Karen Mills, head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, announced her resignation today. As one of numerous appointees who are leaving in  President Obama’s second term, her departure was not a surprise and in some ways was to be expected.

Mills, a former venture capitalist, was unanimously confirmed as SBA head by the U.S. Senate back in early 2009.  In a prepared statement she noted, “I will stay on until my successor is confirmed to ensure a smooth and seamless transition.”

Mills’ position of SBA Administrator was elevated to a Cabinet level position in January of 2012. At the time, we praised that position being elevated and the elevation was generally approved by the small business community.

I’m mid 2011 I wrote a post titled Competition. Things in my universe had heated up and many of the companies I was an investor in were facing lots of competition. It’s 18 months later and there’s 10x the amount of competitive dynamics going on, some because of the maturity, scale, and market leadership of some of the companies I’m an investor in; some because of the increased number of companies in each market segment, and some based on the heat and intensity of our business right now.

I wrote a few more posts about competition but then drifted on to other things. But I came back to it this morning as I find myself thinking about competition every day. Yesterday, I was at the Silicon Flatirons Broadband Migration Conference hosted by my friend Phil Weiser. I go every year because it’s a good chance for me to see how several of the parallel universes I interact with, namely government, academics, broadband and mobile carriers, incumbent technology providers, and policy people think about innovation in the context of the Internet.

"Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart” — Winnie the Pooh.

I went to a conference once where a venture capitalist said that if entrepreneurs treated their startups more like their children and also saw their companies with the eyes of children, chances are we would get more interesting and noteworthy companies.

I think entrepreneurs need to see their startups as children because an idea, no matter how small, has the potential to take up great deal of room in both your heart and your mind. Being an avid fan of the popular children’s book series Winnie the Pooh by A.A Milne, it’s easy for me to see the lessons the lovable tubby bear and his friends can teach entrepreneurs today.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program has announced $10M in funding for up to 10 new awards in FY2013. The Phase IIB Bridge Award is designed to support the next stage of development for promising NIH-funded SBIR Phase II projects in the areas of cancer therapeutics, imaging technologies, diagnostics and prognostics, or interventional devices.

What attributes does a founder need to make his or her startup thrive?

There are plenty of myths floating around Silicon Valley, augmented by the legends of hot-headed young Turks such as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, that you need to be in your 20s with a rigid mindset and a hefty ego. But they're the outliers, according to an extensive survey conducted by one startup incubator.

For the last three years, the Founder Institute has had its applicants perform a battery of personality and aptitude tests. Then it tracked those applicants — more than 15,000 test-takers as their startups launched. The goal: see if any personality traits could be matched to revenue growth and market traction.

In September 2011, eight states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania—were selected to participate in the National Governors Association (NGA) Policy Academy, “Making” Our Future: Encouraging Growth in Manufacturing through Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Investment.” The following month, representatives from these states began participating in a yearlong series of meetings and collaborative exercises designed to foster innovation, rejuvenate manufacturing, create jobs, and grow regional economies.

The NGA Policy Academy was funded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology Manufacturing Extension Program (NIST MEP).

We all read the stories about how crowdfunding could earn you thousands of dollars in just days. Some imagine it happening for our own projects. The good news is that money is indeed out there in the cyber world. The bad news is that it isn’t going to magically appear just because you start a crowdfunding campaign.

The success of your campaign will depend on the foundation on which you build it.

Follow these simple 7 steps to ensure that your crowdfunding campaign gets started on the right foot.

Entrepreneurs are a notoriously stubborn (some say confident) group of people, so I see many of them making the same mistakes that predecessors have made. Thus I’m convinced that it’s useful for all of you to step back from time to time, and listen to some sage advice from people who have been there and enjoyed success.

Recently, as I was perusing a book by Robert Jordan, titled “How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights” I saw some wisdom and inspiration that made sense. All the quotes come from entrepreneurs who have built and sold at least one $100 million company. Of course, you can always argue that each was just in the right place at the right time, or was lucky, or had a rich uncle to get them started, but it would be smarter to listen to the messages:

Millions of Americans have mistakes on their credit reports, some of which are serious enough to lower credit scores and result in worse credit offers, a new government study finds.

As many as 42 million Americans have errors on their credit reports, according to a Federal Trade Commission study of around 1,000 participants and 3,000 credit reports released Monday.

"Errors in credit reports can cost you a loan, a competitive interest rate, a job, security clearance and insurance," said John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at SmartCredit.com.

At 7 p.m. on a Sunday in Hidden Springs, Idaho, the six members of the Starr family were sitting down to the highlight of their week: the family meeting. The Starrs are a typical American family, with their share of everyday family issues. David is a software engineer; his wife, Eleanor, takes care of their four children, ages 10 to 15. One of the children has Asperger syndrome, another ADHD; one tutors math on the near side of town; one practices lacrosse on the far side. "We were living in complete chaos," Eleanor said.

