For all of SXSW’s cutting edge digital technology, the primary connection tool is still a paper product: the business card. Post-conference, participants may spend spend hours imputing contact info and responding via email. As a solution, two business card apps, Blinx and Hashable, will help network-hungry entrepreneurs ditch the antiquated model of exchanging tiny rectangular slices of printed paper. For those who have returned from the conference, Cardmunch will help digitally archive them accurately, based on pictures of card sent to a human transcriber.

Blinx facilitates contact information sharing through SMS messages that automatically download into a smartphone’s contact database. Users text a pre-determined five-digit phone number with a short code, such as “greg," and are sent a customized list of business card information (email, title, cell, etc.).

While I remain skeptical that mobile payments will enjoy the kind of skyrocketing usage some analysts have predicted, some key pieces are undeniably beginning to fall into place to pave the way for growth in the area. Verifone’s vow to include NFC in all its point-of-sale terminals will go a long way toward spurring retailer adoption (which so far has been nearly nonexistent), and handset manufacturers are finally buying in and beginning to package NFC in their smartphones.

But simply providing the technology for mobile payments isn’t enough — the industry still needs to offer truly compelling reasons for consumers to reach for their phones rather than their (real) wallets. The key to that will likely be in developing mobile applications that consumers actually want to use as they shop and conduct transactions.

Three authors writing in the MIT Sloan Management review claim to have uncovered 5 ‘myths of innovation’. In brief they are:

1. The Eureka Moment. Many people think that innovation is based on a blinding flash of inspiration but the truth is more prosaic. Innovation is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. Most companies have plenty of good ideas but have poor processes for evaluating and developing the best ideas.

2. Build it and they will come. The proliferation of Web 2.0 and social media has misled people, the authors argue, into believing that social networks will transform the way we innovate at work. ‘Smart companies are selective in their use of online forums for innovation.’

The stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan has raised alarm over the possible health effects. However, so far, radiation levels outside of the plant remain relatively low and unlikely to cause health problems.

The health effects of radiation depend on the dose a person receives. The acute effects of radiation sickness usually begin when an individual receives a dose of radiation that is one sievert (the standard international measurement of radiation exposure) or above. Most of the workers hospitalized after the nuclear disaster that destroyed a reactor in Chernobyl in 1986 received estimated doses of between one and six sieverts. Because such levels are rarely encountered, radiation levels are most often given in millisieverts (one thousandth of a sievert) or microsieverts (one-millionth of a sievert). For comparison, a chest x-ray delivers about 0.2 millisieverts of radiation, and the average person in the U.S. is exposed to about six millisieverts of radiation per year, about half of which is from natural sources and another half from medical procedures.

When you walk into our conference room at Union Square Ventures, you see the box of cereal on the right on our conference room credenza next to a wifi router and a jar of Jolly Ranchers. It is there because we are big Obama fans? Nope. The cereal box is a reminder to back great entrepreneurs whenever they walk into our office regardless of what they pitch us on (as long as its in our investment universe).

There are three things that every VC looks at when they evaluate a company, market, product and team, and I will look at each in my next three posts in the series. The emphasis between the three varies between VC with perhaps the most important difference coming with the stage of investment. Earlier stage investors look more to team whereas later stage investors look more to market and product, a natural reflection of the fact that for young businesses the product and market are typically evolving fast which places greater emphasis on having the right team. With later stage businesses by contrast if you have a great market and a strong product it is less important that the team is full of A-Star players.

The first, and probably most important, evaluation of market size comes from an assessment of the problem the company solves (or entertainment value it brings) and how much people and companies will pay for the solution. Pretty obviously, the market opportunity is comes from multiplying the number of potential customers by the amount each will pay and the first order assessment looks at how painful the problem is as a proxy for how much people will pay and how wide the appeal will be. On the consumer side the market is usually cut by age, geography, or gender. On the corporate side the market is usually cut by geography, industry or company size.

President Obama just filled out his NCAA tournament bracket on ESPN and after picking all four No. 1 seeds to reach the Final Four, he goes with Kansas over Ohio State for the National Championship.

Before you bet the farm, remember that Obama picked Kansas last year and the No. 1 seed got dumped in the second round by Northern Iowa.

In the next few weeks, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors around the world will begin hearing from colleges and universities in this country about whether they have been lucky enough to be accepted for admission.

But will it turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory if they get in?

At the elite, private institutions the odds of admission are long — a mere 7.2 percent of Harvard’s more than 30,000 applicants were accepted a year ago — and the cost for those not receiving financial aid is incredibly high. This year, tuition and fees at Harvard are close to $52,000, including room and board, a price that has increased at about 5 percent annually during the past 20 years, well above the estimated 2.8 percent annualized increase in the consumer-price index, one gauge of inflation. As far as tuition increases go, Harvard’s arc is a pretty typical one.

Hey startups: do you have what it takes to bring home the big check? From hundreds of applicants, our judges -- Joel Cutler of General Catalyst, David Pakman of Venrock, Rick Heitzman of FirstMark, Stuart Ellman of RRE, Habib Kairouz of Rho, and Laura Sachar of Starvest -- will winnow the list down to seven. Each will present on stage and withstand the judges' grilling. One lucky winner will pocket $100,000: a $25,000 investment from founding sponsor General Catalyst Partners and $75,000 in goods and services to boost his or her startup. Even more valuable than the cash investment is the exposure and networking opportunities you'll receive if you're chosen as one of the seven finalists.

SALT LAKE CITY — Surrounded by supporters urging the federal government to tackle illegal immigration, Gov. Gary Herbert signed into law Tuesday a series of bills passed by the Utah Legislature that have been described as a "Utah solution" to the issue.

