Last week Anita Campbell let us know about what happened at National Small Business Week and the Small Business Administration’s focus on the “3 C’s”: capital, contracts and counseling. There was so much said about the first “C”, capital, I thought it was worth a deeper look.

In her kickoff address SBA Administrator Karen Mills brought us up to date on the results from last year’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) which to date has lent $27 billion to small businesses. But as Mills said, “There’s more work to do.”

To that end, President Obama encouraged Congress to pass the Small Business Lending Fund Act. The House financial services committee has already approved parts of the bill and it will soon go before the full House and the Senate. Mills called the Act a “small business jobs plan.”

"WHERE IS THE BEEF" FOR INNOVATIVE AND ENTREPRENEURIAL SMALL BUSINESSES? THIS PLAN DOES NOTHING FOR THE EARLY STAGE , TECHNOLOGY BUSINESSES THAT HAVE NO ASSETS AND THE LEADERS CANNOT GIVE PERSONAL GUARANTEES. WE STILL HAVE A "VALLEY OF DEATH" WHICH HAS NOT BEEN RECOGNIZED BY THIS ADMINISTRATION, WHICH RELATES TO THOSE FIRMS WHICH NEED EQUITY CAPITAL AND THE ANGELS, VC'S AND STATE TECHNOLOGY BASED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS, IN SOME CASES, CAN'T , WON'T OR DO NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES TO INVEST.

IN ADDITION CONGRESS CANNOT REACH AGREEMENT ON THE REAUTHORITIZATION OF THE SBIR PROGRAM, WHICH IS GLOBALLY THE MOST INNOVATIVE, EARLY STAGE FINANCING PROGRAM THAT EXISTS.

PLEASE PRESIDENT OBAMA, LETS DO SOMETHING TO PROTECT , SUPPORT AND GROW ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SEGMENTS OF THE U.S. ECONOMY, "HIGH GROWTH, INNOVATIVE, SMALL BUSINESS ENTREPRENEURS"!  ........

COMMENT BY RICH BENDIS,PRESIDENT AND CEO OF INNOVATION AMERICA

VCs are on the hunt, and it doesn’t matter if a company is in Boston, Beijing, or Menlo Park, they’re looking to fund great ideas anywhere in the world. Some are even opening offices overseas in an effort to find the next big international thing.

With America's economy still shaky, Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine released the best cities for the next decade on Tuesday. These cities, which offer promising job prospects, were selected based on population growth, unemployment rate, income growth and cost of living. And, the winner is?

Austin, Texas.

That's a ranking Bijoy Goswami of Austin is excited the city has earned. Attracted by the city's booming technology sector, Goswami moved to Austin in 1995 after college. Since then, his career has flourished, he says, thanks to the city's supportive business climate. At 37, he's managed to run a start-up, write a book and produce a short film.

"Because entrepreneurship is the ethos of Austin, it's part of what makes it so special here," Goswami said.

Researchers at an Australian university have developed the first dipstick-type test to determine blood type. The test involves putting a drop of blood onto a thin piece of paper that has been specially printed with antibodies; as the blood seeps into different parts of the paper, the blood type is revealed. The researchers say the test, which costs pennies, could improve medical treatments in the developing world.

Blood typing is one of the most basic medical tests, but it currently requires delicate analysis with microfluidic or optical devices and costs hundreds of dollars per test. People have one of four main blood types, based on antigens on the red blood cells: A, B, AB, and O. Knowledge of blood type is critical to successful blood transfusions, which save millions of lives each year worldwide, and using the wrong type of blood can trigger a fatal reaction

If you have a son or daughter graduating from college this year, you’ve probably gotten the word. When meeting this year’s college grads it’s best not to ask: “Hey, what are you doing next year?” Too many recent graduates don’t have an answer. They can’t find jobs even remotely related to their fields. This year’s graduation theme is: “Don’t ask. Can’t say.”

We owe our young people something better — and the solution is not that complicated, although it is amazing how little it is discussed in the Washington policy debates. We need three things: start-ups, start-ups and more start-ups.

Good jobs — in bulk — don’t come from government. They come from risk-takers starting businesses — businesses that make people’s lives healthier, more productive, more comfortable or more entertained, with services and products that can be sold around the world. You can’t be for jobs and against business.

I’m typing this from the lawn of Alan Patricof’s “Greycroft” home in East Hampton – my first time in the Hamptons.  Greycroft is Alan’s venture capital firm that recently raised its second fund ($130 million) with offices in both New York and LA.  We learned this weekend that it was named after his East Hampton home.

We’re here for Greycroft’s CEO Summit – a gathering of the CEO’s of their portfolio companies with guest speakers covering topics including how to build your team, PR, customer development, etc.

My favorite two quotes of the weekend were:

• “Never trade your cat for somebody else’s dog” (referring to selling your company for stock to another privately held company – quote was from Alan.  I’m going to save that for a future blog post
• “Nail it before you scale it” – I missed who said this but I love this quote.  It is the key to “customer development” that Steve Blank talks about.  Get your product/market fit working before you ramp up your costs (or raise too much money).

The average local retailer or restaurant may not be a feasible candidate for venture capital funding, but if you have an idea for an innovative product or service-or if you are starting a small business that could otherwise be positioned for high growth-you may want to consider stepping into the venture capital game.

Venture capital is an elusive animal-Guy Kawasaki, managing director for Garage Technology Ventures, admitted in a recent post on his blog that "someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic."

However, venture capital can also be immensely valuable for a small business in the tough startup stage. Here are seven questions to assess whether you are a good candidate for VC funding.

Engaging Economic Development


Engaging Economic Development -

The Massachusetts-based nonprofit MassChallenge has launched the world's largest global startup competition, with $1 million in no-strings-attached prize money for the winning entrants.

The annual contest will award at least 12 cash prizes of $50,000 or more to help entrepreneurs get their small business ideas off the ground.

John Harthorne, CEO and co-founder of MassChallenge, said that the contest will be great news for entrepreneurs looking for a chance to turn their idea into a reality. "The results of our competition will be immediate and far-reaching," he said.

Former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman and one-time HP (HPQ) head Carly Fiorina are all-but-certain to win Republican nominations for governor and the Senate in California today. Both are well-known in high tech, both have poured millions of their own dollars into their races ($70 million in Whitman’s case, and that’s just so far), and both have run largely on their business records running high tech corporations. But in both cases, that very business record is mixed at best and disastrous at worst.

Even undisputed corporate stars aren’t automatically fit for office. Let’s see some hands out there: Who thinks secretive control freak Steve Jobs would make a good governor of California? (And who would vote for BP CEO Tony Hayward as dog catcher, even if he weren’t a Brit?)

Business executives often assume that running a large corporation qualifies them for high office without previously serving in lower elected positions. That’s true only in one specific, if somewhat trivial, way, since one big qualification is that a candidate has been a heavy donor to his or her party and is capable of raising the money necessary to run for major office.

Leading at Light Speed is a new leadership book by Eric Douglas detailing the 10 Quantum Leaps to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.

Definition of how to Stimulate the Creative Flow was invented and assigned to #6 of the Quantum Leap.

Creative flow happens when people aren’t feeling afraid – afraid of losing their jobs, scared of losing status, scared of being left out, afraid of being punished. The dynamics of fear can be asphyxiating to an organization.

How pleasurable and desirable does this image of chocolate cake appear to you?

Research has shown that the more tempting this cake looks to you, the greater the chances you’ll take a bite of real cake, followed by another bite, and another. Before you know it, you may eventually find yourself like 34% of U.S. adults -- obese. But what if I told you that viewing this picture as not rewarding enough might also lead you down the path to obesity?

An exciting brain imaging and genetics study from the laboratory of Eric Stice at the Oregon Research Institute, recently published in the journal NeuroImage, has shown just that. Stice’s team had a group of adolescent girls imagine eating appetizing foods while viewing pictures of these foods. Over the following year, those whose brains showed less activation in areas known to respond to natural rewards like foods ended up gaining more weight -- though only if they had a particular genetic makeup.

President Barack Obama says it. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), says it. University and research leaders elsewhere are saying it, too.  The number one current rationale for extra research investment is that it will generate badly needed economic growth.

“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said Obama, addressing the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC last year. Getting down to the details, Collins has recently cited a report by Families USA, a Washington DC-based health- advocacy group, which found that every US$1 spent by the NIH typically generates $2.21 in additional economic output within 12 months.

