Entrepreneurs don’t win based on raw talent alone. Success depends on talent, hard work, and not-so-dumb luck, according to Clarence Wooten, who’s launched his share of startups including Image Cafe in 1998 and seven months later sold it to Network Solutions/Verisign for $23 million.

Instead, successful startups come from a combination of talent, good ideas, hard work and maybe not-so-dumb luck, he said. At the inaugural MIT Sloan Hi-Tech Conference on Friday, Wooten, who is now working on Arrived offered 12 lessons for entrepreneurs.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom knew all the right people in Silicon Valley to get take his startup from idea to $1 billion Facebook buyout. But it seems Systrom had connections to the social network throughout his career.

The New York Times released a background of Systrom’s career today, which opened on a scene the Instagram co-founder laid out for a group of Stanford students in May 2011 (see the speech here). He retold the night he and co-founder Mike Krieger launched the photo-sharing application, which is where his company had its first connection to Facebook.

In 1997, Larry Ellison had a vision for a new paradigm of computing which he called the Network Computer (NC). The idea was simple: a group of partners would build devices and services that leveraged the power of the Internet to compete against the growing Windows monopoly.

Ellison believed that the computer in the client/server era had evolved into too complex a machine for most tasks. With the NC, the ‘heavy’ computation of software and infrastructure would be abstracted from the actual device and delivered instead to thinner terminals via the web, thus radically simplifying access and enabling all new applications and mobility.

When we started Brightcove seven years ago, we expected a five-to-10-year transformation period until we reached a world of purely Internet-based, on-demand TV, motion pictures and “long tail” content. Sometimes it’s hard to see change happen when we are in the middle of it, but amazing to look back and see just how far we’ve come. I look at the past seven years as driven by three waves of innovation.

The first wave of TV transformation was the “Hey kids, let’s put on a show,” period of experimentation and naiveté. Return on investment wasn’t that important yet. In fact it wasn’t really possible. Audiences were too small and monetization infrastructure was not robust enough. It was in these early days when an innovator like Kenny Miller (of MTV Networks, at the time), could take a risk and learn from it, and another cable programming exec would ask in a meeting, “Do you think people really want to watch video over the Internet?”

Next week, NASA will show off some of its latest technology: a system for growing algae in floating plastic bags. The system is the result of a $10 million, two-year project that investigated whether the algae could be used to make biofuels, including jet fuel.

The system is designed to reduce the cost of making fuel from algae by making it possible to put algae farms near wastewater facilities, which offer a large source of nutrients.

But it may prove difficult to implement. For one thing, it will require a lot of plastic. In one possible setup, five square kilometers of plastic bags would be used to produce 2.4 million gallons of algae oil per year—a drop in the bucket compared to the 800 million gallons of oil the U.S. consumes every day. And the bags will likely need to be replaced every year.

Consider who comes to mind when we think of entrepreneurs. Does a day go by without mention of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Richard Branson in the media? While admirable, these men are not accessible, especially to women.

Women are as likely as men to think entrepreneurship is a good career choice, that entrepreneurs have high status, and are represented positively in the media. So why do they admire this endeavor from afar, but think they are less equipped to do this?

The app world is getting a reality check, thanks to apps like Girls Around Me, Placeme or even Highlight. So far, when it comes to sharing data the benefits still outweigh the momentary gut check when your aunt references a party photo or your friends unexpectedly check you in to a place while you told your boss you were home sick. But in the past month one word has kept popping up to describe the current direction of social apps: creepy. Instead of SoLoMoCo or another dumb acronym, this one is an uh-oh.

The rise of creepy

I first heard someone describing an app as creepy when a friend of mine was referencing Highlight. After some older guy she didn’t know popped up as a connection and started eyeing her up at a bar, she quickly uninstalled it. Then at our Structure:Data conference in March I was sitting with an entrepreneur who dropped the word at least four times in a conversation about how people can use the data his firm is providing, “We have to make sure it doesn’t come across as creepy,” he said again and again.

Thanks to the efforts of companies like Square and PayPal, the age of digital payments is upon us. Now one governmental organization hopes to speed up the introduction of official digital currency into the North American marketplace.

The Royal Canadian Mint has launched a competition looking for software developers to create digital apps using MintChip, an experimental new anonymous electronic payments technology. Ian E. Bennett, CEO of the Mint, said, "As part of its research and development efforts, the Mint has developed MintChip, which could be characterized as an evolution of physical money, with the added benefits of being electronic."

Neil Rimer doesn’t get a lot of publicity. Compared to some of his more high profile colleagues at Index Ventures, the cerebral investor tends to stay under the radar.

This is despite the fact that he’s one of the driving forces behind what must be Europe’s leading venture capital firm, certainly as far as the web is concerned. As one of the founders of Index back in 1996, he is intimately responsible for a business that has scored major coups with companies like Skype, MySQL, ASOS, Betfair and more.

So what is he interested in right now? What trends is he watching closely?

A new study by scientists at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science suggests that many species of reef-building corals may be able to adapt to warming waters by relying on their closest aquatic partners — algae. The corals’ ability to host a variety of algal types, each with different sensitivities to environmental stress, could offer a much-needed lifeline in the face of global climate change.

Using a highly sensitive genetic technique, Ph.D. student Rachel Silverstein analyzed 39 coral species from DNA collected in the Indo-Pacific and Caribbean collected over the last 15 years. Most of these species had not previously been thought capable of hosting more than one type of the single-celled symbiotic algae, called zooxanthellae, which live inside the coral and help to supply them with energy.

