The University of Utah’s Technology Commercialization Office has changed its name to the Technology and Venture Commercialization.

University officials said the new name emphasizes the organization’s dual mission in commercializing inventions through partnerships with existing companies and creating new ventures.

The first Ruby on Rails month-long intensive programming class offered by the newly formed CodeFellows organization earlier this year had three women out of about 20 participants. Karen Keasler was one of those three women. And now, CodeFellows is offering a women-only programming course this summer. “I loved it. It was really a great experience to spend an entire month doing coding from 9 to 5,” Keasler said.

Our patent system — as enshrined in our Constitution — is meant to encourage innovation and invention. It was designed to reward Americans for their hard work, risk-taking and genius. It has spurred progress that has driven economic growth and transformed the way we live, work, communicate, and stay healthy. But in recent years, there has been an explosion of abusive patent litigation designed not to reward innovation and enforce intellectual property, but to threaten companies in order to extract settlements based on questionable claims.

There are a growing number of companies, commonly called “patent trolls,” who employ these litigation tactics as a business model — costing the economy billions of dollars and undermining American innovation. In the last two years, the number of lawsuits brought by patent trolls has nearly tripled, and account for 62% of all patent lawsuits in America. All told, the victims of patent trolls paid $29 billion in 2011, a 400% increase from 2005 — not to mention tens of billions dollars more in lost shareholder value.

It may seem as if entrepreneurship and venture capital are exclusively tied to the east and west coasts. In many cases this is true. A recent report derived by SSTI from PricewaterhouseCoopers Moneytree Survey Data shows that California attracted 53% of all venture capital dollars in 2012 in the United States followed by Maryland and New York City with a combined 19% of  VC investment dollars.

For recent graduates pursuing a career associated with the world of startup life, it may seem as if the coasts are the only places to go to start or join a new business.

Ever since the dot.com bubble burst, Oklahomans have been determined to build our own innovation economy — an economy that is diversified from our traditional reliance on oil and aerospace.

We are doing a good job of starting up high-growth companies in new sectors.

We've tackled the problem of access to startup capital through two state supported funds managed by i2E that provide proof-of-concept and seed stage capital. SeedStep Angels, an investor network we have developed of about 30 successful Oklahomans, provides additional capital and mentoring to entrepreneurs.

Washington University in St. Louis will be the anchor tenant in a $73 million laboratory and research facility projected to open at the end of the year in the CORTEX bioscience district.

The conversion of this facility, a former telephone factory at 4240 Duncan Ave., kicks off phase two of the CORTEX district. The building, recently renamed @4240, is being renovated by Wexford Science & Technology, a national research park developer in Baltimore.

In many places around the world, the topics of innovation, start-up ecosystems and entrepreneurship have become common and fashionable areas of discussion. Almost everyone has debates around how to encourage innovation, how to grow the start-up ecosystem, how entrepreneurship can be encouraged and how entrepreneurial activities can be nurtured to grow. Having just spent some time in India talking to some of the players in this ecosystem and attending conferences, India is no different.  

There’s no shortage of daily news on these subjects, with some activity or another that moves its tech cities like Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and others closer to emulating Silicon Valley in some ways (see the Mashable article on Pune).  Just in the last week, mobile start-up accelerator Tandem Capital announced it was launching in Bangalore, India, and will back up to 20 early stage ventures with seed capital of US $200k each. Last year, Startup Village was opened in the city of Kochi, in Kerala state, an incubator with 1Gbps internet connectivity, to encourage telecoms and IT start-ups.

If optimism for entrepreneurship in the United States were plotted on a bar chart, the year 2012 would tower over previous years, at least according to the authors of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

In its 2012 United States Report, the authors said that large numbers of Americans saw opportunity in entrepreneurship in 2012, with Total Entrepreneurial Activity at its highest level since the survey started in 1999.

For decades, the conventional wisdom among local officials pursuing employment growth was to attract a large firm to relocate. ‘Smokestack chasing’ often leads to zero-sum games where regional governments bid against each other to provide substantial incentives to large companies making location choice decisions (e.g. Greenstone et al. 2010).

The success of ‘entrepreneurial clusters’ in recent decades has challenged this wisdom. Now many policymakers state that they want their regions ‘to be the next Silicon Valley’. This new emphasis on bottom-up strategies has led to extensive efforts to seed local entrepreneurship (e.g. Lerner 2009). Today’s policymakers are especially eager to announce the launch of an entrepreneurial cluster in a hot industry, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, or advanced manufacturing.

