Across the globe, 133 early stage venture funds are on the road seeking $10.7 billion in capital. Some, apparently, are meeting with success.

The figures above come from Preqin, which pointed out this week that a new fling with young-company investing may be at hand. From January to July this year, 40 early stage funds closed on $7.4 billion, Preqin reports. This includes the monster $1.5 billion Andreessen Horowitz Fund III, which to be fair is likely to stray from just pure early stage investing.

NSBA and its high-tech arm, the Small Business Technology Council (SBTC), recently gathered more than 500 signatures from small-business owners and various small-business organizations across the country urging Congress and the administration to call for significant changes to proposed rules governing the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

The proposed rules, put forth by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), were prompted by passage of compromise reauthorizing legislation for both programs back in December 2011.

Small and medium-sized businesses account for the vast majority of jobs in America--plus, a lot of political rhetoric about what's wrong with the stagnant economy. To get a fresh read on the state of this vital sector, I chatted recently with Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, the software company whose products include QuickBooks, TurboTax, Quicken and the personal-finance site Mint.com. 

Since Intuit's customer base includes millions of entrepreneurs and business owners, the company intently monitors small-business trends. Here are some excerpts from my conversation with Smith:

Every six months, Cara Altimus, Ph.D., asks herself: Am I making progress? Is what I’m doing relevant? Am I likely to get a job one day?

Eighteen months into a five-year postdoctoral position in the lab of David Foster, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dr. Altimus has reason for concern. Postdocs are finding it harder to land academic positions, forcing them to take multiple postdocs, or leave academia for just-as-hard-to-find industry jobs.

Dr. Altimus’ research examines reactivation of previous spatial experience, believed to be a memory trace, by recording large populations of neurons in the rodent brain. She isn’t actively seeking an industry job and isn’t open to doing a second postdoc.

A slick new Internet and TV provider just stomped into Kansas City residents' living rooms. For $120 a month plus a $300 installation fee (that's waived if you sign up now and commit to two years), customers get the fastest broadband web access in the country, hundreds of channels (minus HBO, AMC, and some other notables), and a DVR-like service that records up to eight shows or movies at once and stores 500 hours of HDTV--or your photos, video, and music, which you can then access from any device in your home. Along with the service comes a shiny new tablet loaded with the remote control app that lets you search all of your stored content (it also works on Android and iOS devices). 

Do you love going to events, but find yourself stranded during happy hour, tongue-tied and tucked in a corner? Initiating and maintaining conversations while networking is a necessary skill, and one you can easily improve with these simple tips.

Mastering small talk will help you find common ground to create a mini-bond with new contacts. Small talk may feel trite and unimportant, but it's the small talk that leads to the big talk.

Ideally small talk will uncover common interests, business alignments, the six degrees that separate you, potential need for your product or service, and basically whether or not you enjoy each other's company. The goal is not to become best friends or a new client on the spot. Although it's nice when those instant connections happen, usually that's not the case.

Clayton Christensen's book How Will You Measure Your Life has turned into a well-deserved best seller. Beyond drawing individual lessons from the book, corporate leaders should turn the central framing question on their organizations — asking how they will measure their company's lives.

The book traces back to Christensen's 2010 Harvard Business Review article, which was based on a speech he gave to that year's graduating Harvard Business School class. "Over the years I've watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I've seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children," Christensen wrote. "I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them."

Want to see an interactive infographic all about you, your online activity and personal interests?

Vizify launched on Thursday a graphical bio service that pulls personal data from all your social networks to create a snapshot of who you are.

The free service analyzes your data and updates across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare, and displays it creatively on one page, so it can easily be shared with potential employers, clients and even dates.

Mitt Romney is growing his own. Well, sort of. His old firm, Bain Capital, is taking on the problem of hiring talented tech workers by training them itself. Bain’s StartUp Academy, launched by the company’s VC arm Bain Capital Ventures, recruits students from top universities and plants them in positions at the tech companies it funds.

StartUp Academy’s current class consists of 21 students culled from 779 applicants from schools like Duke, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and USC. They’ll spend nine months in full-time or intern-level jobs at companies in the Bain Capital Ventures portfolio, taking time out to attend events and meet startup founders. Proselytizing for the 2013 class begins in the fall.

Every entrepreneur wants to know how they can improve their odds on the road to success, and why some entrepreneurs seem to be able to squeeze success out of even a marginal business case. Most experts agree that is has lot to do with your level of passion, determination, and innovation, modulated by a strong focus on reality, common sense, and street smarts.

John Bradberry, in his book “6 Secrets To Startup Success” explores many of these attributes, especially passion, and defines some useful principles to help enthusiastic entrepreneurs squeeze the most out of their passion, while not being trapped by it. Every existing and budding entrepreneur should internalize these reality principles:

The “bottom of the pyramid” concept is the theory that even the poorest markets in the world can be revenue generating for companies if they tailor their product and packaging to these markets.

