Boulder, Colo., has a startup community different from any other. It's like entrepreneur utopia.

Everyone knows one another and everyone helps one another.

Boulder's reputation is so good startups have begun to leave other parts of the nation and relocate here.

Take YPickMe co-founders Adam Kaye and Samya "Lola" Salim. They started in Tallahassee, Florida, where they ran an incubator.

The housing market is still slow in most of the country, but it's heating up again in Silicon Valley.

Earlier this month, we talked to a resident of Palo Alto who estimated selling prices have gone up 30 to 60 percent in the last six months. His evidence was a "teardown" house that sold immediately for $2.1 million — more than half a million over asking price.

Then, over the weekend, the San Jose Mercury reported on a ranch house in Palo Alto that drew 38 bids. It finally closed at $1.65 million, well over the asking price of $1.2 million.

Peter Thiel raised a $32 million fund to invest in startups in... New Zealand, reports the WSJ.

The reports say he "set up" or "opened a fund", but this is not technically true.

As we reported more than a year ago, Thiel has been actively investing in New Zealand for many years. His New Zealand investment firm, Valar Ventures, was registered in July of 2009. So while this is a new fund, the venture firm itself is almost three years old. He described New Zealand to us as "utopia."

While putting your head in the sand and ignoring technology will do no good for your business, there are still some tech traps you should avoid. Here are a few from USA Today.

Lack of security: Your customer lists, account numbers, passwords, bank information, data, contracts, and other vital information are the lifeblood of your business, but far too many small businesses act like the threat to them is not real. But it’s real, very real. So get some great security software and install it. Implement policies that mandate that your staff not download “updates” outside of the normal process. Monitor your social media so as to be on the alert for fraud.

Creativity is the most essential skill for navigating an increasingly complex world — or so said 1,500 CEOs across 60 countries in a recent survey by IBM. And yet federally funded research and development — creativity, institutionalized — is down 20% as a share of America’s GDP since the late 1980s. Private R&D spending has also tailed off since then, when it brought us breakthrough innovations like laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and the mouse. And that was just from one company’s private R&D engine, Xerox’s PARC. At the same time, experts fret that our public school system doesn’t foster enough creativity in our future workforce. All of which makes it easy to worry that we’ll run out of creative leaders producing creative goods. But I think the declinism is overwrought. And that’s because some of the best paths to encourage innovation are surprisingly simple.

In two panels on entrepreneurship sponsored by WSJ India and H.R. College Tuesday, seven of the country’s top entrepreneurs and business minds offered advice to people interested in starting their own businesses.

Readers of WSJ India and India Real Time sent us dozens of questions that were used as the basis for the discussions with the panelists at H.R. College in Mumbai. The summary below will serve as the panelists’ response to the questions, which cannot be answered individually because we didn’t have time to ask them all.

From breast implants that treat cancer to finding new methods of detection in the developing world, these projects are winners of a health innovation challenge from GE.

You’ve probably heard the statistics: One in eight women will develop breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. Breast cancer death rates for women in the U.S. are higher than for any other cancer except lung cancer. There is a lot of progress that needs to be made in detection, diagnosis, and therapy--and plenty of money to be had for those who can make it. So when GE announced last year that it was launching a $100 million global open innovation challenge as part of its Healthymagination initiative, it came as no surprise to learn that breast cancer would be the first focus.

Last fall Nokia (NOK) made the call on a problem. Its waltzing, high-pitched default ring tone was ready for a lift, so the company created a public challenge: Anyone who developed a better ring tone would get $10,000. Valerio Alessandro Sizzi, a DJ in Milan, came up with the winning remix.

Nokia's SOS is an example of open innovation. "No longer is a brand something that is created by the company and delivered to the consumer," the cellphone firm blogged. "Taking off the shackles of our global, wildly creative fan base, we might find a much better expression of our brand than we might have ever done ourselves."

The green economy often is cited as a key driver of the national economic recovery. At the very least, it is creating jobs. The total number of jobs related to green products and services in 2010 was 3.13 million, according to the first-ever green jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week. However, to put things in perspective, these jobs accounted for only 2.4% of the country’s total employment that year.

In many states, jobs associated with the production of green goods and services represented a slightly larger share of employment. In 11 states, green jobs accounted for 3% or more of total jobs. Vermont had the highest proportion of clean economy jobs at 4.4%. Green jobs in these states are represented in many sectors, including manufacturing and construction.

The pace of startups popping up seems matched only by the emergence of new "incubators," or "accelerators," whichever word you chose to describe these startup boot camps that have cropped up across the country.

And Paul Graham, the man behind the grandaddy of them all, Y Combinator, barely pays attention to them. What he is convinced of, though, is that many will die, and that they're formed for the wrong reason.

"People are doing it because it's the cool thing to do," Graham told me during a break at Y Combinator's Demo Day at the Computer History Museum here. "It's just the fashion, like what kind of clothes to wear."

