Business letters aren't a quaint thing of the past. Write them well, and you'll create a lot of goodwill with clients, partners, and vendors. You'll increase your profits, too — by getting key customers to renew large orders, for example, or persuading service providers to charge you less for repeat business.

Here are some pointers to help you get those kinds of results with your letters:

Focus on the reader. Motivate people to act by giving them reasons that matter to them. And try not to begin with the word I; make it you, if possible (You were so kind, You might be interested, and so on). Keep the reader in the forefront because — let's face it — that's what will hold her interest. Not: "I just thought I'd drop you a note to say that I really enjoyed my time as your guest last week." But instead: "What a wonderful host you were last week."

Design firms don’t just work on design projects; they’re often called on to do double duty as HR personnel, fielding requests from clients for referrals to bright and talented recruits.

Boston-based Fresh Tilled Soil has figured out a way to anticipate the client need for full-time, eager designers with coding chops during projects but also after the formal relationship has ended. Its Apprenticeship in UX gives four paid workers 90 days to balance real-world, real-time client work with road-mapped “challenges,” like redesigning the user experience of an existing system such as Twitter, or crafting a typographic system for Adobe’s own site. In the firm’s own words, Fresh Tilled Soil apprentices are pushed to become “bloody brilliant web and mobile product experts.”

In our first science-as-a-service post, I highlighted some of the participants in the ecosystem. In this one, I want to share the changing face of funding.

Throughout the 20th century, most scientific research funding has come from one of two sources: government grants or private corporations. Government funding is often a function of the political and economic climate, so researchers who rely on it risk having to deal with funding cuts and delays. Those who are studying something truly innovative or risky often find it difficult to get funded at all. Corporate research is most often undertaken with an eye toward profit, so projects that are unlikely to produce a return on investment are often ignored or discarded.

So you have been lucky: your idea is the next Google and investors have decided put a pile of money into it. This is all good news — after all, it is not easy to impress venture capitalists. Building a company from scratch is a very difficult business and you need to be prepared. Choosing the right VC is a tough decision. I was once told by a VC that the relationship between a startup and its VC is very much like a marriage. It is a long-term commitment that is full of struggles and disagreements and it is quite difficult to exit. Sometimes the relationship will end badly, other times the startup will exit gracefully and there will be happiness for all.

If social networks were people then LinkedIn would be the grey-suited accountant sitting at the corner of a party too shy to talk to people. Twitter, of course would be the hipster chick and Facebook would be the jock in the cloakroom talking about his recent conquests. I recently saw a message posted on Facebook that read “Daughter, if you want to be successful in life, ignore the jock and spend time with the nerds in the class”; and it got me thinking: how often are we ignoring LinkedIn as a powerful tool to further our careers.

Anyone who works with entrepreneurs will tell you that all are different. Some are really inventors, who view the challenges of building a business as a necessary evil. Others are really marketers out to make money fast, and believe that they can entice customers to any offering. Some just want to change the world and make it a better place. But none have any lock on success.

I’ve always wondered if there was some way that I could quickly deduce a new entrepreneur’s “sweet spot,” and optimize my mentoring to those strengths and weaknesses, maybe similar to the Myers-Briggs type indicator for business professionals. I just saw an interesting step in that direction via a new book “Entrepreneurial DNA,” by Joe Abraham, with his assessment web site.

The event, moderated by David Leonhardt, Washington Bureau Chief at The New York Times; featured, Dean Garfield, President of the Information Technology Industry Council; Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress and included approximately thirty leaders from academia, government, private sector and media in addition to our host Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of The Aspen Institute.

I had an opportunity to participate and while the discussion was diverse, addressing a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues, there was an overwhelming sense that as a nation we need to be more strategic in both our policies and long-term investments if we are to maintain U.S. national competitiveness in the long term. 