Like many parents, the Starrs were trapped between the smooth-running household they aspired to have and the exhausting, earsplitting one they actually lived in. "I was trying the whole 'love them and everything will work out' philosophy," she said, "but it wasn't working. 'For the love of God,' I finally said, 'I can't take this any more.' "

Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who nailed the housing bubble before it burst, was on Bloomberg Television with Trish Regan and Adam Johnson on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the U.S. housing market. As usual, Shiller was reluctant to declare that home prices had bottomed. He explained that the  housing market is a speculative one and that there's no telling which way prices would go tomorrow. He also explained that there wasn't much reason to believe that home prices would appreciate back to levels seen during the last cycle.

Innovate St. Louis, a nonprofit corporation that sponsors the Information Technology Entrepreneur Network, has signed up with the Kauffman Foundation to launch a 1 Million Cups program.

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St. Louis joins Kansas City, Des Moines and Houston as locations for the weekly program, which brings startup and early-stage entrepreneurs together to share ideas.

The Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation started 1 Million Cups in April 2012 in Kansas City. The idea is to provide a community-building coffee klatch for entrepreneurs to present information about their enterprises to one another as well as to possible financers and other advisers.

The marketing section is the most troublesome for many founders to write convincingly and should, in view of the significance venture investors pay to the issue, be the most carefully drafted. It is relatively easy to obtain industry statistics and divide by some number. For example:

The overall market for Product X is $1.5 billion per year and we plan to capture, "conservatively," 10 percent, which means we project $150 million in annual sales. Our strategy is to pursue the following niches...

Incredibly high profile successes by young founders like Mark Zuckerberg have made founding a startup an increasingly attractive career path for college kids. Schools know it, and more and more of them are creating accelerators, competitions, and classes designed to get student ideas off the ground. As a result, students aren't waiting to graduate to get started, they're using their connections at school and the support they're getting to create fascinating startups. We've collected 16 of our favorites.

Perhaps it was just a matter of time – but here’s a new development in the funding of academic research and technology commercialization. The University of Utah’s Technology Commercialization Office (TCO)—#1 in the country for startups launched by research organizations for three of the last five years—has spun off more than 150 companies in the past seven years.

Recently the U’s TCO has launched a program to help build even more value in the startups they spin out. The office has entered an exclusive agreement with crowdfunding platform RocketHub of New York. Their plan is to bring crowdfunding forward for the funding of university technologies on a new web portal: the University Tech Vault.

The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outnumber humans by the end of the year. Perhaps more significantly, the faster and more powerful mobile devices hitting the market annually are producing and consuming content at unprecedented levels. Global mobile data grew 70 percent in 2012, according to a recent report from Cisco, which makes a lot of the gear that runs the Internet. Yet the capacity of the world’s networking infrastructure is finite, leaving many to wonder when we will hit the upper limit, and what to do when that happens.

There are ways to boost capacity of course, such as adding cables, packing those cables with more data-carrying optical fibers and off-loading traffic onto smaller satellite networks, but these steps simply delay the inevitable. The solution is to make the infrastructure smarter. Two main components would be needed: computers and other devices that can filter their content before tossing it onto the network, along with a network that better understands what to do with this content, rather than numbly perceiving it as an endless, undifferentiated stream of bits and bytes.

True innovation involves much more than just a great idea. It requires an environment that rewards risk and breeds creativity on a daily basis.

FEI US 2013 brings together corporate leaders who are championing the environment for success in their organization. Download the brochure for full details here.

To paraphrase investor Peter Thiel, we were promised flying cars, and what we got were 140 characters.

But while I’ve often felt that way myself, I think that complaint is a little too facile.

Thiel’s quip echoes a common lament among those, like me, who were drawn to Silicon Valley because of its legendary achievements: the transistor, the integrated circuit, the Internet, and the personal computer. (Well, the PC actually came from Florida, but it got out of that state ASAP, and it’s fair to say that Silicon Valley companies like HP and Apple had an enormous amount to do with the PC’s success.)

The steady departure of pharmaceutical industry jobs in recent years has helped other states, but hurt the standing of the nation’s medicine chest. As more companies take root in far-flung locations, the New Jersey and New York City region has dropped significantly in the national ranking of life sciences markets, according to a recent report on commercial real estate.

Last year, the region slipped to seventh place among metropolitan life sciences clusters from second place in 2011, according to the latest annual report from Jones Lang LaSalle, the commercial real estate firm. The reasons cited for the slide: ongoing consolidation following big mergers and the simultaneous efforts among such cities as San Diego to offer competitive environments.