The Health IT Accelerator (H.I.T. Accelerator), designed to grow health care IT companies in the Cleveland region, is being launched today by BioEnterprise in partnership with a number of Cleveland region health care, research, and medical payer organizations.  The novel platform for emerging companies recognizes the growing interest in and opportunities for IT entrepreneurs in the health arena.

"The H.I.T. Accelerator is a new approach to growing the region's health IT companies.  It harnesses the expertise of the region's health care leadership to assist emerging companies," said Baiju R. Shah, President & CEO of BioEnterprise.  "The focus is on assisting companies by providing them access to customers and business advice, putting them in a better position to continue to grow their ventures."

It is a dark time for the TV rebellion. Although legions of cord-cutters have abandoned their cable subscriptions, Hollywood troops have driven the early TV-technology startups from their hidden Silicon Valley bases and pursued them across the Internet. Evading the dreaded cable and satellite companies, a group of freedom fighters led by Boxee, Netflix, and Roku have established a new secret base inside their set-top boxes. The evil lords Comcast and Time Warner Cable, obsessed with choking off à la carte Internet TV, have dispatched thousands of TV Everywhere testers into the far reaches of the suburbs …

Okay, maybe ripping off the opening crawl from The Empire Strikes Back is a cheap way to sum up the current situation in the Internet TV galaxy. But you have to admit there are some nice parallels.

A new, self-titled mobile health app from Duet Health is designed to promote patient adherence and help doctors better communicate with patients.

The driving force behind the app was the idea that patients forget 80 percent of what doctors tell them during office visits, Duet Health CEO Jeff Harper told Columbus Business First.

“The time spent reeducating patients is a significant drain on resources across all healthcare, and our mobile tools are designed to act as an additional guide through each patient’s course of care,” according to Duet Health.

One prominent biotechnology venture capital researcher says the concept of the early stage funding valley of death is an “artifact” and actually a reflection of the classic supply and demand.

Many entrepreneurs, investors and life sciences industry veterans take the existence of the valley of death almost as an article of faith. The meme goes that young companies enter that valley, in which attracting investment capital becomes extremely difficult, at an early stage, typically between an initial round of angel funding and the company’s first institutional series A round.

Not so, the managing editor of bioscience venture capital research firm OnBioVC tells Pharmalot.

Innovation.  It’s the buzz word that I hope won’t get overused or abused.  For the past few years, we have heard how it’s the driver to grow a business and the economy as a whole.  And, while that is true, “innovation” is not so novel.  In 1982, the federal government took a progressive, bold step and mandated set-aside funding for innovation in US small businesses.  Since then the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program has been a launching pad for competitive small businesses with big ideas to solve tough problems.

Annually, the feds invest about $2.5B in US small businesses to carry out R&D with a goal of commercialization.  At any given time, there are about 6,500 active SBIR projects working to overcome a critical problem that has been identified by the federal government.  In other words, all those R&D projects are not “technology push” ideas looking for a market.  Quite the contrary, the federal government has done the market research and is positioned itself to be the ultimate customer for the technologies being developed or has identified industry needs the SBIR company can address.

A forthcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research by Professor Michel Tuan Pham, Kravis Professor of Business, Marketing, Columbia Business School; Leonard Lee, Associate Professor, Marketing, Columbia Business School; and Andrew Stephen, PhD ’09, currently Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, finds that a higher trust in feelings may result in more accurate predictions about a variety of future events.

The research will also be featured in Columbia Business School’s Ideas at Work in late February 2012. In the research, the researchers conducted a series of eight studies in which their participants were asked to predict various future outcomes, including the 2008 U.S. Democratic presidential nominee, the box-office success of different movies, the winner of American Idol, movements of the Dow Jones Index, the winner of a college football championship game, and even the weather. Despite the range of events and prediction horizons (in terms of when the future outcome would be determined), the results across all studies consistently revealed that people with higher trust in their feelings were more likely to correctly predict the final outcome than those with lower trust in their feelings. The researchers call this phenomenon the emotional oracle effect.

