Start-ups in the United States will gain increased access to capital and resources, after US President Barack Obama announced a $2 billion package to aid budding entrepreneurs.

The US Small Business Administration has launched a $1 billion Early Stage Innovation Fund, providing matched capital to early-stage small businesses seeking private institutional capital.

The SBA is a government agency that provides support to entrepreneurs and small businesses. The agency’s activities are often referred to as the three Cs: capital, contracts and counseling.

2010 was a bit of a bounce-back year for U.S. technology transfer programs, as licensing income inched up 3 percent to $2.4 billion, compared with the prior year.

Still, that level of licensing income was a far cry from the halcyon days of 2008, when technology transfer programs reported $3.4 billion in licensing income, according to the latest annual survey from the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). 2010′s tally represented a 30 percent drop from 2008.

AUTM blamed the weakness of the last two years on a lack of large one-time payments such as litigation settlements, which helped boost numbers in previous years.

Every list of the best healthcare cities in the country reads like my grandfather’s history teacher wrote them. They’re usually based on the same metrics: which city has the most NIH dollars, the most venture capital and the size of the healthcare workforce in that city.

The best report in recent years came from the Milken Institute, which in 2009 ranked Boston, Philadelphia, greater San Francisco, greater New York and greater Raleigh-Durham as the best five life sciences cities.

A report last week from Jones Lang LaSalle also had Boston, New York-New Jersey and San Francisco in its top five, but also included Los Angeles and Washington, D.C./suburban Maryland (I’ve placed each study’s full list at the bottom of this story).

Here’s a quick tip for individuals who are conducting venture capital intelligence research.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (with the collaboration of National Venture Capital Association) has a pretty nifty tool for digging for insights regarding venture capital investments via The MoneyTree Report.  The report provides ” information on emerging companies that receive financing and the venture capital firms.“   The information that is available in The MoneyTree Report is only for the United States provided by Thomson Reuters.

Once you have obtained free access by registering online, the following pieces of quarterly capital related data are available by:

• Region
• Industry
• Stage of Development
• Financing Sequence
• VC Firm
• Investee Company

When Facebook IPOs at a valuation around $100 billion next Spring, it will create more than 1,000 new millionaires, Reuters's Alexei Oreskovic and Sarah McBride report.

Where will these new millionaires spend their money? Oreskovic and McBride have talked to some sources, and so have we.

In the world of inbound marketing, integrating tactics provides marketers with incredible leverage. However, integration can often be challenging because individual marketing tactics sometime exist in silos with little collaboration. This is especially true with an unlikely power couple, search engine optimization and email marketing.

Search engine optimization is likely a strong source of traffic and leads for you already. And email marketing is most companies' primary inbound lead generation channel. While both tactics rock on their own, they experience some exciting amplification when combined. Let's look at a few ways we can combine search and email for even more leads!

I'm sitting outside of a cafe in Greenwich, Conn., enjoying some free time and unseasonably warm weather, before boarding a 14-hour flight to Beijing. In this era of uncertainty, with the fear of Chinese and Indian economies eclipsing the U.S., of Europe doing too little too late, what we need is some perspective. We need to lift our gaze from in front of our feet and look up, and think about the long term.

I got a precious opportunity to do just that last week at an investor conference hosted by a man who Forbes says is worth about $1.5 billion, who runs a series of funds valued at over $15 billion. I won't give you his name because I have not yet formally interviewed him and would like to, but he laid out a formula for the few of us willing to look for opportunity in trouble. He has a long record. His formula must work. So it’s worth something.

Technology firms frequently require workers to sign non-compete agreements, which typically bar their employees from joining rival companies for one to two years. For firms, the agreements keep workers from taking the knowledge and skills they have acquired and using them to help a rival.

But a new study of more than 1,000 engineers, conducted by an MIT professor, shows that non-compete agreements come with a high cost for employees: When those workers do shift jobs, roughly one-third of them end up leaving their chosen industry altogether, often at significant financial cost to themselves.

Entrepreneur Max Levchin thinks there are too many incubators focusing on too many companies with small ideas.

That's according to a Wall Street Journal report this morning.

Levchin, who left Google earlier this year after the company shut down his Slide division, is working on something big and ambitious (he won't say exactly what). He worries that incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars are biased toward selling early and therefore wouldn't encourage those kinds of big bets.

"I actively plan to increase risk," he said, while incubators are encouraged to decrease risk.

Back when we were doing our MBA Monday series on Financing Options For Startups, I got an email from my friend Andy Sack. Andy was one of the first entrepreneurs we funded by in the mid 90s with our Flatiron Fund. He's done something like a half dozen startups since then and he's a veteran in the very best sense of the word.

Andy said "You missed an important option Fred - revenue based financing. I've got a new firm called Lighter Capital that does just that". I said, "Can you write a blog post for MBA Mondays explaining how it works?" So today, we have a guest post/advertorial on Revenue Based Financing from Andy/Lighter Capital. I hope you like it.

