Living on the harsh, wind-swept northern Great Plains, North Dakotans lean towards the practical in economic development. Finding themselves sitting on prodigious pools of oil—estimated by the state's Department of Mineral Resources at least 4.3 billion barrels—they are out drilling like mad. And the state is booming.

Unemployment is 3.8%, and according to a Gallup survey last month, North Dakota has the best job market in the country. Its economy "sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits," says Ron Wirtz, editor of the Minneapolis Fed's newspaper, fedgazette. The state's population, slightly more than 672,000, is up nearly 5% since 2000.

The biggest impetus for the good times lies with energy development. Around 650 wells were drilled last year in North Dakota, and the state Department of Mineral Resources envisions another 5,500 new wells over the next two decades. Between 2005 and 2009, oil industry revenues have tripled to $12.7 billion from $4.2 billion, creating more than 13,000 jobs.

A new report of job growth, conducted by Babson College Associate Professor Joel Shulman, with input from Emily Leventhal at Athena Capital Advisors, suggests that job growth over the past five years has grown fastest among “Entrepreneurial” companies. Job growth among publicly-traded US Entrepreneurial companies (market cap greater than $200M), as measured by the newly created EntrepreneurShares Mutual Fund (ticker: ENTRX), outpaced job growth among comparably-sized non-entrepreneurial, publicly traded companies in each of the past five years. Moreover, the results show that publicly-traded entrepreneurial companies grew by 0.25% even during 2008-2009, when the overall market declined by 3.25%.

 

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in 1990, to 50,000 in 2000, to over 200 million in 2010.

Besides sheer quantity, viruses, which were originally used as academic proof of concepts, quickly turned into geek pranks, then evolved into cybercriminal tools. By 2005, the virus scene had been monetized, and virtually all viruses were developed with the sole purpose of making money via more or less complex business models.

In the following story, FortiGuard Labs looks at the most significant computer viruses over the last 40 years and explains their historical significance.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BioFlorida is calling all geniuses – BioGENEiuses that is. High school students (grades 9-12) enrolled in science-related courses are invited to submit applications to the Florida BioGENEius Challenge, which is a stepping stone to the U.S. National BioGENEius Challenge. National winners then move on to compete for $19,000 in cash prizes at the Biotechnology Institute’s International BioGENEius Challenge, the most prestigious high school science competition in the world for original research in biotechnology.

“This competition is a great opportunity for students statewide to get their research and ideas seen by national and international biotechnology experts. In turn, showcasing the level of young scientific talent that exists in Florida reinforces how important it is to support and strengthen science education in our state,” said Russell Allen, president and CEO of BioFlorida, Inc., the trade association for Florida’s bioscience industry that represents more than 200 member companies and research organizations in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and medical device fields.

The San Francisco Bay Area has a storied tradition as the birthplace and leading hub of biotechnology, but something curious has happened the past couple years. Most of the scientifically groundbreaking, medical-textbook rewriting, financially lucrative new biotech drugs of the 21st century are coming from somewhere else.

This dawned on me last week as I started thinking about the 20-year outlook for the Bay Area life sciences cluster, in advance of the Bay Area Life Sciences 2031 event I’m organizing in San Francisco on Wednesday evening. It forced me to think about the really innovative drugs that still have a chance to generate billions of dollars in revenue two decades from today, that will help people live longer and better lives, and that are blazing new scientific trails. I’m talking about drugs that are a scientific, clinical, and business trifecta—drugs like Gleevec, Avastin, Herceptin, and Enbrel.

Crowdfunding is the latest initiative to raise capital for start-ups. It's a collective that invests small amounts to support fledgling ideas, and its popularity has created a new asset class with shared, minimal risk.

However, it will be some time though before crowdfunding, which usually takes place through the Internet, evolves into a reliable, sure-shot method of fund-raising in India.

Grow VC India, the first formal platform that promotes this, was launched in July in partnership with Springboard Ventures Pvt. Ltd. While the platform has 1,200 registered investors and 122 companies, it is yet to nurture a deal. However, more than half-a-dozen companies have received funding offers, and are said to be in advanced stages of negotiation. Similar platforms elsewhere in the world like Startnext in Germany and KickStarter in the U.S. are active.

The current imbalance in the supply and demand for venture capital is creating opportunities for V.C. funds.

New limited partner commitments to venture capital funds have dwindled in recent years. This scarcity of capital has created its own Darwinian effect, with a new breed of start-ups flourishing as a result of innovation rather than capital-induced growth. As these companies mature, however, many of them are looking to venture capitalists for the money and expertise to realize their potential.

Back when the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000, liquidity was abundant, with unprecedented valuations for initial public offerings and acquisitions. Because of this bubble, venture capital returns in the 1990s skyrocketed. And as investors grew increasingly bullish on venture capital, limited partner commitments into new venture capital funds shot up to a high of $86 billion in 2000, well over 300 percent of the level two years earlier.

Venture capitalists and farmers share some common ground: tolerance for risk. With the wrong seeds and wrong conditions, investments can wither. With the right seeds and right conditions, profits can abound.

Now agriculture upstarts are pitching venture capitalists to plant their cash in technologies that could revolutionize how farmers produce, move and sell what feeds the world.

“We’re in a boom time for agriculture,” said Jason Henderson, vice president of the Omaha branch of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Traditional marketing says you have to “push” your message out to customers, over and over again, to get it remembered. A more effective approach in today’s Internet and interactive culture is to use “pull” technology to bring customers and clients to your story. You pull people in by providing new content with real value on your website at least every few days.

