Brad Feld, a venture capitalist at Foundry Group, noted advocate for entrepreneurs and author of the book Startup Communities, has been lauded for his hands-on role in helping to make Boulder, Colo., a thriving hub for high-tech startups. Today he announces a venture that will extend his support for entrepreneurs about 600 miles to the east — to metropolitan Kansas City.

Feld this week completed the purchase of a three-bedroom house in the Hanover Heights neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan. The area just off of State Line Road has gained renown as the nation's first Google "Fiberhood," meaning Google's 1-gigabit fiber-optic cable is installed and serving up internet connection speeds 100 times faster than broadband.

You can run, but you can’t hide. Even with all the tools we have at our disposal to help us block out these annoying messages, you’ve probably seen spam from marketers weasel its way into your mailbox, your inbox, your news feed, or your phone.

To assure you that you’re not alone, we’ve assembled 14 shocking statistics about spammy marketing to make the case for why all of us (consumers and marketers alike) need to take notice of the implications of spam. And here at HubSpot, we're working hard to practice what we preach. Today, we launched our Make Love Not Spam campaign to support the creation of lovable marketing. As part of the campaign, we've created an ebook, two SlideShare presentations (here and here), and even a t-shirt to spread the word that, as marketers, we have the power to make marketing something that people love, not hate.

Innovate Health Tech NYC invites software and hardware developers and other innovators living or working in New York City to create new commercially viable technologies that solve urgent health care problems. Individuals, teams, and companies with 10 or fewer employes can compete, and will be required to demonstrate a functioning prototype of a pre-commercial technology in their submission. Technologies may include, but are not limited to, healthcare analytics tools, clinical workflow management tools, mobile health applications, and wireless health monitoring devices. Contestants are encouraged, but not required, to address healthcare priority areas identified by New York City.

The technology included in your submission must not have been publicly available, commercially or for free, prior to January 28, 2013.

The Virginia Beach Economic Development Authority and Hampton Roads Partnership have joined together to launch the Virginia Beach Economic Gardening Initiative. The economic gardening program will allow local entrepreneurs access to resources and information typically only available to larger, more established companies.  Specifically, the Virginia Beach initiative will provide high-tech research tools so participating companies can analyze their strategy and market dynamics. The program includes access to advice from seasoned entrepreneurs through a partnership with the Service Corps of Retired Executives.

One of the most important turning points in the social history of the United States occurred at the beginning of the 1940s. This is not about Pearl Harbor or the Second World War, but  rather about the economic, housing and transportation advances that have produced more affluence for more people than ever before in the world.

After being delayed by World War II, people began moving from the overcrowded cities to spacious (for that time) houses in the suburbs. They increasingly traveled to work and other destinations by car. These trends were at least two decades old at the time, but had been put on hold by the Great Depression. The prewar city (metropolitan area) was considerably denser, more oriented to mass transit and largely monocentric. By 2010, all major metropolitan areas had developed an urban form that was overwhelmingly suburban and polycentric, with the rise of edge cities and the even greater dispersion of edgeless cities. On average, areas outside the traditional downtowns (central business districts) accounted for 90 percent of metropolitan employment in 2000, ranging from a high of more than 95 percent in metropolitan areas like Phoenix, San Jose and Tampa-St. Petersburg to a low of 80 percent in New York.

Since its launch in 2011, Rock Health has made its mark in the healthcare field by ushering a number of innovative ideas from the drawing board to the marketplace. The digital health startup incubator has been a fixture at the past two mHealth Summits, and is part of the reason that funding for digital health companies jumped some 45 percent in the past year. Recently, mHIMSS.org Editor Eric Wicklund spoke to Amy Puliafito, who leads Rock Health's research, social media and marketing efforts, to learn a little more about the organization

Q. How did Rock Health get its start – describe the organization's history and goals and how it operates.

Rock Health was founded at Harvard Business School by Halle Tecco and Nate Gross, MD, who worked with Professor Bob Higgins, an experienced healthcare investor and founder of Highland Capital. Rock Health launched publicly in March 2011 at SXSW, and its inaugural portfolio class kicked off in June 2011.

A piece in Forbes this week calls attention to a recent trend in technology commercialization at universities: the use of crowdfunding.

