The European Commission is being advised once more to focus on measures to provide support and financing for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are considered as the most important source of employment growth in the EU.

The SME sector should be recognised as "the only source of potential job creation in the EU". So says Xavier Rolet, CEO of the London Stock Exchange Group, which also owns the Milan-based Borsa Italiana.

Rolet was in Brussels on Tuesday (15 March) to take part in a high-level meeting on financing for SMEs, hosted by Antonio Tajani, the European Commission vice-president in charge of industry and entrepreneurship.

Jackson Laboratory decided late last year to pull out of talks with Collier County. The report contributed to that decision.

Economic Viability of Jax-Florida

A) What are the potential benefits of establishing Jax-Florida in Collier County?

1) Potential benefit from diversification.

Collier County’s economy currently relies primarily on tourism, agriculture and construction. The county needs to attract sustainable high technology, high-wage jobs that are less affected by economic downturns of tourism and construction to diversity and stabilize our economy.

You’re a technology entrepreneur—more power to you. You’ve built a great product that solves a real problem—congratulations. Unfortunately, that’s only half the battle. Maybe even less than half. Now you have to make the world believe in you and your product.

That’s the part of entrepreneurship that many innovators and startup founders aren’t prepared for. They’re far more comfortable whiteboarding and coding and QA-testing than pitching and persuading. Xconomy is a startup too—our code just happens to be human-readable—and I know how long it took me to come up with a brief, compelling way to explain our company’s vision. At first, I bridled at the task; I’d been brought up to think that journalists don’t market, they report and write. Eventually I realized that it takes something extra to win over busy readers who already have many information sources to choose from. These days, everyone is a marketer—and why shouldn’t they be? Only a monopolist is spared from selling.

Trying to rush it, bombard people with it and be too much in people’s faces is not going to make them notice you faster or get them to buy more consistently. In fact, think about all the emails and newsletters that you now block, delete and unsubscribe to. People tell me all the time they are only following and getting emails from people and companies that really connect with them and provide them with timely information they want and need.

There are some really great professionals and companies who I like and admire, but I just don’t want daily emails (and sometimes it’s two or three a day). Those relentless reminders, repeated offers, re-framed messages, reminders about offers ending, multiple articles just posted on their sites….

Speaking less than a week after a 9.0 earthquake and accompanying tsunami devastated northeastern Japan and provoked a nuclear crisis, President Obama sought to reassure Americans on Thursday saying that "I want to be very clear we do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the United States."

Obama said that included the West Coast, Hawaii, Alaska, and U.S. territories in the Pacific. He did say that the U.S. government continues to believe a 50-mile evacuation zone near the disabled reactors is wise. The Japanese government has ordered only a 12-mile evacuation.

The president added that he'd asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to conduct a full review of American nuclear safety.

It never made sense to exempt online retailers from collecting sales tax. It’s ridiculous now when so many states are in deep fiscal trouble. Illinois estimates that it is losing more than $150 million a year in uncollected taxes; California is losing an estimated $300 million a year. That would cover more than half the planned cuts for the University of California system.

It’s good news that states are using new legal tools to force Internet retailers to do what every other retailer must do. It is disappointing to see Amazon.com fight back.

Amazon and other Web retailers are shielded by a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that retailers could be required to collect sales tax only in states where they had some physical presence. Amazon has kept itself off the hook in several states using warehouses owned by subsidiaries.

What was once the realm of pre-teens and college students is quickly becoming one of the most highly demanded skills in the job market.

Being able to find and publish news and build online connections is a skill that companies -- from tiny mom and pop shops to huge corporations -- want in the role of a social media manager.

How much does this professional tweeter make? The average salary ranges from $34,432 to $56,571, according to PayScale.com.

Most social media managers are women with one to four years of experience.

New startups are popping up daily. With so much competition, older companies are struggling to stay relevant.

Bill Taylor, the cofounder of Fast Company and author of Practically Radical, studied businesses that are successfully reinventing themselves in today's uncertain economy.

"Long-established organizations are really being rocked to their core," he says. And if they don't adapt, they'll die.

Are humans becoming obsolete in the workforce? All signs point to "yes."

