I appreciate the opportunity to comment on Title II of the JOBS Act. I also appreciate hearing that the Commission will likely take more than 90 days to deliver guidelines as the impact of this topic is so worthy of deliberation.

The following are edited excerpts from an online commentary I posted on May 4, 2010…

Let’s not attempt to fix what’s not broken with provisions that asphyxiate investment in start-up ventures and subsequently stifles what has historically been the most sustainable source of new job creation during a period of hopelessly high unemployment.

A proposed change in the eligibility rules for the Small Business Innovation Research program could allow foreign-owned companies to compete for these federal research and development awards, according to the Small Business Technology Council.

“This change has the potential of sending hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to businesses overseas,” wrote SBTC Executive Director Jere Glover in letters to Congress and President Barack Obama. “Products developed and manufactured by foreign firms with U.S. tax dollars are likely to benefit their own countries, to the detriment of American businesses.”

The ultimate compliment that any entrepreneur can get is that they can “see around corners.” This is a statement that they are willing and able (and successful) at projecting market and technology turns, not just straight-line innovations. They have the courage to make bold decisions, often contrary to conventional market research.

Steve Jobs of Apple has been maybe the most visible example of this phenomenon, but others often mentioned include Richard Branson (Virgin Group), Joe Costello (Cadence Design), and Howard Schultz (Starbucks). Most of you could suggest one more, but not many.

The Nonhuman Rights Project, a nonprofit organization advocating for legal rights for animals, is planning on filing two lawsuits on behalf of captive animals in the United States by the end of next year, according to Wired Science. Although the group has not yet decided which species will be targeted, highly intelligent social animals such as bonobos, chimpanzees, elephants, and dolphins are strong contenders.

The head of the organization, animal law scholar and attorney Steven Wise, has made it his mission to have the US courts recognize certain species as persons instead of “things,” and as such, they would have rights to basic privileges such as freedom from imprisonment and captive breeding.

With the economy hitting a low gear, venture funding slipped again in the latest quarter from a year earlier, according to two new reports that track investments in startups.

But in reports released Friday, both Dow Jones VentureSource and the National Venture Capital Association noted double-digit jumps in funding from the first to second quarter of 2012.

U.S.-based startups raised $8.1 billion in the second quarter in 863 deals, a 9 percent drop from the year before, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. The median size of a funding round in the Bay Area in the just-completed quarter was $7 million, higher than the national median of $5 million, reflecting the higher costs of doing business here, the company noted.

The results of the human trials are startling. Even at a lower-than-usual dose, multiple lung metastases shrank or even disappeared after one patient received only two-hour-long intravenous infusions of an experimental cancer drug. Another patient saw her cervical tumor reduce by nearly 60 percent after six months of treatment. Though the drug trial—by Bind Biosciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts—of an experimental nanotechnology-based technique was designed simply to show whether the technology is safe, the encouraging results revive hopes that nanomedicine could realize its elusive promise.

With the mushrooming in the number of accelerator programs offered globally, there’s become a rash of ‘last chance to apply’ emails hitting our in-box of late. To be frank, we could spend a lot of time on these, but I’m sure readers would prefer some real news in their feeds. Thus, to the rescue has come f6S.com, a kind of social network for founders and startups to keep track of these programs.

The real advantage is that you can apply from directly in the site for many of the programs. Thus, you’ll find Springboard, Seedcamp and Ignite 100 in the UK for instance.

Dan Johnson, the economics professor known for his remarkably accurate sports predictions, is at it again. Today, the Colorado College professor released his prognostications for the 2012 Olympics Games in London.

Each year, Johnson punches numbers into a computer and out pop the results.  Over the past five Olympics, from the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney through the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, his model demonstrated 94 percent accuracy between predicted and actual national medal counts.

In an attempt to lure technology start-ups to do business in New York, the Big Apple hosted a Demo Day Wednesday for a select group of entrepreneurs whose companies are trying to break into financial services.

 Sponsored by the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture PLC and held at the headquarters of Credit Suisse in Midtown Manhattan, the day was the culmination of 12 weeks of coaching by venture capitalists and New York banking executives for en

Dear SBIR Insider,

A few important announcements before my open letter to SBA. The SBA's SBIR and STTR Policy Directive (PD) should be released Thursday or Friday of this week. It is supposed to become effective immediately but the agencies will have to see how things "fit" before they jump in. Most of the agencies have been planning for PD adoption based on the last draft, but most have not seen the interim final product. Once it is released, we'll have to study it for a few days before we can discuss the details. Expect a 60 day public comment period, and there will be many!

