If you take a look at the Commerce Department's National Broadband Service map, you'll see that a lot of America still doesn't have a broadband Internet connection. It might look like sparsely populated areas, but in reality 28 percent of Americans don't use the Internet, according to the NY Times. A lot of times, as the article explains, it's not for lack of want: These people simply don't have access.

Only 68 percent of Americans have access to broadband, according to a survey of 54,000 completed by the Commerce Department. Some people in Thomasville, Ala. have had to resort to driving to their local library's parking lot to get a wireless signal. (The librarian took pity on them and now leaves the router on all night. If you need the password, it's posted on the library door.)

A reader asks: I have an employee who has gone onto Facebook and griped about my company. Can I institute company policies that prevent employees from doing this and terminate their employment them if they continue?

Answer: It’s a frustrating and embarrassing situation for a business to see its employees assailing it via social media platforms – but penalizing them for it is a tough, if not impossible, task.

The debate over the First Amendment rights of the employee to post their negative feelings about a company and the rights of the company to protect its private informa tion used to skew in the employer’s favor. That has changed, however, and today the federal government counsels against restricting employees’ Internet chatter, regardless of its nature, because it may violate their First Amendment rights.

It’s among the most-asked questions on startup forums, and an issue we’re dealing with right now at WPEngine as we bring on new employees:

How do you decide how much equity (shares) to give a new employee or partner? Especially when the company is young and according to typical financial assessment the shares are “worth nothing?”

As we start the new year, there will be many opportunities for those who are alert enough to recognize emerging trends, perceptive enough to realize their importance, and clever enough to take advantage of them. Here I suggest nine Minitrends—emerging trends that will become significantly important within 2-5 years, but are not yet generally recognized—that are well worth examining for possible action by those ambitious individuals who seek to start new ventures or keep existing businesses innovative and competitive.

Unlike megatrends, Minitrends are of a scope and importance to offer attractive opportunities to individual entrepreneurs, decision-makers in small and mid-size businesses, innovative thinkers in large companies, and adventuresome investors. In my new book, MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs & Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends, I categorize the nine Minitrends below to those most applicable to different-sized groups. (In the book, I also discuss the background, current trends, and business opportunities of each of these Minitrends in more depth.) I do the same categorization below, but in reality, all provide opportunities to perceptive individuals in all-sized businesses.

Here’s a secret: At the heart of a good idea management system is a knowledge management system. OK, maybe that’s not such a big secret. But if you’re looking at an idea management system and it doesn’t have the components incorporating knowledge management then you’re just getting an electronic suggestion box.

Don’t get me wrong... Ideas are Good

There are many types of ideas an organization can glean from their teams. They can gather unsolicited ideas and gain incremental innovation (“I’ve noticed while doing my work that if we just did ‘this’ we could make more money”; or “do things faster”; or “do things more cost effectively”). You can let the market pull your team toward new ideas (“I just got back from a customer visit and they told me we should also offer ‘this’ product”). Your technical team can push new ideas (“Aha! I’ve tweaked our widgets and now they are much better”). And you can partner with those innovators at the University, those people in research environments, who can explore radical concepts never thought before in any commercial settings to develop “breakthrough” innovations”.

Tulsa is undergoing an entrepreneurial evolution.

You can see it in the growing popularity of the annual Spirit Award competition, the growth of college-sponsored entrepreneurial programs, the development of incubators and resources available for supporting entrepreneurs.

Between 2007 and 2010, an entrepreneurial ecosystem has emerged that has spawned 64 operating startups, the creation of 269 jobs and an annual payroll of $12.4 million. And entrepreneurial enthusiasts want to see that trend continue.

"We need to nurture an environment that allows for businesses to grow. As time passes, businesses mature, families fall out, and so businesses come and go. If we do not have a constant stream and a mechanism to create new businesses, then we will be challenged to have an economy that is strong," said Sean Griffin, who is chairman of the Economic Development Commission Entrepreneurial Initiatives. "So, it's essential for us to grow jobs and grow an economy built on ... locally grown jobs."

