In a recent article about the Startup America Initiative (a public policy and programmatic priority of the Obama White House) and the Startup America Partnership (the private non-profit initiative focused on catalyzing private sector resources for entrepreneurs), I was quoted as saying "everything is moving too slowly." While I do wish that the macroeconomic situation in the country wasn't making it so hard for the private sector initiative to generate outcomes more quickly, I actually couldn't be more impressed with the speed and the implementation of the White House's Startup America Initiative.

To be clear, the Startup America Initiative is the public sector policy and programmatic activity led by the White House focused on increasing innovation and commercialization and accelerating support for U.S. entrepreneurs. These efforts are being deployed through federal agencies like the Departments of Energy, Labor, the Small Business Administration and Commerce including the Economic Development Administration. I've had an upfront and active seat from which to learn about and contribute to this work, as a year ago I was selected to participate in the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE), an organization President Obama and then U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke charged with identifying public policies and programs to foster innovation, entrepreneurship, and commercialization.

TRENTON — Legislation that will provide an incentive for investment groups and individuals to invest in the state’s emerging technology businesses was approved Thursday by the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.

Also known as the “New Jersey Angel Investor Tax Credit Act,” the bill sponsored by Sen. Fred Madden, D-Washington Township, would create specific gross income and corporate business tax credits for start-up investments of up to $500,000 made in state-based high-tech and biotechnology companies. So-called “angel investors” are individual entrepreneurs — or groups — who provide the massive capital investments that start-up technology businesses need to get up and running.

On a dark autumn morning in 2006, environmental geographer James Ford headed out from the small island of Igloolik in Canada’s Nunavut Territory with a young Inuit man to set up fishing nets under the ice of a lake on the mainland. It was shortly after Thanksgiving, a time of year when the ice at this high latitude—nearly 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle—was expected to be quite solid. But as the two followed their snowmobile tracks home later in the day, they suddenly came to a dead end—the tracks vanished. Scanning the surface of the frozen Foxe Basin, they found the continuation of their trail 50 meters to the north, indicating they were standing alongside a crack in the ice that had shifted that distance since they’d passed that morning.

“We both looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, close call,’” recalls Ford, an assistant professor at McGill University. The ice was obviously less stable than they had assumed, and they had not taken the proper precautions. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, Ford says. While the Inuit used to depend on solid, safe ice from early fall until late spring, reports of unstable conditions had become more frequent in the past several years.

Europe is on the brink of a monetary crisis, and with debt-laden nations like Greece, Spain and Italy struggling to avoid financial calamity, the euro itself is swaying perilously.

The reasons for the crisis are complex and many: economic, political, social and cultural. Some of them go back to the inception of the single European currency and even earlier. But faced with problems that have been laid bare in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the continent is now embroiled in a storm that George Soros has called “intractable.”

MIAMI – For business owners, social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and company blogs should be more than sharing marketing messages and industry news. They should be using these outlets to engage customers and drive business, social media marketing consultant Jason Falls stressed here at a panel discussion during Entrepreneur's Winning Strategies conference yesterday.

One way is to use social media to tell the "story" of the business -- how it came to be and what it aims to accomplish. "There's no such thing as boring people and boring businesses," said Spencer Antle, founder of Miami-based clothing supplier Island Company. "Just get on there and tell your story."

Social media as we know it — Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. — is only 15 years old, and yet it feels as if they are permanent fixtures in our lives that have been with us forever. A look at the history of social media, however, shows how fleeting much of it is, and how few genuinely innovative developments there have been since the mid-1990s. The Globe.com, for instance, was the first big, modern form of social media, and it incorporated virtually all the concepts and communications you can currently see in Facebook. It imploded after only three years.

Singapore leads the world in innovation competitiveness while the US is ranked 4th in a field of 44 countries & regions but the EU member states (as a group) rank 19th, according to a report published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

The report compared the EU and U.S. within a field of 40 nations and four regions on 16 key indicators of innovation-based competitiveness, such as scientists and engineers, corporate and government R&D, venture capital, productivity and trade performance. The top three positions in the list aside from Singapore are Finland and Sweden.

