June 1-3, 2011 – New York City

The seventh annual Building the Broadband Economy summit will gather the leaders of the global Intelligent Community movement to hear, among others, Suvi Linde, the Minister of Communications of Finland, which declared broadband a universal human right.  Also featured will be Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, whose famous annual show debuts the gadgets that shape our future.  He will speak on the transformative impact of healthcare information technology.  America's most advanced smart grid is in the city of Chattanooga, and its Mayor will describe the decisions that led its municipal-owned utility to leap to the front of the pack.

Building the Broadband Economy is an international summit for community leaders and their technology partners from around the world.  BBE offers a unique opportunity to learn how to use information and communications technology to build prosperous economies and meet the social challenges of the 21st Century.  The 2011 edition of BBE, produced in partnership with the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, focuses on "Health in the Intelligent Community ."   

The audience for BBE 2009 is limited to 250 attendees in order to provide the right environment to share knowledge and build relationships.  Attendance is principally by invitation but a limited number of paid registrations are available for Innovation Daily readers at a 20% discount. Register under VIP Registration at www.icfsummit.com using VIP Code PTR2011. 

Intelligent Community Forum
www.intelligentcommunity.org

In the war between east coast and west coast entrepreneurship, these venture capitalists are the generals of the east.

The Forbes' Midas 100 ranked the top tech investors who created wealth and funded new ideas in 2011.

While the list is West Coast heavy, these investment stars are making big across the country.

Success in a startup is not possible as a “one-man show.” An entrepreneur has to engage with team members, partners, investors, vendors, and customers. In my experience, the joy of positive engagement is sometimes the only pay you get in an early startup. Amazingly, many successful startups are built on this basis alone, with almost no money.

I will talk here primarily about building the internal team of a startup, but the same principles apply outside to your “extended team” and customers. I like the ten practical and transformative steps outlined by Bob Kelleher, in his new book “Louder Than Words,” from his many years of experience in corporate environments. These are easily adaptable to the startup environment:

1. Link high engagement to high performance. Don’t confuse engagement with satisfaction. The last thing you want is a team of satisfied but underperforming people. Kelleher defines engagement as “the unlocking of employee potential to drive high performance.” Set and reinforce high performance goals.

What is usually the first thing everyone that gets a new iPad wants to know? Which apps to get. But there are still some cool things that you can do with your iPad, even without buying a single app. I’m not talking about well-known features like Multitasking, Folders, Airplay, Airprint, or even the new HD Mirroring capability of the iPad 2. Instead, here are ten, hidden in plain sight, secret features of the iPad 2. You maybe aware of one or two, but let’s see if you knew about all ten.

Access Your iTunes Library Remotely

There are several ways you can access your media collection from your iPad. The first and easiest is to sync your library from iTunes. However, if you have enabled Home Sharing in iTunes on your Mac, you can also access your entire iTunes Library on your Mac while connected to the same Wi-Fi network. To access your Home Sharing library from the iPad you need to click on the Library tab in the iPod app. From here you select the iTunes Library you want to access (make sure you have Home Sharing turned on in iTunes on the computers you want to share from). Unfortunately it is an either/or situation. You cannot browse both your locally synced library as well as your remotely accessed library.

I was the worst pizza delivery guy. Fraternity guys would chase after me as I was peeling out of their driveways after a delivery. Why? The sauce and cheese fell all to one side. I couldn’t help it. I also never got tips. Wende, my partner in our restaurant delivery business, always got tips. But she was beautiful, blonde, great smile, had personality, etc. And I secretly loved her. I couldn’t compete. I always hoped I would deliver to a frat party where all the girls were running around naked. But that never happened.

We also started a debit card for college kids. From the first day we were open for business we had college kids signing up for our card (there were no credit cards for kids then). And anyone who had our debit card could order food from the 20 or so restaurants in town and we’d deliver, but with a 25% markup.

Importance of Critical Thinking to InnovationThe more I hear from innovators (some successful and others not-so successful) on the importance of being able to make snap decisions based on intuition alone during critical stages of the innovation process, the more I’m convinced that perhaps, just the opposite may be true. Maybe, what really matters in determining success of the innovation effort is not so much intuition skills but rather, having a more systematic approach–something that resembles classic critical thinking skills. What I’m talking about here is a systematic approach to critical thinking made popular in the 1960s and 70s by researchers such as Charles Kepner and Benjamin Tregoe (just to name a few). These classic methods that link problem solving and decision making have been all but discarded by innovators today because of being deemed too cumbersome, laborious and certainly not suited to rapid demands of the innovation world of today.

