This week, President Obama will turn his focus from budget sequestration to immigration. A new Kauffman Foundation report released last week argues that making 75,000 Startup Visas available for current holders of H-1B and F-1 visas who start companies could create as much as 1.6 million U.S. jobs in the next 10 years. Will Washington act or, if they cannot agree, throw the baby out with the bath water?

I have long argued alongside smarter Americans than me that we need immigration policies to release pent-up entrepreneurial activity among foreign-born people in the United States, who have in the past accounted for a quarter of all successful high-tech startups in the country. More recently, in 2011, 24 of the top 50 venture-capital-backed companies in 2011 were founded or co-founded by immigrants, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. The pressure on policymakers has increased in this regard from many sectors because of the rapid pace of improvement in other nations’ startup ecosystems which lure startup entrepreneurs and their investors.

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

- George Bernard Shaw

The Business Administration recently released the 2012 Small Business Economy, its statistical report on small business. Because the report provides the latest available data on several key small business statistics, its publication provides me with an opportunity to update five charts that I have published at various times in various places, including Small Business Trends.

Employer Firms Continue to Shrink as a Fraction of all Businesses

As the figure below shows, businesses with employees comprised only 20.6 percent of all U.S. companies in 2010, down from 26.4 percent in 1997.

Small businesses contracting with the federal government will be first to feel the effect of the sequester, the name for across-the-board federal budget cuts that went into effect in Washington Friday.

For example, an estimated 35 percent of suppliers to the U.S. Defense Department are small businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

In 2011, the department awarded 20 percent of its contracts and 35 percent of subcontracts to small firms. Those small businesses benefited at the time, of course. And all of their employees and subcontractors benefited too.

Forbes has released its annual billionaires list. This is the 27th year the publication has put together the ranking. A majority of the individuals on the tech portion of Forbes' massive list are self-made. Bill Gates is still the richest man in technology, his net worth increased by $1 billion between 2012 and 2013.

Alex Fair, founder and CEO of MedStartr.com, says you must listen and ask the right questions.

"Who do you listen to most? The answer is the marketplace – you have to follow the money," he told attendees at the Innovation Symposium on Sunday at the 2013 HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition. 

Fair believes that active listening to customers is an essential aspect of innovation that is often overlooked.  

"Innovation is understanding what people want, determining how much of this is profitable, and then deciding what can be done with it," Fair said.

All too often we see companies coming to us with a new technological advancement that they are very excited about. Sadly, having a new technology does not guarantee a winning innovation. One needs to work hard at the front end to understand what the consumer needs and how the current market offer isn’t meeting those needs. Only against this backdrop can we hope to bring an idea to market that will be truly disruptive. The following article explains.

Flexible, stretchable electronic devices will help monitor athletes on the field, take medical monitoring away from the hospital bedside, and make portable electronics more comfortable—perhaps even wearable. But to do anything at all, they need a power source. Now researchers have demonstrated a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that can be stretched by as much as 300 percent.

Since 2011, researchers led by John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have demonstrated stretchable versions of just about every electronic component—circuits, sensors, electrodes, light-emitting diode arrays, and more. Rogers’s goal, in his lab and at his startup company, MC10 of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is to make high-performance, comfortable, wearable health monitors. These electronics devices might go on clothing, attach directly to the skin in the form of a temporary tattoo, or even fit inside the body, for example on the surface of the beating heart. For all such applications, stretchiness is vital.

A marathon runner approaches the finishing line, but suddenly the sweaty athlete collapses to the ground. Everyone probably assumes that this is because he has expended all energy in his muscles. What few people know is that it might also be a braking mechanism in the brain which swings into effect and makes us too tired to continue. What may be occurring is what is referred to as ‘central fatigue’.

“Our discovery is helping to shed light on the paradox which has long been the subject of discussion by researchers. We have always known that the neurotransmitter serotonin is released when you exercise, and indeed, it helps us to keep going. However, the answer to what role the substance plays in relation to the fact that we also feel so exhausted we have to stop has been eluding us for years. We can now see it is actually a surplus of serotonin that triggers a braking mechanism in the brain. In other words, serotonin functions as an accelerator but also as a brake when the strain becomes excessive,” says Associate Professor Jean-François Perrier from the Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, who has spearheaded the new research.

A remarkable, but mostly unnoticed, 2012 study found a powerful correlation between a community’s civic health and its economic well being. The analysis by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) and its partners found that the density of non-profits whose purpose was to encourage their members’ participation within the community   correlated strongly with the ability of a locality to withstand the effects of the Great Recession. The same analysis revealed that those municipalities having the greatest amount of “social cohesion,” defined as “interacting frequently with friends, family members, and neighbors,” also showed greater resilience in ameliorating job losses during economic downturns, independent of the density of their non-profit sector.

