Every summer, Boston venture capital firm Flybridge Capital Partners throws a big weekend shindig up in Kennebunkport, Maine for entrepreneurs, fellow investors, and their families. For the Saturday night dinner party, they ask everyone to come in costume. In prior years, the theme has been "alter agos," "rock stars," and "heroes and villains." This year, attendees were asked to come as their favorite "Saturday Night Live" character or musical guest.

The Flybridge crew put together this "SNL" parody video, shown during the party. (Toward the end, there's a cameo from yours truly, standing in for Seth Rogen.) The break-down:

0:30 - "Weekend Update"

4:00 - "Mr. Bill Raises Venture Capital"

6:05 - "Digital Short: Like a VC"

A recent Times article noted that the number of men age 65 and older increased by 21 percent from 2000 to 2010, nearly double the 11.2 percent growth rate for women in that age group.

What are the implications -- the benefits and the costs -- of having more men around longer? While most experts say it may be only a blip, some demographers say that a surprisingly rapid rise in the number of men could cost society even more in retirement costs, since they earned more than women and would collect more, and they would add to the long-term care problem.

When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist.

While these may not have been statistically rigorous exercises, they do point to something real: In American public life, researchers are largely absent. Trained to stick to the purity of the laboratory, they tend to avoid the sometimes irrational hurly-burly of politics.

For example, according to the Congressional Research Service, the technically trained among the 435 members of the House include one physicist, 22 people with medical training (including 2 psychologists and a veterinarian), a chemist, a microbiologist and 6 engineers.

The tech sector has had a split personality for the last year or so.

VCs and angels have been throwing big money after startups and the young hotshot engineers who run them, and the tech IPO market has been hotter than any time since the late 1990s.

But established tech companies have been acting conservative, accumulating cash while their P/E ratios languish in the low double-digits -- just above the range that "steel mills trade at before they're going out of business" as Marc Andreessen recently quipped.

You may not have wads of cash to spend on marketing in the early stages of your startup, but that doesn't mean that there aren't effective ways to get your brand out there.

Before the Internet, small businesses only had a few ways to market their products cheaply, through methods like printing out fliers or sponsoring little local events. Now there are all kinds of opportunities out there on the Web—you just need to know where to look.

We are not sure yet what level of success Re.cruit.Me might achieve, or whether it will be a success at all, as we only have just released the service to a private trial group. Be we can feel happy in the knowledge that we’ve been diligent in avoiding many of common mistakes made by Australian entrepreneurial ventures.

Here are the very commandments we used to guide our new venture.

What is Re.cruit.me?

Re.cruit.me is a web-based B2B application offering employers the ability to easily screen candidates for technical roles before their existing recruitment process kicks in. It also offers recruiters a cost effective way to screen and then categorise the clientele they adv

Ithaa is an undersea restaurant at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island Resort. The restaurant is located 16 feet below the surface of the ocean.

CNN has more:

The six-course dinner menu often features French dishes from executive chef Nicolas Boutin and is priced at $320 a person. A lighter three-course lunch menu is available for $195 a person. Both meals include one glass of bubbly champagne.

A few weeks ago, Fred Wilson discussed the role of government grants in helping launch tech companies.

Fred is not a fan and argues that evaluating and aiding early-stage companies is not a core competency of government organizations.

He concludes by asking his readers to look into grant programs available for startups.

We find it hard to disagree with Fred's point of view. Prevailing evidence suggests that federal, state, and local governments are just not focused or passionate enough about growing entrepreneurial endeavors, and also typically lack experience with internet-native businesses.

Looking to head back to school?  Then you might want to check out these 10 schools - they have some of the most popular entrepreneurship programs out there!

1.  University of Houston: The Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship has been a leading program in the U.S. for the past several years. Over 1,800 students are engrossed in the entrepreneurship major or minor at this Texas school every semester. Continuous outside classroom experiences and opportunities are presented to the University of Houston entrepreneurship students, expanding their networks and connections. An average of 65% of students enrolled in this program have started a business in college or shortly after graduation.

