Jim Breyer is Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalist, thanks in part to his lead investment in Facebook back in 2005. Outside of Accel, Breyer–who ranked #1 in the Forbes Midas list of top VCs, serves as a director at Dell, News Corp., Wal-Mart, Brightcove (online video platform, 2012 IPO), Etsy (crafty online marketplace) and ModelN (revenue management).

This June the billionaire, who with a net worth of $1.05 billion fell just short of making this year’s Forbes 400 list of the richest American, flew from California to New York to participate in The Forbes 400  Philanthropy Summit. In the video below Breyer discusses education reform,  lessons learned in the charity world and his system for investing in non-profit entrepreneurship.

Within the publicly funded City University of New York's (CUNY) Baruch College is one of New York's best kept secrets: The Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship.

Since it was founded in 1993 as the "Small Business Lab," with a grant from the CUNY Workforce Development Initiative, the Field Center has served New Yorkers by providing a myriad of resources for aspiring and existing entrepreneurs. The Center has served more than 16,000 businesses with advice, mentoring, and other related services. Its work has resulted in more than $110 million invested into the local economy. Additionally, the Field Center boasts that it has created or saved more than 5,500 jobs.

"Anyone can use the Center: students, entrepreneurs, anyone thinking about starting a business," said Monica Dean, Field Center administrative director. "We provide one-on-one counseling and loan packaging. We offer weekly workshops on topics such as business plan basics, marketing, financing. For students we provide access to internships, we host competitions, panel discussions and other special events."

Which countries are the world’s most frequent bit-torrent downloaders? According to a report by music analytics company Musicmetric, top honours go to the United States, with the United Kingdom and Italy holding second and third place. Round of applause, please.

Musicmetric’s recently released Digital Music Index is a study of the digital music landscape globally, that considers legal services (like iTunes, 7Digital and Spotify) and music sites (like Last.fm and SoundCloud) as well as the unauthorised bit-torrent downloads that pirates everywhere know and love. The company also tracked 750 000 artists to produce the report which spans from 2011 to 2012 (the bit-torrent stats were from the first six months of this year).

Concierge medicine for the masses. Computer-assisted psychotherapy.  A social networking-based application for making “cancer suck less.”  Those are just a few of the challenges being undertaken by the latest class of New York-based Startup Health, a health and wellness focused startup academy and community that launched in June 2011. With the newest class, the program would have 22 companies as part of its portfolio. The latest class reflects a growing diversity of markets, points out Unity Stokes, co-founder and president of Startup Health. From tele-health and physician engagement to social health information and managing health expenses, “we want to show the entire community what’s possible,” he said.  The program, which is chaired by former TimeWarner CEO Jerry Levin and co-founded by Stokes and Steve Krein, aims to create 1,000 sustainable businesses in 10 years.

The U.S. Small Business Administration and AARP will partner Oct. 2 to host the first National Encore Entrepreneur Mentor Day to promote entrepreneurship among individuals ages 50 and older. In events across the country, these “encore entrepreneurs” will be matched with mentors who have small business experience. SBA and AARP will provide training and mentoring services to older entrepreneurs who need to successfully start and grow businesses and create jobs.

AFTER A SUCCESSFUL KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN, THE LOWLINE DESIGNERS MOCK UP THEIR AMBITIOUS PROJECT TO RESCUE DISUSED INFRASTRUCTURE USING NASA-INSPIRED TECHNOLOGY.

In an abandoned warehouse on New York’s Lower East Side, a radical new kind of park is taking shape. Among the peeling paint and old neon signs advertising food, fruit, and meat, an intensive period of design development has yielded a prototype of the LowLine, an underground park whose name riffs off Chelsea’s now-famous High Line.

The High Line got us all thinking about how to reuse and reimagine underutilized and forgotten urban spaces. The LowLine takes that even one step further, inspiring cities around the world to conceive of even the least visible disused infrastructure as potential green space--in this case, a former trolley terminal. “If the High Line is a sand dune, the LowLine is the forest floor,” said James Ramsey, co-founder and lead architect behind the LowLine, an organization in its first year that already has run a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign and has the backing and partnership of many city officials, local community organizations, and corporate sponsors.

The clock is ticking, counting down to January 2, 2013—the date by which the US Congress must approve a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit by $1.2 trillion. If they fail, automatic budget cuts will be made at a variety of federal agencies, including those tasked with funding US life science researchers.

According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), such “sequestration” would slash the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget $2.529 billion, the National Science Foundation (NSF) would lose $586 million, and the Department of Energy Office of Science would be cut by $400 million.

Nearly a dozen local entrepreneurs gathered at the College of Southern Maryland in Leonardtown Tuesday to board the Startup Maryland bus and record video pitches for products and services. The Pitch Across Maryland Contest will use the videos to hold an online vote to select eight of more than 100 Maryland startups to make their pitch to potential investors and customers at the November Entrepreneur Expo

Buying something is different from renting it. That distinction is at the heart of the debate in a dozen states about how -- or whether -- to tax cloud computing services. In the old days (say, back in the 1990s) individuals or companies wanting to use software went to a store and bought a disk. That changed with the advent of downloadable software, but states ruled that downloads were still taxable purchases. The software may not have been sold as a physical item, but its code was still a tangible product consumers were taking possession of.

