Less than a week after Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley crowed about robust job creation on his side of the Potomac River, Fairfax County economic development officials put up some big numbers of their own.

The Fairfax County Economic Development Authority said Tuesday that 159 firms will have created more than 9,000 jobs in Virginia’s largest jurisdiction within about a year’s time. Some have already moved to Fairfax, while others are on the way within the next 12 months, said Alan A. Fogg, a spokesman for the economic development authority.

The numbers may also offer yet another data point in the long, cross-river rivalry between Maryland and Virginia over which state has the more business-friendly environment.

It's been hinted at time and again that MBAs don't quite measure up to engineering degrees in the startup world. Now there's data to back up that claim.

In a report out by Identified, a startup that pulls Facebook data to track employment trends, the difference isn't seen in the undergrad degrees. The spit happens in graduate school.

"The company found 3,337 founder/CEOs have an advanced engineering background compared with 1,016 MBAs," according to the report, which looked at 36 million profiles in the company's database.

You hear a lot about some of the crazy interview questions Google has for all their employees.

But engineers are also a class of their own, and have to prove that they know how to code as well as Google expects them to if they want to work there.

So they have to answer even harder, more computational and logic-based questions. We've found a bunch of interesting ones on Glassdoor.com, a place where you can rate your interviewing experience, and assembled a list.

Cory Bolotsky, a student at Northeastern University, is working on a worthy new project: Startup Summer, which wants to place 100 college students in internships at Boston-area companies this year.

"The student population is by far the most valuable resource we have in Massachusetts, but we really need more good ways to integrate them into the start-up ecosystem," says Bolotsky, who worked briefly for the MassChallenge start-up competition before becoming the first director of Startup Massachusetts in December. (Startup Massachusetts is part of the national Startup America Partnership, which seeks to promote entrepreneurship and is marking its one-year anniversary today.)

Due to the rising costs of obtaining a college and post-graduate degree, entrepreneurs and business-minded individuals have started to suggest that younger people may be better off spending their education dollars on starting a new business. With the total cost of a four-year college degree (including tuition and lodging) sometimes surpassing $100,000, and a graduate program costing about the same, that amount of money could be an incredible launching pad to open a franchise or other start-up.

The need for creative ways to raise capital has become even more important these days. An anemic economy struggling to return to growth following the credit crisis has meant that credit is tight and that traditional avenues to raise funds, be it bank loans or government programs to fund small businesses, have limited resources. Lately, the entrepreneurial community has started clamoring for additional means to raise capital as an alternative to more traditional channels. Additionally, the recent crisis has sent unemployment skyrocketing. As a result, politicians are eager to find ways to create job growth.

One day in December 1955, former President Harry Truman, who had been living in Independence, Missouri since leaving the White House in 1953, arrived home and found his wife Bess at the fireplace, burning a pile of his letters to her.

“Think of history,” he said. "I have," she replied. And she let the letters continue to burn.

Today, we no longer have the option of burning our letters. Our digital tracks are everywhere--in email messages, tweets, text messages, social networking postings, and the visit histories of Internet sites. They are in the hands of family members, friends, acquaintances, current and former coworkers, people we barely remember, and people we prefer to forget. Our movements are logged through mobile devices, and our images are stored in the surveillance archives of retail stores, office buildings, taxis, and transit systems.

In 2007, Professor Rob Wiltbank reported in Returns to Angel Investors in Groups that angel investors made follow-on investment in about 30% of their invested companies. It was surprising for me to learn that follow-on investments correlated with lower returns, that is, angels that made follow-on angel investments saw returns of 1.4X their investment, while those that did not make follow-on investments enjoyed 3.6X returns.  The time to exit for both groups was similar.