2.  Baylor University: With a goal to assist local entrepreneurial efforts as well as national ventures, the John F. Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship has been thriving for decades. Baylor University was one of the first universities to implement an entrepreneurship program and it has proven to be a leader for the rest of the country. Extensive entrepreneurship programs are offered such as International Entrepreneurship Study Abroad, The Innovation Evaluation Program and Institute for Family Business.

Inspired by MG Siegler’s “I’m Quitting Email” diatribe, although this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for quite a while. I was going to save it for my personal blog, but hey, if MG’s allowed to rant about his ongoing struggles with his email inbox here on TechCrunch, I should be allowed to inform you of my loathing of phone calls as well.

And as an added bonus, I can now easily point back to this post for anyone who pings me and asks for a “quick – 2-minutes tops, I swear – phone call” in the future.

Needless to say, of course I’m not actually quitting phone calls under any circumstances. In fact, my family and friends can rest assured that I’ll still be reachable on my mobile phone 24/7 – for better or worse.

Venture Capitalists typically have partners’ meetings on Mondays. Why is that? Who knows. But probably because as a group we travel a lot. So the industry formed around a day of the week when all partners could avoid having company board meetings or traveling.

Yesterday was a Monday. And not a pleasant one.

Rewind. When I first got into the industry it was 2007. Valuations were enormous relative to progress in companies. Web 2.0 was still a term being bandied about. Companies with less than $2 million in revenue were asking for $50-60 million valuations and getting them. My partnership was pretty bearish and scratched our heads a bit at price tags.

It was a great learning time for me. I spent my days meeting companies, figuring out what areas of the market interested me and trying to get a sense for how VCs thought about fair valuations. I thought about things I never had to as an entrepreneur: check size, ownership percentage, deal stage, portfolio construction and risk.

There’s a new goofy Microsoft video making the rounds. No, Gmail Man hasn’t returned – this time it’s four top Microsoft execs bundled into a Mini Cooper and talking Desperate Housewives, iPhones and Google while bickering over backseat space.

Update: It looks like the video was removed from Vimeo this afternoon. We're not yet sure why it was taken down, but maybe it has something to do with the negative reaction from some bloggers, including this post from CNET, which gave it a big thumbs down.

Forbes recently published our list of the world's most innovative companies in which we ranked companies based upon their innovation premium. But why do some companies have a high innovation premium while others do not? During our study we learned that a leader's everyday actions are one of the most powerful signals to their team and organization that innovation truly matters.

Dozens of senior executives at large organizations revealed to us in interviews that in most cases they did not feel personally responsible for coming up with innovations. They felt only a responsibility to "facilitate the process," to make sure someone else in the company was doing it. But in the world's most innovative companies, senior executives like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Marc Benioff (salesforce.com), and A.G. Lafley (Procter & Gamble) did not just delegate innovation; they kept their own hands deep in the innovation process.

In the hype that is social media marketing, it is often hard to distinguish between the braggadocio and the brilliant. Communities are launched with great fanfare only to slink away quietly into the burial ground of false promise. So to stumble across a vibrant community— one that predates Facebook and supports a B2B brand— is not just surprising, it is downright awe-inspiring.

Thanks to the support of an enlightened board member in 2003, the SAP Community Network (SCN) was able to overcome internal naysayers, and gradually grow into a 2.5 million-member social business juggernaut. Now heading community operations, Chip Rodgers, who I interviewed in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit, the SCN sets a high standard, revealing these 9 ways to know your community is truly awesome.

KANGERLUSSUAQ, Greenland—In her knitted ski hat, parka and hiking boots, Åsa Rennermalm doesn't look like an accountant—or a plumber.

