I’VE long considered myself a relatively generous person.

Here in Atlanta, I carry around McDonald’s gift cards for encounters with homeless men and women, build Habitat for Humanity houses and donate 3 to 5 percent of our family’s annual income to charity. In short, I’m logical about my giving on United States soil.

But when I travel to developing countries, all that logic disappears. The expanded power of a dollar, combined with what seems like infinite need, creates so many situations in which no answer seems appropriate. I find myself feeling like either a deep-pocketed patsy or a skinflint.

Last night I had the great privilege to interview Bill Gross, one of the Internet’s true pioneers. To say he has had an impact on the web would be an understatement. His impact has even helped a small country gain admission to the United Nations. All of that are in this week’s episode of This Week in VC. Summary notes, as always, provide below. It was a pleasure to write them myself.

He invented the category of sponsored search. He presented the idea at the TED conference in the mid 90′s and was literally boo’d while he was on stage. I thing I’ve learned over the years is that technology purists hate advertising even when it is that revenue stream that truthfully drives much of our industry.

He created GoTo.com (later renamed Overture) out of a frustration with search. At the time when you did a search on Lycos, Alta Vista or similar for a category such as Cars you ended up getting 9 spam results and 1 proper website to meet your needs.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Cheer up. Stop worrying. Don’t work so hard.

Good advice for a long life? As it turns out, no. In a groundbreaking study of personality as a predictor of longevity, University of California, Riverside researchers found just the opposite.

“It’s surprising just how often common assumptions — by both scientists and the media — are wrong,” said Howard S. Friedman, distinguished professor of psychology who led the 20-year study.

Friedman and Leslie R. Martin , a 1996 UCR alumna (Ph.D.) and staff researchers, have published those findings in “The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study” (Hudson Street Press, March 2011).

New entrepreneurs often seem to confuse viability with fundability. Certainly a non-viable business should be not fundable, but many viable businesses are also not fundable. Thus when an investor declines your funding request, you need to curb your anger and understand the real reason for this outcome.

In my experience, here are the most common issues that cause funding requests for viable businesses to be rejected, in priority order:

1. Inadequate business plan. Some investors say half the ideas pitched to them don’t have any plan at all, even though some have great potential. Other entrepreneurs skip just some of the elements in Ten Keys to an Investment-Grade Business Plan. None of these get funded. Investors know that entrepreneurs who start a business without a written plan almost always fail.

NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has released an animated video showing the tsunami originating off the coast of Japan, and then spreading across the Pacific. Dramatic, to say the least.

Last year, NOAA also produced an animation that visualized the tremors from the big Chilean quake as they worked their way across the globe. Catch it here.

What’s your goal? What’s your aim when it comes to social media? Or defining who you are? Or building your brand (personal or otherwise)? Or growing your blog?

Do you have targets? Do you have a measurement point of where you are now (or where you were at the start of your journey) to where you want to be in 3, 6, 12, 18 months or more?

What’s your end goal? What do you need to be seeing as a return?

Who do you want to impress? Who do you want to emulate, to build from, to surpass? Who do you want to be compared to as “the next Blogger X, or Author Y, or Educator Z”?

You’ve heard of high-tech start-ups being in “stealth mode,” meaning they’re not telling anyone what they’re up to yet. It has a glamorous aura to it, conjuring up images of a brilliant project in the works that will soon be sprung upon the world, disrupting established players and leaving everyone scrambling to catch up.

All this is what Jason Freedman learned at Dartmouth’s Tuck Business School four years ago. And … it’s also what led his first company straight into failure. That’s why when he started his next company, he told everyone what he was up to — with the result that it was a hit and was acquired for a nice sum (I can’t give details) three months ago.

As Japan got hit by the double whammy of an 8.9-magnitude earthquake and the subsequent tsunami, the disaster’s effect on technology came into play, endangering cloud computing and mobile services.

The quake brings back reminders that disaster recovery plans are critical for technology companies and that technology services are more critical than ever in the midst of a catastrophe. The quake was the strongest to hit Japan in at least a century, sending a tsunami as high as 33 feet that flooded northern towns. The quake was followed by a 7.1-magnitude aftershock, which itself is very big.

HONG KONG residents can enjoy astoundingly fast broadband at an astoundingly low price. It became available last year, when a scrappy company called Hong Kong Broadband Network introduced a new option for its fiber-to-the-home service: a speed of 1,000 megabits a second — known as a “gig” — for less than $26 a month.

In the United States, we don’t have anything close to that. But we could. And we should.

Europe’s technology scene is awash with fear and loathing today, after entrepreneurs finally realized new rules regulating online privacy could affect their businesses. In particular, they’ve suddenly cottoned-on to the fact that a pan-European directive about the use of cookies, which is due to come into force on May 25, could have an impact on them.

The story is getting a lot of press and attention right now — most of it very negative indeed. The BBC says the rules are “set to make cookies crumble”, while TechCrunch Europe says it will “kill our startups stone dead”.

NEW YORK - Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced late last week three new steps to make it easier for immigrant-owned businesses to start and grow in New York City: a business plan competition for innovative strategies to provide assistance to immigrant entrepreneurs; new, free NYC Business Solution courses in Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and Russian; and a business expo to showcase locally-based immigrant food manufacturing businesses and link them to consumers nationwide.

