The vast majority of American adults -- some 86% -- now own cellphones, according to new research from the Federal Communications Commission. But mobile Internet use is still far less common.

Of cellphone owners, the majority (66%) send or receive text messages, and more than half send or receive photos. But only 28% currently access Web pages, and 20% download apps to their cellphones. (Time frame: Oct.-Nov. 2009.)

No surprise: It's a generational thing. Of cellphone owners ages 18-29, 48% use the mobile Web and 94% use text messages. Of those 50-64, just 15% use the mobile Web and 51% use text messages.

So I’ve been spending a bit more time than usual talking to entrepreneurs raising capital and venture capital firms investing in early stage companies, and there is a trend that I am trying to wrap my head around.

The trend: large venture capital firms are issuing term sheets committing to invest between $500K and $1.5M in early stage companies, and then offloading anywhere from $100K-$500K of the round to professional angels and seed funds.

So the question is, why are they doing all the work to find/negotiate/invest/and then shepherd these investments, only to let smaller guys piggy back on their deals?

I’ve got a couple potential answers:

1) They want to reduce their exposure to the investment by syndicating the deal, but as capital requirements come down for building companies, there isn’t really room for the syndicate of yesteryear. It used to be that a Series A round would frequently be split between two large venture firms, each invest half the capital with the confidence that future funding requirements would be high enough that they’d both be able to put real money to work behind their bet. But now that the $2M A round is being replaced by $500K seed rounds, and the $10M B round looks more like a $2-5M A round…VC’s are choosing to syndicate with partners who can afford to invest in the first round, but whose coffers aren’t deep enough to go heads up in the second. What that means is that the VC leading the deal, should this deal be a winner, doesn’t have to fight with another deep pocketed investor for an outsized portion of the next round (read: they’ll have an early option to increase their ownership).

It's official. Where innovation is concerned, New Zealand has been asleep at the wheel since 2000.

The rate of innovation in New Zealand not only flatlined for the first seven years of the 21st century but dipped sharply in 2008, according to the Innovation Index of New Zealand, launched by IBM and the University of Auckland.

The index looks at innovation across the New Zealand economy from 1998, focusing on 16 industry sectors including commercial and non-commercial organisations.

The methodology measured seven components of innovation - patents, R&D, trademarks, design, plant variety rights, productivity and organizational and managerial innovation.

The only sector to show strong growth was the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector where innovation activity more than doubled between 1998 and 2008.

Innovation is necessary to build new jobs to replace those lost in the recession. So how do you innovate? Consider the integrated circuit. It was just a matter of taking the next logical step.

Innovation is a beautiful word. Innovators are rightly revered. We owe our jobs to them, build statues to them, read their books, and listen to their sage words. How do they do it? What special food were they raised on? Did they hear the angels sing?

Management gurus break down innovation into five steps or three paradigms or six PowerPoint slides. But the more you know about innovators, the less they seem like genius wizards with secret formulas. Which is good. It means innovation is something inside us all.

I’ll let Jack St. Clair Kilby be the example. Mr. Kilby was a man of few words. I sat down with him in Dallas in 1978 to ask how he had come up with his revolutionary invention, which even then – in the pre-personal computer era – had led to billions of dollars’ worth of new electronics and tens of thousands of new jobs.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to hand a big victory to the cell phone industry by allocating more airwaves for mobile broadband services.

The FCC's goal is to make available 500 megahertz of spectrum for commercial broadband providers over time, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.

Under pressure from the Obama administration to make broadband service ubiquitous across the country, the agency is in the final stages of putting together its long-awaited National Broadband Plan, which is due to Congress March 17. The plan is expected to outline the spectrum goal, sources said.


FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has repeatedly warned of an impending spectrum shortage that could hinder the United States' efforts to stay competitive in the broadband market. He and Blair Levin, who leads the FCC's broadband task force, have said the agency is considering reallocating spectrum licensed to broadcasters and government agencies.

Funding ran out on Friday for a Small Business Administration program that increased loan guarantees and reduced or eliminated loan fees for its two largest small-business recovery lending programs -- a week or so earlier than had been expected. The most recent influx of funds for the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act program, $125 million, had been expected to last through February.

This doesn't mean that loans will cease to be available to small businesses, but for now, those that need money will have to accept the relatively less-favorable terms of traditional SBA loans.

The loan guarantees and the reduced fees had a significant impact: By guaranteeing 90% of the loan (rather than the usual 75%), the SBA reduced lenders' risks, making them more willing to lend money at more favorable rates and on less strict terms;
by covering part or all of the fees, the program made loans more affordable for borrowers. Under the Recovery Act terms, a small business could have saved up to $40,000 on a $2 million loan. That savings could be enough to hire an additional employee -- just the sort of thing the country needs right now.

As we described last week in State Job Creation Strategies Part I: Finding the Money and Investing in Human Capital and Physical Infrastructure, competing globally for jobs starts with policy makers instituting fundamental investments in education, human capital and physical infrastructure that make their state a productive environment for economic innovation. 