In the venture capital arena, Wisconsin has long been a laggard.

Despite some growth in its venture capital pool during the last 25 years, Wisconsin still ranked just 25th among all states in 2010, with $234 million under management, according to the National Venture Capital Association's Yearbook 2011.

Wisconsin ranks 20th in population, U.S. Census Bureau data shows.

The state's dearth of venture capital has stifled the growth of many young companies, said John Neis, a managing director of Madison's Venture Investors, one of Wisconsin's most active venture capital firms.

"We have so many companies that stall out in their development process or raise inadequate capital and put themselves at a competitive disadvantage because they can't go as quickly as their competitors can," Neis said.

Donald Trump won’t fire anyone, and there won’t be cameras on hand to record embarrassing mistakes.

But young entrepreneurs with ideas for tech startup companies will be in the spotlight this summer in a new program sponsored by Ohio Third Frontier and Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

The Ohio’s New Entrepreneurs (ONE) Fund will encourage the development of those businesses by creating 10 teams made up of two to five young would-be entrepreneurs — people at least 18 who are either enrolled in college or graduate school or have been in the past three years.

The teams will work for 11 weeks with veteran entrepreneurs, industry experts and investors to come up with promising technology concepts and business models.

The Securities and Exchange Commission may adopt rules to let internet-age technologies be used in fund-raising.

The agency is considering whether to let fast-growing companies use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise funding by tapping thousands of investors for small amounts of money, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The move is part of a larger review by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether to ease decades-old constraints on how companies can issue new shares to the public. The new funding techniques, known as “ crowd funding,” could usher in a new era of capital abundance for Silicon Valley’s startups.

This morning I headed down to Palo Alto with iPad 2 in hand to check in with students and speakers at the Stanford BASES BT National Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. For this event, more than a hundred student delegates from campuses around the country gathered at Stanford for an intensive weekend of workshops and talks given by leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and and investors; the speaker lineup included such stars as Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, TiVo co-founder Jim Barton, and Twitter director of corporate strategy Elad Gil. On top of all that, students honed their own entrepreneurial ideas in a business plan competition.

I spent a couple of hours talking with student organizers and delegates at the event and listening to a keynote talk by Marissa Mayer, vice president of location and local services at Google. The video below includes interviews with six student teams, as well as an outtake from Mayer’s talk. (I shot and edited the whole thing on the iPad 2 using iMovie.)

I remember a little under 20 years ago sitting with a mentor of mine discussing business and ideas to generate cash. Little had I known at this time that I would be a VC 20 years later. I cared even less though about technology. The business idea was to buy a certain plot of land and put up a parking garage. The idea occurred because we had together driven around looking for parking and couldn't find anything. Yet we did see this plot of land with nothing on it, prime real estate near a shopping center and no parking garages open to the public within miles. The country was coming out of it's communist slumber and people were buying cars like mad. Plus stores were going up everywhere in that part of town. Fast forward 20 years and go to that spot. There's a parking garage right where we wanted to build one. Nope, I didn't finance it. F&%K!!!!!!

A year ago, a headhunter invited Kevin Dinino to interview for a job similar to the executive position he had gotten laid off from in early 2009. But he passed on the opportunity -- as well as two more interview invites he received earlier this year.

After getting downsized, Mr. Dinino, 32 years old, launched his own business, KCD Public Relations in San Diego. Though he spent the first year making just 60% of his previous salary, he's now earning about the same as he did before, and says he's too smitten with entrepreneurship to ever work for someone else again.

"I'm the decision maker," he says. "I don't have to take orders anymore."

In May 2009, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told an auditorium full of venture capitalists that the White House would make it a goal to buy innovative technology from atypical contractors like startups and Silicon Valley Web outfits. Two years later, that kind of outreach is on the rise, but hasn't translated into easier contract wins for the newbies, industry members and observers say.

In the nearly two years since Kundra told that Mid-Atlantic Venture Association conference that the Obama administration was reviewing the procurement process to help technology startups, the General Services Administration has established terms of service with dozens of entrepreneurial developers that have let agencies incorporate new media, such as the location-based social network Foursquare, into their online presences. Also, White House officials issued guidelines in February directing contracting officers to speak with firms on the cutting-edge of the marketplace before writing requests for proposals.

