Carl Schramm, President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, discusses entrepreneurship and education with Charlie Rose.

"What's good in the United States is good almost any place in the world. The universal about starting an indigenous economy is getting firms underway. In fact, there's no other variable that explains growth better than the velocity, the rate of which new firms are being formed."

He goes on to talk about Iraq's economy and government's role in entrepreneurship.

With the rise of new angel investors and early-stage venture funds, the venture capital industry is going through a revival, according to Brad Feld, one of the founders of the Boulder, Colo.-based VC firm, Foundry Group. “It’s back to the basics,” Feld told me during a video interview in which I discovered that both of us love Robert Graham’s somewhat over-the-top shirts. Feld is a great interview subject, mostly because he marches to the beat of a drum that is uniquely his own.

After all, it’s not every day you get to talk to someone whose startup investments spawned esoterically labeled sectors such as “Glue,” “Human Computer Interaction,” “Protocol” and “Distribution” by backing companies such as Oblong, Memeo, PogoPlug, SimpleGeo and Zynga. Foundry also invested in Sling Media, which was subsequently acquired by Echostar for $380 million.

Cell phone companies are finding that they're sitting on a gold mine--in the form of the call records of their subscribers.

Researchers in academia, and increasingly within the mobile industry, are working with large databases showing where and when calls and texts are made and received to reveal commuting habits, how far people travel for public events, and even significant social trends.

With potential applications ranging from city planning to marketing, such studies could also provide a new source of revenue for the cell phone companies. "Because cell phones have become so ubiquitous, mining the data they generate can really revolutionize the study of human behavior," says Ramón Cáceres, a lead researcher at AT&T's research labs in Florham Park, NJ.

Instilling an entrepreneurial spirit in young people has become a popular idea in EU policy circles, but some businesspeople say initiative is something that comes from within and cannot be taught.

Entrepreneurs and policymakers weighed up the merits of inserting entrepreneurship into educational curricula at a debate organised on 25 May by the Generation Europe Foundation and European Confederation to mark SME Week.

You can’t be a product startup if you aren’t measuring revenue/employee number. Unless you are superbly well funded and have lots of cash to throw away, each hire has to have specific KRA and most importantly, the product/service needs to be delivered in the most optimum form.

In fact, at the UnPluggd event, this was one of the key takeaway from Sri Krishna’s session [+ the ratio of sales/engineers in a technology business].

Apple's stock market capitalization (AAPL) has not yet quite surpassed Microsoft's (MSFT), but the value of its actual business is now higher.

Specifically, Apple's business is now worth $200 billion, while Microsoft's is only worth $197 billion--at least by one simple calculation of enterprise value.*

What's the difference between a company's stock market capitalization and the value of its actual business (which is referred to as "enterprise value")?

Minitrends are emerging trends that promise to become significantly important in the next three to five years, but which are not recognized or appreciated by the general public or most businesses. Like precious gems, Minitrends can be extremely valuable to those alert enough to recognize them, perceptive enough to appreciate their potential worth, and clever enough to reap their full potential. This book provides practical, easy-to-understand guidance to assist individuals, small and medium-size companies, and large companies in identifying, analyzing, and exploiting attractive Minitrends effectively.

In February of last year, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The $787 billion act included $500 million allocated to train “green-collar workers” in the environmental sector. The inclusion of this funding in the bill was a major boon for the city of Philadelphia, whose own commitment to building a green economy was well under way.

The Philadelphia initiative was spearheaded by local BALLE chapter and founding member Sustainable Business Network of Philadelphia (SBN). SBN Executive Director Leanne Krueger-Braneky heard Van Jones, author of The Green-Collar Economy, speak at the 2007 BALLE annual conference. Inspired by his work to bring green jobs to disadvantaged communities, Leanne realized that green jobs development could have an enormous, positive impact on Philadelphia’s low-income communities. She invited Jones to Philadelphia where he challenged the city to meet a simple, straightforward goal: train 100 low-income individuals in green jobs within one year.

I recently took part in a one-day symposium that aimed to identify and remove impediments to successful commercialization in Canada.

There was a lot of talk about sales and selling — issues that connect to the larger problem facing Canadian technology companies: an infatuation with technology and disregard for commercialization.

San Francisco-based venture capital firm Burrill & Company is partnering up with Chile's Austral Capital Partners to put together an initial $40 million to $50 million life sciences venture capital fund in Chile.

"We expect to initially have between $40 million and $50 million committed over the next few months...although the idea would be to have between $100 million and $150 million over the next several years," Steven Burrill, the chief executive of the U.S. company, told Dow Jones Newswires. 

