Socialance is a startup out of London that has moved to Santiago, Chile, for six months. The reason for the move is pretty straightforward: Start-Up Chile is giving the company $40,000 without taking any equity stake. And the rent is relatively cheap.

Start-Up Chile, which was here at Disrupt San Francisco, has attracted about 500 companies to its startup program since 2010. The program ends its first phase in 2014. By then, it will have provided grants to 1,000 companies for a total of $40 million.

If you’ve got an idea for a creative project, launching a pitch on Kickstarter might be your best shot at getting funded. The site accepts and posts 75% of applicant ideas. And nearly half of these end up raising enough pledges to receive full funding. This is ideal for students and recent graduates with fresh ideas but low budgets. With project backers giving as little as $20 to projects, the incentives and interests of investors on Kickstarter are also younger and newer than anyplace else. The crowdfunding site (and others like it) is changing the way that small creative projects, startups and products are launched. Of the 28,000 projects successfully funded on the site in the past four years, the average funding goals were low—under $5,000. So, if you’ve got an idea for a new food truck, solo album or an app, consider testing it out on tens of thousands of Kickstarter fans.

The LaunchHouse Accelerator kicked off its inaugural program on September 4 with 10 technology startup companies eager to move to the next level. The program is funded through a $200,000 ONEFund grant and a $50,000 grant from Clarion Direct Investment. Each company will receive a $25,000 investment from LaunchHouse to grow their business.   “We’re quite excited,” says LaunchHouse CEO Todd Goldstein. “It’s changing the way investments are made in Northeast Ohio. With a little bit of capital we work with them to go from idea to validation.”

On Monday, Mayor Edwin M. Lee announced the opening of the Bayer HealthCare CoLaborator, an innovative shared lab for start-up life science companies in Mission Bay. Mayor Lee also announced two new biotech startups are relocating to San Francisco to be the first companies to locate in the CoLaborator: Aronora Inc. from Oregon, and ProLynx LLC from Hayward.

“I am thrilled to announce the opening of the CoLaborator that has already attracted two new life science companies to San Francisco, the Innovation Capital of the World,” said Mayor Ed Lee. “The CoLaborator will encourage the growth of innovative research companies and support startups that will be developing groundbreaking medical treatments, Mission Bay continues to grow as a hub of innovation, and Bayer’s leadership has strengthened this critical growth.”

Investors are people too. They evaluate you like you should assess a possible co-founder or first employee. What are your credentials? What have you done that would convince me that my money is safe in your hands? Only after they see you as fundable, do they want to assess your plan for fundability, not the other way around.

Even with great credentials, it is all too possible for an entrepreneur to come across as a high risk investment. Here are some “rules of thumb” that indicate a marketable and experienced entrepreneur:

This morning, I’m at Wayne State University in Michigan for Techonomy: Detroit, a one-day technology conference in a pretty unusual location for a tech event. The conference is focused on, among other things, the resurgence of technology and entrepreneurial activity in Detroit and other urban areas in the Midwest and elsewhere. Among the speakers: AOL founder Steve Case, Draper Fisher Jurvetson venture investor Tim Draper and Square and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

In the run-up to the 2008 financial meltdown, many top-tier business schools devoted themselves to pumping out a stream of Wall Street recruits. Babson College, ranked #1 in entrepreneurship by U.S. News & World Report, took a different path. “If you’ve been a school that’s used to producing people for Wall Street and those jobs have dried up, you’ve got lots of finance faculty members wondering, ‘What am I going to teach? What am I going to do?’” says Dennis Hanno, the newly-appointed Dean of the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. “I believe it’s nimbleness that we need to be able to create in our students. It’s not so much about how to manage, but how to create. And those skills…have been wholly lacking in a lot of graduate education. Creativity and innovation are where our energy is.”

The way we use computers has remained largely unchanged for nearly 40 years. Even with the advent of touch screens and tablets in the past 10 years, we have only experienced a slight modification of the familiar point-and-click paradigm.

Efforts to improve the user interface have largely focused on making the content of what can be clicked on, or typed into, more intuitive. Although this field of user-experience design has created operating systems, websites and devices that are ever more user-friendly, they still remain stubbornly tied within this traditional relationship between human and computer.

Amazon and Google made their competitors to the iPad smaller than Apple's tablet, with seven-inch screens (measured diagonally) as opposed to their foe's 10-inch display. Chip maker Intel today revealed it has decided bigger is better, demonstrating a desktop computer whose touch-sensitive screen detaches to become a whopping 27-inch tablet with a four-hour battery life.

"This system is intended to move around the house, for new experiences, uses, and collaboration," said Ernesto Martinez, a client innovation engineer at Intel who helped develop the prototype. "When you are working, it has all the features of a desktop. At the end of the day, you lay it down to play with the kids or take it to your room and hang it on the wall to use as a TV."

Some crowdsourcing competitions, like the X-Prize, ask people to come up with technological solutions to a problem. Marblar, a startup launching this month, is doing it backward—asking people to come up with problems that a given technology could solve.

Cofounded by three PhD students in the U.K., Marblar is a platform that aims to help universities commercialize new inventions and resurrect dusty old patents. The company is working with about half a dozen U.K. research institutions, such as the Medical Research Council and Imperial College London, to seed its website with discoveries. These range from a novel form of foam to a new kind of oxygen sensor to a probe that can drill into hard surfaces in new ways.

