REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Even as Wall Street trembles, the market for investing in tech start-ups remains white-hot. Still, some investors are proceeding with extreme caution.

Saying they learned their lesson in the dot-com boom and bust, and the 2008 recession, the institutional investors — pension funds, university endowments and foundations — that put money in venture capital funds are more selectively choosing the firms in which they invest, doing exhaustive research before handing over money, and in some cases driving hard bargains for more favorable management fees and shares of profits.

Though most say they remain bullish on venture capital, they know that as the limited partners, they would be the ones to feel the pain if a bubble bursts. After all, they put up most of the money.

The world is a chaotic place right now with riots in London, biggest ever one day falls on American stock markets, debt downgrades in the US and unprecedented steps from the European Central Bank to bail out the peripheral Eurozone economies all happening in the last week.  The catalyst for these events has been the declining prospects for economic growth and I was asked this morning in an interview with the Guardian what I thought the impact will be on the startup world and the tech bubble that we are in at the moment (I will post a link to the podcast when it is online).

Thinking about it at the time, and in subsequent conversations my view is as follows:

1. Tech valuations have recently been spiking up to levels that aren’t sustainable in the long run.
2. Those valuations have been driven by the IPO market and if the current public market turmoil continues the flow of new IPOs will dry up and those that do make it through will be at lower valuations.  VCs value private companies in part by looking at public market valuations and hence the lower valuations will trickle down to startups.

BOULDER - Finding funding, customers and talented employees remain challenges for Boulder area entrepreneurs, according to a roundtable presented by the Boulder County Business Report.

The event, which focused on innovation and held at the office of Holland & Hart LLP in Boulder, brought together 13 executives and entrepreneurs from young companies running the gamut from a candy company, a web-based media company and several local software firms. Representatives of the University of Colorado Deming Center for Entrepreneurship and Boulder Innovation Center also attended.

Local entrepreneurs continue to face a challenging environment. While Boulder has good resources new companies can capitalize on, outside of startups in a few select industries, such as software or Web development, finding investment remains difficult.

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Some parents wonder if Facebook could be harming our ability to socialize. A handful of psychologists are now starting to ask same the question.

Larry Rosen, author of several books on the psychology of technology, and a research psychologist at California State University, Dominguez Hills, is one of several researchers trying to quantify the psychological effects that Facebook is having on users across generations, with a particular eye toward teens and young adults.

Rosen has already collected some early evidence that suggests that Facebook use may somehow be connected to narcissistic behavior, alcohol dependence, and other psychiatric disorders. But he has also found evidence that Facebook use may be associated with increases in virtual empathy—the ability to consider someone else's emotional state from a distance.

Interest in “social” entrepreneurship continues to soar. The number of conferences and business plan competitions on social entrepreneurship are growing rapidly, the number of courses offered on university campuses is expanding, and social entrepreneurship is getting a lot of press. So, what differentiates a social entrepreneur from a plain old vanilla entrepreneur? I must say that it isn’t clear to me….

To loosely quote Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, “All entrepreneurship is ‘social’ because at a minimum it generates jobs and stimulates the economy.” Given that as a baseline, companies can be socially responsible in an endless number of ways. If a company has family friendly policies, it is socially responsible. If a company recycles used materials and installs solar panels on the roof, it is socially responsible. If a company makes medical products that save lives, it is socially responsible. If a company makes energy efficient cars, it is socially responsible. A company certainly does not have to be a not-for-profit to be socially responsible.

Newswise — Deerfield, IL — The Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) – an association for academic technology transfer professionals – announced its plans to launch the AUTM Global Technology Portal, a website that aims to actively facilitate networking, partnership and licensing deals among corporations and universities.

"The Global Technology Portal will be a one-stop shop for corporations to find university technologies available for licensing," says Laura Schoppe, AUTM VP for Strategic Alliances. "The portal will help facilitate license agreements, collaborative research agreements, and investments or partnership arrangements for university startups," she adds.