The article focused on a collaboration between the University of Utah’s Technology Commercialization Office and the crowdfunding site RocketHub, which resulted in the University Tech Vault, a portal specifically for projects that come out of the university.

Come to find, there are several other sites aimed at supporting donation-based crowdfunding for research projects, some of them created in partnerships with, or entirely around, universities. Most of the ones I found are still in beta mode, which demonstrates the newness of this alternative method of funding research. Feel free to leave any I missed in the comments.

For more than 16 years, Buzz Marketing Group has been a leader in identifying Millennials’ trends and insights. Each January, we publish our trend predictions for the coming year. Our biggest trends in the past have included Wharholism, Instanity, Massclusivity, and Conscious Consumption.

Below is our list of trends in 2013 — and what each might mean to your brand this year:

1. Social Voice.

When it comes to their privacy, Millennials will demand to be heard even more in 2013. SOPA, PIPA, and other grassroots campaigns against privacy policies at companies like Facebook are only the beginning. As it becomes easier for individuals to rally against big companies, they will continue to do so. 

As Valentine’s Day approaches the occasion begs the question: what does it take for two companies in the biopharmaceutical industry to merge? Of all the things that could come between them, how do a biotech startup and suitable partner find each other in this crazy, mixed up world?

Like any good marriage, the reasons that bring a couple together span of a good merger is more than meets the eye. The companies involved share similar goals and work hard to ensure the union endures. But there are all sorts of things That was the gist of an insightful panel discussion at the BIO CEO conference in New York. Among the panelists were: Michael Margolis, a managing director with ROTH Capital Partners, Effie Toshav, partner with Fenwick & West H.Thomas Watkins, former president and CEO of Human Genome Sciences until it was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline, Michael Gilman, a senior vice president at Biogen Idec and Corrine Epperly, the director of strategy, alliances and transactions at Bristol Myers-Squibb (NYSE: BMS)

When Karl Ronn recently said, "Companies that think they have an innovation problem don't have an innovation problem. They have a leadership problem," I listened carefully.

I featured Ronn, a former P&G executive (and current executive coach and entrepreneur), in several places in The Little Black Book of Innovation, most notably for his rant against the evils of focus groups. Ronn is thoughtful, widely read, a seasoned practitioner, and a great communicator.

Ronn's basic idea was that four decades of academic research and two decades of conscious implementation of that work have provided robust, actionable answers to many pressing innovation questions. Practitioners have robust tools to discover opportunities to innovate, design, and execute experiments to address key strategic uncertainty; to create underlying systems to enable innovation in their organization; and to manage the tension between operating today's business and creating tomorrow's businesses. Large companies like IBM, Syngenta, Procter & Gamble, 3M, and Unilever show that innovation can be a repeatable discipline. Emerging upstarts like Google and Amazon.com show how innovation can be embedded into an organization's culture from day one.

HealthStart Pte Ltd, which will soon launch a healthcare-focused incubator in Delhi, is looking to incubate around 15-20 startups this year with a seed capital of up to $100,000 (approx Rs 53 lakh). The organisation, which claims to be the country’s first incubator to focus on healthcare entrepreneurship, will essentially focus on technology players, mobile health solutions and low-cost healthcare within the segment.

“The idea behind HealthStart is that we should create an ecosystem for entrepreneurship, specifically targeted within the healthcare space,” Pradeep K Jaisingh, founder and chairman of the firm, told VCCircle. “This is because even as there are a lot of entrepreneurs who are interested in the segment and want to start a company, there is no support structure,” he added.

Lists are tricky business. Having made them, I know there’s more than a little, well, subjectivity to the selections. People like to argue over them, and that’s the point. It’s a tried and true publication formula, whether it’s the many Forbes lists or the 39 Hottest People in Advertising.

Fast Company has a fair amount of credibility as the bible of innovation. Sure, the luster is off it a bit from the dot-com days when it pumped all sorts of doomed companies, but it’s clawed its way back by focusing on businesses reinventing themselves — and entire categories. From that perspective, it’s interesting to see its point of view on digital media.

Every time I visit India, I visit Nasscom, the high-tech association, to meet with the newest crop of Indian innovators. They account for only a tiny fraction of India’s 1.2 billion people, most of whom remain painfully poor, but I focus on these Indian innovators because so many of them today are focused on making India unpoor. India is now spawning large numbers of innovators concentrating on solving poor-world problems, and cloud-based technology tools and open-source platforms are enabling Indian innovators to do this with little capital. As a result, they are much more willing to try, fail and try again (the secret sauce of Silicon Valley). And, as a result, we’re starting to see a merger here between E.T., I.T. and ID. It doesn’t get any better than that.

