Today I read the following headline in the Boulder Daily Camera: “Phillips 66 to sell 432-acre campus in Louisville.” This was quite a reversal from the headline in the Denver Post 4.5 years ago titled “Conoco deal fuels optimism.” For anyone who drives up and down Highway 36 between Boulder and Denver (or from Boulder to DIA) we regularly see this huge, empty, relatively ugly former StorageTek headquarters site which has been sitting “about ready to be developed any day we promise” by Conoco Phillips. As of today, this is no ambiguity that Conoco Phillips (now Phillips 66) won’t be developing anything on the site.

In the wake of patent battles between major smart phone vendors, an IT recruiter looks at the inhospitable terrain individuals and smaller firms must cross to see their ideas realized I recently had the chance to hear an IT analyst speak about the invention and innovation. He offered an apt example of what the difference is between the two: "RIM invented the smart phone," he said. "Apple innovated it."  

  Invention, which is simply having a good idea, is the first, critical step in a process we call innovation. Innovation is the systematic organization, management and improvement of good ideas. History is replete with examples of talented inventors who have had their had their ideas refined and ultimately, marketed by innovators.

If you want people to invest in your idea, then my best advice is first write a business plan, and keep it simple. Don't confuse your business plan with a doctoral thesis or the back of a napkin. Keep the wording and formatting straightforward, and keep the plan short. For minimum content, see my article “These 10 Key Elements Make a Business Plan Fundable.”

The overriding principle is that your business plan must be easy to read. This means writing at the level of an average newspaper story (about eighth-grade level). Understand that people will skim your plan, and even try to read it while talking on the phone or going through their e-mail.

When we looked at the newest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, released in mid-September, what we found was quite alarming.

As of January 2012, the median time that wage and salary workers in the U.S. had been with their current employers was just 4.6 years. Other recent data points are equally disturbing: The staffing company Randstad says that 40% of employees are planning to look for a new job within the next six months. Another survey notes that 69% of employees are already at least passively shopping for new job opportunities via social media today.

New census data highlights areas of the country where people are more likely to strap on their helmets and bike to work.

Nationwide, more than 777,000 people rode bicycles as their primary means of traveling to work last year, according to the Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey.

In most areas, cyclists accounted for only a small share of all commuters. Last year, they made up an estimated 0.56 percent of U.S. working adults, a rate that has remained relatively stable in recent years. Cyclists accounted for 0.53 percent of commuters in 2010 and 0.55 percent in 2009, according to the survey.

For all the diversity found in the many countries of the world, national flags adhere to a fairly predictable formula. Sure, some states flout convention--I’m looking at you, Nepal--but for the most part, flags are built from the same basic symbols: some colorful stripes, a handful of stars, and maybe a national emblem. But that doesn’t mean they can’t pack in a wealth of coded information. I bet you didn’t know that the inverted yellow triangle on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s new flag, for instance, visually approximates the geography of the country while also representing the nation’s three constituent people with its three points.

London has become home to Healthbox, Europe's first business accelerator focused exclusively on healthcare start-ups.

Launched at Westminster start-up laboratory The Hub, the three month programme is set to support seven healthcare start-ups from across Europe.

Bupa and Serco are among the strategic partners of the Healthbox programme, launched by business incubator and venture capital firm Sandbox.

Selected for their potential to bring about real change to the UK health economy, three UK companies have been chosen for the programme: geriatrics specialist HomeTouch, mobile health platform Medopad and the creators of ground-breaking DNA synthesising technology, Desktop Genetics.

Ideally, when entrepreneurs go to professional conferences or venture fairs, they will have an idea of who they’re going to see there. But realistically, that doesn’t always happen.

Chris Sklarin, an investment manager at Edison Ventures, offered this piece of advice to entrepreneurs attending events where they may have to give a quick pitch to investors they don’t know: Ask them to give their elevator pitch first. Once an entrepreneur knows what industry and stage a particular investor is most interested in, he can tailor his pitch to have the most meaningful interaction possible with that investor.

Keywords, social resumes, applicant tracking systems, and LinkedIn are all relatively new additions to the vocabulary associated with job searching. These systems affect the way your resume is read, interpreted, and shared. For employers looking to hire, these systems make it easier to find the right candidates. The successful job seeker must know how these work to be discovered by employers.

As CEO of Interview Jet, a daily-deal service for finding tech talent, I see hundreds of resumes each day. I’m always impressed by the unending online inventory of people available to employers. In the world of hiring, the total measure of a person is, at first, their resume. Below are insights from a world knee-deep in resumes.

In this economy, count yourself as one of the lucky ones if you have a job. But what if you've had this job for some time and you feel you're overdue for a raise? How do you convince someone to give you more money when there are five other people lined up for your job who would do it for less in a heartbeat?

First, put yourself in your manager's shoes. Would you give yourself a raise? Do you really deserve one, or just want one? Be brutally honest with yourself and about yourself. If you ran the company, would you give your money, your hard earned profits, to you?

Venture capitalists invested $6.5 billion in 890 deals in the third quarter of 2012, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association (based on data provided by Thomson Reuters). For the quarter, investments were down 11 percent in terms of dollars and five percent in the number of deals compared to the second quarter of 2012 when $7.3 billion was invested in 935 deals.

