When I first started as a startup CEO in 1999 there were no guides on raising venture capital. There were no explanations for all of the confusing details outlined in a term sheet.

Drag along rights? Um, OK. That sounds fine to me. I barely understood it. I asked my lawyer for an explanation. He gave me the human explanation for what the term meant. It sounded logical enough, so I moved on to the next point. Only later did I learn how it could be used to screw me.

Redemption rights? Sounds harmless enough. But know that every term in your term sheet is there as a result of some dispute of the past between shareholders or between shareholders & management.  Founders don’t often think about “primary” stock vs, “fully diluted” stock in terms of voting rights. I never did. VCs always know the voting thresholds and no number in your term sheet is there by accident.

If you want to reach the Millennial generation — loosely defined as people born between 1980 and 2000 — it probably won’t come as a surprise that you should use the Internet: some 93 percent of Millennials spend regular and extended periods of time online, according to recent research from Pew. And since Millennials also have the highest labor-force participation by age bracket in the US, it’s a lucrative segment of the population for brands to target.

According to new research from MTV, however, companies run the risk of alienating the very audience they mean to attract if they go about social media marketing in the wrong way. “Extraordinarily nuanced codes and informal rules of behavior are emerging in social media,” MTV’s Nick Shore wrote in a report about his study’s findings published in AdAge this week.

During the summer of 1963, when I was six years old, my family traveled from our home in Philadelphia to Los Angeles to visit my maternal relatives. I already knew my grandmother well: she helped my mother care for my twin brothers, who were only 18 months my junior, and me. When she was not with us, my grandmother lived with her mother, whom I met that summer for the first time. I come from a long-lived family. My grandmother was born in 1895, and her mother in the 1860s; both lived almost 100 years. We stayed with the two matriarchs for several weeks. Through their stories, I learned about my roots and where I belonged in a social network spanning four generations. Their reminiscences personally connected me to life at the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era and to the challenges my ancestors faced and the ways they persevered.

Marc Ventresca's recent presentation at TEDx Oxford asks us to rethink the idea of the entrepreneur. He believes, if I have him right, that we subscribe too heavily to the "heroic" model, the one that says entrepreneurs take risks others refuse, freeing themselves from the bounds of convention.

Ventresca, a professor at the Said Business School, prefers to think of entrepreneurs as system builders, creating enterprise by "marshaling, mobilizing, and connecting different worlds." The iPod, Ventresca says, is not so much an invention as a brilliant combination of ideas and inventions already extant.

I believe this obscures what is most interesting about the entrepreneur. Real acts of innovation are something more than acts of combination. They oblige the entrepreneur to leave the space capsule of prevailing theory and practice — and then return. It isn't easy. Often, it isn't fun. And when the entrepreneur is forced to suffer what Thorstein Veblen called the "penalty of taking the lead," it isn't even profitable.

The Internet continues to grow bigger and bigger, thanks to growing number of Internet subscribers and Internet connected devices according to Akamai, which is about to release its latest State of the Internet (for Q1, 2011) report. The Internet’s expansion is accompanied by steady growth in bandwidth and connection speeds, Akamai’s research shows.

Here are some factoids from the report:

Nearly 60 percent of South Korean broadband connections had speeds of above 5 Mbps. South Korea also achieved the highest average connection speed at 14.4 Mbps. Hong Kong had an average connection speed of 9.2 Mbps, and Japan came in third with 8.1 Mbps.

We’re in business, so we don’t get to sit the tough seasons out and come back when it’s all better. Despite the economy, the small business owner still has serious management issues to address.  We can tackle them head on,  grow our businesses and ourselves–or we can ignore them, but that could eventually put us out of business. Success is the goal, and the better the team, the better the business.

Here are three suggestions to help you take care of your team, so that they can take care of your clients.

This week, comScore pulled data from 1996 and found the most visited domains. Most were search engines, university websites, and pornography.

Some of the companies no longer exist. Others, like Yahoo!, are still around but have fallen in the rankings.