Ronald J. Daniels said his success as president of Johns Hopkins University will depend on the success of East Baltimore Development Inc., the $1.8 billion, 88-acre community revitalization project near Hopkins East Baltimore medical campus.

“If EBDI fails, then my presidency at Hopkins fails,” he told the board of the Baltimore Development Corp. yesterday.

Fortunately for his presidency, Daniels thinks EBDI will be successful. “I think this past year was a banner year to stand back and see cranes and activity happening” north of the campus.

Lack of confidence in your self, your product, and your startup is a surefire recipe for disaster. At the other extreme, too much confidence or arrogance can kill you just as fast. It’s always painful when a startup fails, but as a mentor to founders I would hope that you can learn from these failings and not stumble on the same issues:

“Business plans are for dummies.” Some startups think business plans are only for investors. In reality, you should do a business plan primarily for yourself, as it forces you to think through all the elements. If it’s not written down, you can’t measure it, and thus you can’t manage it. Also written plans are much more effective communication to your employees, lawyers, accountants, and other key players in your rollout.

You’re a Canadian businesswoman, let us say, with a brilliant idea for a high-tech startup. All you need is a year in Silicon Valley – time to network, sell the concept, raise capital and gain liftoff.

Only one problem: You can visit, but you can’t stay. U.S. immigration officials won’t let you.

Enter Blueseed, an enterprise that is the brainchild of two immigrants to the United States, Max Marty from Cuba and Dario Mutabdzija from the former Yugoslavia. They hope to launch America’s first experiment in seasteading, the creation of permanent, politically autonomous floating cities.

It takes about 15 minutes after your first whiff of tech startup success to receive the following proposition on weekly repeat:

I don’t have the money or expertise to turn my brilliant website idea into the next big thing, so I was wondering if you knew anyone who might build it for equity.

You don’t of course. Given the high volume or Zuckerberg-envy fueled ideas and low barriers to entry for creating their minimum viable prototype, any web developer or VC would be bonkers to back a founder unwilling to gather the necessary resources for getting it off the ground. No track record or traction? No dice. And that’s how it should be.

But what if you got far enough to understand where you should go next – dare I say, ‘pivot’ – just as you ran out of resources? Investors still don’t see the all-important traction necessary to jump in. Incubators are cliquey versions of the same, and your team could use some rounding out regardless. Somebody with an eye for scalable ideas on the brink of success must have the tools and talent to pull it off. That’s where Brand Knew has found its niche.

Kickstarter is off to a running start this year. As Alexis Madrigal reported, the crowdfunding platform saw its first two million-dollar projects in one day, within four hours of each other, and a third reached that benchmark this past Monday. Earlier this month, people on the site pledged more than $1.6 million in a 24-hour period, more than doubling the previous record, which had been set the day before. Now, Carl Franzen of Talking Points Memo is putting that cash flow in perspective. He reports that the company is expecting to bring in $150 million in funding total this year -- more than the $146 million provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency charged with supporting the arts (many Kickstarter initiatives are art projects of one kind or another).

It was once considered sage to observe that ‘All Roads lead to Rome’ –  indicating that all paths or activities lead to the centre of things regardless of the startpoint.

In the case of the Cambridge technology cluster and its evolution, all roads lead back to the university.

If that appears to be stating the obvious, the routes by which technology businesses have emerged from the university and the manner in which they have negotiated the road to commercialisation are many, varied and have often been complex.

It is also important to remember that Cambridge University brainpower dates back over eight centuries and its inventions and knowhow were impacting on the way people live and work long before there were identifiable – let alone sophisticated – business networks or communities.

The ingenuity of inventors never ceases to amaze me. Whether it’s Post It notes, zippers or velcro, our lives have been greatly influenced by inventors and their inventions. But how does a modern inventor get their product to market? There are several ways.