Although MarketWatch is theorizing a hiring boom may soon be in the offing, small businesses are likely to stay on the sidelines—at least, according to Office Depot’s latest SMB National Tracking Survey. The monthly poll of small business sentiment finds 80 percent of small business owners have no plans to hire in the next six months—a figure that has stayed pretty consistent throughout the year.

Just 12 percent of the small businesses surveyed plan to hire in that time period, while 8 percent plan to let staff go. Again, both numbers have remained fairly consistent throughout the year (in this survey; other surveys have indicated nearly opposite findings).

Especially in your early years as an analyst, all Wall Streeters can expect to pull all-nighters. Here's how it works. You're on an important project, and your boss realizes there's a mistake in the data, or the client pushes up a meeting, or you're just crashing on a deadline. Either way, time is of the essence, you have to finish a task ASAP, and you're not going home.

In a recent article in Slate magazine’s Future Tense project,  Pascal Zachary made a key observation about the strange estrangement of science from technology in U.S. policy when he wrote: Neither candidate will ask, for instance, why taxpayers spend some $30 billion annually to try to understand the basic causes of diseases but virtually nothing on delivering effective new medical therapies to the ill.

Recently the Obama administration announced a new pilot program to create an institute for public-private collaboration and innovation in additive manufacturing in Youngstown, Ohio. The new National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute will serve as a platform for collaboration for more than 40 U.S. manufacturing and technology companies, nine research universities, five community colleges, and 11 nonprofit organizations across the Ohio-Pennsylvania-West Virginia “Tech Belt.”

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, is a new manufacturing technology of increasing relevance across many industries and across the globe. 3D printers work in a similar way to standard inkjet printers, except that they can use materials like plastics, carbon fiber, or titanium to print 3-dimensional objects instead of 2-dimensional documents. With prices for the technology decreasing rapidly and quality on the rise, additive manufacturing presents great opportunity  for innovation in industries as diverse as aerospace, consumer goods, and medicine.

As we continue to move forward in restructuring our economy from the great recession, it is important to understand the phases of economic development in the U.S.  This infographic illustrates how the pace of economic development has continually accelerated since the beginning of economic growth in the country.

In the early days development was driven by raw material extraction.  Communities sprung up as wood, ore, silver, limestone and other materials were dug up or harvested and sent off to markets.  From the 1850’s to the 1910’s economic development was driven by increased manufacturing activity.  Communities formed near plants and at time the factories  even built the communities for their workforce. 

1. Pack On the Press

For us, the best way to build brand offline has been by engaging traditional media. Whether that means doing an interview for a paper or TV show about the topics that touch our business, or writing a piece ourselves for a relevant industry publication, it’s really worked wonders in building our brand and credibility — not only among older generations but among Gen Y as well.

Work is under way on several fronts to draft venture capital legislation aimed at creating jobs in the state. We support these efforts and wish them better success than the last stab at this important measure last year.

The effort should be bipartisan - and with any luck, it will be.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker has given the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. a mandate to build a broad coalition for the legislation. On the Democratic side, state Sen. Tim Cullen of Janesville recently held an informational hearing with financiers, entrepreneurs, government officials and others.

For some technologists, it's enough to build something that makes them financially successful. They retire happily. Others stay with the company they founded for years and years, enthralled with the platform it gives them. Think how different the work Steve Jobs did at Apple in 2010 was from the innovative ride he took in the 1970s.

A different kind of challenge is to start something new. Once you've made it, a new venture carries some disadvantages. It will be smaller than your last company, and more frustrating. Startups require a level of commitment not everyone is ready for after tasting success. On the other hand, there's no better time than that to be an entrepreneur. You're not gambling your family's entire future on what happens next. That is why many accomplished technologists are out in the trenches, leading and funding startups in unprecedented areas.

NAIROBI: Omidyar Network and Monitor Group announced on Monday the Accelerating Entrepreneurship in Africa initiative. The multi-phase research project will gather insights into the challenges facing African entrepreneurs and the barriers to creating an environment supportive of entrepreneurship. The initiative commences with a comprehensive survey of entrepreneurs in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. Subsequent phases of the research will lead to the formulation of recommendations on the critical policies required for entrepreneurship to thrive in these six countries. Monitor will present the results of the first phase of the research at Omidyar Network’s Entrepreneurship in Africa Summit in Accra, Ghana on October 10.

Monitor’s findings and the Entrepreneurship in Africa Summit are part of a week of events focused on creating and celebrating high-impact entrepreneurship on the continent. The week begins with ON Baraza, Omidyar Network’s annual gathering of its portfolio organizations in Africa, and culminates with the African Leadership Network’s annual conference and the 2012 Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship.

Boston.com launched a new website Tuesday that aims to be a one-stop destination for news, information, and resources related to Massachusetts’ innovation economy.

Called The Hive, the site covers start-ups, the venture community, and pioneers in sectors ranging from medicine to technology, through local reporting, video series, and a curated feed of news and ideas on innovation and entrepreneurship from around the Web.

“We’re building an exciting model that sorts out the signal from the noise in the innovation community around Boston,” said Hive editor Michael Morisy. “It’s about start-ups, but it’s also about university research, the established tech companies, the services that work with these firms, venture capital, the events around town -- the whole ecosystem. If you want to know what matters most today in this space, that’s what we’re going to provide.”