Startup Incubation holds significant importance in a country like India where entrepreneurs by the score are launching new setups and changing the game of business by minutes. For the uninitiated, business incubation programs or centers provide support functions, mentorship and resources to individual entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial setups. This enables them to get all the expert advice and technical guidance that they need to survive for a longer time, unlike most other entrepreneurial ventures that fizzle out within a few months of their launch.

Almost every other prestigious B-school today houses an incubation center so that great ideas can be nurtured from their very source. Currently there are about 100 incubation centers supported by the ISBA which is the apex Indian professional body supporting business incubators. Private incubators are a handful, but gradually growing. These numbers are expected to double within the next two years. Let’s take a look at some of the good business incubation centers in India.

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act cleared its final legislative hurdle today. It is now on its way to President Obama for signature.

The JOBS Act is a big deal for those seeking capital for starting and growing companies. Joe Bartlett, who chairs the advisory council to the public policy committee of the Angel Capital Association, said at the ACA Summit in Austin earlier this month that the JOBS Act represents the biggest set of changes to securities laws in fifty years.

But you may have noticed that different articles about the JOBS Act emphasize different things. It’s about the IPO on-ramp; or it’s about digital rules for angel investing, long overdue; or it’s about equity crowdfunding.

The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) praised the United States Congress for its decisive passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act today. The bill, which has now passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate, contains provisions that create a temporary regulatory and communications on-ramp for emerging growth companies that are pursuing an initial public offering (IPO). This on-ramp is viewed by the start-up ecosystem as much needed relief from the cumulative effect of costly regulations that were dissuading companies from entering the public markets. The JOBS Act now goes to President Obama who has indicated his intention to sign the bill into law.

Playing hockey is a passion for many kids. And more than a few parents have been the target of lobbying efforts by children wanting expensive graphite hockey sticks. While a shiny new Bauer Supreme One95 might be nice, what’s required is practice, practice and more practice. Sidney Crosby with a cheap wooden stick will still play better hockey than a beginner wielding an expensive one.

China could become the world’s largest trade nation in a few years and the largest overall economy by 2030, according to the World Bank. If the United States is to retain economic dominance, it must aggressively promote entrepreneurship in order to bolster idea innovation, productivity and job creation.

Unless America changes the status quo, China’s surpassing of United States GDP is simply a matter of time. The figures are clear: Between 2008 to 2012, the U.S. dropped from first to fifth place in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitive Index. Our quality of math and science education is 51st place out of 138, and our secondary education enrollment rate is 50th place.

If you're struggling to keep your email box from overflowing, you are not alone--this morning, my inbox summary told me I had 616 new messages awaiting my attention. Now, that's a daunting way to start the day.

Email overload is a well-documented phenomenon that has been linked to reduced productivity, inability to focus on important tasks, and even physical and emotional stress. So it is no wonder that alternative forms of communication are being actively pursued to reduce overload, both at home and at the office. One method that is gaining popularity is the activity stream.

Shark Tank--the prime-time feeding frenzy where successful entrepreneurs fight over promising startups, and ruthlessly chew up the unprepared--is stirring up much buzz in its third season. To date, the Sharks have invested more than $6.2 million of their own money in a number of companies. With billionaire Mark Cuban, real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran, venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful), and other business magnates sitting in as the Sharks, the show offers a glimpse of pitching sessions gone totally right--or deliciously wrong.

An example: When three ice cream makers first lined up in front of the Sharks to pitch their product, they generated some friendly conversation. After all, the concept of morphing together beer and America's favorite frozen treat is bound to appeal to our inner glutton. However, when the investors started asking the entrepreneurs tough questions about their finances, the men from The Brewer's Cow had a minor meltdown. Whether the Connecticut-based founders were the victims of calculated editing or simply unprepared, their presentation lacked a certain professionalism. The final verdict? A flurry of "I'm outs" from the Sharks.

Investors crammed into the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., Tuesday to get a glimpse of the future at Y Combinator’s Demo Day. And, with nearly all of the 66 graduating companies pitching their company, their team and their method for conquering massive markets ripe for disruption (all in a two-and-a-half minute pitch, mind you) there was plenty to see.

A number of ideas were fresh, like enabling gesture control via webcams (Flutter) and enabling blueprints to be viewed and manipulated on tablets (PlanGrid), but quite a few were mashups of existing technologies or incremental improvements over what is already in the market.

For someone who’s lived through one tech bubble, it’s hard not to see signs of another one every time the market starts edging upward.

Besides, no one wants to be the rube who’s the last one to realize the party’s over and the cool kids have already left. That’s why so many people are quick to jump to the conclusion that we’re in a bubble.

I’ll admit, the thought crossed my mind recently when I read that a company selling razor blades had raised $1 million from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. That was just a few days after I learned one of L.A.’s hottest new incubators was hatching a company offering dog-sitting services.

Many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs train for big athletic events -- it's part of their competitive nature.

David Feinleib, co-founder of five startups and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, is a classic example.

He has been training for an Ironman event over the last seven months. The Ironman Triathlon includes a 2.4-mile open water swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a full 26.2-mile marathon.