Market Via Your Own Website

For the inventor who wants to keep as much of the profits as possible, selling direct is the way to go. However, selling on your own website can be hard. Here is a sample of all the things you’ll encounter:

Setting up the site – This involves buying a URL, getting a hosting package, installing a CMS like WordPress yourself or hiring a web designer to set up the site for you.

My camera has an auto focus button on it, a perfect gift for the amateur photographer. Once I turn this feature on, I can point the camera on the person that I want to photograph and get a clear shot.  At first, however, it’s blurry. So, holding the camera steady, I wait a second. Once the camera has time to focus, I get my shot and I can share it with friends and family whenever I want.

In business, we’re a lot like that camera.

Starting a new business? Grappling with doubt and anxiety? Trying to squash the worry gremlin that appears daily, thrusts his leering face at you, and spits out the biggest concern of all, “Do you really think you’ll be able to support yourself doing this?”

Add the lack of support from family members and the poor economy and you get nervous jitters, sleepless nights, and a growing sense of uncertainty. You aren’t alone. As a rule, first-time entrepreneurs are beset with questions they have no answers to, from morning till night, day after day.

As a co-founder of five startups and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, David Feinleib has seen both sides of the startup world.

From 2009 to 2011, he was a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, where he got his fair share of terrible pitches.

He's also an entrepreneur. He's sold two startups, Consera (to HP) and onDevice (to Keynote Systems), and is still running three others he cofounded: Speechpad, Onepo.st, and Likewise.

Having a high-stress job can definitely take a toll on someone's mind and body. Especially if you're running an entire company.

Most CEOs get up early and they're passionate about their jobs so it makes sense that they need a stress-reliever to completely free them of all work-related worries.

Mayor Jim Watson this morning joined co-chair Jeff Westeinde and local entrepreneurs to officially open Invest Ottawa, the flagship of the City’s $5.5-million annual economic development strategy.

Invest Ottawa, which replaces the Ottawa Centre for Regional Innovation (OCRI), will foster start-up enterprises, attract new investment, and help existing businesses located in Ottawa expand beyond our borders. While OCRI was established in 1983 to leverage the emerging high-tech industry, the development of Invest Ottawa re-focuses the organization on further developing knowledge-based sectors such as green energy, defence and security, photonics, digital media, film and television, and life sciences.

“One of my priorities in this mandate was to establish Invest Ottawa to help attract more investment and foster greater economic growth in our nation’s capital,” said Mayor Jim Watson. “Recent headlines surrounding public service job losses underscore the need to diversify our local economy, and Invest Ottawa is going to help us do just that. Invest Ottawa is a clear commitment to inspire more entrepreneurs to build our prosperity to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.”

When it comes to Michigan's future, forget the "new economy" and the "old economy." Instead, focus on the "next economy."

That was the message as Business Leaders for Michigan presented its blueprint for an urban strategy that aims to boost the state's economy by focusing on 14 metropolitan areas. The efforts would build on Michigan's manufacturing base, expanding the green business sector and established export market.

It's a strategy that veers away from the emphasis on the "knowledge economy" that came with high technology, as well as initiatives to diversify Michigan away from manufacturing, said Doug Rothwell, CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan.

Congratulations! You've been promoted. You're a global leader in the new R&D organization. This is exciting since you've been sweating the outcome of the long-impending transformation for over a year. The good news is that you will lead a global team spanning three continents. The bad news is that your drug development function will be spread across four global centers of excellence, and some of your colleagues will lose their jobs or be transferred.

You begin to formulate an inaugural summit in Singapore to launch the team and determine your priorities. Then the other shoe drops: Travel budgets were slashed as part of reorg, and the new global teams are expected to operate virtually. You take a deep breath. And then you ask yourself, "How can I drive a faster, cheaper, more innovative approach to drug development — asking people to take risks and behave in new ways — if I can't meet with my team to build the relationships and trust?"