants

FAIRLESS HILLS, Pa. — Last month, Gamesa, a major maker of wind turbines, completed the first significant order of its latest innovation: a camper-size box that can capture the energy of slow winds, potentially opening new parts of the country to wind power.

But by the time the last of the devices, worth more than $1.25 million, was hitched to a rail car, Gamesa had furloughed 92 of the 115 workers who made them.

“We are all really sad,” said Miguel Orobiyi, 34, who worked as a mechanical assembler at the Gamesa plant for nearly five years. “I hope they call us back because they are really, really good jobs.”

In times of economic turmoil, new firm creation is often thought to act as an important driver of innovation and jobs. And recently released data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) indicates that Australia is emerging as the leading developed nation in terms of entrepreneurship.

According to the latest GEM figures, with 10.5 percent of adults engaged in starting a new business, Australia sits second amongst developed nations. The United States, long seen as the bastion of free enterprise, continues to do many things right. In fact, at 12.3 percent the U.S. has the highest overall level of entrepreneurship per capita. Yet recent years have seen a dip in alternative employment opportunities in the U.S., meaning that a much larger number of new businesses are borne out of necessity. Although recovering, opportunity driven new ventures that fuel the economy declined substantially with the global economic slowdown. By comparison, Australia has far fewer necessity driven entrepreneurs.

If there is blue blood in Silicon Valley, it runs through the veins of Adam Draper. As a fourth-generation member of venture capital's greatest dynasty, he has a curriculum vitae that includes getting bounced on the knee of investing legends like William Henry Draper III, his grandfather.

Adam is now 26, a dropout from his senior year of college and part of a new entrepreneurial generation for whom everything runs faster and a little looser. That explains why, when I was about to press "Send" on a story about his latest venture—a fascinating challenge to the venture capital industry his family helped to build—he did a pivot on me.

It's easy to remember one username and password. Keeping five or 10 straight is much harder. Password overload has long afflicted techies, but as we all spend more time doing everything from shopping to banking to playing games on the Web, it's become a more widespread problem.

A number of companies are trying to combat the problem. Approaches range from password managers that secure your login details with one master password to methods that eliminate the need for multiple passwords in the first place.

A 2007 study by Microsoft Research explored the strength, frequency, and usage of passwords belonging to 500,000 computer users. The study found that each person had an average of 6.5 passwords that they used for 25 different online accounts—meaning each password was being recycled about four times.

Inside an 18,000-square-foot warehouse in Halfmoon, New York, a town north of Albany, a researcher gingerly lifts a photovoltaic cell from an oven, its glass backing shimmering with an ultrathin coating of exotic metals.

This particular solar technology—based on a material called copper indium gallium selenide (often called CIGS)—is a clear underdog in the marketplace. With a supply glut depressing the  price of panels made from crystalline silicon, the dominant technology in solar, CIGS is still too expensive per watt of output to compete (see "The Bright Side of a Solar Industry Shakeout").

NEW DELHI, INDIA: As India is emerging as one of the vanguards in innovations and creativity, the National Innovation Council has set aside Rs. 5,000 crore fund to facilitate talent. This, coupled with mega fiber rollout at grass-root levels by 2014 could be staggering for innovators.  

The Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) today organized an international conference on ‘Towards a Better Innovation Ecosystem’ in collaboration with the department of Science and Technology and National Innovation Council, and supported by the CyberMedia’s research (CMR) wing.

Moving towards an initial public offering often seems like a great idea. It allows founders, employees, and investors to cash out, and is a significant source of new funding.

But there's a downside too, according to a working paper from John Asker and Alexander Ljungqvist of NYU's Stern School of Business and Joan Farre Mensa of Harvard Business School—and it goes beyond the  possibility of an embarrassing Facebook or Groupon style collapse.

The other day I read an email from Sally Hogshead of Fascinate, Inc. regarding the link between flaws and influence. According to her, it is your flaws that set you apart. This got me thinking about all of the people I know who worry about their imperfections. Could that worry be wasted time?

Well, I submit that spending time concerned over your flaws is time lost. Let’s face it, we are all flawed. No one is perfect.  We all make mistakes, fail to get things done, and let things slip. I believe it is all a part of life, especially in this fast paced world we are living in.

Tablet computers aren’t the first piece of technology to disrupt the industry: since the 1980s we’ve seen considerable advancement from computers the size of rooms to the one I’m clutching and writing an article with, on the train home from work. Twenty years ago we could never have envisioned that mobile phones would shrink to the size they did, and then elongate to the size they’re currently at.

Companies that have faced this disruption have either evolved or become extinct while whole industries have formed in the wake of new ones. Human beings should be more intelligent thanks to the dropping price of access to technology and ubiquitous information. Tablets, however, aren’t the end of this evolutionary cycle: Google Glass presents a major shift as broadcast-able technology becomes wearable.

From representing hockey players, to painting classes in Italy to heading up high-profile Internet companies, Jordan Banks travels easily between different worlds. He’s now the managing director of Facebook Canada but his real skill in the Canadian technology community may be in creating ties between the people he meets. Like the connectors Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in his 2000 book The Tipping Point, being in Banks’ sphere tends to lead to wealth and opportunities. “I really believe that when you have the ability to interact with people that are community spirited and very intellectually curious and morally sound and you put these people together with no real ulterior motives, awesome things happen,” he says.

Before joining the social network, Banks, who admits the role of connector is “a bit of a natural” one for him and something he enjoys, did some early-stage investing in media and tech companies such as Well.ca, Polar Mobile, The Mark News and the music and pop culture site andPOP Inc. through his fund Thunder Road Capital. “He literally took us by the hand and brought us to meetings with other media companies and other people he knew,” says Robert Ostfield, CEO of andPOP Inc., who met Banks through an acquaintance. The two stayed in touch and Banks invested in the company in 2009. “I think that did a lot for us because we weren’t just a couple of young guys off the street… It was him saying, ‘I believe in what they’re doing and it makes sense.’”

I was extremely pleased to see Congress pass and the President sign the JOBS Act, which will loosen the IPO process for emerging growth companies. A lot of ink (or is that pixels) was spilled talking about how this bill will help the economy, but I want to dig a bit under the covers to explain why having a robust IPO market is so critical to innovation, even in light of the current indigestion surrounding Groupon, Zynga, and Facebook. To do so, one needs to understand how and why most mergers fail and why growth companies are uniquely positioned to drive innovation.

There are natural inflection points in a private company’s lifecycle which drive financing or exit decisions. As companies cross into the $10 million to $20 million annual revenue band, the entrepreneur and his investors have often been in the business for five or more years. Classic software companies, which used to get 80 percent of their revenues up front, grew to this point a little faster; SaaS companies, despite repeatable revenues and their popularity as a delivery model, grow a little more slowly.

If you have had some success in a business, I’m sure you bristle just like I do when someone says “You were just lucky…” I’m a strong believer that we all make our own luck, which means that the harder we work, the luckier we get. In reality, “hard work” is just a catch-all term for a list of principles that good entrepreneurs follow, allowing them to work smarter and improve their odds of success.

A short list of these “hard work” principles, published recently by Anthony Tjan in the Harvard Business Review summarizes them as heart, smarts, and guts. I agree with these, and most people recognize them when they see them in others, but the terms are still a bit abstract for learning purposes.