I spent the summer of 2005 studying poker. I interviewed some of the best players in the world, attended the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, analyzed “pokerbots” -- poker-playing computers -- and chronicled the efforts of highly rational players, such as Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, a game theorist with a PhD who is a world champion and a formidable one-on-one player.

While poker can be analyzed rationally, with big egos and big money at stake it can also be a very emotional game. Poker players explained to me that there’s a particular moment at which players are extremely vulnerable to an emotional surge. It’s not when they’ve won a huge pot or when they’ve drawn a fantastic hand. It’s when they’ve just lost a lot of money through bad luck (a "bad beat’") or bad strategy. The loss can nudge a player into going "on tilt" -- making overly aggressive bets in an effort to win back what he wrongly feels is still his money. The brain refuses to register that the money has gone. Acknowledging the loss and recalculating one’s strategy would be the right thing to do, but that is too painful. Instead, the player makes crazy bets to rectify what he unconsciously believes is a temporary situation. It isn’t the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarized the behavior in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk: “A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.”

Angel Investment Network has reported a positive trend despite the recent shakeups in the global markets with trends that are starting to counter this. And in the midst of this, more business people than ever before seem to be taking the leap from employee to entrepreneur. The pressure of market fluctuations is producing diamonds in the most unlikely places, and more and more people are turning to angel investors to help their business grow.

These changes in the market place also seem to have transformed in the manner in which business is being funded, leading to an upswing in the amount of venture capital investment this quarter. This is following along the trend that Angel Investment Network has seen over the past year, with a continuous increase in the number of business investment deals quarter on quarter. Over the last year we have seen the number of venture capital deals increase significantly as well as the value of these deals.

After spending the early part of my career in the mid- to high-end of the Canadian private-equity market, it became apparent to me that the venture capital market was underserved, attracting limited interest among institutional investors.

In January, we launched Klass Capital, one of Canada’s first micro venture capital funds focused on software companies. Our goal is to invest $1-million to $3-million per deal, deploying $20-million to $30-million of capital over a three-year period.

China's tax office is considering a plan to offer more tax incentives to venture capital companies when they invest in local small-and-medium enterprises, the China Securities Journal reported on Thursday, citing unnamed sources.

Venture capital firms already enjoy tax deductions of 70 percent of their investments when they put money in unlisted small-and-medium scale high tech firms, but the State Administration of Taxation (SAT) is considering widening the criteria to include investments for non-tech companies, the paper said.

While it’s fashionable to focus on data, one has to remember that what matters is what you can do with the data and how it can help grow a business. That is the rallying cry in the web world from Twitter to Facebook but also in an unexpected place: a Seattle hospital.

Ted Corbett, the director of knowledge management at Seattle Children’s Hospital, is using software from a company called Tableau to draw smart inferences from the 10 terabytes of data locked up in his servers and warehousing appliances. The hospital, which employs 5,000 people, uses the visualizations and easy access to data hidden away in multiple places to cut down on waste, reduce errors in medicine and help plan clinical trials. As organizations seek to store, analyze and derive insights from their data, companies are creating software to help them make sense of it all — because it’s not how big the data is, but what you can do with it.

Ever since Blueprint Ventures’ partners decided in 2009 to wind the firm down, New Venture Partners may be the only venture firm left that invests solely in corporate spinouts—technology projects that are locked inside a company that the company no longer wants, even if it’s already invested millions of dollars in them.

Identifying these projects and turning them into independent start-ups is time-consuming. New Venture Partner David Tennenhouse, a Ph.D. in computing who’s worked at DARPA, Intel Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. and who opened the firm’s Silicon Valley office in 2007, says he talks to a lot of people — corporate chief technology officers, directors of research and sometimes business development and mergers and acquisitions people, figuring that “when a project is in imminent danger of being cancelled, hopefully the leader will go to the doorsteps of these people looking for salvation.”

It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down. We're in summer. One easy way to tell: notice all the startup experts and prophets that have sprung up in the last two years (myself included). Notice how many of them made their money during a previous boom. George R. R. Martin would call them summer's children.