As IBM's Watson proved on Jeopardy, robots are becoming smarter than people. They also make fewer mistakes and they don't get bored.

By 2013 there will be 1.2 million industrial robots working worldwide -- that's one robot for every 5,000 people, according to Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works and author of Robotic Nation.

Robots are currently analyzing documents, filling prescriptions, and handling other tasks that were once exclusively done by humans.

Erica Douglass was too young to feel so old. Tired and sick every time she ate, her doctors told her to slow down and spend less time at her six-year-old Silicon Valley-based web hosting company. She was told to take a vacation and began to think her illness was all in her head.

Struggling with what would later be diagnosed as Celiac disease, a condition that damages the lining of the small intestine, Douglass didn't understand why her body was failing her. Running her company was becoming harder and harder. Finally, unable to get an accurate diagnosis for her condition, and seeing the first signs of the recession and some major industry shifts on the horizon, she sold her business to a competitor in a hastily arranged agreement that paid her $1.1 million over a three-year period. She was 26.

That's number of possible brackets that one could fill out for the 64-team NCAA Tournament. That's a little over 9.2 quintillion possibilities.

According to RJ Bell of Pregame.com, that would take you 292 trillion years to fill out all possible combination (at one per bracket per second.) Unfortunately, you only have a few more hours left to fill yours out before the first tip-off.

The good news is that you only need one pretty good bracket to claim eternal glory and the envy of all your co-workers. (And maybe money, if only gambling were legal.)

Rich Bendis would like to add that there will be only one winner: Kansas.  Ed.

Startups provide business leadership with new products, services, and new revenue models, but leadership startups can only be built by entrepreneurs who are leaders themselves, and incent leadership in the people around them. Leadership which incents other people to be leaders is called “contagious leadership.”

John Hersey, in his book “Creating Contagious Leadership,” describes nine required habits for inspiring a contagious leadership culture within a startup, as well as within other types of businesses, or even life in general. He and I believe that leaders have to make the overt decision to acquire these habits or skills, and don’t have to be born or trained into them:

1. Spotlight leadership acts of others. This is the habit of focusing attention, directly or indirectly, on leadership efforts and accomplishments of another team member or group. For managers and non-contagious leaders (contained leaders), the spotlight seems to always be on themselves.

According to Business Insider, only 3 out of every 100 companies that try to get cash from angel investors succeed. The success rate with venture capitalists is even lower. Disappointed yet?

The truth is, you do not always need an investor to get going. Below are a few tips that will help you get off to a good start.

Bootstrapping. Self-funding is the preferred source of cash for your startup – if you can do it.

Small business grants. This source often gets overlooked, but it should be a major focus these days due to government initiatives on alternative energy and technology.

It’s been a couple of years since my last note concerning jobs and the economic downturn, and unfortunately it remains a challenge. I am sure you are wondering when the job market will snap back to its old self. But evolution in this market has already taken place – so you must adapt to meet the changes (good and bad) that make up the new reality.

“Mutations” to jobs have already occurred, such as permalancing, and these changes are emerging as the new “normal” for many Gen Yers across the country. These mutations can bring along a whole new set of issues, such as “free-floating” job insecurity and the eventual impact upon job satisfaction.

The old issues are still there, along with some new ones. Is job security now your primary issue? Not meeting your key career goals? Here are some thoughts to consider in 2011 . (Read the original article here at Annaivey.com.) Some of the ideas remain as important as they were 2 years ago – others are new points to consider.

Three years ago, when the merger between NYU and Polytechnic University was just under way, I wrote a well received opinion piece arguing that aggressive development of New York City’s university-based engineering research programs might prove key to its ambitions to become a center of technology-based business development. I even argued that competition in this arena (between NYU-Poly and Columbia) would be salutary. Apparently, someone was listening, but not exactly in the way I expected!

Some months ago, New York City issued a “request for expressions of interest,” seeking to identify academic institutions anywhere in the world that might want to develop what the City called an “applied science and engineering research campus.” Today, the City announced that it had received 18 expressions of interest, and clearly had met its goal of stimulating worldwide interest. Represented in the pool were a number of strong U.S. institutions (some being usual suspects, and others a bit of surprise) and also proposals from institutions in Canada, France, Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Switzerland, and the U.K. Pretty impressive!

