The green economy shows signs of steady growth as hiring picks up and companies spend more on environmental efforts, according to a semi-annual survey by GreenBiz.com.

Unlike last year, when the economic downturn dominated corporate decision-making, customer requirements are now the driving factor for most large companies, reports the survey taken earlier this month of 483 companies, nearly half of which have $1 billion-plus annual revenue.

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Today, 35% of large businesses cite customer requirements as the top factor determining their green agenda while 25% cite company leadership. Only 20% name the economy, down from 40% a year ago.

Startups are hard.  When you read the press you only read the glamorous bits.  You read about Mark Zuckerberg or the guys at FourSquare, Twitter or Zynga.  But that’s a bit like reading about your state lottery winner and feeling bummed out because you haven’t won despite years of trying.  The reality is that most of you will never hit it BIG yet you’ll lead fulfilled and productive lives.  Whether you choose to be happy or not is up to you.  Will you choose the dopeness or the wackness? (if you don’t have the reference and want it you can click the image above)

Life is hard.  It’s hard for everybody.  We all imagine that somebody else has it figured out yet when you meet the people who you think actually do have it all you find out that life is hard for everybody.

I point that out because one of my favorite quotes in the world (and one I often repeat) is that “life is 10% how you make it and 90% how you take it.”  It’s not a recommendation that you don’t have to put in effort to make your life better.  It’s an acknowledgement that whatever the outcomes in your life you can choose to be happy or choose to be miserable.

"If you can dream it, you can do it." - Walt Disney

Many great breakthroughs have come in dreams.

Rene Descartes got the concept for the Scientific Method in a dream. Elias Howe came up with the final design for the lock stitch sewing machine in a dream. August Kekule arrived at the formulation of the Benzene molecule in a dream.

In the dream state, the subconscious mind arrives at solutions that the conscious mind is unlikely to discover during the daily grind -- no matter much it obsesses, gathers data, or blames the "organization."

That's why Thomas Edison and Salvadore Dali used to take naps during the day. They knew they got their best ideas in dreams, so they decided to wake up more than once a day. Yes!

A few weeks ago, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors issued stock to the public. Its charismatic CEO Elon Musk was once touted by Wired as a "triple threat" disruptor based on his previous experience with PayPal and Space Exploration Technologies. A successful stock market introduction led to Musk being worth millions, on paper at least.

Last week, a company called QlikTech issued stock to the public. The company is more than a decade old. Most people wouldn't recognize CEO Lars Bjork if they ran into him on the street. A Google News search found 2,180 articles about Tesla, and 68 about QlikTech.

Tesla's the sexier company, but is it better positioned for success?

A startup company has a printing method for solid-state batteries.

An Orlando startup has developed new manufacturing techniques that could improve the stability and lifetime of batteries used in electric vehicles. Planar Energy, a spin-off of the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL), is working on scaling up solid-state lithium-ion batteries.

Conventional batteries, which typically use a liquid electrolyte, can suffer from undesirable chemical reactions that damage the battery's cathode. Replacing the liquid electrolyte with a solid ion conductor can improve battery stability and lifetime, and also allow a battery to be smaller because additional components aren't needed to maintain stability. Solid electrolytes are also compatible with a wider range of battery chemistries that could potentially offer higher power or storage density.

Forget a quick once over with a chamois – Britain’s most expensive car washer will spend 250 hours on your vehicle.

But Gurcharn Sahota’s service comes at a price as he charges up to £7,200 to get a car looking showroom new.

The 30-year-old entrepreneur runs his company from his parents’ garage in Derby.

Here he has built a Formula Onestyle pit to wash the underside of cars and uses an array of cleaning products costing up to £8,200 per tub.

Not content with polishing and buffing every inch of a car five times, Mr Sahota also uses a microscope to check for tiny scratches invisible to the naked eye.

Google the word "entrepreneur" and the search engine will respond with more than 30 million results to your query. However, Google "reinventing entrepreneurship" and the results will number only in the hundreds.

While superficial, this experiment reveals a worrying condition.

