Albert L. Sokol has been pondering the problems facing biotechnology start-ups and has come to a conclusion: many could improve their outlook by shifting their structures.

Sokol, a partner with the law firm Edwards Wildman Palmer, recently has helped two venture-backed biotechs convert from C corporations to limited liability companies, a change that he and some venture capitalists say could help many young drug-makers.

Because not enough of these companies have been acquired or gone public in the past few years, venture firms have been investing less in biotech. U.S. investment fell 45% to just over $1 billion in the first half of this year compared to the same period of 2011, according to VentureSource, which is owned by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of Venture Capital Dispatch.

Kansas City isn’t just experiencing big things this summer...it’s experiencing fast things, too. This summer, Google opened its very own home in KC and the location quickly became known as Google Fiber Space. Google Fiber Space is a modern, techy place full of Google Fiber demonstrations, interactive video, hands-on activities and even free food! It all sounded too good to be true...so I decided to take a look at Google Fiber Space for myself.

And it was better than I imagined. I had the opportunity to demo Google TV, play with the super cool Google TV tablet/remote, take a look at the various "Fiberhoods" and enjoy refreshments with the Google Fiber team. I even had the opportunity to sit down with Google Fiber Community Manager Rachel Hack and ask her a few questions about Google Fiber’s implementation in Kansas City...and what we can expect next. My partner Derek and I asked Rachel about Google Fiber for business, the ins-and-outs of Google TV, Kansas City as the home of Google Fiber and we even took questions from people on Facebook and Twitter who had interesting questions about the high-speed Internet. Want to hear what Rachel had to say? Listen to this episode of Think Big Radio: Listen to the Google Fiber podcast!

Joe Kraus isn’t just a Google Ventures partner. He’s also a poker player, and I think he knows that both pursuits involve a certain amount of gambling, regardless of how much skill you think you have.

“In poker, if my analysis doesn’t agree with my gut, I’ll usually go with my gut,” he tells me in his corner office in the Google Ventures building in Mountain View.

“As an angel investor, I made a bunch of one-meeting investments based on feeling. In the venture world, that doesn’t work. … You have a gut read in your first meeting, then you do all of this analysis, and it either confirms your gut or not.”

Most, if not all, major platforms on the web — Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress — have universally adopted “native” advertising formats, and billions of dollars are now being spent through Promoted Tweets on Twitter, Sponsored Stories on Facebook, Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon and Promoted Videos on WordPress blogs, among many others. And you’re already seeing companies like Spotify introducing branded playlists and Tumblr enabling brands to promote their posts.

The success of these companies hasn’t gone unnoticed by today’s entrepreneurs, whose starting point for monetization is now native. Imagine an entrepreneur telling a prospective investor that their monetization model is to slap display ads in the corners of their site – not going to happen!

Qatar's budget surplus tripled to $12.2bn in the fiscal year ending in March - allowing the Government to make good on its plans to increase infrastructure spending to over 10% of its GDP in the build-up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Furthermore, Qatar has retained its position as the Middle East's most innovative economy in the annual Global Innovation Index 2012 (GII). The study, commissioned by leading business school INSEAD in partnership with other leading research organisations, scored 141 countries based on the degree to which their economic environment enables innovation, as well as actual innovative outputs.

The Beyond Phase II Conference showcases the SBIR Program’s Phase II awardees’ technologies and provides a forum for commercialization opportunities. The event brings together current SBIR Phase II companies, key technology and acquisition personnel from government and industry to enable the transition of SBIR-funded research and development into products for military, government and private sector commercial markets. This event is the only national SBIR event focusing on transitioning advanced SBIR research and development into commercialization opportunities.

Hosted by the Department of Defense, SBIR/STTR programs, with support from major SBIR Federal agencies, the Beyond Phase II Conference and Technology Showcase will take place at the JW Marriott Indianapolis, Monday – Thursday, September 10 - 13, 2012.

Dully whining electric motors may soon compete with roaring turbofans in the sky as battery-powered planes and helicopters take flight.

Aircraft are emerging as the new frontier in electric vehicles as new technology and market demand converge to drive development. More energy-dense batteries, lighter components and more efficient power electronics are making plug-in airplanes a realistic prospect. Talk of taxes on greenhouse gas emissions and more stringent noise regulations have sent engineers looking beyond pistons and turbines.

Startups around the world raised $1.8 billion through 453 crowdfunding sites in 2011, a British report says.

The number of crowdfunding sites grew by 60 last year, topping growth of 38 per cent in 2008, according to the study by the UK-based innovation foundation Nesta.

In Europe there were five portals for equity crowdfunding (which allows donors to take an equity stake in the venture to which they give money) operating at the end of 2011 which raised a combined total of $12.2 million. Three more equity crowdfunding sites are slated to launch in Europe by the end of this year.

Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) today announced the launch of its College Innovator Fund - a national search to find, mentor and advance the next big ideas in the areas of technology, sustainability, education or a related field. Best Buy is looking for consumers that have created a product, service or piece of software that may change the way we interact with the world around us. Now through August 14, 2012, participants can submit a two-minute video on the Best Buy Facebook page describing their innovation for a chance to win one of four cash prizes totaling $100,000 to bring their idea to life.

