Aquaporin says it will be able to turn salt water into drinking water with a customized molecule that mimics the function of similar molecules found inside liver cells.

Yelp publishes restaurant and hotel reviews from unpaid contributors.

That pretty much underscores the differences between the green technology industry and the web. Every week, someone -- usually in a petulant voice -- asks me, "Where is the Google of green?" or "How come there is no Steve Jobs of green?"

My first reaction is, don't jinx it, people. The next thing you know, people will start obsequiously yammering about how their iShingle solar tile has fundamentally changed their outlook on roofing and building materials and life in general.

Constructing the perfect city means blending the best and boldest ideas from across the nation. Here are 12 we hope all future cities will embrace.

Tuesday, May 4, 3:00 - 7:00 University of Southern Maine, Abromson Cetner

Portland,
ME—As
 the
 economy 
begins 
to 
show
 small 
signs 
of 
recovery 
with 
job
 growth 
for 
the 
first
 time
 in
 three
 years,
 Maine
 businesses
 come
 together 
to
 discuss 
how 
to
 more
 quickly 
grow
 Maine’s
 innovation
e conomy
 and 
hear 
how 
gubernatorial 
candidates 
intend
 to
 spur
 entrepreneurship,
new
 technologies 
and 
businesses 
in 
Maine.


For more information download the PDF

The spirit of entrepreneurship was alive and well at last week's Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship. The White House took a political risk in hosting a summit on "global" entrepreneurship in a climate when so many Americans, anxious about their local economy, are easily blinded to the vital role entrepreneurs play in building the stable economies overseas essential to our growing firms back home. The summit though was a foreign policy success and a solid statement of support for the role all entrepreneurs play in creating jobs and economic growth.

Entrepreneurs have led the way to recovery from previous economic downturns by seeding new ideas and creating firms. For example, in the U.S., more than half of the companies on the 2009 Fortune 500 list were launched during a recession or bear market. The convening of the Summit and the array of announcements was therefore welcome news, and suggest that the world’s risk takers and innovative entrepreneurs are perhaps no longer thought of as mere adjunct players on the sidelines of our economies but central to their recovery.

What can extreme surfing and World of Warcraft teach the enterprise? Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge and former Xerox PARC Chief Scientist John Seely Brown holds them as examples of the power of frequent benchmarking and full industry info-share. He also uses them to show how the core ecosystem can be made stronger by sharing knowledge gathered from learning on the edge. In addition, Seely Brown touches upon his theory of a monumental economic shift from a push to a pull economy as outlaid in his 2010 book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.

Starting and growing a business is not for the faint of heart – especially if you want to grow fast. When I say “grow fast” I’m talking about rates of 80-100 percent per year. It’s achievable, even in this economy, but it results in spectacular highs and lows and tests and stretches the entrepreneurial venture in every imaginable way.

Our company has gone through this type of growth over the past seven years. Here are five of the biggest lessons we’ve learned about managing a growth-stage company:

Set your prices higher - Most entrepreneurs simply don’t charge enough to make a profit. This hampers the business’s growth because there isn’t enough dough to share with marketing partners. Consequently, the business struggles to grow at a fast rate, not because the product wasn’t good, but because it was too inexpensive.

I remember many years ago when we were launching our first product.  I had a price in mind, based on competitive research and what seemed reasonable to me.  Fortunately, a couple of partners talked me into charging a higher price, and that made all the difference in the marketing of that product, which paved the way for us to eventually launch our flagship product.  I often think that we might have never escaped those early years if we had set a lower price on that first product.

Size matters -- or does it?

Airline carriers in the United States would seem to say yes. The industry has lost $60 billion in the last decade and took a big hit more recently due to a cloud of volcanic ash that grounded flights across Europe. Major airlines are looking to consolidate as a way to return to profitability amid continued struggles with high fuel prices, competition from low-cost carriers, and a limited customer pool that shriveled even more when the recession curbed travel for business and pleasure. Two years ago, Delta and Northwest merged, making Delta the nation's largest carrier. United and US Airways recently broke off merger talks, but many believe those discussions were simply a way for United to entice Continental to come to the bargaining table -- a strategy that has reportedly worked.