Entrepreneurship has a critical function in the economy. Entrepreneurs are responsible for substantial employment generation and create important spill-over effects that have a significant impact on long-run regional-employment growth rates. Entrepreneurial firms account for substantial increases in productivity and economic growth and they modulate volatility in labour markets.

Perhaps most important, they are crucial to the development and commercialization of innovation.

The need to drive innovation capacity in industry is more urgent than ever. In addition to the staggering challenges of the economic crisis, current industry outlooks increasingly have embedded in them a collective note of warning that deserves our attention. Underlying structural changes, in economic liberalization, capital market developments, technological advances and deep demographic shifts, as well as the changes required to sustain competitiveness, are having a destabilizing effect on many firms.

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm started by PayPal Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel, raised $250 million to invest in companies focused on the Internet, science and engineering.

The money will finance the new Founders Fund III, the San Francisco firm's third and largest fund, according to a statement Monday. Most of the capital came from existing investors.

Thiel and co-founders Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, early investors in Palo Alto's Facebook Inc., are bucking a broader decline in venture fundraising. Venture firms raised $1.9 billion in the second quarter, a 56 percent drop from a year earlier and the lowest level since 2003, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

An imminent swarm of tiny quakes beneath western North America could help seismologists prepare for a big one — but only if they can learn to interpret the tremors, finds Naomi Lubick.

For the past few weeks, seismologists at the University of Washington in Seattle have been on high alert. Any day now, they expect a flurry of microtremors deep under the nearby Olympic Peninsula, just as occurs roughly every 12–14 months. And when that wave of vibrations comes along, the researchers will be ready to catch it.

Over the past year, the seismology team has set up an elaborate net — an array of more than 100 seismic sensors planted in the ground throughout the peninsula's mountains. When those instruments start picking up signs of the tremors, the researchers will rush back out to install extra seismometers above the spots where the earth is shuddering. Every few days the scientists will tend to the sensors, replacing batteries and downloading data, with the hope of capturing as much information as possible about the seismic events underfoot.

Alan Patricof is one of the most experienced and successful VCs around.  He was one of the founders of Apax Partners which is one of the most successful venture and private equity companies in European history and his investment successes include Apple Computer and AOL.  Most recently he founded an early stage venture fund called Greycroft Partners based in New York and they have just closed their second fund.

Raising the money for that second fund was hard work, even for a man with Alan’s experience, and he has written at length on exactly what they had to do on Business Insider.  The whole post is well worth a read.  I’m going to bring out three highlights.

First the stats – they had to talk to a LOT of people:

We had 515 contacts, of this, roughly 250 passed for various reasons and 100 were non-responsive. We had 154 visits, 97 due diligence requests, 33 second visits, and 12 reference requests, to ultimately produce 9 institutional investors. 

That’s less than a 2% yield of all contacts and 6% of first meetings.

This time-lapse photo was taken in eastern Victoria, Australia, and features Noctiluca Scintillans, a type of algae that naturally produces a light-emitting chemical reaction. You can't see it during the day, but, at night, the algae glow electric blue, illuminating portions of the shoreline where wind pushed the blooms during the day.

As summer heats up, we take a look at the leading players, and who to watch, in the world of demand response.

Ah, summertime! Nothing but long days complete with ice cream cones, sandy beaches and peak load management. As temperatures smolder in the 90s after hitting triple digits early in the season, electricity demand is soaring around the country, hitting near record highs in some regions.

While demand response was already a hot topic in smart grid circles (not to mention load shedding, which has been around longer than the phrase 'smart grid'), it has become absolutely necessary during these periods of critical peak demand. And this might be just the beginning. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission estimated there was a reduction of 37 gigawatts in peak demand from demand response in 2009, and FERC projected that the figure could jump to 188 gigawatts in 2019.

Demand response is also shifting these days from just shedding that critical peak load to offering more constant management, a trend that is altering the field, creating opportunities for the current players, and carving openings for other companies looking to get in on the action.

Pan-european startup programme Seedcamp has released the names of the teams appearing at the Mini Seedcamp London next week. Seedcamp says they “saw many teams applying with innovative ideas in the mobile space and we are seeing more and more dedicated, smaller applications adressing very specific markets.”

