After two rough years, health-care venture capitalists are adapting to deal with what could be more tough times ahead.

While medical companies have produced some of the best exits recently-–most notably, Ardian Inc.’s $800 million sale to Medtronic Inc.–-the downturn has left many companies gasping.

“The biggest issue in health-care venture capital is that most of the funds are out of money,” said David Collier, managing director of venture firm CMEA Capital. As a result, “We’ll continue to see bankruptcies in both devices and drug-development companies.”

This is part of my ongoing Series on University Entrepreneurship.

This past Sunday I attended the closing demos of a week-long(!) development extravaganza put on entirely by a new student group on Columbia's campus. The format was a seven day hackathon interspersed with various instructive workshops and capped by the aforementioned final demofest. The event attracted some terrific sponsors as well as a veritable murderer's row of panelists/judges who provided some amazing feedback to the various student hackers that presented their work. Among the panelists were the likes of Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, David Jagoda of Andreessen Horowitz, Thatcher Bell of Draper Gotham, Prof. Chris Wiggins, Justin Singer from IA Ventures and Steve Jacobs, CIO of Gilte Groupe. Of course the faculty advisor of this group was none other than one of the great evangelists for student entrepreneurship in the country- my colleague Chris Wiggins, co-founder of HackNY.

The Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) in Seattle, Washington awarded some $600,000 in grants for the commercial development of technologies to improve the diagnosis and management of health conditions. LSDF is a Washington state agency that makes grant investments in life sciences research to benefit Washington state citizens.

Christopher Bernards at Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason in Seattle received a $150,000 LSDF award to conduct first-in-human testing of a device that can deliver drugs directly to the central nervous system through an intranasal route. The new methods, if successful would be less risky, painful, and expensive than current techniques involving direct injections into the cerebrospinal fluid.

For days, Tahrir — or Liberation — Square has dominated headlines as the center stage for a budding Egyptian revolution, with scenes of chaos and courage beamed from there across the world. But in the late 19th century the area was dubbed "Paris Along the Nile" for its European architecture; the square itself is surrounded by some of the most important buildings in Cairo, including the national museum, the headquarters of the ruling party and the state-TV building. In 1952, it saw the stirrings of a military-led revolt that ousted the ruling monarchy and paved the way for the charismatic, autocratic Gamal Abdel Nasser to take power a few years later. In March 2003, an estimated 30,000 Egyptians protested the Iraq war there. But nothing compares to the hundreds of thousands that have recently flooded Tahrir Square calling for democratic reform and the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.

UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.

Steve Duncan is an urban historian and photographer whose mission is to “peel back the layers of a city to see what’s underneath” – to piece together the complex cities we inhabit. In this fascinating video, we follow Duncan as he explores the underbelly of New York City. Andrew Wonder, using a Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 24mm f/1.4L lens, documents the adventure. The sensory experiences must be extraordinary, as Alan Feuer (who accompanied Steve and Andrew on one of their trips) writes in the New York Times:

The sounds down here are even more impressive than the sights and smells: the Niagara-like crash of water spilling in from side drains; the rumble of the subway; the guh-DUNK! of cars hitting manhole covers overhead, like two jabs on a heavy bag.

Have you ever thought about starting your own company? Do you have a great idea that you think could be the next Twitter? Perhaps it’s time you turned your dreams into reality. More and more, young women are not only starting their own businesses, but they are also achieving enormous success doing so. Take recent start-ups like Her Campus, Rent the Runway, and LearnVest: all three lucrative businesses were founded by women in their early twenties.

Once known for massive steel mills belching smoke into the sky, Cleveland could one day be known as the center of innovation for clean, alternative energy with wind turbines lining the edge of Lake Erie and spreading west across the northern portion of the state.

Don’t hold your breath, you say? Consider this: LEEDCo, a nonprofit group heading Northeast Ohio’s efforts to initiate an offshore wind project, and Fresh Water Wind, a private developer working with LEEDCo to finance, construct and operate the wind turbines, recently signed an option with the state of Ohio for offshore land on which to build a 20-megawatt wind farm.

Overview | What is the “Sputnik moment” to which President Obama referred in his State of the Union address, and how do educators place this comment in the context of science education? What questions and ideas do students have that can generate innovative science projects? In this lesson, students consider the current state of science fairs, explore the role of creativity and ingenuity in science, and develop science fair project proposals.

Be nice to your classmates, because - with the help of K-State's Center for the Advancement of Entrepreneurship - the next Mark Zuckerberg could be sitting in the next desk over.