This concept was introduced by the Late Professor of the University of Michigan, C. K. Prahlad, in his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Some well known examples of products that cater to these markets include micro-credit products and selling shampoos in sachets.

Google announced on Thursday that it will get into the cable TV business, saying its previously announced build-out of a fiber-optic network in Kansas City, Kansas, and neighboring Kansas City, Missouri, will include television as well as high-speed Internet services. 

The move is a direct challenge to high-speed Internet and cable TV providers, who have long enjoyed a monopoly on their services in many communities across the country, and typically offer much slower Internet access speeds. And it could represent a major business expansion for the search giant—even though Google has painted the buildup as more of a charity project meant to drive tech innovation and get more people surfing the Web at higher speeds.

The economic crisis has hit all workers hard. But the creative class — which includes professionals in the fields of science and technology, design and architecture, arts, entertainment and media, and healthcare, law, management and education — has fared better than most.

Unemployment for this group never grew much higher than 5 percent, while the national rate surged to more than double that and triple for blue collar workers. 

The question of food security in the world, on account of galloping population growth, seemed to be one of the most pressing concerns at the recently concluded ESOF 2012 (Euroscience Open Forum) in Dublin.

By 2050 the global population is expected to reach 9 billion with the majority of this increase in our part of the developing world – in Asia. In order to feed this massive number of mouths, speakers at the forum indicated that a huge rise in food production of about 50% was required. The question in everyone’s mind was, if we cant feed the starving 1 billion today how can we ramp up for the increased numbers in 2050?

Our bodies would not be able to function properly without bacteria. They are found throughout our bodies and aid in many processes such as digestion. The human digestive tract is littered with 000’s of so called ‘friendly-bacteria’. These friendly bacteria help digest food and ensure harmful bacteria do not build up. If the harmful bacteria do build up an infection may begin. I imagine every single one of you reading this have had an infection of some sort, from a typical throat or chest infection to something a little more embarrassing! My point is, in the world we live in, what do we do when we have an infection? We go to the doctors and get a prescription for some antibiotics. Within a week the infection will have gone and we are back to normal. But what would, or what will we do without antibiotics?

Biologist David Gruber dives the glowing ocean to discover new fluorescent molecules that could one day find their way to the lab bench.

SBA has just concluded the public comment period for the size rules on the SBIR program.  As we had hoped, the input and comments we received on the rules were robust and included a wide range of opinions.   As we now begin the process of digesting the comments and evaluating how to change the proposed rules, I’d like to take this opportunity to let people know where we go from here.

Here are four things you should know about the proposed SBIR size rules:

SBA was given a tight, congressionally mandated timeline.  Congress gave SBA aggressive deadlines to draft the rules and get them out to the public.  And we had significant work to do to turn the statute into detailed, practicable working regulations. In order to meet these deadlines, SBA took the approach of drafting the rules and as quickly as possible putting them out for public comment in order to get reaction and input that will shape what the final rules look like.

Tom Walker, CEO and president of i2E, is wrapping up his 14-year tenure with the nonprofit company to take a similar job in Ohio.   

Even as Tom Walker, president of i2E Inc., recounts his proud accomplishments with the entrepreneur support firm over the past 14 years, he cautions that the state could do more.

Walker, 43, will leave i2E next month to take a similar position in Columbus, Ohio. The firm he helped found has grown from an entity that simply aimed to help startup companies with business plans to an organization that manages about $40 million in capital that is invested in those early stage Oklahoma companies.

Even before Governor Patrick announced the Massachusetts Big Data Initiative in May, the state had already established itself as the big data capital of the world. We have 12,000 people employed in the sector in more than 100 companies. We have big money flowing from venture capital ($350 million in 2011) to fund local startups offering new solutions. We are also already home to storage giant EMC, which lends further credibility to this burgeoning field.

But while this is all good news, there remains a major hurdle: Most enterprises have no idea what to do with all of this data that’s growing exponentially every second. And big data companies cannot sell their products without doing a better job of explaining “so what?”

Venture capitalists exhibit some strange behaviors, but none is more bizarre than the near-inevitable scheming to remove a company's founder-CEO. Odder still is that these plans are often hatched just as the company begins to really perform.

The process, instituted by a particular stripe of venture capitalist, represents the acme of "adult supervision" by the VC, a destroy-the-village-to-save-it moment of investor heroism. The show trial brings rote charges — the CEO is too autocratic, too visionary (crazy), late on monetization, late to exit, and far too young — with succession by a gray-haired realist as the inevitable penalty. The CEO, the VC reminds us, serves at the pleasure of the board. Sensible in theory, this strategy almost always destroys value in practice.