On Thursday, I moderated a panel of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists discussing a provocative question: As startup valuations get frothy, are we blowing another bubble?

It seems like you can wander down Sand Hill Road muttering “social location games” and get a $20 million check dropped in front of you these days. And yet lots of promising startups developing deep technologies are starving for capital. So what’s the deal?

The panelists at the event, sponsored by the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney, were Paul Martino, chairman of Aggregate Knowledge; Christine Herron of First Round Capital; Corey Reese, CEO of Trumpet Technologies; and Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners. I began the panel asking everyone to recall where they were in March 2000 — the Internet bubble.

Startup incubator Y Combinator has just closed $8.25 million new fund led by Sequoia Capital with Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Aydin Senkut, XG Ventures, and Geoff Ralston participating.

The new fund is four times larger than $2 million fund raised last year. This is because it’s meant to be a long term fund and Y Combinator is planning to increase the number of startups the incubator funds. At least 35 (give or take) startups will join the summer 2010 funding cycle. The previous YC funding cycle, winter 2010, had 27 startups, with 20 of the companies hitting profitability or securing commitments for further funding.

The United States wastes at least $6.4 billion each year in "forgone innovation" - legitimate technologies that cannot get licensed and start-ups that cannot get funding - because of backlogs and dysfunction at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the agency that's supposed to protect and encourage innovation in America.

That figure, enough to provide an average round of venture capital funding to more than 1,000 start-up companies each year, comes from the first-ever effort to quantify the economic damage inflicted by the chronic delays at the Patent Office. It was calculated by London Economics, a British research group commissioned by the British patent office to study the impact of patent backlogs around the world.

The group's report notes that backlogs are becoming common globally as companies seek simultaneous protection of each of their ideas across Europe, Asia, the U.S. and Canada.

Commencement is supposed to be filled with hope, but for the class of 2010, these are grim times. Over the past year, the unemployment rate for college graduates under age 25 has averaged 9.1 percent. For the roughly half of high school graduates under 25 and not in college, the average is 22.8 percent.

Worse, a deep labor recession, like this one, may be more than a temporary hardship. It could signal a long-term decline in living standards — downward mobility.

Where you start out in your career has a big impact on where you end up. When jobs are scarce, more college grads start out in lower-level jobs with lower starting salaries. Academic research suggests that for many of these graduates, that correlates to overall lower levels of career attainment and lower lifetime earnings.

We all live with misconceptions about the world. This is quite normal. No one can be an expert in everything, so we simplify our learning into easy-to-remember snippets, which are often very close to the truth, but never quite there.

Generally, our misconceptions are insignificant and do little harm. Some times they are very significant and do a lot of harm.

For example, many people believe that when they leave home in winter, they shouldn't turn off the heat entirely, but rather lower it a few degrees. If they normally maintain a temperature of 20°C (68°F) when at home, when they leave they should turn the thermostat down to about 15°C (59°F). Why? Because they insist that letting the house get very cold when they are away, and then heating it up again when they return, uses up significantly more energy than keeping it at a moderate temperature throughout the day.

Sparked by the success of a referendum in Ohio earlier this month to enlarge bonding for economic development by $700 million, there is a growing interest in a similar initiative in Wisconsin.

By a solid margin of 62%-38%, voters in Ohio authorized the four-year expansion. The plan builds on the creation in 2002 of a $1.4 billion bonding program to promote innovation and long-term growth.

Ohio's economy, which has lost 635,000 jobs since 2000, is just as challenged as Wisconsin's, and voters there bit the bullet and supported a large-scale initiative called the Ohio Third Frontier. The commitment of more than $2 billion for economic development in that state dwarfs all job-creation initiatives in Wisconsin.

The quick-service industry is one that thrives on innovation. After all, who do you think invented Ronald McDonald, the drive thru, and the Fourthmeal?

In an industry crowded by competition, however, there are a few thought leaders that stand out above the rest. QSR magazine, the leading news source covering the quick-service industry, chose the top 10 innovators in the $164.8 billion restaurant segment and covered them in its May 2010 issue, available now to qualified subscribers.

"There's really no better way to describe the people who made QSR's top innovator's list than to say simply they are the people who matter most in quick service," says Blair Chancey, QSR's editor. "It was thrilling pulling together the list because these are the A-list celebrities of our restaurant segment and arguably the restaurant industry as a whole."

The 2010 Top 10 Innovators are:

Cheryl Bachelder, CEO of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen

David Novak, CEO of Yum! Brands

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks

Steve Ells, CEO of Chipotle

Cardiac patients are living longer and longer--up to 20 years after receiving stents, a heart bypass, or heart-valve replacements. But extended lifespan is often accompanied by other complications, as a repaired heart can still have difficulty getting enough oxygen. The accompanying pain, a squeezing pressure in the chest called angina, can plague patients for years, and there are some for whom no surgery can provide relief. But a noninvasive shockwave machine could help prompt the growth of new blood vessels, restoring the heart's oxygen supply and alleviating the pain.