On his first day as the new president and CEO of EmergeMemphis, Carlton Crothers talked about a grand vision of “creating an innovation ecosystem” in Memphis.

Crothers is the new head of an organization formed in 2001 that serves as an incubator for high-growth companies. He comes to Emerge from Innovation Ecosystem Design in Dallas, with a long career of entrepreneurship-related endeavors behind him.

Few gadgets have generated as much excitement and hostility as Google Glass, a voice-activated computer-monitor combo worn on eyeglass frames. Now being tested by early adopters, Glass is an ambitious attempt to advance “wearable computing.” It’s also a milestone for Thad Starner, a Georgia Tech professor who has been building and wearing head-mounted computers since 1993. A decade ago, he showed Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin a clunky version of such a device; in 2010 they hired Starner to be a technical lead for Project Glass. He met recently with MIT Technology Review IT editor Rachel Metz.

International news agency Bloomberg is taking a shot at the venture capital game with its new fund, Bloomberg Beta, which was launched yesterday and is designed to invest in early-stage startups.

Headed up by Roy Bahat, the former head of IGN Entertainment and current chairman of Ouya – the open source, Kickstarter-funded video game hardware startup — the US$75 million fund has already invested in nine companies such as ProsperWorks, Codecademy and Newsle.

Employee of the month and "spot award"-type bonuses leave it to managers to decide who’s doing a good job. If they like a particular employee, lucky them; if not, tough luck. But with Bonus.ly, a peer-to-peer bonus scheme, employees get to decide who the top performers are.

It works like this: A team-leader goes to the site, signs up, and sets an overall budget. Bonus.ly recommends about $100 per employee, per month. The staff then reward each other in, say, $10 or $20 amounts. At the end of the month, the company settles the balances.

For a moment, let’s not think about the @ symbol in the way we usually think of it, as the fulcrum of an email address, the navel connecting us to our Twitter handles, or even just the weird a hanging out above the 2 key.

Let’s imagine it instead blinking upon a screen. It exists as our focal point in a Metaverse of text. It’s a world with endless layers, the geometries, architectures, and inhabitants of which are likewise described by symbols on our keyboard. And in this world, @ is our avatar: a logogram of power that, once inscribed, represents our identity in an entirely digital world.

How long can this go on? According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the 17-nation euro zone remains the "weakest link" in our global economy after years of economic stagnation, mired in high unemployment, plagued with stalled or contracting economies, and paralyzed by political dysfunction. Similarly, The Economist also lambasts eerily complacent EU leaders for "sleepwalking through an economic wasteland."

Climbing the organizational ladder often requires employees to work long hours and deal with difficult and complex issues. Some days on the job are likely fun and positive and other days are tension-filled and stressful. A common dilemma for many people is how they manage all of the competing demands in work and life and avoid letting any negative effects of work spill over into their personal lives.

Abigail Barrow says there’s been a lot of discussion recently about whether the future of drug and medical device companies will be anything like the past.

The founding director of Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center (MTTC) says that’s why the theme of Wednesday’s Massachusetts Life Sciences Innovation (MALSI) Day, the biggest day for life sciences startups and innovation in the state, will be “Business as Usual or Brave New World.”

May 27, 2013 in Crowdfunding State legislators in North Carolina continue to work on an investment crowdfunding bill. (For context, see this earlier post about the North Carolina initiative.)

You can find the text of both the original and a more recent substitute bill here.

I didn't see a redline or any committee report summarizing the changes that had been made to the original bill, so I ran a redline myself and posted it here on AWS.

Is humanity getting smarteror dumber with time? The answer may be both.

While IQ scores are rising at a remarkable rate, humans' underlying genetic potential for smarts could be on the decline, a new study suggests. The research found that by one measure of intelligence, the Victorians had modern folk beat.

Entrepreneurs play an important role in society. They identify and exploit opportunities to provide goods and services that were previously unavailable, or in limited supply. In order to launch a successful business, it is essential to plan well, stay motivated and execute to perfection.

There is no specific set of skills required to become an entrepreneur. These can be learned and developed over time. For that, it is imperative that you and your business venture survive for long enough. A startup does not have many resources and in its initial days; its biggest resource is the entrepreneur himself. Consider the following points to evaluate your entrepreneurial readiness and examine if you are up for the journey: