Do serious tech companies still need to be based in Silicon Valley? There seems to be an endless debate about this among founders everywhere. My own startup, Vitrue, turns 5 this week. That’s forever in startup years, and it’s got me to thinking about my friend Ron Conway. Ron invested in Vitrue on October 28, 2006. He’s a true industry legend (noteworthy enough to have his own Wikipedia page) and a long-time Valley resident. At the time, we had several late-night, semi-sober conversations about moving the headquarters to Silicon Valley. Five years later I’m glad I stuck to my guns and kept the company in The Big Peach.

At the territory level, an initiative such as the “27th region” has recently appeared. This is a public innovative agency whose goal is to help the French regions to change their policy making methods and prepare them to enter a more workable world. Its action is based primarily on a greater involvement of citizens in their choice and is in line with the need to create more relations between territories, management and citizens.

In education, some major French colleges have realized that they had to use every incentive to integrate young people from different backgrounds to those they traditionally welcome. In addition, more and more young French have a positive view of entrepreneurship. In 2009, a survey by the institute OpinionWay indicates that over 50% of young people said they were tempted by entrepreneurial jobs. These young people believe that the ideal company has to carry the values of innovation, team spirit and be at a scale where each employee can be heard.

General Electric has finished acquiring thin-film solar panel maker PrimeStar Solar and will build a 400-megawatt thin-film solar panel manufacturing plant in the U.S., the company announced today.

The new plant will manufacture thin-filmed solar power panels — photovoltaic cells that are more flexible and can be placed on most surfaces — that capture around 13 percent of the sunlight shining on the panel and convert the sunlight to electricity. The production process uses a cadmium-telluride crystal compound in the photovoltaic cell, which is a cheaper material than the polysilicon materials used in other thin-film solar cells — although it’s less efficient at capturing sunlight.

Most thin-film solar panel manufacturers make photovoltaic cells that capture 15 to 20 percent of the sunlight shining on the panel. Those panels typically use polysilicon materials or some combination of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS). SoloPower, for example, employs CIGS in its panels and recently closed a funding round worth $13.5 million. GE’s new plant will produce less efficient solar power cells, but they will theoretically be cheaper to produce and the production will be on a larger scale than other, smaller thin-film solar panel manufacturers.

Growth increases the exchequer’s tax take, reduces the need for welfare as recipients find their way back into work, and increases the size of the economy against which the debt and deficit are measured. Growth is the result of the creation of new jobs that provide consumers and government with goods and services. Once the budget is in balance, growth provides the basis for the real-terms increases in public spending which will pay for improved public services and infrastructure. Without growth, the path back to prosperity and economic security will be far steeper.

Going for growth is a new collection of essays published jointly by ippr, Left Foot Forward and German think-tank Friedrich Ebert Stiftung – an esteemed collection of authors includes ippr’s senior economist Tony Dolphin, NEE panel member Charlie Leadbetter, NEE collaborator Adam Lent and former ippr director Gerald Holtham. The book’s focus is the role of smart government in creating the conditions for growth, and therefore jobs.

A vibrant venture capital ecosystem is contributing to the spurt of innovative business models.

What is common between Romesh Wadhwani, Gururaj Deshpande, Sabeer Bhatia and Krishnan Ganesh? They are not only successful entrepreneurs but are also successful serial entrepreneurs.

A serial entrepreneur, according to the Wikipedia definition, is one who continuously comes up with new ideas and invests in new businesses. While there is no data on serial entrepreneurs in India, industry experts say the trend is on the rise.

While some believe that a more vibrant and mature venture capital eco-system in India is contributing to the trend, others say interesting business models that have developed over time has made the difference. Internet is one such area that has seen a spurt in activity from entrepreneurs to repeat their success.

Wow. If this app had been pitched to us on the 1st, I would have been sure it was an April Fool’s joke. Coming in a few days later, however, it seems almost genius.

