arrived in New York City (my former home town) just in time to watch the NY Giants win the Super Bowl. But that hasn’t been the only big news coming out of New York lately. “Linsanity” is taking over and it’s been a marketers dream.

For those readers who are not NBA followers, Jeremy Lin is the first North American of Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA. He’s also the second Harvard Alumni to play in the NBA. And he’s setting a new NBA record with 20 or more points as a first time starter in his last 5 starting games.

Our popular Top 10 list of FDA warning letter findings is back! To assemble the list, IMARC’s clinical monitoring team reviewed warning letters issued by investigators and sponsor-investigators last year through FDA’s Bioresearch Monitoring Inspection Program. This list of warning letter findings is not intended to point fingers at investigators, but rather, to document the non-compliance trends in an effort to raise industry awareness of improvement needed. Whether you are a sponsor, a monitor, or an investigative site, everyone has a stake in the outcome of an FDA BIMO inspection.

In a last-ditch effort to get an investment capital bill passed before the end of this session, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. has floated a proposal to fund promising young companies with money raised from the sale of unused investment tax credits.

The proposal comes as many lawmakers acknowledge there is little hope of salvaging a $400 million venture capital bill Gov. Scott Walker promoted early last year as a key component of his effort to create more jobs in the state. That bill was derailed by controversy over whether to include participation from out-of-state financial firms called CAPCOs.

So you decided to go into business for yourself. Well here are twelve critical pointers you will need to succeed in your entrepreneurial venture.

1. Purpose Very simply stated, you need to know what you want to achieve in life and be willing to go after it.

2. Project Your business idea that recognizes: a need in the marketplace and involves a product or solution that brings value to the client.

It’s an oft-repeated Detroit lament: There are no jobs in this city and even if there were, the undereducated masses wouldn’t qualify for them.

Not so fast, says Antonella Solomon, chief operating officer of Launch Learning Group (LLG), a Bizdom U start-up launched in 2010. Her company has created a training course which utilizes innovative, tech-based tools to help people get licensed in the insurance industry—a seemingly recession-proof sector where the only initial qualifications a prospective employee needs is to be age 18 or older and felony-free.

Inventors from Archimedes to Thomas Edison and Jonas Salk have made mistakes that caused their discoveries to develop in surprisingly helpful directions.

Now the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is trying to capture mistakes like this, with the idea that making mistakes on purpose is something that all of us could be taught. Today the business school named the winners of its first Brilliant Mistakes Contest, which awarded prizes (including Southwest Airlines tickets, free courses and conference tickets, and lunch with a contest judge) to people whose mistakes were the most productive.

Medical venture capitalists used to try cut their financing risk by recruiting several investors into funding rounds, but the challenge of keeping large syndicates together is causing some to rethink this approach.

A broad syndicate is supposed to reduce the risk that a start-up will run out of cash and enable the company to bargain from a strong position with new investors or collaborators. When a syndicate is united, it can do just that. But the difficulty health-care investors have had in selling companies or taking them public recently has forced them to hold positions longer. As years go by, investor groups that started strong can fray.

"It's not every day you have robots running through your house," Barack Obama quipped last week at the White House science fair, a showcase for student exhibitors that also gave the US president a chance to reiterate a favourite theme. Science and technology, he said, "is what's going to make a difference in this country, over the long haul".

Obama would clearly like to see many more robots, as well as researchers and engineers, running around in the future, a wish reflected in his budget request for fiscal year 2013, released on February 13. The document's message is one of big ambitions with fewer resources.

Someday soon a breath test could do more than just tell if you've been drinking. Metabolomx, a startup in Mountain View, California, recently completed a clinical trial that shows that its breath test can spot lung cancer with 83 percent accuracy and can also distinguish between several different types of the disease, something that usually requires a biopsy. The accuracy of the test matches what's possible with low-dose computerized tomography imaging of the lungs.

Existing tests for lung cancer—the leading cause of cancer death worldwide—cause too many false positives, which means patients face unnecessary biopsies or exposure to radiation from imaging, and none are currently approved by Medicare. A breath test promises much simpler, safer screening.

The UK’s leading research universities are to get a massive boost for their spin-out activities from a new £150 million investment fund that is to be raised by the private equity firm MTI Partners.

The Orion Fund, to be established in collaboration with the technology transfer offices (TTOs) of University College London and Manchester and Edinburgh universities will be the largest specialist fund in the world dedicated to university spin-outs, according to MTI.

While it will invest the majority of the money in technology that has already crossed the Valley of Death funding gap and reached proof of principle, the Orion Fund will also include a proof of principle investment programme. This programme will be overseen by the three TTOs, providing pre-seed funding to get technologies to the point when they are ready for a larger investment from the Orion Fund of £250,000 - £750,000.

I like to define a startup in a way that goes something like this: A startup in my world is a young company in a new, fast growing and evolving industry that could swing, change or be disrupted very quickly.

The reason that it’s relevant for me to lay out how I define a startup is because this definition is extremely important when considering hiring a team. It is often not as simple as hiring the best person for the job. It’s much deeper and more complicated than a simple contract with leave allowances and a stable income.