WASHINGTON — President Obama, who emphasizes American innovation, says modernizing the federal Patent and Trademark Office is crucial to “winning the future.” So at a time when a quarter of patent applications come from California, and many of those from Silicon Valley, the patent office is opening its first satellite office — in Detroit.

That is only one of the signs that have many critics saying that the office has its head firmly in the 20th century, if not the 19th.

Only in the last three years has the office begun to accept a majority of its applications in digital form. Mr. Obama astonished a group of technology executives last year when he described how the office has to print some applications filed by computer and scan them into another, incompatible computer system.

Computerworld - A hot topic among CIOs and management consultants is the notion that IT departments should play a major role in developing new products, entering new markets or improving customer service.

Consultants call this "IT-driven business innovation." Some companies, such as Harrah's Entertainment Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co., are already doing it (see related story). But at many other companies, the culture isn't ready for IT-led innovation.

Steve Romero, who holds the title "IT governance evangelist" at CA Technologies, compiled the following list of obstacles to IT-driven business innovation in a recent blog post:

• The business doesn't view IT as a source of business innovation.

• A history of technology failures erodes business confidence in the IT department.

Startup.

Entrepreneur.

Small business.

We hear each of these terms, sometimes used interchangeably, but what really is the difference? Is it just semantics? Here’s my take on the 3.

Startup

Fifteen years ago, no one ran a startup. I’m not even sure when the term was first coined. I know with the dot com boom, there were startups everywhere. These days, startups tend to be tech services and more often than not are seeking either funding or to be acquired.

What seems to differentiate startups from small businesses and entrepreneurs is their risk/reward level, at least according to Steve Blank. Startups are volatile, and many fail. But investors who do put money into startups often make their money back tenfold. Look at companies like Mint.com, MusicMatch, Groupon. Whether they were bought by giant corporations or are going it alone (as Groupon still is), they certainly prove the risk/reward model.

Cambridge, Massachusetts. The National Bureau of Economic Research's Innovation Policy and the Economy Conference will be held on April 12, 2011 at the National Press Club, 529 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC. The conference seeks to provide an accessible forum to bring the work of leading academic researchers to an audience of policymakers and those interested in the interaction between public policy and innovation.

After two straight years of declining venture capital investment, 2010 saw an increase in deal flow compared with the previous year.

Venture funds collectively increased their investments by 19 percent over 2009 to $21.8 billion. The number of deals made grew by 12 percent to 3,277. Even though growth slowed in the last two quarters of the year, it was still the industry's first positive year-to-year growth since 2007.

"We were clearly in recovery mode," said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association in Washington, D.C. "We hope this continues in 2011."

The news came courtesy of the latest MoneyTree Report, produced by the NVCA and PricewaterhouseCoopers with data from Thomson Reuters.

A decade ago, as a recruiter for a data storage company called StorageNetworks Inc., Jason Jacobs was flying around the country to help his employer open field offices. “We were hiring six or 10 people every week, and at one point, I was living out in San Mateo for a month to get our West Coast office opened,’’ he recalls. “It was a crazy time.’’

The Waltham company, founded in 1998 to help fast-growing dot-coms and big corporate customers deal with the explosion of data, went public at just two years old, without ever having turned a profit. Its shares began trading on the Nasdaq stock market at $27 and ended their first day at $90.

Vernal » Utah State University has had boots on the ground here for four decades. But it wasn’t until last fall that it put a distinctive new footprint in the community with the opening of the Bingham Entrepreneurship & Energy Research Center.

The $23 million complex aims to be a hub of energy industry innovation, not just for eastern Utah but the world. It also continues to serve as an eastern campus for Utah’s only land-grant university and a community resource.

“The Bingham Center is really the focal point for opportunities for the state of Utah and the eastern Utah region to add value-added economic development opportunities,” said Robert T. Behunin, USU vice president for commercialization and regional development, at a presentation last year.

At the request of Gov. Scott Walker, former state Sen. Ted Kanavas is taking the lead in developing a venture capital fund for Wisconsin.