Wouldn’t you like to be one of the lucky people who joined Google and Microsoft when these were startups, and now be a multi-millionaire? So people ask me “How many shares should I ask for when I join a startup today?” In reality, the number of shares doesn’t mean anything – it’s your percent of the total that you need to negotiate.

For example, 200,000 shares may sound like a lot, but if the startup has issued 20 million (a common starting point), that’s just 1% of the company. By the way, you will normally only be offered “options,” which vest over a 4-year period after a 1-year “cliff.” That means you will get none of these until after you work for one year, and the total only if you stay for four years.

Making plastic from sugar can be just as cheap as making it from petroleum, says Dow Chemical. The company plans to build a plant in Brazil that it says will be the world's largest facility for making polymers from plants.

The project will begin with the construction of a 240-million-liter ethanol plant, a joint venture with Mitsui, that is set to begin later this year. By the beginning of next year, Dow will finish engineering plans for facilities that will convert that ethanol into hundreds of thousands of metric tons of polyethylene, the world's most widely used plastic.

By all appearances, the U.S. semiconductor industry was on the ropes in the mid-1980s. After a multiyear effort to become a force in semiconductor memory chips, Japan now led the industry—both in market share and in the quality of its products. That raised fears the U.S. could lose not only a highly innovative industry but the components crucial for everything from computers to weapons systems. Yet by the early 1990s, that decline had reversed and U.S. chip makers regained the lead.

What happened? Among other things, a 1986 trade agreement that gradually reduced Japanese competition, a recession in Japan, a shift by U.S. companies to making more lucrative kinds of chips—and Sematech. Short for Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology, the consortium of 14 American chip makers such as Intel and Texas Instruments began operations in 1988 with an ambitious goal: to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry by finding ways to reduce manufacturing costs and product defects.

A bicycle going 20 mph is bound to attract some attention. However, if it is moving at that pace without pedaling, it will definitely turn heads. Dave Martin grabs everyone’s attention on purpose, reports Bellaire Examiner. After all, he is the owner of an electronic bicycle shop, RevolutionE.

The shop is Martin’s encore career. He has a background in manufacturing, an industry he left recently to develop the electric bike market in Texas. His brother had purchased one about a year ago and Martin saw potential for LEV (light electric vehicles) and their clean, green and efficient qualities.

Powered by a battery pack about the size of a lunchbox that slides onto the back fender, an e-bike can reach up to 20 miles per hour with a range of 13 to 30 miles per charge, Martin said. His customers report using the power pedal about 30 percent of the time.

P. Jeffrey Conn left a full professorship for a job in Big Pharma 11 years ago because he saw no path in academe to turn his novel idea for treating Parkinson's disease into an actual drug. Now he and a corps of scientists are closing in on a molecule that could bring relief to the millions suffering with the condition's debilitating tremors and paralysis.

When the Eindhoven Region of the Netherlands was named Intelligent Community of the Year on June 3 in New York City, the celebration was something to see. Since 1999, the Intelligent Community Forum has been honoring communities for achievement in building prosperous, inclusive and sustainable economies on a foundation of information and communications technology.

Nominate your community

ICF invites communities large and small, in industrial and emerging nations anywhere in the world,, to nominate themselves for this unique annual award program. There is no fee for nomination. To enter, complete a 6-question nomination form available on the ICF Web site.

Should my community even try?

If you are not sure whether or not your community qualifies for consideration by ICF, you can now take our new Online Self-Test. Answer 15 yes-or-no questions, and the Self-Test will help you understand how likely your community is to be honored as one of the world's Intelligent Communities. It all begins with the Smart21 Communities announcement in October - in Eindhoven, where the celebration continues.