Hiring is tough because it’s like giving your baby (company) away to someone you’ve known for a 45 minute interview.

How do women entrepreneurs feel about their businesses, their prospects and themselves? The American College recently surveyed some 800 entrepreneurial women, in business for a minimum of three years, about their financial goals, stress levels, and optimism regarding their businesses work/life balance. In other words, what issues kept these entrepreneurs up at night?

Here’s what they found—see where you fit in:

Sleeping Soundly: Thirty one percent of the respondents say being an entrepreneur has met their expectations. They enjoy a good work/life balance and are successfully managing the financial aspects of their businesses. They are confident about their present financial stability and feel they have planned well for the future. This group had the highest business revenues of all the women surveyed.

Massachusetts residents don’t need to be told that their state is a leader in the high tech industries. But data from the National Science Foundation finds that Mass. has the sixth highest percentage of businesses in high technology. If anything, Mass. residents might be surprised to hear they aren’t ranked higher. Via The Atlantic, here are our state’s stats:

6: MASSACHUSETTS

• Business establishments in high-tech industries: 10.02 percent (6th)
• Total business establishments in high-tech industries: 17,434 (13th)
• Workers in science or engineering occupations: 6.51 percent (2nd)
• Workers employed by high-tech businesses: 15.11 percent (4th)
• R&D spending as a percentage of state GDP: 3.04 percent (7th)

When entrepreneurs ask me if I have a single message which will help them, I say: doing good can help improve your prospects, your profits and your business – and can change the world.

I believe that business can be a force for good, and that by doing the right thing it will prosper. In other words, doing good is good for business.

So far business, or capitalism, for the most part, has been a means of making money. The means by which that money was made have not been as important as the end result. One of the most devastating theories of the 1970s was that – no matter what it took – the primary purpose of business was to maximise value for shareholders. This led to a variety of social ills where businesses polluted, discarded employees at the drop of a hat or created unsustainable short-term gains.

A pioneer in the multitrillion-dollar credit-derivatives market is seeking approval for what could be the first exchange catering to privately traded derivatives, or "swaps," instruments that currently trade off-exchange.

Sunil Hirani, who in 1999 co-founded Creditex Group, an electronic execution platform for credit-default swaps, has asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to approve the new venture, trueEX, as an exchange or "designated contract market" for swaps, according to documents made public on the CFTC website Jan. 31. Mr. Hirani and other staffers at trueEX also met with CFTC member Scott O'Malia on Feb. 1, CFTC records show.

A new investment fund designed to help tech innovators transfer their ideas to market was unveiled yesterday.

The Orion Fund – which was launched by venture capital firm MTI, in partnership with the Universities of Manchester, Edinburgh and University College London – aims to raise £150m for tech start-ups, making it the largest investment fund of its kind in the world.

Working with three of the UK’s top six universities for commercial tech research, the fund will assess hundreds of innovations for their potential – and many will receive pre-seed funding to test their viability as businesses.

Ultimately, 35 of the country’s best tech innovations will be selected to receive seed funding of between £250,000 and £750,000. These businesses can then potentially bid for further investment, typically ranging from £3m to £5m, at a later stage.

After seeing many of its portfolio companies come to life with newfound traction after participating in its Start-Up University program, Google Ventures has decided to expand the program, and will soon move it from the 12,000-square-foot building it occupies to a space nearly twice that size.

The firm, which calls itself “the most operational VC firm in Silicon Valley,” is backing technology companies at a faster clip than rival firms–making two investments per week, on average–and is looking to engage with company founders on a level that is probably unknown outside of the Googleplex in Mountain View.

£6.5 million has been awarded to seven business-led projects that will focus on developing nanoscience technologies to benefit the healthcare sector.

Funding has been approved by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and the Technology Strategy Board and will go to projects that focus on developing therapeutic agents and diagnostics innovation.

The investment is targeted to develop the UK’s standing as an early competitive adopter of these types of technologies.

It is hoped that world-class ideas from academia can be commercialised through building supply chains with innovative businesses.

If you own a computer, you are probably familiar with the term “reboot” — the process by which a computer is restarted. Why bother restarting a computer? Because the longer a computer is on, the slower it often becomes due to the accumulation of countless invisible “background processes” going on behind the scenes — usually without our knowledge or consent.

So there you are, staring impatiently at your screen — waiting… waiting…. waiting — for what seems like an eternity to gain access to all that cool software you own.  What’s yours, unfortunately, has become frustratingly inaccessible.

The same phenomenon goes on inside of a human being.

In the old days, you listened to music on your iPod while exercising. During an idle moment at the office you might use Google on your Microsoft Windows PC to search for the latest celebrity implosion. Maybe you would post an update on Facebook. After dinner, you could watch a DVD from Netflix or sink into a new page-turner that had arrived that day from Amazon.

That vision, where every company and every device had its separate role, is so 2011.

The biggest tech companies are no longer content simply to enhance part of your day. They want to erase the boundaries, do what the other big tech companies are doing and own every waking moment. The new strategy is to build a device, sell it to consumers and then sell them the content to play on it. And maybe some ads, too.