The National Institutes of Health will establish by October its new center for helping pharmaceutical companies make drugs from university research discoveries, NIH leaders said Wednesday. They are moving ahead with the plan despite protests from scientists, lawmakers, and some agency officials.

"Change requires action," the director of the NIH, Francis S. Collins, said after meeting with advisers he described as committed to the creation of the NIH's proposed new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

No matter which way it goes, the decision on whether to create the center, known as Ncats, carries potentially major implications for universities and their researchers. Even critics of Dr. Collins's initiative said they recognize that too many scientific discoveries in university laboratories are not finding their way to the stage of industry development necessary to improve and save lives. At the same time, university scientists have warned that the proposed organizational changes could endanger more than $500-million a year in critical existing NIH programs. The proposed budget for Ncats is $700-million a year.

Following years of activity on metropolitan development, INTA has created a Community of Competences bringing together global expertise to address new challenges facing present-day metropolitan territories.

Globalization and movement of people, goods, information and funds have given to a limited number of cities a specific role: the metropolis. These urban systems are territorial anchors and production places in support of globalization; they are also urban networks that contribute to the re-composition of territories in terms of power, activities, attractiveness or influence. The development of the large metropolises is however not representative of all urban situations, in particular those of the "intermediate" metropolises.

When you pitch your startup to potential investors, you better be excited and prepared. That's the lesson from Launch conference right now, where a group of panelists just administered a verbal beatdown to Appconomy CEO Brian Magierski, which makes a mobile app called Groupin for tracking your participation in different groups.

The basic problem expressed by angel investor Dave McClure was that there are plenty of other mobile groups apps out there, and that Appconomy wasn't presenting anything unique or new. Yammer founder David Sacks pointed out that users could do exactly the same thing through Facebook, and wondered how Appconomy could hope to make a business appealing to the steadily diminishing group of people who AREN'T on Facebook.

It’s all a matter of trust. Whether we’re talking social media or business, it’s about building relationships with potential customers so they trust us long enough to stick around and hear what we have to say. Because if they don’t, all that great content, interacting and marketing won’t help. Without trust, you have nothing.

With trust so important, everyone wants to know who people trust more. Who is it you want singing your company’s praises to make an impression? Is it a potential customer’s next-door neighbor, an authority figure, a celebrity? Recently, I stumbled upon on an eMarketer post that commented on two studies that seemed to offer conflicting answers to that question. I thought perhaps I’d dig into their numbers a bit to find the real story.

Back in January I wrote a post inspired by Ev Williams comments on focus that I read in the TechStars inspired Do More Faster collection of pieces of advice for startups pulled together by David Cohen and Brad Feld. At the time I commented that I was enjoying the book a lot, and I wish I hadn’t left it on my shelf for so long before picking it up, somehow forgetting that I got distracted by another book (Surface Detail by Iain M Banks, rare for me to read non-fiction these days, but I love his Culture novels) –I’ve picked it up again now though and this time I’m going to paraphrase Dharmesh Shah’s thoughts on avoiding co-flounder conflict.

Dharmesh Shah is the founder of Hubspot – a provider of inbound marketing software that some of the smartest sales and marketing execs I know rave about. He also writes the popular OnStartuUps blog.

Women entrepreneurs got an important nod from the European Commission in its review of the Small Business Act this week, and advocates hope it signals renewed energy and funding for EU initiatives.

In sharpening its priorities to help small and medium-sized businesses, the European Commission said it will create mentoring schemes for female entrepreneurs in at least 10 member countries to provide advice and support.

The idea has been floating around for more than a year and is expected to be modelled after the existing European Network of Female Entrepreneurship Ambassadors.

In 2009, Zachary Johnson, a junior at Northwestern University, decided to promote the pop music of a friend at Duke, Mike Posner. Through a few calls and e-mails, he identified influential students at six college campuses, then asked those students to promote Posner's music in a coördinated way on Facebook, building an extensive friend network around the artist.

If sales are any proof, Johnson's marketing worked. Posner's single "Cooler Than Me" hit number 6 on the U.S. Billboard charts in July 2010. Partly on the basis of this success, Johnson launched Syndio Social, a startup that provides consulting services to show companies how to leverage a few key individuals.

The White House recently convened an unprecedented consortium of public and private entities to announce the launch of Startup America. The purpose was to galvanize a coordinated effort to define and implement President Obama’s vision and strategy to foster entrepreneurship and provide more push to the United States’ economic development.

Startup America has a lot going for it: a broad group of influential entrepreneurship stakeholders, real entrepreneurs at the heart of the dialogue, a sincerely committed president and an independent convening S.W.A.T. team who are making entrepreneurship a top priority and a powerful, well-connected, smart board with a smart-looking interim CEO. In my book, Startup America has gotten the basics right; I don’t take this lightly – my observations of more than two dozen countries is that very few have done even this.

GenYers have a keen interest in starting businesses and overwhelmingly think that entrepreneurship education is important, says a new survey of 1,623 GenYers conducted by Buzz Marketing Group, the Young Entrepreneur Council, and presented by LegalZoom. At the same time, however, they believe that the resources available to them from colleges, government, and financial institutions are inadequate.

Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneurs Council (and, full disclosure, my blogging partner on Inc.com) talked about the results of the survey last Friday in Orlando at the Future of Entrepreneurship Education Summit. “It’s important that government agencies, non-profits, and private enterprise include us directly in the conversation on youth entrepreneurship,” says Gerber, who is 27and runs a video production company called SizzleIt. Buzz Marketing Group, by the way, is run by youth marketing guru Tina Wells, who was featured in my book, Upstarts! While 20% of survey respondents aged 18-29 described themselves as self-employed, only 29% of those who have their own businesses said that they had a strong support system.

If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. If you have time, the president of Stanford will throw in a tour, and then you can drive by Intel or some cleantech firm for a photo op standing in front of an impressive looking piece of equipment.

The “official dignitary” tour of Silicon Valley is like taking the jungle cruise at Disneyland and saying you’ve been to Africa. Because you and your entourage don’t know the difference between large innovative companies who once were startups (Google, Facebook, et al.) and a real startup, you never really get to see what makes the valley tick.

Blogging is on the decline, according to a New York Times story published this weekend — citing research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project — and it is declining particularly among young people, who are using social networks such as Facebook instead. Pretty straightforward, right? Except that the actual story said something quite different: even according to the figures used by the New York Times itself, blogging activity is actually increasing, not decreasing. And as the story points out, plenty of young people are still blogging via the Tumblr platform, even though they may not think of it as “blogging.” What blogging is really doing is evolving.

The NYT story notes that blogging among those aged 12 to 17 fell by half between 2006 and 2009 according to the Pew report, but among 18 to 33-year-olds it only dropped by two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier — which isn’t exactly a huge decline. And among 34 to 45-year-olds, blogging activity rose by six percentage points. The story also admits that the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the U.S. in December than it had a year earlier (a 2-percent decline), but globally its traffic climbed by 9 percent to 323 million.

As we bring on new employees at my new venture, I’ve been struggling with the question of how much equity (shares) should I give a new employee or partner.

I’m not alone. It’s one of the most frequent questions in start-up forums – and it’s doubly complicated when the company is young and according to typical financial assessment the shares are “worth nothing?”

The question gets even muddier when the new hire is getting a salary. Typically that salary is less than market with the balance given in the form of equity, but again how do you compute that when the stock is, today, of no value?

House Bill 11-1266 was introduced in the Colorado legislature Tuesday calling for the establishment of private capital exchanges, licensing of private capital agents and the establishment of a $100 million per year seed capital fund to address the critical lack of capital now available in Colorado for small businesses. The bill may represent the most significant economic development legislation this year with the greatest potential to create new jobs in Colorado.

Representative Pete Lee (HD-18) of Colorado Springs seeks to help small businesses in Colorado create new jobs. Recognizing that small businesses are the greatest source of new jobs in Colorado, creating 99.7% of net new jobs from 2004 to 2005 (Source – U.S. Small Business Administration), Representative Lee is sponsoring a bill designed to have the greatest possible economic development impact without use of State funding, help drive innovation at the grass roots level, and to create a climate of collaboration and opportunity for a large number of small businesses entrepreneurs in Colorado who are in need of creative capital solutions to the growth and development of their companies.

A Moncton-based firm has received federal funding to provide business skills development to help information technology companies achieve continued growth.

Tech South East Inc. will be offering a series of workshops and seminars to members of their information technology group and to health and life science companies in the region thanks to a $47,475 investment through ACOA's Business Development Program.

The announcement was made yesterday in Moncton by Rob Moore, Minister of State for Small Business and Tourism and MP for Fundy Royal, on behalf of Keith Ashfield, Minister of National Revenue, Minister of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) and Minister for the Atlantic Gateway.

Some 10,000 people worldwide use a version of the Web like no other: it is operated by voice over the telephone. Called the "Spoken Web," it is the result of an IBM research project attempting to re-create the features and functions of the text-based World Wide Web for people in developing regions with low levels of literacy and technical skills.

Four years since the first prototype was released, the spoken Web is part of everyday life for users in four Indian states and parts of Thailand and Brazil. These people use it to learn of things such as local grain prices or job opportunities. On the spoken Web, telephone numbers replace Web addresses. A person can call in to a voice site and listen to or record content.

The next time you hear about a web business that will give its product away for free and 'monetize the eyeballs' that result, consider this: there is a finite pool of advertising dollars in the U.S., and that pool has shrunk 25% since its last apex in 2007.

That, contends ThingWorx co-founder Rick Bullotta, means every move made by even the most gigantic businesses on the web, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, is an attempt to steal a part of that business away from a competitor. In other words, they're all locked in a zero-sum game.

One of the more impressive, if understated, effects of Google's success has been the proliferation of entrepreneurs that spent time at Mountain View.

On Quora, we saw a thread listing all the startups that have sprung from ex-Google employees.

The total number was 49, which, granted, isn't an overwhelming number, but it's more than most big tech companies.

We've taken a look at just 15 of these startups to highlight the kinds of companies founded by ex-Googlers.

The emerging green economy is being targeted by a "surge" in fraud as organised criminals seek to take advantage of environmental sectors that have yet to deploy adequate due diligence and fraud prevention measures.

That is the stark warning in a new report from consultancy giant PwC, which claims the recent cyber attacks on the EU emissions trading scheme are part of a wider trend that has seen criminal groups deliberately target green projects and financial mechanisms.

Whether a technology business, consultancy, manufacturing company, or creative business — whatever – there is a lot of room for technology to help you operate your business more efficiently and effectively.

But as Mike Gorsage says in Scaling Your Business with Technology, to get the right technology you must be sure to “ask the right questions.” The right questions can make the difference between a business-elevating purchase and financial waste.