Given that my job of sitting in front of a computer and blasting out gadget news isn’t exactly an active one, I’ve gotta be fairly careful to avoid packin’ on the pounds. At one point this entailed keeping a fairly detailed journal of meal calorie counts tediously pulled ingredient by ingredient from a time-wrecking databases. As you can probably tell from my unenthusiastic tone and use of words like “tedious” and “time-wrecking”, that didn’t last too long.

Facebook is again outgrowing its Silicon Valley headquarters and is planning to move in to a huge campus in Menlo Park, formerly owned by Sun and vacated after the company was bought by Oracle.

The NYT has a story on the move and the most striking thing is how autarkic and cut off from the rest of the world the campus is going to be, it seems. The architects in charge of the project are basically designing it to be a self-contained mini-city with urban-looking environments and cafés designed by the architects who designed the Ace Hotel.

Cutting research funding to narrow the budget deficit would hurt innovation now and for decades to come, Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield said to venture capitalists Thursday.

Hockfield, speaking at the National Venture Capital Association annual meeting in Boston, said federal research-spending cuts would discourage young scientists and do little to solve the nation’s deficit problems.

“The big fixes have to be in our entitlement program,” Hockfield said. “If we decimate our research budgets in order to solve our deficit problems, if we kill the seeds for growth, we are dead doubly.”

Ann Arbor is getting a fresh infusion of Silicon Valley.

Ann Arbor SPARK, one of four business accelerators in Southeast Michigan, said Tuesday that it named Paul Krutko president and CEO.

Krutko, previously the chief development officer for San Jose, CA., will replace Mike Finney, who’s now CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

Krutko brings an impressive resume. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, he led economic development efforts in Cleveland, OH, and Jacksonville, FL, before moving to San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley.

What do the founders of Netflix , Zappos, Whole Foods, and Alibaba.com have in common?

They were all started by entrepreneurs in their second (or third) act:

* Before Reed Hastings founded Netflix, he founded Pure Atria Software, which was eventually acquired by Rational Software. Soon after the acquisition, Hastings took a couple of years off to think about his next business, which would be Netflix.
* Before Zappos, Tony Hsieh founded LinkExchange, which was acquired by Microsoft for $265 million in 1999.
* John Mackey started a health food store called “Safer Way” in a garage years before he founded Whole Foods.
* Jack Ma founded China Pages four years before he launched Alibaba.com in 1999.

Startup incubator TechStars has raised $8 million in new funding for its programs in Boston, Boulder, New York, and Seattle. The new funding comes from more than fifty venture funds and over 25 individual angel investors. This brings the incubator’s total funding to nearly $11.5 million.

TechStars, which launched in 2007, is a “startup boot camp” for tech entrepreneurs in which selected startup receive up to $18,000 in seed funding (or $6,000 per founder up to three founders in exchange for 5 percent of the company), three months of mentorship from successful entrepreneurs and investors, and the opportunity to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program.

What defines successful Innovation? Innovation is the process of using intellectual capital to create new products or services that generate positive business results in the form of financial returns. Discovering new findings then spurs more innovation which leads to further financial returns, and so on.

Innovation is successful when positive outcomes result in return on investment (ROI). That is why Value Creation is so important. Adding perceived value to a new product or service will drive ROI. The value proposition is the key to successful innovation. Develop an innovation with high perceived value to your customer, and strong sales will follow.

(New York City, 4 April 2011) – The Intelligent Community Forum, a New York-based think tank dedicated to studying the use of information and communications technology to create the community of the 21st Century, today named Finland’s Minister of Communications Suvi Linden as its Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year for 2011. ICF selected Minister Linden for her commitment to ensuring affordable broadband access to every citizen in Finland and her involvement with national and international groups, including her work as a member of the United Nation’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development.