Dinosaur eggshells are valuable indicators, both biologically and environmentally. For our research focus, we have decided to determine eggshell thickness in correlation to points on an eggshell and the implications that may result. Two principal problems that we encountered initially were that we had no way to record an accurate measurement of the eggshell width, and that we did not know for certain the orientation of the egg in that there was no apparent way to tell which point on the egg was laid skyward – "up". We addressed the first issue in the experimental design and the second we hope to address after the data has been collected and analyzed.

Zong, a company originally from Switzerland specializing in mobile payments. For the London-based VC fund Advent Venture Partners, this constitutes the third successful exit of the year. Frederic Court, who has been a General Partner at Advent Ventures for the last ten years, shares his opinion regarding the exit environment in Europe. Are M&A opportunities increasing for local startups?

Hello Frederic. First, could you specify the three companies in which you had invested that were acquired this year?

Yes, of course. First was The Foundry, a British company sold to private equity fund Carlyle Group (the firm could not disclose the exit valuation for The Foundry but it is believed to be in the £75-100m range) in March. Then, 49% of DailyMotion was bought by Orange for €60 million in April (and the acquisition of the rest will follow in the near future). And finally, the acquisition of Zong by Ebay for $240 million that we just announced 2 weeks ago.

An IBM patent points to an on-screen keyboard that matches the user’s anatomy, changing to reflect each users “unique typing motion.”

The keyboard requires calibration in the form of various exercises. The system then senses various variables like “finger skin touch area, finger size data and finger position.” It then creates a unique keyboard based on a “set of averages.”

For example, some of the buttons will be bigger or smaller than others and potentially in different places. This allows for more efficient typing on touchscreens and surface systems.

Gaby, a high-end French restaurant in Manhattan’s Sofitel New York, launched a lunch idea earlier this summer: 30 bucks for a 30-minute meal.

Could this be ideal for the savvy entrepreneur looking to butter up more than bread with a potential client or investor? Maybe not.

More than ever before, the wide array of lunchtime options makes picking a venue a bit of a crapshoot. Do you opt for a longish, pricey meal that evokes the Mad Men era? How about those 30-minute briskly moving sit-down affairs? Maybe “trucking it” is a better choice to demonstrate your hipness factor. And, hey, what about just ordering in?

“Picking the best lunch option is about intent, location, and perception,” says David Leite, the publisher of Leite’s Culinaria, an online food publication, and the author of The New Portuguese Table. Leite, who has 18 years’ experience in the advertising business, says one of the biggest challenges facing an entrepreneur trying to advance a lunch deal is time.

When it comes time for promising grads to pick a place to look for their first job and put down tentative roots, some cities obviously have more appeal than others. The hustle of New York or brainy buzz of the Bay Area naturally attract talented young people. But what could induce bright grads to less celebrated cities like Providence, Rhode Island or Detroit, Michigan that are in need of an injection of youthful optimism and energy? (Though in all fairness to Detroit, the NY Times recently reported a surprisingly vibrant youth scene in the rusty city).

Blakely spent two years doing double duty as both a loyal employee and an intrepid entrepreneur. During the day, she sold fax machines for the firm Danka. On nights, weekends and during lunch breaks, she took steps to launch the Spanx body-shaping hosiery business.

"I had been thinking about a product I could come up with on my own," says Blakely, 40. "I liked to sell and I was good at it. But I (wanted) to sell something that I was really passionate about."

It was a 1998 fashion dilemma that helped her find that product. Blakely hoped to don a pair of white pants for a party, but she couldn't figure out what to wear under them so she would look svelte and not have visible panty lines. Her solution: Wear a pair of control-top pantyhose, but cut off the feet so she could wear skin-baring sandals.

I’ve been told a few times that I need “proof of concept” for my business before an investor will provide me with capital. What, exactly, constitutes proof of concept and how do I know if I’ve attained it?

I can’t know exactly what each of your potential investors had in mind when they asked for a “proof of concept” (POC), but I’ve asked for many POCs and I can certainly tell you what I am thinking.

In a nutshell, having a POC is about risk mitigation.

When an entrepreneur pitches an opportunity there are always a number of premises that underpin the rosy outcome.