It’s natural for us to seek, if not perfection, at least to try and optimize impacts.  This applies to the collection of components which support effective development ecosystems. For example during the 1990s when countries in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia were transitioning to independent nations, many were eager to learn how they could capitalize on what in some cases was their impressive science base. However, the view was frequently expressed that “we cannot make progress on commercializing science and technology until we have clear laws on intellectual property ownership and protection” or “we must wait until we have sufficient investment capital resources.” Fortunately, in Russia for example, many individual scientists and research institutions began to develop procedures and support systems for technology commercialization – even though most of the needed mechanisms were not yet in place, or potentially dangerously unclear; might the government, sometime in the future, claim all rights and revenues from new products or new businesses created from government funded research?

Entrepreneurs face challenges raising capital to fund the development of new ideas in the United States because of regulatory constraints,

primarily those imposed by the Securities Act of 1933 (“Securities Act”). Although avenues exist for entrepreneurs to seek financing, funders typically hold the purse strings tightly and release them selectively. Crowdfunding is a promising method of raising capital that allows an entrepreneur to shop his or her idea to a greater audience of potential investors without running afoul of the Securities Act‘s constraints.

Traditional funders, such as venture capitalists, refused to finance an idea by Eric Migicovsky and his colleagues at Pebble Technology to develop Internet-connected, customizable wristwatches.1 These watches could link via Bluetooth to, and display information from, smartphones and could also function as cycling or running computers or remote controls for playing music.2 So, on April 11, 2012, the Pebble team turned to Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform, through which they asked the public to pledge a total of $100,000 to the team’s idea. Just 37 days later, Pebble had attracted 68,929 “backers”3 of its watch and had raised over 100 times its request: $10,266,845.4

Researchers at IBM have assembled 10,000 carbon nanotube transistors on a silicon chip. With silicon transistors approaching fundamental limits to continued miniaturization, the IBM work points toward a possible new way of continuing to produce smaller, faster, more efficient computers.

Earlier work by IBM showed that nanotube transistors could run chips three times faster than silicon transistors while using only a third as much power. And at just two nanometers in diameter, the nanotubes—carbon molecules resembling rolled-up chicken wire—are so small that chip makers could theoretically cram far more transistors on a chip than is possible with silicon technology. But controlling the nanotubes’ placement in arrays numerous enough to be useful—ultimately, billions of transistors—is a major research challenge.

Thomas Edison's inventions would be nothing without collaboration. In her new book, Midnight Lunch: The Four Phases of Team Collaboration Success From Thomas Edison's Lab, Sarah Miller Caldicott (Edison's great-grandniece) details how the great inventor bonded with his team to breed innovation. It was a four-step process.

Step 1: Capacity Build diverse teams of two to eight people. What worked for Edison: To create the lightbulb, Edison's team had to include chemists, mathematicians, and glassblowers. Modern counterpart: Facebook's small, collaborative coding teams.

Grand Challenges represent enormous potential in their power to use open innovation practices to generate worldwide awareness of — and affinity for —private and public sector organizations. As challenge prizes grow and social media bring them to the attention of the world, Grand Challenges have also become an important part of public relations exercises for Grand Challenge sponsors like Virgin, Netflix and General Electric.

AngelList, the online service that matches startups with investors, just announced a new feature that shows customer counts and startups that are “trending” by gaining the most customers over the course of the month.

The photo below on the left shows the current list of trending startups, including the startup name, a short description, investors, past funding rounds, and how many new customers they’ve gained so far this month. Users can also choose to view how many new followers each startup has received on AngelList over the week.

Everyone wants to try great local dives when they're traveling, but they're hard to come by. Foursquare crunched 3 billion check-ins across the nation and more than 10 million tips its 30 million users have left to find them for you. It released guides in 30 major US cities based on where people actually go. Here are the most popular recommendations for bars, restaurants, speakeasies and outings across the United States.