With the launch of our Big Society Finance Fund, NESTA's Stian Westlake looks at how financial innovation can help the social sector do more and do better.

Can financial innovation help solve society’s ills? You’d be forgiven for saying no and moving on. After all, reckless financial speculation has torpedoed our public finances and left the most vulnerable in society clinging to the wreckage. But the right kind of financial innovation still has a role to play: it can provide the money innovative social enterprises need to expand, the liquidity and the leverage that charities need to tap into commercial finance. In short, it can help the social sector do more and do better.

That's why today is a big day for us. This evening, NESTA is launching the Big Society Finance Fund, an experimental project investing money into some of the most promising social finance projects - each of which we hope can change the UK modestly but for the better. We're also publishing two pieces of research looking at the need for social finance and people's willingness to invest in it.

The lowly sandbag has improbably — and seemingly eternally — remained the back-breaking brick of choice for anyone in a hurry to erect makeshift barriers during flood season.

But now there is growing competition.

As Fargo, N.D., confronts its third major flood in three years, local governments, businesses and residents are shifting to a number of modern alternatives to hold back the waters of the Red River.

“I’ve seen enough sandbags for a lifetime,” said Alan Kallmeyer, who enlisted dozens of friends and co-workers the last two years for a full day of this grueling masonry, filling and stacking thousands of sandbags around his riverside house.

If your first startup fails, you are about average. Most entrepreneurs fail on at least one attempt. Investors agree that an entrepreneur who has never failed probably hasn’t pushed the limits. What investors look for is not that you never fail, but that you learn from the failure, maintain a positive attitude, and work with integrity on the next one.

According to Harvey Mackay in his book “Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door,” how to rebound from failure or rejection is an essential skill to acquire for success. His bullets are about job hunting, but I believe the principles apply equally well to starting a business:

1. Analyze every failure, but never wallow in one. Failure is a condition that all of us experience. It’s our reaction to our failures that distinguishes winners from losers. A great entrepreneur is like a great racehorse. There’s no quit in them. Defeats are temporary. Heart and class are permanent.

In this issue we have some good news to report. A government shutdown has been averted for at least a week via another continuing resolution (CR) (the 7th in a series). This is supposed to allow the parties to draft the language for a bill to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year, Sept 30, 2011. They agreed upon a $39 Billion in budget cuts but it is not clear at this time where the cuts will be made.

Don't celebrate too quickly because we may still have to face a battle for the raising of the debt ceiling in the near future.

In this issue:

* Next Week's National SBIR/STTR Conference Ready To Roll!!
* House Releases Its New SBIR Reauthorization Bill

The business model for medical device startups is said to be in jeopardy, and it’s the topic du jour at conferences everywhere, as entrepreneurs are complaining bitterly about arbitrary FDA regulators and tight-fisted insurers. Much of this industry’s spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship is migrating overseas, it is often said.

Yesterday, I heard all that and more when I stopped by a conference that featured a couple of big names—Beckie Robertson, a veteran med device investor and managing director with Menlo Park, CA-based Versant Ventures, and Rob Michiels, the former president of CoreValve, the Irvine, CA-based maker of an aortic valve device that was acquired by Medtronic for $700 million two years ago. These two talked about the pros and cons of commercializing new medical technologies overseas first, at a conference in Bothell, WA organized by the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association.

News that the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering easing limitations on the sale of stock by private companies is a further sign that the Obama administration is conducting a sweeping review of the ability of growing, young businesses to tap capital markets.

But unlike the Treasury Department’s interest in improving access to public markets–which has led former National Venture Capital Association Chairwoman Kate Mitchell to form a task force to develop recommendations–the SEC initiative could make staying private more compelling, which is not something the venture industry wants.

A Calgary entrepreneur has taken his faith in one of this city's prime second home markets one step further.

Steve Brown has invested in an Arizona drywall business that wants to get even more involved in residential construction -the market where more and more Canadians, bolstered by a strong Canuck dollar and low U.S. prices, are looking for recreation or investment properties.

Brown is no stranger to the ups and down of the housing industry.

He's one of Calgary's many builders, suppliers and tradespeople who were just starting out when they were hit by the economic downturn of the 1980s.