In a clinical trial at three centers across the United States, cardiologists are testing the safety of the shockwave device, developed by Maryland-based Medispec. The "Cardiospec" machine is based on the same sound-wave technology used to break up kidney stones, but it requires only about one-tenth the energy. "Shock waves are acoustic waves that create pressure that can be focused," says Medispec's Gil Hakim, the company's director of new product development. Direct that pressure toward the heart muscle with just the right intensity, and it causes the body to produce new blood vessels.

Coordinating your friends for a night out in any city can be chaotic. The texts and phone calls required to get everyone at the same place at the same time can get tiresome. Luckily, as Apple says, there’s an app for that.

Mobile geolocation app Foursquare allows users to “check in” wherever they are, sending a notice to friends and online followers. Ideally, friends can then potentially catch up with each other during a night out.

Though the app is primarily used to for the purpose described above, the site Social Great has tapped-in to the data trail left by all those check-ins to compile the city’s top venues visited by Foursquare users, which typically tend to be young, tech-savvy folks with smartphones. (A bit of a disclaimer: Social Great only counts check-ins from people that have signed up for its service, so its not a scientific representation of all Foursquare users.)

New York City based FirstMark Capital recently announced FirstSteps, the firm's new seed-funding program.

FirstMark has always been involved in seed rounds, but the new program represents a greater emphasis on very early stage companies, which FirstMark thinks will increasingly be necessary to bring in the huge returns that venture capitalists are accustomed to.

Are you sick and tired of hearing about the constant need to innovate in today's markets?

If so, I have some bad news. Innovation is not just another catchphrase of the day. It's a new business imperative, and it's not going away any time soon. The good news is that most leaders and managers are finally starting to accept this fact, although some more grudgingly than others. They understand the need for innovation, and they see the wisdom in coming up with new products and services that add more value to their customers as well as in gaining efficiencies for processes and approaches.

Entrepreneurship need not have any definitive skill set, but as you go along you would need to master some of the skill sets. Chances are that most of these ‘to be acquired’ skill sets are secondary to your nature (especially for the geeky founders).

Here is an insightful presentation you must watch.

Be it persuasive, ingenius, fascinating, inspiring or jaw-dropping, there’s no denying the riveting value of TED Talks — and it’s no secret that the Anthill crew are fans.

Well, have you ever thought of what it would be like to deliver the perfect, audience grabbing talk? We know we have.

Using statistical anaylsis of user ratings, Sebastian Wernicke has come up with the optimum TED talk and, unsurprisingly, it’s nothing like you’d expect.

Sooner or later every business will face decisions relative to what, how, when, where, why and who ought to manage their social media activities.

Some will wait until they get pulled in by the market dynamics while others will be the ones leading those dynamics. The difference between the two will be the difference between leading and following change.

Summary Points:
* Action is the ultimate reaction
* Reactions are driven by intent
* Intentions are driven by relational attributes
* Mass media to media from the masses
* Culture is the foundation of intent

In a earlier post titled “5X6 Social Media Revenue Matrix” we discussed the strategic elements that influence “social” organizational effectiveness and the related initiatives.

I was reading Should We Worry About Older Entrepreneurs? from Small Business Trends the other day when I stumbled upon this intriguing quote:

Field also worries that entrepreneurship might not be right for older Americans because these folks have spent too much time in the corporate world.

Hmmm … a bit of a generalization, no?

We're not even half through 2010 and already we have had the chance to witness two environmental events for the books--the ever-growing oil spill in the Gulf and the approval of the first offshore wind farm in the U.S. Both the oil spill and Cape Wind will leave lasting impacts on the Gulf of Mexico and Cape Cod, respectively. But make no mistake. The negative impact of the toxic oil spill outweighs that of our biggest, latest, best effort at a sustainable energy project.

Top Democrats introduced legislation that would raise taxes on investment managers, as well as many professionals and some multinational businesses, to offset the cost of a new grab bag of economic-relief initiatives.

But lawmakers likely face a fight in mustering the votes to pass the sprawling legislation, particularly in the Senate.

Somewhere in your closet there's a pair of gloves straight out of "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo." Well, if you dust them off and fire up your Webcam, you'll have the beginnings of a nifty gestural interface system, thanks to research at MIT.

Robert Wang of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory designed a gestural system that tracks a pair of rainbow-colored Lycra gloves to be used with a standard Webcam. The gloves, which cost only a dollar to manufacture, can be used to manipulate virtual objects such as blocks or even complex machinery models.

Four decades ago, I used to spend hours watching the computer simulation called "Life" play itself out on my Atari computer screen. That simple - yet powerful program showed how a few fundamental rules can not only cause order to be created out of chaos, but also give rise to self-replicating structures.

Craig Ventor, leader of one of the teams that decoded the humane genome has developed a much more sophisticated version of that game. Ventor and a team of scientists has actually created a form of artificial life in a test tube that is derived from a software code stored on a computer.