But experts are skeptical about the "bigger is better" strategy. They acknowledge that, if the deal is done right, merging two carriers into one will cut down on competition, reduce capacity in a saturated industry that already has too many planes in the air, and allow the newly consolidated company to trim its employee ranks and merge costly operations for services like reservations and gate maintenance. If profits return, the carriers could invest them into improving customer service and possibly waiving fees for baggage and in-flight meals that have raised the ire of travelers. But the key words are "if done right." Many observers say the carriers have proved downright flighty at following through on changes that improve operations and put the customer first.

It is common knowledge that sustainability is a big deal. It is a multidimensional issue that impacts all sectors of society. Companies wrestle with how they are going to respond beyond the obvious of energy conservation and waste reduction, when sustainability begins to blur with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Some direction and insights are provided in an excellent article, “the Sustainability Imperative: Lessons for Leaders from Previous Game-Changing Megatrends,” by David Lubin and Daniel Esty. This article frames sustainability in way that organization’s can take actionable steps to impact their sustainability efforts (Harvard Business Review, May 2010).

Many readers are familiar with Esty’s landmark book, Green to Gold and his work in the environmental policy arena. Ideas presented in Green to Gold evolve in the Sustainability Megatrends article. Lubin and Esty assert that the current sustainability movement can be viewed as a megatrend as popularized by John Naisbitt in 1982. As such, there are lessons that companies can learn by examining other megatrends such as IT and quality.

Massachusetts has an answer to the question, “How can we generate more technology entrepreneurship activity, and hence more startups and more jobs, in the commonwealth?”

The “12x12” initiative, announced today at The Nantucket Conference, matches 12 leading CEOs in Massachusetts with 12 leading venture capitalists in the state to create 12 new startups in the next year.

The initiative was co-founded by Michael Greeley, founder and general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, and Andy Ory, founder and CEO of Acme Packet Inc, following discussions with digital technology leaders at the Tech Hub Collaborative. The two co-founders brought a few notables into the “12x12” organizing committee, including Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, chairman of the Sparta Group; Jonathan Kraft, president of The Kraft Group; Paul Sagan, CEO of Akamai Technologies Inc.; and Steve Vinter, site director of Google Inc.

In 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”.

This special report will argue that something comparable is now happening in the emerging world. Developing countries are becoming hotbeds of business innovation in much the same way as Japan did from the 1950s onwards. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just 2 cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production and distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modern business, from supply-chain management to recruitment and retention, are being rejigged or reinvented in one emerging market or another.

Yes on Issue 1 will bring jobs, grow economy - By David Hodge

Everyone wants to see more jobs and strong economic development in Ohio. But rarely do we, as individuals, get the chance to actually do something about these big issues. On May 4, all Ohioans have one of those rare opportunities to make a real difference by voting on Issue 1.

Third frontier a ticking timebomb of debt - By David W. Johnson

A $500 million ticking time bomb of debt may well balloon by an additional $700 million if the voters of Ohio are duped into approving Issue 1 on the May 4 ballot. This issue would extend the Ohio Third Frontier program, which has already spent almost $1 billion supposedly transforming the "intellectual property" of Ohio's universities into new high-tech ventures at corporations in Ohio - and at some outside of Ohio.

Sometimes I agree with him. Sometimes, passionately, I don’t. But after reading Paul Krugman’s “Building a Green Economy” in the Sunday New York Times magazine, mostly I just wanted to hug him.

Klugman begins in a matter of fact way by observing that in the debate over climate economics, the “casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy.” He then goes on to explain in significant detail why among environmental economists there is widespread agreement this is not so, regardless of country of origin or political persuasion.

After detailing the emissions problem, Krugman moves on to a dispassionate and detailed explanation of the costs of correcting the effects of climate change. His conclusion: “We know how to limit greenhouse gas emissions. We have a good sense of the costs — and they’re manageable. All we need now is the political will.”

ZEBULON, N.C.—In a nondescript factory in this small, wooded town, 10 giant machines worked around the clock last year to churn out 1.4 billion plastic corks, enough to circle the earth 1.33 times if laid end-to-end.

Unknown to most American wine drinkers, the plant's owner, Nomacorc LLC, has quietly revolutionized the 400-year-old wine-cork industry. Since the 1600s, wine has been bottled almost exclusively with natural cork, a porous material that literally grows on trees in Portugal, Spain and other Mediterranean lands.

But over the past 10 years, an estimated 20% of the bottle stopper market has been replaced by a new technology—plastic corks that cost between 2 and 20 cents apiece. More than one in 10 full-sized wine bottles sold worldwide now come with a Nomacorc plug, while another 9% or so come from other plastic cork makers. Screw caps took another 11% of the market.