DETROIT, March 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a study led by the Kauffman Foundation, the Business Accelerator Network for Southeast Michigan – the group of the region's four key business accelerators – Ann Arbor SPARK, Automation Alley, Macomb-OU INCubator and TechTown have created more than 1,000 jobs and invested approximately $18 million in hundreds of start-up companies while securing more than $101.2 million in additional capital, a 6-to-1 investment ratio. This regional evaluation of assets lays out the powerful existing capabilities of these business accelerators and substantiates that the network provides the support needed to create a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The study concludes that Michigan already has in place many programs and initiatives that have been designed for entrepreneurs.

The Business Accelerator Network for Southeast Michigan's asset map details the network's strengths at building and supporting an entrepreneurial culture in southeast Michigan while also pointing out overlap in services, with the goal of determining how to strengthen the network and better encourage business growth and job creation.

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, the federal law that jumpstarted technology transfer into a $2 billion-plus industry, faces its severest test in the patent dispute pitting Stanford University against Roche Molecular Systems. The case exposed the law’s failure to ensure that researchers and other inventors properly protect their intellectual property rights in ways that do not harm the universities that employ them or the government that funds them.

Chief Justice John Roberts addressed that failure head-on during oral arguments heard on February 28 for the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University v. Roche Molecular Systems Inc. et. al case. “Is there a reason that the federal government can’t just say, ‘From now on we’re not going to give any money to Stanford or anybody else until they have an agreement making clear that the inventor is going to ensure that title rests with the university, which then triggers the Bayh-Dole Act?’” Chief Justice Roberts asked, not so rhetorically.

On the face of it, the budget proposal that Ohio Governor John Kasich released this week looks like terrible news for state universities. Not only would Kasich’s plan slash higher education spending by 10.5 percent but it also would cap tuition increases at 3.5 percent a year.

So it might come as a surprise that some university presidents received the plan warmly. Within hours, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee released a statement praising the governor for “understanding that higher education and our state’s long-term strength are inextricably linked.”

Gee’s optimism rests on another aspect of the governor’s budget. In exchange for the budget cuts, Kasich would give state universities more autonomy in running their day-to-day affairs. Long-term, that could save schools money. “We at Ohio State continue to move aggressively in both advocating for regulatory freedom and reconfiguring and reinventing our institution,” Gee said.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CompTIA urges the Senate to repeal the 3 percent reporting requirement as an amendment to S. 493, the “SBIR/STTR Reauthorization Act of 2011.” Enacted in 2005, this requirement would force federal, state and local governments to withhold 3 percent on most of their contract payments to small businesses, including Medicare payments, farm payments and certain grants. As an organization representing small and medium sized IT businesses, CompTIA encourages swift action to repeal the 3 percent withholding requirement in the Senate so that small IT firms with government contracts will not be penalized.

The following statement can be attributed to Todd Thibodeaux, President and CEO of CompTIA.

“As the Senate prepares to vote on amendments the SBIR/STTR Reauthorization Act of 2011, Senators from both sides of the aisle must keep in mind the needs of small businesses with government contracts. Many small IT companies work with federal, state and local governments to service the needs of the public sector, and this provision would reduce cash flow to these solution providers. At a time when IT firms are updating and enhancing information technology infrastructure across the country, withholding 3% of contract payments would short-circuit small businesses striving to weather the economic storm.

I made the worst decision in venture capital history in late 2000. I was a partner at a venture firm called 212 Ventures. What? You never heard of it? We had $100 million from Investcorp, $5 million from CS First Boston, $5 milion from First Union (which became Wachovia) and $5 million from UBS. I had a few partners but I won’t soil their names with this story. BecaUSe what follows was completely my fault.

It was either late 2000 or early 2001 when one of the associates (and my future business partner) Dan Kelly approached me with an opportunity. Dan and a guy named Jason Liebman had both been junior bankers at CS First Boston together and maybe shared a cubicle. Dan went off to work for a hotshot venture capital firm (my firm) and Jason went off to an obscure dot-com company in the middle of the Internet Bust. The company was called Oingo.