DOE Update The DOE has released their topics for their FY-13 SBIR/STTR Release (1) which will open August 13, 2012, and close October 15. A letter of intent is required and must be received by September 4. Complete details are available at:

http://science.energy.gov/sbir/

Sharing an already tight apartment with a roommate is a common reality for many urban dwellers. But what if your roommate was a car, and when it was home you couldn’t be? Parking + Housing is San Francisco-based designer Aaron Cheng’s submission to this year’s James Dyson Awards. The brief was to create something that solves a problem--Cheng envisioned a building that doubles as both residence and garage at alternating times, making use of space that’s often left empty for half of the day.

Quick to hire and quick to fire, right?  

The last thing that you want, conventional wisdom says, is to be carrying around dead weight on a team--or harboring a disruptive employee.  Bad hires can cause your best people to want to leave.  It can slow down productivity. 

I agree that one person can do a disproportionate amount of damage within a company, but does that always have to be the case?  And, does relying on the nuclear option of getting rid of someone create the wrong kind of culture--and perhaps even a management laziness to work things out.

Research from the University of Southampton, which examines how dolphins might process their sonar signals, could provide a new system for man-made sonar to detect targets, such as sea mines, in bubbly water.

When hunting prey, dolphins have been observed to blow ‘bubble nets’ around schools of fish, which force the fish to cluster together, making them easier for the dolphins to pick off. However, such bubble nets would confound the best man-made sonar because the strong scattering by the bubbles generates ‘clutter’ in the sonar image, which cannot be distinguished from the true target.

After twelve years horsetrading, a voluntary agreement between the European Commission and Europe’s research bodies aims to get 27 national research systems functioning as one, and complete the European Research Area (ERA)

EU Research Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn signed an agreement with a broad swathe of Europe’s research funding bodies this week, in an attempt to glue together the European Research Area and open up a single market for research jobs and scientific data in time for the start of Horizon 2020  – the EU’s new €80 billion research funding plan - in 2014.

“We want to ensure that researchers can move as freely between Rome and Riga, or Sofia and Stockholm, as they can between Wisconsin and Washington, or Massachusetts and Minnesota,” Geoghegan-Quinn said.

This week, the University System of Maryland (USM) announced that smoking would no longer be permitted on any of the 12 USM campuses, including the flagship University of Maryland at College Park.

The policy, which will take effect on June 30, 2013, prohibits smoking on campus grounds, outdoor structures, and in school vehicles. Each university president, however, will be able to designate a “very limited area” where smoking may occur without interfering with the health of others.

By now, you've probably backed - or been asked to back - something on Kickstarter. For artists and many small community-focused businesses, it's the cool thing to do and, frankly, a great way to raise the capital you need without having to get involved in a complex business relationship with investors. It's also a fantastic way to build a community of interested potential patrons around your business.

There are also Kickstarter alternatives popping up - IndieGoGo and Ulule to name a couple - as well as a new Raleigh-based startup, Equity Shack, that is taking advantage of newly passed federal legislation that requires the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to create rules for microinvesting by small, unaccredited investors (hopefully available early 2013).

As part of the TechStars RisingStars program, today marks the opening of Patriot Boot Camp, a three-day educational and mentorship program aimed to empower 75 veterans with the entrepreneurial skills necessary to start their own ventures.  Patriot Boot Camp is free for participants and is being held at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Today’s agenda aims to help participants find their fellow co-founders in addition to selecting a business idea.  Day two will include the feedback of a group of prominent mentors, including Zaarly founder, Eric Koester, and Brazen Careerist CEO, Edward Barrientos, to help the teams further refine their ideas – which will then be pitched in front of a group of investors and media at Demo Day, this Friday, July 20th (the event is free - register here).

The data on the national R&D enterprise that are gathered and published annually by the National Science Foundation are so dimensionally rich that the implications are actually difficult to absorb. In the SlideShare presentation below, I’ve taken a try at teasing out some observations that may be of interest to people interested in the innovation system. Some of the findings are obvious; some not. Your comments are welcome.

To manufacture its new sodium-nickel batteries, which could be used to store power from wind turbines or help power remote cell-phone towers (see “GE’s Novel Battery to Bolster the Grid”), GE has opened a large factory in Schenectady, New York. Here’s a look inside it at some key steps in the manufacturing process. 

The National Science Foundation outlined plans on Wednesday to aggressively expand a program for teaching entrepreneurial skills to faculty members and graduate students, saying the initiative's first year has shown it to be a cost-effective pathway to commercializing discoveries.

The program, called I-Corps, involves teaching scientists the basic skills of marketing their inventions. While it's too early to reach definitive long-term conclusions about market-success rates, the first