Many of us sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, and then go home and head for the couch to surf the Web or watch television, exchanging one seat and screen for another. Even if we try to squeeze in an hour at the gym, is it enough to counteract all that motionless sitting?

A mounting body of evidence suggests not.

Increasingly, research is focusing not on how much exercise people get, but how much of their time is spent in sedentary activity, and the harm that does.

I have a certain friend who called me again a while back, all excited about his latest revelation. “What if you could go to a web site and find all the recipes you could make today, with just the ingredients you already have in your kitchen? I’m going to start a website to offer this service!”

I’m sure you all realize that there could be quite a distance between a great idea and a great startup. But many people don’t have a clue on how to bridge the gap. So, trying carefully not to rain on his parade, I suggested to my friend that he complete the following analysis as due diligence on the idea before spending his life savings (and others) to roll out a solution:

1.

Competitors are few. Use Google or one of the many other search engines to search for existing solutions to this problem. A search argument like “recipes from the ingredients you have on hand” might be the place to start. If you find ten competitors who already have this offering, it’s probably not worth going any further.

Small-and medium-sized businesses in southern Ontario will have an opportunity to work with local colleges and universities to bring promising new products to the marketplace faster. Mr. Paul Calandra, Member of Parliament, Oak Ridges-Markham today announced that an investment under the Applied Research and Commercialization Initiative would go to OCAD University.

"This investment will create jobs and sustain economic growth by helping small businesses get new ideas into the marketplace faster," said MP Calandra. "Our government is committed to supporting families, businesses and communities of southern Ontario."

At VtSBDC we believe technology-driven entrepreneurs and businesses offer significant economic growth potential, life-enhancing innovative products and services, and the creation of better-paying job opportunities for all Vermonters.  

Contact your Technology and Commercialization Advisor

As part of our overall business assistance service, the Technology and Commercialization Advisory can specifically help you with:

The National Venture Capital Association, which represents more than 400 venture firms, wants some wiggle room in complying with the venture capital exemption to registration requirements imposed on private equity and hedge funds by the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial markets.

In a comment letter submitted Thursday to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the NVCA asks that venture firms be allowed to use up to 15% of a fund’s committed capital to pursue activities outside the agency’s proposed definition of venture capital while still qualifying for the registration exemption.

Top officials from some of the nation’s leading technology companies and venture capital firms said Friday that Utah entrepreneurs need to think big and look outside the state’s borders for support.

The state Legislature also needs to continue to support higher education, said speakers attending a roundtable discussion in Salt Lake City organized by U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch. Their discussions with Utah entrepreneurs at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah were closed to the public.

I’ll come right out and say it: I hate New York. OK, maybe it’s worse during football and baseball season. Maybe it’s especially bad this week as the J-E-T-S and their loudmouth coach (see right) are talking trash about the Pats. Maybe I just need an excuse to wind people up.

But tech investors love New York. Especially Boston-based tech investors. There has been a rash of early-stage investments in New York startups lately. Just this week, OnSwipe raised $1 million in seed funding from a group that includes Boston-based investors Spark Capital and angels such as Wayne Chang, Jennifer Lum, Roy Rodenstein, and Dharmesh Shah. Meanwhile, SalesCrunch raised a $1.4 million seed round from investors including First Round Capital, Accel Partners, and NextView Ventures, a Cambridge, MA-based micro-VC firm.

The next generations of telecom technologies are called “LTE” or “4G”. China’s Huawei believes that by 2015, it will hold 15–20% of the worldwide patents in these technologies, and that these will earn it at least 1.5% of the sales price of every device—every cell phone, laptop, and tablet—that uses them.  Huawei is on track to achieve its goals: in 2007, it held just 152 patents; by the end of 2009, it had applied for 42,543 patents, of which 11,339 had been granted in China, 215 in the United States, and 1282 in Europe. Huawei’s rival, ZTE, claims to hold 7% of the world’s LTE patents and plans to increase this to 10% by 2012.

An international study published last month looked at how students in 65 countries performed in math, science and reading. The winner was: Confucianism!

At the very top of the charts, in all three fields and by a wide margin, was Shanghai. Three of the next top four performers were also societies with a Confucian legacy of reverence for education: Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. The only non-Confucian country in the mix was Finland.

The United States? We came in 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math.

Your workspace determines the way you work and helps to be productive and happy. When you are working in colorful, organic, playful and positive environment you are more creative and quickly discover new ideas than in a grey, boring and linear one. But even understanding this fact, not a lot of companies try to do everything possible to arrange a comfortable and inspiring workplaces for their employees. As usual, employers often expect their collaborators to simply buckle down and generate, instead of fostering an environment that allows ideas to mature and ripen.

In this showcase we’ve collected not only pictures of awesome workplaces, but also some useful suggestions how to provide really creative environment. So, let’s begin. Firstly, the more inspirational your workplace is, the easier it is to stimulate the creativity and discover fresh thoughts. Let your workers decorate their workspace as they wish, allow them use interesting accessories, boards for tips and paper sticks, photos and other inspirational trifles. Physical arrangement really matters.

Even if you’re not a regular user, you have no doubt heard of websites like LinkedIn, PayPal, About.com, and eBay Inc., which have transformed the way we manage our careers, gather advice, and buy schlock we don’t need. A trio of investors with experience building those sites are launching a new Cambridge-based investment firm, NextView Ventures, to try to create a new generation of equally successful Internet businesses.

They are raising about $15 million in capital to help entrepreneurs get going. NextView is just one of three new seed stage investment groups, which put money into companies at the earliest stages, taking root around the Boston area.

