Name: Catchafire

Quick Pitch: Catchafire matches volunteers and social good organizations for pro bono work.

Genius Idea: Carving out a niche for pro bono work instead of compiling a general volunteer database.

Catchafire founder Rachael Chong is not especially well-suited for building houses. As a physically not-large person, her hoisting power is relatively limited, and she doesn’t consider herself to have any particular carpentry skills. So why, when she had valuable skills in finance and business that she was willing to share, was she tacking on shingles for Habitat for Humanity — a cause she believed in but nonetheless frustrated her?

Double dip may be back.

It has been three decades since the United States suffered a recession that followed on the heels of the previous one. But it could be happening again. The unrelenting negative economic news of the past two weeks has painted a picture of a United States economy that fell further and recovered less than we had thought.

When what may eventually be known as Great Recession I hit the country, there was general political agreement that it was incumbent on the government to fight back by stimulating the economy. It did, and the recession ended.

The New York Times asked me to give them an opinion piece on the Mayor's effort to bring a new science and technology University to NYC. They also asked a few others, like Caterina Fake, Eric Reis, Dave Tisch, and several more students of NYC and technology. The entire discussion is here.

But the best thing I've read on this topic was not in the NY Times. It was on a blog, of course. Written by NYC's very own Chris Dixon. He nailed it.

Data drives everything we know and don’t yet know. Data also drives the economic value of the internet. Every time we type an email, dial a number, add a tweet or publish content we are adding data to the “network” and that data carries meaning and meaningful indicators of behavior.

Data is exploding faster than most imagine and with explosive growth organizations, people and machines are learning more about human behavior and people’s preferences faster than ever before.

Moore’s law states that the amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. The social web is accelerating data. According to Cisco by 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes.

This was a question recently posed on the website Gamification.org. The interesting and hugely important thing about the folks at Gamification.org is that they are trying to bridge the reality chasm between entertainment games and economic games.  This, I believe they are rapidly learning, is yet another game.

So, sure, I’ll play…

The questioner asks that the respondents keep in mind the things that matter when raising money.  These are called the initial conditions:

• Traction
• Team
• Technology
• Validation

Want to make sure you never come up with a great idea? Here are twenty suggestions to help you kill your creativity.

Always think the way you've always thought. When confronted with a problem, fixate on what you were taught about how past thinkers solved it. Then analytically select the most promising logical past approach and apply it to the problem, excluding all other possibilities.

Be focused. The key to logical, linear thinking is knowing what to exclude from your mental space. Exclude everything that is dissimilar, unrelated or is in some other domain from your subject. If you want to improve the can opener, only study existing can openers and how they are made. Then work on improving what exists.

As a serial entrepreneur and professor in Silicon Valley, I am frequently asked what it takes to create an ecosystem of start-up innovation. Usually, the question is phrased like this: "What does it take to create a Silicon Valley in our backyard?"

I give everybody the same answer: "Invite a bunch of entrepreneurs into a room. Then leave."

One of the most important, and underrated, aspects of entrepreneurship clusters is location. Entrepreneurs don't need "teaching" so much as space. A place to gather, share ideas, experiment, fail, and settle on an innovation.

From my experience, there are five elements to every success "ecosystem" of entrepreneurship.

1) A culture of collaboration: To lean over to a group engaged in conversation at a table next to yours at a Silicon Valley coffee shop, and ask, "Do you know anything about [programming platform] Ruby-on-Rails?" is tantamount to saying, "Oh hi." We ask people we meet about technology, about trends, and what they're up to, and what new project their friends just started. There is an informal air of collaboration in Silicon Valley. It's network-building friendships. It's informal mentorships. And it's everywhere.

MEET the British Bill Gates. He studied computer science at Cambridge—dropping out to start his career in nearby “Silicon Fen”. Then he launched his own start-up, based at “Silicon Roundabout”, a new hub of tech firms in east London. Bolstered by finance from the City, he resisted the lure of a foreign takeover, ultimately listing on the London Stock Exchange.

It is a plausible biography—given the necessary addition of animal spirits—but an imaginary one. Britain has no digital equivalent of the 18th-century industrial innovators who turned technology into commercial leadership. Its more recent prowess in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology has not been emulated in the digital sphere. David Cameron’s government should ponder this failure and address the reasons for it. Luck is one of them, but so are national and European regulations and a tepid climate for entrepreneurs.

The quick expansion of social and mobile technologies is creating a widely distributed workforce. To better suit employees who come into offices more sporadically, some companies and design firms are testing radically new—and more efficient—configurations for physical offices, and betting that improved technology will make the experiment more successful than similar ones in the 1990s.

A project at the headquarters of Cisco Systems in San Jose, California, for example, overthrows decades-old conventions about office space. Called Connected Workplace, it replaces individual cubicles with open clusters of wheeled desks that belong to groups, not individuals; personal belongings are largely confined to lockers.

