The third and final wave of provisions of the America Invents Act (AIA) will become effective on March 16, 2013, completing the overhaul of United States patent law that began with enactment of the AIA on September 16, 2011. These provisions will move the United States to a first-to-file system, greatly expand the definition of prior art and usher in the use of post grant review.

First-to-File

Beginning in mid-March, the United States Patent Office (Patent Office) will use a first-to-file system rather than the first-to-invent system that is currently in place. This means inventors will no longer be able to “swear behind” the date that they first conceived of their invention. Rather, priority will be determined by the patent application’s effective filing date — the date the application was filed or the filing date of the earliest application for which the application can claim priority. As a result, once the AIA takes full effect on March 16, 2013, speed to the Patent Office will be paramount, and clients will likely need to file patent applications earlier and may need to file follow-on applications more often than their current procedures require.

When longtime entrepreneur Beth Marcus set out to raise money for her latest venture she went straight past the traditional underwriters in Boston venture capital community.

Instead she raised small sums each from a chiropractor, marketing consultant, former day-care provider, and a score of other backers not normally thought of as kingmakers in the local technology world. They are angel investors, and their ranks in Boston are swelling fast as the tech economy goes deep into another boom cycle and hot young start-ups are selling for millions of dollars.

Everyone has to be a nerd about something. For some people, it’s math. For others, it’s baseball stats. For me, it’s venture capital.

I may have been the only person who gasped last week when I read in my email that Mark Heesen– head of the National Venture Capital Association was resigning. “This is a huge deal!” I said.

This is a guest post by Julia Plevin, a VentureBeat contributor and a ‘marketing maven’ at Luvocracy.

There’s a widely held belief that startups are fun places to work and all employees become overnight millionaires. But once you get over some of the perks –- like free snacks and no meetings before 10 a.m. –- it becomes clear that startups are actually a grind.

And for every Instagram or Airbnb that seems to materialize out of thin air, there’s tons more startups that trudge along slowly. In fact, the median time from initial VC investment to IPO is 10 years. That leaves a lot of time for workplace politics, blunders, boredom, and mistakes.

Equating entrepreneurship with a virus, Ashok Rao, chairman, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Global said that it is something which one either has or doesn't have. "It is not hereditary and very few have it and it must be encouraged, because it has been these entrepreneurs who, with their innovations, have saved the world again and again after every economic slow down," Rao said.

Rao was speaking during TiEcon Central India 2013 organised by the Nagpur chapter of TiE, a two-day entrepreneurship conference being held in the city and being aired live in all the TiE centers across the globe. The theme of the conference was 'Thriving in Turbulent Times'.

The House of Lords, the second chamber of the UK Parliament, is conducting an inquiry into the effectiveness of European Commission proposals relating to research and innovation. Last year the Select Committee on the European Union examined a number of Commission proposals for projects and strategies containing a strong emphasis on research and innovation with the aim of stimulating growth and jobs as part of Europe’s 2020 strategy. So is research and innovation the way out of Europe’s current woes? And is the way to administer and fund research and innovation working?

We know that the economic returns from research can be sizeable and social challenges such as population aging immense. The only game in town is for Europe to invest in research and innovation. This is key to navigating ourselves out of the lost decade of austerity and improving the health and wellbeing of Europe’s 500 million citizens. The challenge is that many regions globally are also betting their future on the knowledge economy — be it in the Middle East, the Guangzhou Development District in China, Singapore, or elsewhere. So the daunting challenge for Europe’s policymakers is to be world’s finest knowledge-based economy.

A few days ago a reporter for Investor’s Business Daily contacted me by email, asking several questions about innovation. I didn’t have the time to answer all of them, so I asked him what he really wanted to know. He replied that what he really wanted was a bottom line answer to the question of what makes the most difference in a company’s ability to innovate. As is my inclination, I reframe such questions to be about what isn’t there, versus what is.

Here’s my reply:

If I think about “why Johnny can’t innovate,” i.e. the things that prevent a company from cultivating a companywide culture of innovation, it would come down to a half-dozen things:

As Kendall Square gains altitude as a tech and biotech epicenter, its neighbors — including MIT — are finding educational and entrepreneurial opportunities there.

The Kendall Square Association’s (KSA) annual meeting on Wednesday — which included a keynote presentation by MIT President L. Rafael Reif — focused on ways MIT and others can foster, and benefit from, Kendall’s rising innovation ecosystem.

WHEN I was a child, I liked to play video games. On my brother’s Atari, I played Night Driver. On his Apple II, I played Microwave, Aztec and Taipan! When I got to go to the arcade, I played Asteroids and Space Invaders. Enlarge This Image

Jacob Thomas Here’s what I learned: At a certain level on Microwave, the music from the bar scene in Star Wars comes on. If I am at the front line when aliens descend to Earth, we’ll all be in trouble. Also, dealing opium in the South China Sea is more lucrative than trading in commodities.

In short, I didn’t learn much of anything. My parents didn’t expect me to. I just had fun.

If the basketball court is a stage, one of its star performers is often the head coach, arms waving, face red, mouth open wide as he shouts over the din of the crowd. Some of that emotion is directed at officials, who say the antics from the coach’s box have become worse: in a memo last year, John W. Adams, the national coordinator of men’s basketball officiating for the N.C.A.A., encouraged officials to crack down on offenders. But the coaches are usually trying to get the attention of their players. Jay Bilas, a college basketball analyst for ESPN who played at Duke under Mike Krzyzewski, says that while Coach K might have been withering, he was constructive: “He’d say, ‘That was a bad bleeping shot,’ and, ‘Let’s do it right the next time!’ ” And did Bilas ever shout back? “Never,” he says. “What would I possibly yell back?”

It’s fun to ponder the awesome disruptive power that equity crowdfunding might have over the venture capital industry. The very people who spend their days plotting the disruption of any industry touched by technology are themselves displaced by hordes of technology-enabled angel investors. How ironic.

VCs are even playing along. Take FirstMark Capital Managing Director Lawrence Lenihan’s response when asked if crowdfunding platforms threaten his business: “Why should I as a VC not view that my industry is going to be threatened?”

Raising money is hard. Despite the proliferation of fundraising websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the truth of the matter is that this newfangled crowdfunding still works best when you bring your own crowd. Just witness the Veronica Mars Movie Project, which hit its $2 million funding goal within 10 hours of launch. How? Well, this was a project that already had its own built-in fan base.

You may think that Kickstarter is where you can float an idea and see if there are enough people out there who believe in your idea to make it happen. To some extent, that is true — you have an idea for a book or album or game or marionette theater that has a minimum cost to produce, and you want to see if there are enough people who would pay for it to make it worth actually producing. Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing funding is exactly designed for this.

Grumpy Cat, the feline Internet sensation, had people lining up for hours to see her at the recent South by Southwest Conference.  And her owners aren’t taking any chances over Grumpy Cat’s intellectual property rights.  They have filed for U.S. trademark protection for Grumpy Cat.

Grumpy Cat’s real name is Tardar Sauce.  By all accounts she is a sweet-tempered cat but has a naturally sourpuss expression on her face.  She is owned by Tabatha and Bryan Bundesen, sister and brother, of Arizona and Ohio.

We live in a mobile world. That much is obvious. The momentum has shifted steadily in favour of gadgets and services that are portable or mobile and those that deliver networking capabilities and entertainment. And that’s changing the way we live in profound ways that you might not have even noticed yet. According to tech research company Gartner, the most profound changes are occurring in the way people organise their lives and the spaces they live in.

Roughly three years after announcing that he was expanding his California bioscience incubator to San Antonio, InCube Labs founder Mir Imran may wish he had made the move even sooner.

InCube has found willing investors, as well as corporate and community support, in the nation’s seventh largest city. That has allowed the organization to adjust its expectations and strategies in a way that could prove to be hugely beneficial for the life sciences entity and for San Antonio long-term.

An Australian startup called Sharetapes Rick Rolled its way to fame with a Vine that Mashable and NowThisNews deemed the best for any startup at South by Southwest this year.

The Vine, below, tersely outlines the company's business model: NFC- and QR code-enabled physical cards that hold information like songs and videos.

In a study, college-age women who were concerned about their eating behaviors reported that moods worsened after bouts of disordered eating, said Kristin Heron, research associate at the Survey Research Center.

“There was little in the way of mood changes right before the unhealthy eating behaviors,” said Heron. “However, negative mood was significantly higher after these behaviors.”

Linas Sabaliauskas, attorney-at-law and partner of TRINITI, a Baltic alliance of law firms, writes that in the near future venture capital markets in the Baltic States are going to expand even more rapidly, providing new opportunities and opening new possibilities to the players of the private equity and venture capital markets.

Venture capital has become more and more relevant and its importance tends to grow in the Baltic States. One of the main reasons which stimulates venture capital growth is the support of the governments of the Baltic States and the European Union.

There is no doubt that venture capital is beneficial for the local economy because of its stimulation of the development of IT, biotechnology, clean tech companies, creation of new job positions as well as new sources of tax revenues for the state. For this reason European Union and member states support and finance the establishment of the venture capital funds.

After winning a competition, I had the chance to fly down to South Africa and spend three days with my idol, Richard Branson.

It all started in 2011, when Branson released a book “Screw Business as Usual,” where he argued that for-profit businesses should play a role in addressing today’s social and environmental challenges. To celebrate the release, he asked startups from around the world to submit their business model and explain how it will change the world for the better.

With all the buzz these days about how sexy and cool the enterprise has become, there is a segment of business customers that startups are overlooking: small businesses. Small businesses tend to have far less capital than large enterprises, but as customers, they offer startups a number of advantages that make them ideal customers to focus on.

However, selling to a small business is nothing like selling to a large corporation. The interests of your target are often quite different from one context to the next. If your business is built to serve them, you will need a sales approach that is designed to address their main concerns head-on. Below are some of the advantages that make small businesses such desirable customers to have: