Accel Partners- Accel Partners is a global venture capital firm. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California; London, UK; and Bangalore, India; as well as in China via the IDG-Accel Partnership.

With over $6 billion under management, Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful category-defining companies including: Actuate, Alfresco, AdMob, AMCC, Arrowpoint, Baidu, BBN, Brightcove, ComScore, Etsy, Facebook, Focus Media, Foundry Networks, Gameforge, GlamMedia, Imperva, Infinera, Interwoven, JBoss, Kayak, Knewton, Macromedia, metroPCS, Mu Sigma, Polycom/PictureTel, Portal Software, QlikTech, Real Networks, Redback Networks, Riverbed, Sohu.com, UUNet, Veritas, Walmart.com, Webroot, XenSource, and Zimbra.

Austin Ventures – Austin Ventures (“AV”) has worked with talented entrepreneurs to build valuable companies for over 25 years. With $3.9 billion under management, AV is the most active venture capital and growth equity firm in Texas and one of the most established in the nation. With an investment focus on business services and supply chain, financial services, new media, Internet, and information services, software, and Texas special situations, AV invests at all stages of company development, from $100,000 “planned experiments” in early stage ideas to $100+ million investments in expansion rounds, minority recapitalizations, and buyouts of lower middle market growth companies. AV’s strategy is to partner with talented executives and entrepreneurs through its CEO-in-Residence and Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs.

One of the most important questions you will be asked by potential investors is how your solutions beats the competition, not just today, but over the three to five year life of their investment.

There is no perfect answer to this question, but there are many wrong answers which will immediately jeopardize your credibility.

The concept is called “sustainable competitive advantage.” A good answer might be “We have several patents on the base technology, which is so robust that we expect to roll out new products every year for the next ten years, always staying a step ahead of our competitors.” That implies competitive now, and the potential to stay in the lead.

"It takes a while to get from entry level to becoming someone who is a very experienced and influential investor," says well-respected venture capitalist Fred Wilson. "It took me 25 years."

Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, is trying to do it in half the time. He is only 25, but he's already a co-founder turned Venture Capitalist with one exit (Hot Potato to Facebook) under his belt.

Is his work being taken seriously by the community? "I feel like being involved as an entrepreneur and a VC, people respect my age," he says.

The Europe 2020 Strategy puts forward as a key priority for the Union the promotion of a more resource efficient, greener and more competitive economy. This Memo presents an abridged look at industrial competitiveness in SE Europe's EU Member States drawn from the report Member States competitiveness performance and policies. The main objective is to analyse industrial competitiveness and to present the policy measures Member States carry out to improve their competitiveness and, by implication, the competitiveness of Europe as a whole.

Bulgaria

Bulgaria’s real effective exchange rate depreciated slightly from its 1999 level to 2005 but appreciated strongly from 2005 to 2009, indicating significantly decreased competitiveness. Bulgaria was confronted with one of the biggest drops of manufacturing output in the European Union during the crisis. It fell by almost 35%, but regained 17% in July 2010.

Towards an innovative industry: According to the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) 2008, Bulgaria has an innovation performance below the EU average.

As the U.S. economy remains mired, Washington seems to be increasingly looking to science, technology and innovation to power the economy out of the ditch.

Last month, I sat down for a conversation with Tom Kalil, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s deputy director (see page 12). During my interview with this very smart guy, I was repeatedly struck by the recurring correlations he made between innovation and the economy. No matter what your opinion of President Obama, it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t get it when it comes to the importance of ramping up America’s technological proficiency to create and retain jobs and to keep up with other, emerging nations.

The president pumped billions of dollars in federal stimulus money into technology and education initiatives and has called on leaders at virtually all government agencies to try and harness the best technologies to help government work better.

A less controversial technique comes from Eduardo Gold, who was awarded $200,000 by the World Bank to restore a Peruvian glacier by painting mountains white. In theory, altering a mountain peak's albedo (the strength of the surface's reflection of light) should cool its surface, triggering a cold micro-climate in the surrounding area. So far, workers have covered almost five acres of the Chalon Sombrero peak with whitewash. Eventually, Gold hopes to cover three peaks and 173 acres in the Peruvian Andes with a solution made from water, lime, and industrial egg white.

Twenty-year-old entrepreneur Jessica Mah, freshly graduated from the University of California, Berkley, has just closed a $1.2 million round of angel financing for her startup software firm, InDinero. A simple online finance management tool, InDinero aims to do for small businesses what Intuit’s Mint.com online finance manager does for individuals — bring fiscal order out of chaos.

This is the not Mah’s first waltz around the floor at the entrepreneur’s ball; she started her first company selling website templates on eBay when she was 13, two years before she graduated from high school. And she founded two more while an undergraduate studying computer science at Berkley.

TORONTO (Reuters) - The co-managers of a $150 million venture capital fund backed by Research In Motion will open offices in California's Silicon Valley and elsewhere as they focus on mobile phone-related investments.

"We're at the beginning of what will be a transformational decade," said Kevin Talbot, who co-manages the Toronto-based BlackBerry Partners Fund with John Albright.

"There are 2 billion bank accounts in the world today yet there are 5 billion (mobile phone) subscriber accounts. We see massive numbers, we see huge velocity," he said, adding that mobile entrepreneurs can now be found globally.

NEW YORK, Oct. 28, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dow Jones Indexes, a leading global index provider and a CME Group company, today announced the launch of the Dow Jones U.S. Venture Capital Index, designed to measure changes in the market value of venture capital-financed companies in the United States. The new index has been licensed to Chicago Alternative Investment Partners, LLC to serve as a basis for financial products.

"This index tracks an asset class that has not been readily available before to the general public," said Michael A. Petronella, president, Dow Jones Indexes. "By publishing this index, we intend to shed light on this dynamic market and offer investors access to information in this important segment of U.S. economic growth," noted Petronella.

The methodology for the Dow Jones U.S. Venture Capital Index was developed by Dow Jones Indexes together with Sand Hill Econometrics. The values are based on a combination of values reported to Dow Jones VentureSource and value estimates based on Sand Hill's previously developed econometric methods for estimating company values when a recent market value is not readily available. Dow Jones VentureSource database is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

I received a great question from one of my subscribers the other day.

It read as follows:

Is crowdfunding an option for my business? It seems that most of the crowdfunding is for artsy, music or non-profit projects or companies. I have a [blanked out for confidentiality] that I want to [blanked out for confidentiality]. I need $250,000 to [blanked out for confidentiality]. Would crowdfunding be right for me?

Great question. Here's my answer.

The biggest Crowdfunding platform right now is Kickstarter.com. And the majority of projects on Kickstarter are artsy, music or non-profit projects or companies like you mentioned. However, Kickstarter has also been successfully used by many for-profit business ventures like Diaspora ($200K+ raised) and Glif ($120K+ raised) who both raised a lot of money.

  new   Two levels below a Menlo College dorm building, three veteran entrepreneurs are on the lookout for fresh business ideas, as they prepare to open the first busineess incubator on the campus geared towards helping students transform their ideas into profitable companies.

"Any entrepreneurs out there with interesting ideas are welcome. We'd love to get visitors when we're ready," said Gary Kremen, founder of Match.com and co founder of the yet-to-be completed Menlo Incubator.

The business incubator is in the preliminary stages of developing a functional office on campus underneath Kratt Hall,  and is scheduled to open next January.

Commentary & Insights on EntrepreneurshipThe e360 blog brings an array of editorial views to current events shaping the world of entrepreneurship. Engage, exchange, and expand your own view of the world!

An effective university technology transfer model should take advantage of lessons learned from the current process, tap into the power of the free market, use today’s internet technologies, and enlist emerging open innovation paradigms.   The good news is that drastic change to today’s university tech transfer process may not be necessary.  Let’s call this proposed model the “Plan B” approach since it introduces a second, alternative path to invention commercialization that would complement, rather than replace, the work of the university TTO.     This proposed model would maintain the core of today’s university tech transfer model, but would take advantage of the power of the free market, capture the long tail of invention licensing, and make use of open innovation  licensing paradigms. 