On Wednesday of this week, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake wrote a provocatively titled blog suggesting that wanna-be entrepreneurs should drop out of college. She based this opinion on the amount of successful companies founded by drop-outs, including Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft, as well as the drop-outs she finds herself investing in as an angel. But should education play such an insignificant role in entrepreneurship? The answer is not as simple as some think.

As with many blogs by intellectual authors, the comments they elicit are often as good, if not better reads that the original post itself. As for Fake's post about dropping out of college, this is certainly the case. The notably civil discussion ignited in the comments by Fake's intentionally comment-baiting title and post are some of the most interesting perspectives on entrepreneurial education I've yet to read.

HARTFORD — The Rell administration and Democratic lawmakers have agreed on a comprehensive economic development bill with more than $250 million to help small businesses.

The bill, headed for an expected vote in the House today, redirects $200 million in insurance industry tax credits to a 10-year-program of investing in technology startups.

The largest slice of the money will be offered to venture capital firms as a match to their investments in technology firms with fewer than 250 employees or less than $3 million in sales, as long as 80 percent of the firms' employees are in the state.

Entrepreneur: Jeff Hammerbacher, 27
Funding: $11 million from Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and angel investors that include Gideon Yu and Caterina Fake

A friend of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's at Harvard, Jeff Hammerbacher was recruited away from Bear Stearns to assemble a Facebook team to analyze data about users' behavior on the site. To do that, he used the open-source cloud computing software called Hadoop. Now Hammerbacher is a co-founder, vice-president of products, and chief scientist at Cloudera, which sells technical consulting and software tools to help companies use Hadoop to analyze large amounts of data. Cloudera co-founder Christophe Bisciglia was one of Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. Cloudera's customers include Netflix, Samsung, ComScore, and LinkedIn.

Toughest decision: Changing Cloudera's business model to make it into a software vendor. "Initially [our model] was 'ship your data to us and let us manage it,' " Hammerbacher says. "It made a lot more sense to make the pivot and become a software vendor."

At a press conference in London today, Ontario’s Minister of Research and Innovation, John Milloy, is scheduled to announce the Province’s new $161 million Life Sciences Commercialization Strategy.

The bulk of the money ($114 million) is allocated to the Global Leadership Round in Genomics & Life Sciences (GL²), though $100 million of that was announced last year. Recent announcements under this program include $8.1 million for the International Barcode of Life Project, an $8.8 million grant to SickKids for autism genomics research, and $24.8 million to a posse of University of Toronto genomics researchers.

The wings on angel investors may have been clipped during the recent recession. But they seem to be getting airborne again after a sluggish 2009.

Get-togethers pairing angels with entrepreneurs are on the upswing in tech-friendly cities like Seattle. Anecdotal evidence shows that the pace of investing is picking up, though researchers won't have concrete figures until after the first half of the year.

All this suggests that a fresh crop of innovative companies is on the way, thanks to angel investors who typically pour money into startups in exchange for debt and equity.

Most early stage startups having monthly board meetings. I normally recommend 8 meetings per year. It makes no sense to meet in August or December due to travel schedules of most investors. You can do calls if need be. And I often recommend that board meetings be every 5 or 6 weeks rather than 4 to give enough elapsed time for stuff to actually happen between meetings. Quarterly is too few for an early stage business.

But that isn’t what this post is about. This post is about what happens BETWEEN board meetings.  And most companies don’t do enough between board meetings.  Doing nothing between board meetings to me is like running the “waterfall software development process.”  We all know that modern software companies run on the “agile” development process by having short release cycles and frequent communications.  Boards will thrive on this, too.

Today’s Saturday book review is about an enjoyable little book called “Start Up: 100 Tips to Get Your Business Going” by GL Hoffman.

I say “little” book, because it truly is, at least in size. It’s a small spiral bound compilation of 100 tips for startup entrepreneurs, about 4 inches by 5.5 inches in size. It’s perfect for slipping into a pocket, briefcase or purse, and taking it with you when you travel.

Each page in the book contains one tip that entrepreneurs can run their businesses by. Each tip is an easily digestible bite of insight.

Here’s an example:

40. Incremental improvements almost always win.

Too often we think we must improve in a dramatic fashion. All it really takes is consistent, small, incremental improvements in your new, developing business. Try to do one thing better each day.