There is nothing that India needs more than an energy technology (E.T.) revolution that would deliver cheap, reliable power to millions suffering from energy poverty. If every village had some reliable power, plus access to high-speed Internet (I.T.), hundreds of millions of Indians would be able to live locally but act globally — that is, they would be able to remain in their villages, yet have access to the education and markets that could enable them to escape poverty and not have to join the hordes in the megaslums of the megacities like Mumbai or Kolkata.

Only in tea can you find a drink for nearly any mood. There is a tea you can drink at bed time to help you sleep, there is one for when you get up in the morning and need a boost. In some countries a cup of tea is simply a part of the daily routine.

There is so much more to tea than that, of course. It has a history and there are a series of health benefits that come with it too, all of which Robert and Susanne Schaffer, the husband and wife team behind You, Me and Tea, know all about. Located online and at a brick and mortar shop in Suffolk County, NY, they have been offering premium teas to the world since March of 2008.

This week, Gov. Scott Walker is expected to unveil his proposal for a venture capital fund. Most everyone agrees that the state needs more angel and venture capital for start-up companies, which create almost all new jobs. The sticking points are just what role state government should play, how much the state should invest, and how to manage such a program.

Creating a venture capital fund was a key issue left hanging in the last legislative session. They debated but failed to pass a $400 million plan.

When we came across this infographic about billion startups by Staff.com, we were impressed to see the number of young companies that have sky-high valuations. That is, until we started calling out big names that we expected to see on the list. Where is Pinterest? What about SurveyMonkey, Rovio and Kayak? Once we started doing some research we realised that the billion-dollar club has in fact become more of a party in the park than an exclusive VIP snootfest. The New York Times did the thumbsuck-math and came up with a number between 25 and 40 startups that now have billion dollar plus valuations. Many companies like Palantir, which does predictive data analysis or Zscaler, a startup that provides online corporate data security, shine outside of the consumer mainstream spotlight. Lesser-known consumer companies like Jawbone, the mobile gadget maker has a US$1.5 billion valuation, while private sales site Vente Privee fly well below the radar despite boasting a US$3 billion price tag.

As I talk to large companies both within and outside the consumer products space, I’ve noticed that the ones best positioned for success are those that realize the days of relying solely on internal R&D teams to drive all innovation are over. Think about it. How can 10, 50 or 100 people sitting in a corporate HQ or lab somewhere possibly out innovate those companies that can solicit input from the millions of actual consumers they can connect to via various web platforms? This concept, of dispersed innovation replacing “top down” innovation is one of the not so quiet trends amongst sophisticated consumer companies.  Below are four platforms we love for promoting dispersed innovation:

Do you think men make better entrepreneurs than women, and why? I did some research on this subject a while back, and I found some interesting perspectives. Everyone seems to agree that women think differently than men, and run their businesses differently, but there is a lot less agreement on which styles are better or worse.

First of all, it is evident that there are far fewer women entrepreneurs today than men. According to a recent article in the Huffington Post, last year marked a new high for female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies, but the percentage big companies run by women is still less than 4%. In startups and small companies, the numbers are much better, but still estimated to be below 25%.

2012 was a huge year for Silicon Valley.  Facebook went public, Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo, laws changed to foster new industries, enterprise startups got hot, and billion-dollar companies were formed and acquired. Now, after months of research, debate, and more research, we're happy to present the latest installment of the Silicon Valley 100, Business Insider's authoritative compilation of the people who did the coolest things in Silicon Valley this year. That means people who:

Yikes. Online media. It’s a little like a noisy bar where all of the cool people hang out but everyone talks at once. Loudly. So, how do you make yourself heard? You’ve got to know when and how to talk, so everyone else keeps quiet and listens, but also so the stranger you’ve got your eye on can hear you.

If you’re newish to digital media, or even if you’re a veteran who’d like more responses from your target audience, I also have a secret technique for you. It’s fail-safe — never letting me down in making new clients (especially online media newbies) think I’m a communication savant*, which is always nice.