This year, the center will hold its third annual entrepreneurial competition, an all-university event titled "The Next Big Thing."

Jeffrey Hornsby, professor of management and director of the Center for the Advancement of Entrepreneurship, said the competition is meant to generate fresh business ideas.

After my quarterly Return Path exec team offsite last week, my team and I were rehashing the day’s conversation over dinner. Was it a good day or a bad day? An upper or a downer? We concluded that the day was as it should have been – a good mix of what I will now articulate as the three main functions of a management team. Here they are with some color:

1. Create an environment for success: Do people like to come to work every day? When they get there, do they know what they’re supposed to do, and how it connects to the company’s mission? Are people learning and growing? Are you building an enduring organization beyond you as a leader?

The European Commission on Wednesday (9 February) requested public recommendations on how to cut the duplication and bureaucracy that hobble innovation in Europe.

The goal is to streamline four programmes totalling more than €143 billion in funding for innovation and research.

These include the Seventh Framework Programme for research (FP7), the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, the Cohesion Policy aimed at regions, and funds made available by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.

Globalization is both the biggest opportunity and the greatest challenge for business schools worldwide as they struggle to keep up with the demand for graduates who can work across countries and cultures, says a report released today.

The 346-page report is the result of a three-year study by a task force of deans and scholars from top business schools worldwide. It offers a critique of the flurry of global activities that business schools have initiated in recent years.

If you’re like many small business owners today, your workplace includes three generations of employees: boomers, Gen X and Gen Y/Millennials. ZDNet recently took a look at the challenges of managing multigenerational workforces and how some companies handle this issue. Although the examples used were large companies, there’s a lot that small businesses can learn.

In my ongoing quest to get you good transcripts of the wonderful interviews we’ve done in the past on This Week in VC, I present you with one amazing interview here with angel investor Tom McInerney. He’s a friend, co-investor, former entrepreneur turned angel investor and “wizard of Oz” behind the scenes at the uber hot startup Klout.

Engadget got ahold of Nokia CEO Stephen Elop's memo to employees yesterday, and it's one of the most scathingly honest assessments of a company from its leader that we've ever seen.

He basically says that Nokia's current position is hopeless -- Apple owns the high-end smartphone market, Android has taken market leadership from Nokia in the midrange after only two years, and Chinese company MediaTek has created reference designs that now ship in one-third of all smartphones worldwide.

Up until summer 2009, Ami Kassar was a nine-to-fiver, working for Advanta, one of the largest providers of credit cards to small business. But then the company went bust, another victim of the credit crisis, and the newly unemployed Mr. Kassar decided to strike out on his own.

He formed MultiFunding, a broker that helps arrange loans for small businesses. It was hardly an auspicious time to open any business, but Mr. Kassar’s challenge was particularly daunting: the freeze in small commercial loans was only beginning to thaw. Plus, business loan brokering has been a fairly obscure and even somewhat shadowy field — but one that Mr. Kassar says he believes serves a growing need.

If you are raising kids, you have a unique advantage over your childless peers when it comes to creating a successful business. I’m pretty sure this claim will probably raise the hackles of some, but hear me out. There are lessons for all in drawing parallels between raising a kid and a company.

Let’s start with the assumption — and I think it’s a good one — that the end goal of starting a business should be to create something that can one day thrive without your personal involvement. That way, you’ll have all of your options open: run your business forever without the stress of dealing with the details, install a manager and become a shareholder, or — if the price is right — sell it.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson, e-mail is the cause of — and solution to — all of life’s problems. That’s why we spend so much time talking about e-mail efficiency, inbox management, and better messaging strategies.

Indeed, just the other day Rick recapped The 99 Percent blog’s recommendations for e-mail etiquette for the super-busy.

Having reviewed the blog’s advice, though, it seems to me that it’s not really about etiquette so much as just advice for communicating more effectively and efficiently. If you apply these tips, your e-mail will be more lucid, which will result in fewer traded messages, faster responses, and less time in your inbox. It might look like etiquette, but it’s really quite self-serving.

Throughout the history of franchising, there have been some amazing rags-to-riches stories, many of which have entered the realm of modern business lore. When the Franchise Help staff and Matt Wilson decided to assemble a list of the 10 most famous franchise founders of all time, it quickly became clear that achieving any kind of consensus about this ranking would be nearly impossible given all the great candidates from which to choose.

In a bid to get people spending again, retailers distributed $332 billion in coupons last year, a 7 percent rise from 2009, according to NCH Marketing Services.

We identified the 10 cities where people are most addicted to coupons, based on data from Coupons.com.