Download the PDF

The Australian government has announced that the country's largest energy supplier and retailer, EnergyAustralia, will lead a $100 million "Smart Grid, Smart City" project in the state of New South Wales that will begin later this year. The project will be a little bit of everything when it comes to smart grid, from substation automation and charging stations for electric vehicles to home area networks and time-of-use pricing.

The focus for this demonstration will not be world-renowned Sydney, but rather the small city of Newcastle, about 100 miles to the north. The consortium led by EnergyAustralia also includes IBM Australia, AGL, GE Energy, TransGrid, Newcastle City Council and the NSW Government.

Although Newcastle is the center point of the project, there will also be trials in Scone, downtown Sydney, Ku-ring-gai and Newington. There will be a total of 50,000 smart meters and about 15,000 homes that will be given in-home energy management systems to track electricity, water use and CO2 emissions.

The National Science Foundation has released the first data from its new Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS). Dr. Arden Bement, Director of NSF, and Dr. Thomas Mesenbourg, Deputy Director of the U.S. Census Bureau, announced the release via a webcast on May 26, 2010. Read more in the report, U.S. Businesses Report 2008 Worldwide R&D Expense of $330 Billion: Findings from New NSF Survey (NSF 10-322).

Fifteen teams of Babson College students and recent alums are spending ten intensive weeks of their summer vacation taking part in Babson’s Summer Venture Program to strategize, shape and accelerate their entrepreneurial businesses. Eighty-one teams applied to the program.

The program’s organizer, the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson, is providing open work space for the teams to develop their business projects, network, assist one another and share resources. Many of the students live in Babson dorms so they can work around the clock to refine their ventures.

By 2015, it's estimated there will be one trillion connected devices. People with pacemakers will be monitored by wireless systems. In the near future, automobiles will run on 64-bit, multi-core processors, running millions of lines of code.

It's a future that IBM believes will be increasingly dominated by a "system of systems," where software scales on devices that interconnect to create a convergence of mechanical, electronic, and digital technologies.

It's another example of how data is changing all aspects of how products are developed. It's also a grand view of our future that almost seems like science fiction.

(Media-Newswire.com) - Espoo, Finland - Nokia today published its 2009 Sustainability report. The report contains facts, figures and examples of sustainability initiatives and provides a new level of transparency regarding social and environmental responsibility.

"This report gives some great insights into the work Nokia does to enhance sustainability," says Esko Aho, EVP Corporate Relations and Responsibility. "We believe that mobile technologies can contribute to economic growth while offering considerable opportunities to address climate change and sustainability."

Highlights from 2009 include the honor of being ranked as "World Technology Supersector Leader" by the widely recognized Dow Jones Sustainability Index, positioning Nokia as number one in sustainability across the entire global technology sector on the basis of a detailed corporate sustainability analysis.

Whole Foods has the most Twitter followers but Starbucks’ huge Facebook audience makes it the highest-ranking brand on social media, according to a ratings study done by London-based Famecount, a media measurement service that aggregates popularity across social media channels.

No surprise that Coca-Cola is second, but Famecount ranks it well behind Starbucks. Whole Foods came in at No. 3, based almost entirely on its 1.7 million followers on Twitter.

In just five months, a new economic development initiative funded last year by the Florida Legislature and administered locally by the Economic Development Council (EDC) of Collier County is already reaping benefits by helping established Florida companies get the tools they need to succeed and grow new jobs.

Thanks to the leaders of this year’s legislative session, in both the Florida Senate and House, which voted to include additional funding, this program will continue to positively impact Florida’s existing businesses.

As a firsthand witness to the impact the Economic Gardening program has already made on our region’s growth-oriented businesses, I applaud our legislative leaders for recognizing the potential of this program to create thousands of jobs in Florida.

The GrowFL Technical Assistance Program was unveiled by the Florida Economic Gardening Institute (FEGI) and partners, including the EDC of Collier County, Florida Economic Development Council, Enterprise Florida, Workforce Florida, the Florida High Tech Corridor Council and others late last year as a statewide effort to cultivate what are known as “second-stage” growth companies. These are companies that have grown beyond the entrepreneurial stage to become successful, but which could use some additional assistance to reach the next stage in the business growth cycle.