During its annual “Building the Broadband Economy” Summit on June 1, the Intelligent Community Forum will announce the creation of a Centers of Excellence project. The project is designed to brief nearly 100 intelligent community leaders who are part of what ICF calls its movement’s “Alumni,” on topics of key importance related to access technology implementation, broadband and IT and effective development of local economic and social activities.

Effective June 1, ICF will accept expressions of interest from companies, organizations and consortiums willing to provide in-depth, analytical content and briefings on a regular annual schedule to its group of intelligent community mayors, CIOs and other influencers. These represent cities, regions or towns that have been awarded the status of “intelligent community” through ICF’s trademarked awards program. The intelligent communities of the world are part of a non-profit trade association, which was chartered under ICF’s foundation in May 2010. The goal of the Centers, according to ICF Co-Founder Louis Zacharilla, is to work on developing projects and policies that will guide investment, management and innovations for communities at no cost to the communities. The ICF’s association and its intelligent communities working groups are chaired by the mayor of Waterloo, Ontario (Canada), Brenda Halloran.

GE is playing defense after a NYT article said the company paid zero in US taxes.

On Twitter, GE PR is fighting with Henry Blodget over the some technicalities.

The company has put up a GE Tax fact sheet, which links to this presentation (.pdf) from the Business Roundtable laying out the need for reform of the US tax system.

The gist: Only the US forces companies to pay taxes on overseas earnings, and since non-US earnings are a growing share for everyone, this is putting US companies at a big disadvantage.

Have you ever reached that moment in your startup business when your faith in your idea and in yourself is severely tested? You invest a significant amount of money to get things started, build a prototype, prove the concept. You'd like to bring in angel or venture capital investors to get you to the next level. You've spent more from your personal funds than you intended. You've relied on consultants and freelance developers so far, but in your gut you know you need much higher-level, dedicated technology resources to push your development to the next level so that investors with deeper pockets will jump in.

So, you're at that proverbial fork in the road. You could write yourself another sizeable check from your savings, or from your IRA or 401(k), or from your home equity, but you really don't want to do that because it will make you very uncomfortable. What do you do? Here are a few ideas to get you through this period.

NASVF announced this week that the 2011 Annual Conference will be held in Arlington, Texas, October 17-19, 2011. The event was held in conjunction with the World’s Best Technologies Innovation Marketplace and hosted by the 2011 NASVF Conference host, the Center for Innovation based Arlington, Texas. Arlington’s mayor, the Honorable Dr. Robert Cluck, welcomed NASVF to Arlington.

NASVF also hosted a standing room only panel the opening day of the conference featuring several Board members as panelist in a session focused on “Innovation Capital – It’s More Than just Money.” Rich Bendis, President and CEO of Innovation and Board Vice Chair moderated the panel including Kef Kasdin, Partner Battelle Ventures; Rebecca O. Bagley, President and CEO, NorTech; Richard Fox, Partner, Astralis Group, LLC; and Steve Mercil, Founder and CEO Rainsource Capital, NASVF Board Chair.

It’s no wonder that Cleveland Clinic has placed an increased emphasis on commercializing medical innovations by its doctors.

Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove revealed in a recent interview that the $78 million sale of Clinic neurotechnology spinoff Intelect Medical to Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) in January returned an impressive $28 million to the health system.

“We’ve spun off about 35 companies,” Cosgrove told the online journal of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “We just had one purchased, which returned about $28 million to the Cleveland Clinic.”

A new report by the University of Utah pegs the economic impact of the school’s start-up companies over the last 40 years at $754 million, responsible for more than 15,000 jobs.

The analysis by the Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR) examines 188 companies and invention licenses created since 1970.

The U.’s process of start-up creation accelerated after it overhauled its technology commercialization procedures in 2005. It is now the No. 1 university in terms of spinning off companies based on technologies developed on campus, setting up about 20 new companies a year.

Is Wall Street blocking the next Google from even getting off the ground? Yes, according to a new report from the Kauffman Foundation, which says high-paying jobs in the financial sector have bled the prospective pool of startup founders and employees until it’s pretty shallow. In a report called Financialization and its Entrepreneurial Consequences, the authors (Paul Kedrosky and Dane Stangler) explain that because jobs in the finance sector pay so well, they take talent away from startups and may even be responsible for the “potentially weaker” startups being funded. From the report:

As the data on MIT graduates and the sectoral share of science and engineering employment suggest, it is conceivable that some degree of talent allocation between entrepreneurship and employment was affected by the rise of finance. Recall Figure 3: If we presuppose that some fraction of those scientists and engineers working in the financial sector would otherwise have started companies, we can imagine perhaps a slight effect of financialization on potential entrepreneurship. This also points to a question of the quality of companies being started, which we discuss below. It is difficult, again, to make firm statements as to causation, but the historical data seem to suggest that a two-way feedback effect exists.

Umberto Eco, encyclopedic Italian author, philosopher, and semiotician is known, among other things, for the size of his private libraries. Just one of them is thought to contain over 30,000 books – and among private collections, is generally the stuff of legend.

When asked if he has read each of these tomes, Professor Eco is said to have explained that the value of such a collection was not in the books that he had read, but in fact in his assortment of unread books, his “anti-library.’ “A private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool.” writes Nassim Taleb author of the induction-defying Black Swan. In other words, knowing what you don’t know can be even more valuable than what you do.

As you may have heard, professional social network LinkedIn passed 100 million members this past week. Amid an upcoming IPO, this was a pretty significant milestone for the social network. And today, LinkedIn co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman has sent the first million members an email, personally thanking them for joining the network in its early days.

TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld received a note (he is member #261,186), which we’ve embedded in the post. The note reads: I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn’s first million members (member number -- in fact!*). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you.

The Census Bureau just finished releasing all of the state redistricting file information from the 2010 Census, giving us a now complete portrait of population change for the entire country. Population growth continued to be heavily concentrated in suburban metropolitan counties while many rural areas, particularly in the Great Plains, continue to shrink.

In finance, a bubble is too much money chasing assets, greater asset production and a herd mentality. In startup business plans, a bubble is too many entrepreneurs and too many investors chasing the latest “next big thing,” like Google search engine, Facebook social network, or Amazon e-commerce site. In all these cases, a bust is inevitable, and everyone loses.

The big question is how to spot these bubbles and jump to a better alternative, rather than get sucked into the vortex. I read a book recently by Vikram Mansharamani, “Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst,” which gives some insight on the financial side, but I believe it can be equally applied to bubbles for startup ideas as follows:

1. Avoid the herd mentality. In theory, this is called the “emergence of group order” or swarm mentality, where everyone rushes in without regard to whether there is enough food to go around. For startups, investors usually toss business plans with ten or more real competitors, especially if a couple have the penetration of a Facebook or Google.

A crowdfunding platform dedicated to raising funds from the general public to support creative ideas from fashion to film and TV has gone live.

Led by Business to Arts, Fund it aims to allow people to share their ideas for creative projects with their online and offline communities, offering unique rewards for different sums pledged.

Fund it has been developed with the support of a technology grant from the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport, and private foundation investment.

Talent acquisition functions spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars designing processes to hire top performers, innovators, and game changers. Unfortunately few of those dollars or hours are spent fixing the biggest roadblock in recruiting A-level talent: weak hiring managers. Everyone seems to intuitively know that managers are the weakest link in any hiring process but few have had the time to research the topic and to identify the specific reasons how weak managers hurt the overall hiring effort.

As part of a larger project I’m currently working on (developing a “bad manager identification” orBMI program), I have been able to compile a long list of how weak managers hurt both the speed and the quality of hire.

If you decide to initiate an effort to train managers on how to hire, these factors and their related negative impacts could be crucial in building the business case for training hiring managers and rewarding them for great hires.

Local innovators, entrepreneurs and institutions working to create jobs in high-growth sectors such as health care, technology, research and design, and alternative energy are eligible for two funding opportunities.

The Innovation Providence Implementation Council has announced $110,000 will be available for a third round of grant funding, particularly for short-term projects likely to begin within the next six months. Grants will range from $10,000 to $25,000 each. The council was created in 2008 by the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and other local partners.

Those eligible to apply for the grants include institutions of higher education, hospitals, industry trade associations, for-profit private sector businesses and nonprofit organizations, as well as past recipients of the innovation grants. More details are available on the Chamber’s website: www.providencechamber.com.

SAN FRANCISCO — Eric Firestone began a new job at a Web start-up here three weeks ago, and he’s already thinking about what he might do next. But that’s just fine with his new employer.

The company, a service to turn cellphones into credit card readers, lured Mr. Firestone from Apple partly with an unusual pitch: it promised to give him weekly lessons about starting his own business someday, including how to find venture capitalists to finance it.

Mr. Firestone, a 28-year-old software engineer, said he could try to get financing for a start-up from venture capital firms now, “but I feel like I’d be having a hard time. Here you get to learn.”

The vast majority of startups with roots in a university are formed by alumni or former students, similar to the process that was depicted in the movie The Social Network. The Zuck had it easy. Since Zuckerberg was a Harvard undergraduate student, not an employee, the university could not lay claim to an ownership stake in Facebook. Had Harvard owned a patent for a core component of Facebook’s technology or business method, the plot of The Social Network may have been different. Imagine the following:

* Zuckerberg works for Harvard
* Zuckerberg uses a Harvard computer, network, and proprietary photos of students from Harvard’s various residence halls
* Zuckerbergs files his invention, as required by his employment contract, with Harvard’s technology commercialization office
* Harvard files for a patent which costs Harvard $30,000 and lots of staff time and overhead
* Zuckerberg decides he *must* launch Facebook commercially, and he and his co-founders approach Harvard’s patent office to see what their options are

The “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” analogy might not be that far off when comparing venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. I spent four years as a VC, and I’ve been the CEO of an e-commerce startup for the last two years, so in yesterday’s opening piece, I gave some pointers to VCs, and particularly associates, on how to better work with entrepreneurs. Today, I’m going to give some advice to entrepreneurs based on my personal experience on how to work smarter with VCs.

* It’s a numbers game. Expect casualties. I’m not kidding. Preparing to reach out to VCs, particularly if it’s your first time, is not unlike the preparation one does when preparing for battle (and this comes from a former air force pilot). You should prepare for a process that can take six or nine months or even a year, depending on the market conditions. You need to prepare for people with little knowledge of your technology or market who are comfortable telling you that there is no market for your technology.

With revenues of $10.7 billion last year and 16,850 shops in 40 countries, Starbucks is clearly the world's top coffee retailer.

The coffee giant celebrated its 40th anniversary this month but it shows no signs of slowing down.

Heck, it's brand is so well recognized all over the world it doesn't even put its name on its cups anymore.

In the past few months it has announced new partnerships with other coffee companies, grocery stores and plans to move into digital content as well as introducing new products. In some stores you can already have wine with your coffee.