If there simply is no way to get a handle on the pre-money valuation in an angel round, the trick is to postpone the valuation/pricing decision until a future event, typically the first professional (some times called the Series A) round of financing, when the company is more mature, professional VCs are investing and perhaps competing to invest, in which case the price is fairly, established by definition through an informal auction.

Stop waiting for the perfect time to start something, or build your dream startup. Stop waiting until the time is perfect. Stop waiting until your product is perfect. Stop waiting for things to come to you, and start taking action.

I’ve heard all the excuses in the book:

I don’t have enough startup capital I don’t have a technical cofounder I don’t know where to start I’m too scared I don’t have any connections I’m too busy I don’t know how to build it

Not every venture capitalist is lamenting the venture industry’s thinning ranks.

Bain Capital Ventures, for one, has actively staffed up its partner ranks even as some of its peers see their own ranks dwindle.

“(There’s) less money being raised in the venture industry,” said Mike Krupka, co-managing partner at the Boston-based venture and growth firm, which over the years has backed companies such as Kiva Systems, LinkedIn and SurveyMonkey. “We’ve tried to take advantage of some of those market dynamics and build our business as some venture firms have struggled.”

Eric Johnson over at AllThingsD calls our attention to a “breathtaking” game, the pleasingly literally titled Throw Trucks With Your Mind, on Kickstarter. The game, beloved by those who try it, uses a NeuroSky headset to enable you to control objects onscreen with the sheer force of your mind. Multiple people who’ve played the game say it’s about as close as you’re going to get to feeling like a Jedi. Sounds like a winner, right?

And yet the game has only scored, as of this writing, roughly half of its $40,000 goal. The project has 12 days to go, but unless it catches a wave of popular support—totally a possibility, admittedly—it seems quite possible that it won’t get funded. Of course, Kickstarter is full of projects that, it would seem, rightly failed to meet their goal. BuzzFeed has amusingly rounded up 37 of the “saddest” examples here. Indeed, a survey last year showed that about 41 percent of Kickstarter projects fail. But it seems that Throw Trucks With Your Mind genuinely deserves to rise above that graveyard.

It might be easier to explain the 50 Disruptive Companies project by starting with what it is not. It is not a quantitative assessment; we don’t think R&D spending or numbers of patents and new products necessarily reveal what’s most meaningful about a company’s innovative power. It also is not a ranking. We don’t mean to suggest that any of these 50 companies is more important or better than the others.

I’d like to respond to Tim Kastelle’s article through the eyes of  Marie Curie, the only person to win Nobel prizes in two separate sciences. Curie once said this about the importance of dreamers:

“Humanity certainly needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.”

The explosion in smartphone use is leaving businesses vulnerable to cyberattacks since almost half of their employees' mobile phones can become a target, according to new research. The 2012 Cyber Security Risk Report – published by Hewlett-Packard at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco – found that mobile phone vulnerabilities rose significantly (68%) from 2011 to 2012, mirroring the growth of mobile applications and the use of smartphones.

Of the mobile applications tested by HP, 48% of them were found to be vulnerable to unauthorised access.

For the past few years Jason Calacanis' LAUNCH festival has been one of the premier venues to -- you guessed it -- launch a hot new startup in the hopes of attracting serious investment dollars.

When the JOBS Act was signed into law last year, Calacanis saw an opportunity to broaden the potential sources of those investment dollars by incorporating a real-time, live crowdfunding campaign into the annual event.

Phil Heath is the current face of professional super heavyweight bodybuilding. A two-time, back-to-back Mr. Olympia, Heath has pushed the limits of the human physique to its extreme.

It takes a special type of drive, some would say “crazy”, to make it in the sport of bodybuilding. Heath embodies this drive as well as the unrelenting spirit found in many an entrepreneur taking on the challenges of building a business from scratch.

Whether you’re sculpting a physique, or crafting a business, the lessons learned on the way to success are often similar.

Whether it’s a business or personal interaction, multiple studies show that as much as 50-65% of the communication is nonverbal. That means that people addicted to text messages, twitter, and email may be sending only half the message, and receivers often misinterpret even that half.

Yet the use of SMS text messaging for all purposes, including business, has grown consistently worldwide since it was introduced 20 years ago, to an estimated 7 trillion/year, according to the Quora statistics website. Amazingly, it leveled off in 2012, only due to Twitter, which has already superseded SMS texting in volume of messages. Email volume just continues to increase.