We founded Union Square Ventures in 2003 to invest in the applications layer of the web. Over the last seven years, we have refined that investment focus. We now invest almost exclusively in Internet services that create large networks. Some might think this focus is narrow. We don't see it that way at all. We believe the irresistible economics of Internet networks will ultimately transform the entire global economy. We continue to be very excited by the opportunity to invest in that transformation.

Early on, we recognized that investing in web services was different than investing in chips, routers and enterprise software. The start-ups are more capital efficient. Differentiation is more about user experience than proprietary technology. Defensibility is more about network effects than patents. We have designed our small, collegial, partner driven firm specifically for this new opportunity. Smaller fund sizes allow us to invest only as much as an entrepreneur needs and our successful portfolio companies can have a big impact on the funds' returns.

The Creative Economy Report 2010 from the UN is the second policy-oriented report to present the United Nations perspective on this topic. The creative economy is now a topic high on the agenda for economic development in both the developed and the developing world. As the report puts it,

'adequately nurtured, creativity fuels culture, infuses a human centred development and consitutes the key ingredient for job creation, innovation and trade while contributing to social inclusion, cultural diversity and environmental sustainability.'

A year and a half after President Barack Obama appointed an IBM Corp. executive to fix the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, its problems by several key measures have only worsened, as damage inflicted by years of congressional raids on its funding continues to make it all but impossible for the agency to keep up with its workload.

The result: More than 1.2 million patent applications, filed by inventors and entrepreneurs ranging from major corporations to garage tinkerers, are still awaiting final decisions, a number nearly unchanged from the levels of the past three years.

Jimmy Wales incited scrutiny in December 2005, when technology writer Rogers Cadenhead revealed that the Wikipedia head honcho had altered his own biography several times — a practice that is generally frowned upon. Cadenhead wrote on his blog, Workbench, that Wales had made changes to his bio 18 times, including deleting phrases describing former Wikipedia employee Larry Sanger as a co-founder of the site. Although the current Wikipedia article describing how the site came about flat out says: "Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia," there was a time that Wales felt inclined to downplay Sanger's role in Wikipedia's founding. Called out for his transgressions, Wales said that the changes were necessary to clarify and give a more nuanced description of the roles that each of the men played in creating the site. He contends that the changes had nothing to do with the earlier falling out between the two. In 2002, Sanger resigned from Wikipedia, after repeated disagreements with Wales about Sanger's desire to rid the site of "trolls" and "anarchist types."

With the advent of social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, Internet usage has totally morphed, from a serious business medium, to a social and fun medium that still means business. Regular people now build business applications with “mashup” technology, rather than hiring programmers.

I’m a technology follower from the early days of the Internet, so a couple of years ago I decided to dive into this new world and check it out (who even heard of blogging or mashups ten years ago). I realized quickly that this new world isn’t just for the social life of Gen-Y – it is a sea change for everyone in business, especially startups.

One of the biggest criticisms about Silicon Valley is the lack of women.

Not enough female CEOs. Not enough female engineers. Not enough women on boards. Not enough women in venture capital. Not enough female entrepreneurs.

Yet by focusing on what's missing, it's easy to overlook what is here: a network of powerful women shaping the most important companies in Silicon Valley.

And so, for the first time, the Mercury News has compiled a list of the 10 most powerful women in the valley's tech industry.

In putting this list together, what I found is that many of the most powerful women aren't CEOs. They are second-in-commands, or leaders of major divisions. In fact, there is only one female CEO in the entire SV150: Yahoo's Carol Bartz.

Just-released information shows that Microsoft was granted the third most U.S. patents of all companies in 2010, with Apple way down the list at number 46. Why, then, does Microsoft lag so far behind Apple when it comes to developing innovative products?

The IFI Claims Patent Service reports that Microsoft was granted 3,094 patents in 2010, behind leader IBM with 5,896, and number two Samsung with 4,551. Apple, number 46 on the list, was granted 563. However, Apple was also cited by the service as having the greatest increase over 2009 in patents among the top 50, with a whopping 94% increase. Still it lags far behind Microsoft.

I want to THANK all of you that voted for me in the Speakers Platform TOP 5 Speaker contest.The contest ended last week and many of you have asked if your votes worked..............and the answer is that they did and were much appreciated. The Speakers Platform organization advised me that you had actually cast 93 WRITE IN votes , which they thought was amazing. Your write in votes actually put me in 5th place, but there was other criteria, related to their familiarity with the speaker,  that they factored into their final decision.and since they did not know me enabled another speaker to garner the 5th place spot.

All is not lost though as they asked if they could represent me and guaranteed I would be a listed nominee , not a write in in their next contest. I appreciate your support and hope you will continue to read innovationDAILY.

Best regards to all, and if you ever need an Innovation Speaker there are at least 93 references that might be willing to endorse me........................Thank You again, Rich Bendis

--Digital North Seminar Showcases Canadian Talent, Opportunities, and Partnerships to New York Metro Area Digital Media Executives--

New York, January 10, 2011 – The Consulate General of New York, announced today it will host “Digital North – Creative Opportunities in Canada”, a seminar and networking reception designed to strengthen ties between the digital media industry in the New York metro area and Canada on Thursday January 27^th, 2011 at 6:00pm.

The one-hour seminar will highlight the differences and parallels between Canada and the United States’ digital media environment. The event will include an overview of Canadian tax incentives and government programs available to companies with international expansion plans. The reception following the seminar will provide industry executives with a platform to network and build their cross-border contacts.