In the Plan B approach, universities would give their TTO first right of refusal for new inventions, remaining the first step in the university commercialization process.  Within a specified time frame, the TTO would choose one of two options:  commit to managing an invention or formally turn down the opportunity and would hand the reins over to the inventor.  If the TTO declined, faculty would be offered the chance to manage the invention themselves, or would be permitted to enlist third party commercial agents.  The selected agent would work on comission only and would assume the costs associated with getting an invention ready for market such as patent, marketing and prototyping expenses.  In essence, the agent would fully step into the role ordinarily played by the university TTO.   Regardless of the TTO’s decision, the university would still retain title to the invention. 

Now that we've reached the end of our month focusing on digital marketing, it's time to ask: what did we learn? The special report we rolled out with daily features represents hundreds of hours of research, design, synthesis, and analysis. But as a time-starved entrepreneur or executive, you want to know at a glance what it all means for your job and your company.

Some of what we illustrated turned out as expected. Marketing in all its forms is the number one area of corporate investment, and we knew it wouldn't be difficult to show that the explosive growth of digital marketing represents the biggest threat to the way things have been done in the past. We all know that we've become a screen-obsessed culture. Our waking hours are spent skipping from the desktop to the laptop to the tablet to the smart phone to the HDTV. As our habits of consuming information and entertainment change radically, so must the time-honored practice of marketing.

In these tough economic times, more and more people are turning to entrepreneurship as an alternative to traditional employment. I applaud this trend, but caution all of you thinking this direction to approach entrepreneurship with your eyes wide open. It is not for everyone, as the entrepreneur’s path is fraught with challenges.

Many experts have tried to clearly lay out the criteria for success in a way that allows you to judge your own situation and your own temperament, and make a rational decision before starting down this path. One of the best summaries I have seen is a new book by Bill Murphy, Jr., titled “The Intelligent Entrepreneur,” which outlines the ten rules of successful entrepreneurship, as follows:

1. Make the commitment. Entrepreneurship can be learned. But you have to be committed to the process of building your own thing and the act of creating something, rather than just coming up with an idea. It will likely take several ideas, with the learning process of failing on a couple, before you can call yourself a successful entrepreneur.
   
   
2. Find a problem, then solve it. Rather than finding a new idea first, try finding a problem first. Problem solvers make successful entrepreneurs. Idea people are dreamers, who often don’t enjoy the hard work of a solution in a specific timeframe to make money.

Our world is changing all of the time. It’s exciting. These changes create new space to explore and new opportunities for growth and improvement. Like everything else, our economic world is in a constant state of flux too. Businessmen and entrepreneurs are rowing down an endless stream of ideas and innovation. Their aims are not only to make money, but to improve the world in a way the relates to real people like you and me.

In just one or two centuries, which is a tiny sliver of the world’s entire history, we have made incredible improvements in technology, medicine, entertainment, art, and culture. Most of us wouldn’t even be able to bear the burden and suffering of living a hundred years ago compared to the luxuries we have today in the form of TVs, computers, and iPods.

Richard Florida’s Creative Class blog reports that certain areas of the USA have a much higher use of social media than others. There are significant differences between California and Oklahoma, for example. Check out the map of the American Spiky Social Network.

The level of geographic concentration is pronounced, though the leading social media metros are not surprising. San Francisco and San Jose, Silicon Valley, top the list, with New York City, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Salt Lake City, L.A., and Atlanta rounding out the top 10.

I did a quick check of visitors to this blog over the past few months and it almost mirrors these results, with California, New York & Texas leading. This may be due to population but I find it a rather interesting coincidence.

Apple filed its annual report with the SEC yesterday (a "10K," in Wall Street-speak).