The next step, as this Dispatch will describe, is helping the private sector leverage opportunities for job creation and technological innovation. Too often, some state leaders treat economic development as merely a bidding war between states to give away the most tax breaks or economic subsidies to big corporate bidders. Not only do most studies show such tax-giveaway approaches to be ineffective -- fundamentals like labor productivity and physical infrastructure are more critical in site selection for most global businesses -- but they end up devoting most state resources to a few large businesses while ignoring investments in start-ups and smaller homegrown firms that are the heart of long-term local prosperity.

Evan Bayh said it true. The process Congress uses is flawed. It's more about partisan deal making than the public interest. Back room deals. Sneaking legislative provisions into sometimes unrelated bills to serve private interests and avoid scrutiny and discussion.

We have new evidence today, as they're at it again. With SBIR the victim! And they do it with smug satisfaction, unabashedly sanctimonious. They talk up the little guy (small business) but serve big money (VC) interests instead.

Basically, the House, via Rep Jason Altmire (D-PA), is attempting to bypass the SBIR reauthorization negotiations with the Senate and force the House version of the bill (S.2965) through the back door. If he succeeds in including it in the Job Stimulus bill, it will be difficult for the Senate to oppose it, especially since the President wants this legislation passed quickly.

Walk into an urban high school and look around at the kids. Roughly half of them will drop out of school. If you knew which ones, you might be able to steer them toward a different path. But you can't solve a problem until you can spot it, and how do you spot a future dropout?

Some Johns Hopkins University researchers, frustrated by the high-school-dropout rate, went looking for early-warning signs among students in Philadelphia. What were the telltale markers of a student who wouldn't graduate? Their analysis came back with astonishing clarity. Poring over eighth-grade attendance records, they found hundreds of students who had missed more than one out of every five class days. Of those frequent absentees, 78% eventually quit high school. Similarly, of the eighth graders who had failed either English or math, three out of four dropped out. No other factor -- gender, race, age, or standardized-test scores -- had the predictive power of those two patterns.

On the eve of the National Algae Association West Coast meeting in Las Vegas (Thursday and Friday of this week), news from the European Algae Biomass Association as well as presenters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in San Diego offered news on business models, new research and timelines for algal fuel commercialization.

The co-location imperative

In California, Scientific American is reporting on co-location schemes for access to carbon dioxide or wastewater. “Various scientists speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference, which wraps up here today, were promoting the notion that algae operations should be located next to industries that can supply one or more of the nutrient streams,” Scientific American’s blog writers reported. The SciAm item focuses on a presentation by Sunrise Ridge Algae in Texas that is operating a pilot plant in Austin, Texas and using wastewater from the nearby Hornsby Bend plant. The article also profiles the co-location of the Seambiotic pilot plant in Israel with a coal-fired power plant.

Technologists have been worrying aloud for years that America is losing its competitive edge as other countries invest more heavily in technology education and innovation.

To counter that trend, Intel and 24 venture capital firms said Tuesday that they planned to invest $3.5 billion in American start-ups over the next two years, The New York Times’s Claire Cain Miller reported.

In addition, Intel, Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and 13 other employers pledged to add jobs in 2010 — specifically by hiring 10,500 graduates of American colleges, largely those with computer science and engineering degrees.

The initiative, called the Invest in America Alliance, is spearheaded by Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, and was announced on Tuesday by the company’s chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

THIS IS A NOTEWORTHY INITIATIVE BUT WILL NOT ADDRESS THE GROWING "VALLEY OF DEATH " THAT VC'S CANNOT AFFORD TO FOCUS ON AS DEAL SIZE IS TO SMALL AND COMPANIES ARE GENERALLY AT AN EARLIER STAGE THAN THEY ARE WILLING TO INVEST IN...............RICH BENDIS

Intel Corp.’s announcement of a new $3.5 billion venture alliance to invest in U.S. start-ups puts a nice face on the chip giant and the venture industry. It conjures up an impressive vision of an industry coming together and committing to a major new initiative.

Except for one thing – it’s not new money. The 24 venture firms that have signed on have not raised new capital, and they’re not pooling their capital into a new fund. While $3.5 billion is a nice big, round number, it simply represents the total amount that this small but prominent slice of the venture industry already planned to invest in U.S. companies.

In fact, there’s nothing forcing the venture firms to invest that amount during this two-year period. They’re simply giving their word.

Intel itself says it’s committed to investing $200 million in U.S. companies over the next two years – not an insignificant amount. But it likely would have invested that total without this announcement. Last year Intel invested $327 million through its Intel Capital venture arm, about half of which went to North American companies.

Partnership Combines Strengths to Speed New Treatments to Patients

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health today unveiled an initiative designed to accelerate the process from scientific breakthrough to the availability of new, innovative medical therapies for patients.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health today unveiled an initiative designed to accelerate the process from scientific breakthrough to the availability of new, innovative medical therapies for patients.

