LOS ANGELES – It's a given that the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, is the technology capital of the world. Seven of the top 10 most-visited websites are based there, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Ask. But how does the rest of the USA fare for tech start-ups?

USA TODAY asked the National Venture Capital Association to rank the top 10 cities for start-ups, based on dollars invested in young tech companies in 2011. Brainiac-rich Boston ranked No. 2, followed by capital-rich New York City, entertainment-meets-tech Los Angeles and business-to-business Washington, D.C.

High rents in San Francisco and New York are making other parts of the country, where living expenses are lower, more attractive. Some of the hottest names in tech are building facilities elsewhere — including software maker Adobe in the Salt Lake City area, chipmaker Intel in Portland, Ore., and Apple in Austin. These areas are seeing strong job growth because of the "available talent and relatively low costs" of real estate, says Colin Yasukochi, director of market research for real estate services company CBRE.

You might have a great idea for a startup. You may be passionate, driven, and ready to go. But how ready are you to manage your risks?

Many startups fail because of ineffective risk management. So how do you avoid a similar fate? It all depends on how well you understand and manage your risks.

As the CEO of a company that helps organizations across the world build stronger and more integrated risk management processes, I’ve seen many startups misunderstand and underestimate their risks. Here are a few of the most critical ones:

Who is leading the world in innovation right now? Using the latest data from the ‘World Patent Report: A Statistical Review’ (2008), Grant Thornton has charted the new world powers in innovation. The infographic shows which countries have filed the most patents for each dollar of research budget – and which ones have had the most patents granted. The results may surprise you…

More than half, or 63 percent, of bachelor's degree holders are settling for a job selling T-shirts, cell phones, coffee, or fixing store displays, a new survey out today finds.

“The shaky economy has forced many (Millennials) into a world of underemployment,” says Katie Bardaro, lead economist for Seattle-based PayScale, Inc., a provider of on-demand compensation data and software. PayScale worked on the survey with Millennial Branding, a Boston-based Gen Y research and management consulting company.

Thousands of earthquakes occurring in rapid succession in less than a year under an Antarctic glacier may have been linked to ocean tides, new research suggests.

Scientists investigated seismic activity under David Glacier, a large glacier in East Antarctica about 270 square miles (700 square kilometers) in size. The glacier serves as the outlet from which ice from 4 percent of that region's ice sheet drains out toward the sea.

To learn more about the foundations and behavior of this glacier, the researchers analyzed seismic data gathered from there over a nine-month period between 2002 and 2003 by the Transantarctic Mountains Seismic Experiment array of 42 seismometers. They identified about 20,000 seismic events during this period that were stronger and lasted longer than the shaking typically seen with glaciers.

The next time you’re at cocktail party and someone says “Computing power doubles every 18 months,” jump in with this before they can qualify the statement:

“Actually, the 1965 Moore’s Law seems to be a special case of Wright’s Law, spelled out by Theodore P. Wright in a 1936 paper, ‘Factors affecting the costs of airplanes.’ In fact, Wright’s Law seems to describe technological evolution a bit better than Moore’s—not just in electronics, but in dozens of industries.”

Your interlocutors will gaze at you with admiration and wonder. Or, more probably, edge away and leave you in peace.

A new Santa Fe Institute (SFI) working paper (Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress, by Bela Nagy,  J. Doyne Farmer, Quan M. Bui, and Jessika E. Trancik)  compares the performance of six technology-forecasting models with constant-dollar historical cost data for 62 different technologies—what the authors call the largest database of such information ever compiled. The dataset includes stats on hardware like transistors and DRAMs, of course, but extends to products in energy, chemicals, and a catch-all “other” category (beer, electric ranges) during the periods when they were undergoing technological evolution. The datasets cover spans of from 10 to 39 years; the earliest dates to 1930, the most recent to 2009.

How often do you hear these kinds of phrases in your company? Or worse, how often do you say them?

• We already tried that; 
• it’ll never work. 
• Nothing’s wrong with the way we’re doing it now, so why rock the boat? 
• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Life in the world’s oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world’s leading marine scientists has warned.

The researchers from Australia, the US, Canada, Germany, Panama, Norway and the UK have compared events which drove massive extinctions of sea life in the past with what is observed to be taking place in the seas and oceans globally today.

Three of the five largest extinctions of the past 500 million years were associated with global warming and acidification of the oceans – trends which also apply today, the scientists say in a new article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Local farmers, business owners and chefs gathered in the Stamford Learning Accelerator at the University of Connecticut Stamford Campus Tuesday afternoon to learn about a plant that can be used for anything from food to biofuel, according to UConn professor Charles Yarish.

"Seaweed is a crop that can be used for a variety of things, and the best part is we can grow it right here in Long Island Sound," said Yarish. "Seaweed can be used as a table vegetable, a fertilizer, animal feed, a biofuel and can be used as a natural tool for fighting the effects of pollution in the sound by reducing nitrogen in the water. It's an amazing plant."

Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, is a preëminent figure in venture capital. He's been at it for 25 years: his first big deal was an investment in the Web community GeoCities, which Yahoo bought for about $3 billion in 1999. He went on to back startups including Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare. But from his successful perch, Wilson worries that his industry is in trouble.