Saying the creation of such a fund would contribute significantly to Walker's goal of creating 250,000 jobs, his staff is laying out an aggressive schedule that would have venture dollars being invested in high-potential, entrepreneurial companies by July 1, according to a memo written by Jason Culotta that was obtained by the Journal Sentinel.

As the strongest voice for Arizona’s high-technology industry, the Public Policy Committee of the Arizona Technology Council announced today its strong support for the Arizona Competitive Package. The Council has been a key resource to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, the Arizona State Legislature and the proposed Arizona Commerce Authority in defining the components of the Arizona Competitiveness Package.

With the release of this comprehensive legislative proposal, the Governor, Senate President and House Speaker have outlined what will truly be a great future for the state. The Arizona Competitiveness Package embraces high technology industries as the engine that will drive our state for the next thirty years. Small business entrepreneurs will be rewarded for the jobs they create and the state will be provided with the resources it needs to dedicate to the education of our children.

After years of cloudy skies in Startupland, the sun is peeking out, and investors are tipping their toes back into the wading pool. Last year, venture capitalists and angels who co-invested with them placed $7 billion into seed and early-stage deals, an 11 percent increase from 2009, according to the most recent PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree report. From the conversations I'm having in the investor community, this year is promising to be even better.

Is this a limited window of opportunity, or more? It's hard to know just yet. But as the stock market edges ever higher and the wealthier feel healthier, there's a good chance that American startups will also get their moment in the sun.

At a time when almost one out of every ten Americans is now unemployed, progressives have the opportunity to take the lead on Job Creation policy. This Dispatch will address Job Creation policy options featured in Progressive State Network’s 2011 Blueprint for Economic Security. Now is the time for progressive to contrast the empty rhetoric of the right. After sweeping to power in many states, conservative efforts at job creation are nowhere to be seen, at the same time that they refuse to even consider the critical investments needed to help put Americans back to work and rebuild prosperity in our states.

Thankfully, progressives have a different vision to offer: a green economy that will put Americans back to work by creating good jobs at home, setting our nation on a path to energy independence, and marking a new era of American innovation, production, and leadership.

The traditional mode of starting a company is to plan a serial process, where you complete only once all the steps, leading to the “big bang” launch of the company. I strongly recommend a dramatic departure from this model, called “planned iteration,” where you assume you won’t get it right the first time.

This idea was well articulated by Paul Graham in an old essay, called “Startups in 13 Sentences” in which he talked about “making a few people really happy rather than making a lot of people semi-happy.” One of his key points is that “launching teaches you what you should have been building,” and I agree.

All you old software development types will recognize the analogy to the traditional two year “waterfall model” of software development, which has been totally replaced with the Agile iterative methodology. Agile assumes and plans for iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve as more is known and markets change.

SAN DIEGO, CA — Knee pain related to osteoarthritis (OA) is a common complaint among obese individuals and retired professional athletes, especially former NFL players, but researchers presenting their work at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine’s Specialty Day program (February 19th) say they have a simple solution: lose weight.

“Our research on patients who were obese with early-onset knee osteoarthritis showed that those individuals who underwent isolated weight loss via bariatric surgery and lost an average of 57 pounds within the first six months significantly improved their knee pain, stiffness and physical function. Quality of life, activities of daily living and sports activity also improved; all of this without other arthritic treatments,” said lead researcher Christopher Edwards of the Penn State College of Medicine.

As the managing partner of Think Big Partners, Think Big Kansas City and bizperc, Herb Sih has been busy over the last three years (Left, photo from thinkbigpartners.com). Most recently, Think Big announced a collaboration with Angel Capital Group, a Tennessee-based investment group, to launch 4-6 companies in an incubator right here in Kansas City.

The Think Big KC incubator is based on the Y Combinator/TechStars proof-of-concept model. Founders apply with a business plan and receive a little funding, along with some legal and marketing help, and 90 days of mentoring to ship their concept. At the end of the incubator period, the founders will be able to pitch their concepts to investors and try to raise further seed money to grow their ideas.