Summer will end. When, how much, and why - I don't know. These are questions for financial analysts and investors, people with their ears (and attention) much lower to the market-ground than entrepreneurs can afford. But the signs of winter are all around us: persistently high unemployment, market shocks, ill-timed austerity measures. For a while, startupland can stay insulated from these broader forces, but not indefinitely. The LP's that fund booms are, after all, pension, municipal, and sovereign wealth funds. Consumers need disposable income to invest in the latest products, as do the companies who serve them and advertisers who reach them.

My wife and I have picked out the perfect spouse for my son.  They have developed a wonderful relationship together over the years, with great chemistry and warmth.  She comes from a family that has identical values and priorities to ours and would make wonderful in-laws.

They are both 9 years old.

This example – admittedly absurd (although we still do talk about it!) – got me thinking about the challenge of arranged marriages in the world of entrepreneurship.

Many entrepreneurs come to us and say “I have this great idea, all I need is a technical co-founder” or “I have a killer technology that I’m developing, all I need is a business co-founder.”  They look to us to help make the match in the hopes that they will complete their team and live happily ever after.

Many of our loyal readers have  requested RSS feeds for Innovation DAILY, and I am pleased to announce  you can view InnovationDAILY in your favorite RSS viewer.

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“Innovation” is a scary word when it’s aimed in your direction.  Say you’re looking for ways to improve your business; you know you need to be innovative, but then you immediately flash on an image of Steve Jobs and freeze. The word innovation tends to set a really high mental bar.

But the bar isn’t really that high. Finding new ways to improve your business is relatively easy. Don’t think about being innovative.  Think about something else instead:

Pain.

To be innovative you just need to use what you already know — about your business and about your customers — to eliminate a little mutual pain. Anyone can do it; for example, the owner of a gas station/convenience store near where I live is innovative. (Surprised the words “convenience store”  and “innovative” appear in the same sentence?)

Could everybody just calm down?

Lately it feels like we’re in this self-fulfilling cycle of bad news where one economic data point sets off the tweets, then the 24-hour news channels — desperate to make the economy look like a spectator sport — get all lathered up. The radio talk shows proclaim the end of the world and then the fading newspapers jump in with ever-more sensational headlines and pretty soon, you might think the whole world is coming to an end because unemployment only dropped 0.1% instead of the hoped for 0.2%.

But there is nothing any of us can do about the national unemployment rate, Italy’s debt, the U.S. real estate market, or any of their effects on the stock market.

Over the past few years, BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) has become a buzzword of sorts for technology- and finance-watchers. India is already known for call centers, IT development, and expatriate coders. The country is also home to one of the world's fastest-growing middle classes. Angela Saini, the British author of the new Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over The World, believes that India is also becoming an innovation center to be reckoned with, and a world leader in tech.

Fast Company recently spoke with Saini about India's tech industry, the growth of Indian startups, and what the future holds for Indian innovators.

The U.S. Department of Energy today released a report – 2011 U.S. Billion-Ton Update: Biomass Supply for a Bioenergy and Bioproducts Industry – detailing U.S. biomass feedstock potential nationwide. The report examines the nation's capacity to produce a billion dry tons of biomass resources annually for energy uses without impacting other vital U.S. farm and forest products, such as food, feed, and fiber crops. The study provides industry, policymakers, and the agricultural community with county-level data and includes analyses of current U.S. feedstock capacity and the potential for growth in crops and agricultural products for clean energy applications. The biomass resources identified in the report could be used to produce clean, renewable biofuels, biopower, or bioproducts. For example, with continued developments in biorefinery capacity and technology, the feedstock resources identified could produce about 85 billion gallons of biofuels – enough to replace approximately 30% of the nation's current petroleum consumption. This data will be used by both the public and private sector to grow the bioenergy industry and help achieve President Obama's goals of dramatically expanding renewable energy resources and developing alternative fuels for America's transportation sector.