Investment for the first three quarters of the year was $20 billion into 2,661 deals. The report says that this level is below what it was at this point last year last year, making it likely that 2012 will fall short of 2011 in terms of both dollars and deal volume.

New Enterprise Associates might not be a household name in Chicago, but the Silicon Valley-based firm is one of the country’s most well-known venture capital investors and it has a long history in Chicago dating back to 1987. It’s an investor in Groupon and a number of other local startups. And now it’s opening an office in Chicago, adding to its locations in Silicon Valley, New York City, the Washington, D.C. area, China and India.

The ocean plastic problem is a huge menace. Hundreds of tons of plastic find their way into our oceans every year. The problem is severe because plastic on land or water just does not go away. In our oceans, plastics disintegrate over time into small particles easily ingested by fish and other marine wildlife. And guess, what?  It resurfaces in our food chain and affects delicate ecosystems.

Method employees have been picking up plastic on Hawaiian beaches and collecting it to be recycled into bottles, not just to chip away at the problem, but to raise awareness. Conscious capitalism!

Though I speak to groups of women and children about following your dreams and becoming an entrepreneur, I often refer to myself as The Accidental Entrepreneur. One of my favorite pastimes is making perfumes for myself, which then turned into a hobby making lotions, creams and massage oils in my kitchen, which then became a business only after my mother encouraged me to sell at a flea market nineteen years ago. Thanks, Mom!

I stumbled into entrepreneurship and I stumbled into the beauty business, and for a number of years, that was okay. The process of discovering opportunities, falling down, getting back up and then falling down again was exciting and encouraging. Everyone around me would always say, during the tough times, "Well, Lisa, if it was easy, everyone would have one."

SPECIAL REPORT / A new European Commission-backed SME funding instrument, launched last week, seeks to entice increasingly wary banks to back the strapped sector by matching risk associated with innovative companies. But SMEs feel gloomier than ever, new data show. The Risk Sharing Instrument (RSI) signed its first agreement with UniCredit Bank Austria to support up to €120 million of lending over two years.

The instrument was developed by the European Commission in partnership with the European Investment Fund (EIF), the specialist provider of SMEs for the European Investment Bank (EIB), based in Luxembourg.

Last week U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta warned that critical infrastructure such as power grids or chemical plants could be inactivated or destroyed by a cyber attack, and he pledged that the U.S. would "defend the nation in cyberspace" as it does on land and sea, in air and space.

But with the art of cyber detection and defense lagging far behind the sophistication of attacks (see "Hey, Hackers: Defense Is Sexy, Too"), the U.S. and other nations appear largely unprepared to rapidly detect and respond to an attack on critical infrastructure. That would make it difficult to respond with "decisive action" as Panetta promised, or even to know whom to retaliate against.

Content marketing has taken off as brands move away from traditional advertising in order to embrace a more social, engaging way to connect with consumers in order to nurture brand loyalty and awareness.

Content marketing is based on the idea of creating, curating and most importantly, publishing and sharing original content. In today’s information obsessed online communities this branch of digital marketing is rapidly growing as people increasingly realise the power of branded content.

Despite its success, the idea behind creating a content-focused strategy is still relatively new. According to a recent study conducted by Outbrain and Econsultancy, a minority of people, along with 13% of agencies worldwide, are already defining content marketing strategies.

Data centres aren’t usually synonymous with beauty. But, of course Google would have the most stunning server rooms in the world…. that no one besides a handful of employees can see.

But thanks to Google’s new website ‘Where the internet lives‘, you can take a virtual creep around its data centres from Finland to the US without infringing on other users’ privacy. The interactive gallery is stocked with amazing photographs by Connie Zhou which are annotated with captions and clickable hotspots which give you more detail about what you’re seeing. You can also head over to Street View and take a stroll through Google’s data centre in Lenoir in the United States, or read the article on the inside of the centre (Google let Wired’s Steven Levy inside) if you’re so inclined.

Europe needs its SMEs to drag it out of economic crisis, but most are operating below their 2008 levels. Now the Commission is promising to get them growing with “the most ambitious action plan to boost entrepreneurship Europe has ever seen”

As the European Union economy threatens to dip into recession again, the 20.7 million small and medium-size companies (SMEs) that form its backbone are yet to recover to their pre-crisis levels in terms of value-added and employment, according to the European Commission’s 2012 annual report on the status of SMEs published this week.

The report, ‘EU SMEs in 2012: at the cross roads’ might more appropriately be entitled ‘EU SMEs in 2012: at a standstill’, since only in Austria, Germany and Malta are small enterprises showing signs of recovery.

I’m not much of a television person, but my family loves one of the popular “reality” shows, called “So You Think You Can Dance,” so I’m sort of forced to watch it every week on Fox. Over time, I’ve concluded that even startup entrepreneurs can learn a few things from this one. Of course, you must ignore the pomp and circumstance of the TV staging.

I’m on the selection committee of our local Angels group, so I know that every CEO approaching our group for funding goes through ten minutes of creative “dancing,” to give us a basis for selecting startups that are most qualified and “ready” to proceed to the next level. If selected, they go through it again in the real meeting of 30-50 investors. It’s tough and not fun for either side.