Teams applied from all over Europe and beyond, and there is a trend towards self-financing and bootstrapping but the “quality [of teams] is growing from strength to strength each year”. Personally I am not surprised they are doing that given the dearth of early stage funding right now, but, perversely this lack of funding, especially in Europe, does rather concentrate the mind on what startups should be doing. There’s nothing like a downturn for sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

Entrepreneurship is far from an exact science. It probably is the furthest thing from it. Don’t believe it? Just ask any entrepreneur! There is one term in the scientific world that may describe us though, an AMOEBA…single cell (entrepreneurs are usually a one man army starting out) and they have to constantly try to change and duplicate themselves to survive as do entrepreneurs. The commonality of change is a dish served daily to amoebas and entrepreneurs. The last thing entrepreneurs should be resistant to is change. With that being said here are 5 mistakes entrepreneurs should avoid making.

1. Staying in bad business relationships too long: Typically a bad deal will not all of a sudden become a good deal no matter how long you delay making the decision to cut the cord and move on.
2. Becoming psychologically married to passion not profit: We all have our entrepreneurial passions and have heard the cliché’ that we should do something we love and we will never work another day.  The rest of that should say if we pick the wrong passion business over the right profit business we may end getting to know the inside of a bankruptcy court all too well. Be smart about the economy we are in. Insurance may not be sexy but it may make you more money than a smoothie franchise (no offense smoothie people).

Sir Ronald Cohen talks about social finance

In a recent article in the Telegraph, Sir Ronald Cohen, the “father of private equity” in the UK and founder of Apax Partners, is quoted as saying “An important part of the capitalist system is having a powerful social sector to address social issues.”

Those of us interested in social finance in Canada have long looked to the UK in general, and the work of Sir Ronald Cohen in particular, for advice and direction. Sir Ronald (as he is affectionately called) recently addressed student at Harvard Business School telling the students about the next big thing in the business world – social finance.

“If I had been leaving Harvard in 2010, this would be the area I would want to be going into,” says Sir Ronald. About one-fifth of recent Harvard Business School graduates agree given that they have been drawn to “social enterprise-type organizations.”

Ever wonder what it would feel like to wake up excited for another day at the office?

We scoured the nation for companies that are using innovative perks to keep their employees motivated and their business moving forward.

Great benefits pay dividends down the line by instilling a sense of community in the workplace.

Offerings like giving workers a chance to beef up their education or stay fit means senior staff will be better prepared to tackle big tasks when the going gets rough.

Putting employees at ease in the office also leads to more productive work hours. Many of these perks are aimed at the small stresses that force employees to duck out early or show up late.

8 billion smackers. That's what Las Vegas Sands spent constructing Marina Bay Sands, the world's most expensive standalone resort that looks more like a cruise boat perched atop a 55-floor skyscraper than any fully earthbound structure.

Not to mention, as you make your way to the rooftop (after, you know, spending some time to take a canal ride in the shopping center, or to poke about one of the building's 1600 casino slot machines, or to just sit back and enjoy the fish bouillon that Mario Batali has catered specifically for your taste buds), you discover that - WOW - there's a pool here 3 times the size of any aquatic compartment Michael Phelps may have competed in during the Olympics. Don't worry, if you're planning on taking a few laps pre-boardroom meetings, you won't flip over the edge anytime soon -- there's a catchment area if you're really leaning too close to catch the city views.

Succeeding in the new economy—or any economy—takes innovation. The top states for business prize innovation, nurture new ideas, and have the infrastructure to support them. We evaluated the states on their support for innovation, the number of patents issued to their residents, and the deployment of broadband services.

The International Development Design Summit is an intense, hands-on design experience that brings together people from all over the world and all walks of life to create technologies and enterprises that improve the lives of people living in poverty. Unlike most academic conferences, we emphasize the development of prototypes, not papers and proceedings. In moving the technologies on the path from idea to implementation to impact we aim to create real ventures, not just business plans. IDDS is part of the revolution in design that aims to encourage, promote, and build more research and development resources that focus on the needs of the world’s poor. We draw inspiration from several current models of innovation, design and community empowerment: co-creation, cross-disciplinary collaborations and crowd sourcing.