Albert Wegner (Union Square Ventures) has today’s VC Post of the day titled If You Need To Raise Money, Get Your Financing Done ASAP. In it, Albert expresses his belief that given the current macro economic environment, companies should focus on getting their money raised quickly – as in right now. He’s conveying global / macro pessimism that many people are talking about. While there are obvious timing disconnects between the long term value of a startup (often much more than five years), there is often a sentiment shift in the funding environment – all the way through the funding supply chain – when the economy goes south.

The next decade will bring remarkable changes in the way office work is done. Perhaps nowhere will change be more profound than in countries such as India, where improved network access and smart technologies could make it possible for certain tasks to be divided among people working outside major city centers, including in rural areas.

Xerox is one of many companies researching this trend and developing the technologies that will pave the way. CTO Sophie Vandebroek described some of the efforts of the company's two-year-old Xerox Research Center in India with Technology Review's chief correspondent, David Talbot.

Recent trends in economic indicators R such as unemployment rates and job growth clearly favor Nebraska. However, these trends may differ from the state’s performance in core mehasures of economic strength such as entrepreneurship, net migration and capital formation. Given this, the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Bureau of Business Research seeks to track these core economic measures in Nebraska and in all U.S. states.

The state entrepreneurship index is one effort to traEck these core trends. Specifically, the index is used to track entrepreneurship in Nebraska and compare with the other forty-nine states.

The index was developed by Eric C. Thompson and William B. Walstad in Entrepreneurship in Nebraska: Conditions, Attitudes, and Actions (GBallup Press, 2008). In this report, we use the same methodology to calculate a 2010 index and compare it to the 2008 index.

Download the PDF

Venture capitalists from around the world say the current level of IPO activity is too low to support the health of the venture capital industry in their respective countries, a new report has revealed.

According to the 2011 Global Venture Capital Survey sponsored by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association, venture capitalists in the US, China, Brazil, India and France found it most important to have an active IPO market in their home countries, followed closely by the UK, Canada, and Germany.

While start-ups in Silicon Valley, Boston and New York receive the bulk of venture capital, and the most media attention, the money is actually spread around the country further than you might think.

Using data from Dow Jones VentureSource and software from Tableau, we dumped onto a U.S. map the nearly 1,500 venture-capital funding deals — worth more than $14 billion — that took place in the first six months of the year.

Check out the map on the “Interactive Graphics” tab of this post (or click the picture). You’ll see that start-ups in 40 states were recipients of venture capital — even Hawaii.

As the United States continues to fight its way out of the Great Recession, more attention has been directed to the question of why is has taken so long for workers to find re-employment. In economist parlance, this is primarily a question of “structural unemployment.” This describes the type of unemployment that results from a mismatch of worker skills and the skills demanded by employers.

As of April 2011, there were 13.2 million unemployed workers and 2.9 million unfilled job openings. In other words, April’s bulky 8.7% unemployment rate could have been lowered one percentage point (to 7.7%) if just half of the advertised job vacancies were filled by unemployed workers. Obviously, it is not realistic for every position to be filled immediately—it takes time for employers to find the right workers, and vice versa. But the odd pairing of high unemployment and high job vacancies illustrates a structural employment issue, which may have worsened in recent years.

Economists forecast that Friday's unemployment report will show the nation's unemployment rate has not changed at 9.2 percent, with an expected figure of 90,000 jobs added last month. Congress has done little to address unemployment, infuriating voters around the nation. But, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University has an idea about lowering unemployment. The institute has teamed up with the city of New York to found an incubator that provides a physical space and money to help new businesses take off.

The Takeaway's host, John Hockenberry spent a day visiting young entrepreneurs at the Varick Street Incubator, and he speaks with Polytech president Jerry Hultin about the venture.

IT'S REALLY JUST A MATTER OF TIME. Using iPads as in-store touch-screen displays makes too much sense for consumer and retailers alike.

They're more interactive than traditional digital signage and much easier to use than PC-based kiosks.  They're also less expensive than either option and you can instantly update an entire fleet of iPads from any web-enabled computer.

If only there was a place to turn, a person to talk with who understood the whole process; someone ready with answers to the questions you haven't even thought of yet.

Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield cited evidence that digital technology is having an impact on our brains:

• A recent paper, Microstructure abnormalities in adolescents with internet addiction disorder, in the journal PLoS (free access).
• Increase in people with autistic spectrum disorders.
• The rise in the appeal of Twitter.

When we don’t eat, hunger-inducing neurons in the brain’s hypothalamus start eating bits of themselves (autophagy), sending a hunger signal to prompt eating, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found in experiments with mice.

They said the new findings suggest that treatments aimed at blocking autophagy may prove useful as hunger-fighting weapons in the war against obesity.

It is clear by now that Android is winning the overall mobile market share battle in the U.S. among smart phones. But how does the battle break down by state? Mobile ad network Jumptap put out a report this morning (embedded below) with a map showing which states have more Android activity versus iOS activity across its network that reaches 83 million mobile users.

According to Jumptap, Southern and Western states like Florida, Texas, California, and Oregon over-index for Android. Whereas the Midwest and New England states are dominated by Apple devices. Strangely, New York state is neither. It is one of the few remaining Blackberry strongholds. (I’m sorry, that’s just embarrassing, and I live in New York).