Despite the lower ratings, the report concludes that the EU has made marginally faster progress than the U.S. over the past decade—while America made little or no progress—with the EU ranked 28 and the U.S. 43. The relative improvement of the EU over the U.S. in the last decade is driven by EU and member state efforts through innovation incentives and lowered corporate tax rates to be more globally competitive. In contrast, the U.S. continued to have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.

"In the 50's and early 60's, they didn't call it venture capital," says Reid Dennis, the founder of Institutional Venture Partners, a firm with nearly $3 billion in committed capital. "They called it a special situation," he jokes.

Dennis, who made his first investment in October 1952 in Ampex, a company that produced an early version of a tape recorder, is one of several venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to be interviewed in Something Ventured, a new documentary film that explores the origins of the venture capital industry—told through first person accounts from the men that helped shape it, including Arthur Rock (who funded Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Apple and Teledyne), Tom Perkins (founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Bill Draper (founder of Sutter Hill Ventures) and Reid Dennis.

As obesity becomes a global health threat, scientists are discovering new details about how this complex affliction affects the body--and about the many factors that bring it on. In a partnership with theVisualMD, here is a look at the fascinating details behind this common condition

Michael Arrington, editor of the popular tech startup news site, TechCrunch has decided to shift gears and become a venture capitalist (VC).

Debates on journalistic ethics aside, is it that easy to become a VC?

Marc Andreessen, founder of the leading venture firm, Andreessen-Horowitz Ventures, once said, "In California, you need a license to drive a car or buy a gun, but not to be a venture capitalist." Even the local barber has to pass a State Board Exam, and get a license to cut hair. Being a VC calls for two distinct abilities: raise money from institutional investors (called limited partners) and invest it in a portfolio of companies -- the Facebook, Twitter, Zynga's -- to generate obscene returns. Sounds deceptively easy! Not quite. Here are a few characteristics of successful venture capitalists:

Can you raise money? According to the National VC Association (NVCA), venture firms shrunk from over 1023 in 2005 to 791 in 2010. In other words, institutional investors are not handing out money as fast as they once did. Ten years ago, during 1999-2000, venture funds raised $100 billion. In 2010, only 157 venture funds raised $12.3 billion -- the lowest in the past seven years. Despite this apparent slowdown, for best-in-class VCs, raising money is a quick in-and-out 90 day process, while the rest of the wannabees spend 18 months or more raising capital. Institutional investors are being very selective. Venture funds that can demonstrate a compelling strategy are welcome. For the rest, Darwin prevails.

If you need to innovate, but find yourself procrastinating, your excuse is on this list. While you may have all the "proof" you need to prove yourself right, being right doesn't necessarily increase your odds of innovating. So, take a look, note the ones that bug you, and find a way to go over, under, around, or through them.

1. I don't have the time.

2. I can't get the funding.

3. My boss will never go for it.

4. Were not in the kind of business likely to innovate.

5. I've got too much on my plate.

6. We won't be able to get it past legal.

For all the talk the last few years about the large number of people leaving corporate life for the world of entrepreneurship, I know people who have made the opposite move – switching from working by themselves to entering corporate life and working for someone else. When going from working at home or in a small business to a larger, more formal work setting, a number of rules are different.

In response to a post from Nate Riggs, an important partner of The Brainzooming Group who recently took a position at Bob Evans Farms, Inc. as Digital Marketing Strategist – Restaurant Division, I put together these 5 observations for anyone beginning a corporate job after being in small agencies and entrepreneurial ventures.

Dolphin communication seems to be more akin to humans talk than originally thought. Dolphin calls recorded in the 1970s were re-analyzed to reveal that dolphins use tissue vibrations rather than whistles to communicate. The research, published in Biology Letters, broke the recordings down using mathematical computing and visualization scripts. This allowed the team to determine the frequency and harmonics of each whistle-like sound.

The whistles dolphins produce turn out not to be whistles at all, but tissue vibrations akin to the vocalization produced by terrestrial mammals. This explains why dolphins can convey information and identify themselves to one another regardless of the depth they are swimming, the researchers told Wired Science. The findings could have implications for all toothed whales since true whistles would be less effective for communicating the ocean depths. Tissue vibrations allow the animals to recycle air and quickly change their tone mid-chatter, whereas whistling blasts air out at once.