Frankly, the conclusion that angels who make follow-on investments can expect lower returns is distressing to me.  At a time when venture capital, on average, has moved to later stage investing, angels need to plan on making multiple investments to help startups survive to positive cash flow and eventually to exit.  Fifteen years ago, angels typically invested $250K to $500K in startup companies while the average venture capital investment was $2-3 million.  As we saw in Average Round Size in Angel Deals, the average angel investment is now about a bit over $300K but venture capital is now investing $7-8 million per deal.  While it may not have been true in the past, angels now need to provide startups with enough runway to get to positive cash flow, to venture financings or to an early exit through several rounds of angel capital.

Everyone likes the word "entrepreneur." Its precise definition is elusive, but even if we as Americans don't really know what "entrepreneurship" means, we know that we like it, and we want more of it. After all, the word evokes all the popular clichés that are so prominent in our culture, especially around election time: the American Spirit, the struggle to overcome, innovate, inspire positive social change, and so on. Indeed, entrepreneurship has become a catch-all in these times of economic turmoil, representing something of a black box that will make everything better, so long as we encourage it.

There are plenty of places throughout the blogosphere which talk about the typical VC meeting, delivering both advice and tips. (In that corpus, a while ago I blogged about seven mistakes that entrepreneurs often make during a pitch session.) Along those lines, I think the proverbial 12-slide deck helps provide structure to a conversation where a multitude of information needs to be communicated in a short (often an hour or less) period. There’s a reason that's become "standard."

But after having had the privilege of meeting with hundreds (if not thousands) of entrepreneurs over the past seven years as a VC, I've also stumbled upon three non-standard questions which I very often ask during an initial meeting which help facilitate a discussion beyond just a rote "pitch."

Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley prefer to fund the young, the next Mark Zuckerberg. Why? The common mantra is that if you are over 35, you are too old to innovate. In fact, there is an evolving profile of the "perfect" entrepreneur—smart enough to get into Harvard or Stanford and savvy enough to drop out. Some prominent figures are even urging talented young people to skip college, presumably so they do not waste their "youngness" on studying.

To a degree, the cult Silicon Valley has built around young people makes sense—particularly in the Internet and mobile technology. The young have a huge advantage because they aren't encumbered by the past. Older technology workers are experts in building and maintaining systems in old computer languages and architectures. They make much bigger salaries. Why should employers pay $150,000 for a worker with 20 years of irrelevant experience when they can hire a fresh college graduate for $60,000? After all, the graduate will bring in new ideas and doesn't have to go home early to a family.

Independent and remote work may be on the rise and, as many experts have told us, this offers great benefits, from access to new markets for previously underemployed talent to the joys of autonomy and control for workers. But not every aspect of the change is rosy. Provision of benefits like health insurance is an often mentioned problem as is downward pressure on wages, but on Deskmag recently, Nina Pohler identified another potential problem: exploitation of independent workers by those contracting out work.

“While coworking spaces might come pretty close to the ideal working space, at times they can also be spaces where some of the worst characteristics of a capitalist economy are being reproduced — just like in an ordinary workspace,” she writes. Independent work may solve many problems, but it doesn’t get rid of asymmetric relationships between those handing out work and those completing it, she states. What does she mean by this?

After previewing its expansion plans last summer, San Diego’s EvoNexus, the free startup incubator established by the non-profit technology group CommNexus, has opened a newly renovated downtown office space. A dozen early stage companies began moving into the incubator Monday.

CommNexus founded EvoNexus in 2009, when San Diego’s innovation economy was reeling from the Great Recession. The incubator has taken in 14 companies so far, including six that have moved out of the EvoNexus incubator in University City. Office space, utilities, and other services are provided to startups free of charge, and companies leave with no obligations to EvoNexus or CommNexus.

We received official word this week that "the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is now seeking nominations for the 2012 Medal of Technology and Innovation (NMTI), the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, bestowed by the President of the United States on America's leading innovators."

“We want to honor this nation’s creative geniuses,” said Richard Maulsby, the USPTO’s acting chief communication officer and NMTI program coordinator. “This medal goes to innovators whose talent helps guarantee U.S. leadership in technology across the board.”

Visit Boston and one of the first things you're sure to hear is that, for a big city, the population is among the youngest in the country. Jam-packed with universities, such as Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern and Tufts, a whopping 72 percent of the population is under the age of 44.