Microsoft researchers are set to launch Project Greenwich, a website that helps users assemble and chronologically organize content about a person, event, or any other subject. The site, to launch in beta on October 31, allows users to archive uploaded items, such as photos and scans of objects, alongside links to existing Web content around a horizontal timeline marked with dates. Different timelines can be combined and displayed on the same page or merged.

Project Greenwich users attach images, maps, and other visual content, plus accompanying text, to relevant dates on their timelines. Each entry, which a viewer can click to see in full, is illustrated with thumbnail pictures in chronological order to show it in the context of other entries, and potentially alongside other timelines.

In 1997, Apple didn’t look as if it had much of a future. The company was losing money, and its co-founder Steve Jobs had just come back to try to reverse the decline. “It was a low point for the company,” says Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections and the Film and Media Collections at Stanford University.

Streamlining operations, Apple decided to donate many of its research-and-development records and advertising materials, some historic machines, and other pieces of company history to Stanford. It’s now part of Stanford’s Silicon Valley Archive, which includes Valley-related material dating from to the early-20th-century days of radio engineering up through the computer and biotech start-ups of recent years.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Lee Redden, 26, a Ph.D. student in engineering at Stanford, recently decided to shelve his education and help found a start-up company. His skills lie in a couple of red-hot niches of artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning. Yet he is not applying his talents to Internet search, online commerce or intelligence surveillance.

Mr. Redden’s ambitions are further afield — in farm fields, actually. His company, Blue River Technology, is developing a robotic weed killer for organic farms, which shun chemical pesticides. The new venture, he said, is “a great way to bring this technology to agriculture.”

It’s very important to realize that your brand is one of the most important aspects of your business. It can differentiate between visitors and buyers, and can also be the determining factor for success or failure. As with any other project, there are several things to consider when building a successful brand for your company. Below are some suggestions for things you can do to come up with a great brand that will imprint itself in your consumers’ minds.

A new report prepared by Collaborative Economics and produced by the organization Next 10 finds that California took in $467 million in global venture capital (VC) investment in EVs (69% of total dollars) in the first half of 2011.

The report, Powering Innovation: California is Leading the Shift to Electric Vehicles from R&D to Early Adoption, tracks key indicators to assess opportunities and obstacles for California in the EV sector.

Among the findings:

• In 2010, California accounted for 80% ($840 million) of total US and 60% of total global venture capital investment in EV-related sectors.

The European Union has implemented 30 of the 40 Innovation Union commitments according to State of the Innovation Union, a comprehensive progress report on the Innovation Union, the European Union's (EU) flagship initiative under the Europe 2020 growth strategy for the decade. By the end of 2011, the European Commission will have passed all six Innovation Union legislative proposals. The report highlights several of the new initiatives including the first Innovation Partnership in Active and Healthy Aging; the European Institute of Innovation and Technology; and the Smart Specialization Platform. However, the EU still has more to achieve including strengthening efforts at a national level to prioritize investments in research

Businesspeople and consumers alike look up to Steve Jobs as perhaps the greatest CEO of his generation. He undoubtedly made a profound impact on this world.

But business executives shouldn't read his biography. You can't be like him, and you shouldn't be like him. And when you read it, you won't be able to resist trying.

You can't be like him because he was a genius.

Many of the business lessons in Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs can't be applied anywhere else. Jobs had a management style unique to himself, and it was deeply connected to his company and industry at the time. What he did at Apple only worked because of his own inexplicable, and extraordinary, abilities.

The City of Newport Beach in January, 2011 offered their local businesses the chance to participate in a 100 day transformational program- for Free. Over 250 attended the initial workshop and many of them signed up for the 13-week program which recently concluded. On Tuesday night, April 26, 2011, in city council chambers, the students were all honored. Over the course of four live classes and six teleseminars, businesses of every sort learned to understand their “competitive edge”, how to articulate themselves and honed their “elevator pitches” in clear, concise ways.

The University of Arizona is starting a new technology transfer center, aimed at making it easier to bring UA-designed products to market.

Tech Launch Arizona (TLA) is envisioned as a clearinghouse for technology commercialization, to facilitate the entry of UA research into the market.

"We wanted to do a reorganization, which I think will make us considerably more efficient in this area," said Eugene Sander, interim president of the UA.

The plan is for Tech Launch Arizona to bring together the academic and private sectors to enhance economic development in the region.

There aren’t many entrepreneurs in public media, but Jake Shapiro is one to watch.

His Cambrigdge-based non-profit, PRX, announced its Public Media Accelerator this week, a project which will provide funding and expertise to teams with innovative ideas for increasing the impact of public service media. The program is supported by a $2.5 million grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Modeled on startup incubators from TechStars to Y Combi to RockHealth, the idea is to stimulate innovation and disruption in a space known for a remarkable lack of it.  The project will invest in both nonprofit and for-profit ventures building apps, services and media products.