Innovation is widely hailed as the key to seizing competitive advantage and sustaining profitability. Yet, most companies allocate little structured attention to cultivating this precious resource. Why, in the age of know-how, show-how, relationships, and best practices, do companies routinely overlook the critical need to manage and extract value from creativity and knowledge? Why, in a business climate demanding transparency and accountability, is there a striking lack of discipline regarding assets we can’t necessarily touch, but that are clearly driving the lion’s share of revenue for Apple, Google, IBM, 3M, Amazon, Netflix, Priceline, and countless other companies.

In HARVESTING INTANGIBLE ASSETS: Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company’s Intellectual Property (AMACOM; October 27, 2011; $29.95 Hardcover), Andrew J. Sherman challenges business leaders to question the popular motivational approach to fostering innovation and creativity, as well as the standard emphasis on balance sheets over home-grown processes, informal collaborations, and employee expertise. Based on his work with some of the world’s most innovative and successful companies, Sherman presents systematic methods for managing, measuring, maximizing, commercializing, and protecting the greatest sources of value—concrete, bottom-line, as well as shareholder value—in today’s information-centric, innovation-driven world.

For the second year in a row, Area Development has conducted a survey of a select group of highly respected location consultants who work with a nationwide client base. We asked the consultants to name their top-5 state choices in 12 site selection categories. Here are the top overall states:

States were ranked in each of the 12 site selection categories based on the number of times they were named as a "top-5" choice by the responding consultants. Next, a top-5 state's ranking in each of the 12 categories was assigned a weight in accordance with its position in these individual categories. Based on these total weighted scores, Texas is far and away the consultants' #1 choice for doing business, followed by Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina (with weighted scores only a point apart), and finally Indiana in the #5 spot. Taking the #6–#10 rankings based on weighted scores are Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and — surprisingly — California, in that order.

The Obama Administration today announced the winners of the $37 million Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge, a multi-agency competition launched in May to support the advancement of 20 high-growth, regional industry clusters. Investments from three federal agencies and technical assistance from 13 additional agencies will promote development in areas such as advanced manufacturing, information technology, aerospace and clean technology, in rural and urban regions in 21 states. Projects are driven by local communities that identify the economic strengths of their areas, with funding awarded to the best proposals.

These public-private partnerships are expected to create more than 4,800 jobs and 300 new businesses, as well as retain another 2,400 jobs and train approximately 4,000 workers for careers in high-growth industries, according to grantee estimates. Each of the 20 awards average about $1.8 million per project, and winning clusters will contribute another $13 million in total matching funds.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - University of Maryland experts in planning and economic development will create a new, sophisticated, 3-D analytical tool that 'maps' innovation and entrepreneurial networks in the State, and helps spot opportunities for new business collaborations.

A $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce will fund the project, as well as redevelopment assistance for Baltimore and expanded education for development professionals.

"A detailed image can help you spot possibilities, gaps and missed opportunities in business networks," says University of Maryland Urban Studies Professor Marie Howland, co-principal investigator for the grant and associate dean of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. "You can squeeze a great deal of data into this analytical format, and potentially discover unrecognized opportunities and trends."

The tenth edition of the OECD Science, Technology and Industry (STI) Scoreboard has been published this week by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. With over 180 comparable indicators, it analyses trends in science, technology, innovation and industrial performance in OECD and major non-OECD countries (Brazil, Russian Federation, India, Indonesia, People’s Republic of China and South Africa).

The report shows that the United States is leading the way for research. Forty out of the Top 50 universities with the highest research impact are located in the U.S. and the rest are in Europe. Research and development spending in the U.S. was the highest amount of the countries compared ($400bn in 2009), with China and Japan coming second and third. The report also states that innovation is critical for effectively overcoming the current economic challenges:

Climate deniers are accused of practicing pseudoscience, as are intelligent design creationists, astrologers, UFOlogists, parapsychologists, practitioners of alternative medicine, and often anyone who strays far from the scientific mainstream. The boundary problem between science and pseudoscience, in fact, is notoriously fraught with definitional disagreements because the categories are too broad and fuzzy on the edges, and the term “pseudoscience” is subject to adjectival abuse against any claim one happens to dislike for any reason. In his 2010 book Nonsense on Stilts (University of Chicago Press), philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci concedes that there is “no litmus test,” because “the boundaries separating science, nonscience, and pseudoscience are much fuzzier and more permeable than Popper (or, for that matter, most scientists) would have us believe.”