Guy Kawasaki, in his new book “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions” provides some in-depth recommendations on the “how to” of pull technology. Here are some of his recommendations for web sites and blogs that I particularly recommend to entrepreneurs and startups:

• Provide good content. This may seem obvious, but how many websites have you reviewed that are static and just plain dull? A website or blog without appealing or entertaining content for your market segment is not enchanting.

Want to know why the newspaper business has collapsed? Look at this chart from Marc Cenedella, CEO of TheLadders.com.

He shows ad revenue from help wanted classifieds dropping 92% in last 10 years, hitting $723 million last year, down from $8.7 billion in 2000. Once that easy money left the newspaper industry it was a lot harder to earn as much profit.

InstantShift and Wix recently released an infographic that determines how many apps the average developer needs to sell to make 7-figures.

Based on the average app price in Apple's store ($2.45*) and the cut of sales a developer receives (70%), here's the exact formula needed to become a millionaire:

2.45 x 0.7 x 581,395 apps sold = $1,000,000 (almost).

Every parent worries about screwing up their child's life. Even with the best intentions, some parenting mistakes are inevitable.

Unfortunately, some of those mistakes made us dumber along the way.

Many factors influence our intelligence. Some are genetic and are out of our hands. Others, like excessive drinking, are self-induced. Others have to do with how we were brought up.

At the heart of the famously overpriced Hong Kong housing market, Severn Road is once again the most expensive street in the world, according to Financial News.

One square meter of real estate in Severn Road goes for $78,200.

Paris' Avenue Montaigne fell off the radar this year only to make room for Quai Anatole, also in the French capital.

The 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan is causing problems for at least one of its fleet of nuclear reactors—and authorities have shut down 10 of the country's 55 units. Tokyo Electric Power confirmed that pressure had been rising inside reactor No. 1 at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast, one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. That means cooling water is not getting to the reactor core, causing a build up of steam inside the containment vessel. The problem, according to Japanese media reports, is a loss of grid electricity to run the pumps that bring in cooling water. The backup diesel generators that are supposed to provide emergency power in that case are out of order, according to the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, but replacements were being taken to the plant. (Similar diesel generators were providing power to the nation's Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which recycles spent nuclear fuel.)

‘THE FIRST step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation,’’ President Obama said to a concerned nation in his State of the Union address. Our nation has a remarkable record of rising from the ashes of crisis, and education and research in science and engineering have often led those revivals of prosperity and morale. Of the world’s top 20 research universities, the United States claims 17. As leaders of two, we know our institutions must play a central role in helping America to rebuild.

The nation has suffered profound dislocations before — the Civil War, countless cycles of boom and bust including the Great Depression, two world wars, and the Cold War. The letters and documents of each period make clear that in every case, many felt that America’s time was up, and this bold experiment of a nation could not long endure. Yet in each case contemporary observers underestimated America’s capacity for self-renewal.

An electronic suggestion box is not as good as an idea management system. In fact it might be worse than doing nothing at all.

Unfortunately for those organizations unwilling (or shy of proper budget) to jump into innovation all the way; afraid to get a purpose-built idea management system… they decide instead to just offer employees a place to submit their suggestions. These electronic suggestion boxes are not much better than the real metal box with a slot. They accept suggestions. The question is: what you are going to do with the ideas you get.

I just posted this at Quora in response to a question about social innovation business models (note: I have edited a couple issues, but the posts are relatively the same–at the moment this document is more extensive & insightful):

1) Association Model: Collaborative Consumption (think Zip Car & Netflix)–but a similar model is used by mobile entrepreneurs who sell use of their phones. [similar to affordable co-working spaces for new businesses & group buying in principle]
2) Association Model: training, networking, events, etc. (Social Enterprise Alliance & the B-Corporation organization). Encourage best practices. (I don’t know how lucrative Co-ops are or can be, but they are relatively similar in nature–it seems that the association model is slightly better–but I’m sure its different on a case by case basis)

About 300 Stanford business students showed up to listen to a guest lecture this week — even though it was the last week of the quarter and they had projects due.

But when the speaker is Skype Technologies co-founder turned venture capitalist Niklas Zennstrom talking about the long, hard process of building a company – well, schoolwork can wait.

Although he steered clear of discussing Skype’s IPO, which is expected later this year, Zennstrom did talk Tuesday about how Skype was a third attempt at building a company: Its free Internet phone service evolved first from a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called Kazaa that ran afoul of the music and film industries, and then from a distributed database company called Joltid that was running out of money and needed a way to make free phone calls.

The pitch. It’s the life blood of entrepreneurs, and if you’re shy about telling your company’s story to potential investors, you better get over it fast.

“There’s a process you have to go through to raise money,” said Cairn Cross, a founding partner of FreshTracks Capital, a venture capital firm based in Shelburne. “You need to pitch a lot, and you need to pitch to a lot of people. You get a lot of nos.”

FreshTracks was one of the sponsors of the Vermont Peak Pitch 2011 event last week, an event that brought together aspiring entrepreneurs and investors at Sugarbush Resort in Warren to take the lift ride together and ski back down. It’s on that six-minute ride up, and on top before the ski down, that entrepreneurs have the ears of the money folks to sell their ideas. It was the first time for the annual event at Sugarbush.

PsychTest has created the Entrepreneur Personality Test. It is a unique test that can assess whether you’re entrepreneur material

The test covered seven key business traits, namely Self-sufficiency, Conscientiousness, Drive, Social Skills, Optimism, Risk-taking, and Networking Ability. With over 12,000 test-takers to date, PsychTests data revealed that entrepreneurs who took the test outscored those without business experience on every scale. When comparing female vs. male entrepreneurs, men were more driven than women (score of 67 vs. 62 on a scale from 0 to 100), while women had better social skills (70 vs. 67) and tended to be more optimistic (72 vs. 67).