The initiative involves two interrelated scientific disciplines: translational science, the shaping of basic scientific discoveries into treatments; and regulatory science, the development and use of new tools, standards and approaches to more efficiently develop products and to more effectively evaluate product safety, efficacy and quality. Both disciplines are needed to turn biomedical discoveries into products that benefit people.

(RTTNews) - Senators John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., unveiled legislation Wednesday intended to drive job creation and increase America's global competitiveness by helping immigrant entrepreneurs secure visas to the U.S.

Under the StartUp Visa Act of 2010, an immigrant entrepreneur will be allowed to receive a two-year visa if he or she can show that a qualified U.S. investor is willing to dedicate a significant sum - a minimum of $250,000 - to the immigrant's startup venture.

The bill would also amend immigration law to create a new EB-6 category for immigrant entrepreneurs, drawing from existing visas under the EB-5 category, which permits foreign nationals who invest at least $1 million into the U.S., and thereby create ten jobs, to obtain a green card.

Although this video wasn't commissioned by the organization behind National Entrepreneurship Week (February 20-27), I'm confident it sums up their mission quite well.

From the Grasshopper, the virtual phone system designed for entrepreneurs:

THIS 2 MINUTE VIDEO IS WORTH THE TIME AND A GREAT ENTREPRENEURIAL MOTIVATOR.....RICH BENDIS

The United States is home to the world’s first research park, launched in 1951 at Stanford University. In the sixty years since, another 170 university-related research parks have sprung up across the country, promoting innovation, incubating technology, and stimulating economic growth. Today, however, the United States has lost its lead. China, India, and Korea are home to the world’s largest research parks, developed by their national governments, attracting global research and development companies from afar to their shores.

In 1981, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, giving universities the lead role in transferring technology into the private sector from federally supported research. Such research contributes anywhere from $47 billion to $187 bil- lion annually to our nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Other countries have copied the U.S. university commercialization model, with the result, for example, that universities in the United Kingdom now have a better record than U.S. universities in technology commercialization.

Many Web sites get most of their revenue from online advertising. So which advertisers are spending the most money online -- and helping online publishers keep the lights on?

AT&T and Verizon, the two largest U.S. phone companies, bought the most online ads last year, according to comScore. In the 12-month period ending last November, AT&T bought almost 85 billion ads, while Verizon bought almost 57 billion.

On the whole, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 4 trillion display ads last year, according to comScore, representing roughly 20% year-over-year growth.

Mojo is a folkloric word that refers to the physical manifestation of a supernatural force. MOJO is also the title of a brand-new book by my friend and pre-eminent executive coach, Marshall Goldsmith. “Mojo,” as Marshall writes, “is that positive spirit toward what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside.”

Consider mojo a form of self-motivation that spurs us onward to achieve for ourselves as well as for others. There four aspects to this positive force, two are focused on the inner self and two are focused on our outer self. That split between what we are inside and how we are perceived makes the concept of mojo useful for anyone seeking to improve as well as to make a positive difference.

Let’s examine the four keys, each of which is defined by a straightforward but evocative question:

Identity: Who you think you are? Self-awareness becomes with an understanding of how you view yourself. The operative word in this question is think; that is, how do you perceive yourself. The book explores four aspects of identity – remembered, reflected, programmed and created. Understanding how each attribute affects your self-understanding provides a good handle on getting to know yourself better.

How places like China, Brazil, and Israel are taking aggressive steps to encourage more start-ups – and what that means for the US.

From Europe to Asia and beyond, the hunger to innovate has created lots of entrepreneurial competition for America.

Start-up firms are helping to manage traffic in the teeming cities of Brazil and have allowed less-populous nations such as Israel to become fertile soil for new business ideas.

These nations view innovation as a vital source of economic competitiveness. Not that long ago, the United States was the clear world leader in most industries and technology.

Now, while it's hard to put any other nation as "No. 1," America no longer enjoys such a privileged position.

The global spread of inventiveness is a disruptive force but also a beneficial one, economists say. If more of the world's people are innovators, more will be creating new industries or solving problems like how to control carbon emissions.

Access to technology has become easier than ever. Technology concepts that once had a high barrier to entry to the uninitiated have converged into frameworks, APIs, and libraries which give even relatively unskilled programmers the ability to create web software easily. Cloud infrastructures can alleviate a large part of the cost and complexity of scaling and availability under high traffic demands.

The abstraction doesn't even stop at the basic technology; at one level above this, some of the fundamental use cases in web software can be delegated to high availability services e.g. Twitter or Facebook Connect for primary user login and profile management or Yahoo Pipes to translate and combine different data sources into a format you require without having to write a line of code. Reusing the essential use cases of software was an original vision in a startup I worked for nearly ten years go, and at the time it seemed a distant and indistinct goal. Today, loosely-coupled Service-Oriented Architectures allows business the freedom to focus on the core business problems.