Minister Linden will deliver the Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year address at the conclusion of ICF's annual Building the Broadband Economy summit. She will be the featured speaker of ICF’s annual awards luncheon at New York City’s Steiner Film Studios, beginning at Noon on 3 June. Admission is by invitation only or by sending an email request to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

There are as many management theories as there are management gurus, academics, and bloggers. And since theories - true or not - have a tendency to stick around, well, that means there are lots of myths.

Management isn’t a science; it’s an art. It involves millions of people in thousands of organizations, each of which is unique. That’s what makes it so subjective, by definition. Sure, certain innovative management concepts become the rule, but they’re rare, that’s for sure.

I’ll forgive anyone for almost anything if I get a heartfelt mea culpa — an apology with no strings attached — but, unfortunately, that’s hard to find these days. Our culture is inundated with victims who like to scapegoat:

* “It wasn’t because of the steroids I was injecting — it must have been my trainer’s fault.”
* “We didn’t misjudge the severity of the recession — it was those greedy Wall Street financiers who made it this bad.”
* “It wasn’t because we ignored the safety warnings for years — it was a natural disaster.”
* “It wasn’t that I have been stealing my country’s natural resources for years and stuffing the money into my Swiss bank account — it was Twitter that caused my people to revolt.”
* “It wasn’t the third line of coke that I snorted — it was that my parents didn’t pay enough attention to me as a child.”

Gayle Laakmaan McDowell has worked at Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

After interviewing more than 120 people during her spat at Google, she wrote a book, The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Any Top Tech Company.

In it, she lists four ways to standout to Google besides your GPA (which she claims doesn't matter all that much):

Show you're passionate about technology. Read tech blogs and news, talk about recent innovations, and tell your interviewer all about it.

Baruch "Barry" Blumberg, a multifaceted researcher who shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his work on infectious viral diseases, died on Tuesday (April 5) of an apparent heart attack while attending a conference on astrobiology in California. He was 85 years old.

Blumberg identified the hepatitis B virus (HBV) in the 1960s -- long before the advent of genomic sequencing and DNA sequencing technology -- travelling for years to collect blood samples from different ethnic groups around the globe. His journeys led him to Australia where, in the blood of an aborigine, he found what he'd later identify as the surface antigen of the virus. Blumberg would go on to help develop diagnostic tests and a vaccine that would drastically reduce the spread of hepatitis B, a debilitating liver disease. Chronic hepatitis B infection is also known to cause liver cancer.

Over the course of my career I have done the bootstrap venture, the venture with significant VC dollars and the capital efficient venture (sub $5 million). Through all of these experiences I’ve learned lessons about capital raising, and more specifically, the cost of doing a large VC round. I’m not about to claim that VC money is always a bad idea, but before you take your startup on a tour of Sandhill Road, here are five reasons NOT to accept the big paycheck.

You’re the rule – Let’s acknowledge this and get it out of the way: Occasionally there’s an exception as to when it’s smart to raise a large VC round. Most startups that go after this kind of capital are not in that camp.

A great example of this is when a company is perfectly positioned, has a proven model and by “throwing gas on the fire” it can move to dominate a position in a marketplace. These are the stories we read about when the big hit occurs. These deals are the exception, not the rule, but they’re the ones that get the majority of press and attention.

Google has just announced its very first clean energy project investment in Europe, and hopefully not its last. The Internet giant is pumping 3.5 million euros (roughly $5 million) in a solar photovoltaic power plant in a town near Berlin, Germany.

Google isn’t investing in the plant on its own – it has sided with German private equity company Capital Stage.

The company is quick to point that the transaction still requires the formal approval of the German competition authorities, and is subject to other customary closing conditions.

What is happening in the innovation community right now? In this post, I give a quick overview of the top trends and issues based on the interactions and inspirations I have had over the last month or so.

1. User-driven innovation – does it work?

How valuable is user input for innovation? This is a classic discussion that picked up more steam with this article, User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and IKEA, by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen who states that companies should lead their users, not the other way around.