The initiatives are a result of a yearlong series of roundtables with community groups and are part of the City’s agenda to support immigrant communities and empower them to grow and create jobs.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 8.9 hit Japan today, resulting in tsunami warnings for 20 countries, as well as California and Hawaii. Crisis mappers wasted no time responding: In under 2.5 hours Google launched its person finder application, which was also used when New Zealand's 6.3 quake struck last month, and a local developer in Tokyo, Shu Sigashi, a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation in Japan, quickly put up a localized Ushahidi crisis platform.

Crisis mapping's reach only goes as far as it is utilized, so the key now is getting the word out that online tools are available to help report the missing. Google's person finder app is already rapidly increasing in usage. Within a couple hours 2,000 reports had been logged.

What is the one thing that ALL career advisors agree on?

Internships.

They agree that internships are the best way to:

* Gain real world knowledge not being taught in classrooms
* Greatly increase their sphere of influence through networking
* Most important, make the entry-level candidate far more employable

In fact, a recent study by Gardner, Chow and Hurst for Michigan State states that 90% of direct-from-college hires will go to those with internship experience on their resume.

Former Washington Gov. Gary Locke’s nomination as the U.S. ambassador to China puts someone the state’s business community knows very well at the forefront of one of the nation’s most important global relationships.

That doesn’t mean every Seattle-area company can expect the red-carpet treatment in Beijing—after all, presuming he’s confirmed by the Senate (which seems likely), Locke will be representing the entire country, not just his home state of Washington.

You failed in your last business start-up. Excellent — play it up when you go out looking for funding in your next endeavor.

Shikhar Ghosh, an expert on entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, points out that most new businesses fail–there is nothing unique about it, nothing to be ashamed of. You’re in good company, in fact: Steve Jobs screwed up NeXT. Also, say hello to once-fired failures Henry Ford, Walt Disney and Oprah Winfrey.

In fact, it can be an advantage, he tells HBS Working Knowledge. For one thing, running a doomed company provides the entrepreneur who is willing to learn some hard-earned lessons about what it takes to succeed the next time. A failed business also yields networking opportunities with VCs and relationships with other entrepreneurs whose companies are succeeding.

Myths About Creativity

Myth One - You are lacking something.
Myth Two - There is an expert out there to help you.
Myth Three - It will take you a long time to get it.

Realities About Creativity

Reality One - You are always connected to an ever-present wellspring of creativity, power and wisdom.
Reality Two - The expert in your creativity is standing in your shoes right here and right now.
Reality Three - It doesn't take time - you have it right now.

Feeling Stuck?

Several other researchers and I have studied creativity and stale thinking patterns. Our work has focused on what we call the Identity System (I-System). We all have an I-System. It's either on or off. It's on when your mind is cluttered with spinning thoughts, your body is tense, your awareness shrinks and you have trouble reaching your goals. The I-System causes you to falsely identify with the contents of the spinning thoughts and the resulting physical distress. This, in turn, can disrupt your otherwise natural access to your wellspring of creativity. With your mind cluttered with old thoughts, you become trapped in a box!

IT IS Sunday January 2nd, a national holiday, in a medium-sized Chinese city, just north of the Taiwan Strait. The temperature is well below freezing. There is no heating in the factory, which makes components for electrical tools. This probably reflects frugality rather than a ban, imposed by Mao Zedong, covering every building south of the Yangzi river. A thin haze of winter light comes through the windows. The only other sources of illumination are flickering cathode-ray computer terminals, which make silhouettes of the heavily clad workers sitting at them.

Down the corridor, in a huge office even colder than the main floor, the company’s president sits at the head of a low table surrounded by friends. His hands are too busy to shiver, plucking tiny cups out of boiling water and making tea with a jumble of strainers and clay kettles. The cups are passed around, returned, and passed again, providing little jolts of warmth.

Bangalore: India's burgeoning population of young generation uses technology to empower themselves to create opportunities for inclusion. They connect innovations with society and enterprise. These innovators coming from a wide range of fields are being listed in the prestigious India TR35 honor by MIT's Technology Review India. Here is the list of young innovators, all under age 35, who exemplify innovation in business and technology.

1. Ajit Narayanan

Ajit Narayanan, 29, has been awarded MIT's Technology Review India's 'Innovator of the Year' for exemplifying the spirit of innovation in India. Toiling for a few years at a startup, Invention Labs Engineering, incubated at the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Madras, Narayanan has developed an alternate communication system for millions of people who remain incommunicado with the society due to their disabilities. Avaz, (voice in Hindi) is the tool which uses a variety of software and hardware to provide a voice to these muted millions using just their muscle movements.

According to Dow Jones VentureSource, venture financing is up 10% in the past year – which is encouraging news for job creation. Less encouraging however (also from DJ Venture Source) is that it’s still down 27% compared to two years ago.

We’ve written previously about the slight misconception concerning job growth in the economy: jobs are created mostly by new businesses, which start out small, as opposed to the more common short-hand of “small businesses.” The Wall Street Journal reported on the subject a few days ago, with a sobering graph, in Few Businesses Sprout, With Even Fewer Jobs.

Cupertino, Calif. (PRWEB) March 10, 2011

New Scholars, a social venture focused on empowering an entrepreneurial Africa, has announced the five winners from its Entrepreneurial Safari. The five entrepreneurs now enter a formal incubation process with New Scholars, which will help evolve their proposals into successful businesses in Southern Sudan and Kenya.

The winners were selected from a pool of thirty-six entrepreneurs who participated in the New Scholars Entrepreneurial Safari in Kenya in December 2010. During the two-week bootcamp, African entrepreneurs eager for guidance and feedback on their business ideas collaborated daily with Kenyan and Silicon Valley professionals who served as mentors, imparting best practices for entrepreneurial success.