Lately VCs haven't come close to generating the returns on their investments that made them stars in the 1990s. It's even becoming questionable what value they generate for society. IT companies are finding it cheaper than ever to get going now that they can rent computing resources from providers in the "cloud." Meanwhile, alternative funding mechanisms are proliferating. And because VCs often shy away from technologies that take a very long time to bear fruit, such as many in energy or biomedicine, some critics contend that VCs flood the world with too much money for ideas that don't solve big problems.

Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority (FRA) officially opens its new $8 million, 37,000 square-foot Accelerator Building today, adjacent to its original Incubator Building at the Bioscience Park Center (BCP) in the Fitzsimons Life Science District. The announcement is made by Steve VanNurden, FRA President & CEO, who says, "The addition of this Accelerator will offer companies growing in the Incubator an opportunity to expand and continue their expansion nearby."

The FRA's original Incubator Building opened in 2000 and now houses 35 companies in different stages of development. The expansion will enable companies to move into larger, long-term space. The new space includes:

Your company’s intellectual property -– from your logo to trade secrets -– can be just as valuable as physical assets. This is particularly true for digital startups. Yet, taking the necessary legal steps to protect your intellectual property can be costly and time-consuming, often burdening a young startup before it gets off the ground. It’s a delicate balance to determine what actions to take and when, but the following is a primer on the various types of intellectual property.

When you are not presenting to investors or your team, try to spend more time listening than talking. You can’t learn anything new while you’re talking, yet many entrepreneurs seem to never stop. It’s a sad spiral, since the more you talk, the less people really hear, meaning they don’t learn anything either. If someone left this article on your desk, read extra carefully.

Building a business is all about building relationships, and one of the most important elements of a relationship is effective communication. Communication doesn’t happen unless both parties practice the art of effective listening. Check to see if you are practicing the key disciplines of listening, as outlined by Brian Tracy in “No Excuses: the Power of Self-Discipline”:

There’s big talk these days about “big data” in education—looking for patterns of behavior as students click through online classrooms and using the insights to improve instruction. One start-up company that manages online discussion forums for thousands of courses recently performed its first major analysis of behavioral trends among students, and found what its leaders say amounts to advice for instructors.

The company, Piazza, shared the analysis with The Chronicle, without identifying any of the professors or students involved. The data set included online interactions among students and professors in 3,600 courses at 545 colleges and universities over a period of 18 months.

It was the second week of TechStars and I was doing office hours with each of the 11 teams going through the Boulder 2010 program. I was sitting across the table from Adam Wilson and Ian Bernstein who each looked tired and dejected. In front of them were three slides.

I asked them what was wrong. They said they were having trouble deciding which of three different products to pursue. They’d had a dozen meetings with different mentors and were getting wildly conflicting data, which we refer to in TechStars as “mentor whiplash” and is a normal part of the first 30 days of TechStars for every team.

Over the next six weeks, I will publish a post on each of the six shifts presented in my new e-book, Associations Unorthodox: Six Really Radical Shifts Toward the Future, created in collaboration with CHIEF. If you have not done so already, I hope you will download the e-book today. Also, please join me on September 26 from 2 pm-3:30 pm EDT for my webinar on the e-book, presented in collaboration with Peach New Media. As always, I invite your feedback in the comments below, or you can join the Associations Unorthodox conversation on Facebook or Twitter using the hashtag #auxsix.

The Problem

The commitment to growing membership lives within the DNA of all associations. Indeed, the phrase, “membership organization” may well be the most orthodox description of an association’s organizational identity. Without question, it is the operative mental model behind the preponderance of association business models, even when member dues are not a major revenue stream. Yet with sky-high stakeholder expectations for meaningful value, new forms of competition and unfavorable economic shifts putting pressure on established association lines of business, the traditional membership value proposition faces serious long-term challenges. For example, the enormous popularity and global reach of public social networks has altered forever the fundamental human experience of associating, making it simple and mobile, ubiquitous and inexpensive. Membership has become a pass-through, with the effect of commoditizing traditional “pay-to-play” arrangements. As a result, the membership and member centricity of their existing business models is an increasingly unsustainable burden for associations to carry into the future.

T he White House announced it plans to introduce the inaugural members of its Presidential Innovation Fellows program in a ceremony Aug. 23, at 10 a.m. (EDT) that will be streamed live on WhiteHouse.gov/live.

"This new initiative is bringing in top innovators from outside government to work with top innovators inside government to create real and substantial changes that will in a very short time frame benefit the American people, save taxpayers money, and help create new jobs," said U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Todd Park.

In mid-2010, the already frenetic Todd Park was in overdrive. President Obama had just signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the most significant reform of the American health care system since Medicare. It was Park’s job to figure out how government could use technology to make the law’s implementation as smooth and fruitful as possible. 

As the Health and Human Services Department’s first chief technology officer, Park had a broad mandate but not a lot of staff. The idea behind the new position, he says, was to act like a “lean startup” smack in the middle of a mammoth federal agency, pulling together tools and resources on the fly to meet a particular need. 

In this case, one of the tools Park decided he needed was Ed Mullen, a freelance Web designer in Jersey City, N.J. 

How much does the first hour of every day matter? As it turns out, a lot. It can be the hour you see everything clearly, get one real thing done, and focus on the human side of work rather than your task list.

Remember when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. You should too.

The ebb of Artic ice during the warm months of the year is expected to reach an all time low by the end of the summer. There will be 186,000 fewer square miles of ice than the previous lowest record, which was in 2007, according to BBC News, and the ice is expected to continue melting into mid- to late September.