"Utah is doing the right thing, is doing the hard thing. Doing nothing is not an option," Herbert said in a brief signing ceremony in the Capitol's Gold Room attended by business, legislative and religious leaders, including Presiding Bishop H. David Burton of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Asked by a reporter for the LDS Church's public position on the immigration bills, Bishop Burton said the church had endorsed the Utah Compact. "We feel that the Legislature has done an incredible job on a very complex issue," Burton said.

Egypt_Entrepreneurship_Report

What if someone sold socks that didn’t match? In his new book Disrupt, Luke Williams, a veteran of frog design, talks about how that offbeat question was the impetus for the launch of Little Miss Matched, a company whose purposely mismatched socks proved surprisingly popular with young girls. It’s one of a number of examples Williams cites of new business innovations that began with what he calls “a disruptive hypothesis.” Another better-known one is Netflix, whose business model provided an answer to the question, What if a video rental company didn’t charge late fees?

It’s interesting that when you deconstruct stories of innovation, you find that many of them start with a question--often one that could be considered provocative, naïve, or maybe even a little crazy. In my own research into the design world, I found that breakthroughs ranging from the OXO potato peeler to the Cheetah prosthetic foot could be traced back to someone, somewhere, asking “What if…?”

In the past few years, online crowdsourcing has emerged as an ultra-popular method of finding solutions to difficult problems such as infant mortality rates and out-of-control oil spills. Could crowdsourcing help Japan quell its nuclear disaster and help the country get back on its feet?

The Global Innovation Commons, a repository of innovations that can be used because of patent expiration, abandonment, invalidity, or lack of in-country protection, has compiled a list of patent disclosures and open source technology that could be used as part of Japan's earthquake response--or even to cool down the rapidly worsening nuclear reactor situation in Fukushima.

Google has announced a new program for nonprofits, which they say will include a grant for adwords, exclusive tools, and collaboration forums. "Instead of applying to each Google product individually," nonprofits can apply for a suite of tools here, according to Google's blog post.

The user-friendly site, Google.com/nonprofits, looks like it aims to simplify and educate how nonprofits can use the wide array of google products for their organization (like this video below).

The first of proposed £200 million network of Technology and Innovation Centres to be set up around the UK was announced today (17 March). The centre in High Value Manufacturing, will be formed from a group of existing research and technology facilities, providing an integrated capability and covering all forms of manufacture using metals and composites, process manufacturing technologies and bioprocessing.

At the same time, the formation of nine new university-based Centres for Innovative Manufacturing with government funding of £45 million was announced. These centres will be charged with taking basic research and developing it to the point where it can be taken forward to commercialisation by the TICs.

The formation of the first TIC follows the publication a year ago of a report by the entrepreneur Hermann Hauser, in which he said the UK’s approach to exploiting basic research is sub critical, lacks a national strategy, does not meet business needs and overlooks relevant expertise.

The Commission is stepping in to provide a focus for small-scale and disparate attempts to applying new thinking and techniques to unmet social needs, with the launch yesterday (16 March) of Social Innovation Europe.

While there may be many examples of social innovation in action, for example, in cooperative movements or microfinance schemes, to date it has not been seen as a distinct field that has the potential not only to deal with social problems, but also to promote the development of a new commercial sector of specialist companies and service providers.

Social Innovation Europe will provide access to expertise and build a network of practitioners who are involved in devising new ways to confront issues such as promoting active ageing, responding to climate change, and helping local communities apply innovation to create sustainable cities.

This week’s tax question:

I’m used to getting stock options, but my new employer offers restricted stock instead. Does this change what I’ll owe in taxes, and do I need to do anything now?

We passed the question on to Steve Henley, national tax practice leader at , the seventh largest accounting provider in the U.S. Here’s his answer:

The receipt of restricted stock as part of compensation results in tax consequences that depend upon whether the taxation is delayed to a future year or whether a special election is made to be taxed in the current year.

Cyber security isn’t as sexy as social media among venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. But it’s a critical technology sector that has been gaining momentum with the economic recovery and the rising threats from cyber criminals.

That was the message for security entrepreneurs and investors from a group of venture capitalists and security experts at today’s Information Technology Security Forum at Stanford University. They said that cyber security’s hot segments include protecting mobile devices and cloud services from new kinds of ever-evolving threats. (Critical vulnerabilities were found in Adobe products just this week). And the emerging threats can only be dealt with by combining the forces of governments, law enforcement, big companies, start-ups and venture capitalists.

An escalating crisis at nuclear power plants in Japan following a massive earthquake and tsunami has not changed the investing thesis about clean technology, according to a number of leading venture capitalists and researchers.

Fears of a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan sparked a new wave of criticism of nuclear energy — and a rally in clean-energy stocks on Monday. But that interest quickly waned as stocks in the sector dropped back from that day’s highs as the stock market experienced a broad sell-off.

And that brief surge of interest never touched the private investment community, because venture capitalists typically focus on longer-term plays, said Steve Minnihan, a partner at Lux Research, a firm which specializes in cleantech.

Startups. We know the mantra: Team matters. Is this philosophy exaggerated? Overrated? Cliché? No. Team is the only thing that matters.

Whatever you’re working on now, the half-life of innovation is so rapid now that your product will soon be out-of-date. Your existence is irrelevant unless you continue rapid innovation.

Your ability to keep up is dependent on having a great team of differing skills. Individuals don’t build great companies, teams do.

The nature of the Internet and global knowledge is such that even if you’ve stumbled on to a super interesting area of innovation there will be many teams tackling the same problem at exactly the same time. If you develop something novel that catches a spark you’ll have the world gunning for you over night. In this globally connected world product leads disappear in nano-seconds.