The OECD launched its Innovation Strategy today, setting out what it think needs to be done to foster smart new ideas. The strategy is at the heart of a session at the OECD Forum on Thursday morning, “Unleashing Innovation”, where moderator Luca de Biase, the IT and Science Editor of Italy’s Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper, has noted that there’s rarely been a more important moment for innovation. That’s not just because we need to drive new growth in the wake of the crisis but also because we need to tackle problems like climate change and ageing populations.

A video on YouTube gets 50% of its views in the first 6 days it is on the site, according to data from analytics firm TubeMogul. After 20 days, a YouTube video has had 75% of its total views.

That's a really short life span for YouTube videos, and it's probably getting shorter. In 2008, it took 14 days for a video to get 50% of its views and 44 days to get 75% of its views.

Why? In the last two years, YouTube has improved its user interface, which helps videos get seen early on. Also, the world has gotten more adept at embedding and sharing videos in real-time via Twitter and Facebook. (And there's probably more video to choose from.)

The fifth annual Maker Faire drew tens of thousands of people to the county fairgrounds in San Mateo, Calif. Started by Make magazine for the Do-It-Yourself crowd, the event is a blend of wacky Burning Man style creativity, Rube Goldberg inventions, and technological marvels. Organizers estimate 95,000 people will attend by the end of this weekend. The 600 exhibits featured science projects by kids at local schools to well-financed projects by major corporations. All of them were celebrations of the can-do attitude that fuels Silicon Valley, breathing life into the innovative prototyping process and the culture of hacking.

Today’s the opening day our of TechCrunch Disrupt conference, and we’re starting it off with a bang. Famed interviewer/journalist/host Charlie Rose is talking to John Doerr, partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Doerr is known for his massively successful investments in companies such as Google, Amazon, Intuit, and more recently Zynga (among many others).

Rose asked Doerr for his thoughts about what’s coming next. Doerr says that’s we’re on the third great wave of innovation. The first was the microchip/PC in the 80s. The second was the Internet in the 90s. And now we’re entering a wave of social, mobile, and new commerce, Doerr says.

And what’s leading that wave? The iPad.

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine’s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Inside the pages of this magazine’s December 2008 issue, the 100 moments that most shaped this city were listed in careful detail.

Grants, loans and capital investments can provide a crucial boost to a young business, but not every region provides the same level of support. Find out if your state is a good place for entrepreneurs to find the backing they need.

In today's economic climate, even the most experienced entrepreneurs might need a helping hand. But although federal stimulus funding has been used to support ailing automakers and banks, small businesses and startups have had a more difficult time obtaining public funds or loans for their enterprises. Fortunately, conditions tend to be better on a regional level, with many states providing benefits and favorable lending practices to encourage local entrepreneurship.

Over 20,000 students and supporters from around the world will travel to Michigan for the 31st annual Odyssey of the Mind World Finals from May 26 – 29 at Michigan State University. Students from different cultures and widely varying economic backgrounds will prove that creativity is universal. They will all demonstrate their unique creative solution to an Odyssey of the Mind problem.

The teams have worked throughout the school year solving an OotM problem and were judged as the most creative in a series of rigorous state and national competitions. At MSU, the teams will represent their state and country in hopes to prove that they are the world's most creative problem-solvers. Odyssey of the Mind has teams throughout the United States and in more than 15 other countries including China, South Korea, Poland, Germany, Singapore, and Mexico.

Google unveiled the results of its first state-by-state analysis of the company’s impact on regional economies at press events in 10 cities on Tuesday, including Cambridge, MA, Detroit, and Seattle. For the most part, Google measured the value it generates when local advertisers and Web publishers use its AdWords and AdSense platforms for Web advertising.

Overall, Google claimed that transactions enabled by its search and advertising tools added up to $54 billion across the United States in 2009. About one-fourth of that that activity, $14.13 billion, took place in California. New York felt the second-biggest Google impact, with $6.27 billion in advertising-driven activity, followed by Illinois at $3.24 billion and Texas at $3.18 billion. Xconomy’s other home states of Massachusetts, Michigan, and Washington saw total economic value of $2.2 billion, $906 million, and $2.8 billion, respectively.

Women across the nation are preparing to play an integral role in the green economy, and the United States will need their help if we’re going to pull ourselves out of the recession and compete in the new economy on a global scale.

It’s true that men have been hit the hardest in the recession as far an unemployment numbers go, but we will need to seize the opportunity to diversify the future workforce in a way that will incorporate all workers in all areas of the clean energy economy—including those where women have been traditionally underrepresented.

Sir,

Regarding ‘Regional ’stars’ rewarded for innovative projects‘:

The EU’s integrated ‘innovation chain’ has never been complete and therefore will never work. For if we have a broken link in any connected chain or necklace, it will always inextricably fall to the ground. The only way to fix that link is to connect the two unconnected ends together: likewise for Europe’s innovation strategy, which is currently missing its vital link of ‘independent’ invention and ideas - the prerequisite of economic dynamism in the 21st Century.