Building a new company, at best, is organizing chaos. Business plans evolve, unexpected market challenges and opportunities are revealed, and a steady flow of new team members add to (or detract from) the mission.

It's exciting, inspired, and full of small victories: the first customers who trust you, technology that actually works as expected, and outsiders talking about your pretty baby.

It's heart wrenching, ego busting, and full of failures: investors you can't convince, assumptions you get wrong, deadlines you blow.

For three years running, Menlo Park, CA-based Morgenthaler Ventures has organized a fall event called DC to VC, with a focus on the conditions for health IT innovation in an era of rapid healthcare reform. The 2011 edition of the DC to VC event was organized around a pitch competition called the Health IT Startup Showcase, and Morgenthaler is reprising the format this year, but will present it for the first time in conjunction with the big Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Today Morgenthaler released the names of the seed-stage and Series-A-stage finalists who’ll be pitching their company’s stories to judges on Wednesday, October 10, the final day of the conference.

You don’t necessarily have to have an office, or even a presence, in another country to broaden your global business knowledge and reach. Our infographic below shows that small business professionals live all over the globe. Get out there and meet these fellow SMBs by asking and answering questions in the Startups and Small Businesses Category of LinkedIn Answers and joining LinkedIn Groups. You can also find your peers (or mentors) by doing a LinkedIn Advanced People Search by title, company size and a whole host of other facets.

My big insight about innovation these days would make Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr, proud.

"Now that we have met with paradox," explained Dr. Bohr, "we have some hope of making progress."

Innovation is full of it -- paradox, that is.

On one hand, organizations want structures, maps, models, guidelines, and systems. On the other hand, that's all too often the stuff that squelches innovation, driving it underground or out the door.

Charlottetown, PEI, September 14, 2012---With the right investments, the Prince Edward Island Bioscience Cluster could be providing 1500 jobs and its 36 companies generating more than $200 million in annual revenue by 2015, says a new strategy for PEI’s bioscience sector released today at the PEI BioCommons Research Park.

Ron Keefe, Chair of the Board of the PEI BioAlliance and CEO of BioVectra, said that Cluster partners from businesses, research agencies, and governments are moving forward with the 42 recommendations contained in the Strategy that would effectively see a doubling of the bioscience sector’s economic impact over the next four years. “We believe that we can continue to build on the momentum we’ve gained over the past several years, with new expansions, new companies, new products, and new markets,” said Keefe. “This Strategy represents a synthesis of what we’ve learned together to be the essential ingredients for establishing an environment for high technology companies to be successful,” he said.

I go to China every four or five months for work. I have to visit all the corporate headquarters in Beijing and Shanghai, but the highlight of every trip is the day I spend at Hua Qiang Road North in Shenzhen. Pretty much every piece of electronics we use today is sourced and manufactured within 100 miles of Shenzhen, and Hua Qiang is the city’s electronics shopping district.

On my last trip, in July, I met a ‘procurement’ consultant, and he told me which of the 50 mega malls in the area to visit to buy tablets.

“Scope creep” (or feature creep) is an insidious disease that kills more good startups than any other, especially high-tech ones, and yet most founders (who may be the cause) never even see it happening. This term refers to the penchant to add just one more feature to the product or service before first delivery, just because you can.

The instigators are all well-intentioned – executives talk to potential customers who “must have” a few more things; or the technical team edicts some “technically elegant” options that they can’t resist adding before release. The result is a bloated first product which finally collapses under its own weight, or is too late and too expensive for the intended customer.

I’m sure we have all seen entrepreneurs with high levels of passion and confidence touting an idea that seems to make very little sense to us. Of course, we never see ourselves in this mode, yet we need to recognize that all humans see reality differently through a built-in set of “cognitive biases,” based on their own unique background of experiences, training, and mental state. These biases are good, in that they allow us to quickly filter and make decisions in the constant barrage of information we face each day, but bad because they often lead to errors in reasoning and emotional choices. The worst case is called the “passion trap,” where a pattern of beliefs, choices, and behaviors feel good and become self-reinforcing, but lead to disaster.

I recently returned from Brazil, the world’s sixth largest economy, where President Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist revolutionary, is using pro-growth incentives such as lower interest rates, proposed tax cuts and infrastructure investment to fuel her nation’s quest for sustained economic growth and help more Brazilians stand on their own two feet. That Rio will host the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in March 2013 is obviously important for Brazilians. It might be more important for the rest of world.

Most are familiar by now with Brazil’s success with winning bids for the soccer World Cup in 2014 and Olympics in 2016. You are probably not aware though of another global gathering earlier on the time horizon – namely that Rio won the bid to host the next Global Entrepreneurship Congress in March 2013 – a 125 nation brainstorm about how to wash away barriers to entrepreneurship and solidify the current wave of vibrant, informal networks of nascent entrepreneurs that are powering a new wave of startups around the world. Why you might ask in the scheme of things would that matter?

Entrepreneurs raising money too often attempt to shape investor risk behavior to their investment opportunity. Instead, shape your business model to match the needs of not only your customers but investors too.  Think creatively to find the solution which your customers will pay for—no matter how little the revenue is per customer—to craft your business model to match investors’ DNA to risk.  Design your business model and its execution to systematically attack each of their fears to early stage tech deals.