But when it comes to staying young, Boston ranks No. 7 -- well behind San Francisco, where the average age has shot up to 38.5, according to RealAge.com, a website that seeks to gauge your age based on a different yardstick.

Have you heard the one about the American job that came back onshore after having spent decades abroad?  No joke.  As offshore wages, intellectual property theft and other costs rise, the financial advantages of manufacturing overseas are beginning to melt away like the morning fog.

In a decades-old lament, hundreds of thousands of American jobs have migrated to other countries due, in most cases, to the cost advantages of cheaper labor.  That’s begun to change… and none too soon.

According to ABC News, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2008 more than 11,000 American jobs were lost to “‘out-of-country relocations’ for cheaper, foreign labor.”  That number fell by more than half in 2010 to 5,300.

You can tell a lot about a person from their body. And I don’t just mean how many hours they spend at the gym, or how easy it is for them to sweet-talk their way out of speeding tickets. For the past several decades researchers have been studying the ways in which the body reveals properties of the mind. An important subset of this work has taken this idea a step further: do the ways our bodies relate to one another tell us about the ways in which our minds relate to one another? Consider behavioral mimicry. Many studies have found that we quite readily mimic the nonverbal behavior of those with whom we interact. Furthermore, the degree to which we mimic others is predicted by both our personality traits as well as our relationship to those around us. In short, the more empathetic we are, the more we mimic, and the more we like the people we’re interacting with, the more we mimic. The relationship between our bodies reveals something about the relationship between our minds.

When it comes to building your own personal brand, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn get all our digital love. However, for the majority of business professionals, the hundreds of people you're emailing day in and day out make up the most important social network you have.

Tools like Smartr help personalize the inbox experience, assigning photos, titles, and email history to names. Tout offers you the tools and templates you need to track and schedule your messages. What's missing for most people in this day-to-day email equation is a helpful and memorable email signature.

This precious real estate at the bottom of every message is often filled with either too much or too little information (or, worse, dead space). Sifting through my own inbox, there are few signature stand-outs among thousands of contacts.

Every entrepreneur has an idea for transforming a market with innovative new technology, or transforming society with a new process. But unfortunately, most of these ideas fail at the execution level, or are not truly innovative. Entrepreneurs who have been really transformative, like Steve Jobs and Walt Disney, seemed to know how to deal with all the right elements.

Jeffrey A. Harris, in his new book “Transformative Entrepreneurs,” provides examples of key elements of transformative ideas and leadership abilities that separate the winners from the losers. I found his observations, like the following, to be inspirational for those of us chasing an entrepreneurial dream:

It’s all about the people. Ideas have to be implemented well to change a market, or the world. Good implementation requires a plan, and a great plan and great operational decisions come from great people. That’s why investors look for entrepreneurs who have true grit, dogged persistence, and a disdain for the status quo.

There are two views on entrepreneurship in America: the first (largely feigned), that it is a pure virtue like freedom of speech or religion, and the second (real) attitude that it is largely a game for the naïve. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Dell make fine fodder for commencement speeches, but when parents and career counselors thrust graduates into the job market, the default isn't entrepreneurship, it's corporate serfdom. Entrepreneurship is a deviation, an occupation for heroes, heroic for the reasons it can't be recommended: it's just too unsafe. But the conventional position is nonsense; building new companies is far more sensible than the practical will admit.

In today's knowledge-driven economy, innovation is the prime driver of progress. India's ability to generate wealth and create social good will come to naught unless we monetise innovative ideas by unshackling entrepreneurship. For innovation to flourish, we need to fund ideas to take them to market. Without capital, even the most transformative ideas can die before they take wing.

India's economic agenda is being shaped to deliver high growth based on an innovation matrix that cuts across social and economic activity. This approach is expected to result in economic reforms and value-added products and services that are key drivers of India's progress. Whilst the strategy is sound, the process of implementation is pivotal to its successful outcome.