"At Best Buy we understand the impact that technology and entrepreneurialism can have on our society," said Stephen Gillett, President, Best Buy Digital, Global Marketing & Strategy. "Students are often at the helm of this forward thinking so what better time to provide a national platform to help them introduce and support these ideas than during the back to campus season. Through Best Buy's College Innovator Fund we are uncovering the next generation of innovators that will advance and improve the way we connect with the world around us."

In our interview with PayPal co-founder Max Levchin (see “Q&A: Max Levchin”) we heard the entrepreneur say how Silicon Valley has been overrun by an influx of underambitious startups. The ease of raising money these days, he said, means many entrepreneurs’ big ideas are easily confused with a product feature.

Scott Summit heads Bespoke Innovations, a company that prints custom prosthetics for its clients using 3D printing. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Summit described the design of a limb he’s making for a client, saying, “We are designing a Porsche 911 aesthetic for him. It’s a really classic design with clean lines and timeless detailing.” 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, has been heralded as “revolutionary” by The Economist and The New York Times and is becoming the next big thing in American manufacturing.

According to Forbes, the technology costs one-tenth of what it did five years ago. If the cost continues to drop, and the technology continues to advance, 3D printing has the potential to massively decentralize manufacturing, changing how we design, manufacture, and shop. What is less clear is which countries will capitalize on 3D printing.

Blogging has come a long way in the past few years, from a social release for narcissists, to today’s required vehicle for promoting your consulting business and gaining valuable online exposure. Even with product businesses, it’s the ultimate way to build your brand credibility, bring in customer leads, and get feedback from your target market.

Let me be clear – a product or consulting startup today without a blog, even with a static website, risks not being competitive in cost and time to reach and hold that critical mass of online customers. If you can’t justify both a web site and a blog, skip the old-fashioned web site, and make your blog do double duty as described below.

For a country slated to become the third largest Internet market in the world after China and United States, broadband speed and penetration sucks! Don’t go by our words. Here’s more proof: According to a new report, sixty countries around the world had broadband adoption levels greater than 10%, while China and India had the lowest levels of adoption among countries on the list, at 3 % and 1.2 % respectively.

Like before, India remains the country with the lowest average connection speed in the region at a 1 Mbps. The latest Akamai state of the Internet report reveals that India and China are lagging global peers when it comes to broadband penetration but there is hope. While the average connection speed in India is in the pits, there has been significant improvement in the first quarter of 2012, the report said.

Small business owners rank creating a business plan right up there with writing the dreaded high school term paper, college thesis, and bar exam rolled into one, says Tim Berry.

Tim, who is founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, and a co-founder of Borland International, says:

“Small business owners put off writing a plan because of the stupid mythology of the big formal BUSINESS PLAN that supposedly represents you in front of some feared imaginary judge and jury, a morph of bankers, investors, and the Spanish inquisition.”

It sounds counterintuitive, but many sales people do not plan or prepare for their sales presentations. Sales people spend so much time on lead generation calls, qualifying sales leads, and appointment setting that often, by the time they get around to meeting with a prospective client, their actual sales presentation is an afterthought.

This is a big mistake. Sales people can’t assume that the sales presentation will take care of itself, or that they can “think on their feet” and talk off the top of their heads.

Not all the smart people work for your company. Henry Chesbrough explains how corporations can all benefit from open innovation. This is true both from the outside in -- leveraging external ideas and technology to reduce costs and time spent in research and, more crucially, from inside out, making unused innovations more accessible to external users.

To fully embrace open innovation, organizations need a change in mindsets and an acceptance that we live in a world of abundance of knowledge. It is possible to protect the original investors in research and development while still maximizing the fruits of this knowledge.

We are in the middle of a busy earnings season on Wall Street, which for an independent investor like me means listening to a lot of company conference calls. While that admittedly is not always the most exciting way to spend your days and evenings, I would like to relate a story about a novel thing that practically made me jump out of my seat as I was viewing a live videocast of Roche’s call last week. I hope that by telling it other biotechnology and pharma companies (or really anyone), and their respective investor relations firms, can see how this practice can be improved in a big way simply by doing a small thing. In the process, I can guarantee that you will at a minimum earn a nice piece of investor goodwill while also helping to improve the overall system.

A team of law and entrepreneurship experts from the University of Missouri-Kansas City is proposing changes in U.S. immigration policy that would allow foreign students to stay in this country if they launch profitable businesses.

In a paper published this week by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the UMKC group suggests at least four immigration law reforms that would correct the problem of expiring student visas that force budding entrepreneurs to leave.

Allowing them to stay and start their businesses would ultimately result in jobs to bolster the U.S. economy, the paper says.

At the end of the day, your business comes down to numbers — low overhead, high revenue, increasing net profits, and even expanding social media reach. A valuation is an incredibly attractive number that intimidates competition and attracts potential investors, but how can entrepreneurs accurately value their business when it’s still a fledgling startup?

We asked 10 young entrepreneurs for their top tips for putting an accurate valuation on an early-stage company. Here’s what they had to say:

Behold, convergence.

A startup backed by the likes of Medtronic and Novartis has combined sensors with mobile technology, pharmaceuticals and medical devices to develop what’s being hyped as the U.S.’s first smart pill system.

Just cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Proteus Digital Health‘s tiny ingestible sensor is used with a companion wearable patch and mobile app to improve medication adherence.