US venture capital (VC) funding in the life sciences sector, which includes the Biotechnology and Medical Device industries, dropped 14 percent in dollars and 7 percent in deals during 2012 according to a new PwC US report, "Double-digit dip" that includes data from the MoneyTree™ Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association based on data provided by Thomson Reuters.  Venture capitalists invested a total of $6.6 billion in 779 Life Sciences deals during the year, compared with $7.7 billion in 836 deals during 2011. The number of Life Sciences companies receiving VC funding for the first time reached the lowest level since 1995 with only 135 companies receiving funding in 2012.

Compared to the prior quarter, Life Sciences venture funding rose 11 percent in Q4 2012 to $1.9 billion. Deal volume also increased, rising 12 percent to 187 deals compared to the prior quarter.

Angel groups and investors continue to actively support entrepreneurs nationwide, and in Q3 2012 the median round size for angel group deals reached a five quarter high at $640K. This most recent survey of angel group deals also showed that early stage valuations remain stable. We were particularly interested to see the jump investment – deals and dollars – in mobile companies in Q3. The Southeast also had a large jump in deals, rivaling the number of deals completed in the quarter in California.

Through our partnership with the Angel Resource Institute and CB Insights, we are studying angel group investment activity to arm entrepreneurs and investors as they seek to better understand angel investing and jump start emerging businesses.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the British pharmaceutical company, reported lackluster fourth quarter earnings for 2012 this morning, with a 3.5% drop in revenue. But the company’s performance would have been much worse if it hadn’t successfully avoided a looming threat that every brand-name pharmaceutical maker faces from time to time: the end of a patent on a blockbuster drug.

GSK’s Advair inhaler (called Seretide in most of Europe and India)—used to treat asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—lost its patent at the end of 2010. Ordinarily, a cheaper, generic version of a patented drug comes out shortly after the patent expires, and the generic quickly eats away at the marketshare and revenue of its branded progenitor. But Advair still brings $8 bln in sales to GSK, making it the third highest grossing drug worldwide. The only other off-patent pharmaceutical in the top ten is Lipitor, used for treating high cholesterol, which earned its maker, Pfizer, less than half as much in 2012 as it did in 2011, the year its patent expired (in spite of Pfizer’s unprecedented campaign to keep Lipitor a top-seller by strategically slashing prices).

Congressman Michael Honda (D., Calif.), who has been representing Silicon Valley in the U.S. House of Representatives for the past 12 years, recently submitted a bill asking for Congress to create and fund a new office at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which would be called the Office of Wireless Health.

The office would be tasked with regulating the growing number of mobile, wireless health gadgets and applications, which have been proliferating wildly since the start of the smartphone craze.

While tech investors and federal regulators often co-exist like dogs and cats, Rep. Honda insists a new FDA office could help and not obstruct innovation. He discussed his bill with Venture Capital Dispatch.

A lot is being said and a lot will be said about Michael Dell’s decision to take the company he started in 1984 in his college dorm room private (with some cash from Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft and other investors.)

People are also going to point out that karma is a bitch. Others will say that the cloud will prove to be the ultimate undoing of Dell, and that mobile is Roundrock, Texas-based company’s Achilles heel. I would agree with some if not all of those assessments. I would also be hard pressed to ignore the harsh reality of tech-land — turnarounds rarely turn.

And despite knowing all that, I cannot help but applaud Michael Dell, the founder.

Dell is doing what few people do — putting both his reputation and his fortune on the line in order to save and perhaps revive the company with whom his name and legacy will always be intertwined. This is high-stakes poker: he is putting millions of dollars of his own money in addition to investment from his investment firm, MSD Capital, on top of kicking in his stake in Dell.

Networking and volunteering time to help other entrepreneurs can result in meaningful experiences that inspire and encourage. Many young entrepreneurs feel they must wait until they’ve exited a company or are older to give back – but the truth is that it’s never too early to start, and there’s never too small an impact to make. Sharing your entrepreneurial journey and aligning yourself with founders from other industries can directly contribute to your company’s growth and make you a better business leader.