Venture capital has been getting a lot of support from politicians and the press recently, notably the passage of the JOBS (“Jump-start Our Business Start-ups”) Act. A key provision, much mentioned by President Obama, lets Joe Ordinary become a venture capital investor via legalization of Crowd Funding (more).

Active Venture Funds & Capital Commitments; Source: NVCA yearbook.

It’s ironic that just as the barriers for small investors have been lowered, the large institutional investors have been backing away from venture capital. As the chart shows, the amount of money committed to venture capital funds in the U.S. (most of which comes from institutions) and the number of funds making active investments have shrunk by about half in the last five years.

In 1982, the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant program was launched. Since then, small technology companies have received more than $26 billion to develop and commercialize new technologies. The SBIR program is designed to spur technological innovation, satisfy Federal R&D needs, and increase commercialization of technologies derived from Federal R&D. Eleven Federal agencies, including DARPA, NASA, and the DoD, participate in the SBIR program. These agencies must spend at least a portion of their annual R&D budgets on SBIR programs.

In order to qualify as a small business, the US company must have fewer than 500 employees and meet a few other criteria. Qualified small businesses are given money in phases to develop new technologies based on their proposed solution to R&D prompts issued by participating agencies. This research and development generally leads to the development of new technologies, some of which are patentable. To find out who owns the patent rights, and what obligations a small business has under SBIR grants,

In a world where pop culture is increasingly embracing science and technology, the production of a startup reality series was probably only a matter of time.

Three Philadelphia based entrepreneurs, Municibid founder Greg Berry, Municibid, his chief marketing officer Mike Bianchini, and RazorServer’s vice president of technology Dave Drager, quietly announced plans to launch a week-long summer accelerator at the New Jersey sea shore —  Startup Beach House — in February. Now the promise is being realized, with the launch of a website and applications, as Berry announced to the Philly Startup Leaders listserv.

Just about everyone has heard of the elevator pitch – that succinct summation of what you do that piques the interest of a potential customer or investor. Of course, in the Internet age, the elevator pitch has been shortened to the escalator pitch, then the Twitter pitch. As a result, a person has to adapt to the situation they’re in.

So, what do you do when you’re hit with the inevitable question “what do you do?” Do you captivate strangers right off the bat? Do you get people asking questions, or following up with you later?

We’ve all been there. You’re all set to buy something, credit card in hand, but for one reason or another you never close the deal.

Maybe the third time you were asked to enter your credit card number you gave in. Perhaps it was the exorbitant shipping costs. Maybe the site crashed.

The truth is, there are at least seven things that send potential customers fleeing in horror from your website, some of which were chronicled in this perceptive comic from The Oatmeal. If you actually want people to stick around and buy stuff from your site, you may want to take note of and avoid these common pitfalls.

Invention mining, also known as “invention harvesting,” is the art of engaging with an engineer or scientist to identify and capture inventions, including those that might otherwise go unrecognized. Inventions are the raw material of any patent program, so identifying a company’s inventions gives the company more choices for strengthening its patent portfolio and making the best use of its patent budget. Done well, invention mining is not disruptive to the inventor’s work and can generate significant return on investment.

Seven Ontario universities have formed a $210-million research-and-development deal with IBM to harness cloud computing and supercomputers to work on big issues like managing energy resources, reports The Globe and Mail. IBM is providing $175-million, with the rest coming from the federal and Ontario governments. The newspaper says the deal is an example of the federal government’s effort to spur closer ties between universities and industry, which was a key part the latest federal budget and has been met with a mixed response from academics. The University of Toronto and Western University are the lead higher-education partners in the project. According to the University of Toronto, IBM researchers will be based on its campus, and the partnership will help solve “critical problems related to cities, heath care, water and energy management, and building the next generation of supercomputers.”

The first three months of the year might have been a challenge for Google from a public relations point of view, with politicians and state attorneys general, European regulators and ordinary users troubled by the search giant’s new privacy policy. But its financial numbers were another matter, largely rebounding from a weak fourth quarter.

Along with its quarterly results, released after the markets closed on Thursday, Google announced what would effectively be a two-for-one stock split. The split will create a new class of nonvoting shares and allow the company to reward its employees with stock without diluting existing shareholders. It is the first time Google, which went public in 2004, has split its shares.

Entrepreneurs seem more quickly frustrated these days when their “million-dollar idea” doesn’t turn into a sustainable business overnight. They don’t realize that it takes many skills to build a business under the best of circumstances, and today’s world of instant gratification doesn’t leave room for the patience and practice to develop these skills.

Successful sports figures and musicians have long understood the value of time and practice in perfecting their skills. So why do entrepreneurs think that building a business is intuitively obvious, and should happen overnight? Building a business is a complex task, like building the product or service, and requires the same focus, discipline, and practice to get it right. Even the revered Steve Jobs of Apple didn’t get it all right the first time.

The number of seed capital options for early entrepreneurs in Metro Detroit have risen significantly in recent years, prompting the Michigan Economic Development Corp to increase efforts to connect these entrepreneurs with cash funds.

The MEDC will host a series of events showcasing the seed-funding and business-building options available to Michigan's growing class of entrepreneurs. These free events, which kickoff next week, are designed to help entrepreneurs and start-ups find growth opportunities through the business services and financial support made available through MEDC-supported business incubators and accelerators across the Great Lakes State.