But the Rutgers University hydrologist draws on both disciplines as she works at the southwestern edge of Greenland's vast ice sheet. She's spent the past four years trying to answer a deceptively simple question: When Greenland's ice melts, where does the water go?

"Satellites show the surface of the ice is melting and the volume of ice is decreasing," Rennermalm says. "But how much meltwater is leaving and reaching the ocean? That will influence future sea level rise."

In the not-too-distant future broadband speeds will be measured in gigabits per second rather than megabits per second, the former being 1,000 times faster than the latter. Such blazing fast data transmission will vastly improve the quality of streaming high-definition video, playing online video games, participating in video conferences and using voice over IP, all of which struggle with latency at today's average data transfer rates, which range from less than one megabit per second (Mbps) to 10 Mbps (pdf). The sticking point over gigabit-per-second broadband: who will pay for it?

Telecommunications companies, still stinging from the financial beating they took a decade ago after hastily building up capacity for Internet companies that soon went out of business, have been leery ever since of investing in infrastructure unless they are certain there is a demand for it. Most customers, many of them still exploring the wonders of YouTube and for the most part content to simply use e-mail and social networks, are not demanding, nor are they willing to pay a premium for, service that moves information at 1 billion bits per second.

Students and faculty from across Georgetown University were invited to pitch their business ideas last year in the first-ever Hoya Challenge. Participants were eligible for $10,000 in cash prizes and workspace this summer at a local business incubator.

The year-long event, a living lesson in entre­pre­neur­ship, never involved a textbook.

The university is one of many in the region ramping up its entre­pre­neur­ship programs, both inside and outside the classroom, as a growing number of students in business schools and beyond want to study the subject.

The dynamics pushing the trend are varied. The troubled economy has made traditional jobs more difficult to obtain. Flashy success stories such as Google, Facebook and Groupon give entrepreneurship a certain glamour. And many of today’s graduates are less likely than their parents to pursue careers in a single company or industry.

As I got caught up on my reading this morning, I was amazed how many column inches, pixels (and a Google logo) were dedicated to what would have been Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday.

The more I read, the more I was reminded that the Lucy we all loved (even my kids LOVE I Love Lucy reruns) was more than a gifted comedienne – she was a remarkable entrepreneur.

Note I didn’t say “woman” entrepreneur – simply because it would be inappropriate to compare her to only females in the business world. Few – men or women – compared to Lucy while she was breaking invisible barriers and building what can only be described as an empire.

Where do you look for iPhone and iPad accessories? Your local Best Buy? The online Apple Store? There are lots of places to look, but one destination in particular has become my go-to spot for accessory browsing: Kickstarter.

The crowd-funding site, which invites users to invest in various projects with small sum “pledges” that only have to be paid if a project reaches its funding goal, is a breath of fresh air for a jaded iDevice accessory shopper like myself. And Kickstarter projects associated with Apple hardware seem to have a knack for doing well, both on the site and after achieving funding. Dan Provost, co-designer of the Glif and the Cosmonaut (both listed below), shared with me his opinion of why Kickstarter has prompted so many interesting Apple-related projects:

To a smaller degree, the influx of Apple accessories on Kickstarter has mirrored the deluge of apps into the App Store back in 2008. Apple has created an amazing tool in the iPhone, and people are excited to build things for it. Apple enabled individuals to publish software on the iPhone in 2008 with the opening of the App Store, and it seems Kickstarter has created that same enthusiasm for hardware.

Building a startup is hard work for low pay, it’s risky, and it requires total responsibility to make it work. Yet, many entrepreneurs are the happiest people I know. On the other hand, I know many unhappy individuals who are always partying, have minimal commitments, and little responsibility. I suspect the real parameters of happiness have eluded these people.

According to one of my favorite authors, Brian Tracy, in his book “The Power of Self-Discipline,” happiness is not even a goal that you can aim at and achieve in and of itself, but it is a by-product that comes to you when you are engaged in doing something you really enjoy while in the company of people you like and respect.