Business incubators for sharing services were all the rage back in the days of the dot-com bubble (700 for profit, many more non-profit). About that time the bubble burst, causing more than 80% of them to disappear. Now they are coming back, and the best even provide networking, technical leadership, and seed funding, as well as investors waving money at graduates.

Incubators I hear mentioned most often include YCombinator, led by Paul Graham in Silicon Valley, and TechStars, located in Boston, Boulder, New York City, and Seattle. TechStars has several excellent mentors on staff, led by founder and CEO David Cohen. Both provide excellent networking to investors, and on-site technical leadership, which I believe sets them apart.

Hans Christensen has worked to help entrepreneurs throughout the MENA region launch business, in his role as the director of Silicon Oasis Founders, a Dubai -based incubator that supports ICT-focused entrepreneurs in MENA associated with the mobile application space and related tech sectors.

He’s seen his fair share of applications- both successful and unsuccessful- to the incubator, which aims to incubate leading high-potential ICT ventures in the seed phase, as well as existing tech companies looking to optimize their performance. SOF is fully owned by Dubai Silicon Oasis (DSO), an integrated free zone technology park, which is, in turn, a 100% owned entity by the Government of Dubai.

LARKSPUR, CA – Health Tech Hatch (HTH), a seed money and development platform for health IT entrepreneurs, announced its launch on Oct. 8. The organization offers crowd funding, prototype testing and mentorship to spur innovative health and wellness products, officials say.

Health Tech Hatch's leadership team are founding members of the National Crowd Funding Association. They say this new platform will spur development with the help of crowd funding and social media, also supporting innovators by offering clinical and usability testing and rating of concepts and prototypes, along with marketing support to help entrepreneurs attract funding.

If you want to be an entrepreneur or launch a small-business startup, you not only need a good idea, you need the right vocabulary.

You'll have an edge if you can sprinkle in buzzwords liberally that make you sound cutting edge and cool, especially if you're pitching your company to an investor or talking to your know-it-all brother-in-law.

So here, to help you keep up to date, are nine buzzwords and phrases that entrepreneurs and small-business owners need to know now:

Here’s a good question: What would you do if someone handed you $100,000 in cash with no strings attached?

It’s not a hypothetical. The other day, I asked Ashley Stanley. And Josh Schwarzberg. Ditto John Hoctor. Also Chris Mills and Breanna Berry. Any of them could end up with a six-figure check soon.

All survived earlier competition to reach the final round at MassChallenge, the Boston business accelerator that nurtures start-up companies. Judges — including former Vertex Pharmaceuticals chief Josh Boger, famous tech entrepreneur Desh Deshpande, and Boston Celtics chief Wyc Grousbeck — will hear 20-minute presentations from 26 finalists Tuesday and Friday this week. The winners will be announced Oct. 23.

LINCOLN — Justin Brouillette and Nicholas Pajerski were University of Nebraska-Lincoln students in the fall of 2008 when they couldn't find a good laptop stand. Their solution? Build one.

And the Prop was born.

When the two were looking for a way to turn their idea into a product, they joined a growing number of people turning to NUtech Ventures, a university technology transfer office that connects ideas and innovations to the private sector.

Of course a nice glass of wine goes well with a hearty steak, and now researchers who study the way food feels in our mouths think they may understand why that is: The astringent wine and fatty meat are like the yin and yang of the food world, sitting on opposite ends of a sensory spectrum.

The findings, reported in the October 9th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, offer a whole new definition of the balanced meal. They also offer a new way of thinking about our eating habits, both good and bad.

“The mouth is a magnificently sensitive somatosensory organ, arguably the most sensitive in the body,” said Paul Breslin of Rutgers University and the Monell Chemical Senses Center. “The way foods make our mouths feel has a great deal to do with what foods we choose to eat.”

With more than 850 biotechnology companies, the Bay Area is the oldest, largest and most productive life sciences cluster in the world, employing more than 125,000 people in the region. For more than 30 years, this region has led the world in researching and delivering new cures and treatments for debilitating diseases including cancer, Multiple Sclerosis and HIV/AIDS. But the industry is facing serious challenges with early stage innovation in the current economic climate.

For years, our strong roots, supported by our vibrant businesses, academic community, and engaged elected officials – have brought countless biotech firms to the Bay area, cementing our nationwide role as a leader in biotechnology and biomedical scientific breakthroughs. In short, this is where all the action’s taking place.

The clock is ticking. Hunched over the computer screen, a backer of a popular crowdfunding site hits the refresh button every few seconds to check whether his latest investment, an online game, has hit its target funding amount.

Does this sound like a healthy dedication to helping entrepreneurs start companies? The experts believe otherwise; they argue that this is an addiction not too dissimilar to Internet poker or online shopping.

“I admit there’s something seductive about kickstarting a game,” one user confessed on a community forum dedicated to the topic of “Kickstarter addiction”.

New research suggests that three out of every four venture capital-backed startups don’t return investors’ capital, according to research by a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School reported on by the Wall Street Journal.

Shikhar Ghosh’s research contrasts with what venture capitalists generally report: that out of 10 startups, three or four fail, another three or four return the original investment, and one or two produce substantial returns.

The preferred story for California's economy runs like this:

In the beginning there was prosperity.  It started with gold.  Then, agriculture thrived in California's climate.  Movies and entertainment came along in the early 20th Century.  In the 1930s there was migration from the Dust Bowl.  California became an industrial powerhouse in World War II.  Defense, aerospace, the world's best higher education system, theme parks, entertainment, and tech combined to drive California's post-war expansion.

Then, in the evening of November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.  On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved.  The Cold War was over.  America responded by cutting defense spending and called the savings the Peace Dividend.

If you attend business school, you can expect to read a lot of case studies. Professors love them because they offer real-world examples of why businesses succeed and fail.

There are some classic cases that every business student should know, like why Apple changed its name and how Ryanair beat two industry giants.

Biotech has never concentrated in just one place. This industry tends to grow up in geographic clusters, but it will always be spread around the map, partly because great science comes from hundreds of academic hotspots around the world.

But there have always been two places—San Francisco and Boston—that have stood out way above all the other hubs of biotech. And something truly special is happening now in Boston’s biotech cluster, and it’s a long-term mega-trend. Boston, I’m convinced, is very close to taking the title as the world’s No. 1 biotech hub, and holding onto that distinction for a generation.

Dr. Robert D. Atkinson discusses what he believes is the real reason for the financial collapse and Great Recession.

Ever think you should probably expand your skills and learn another language? While learning to speak Japanese, French or Spanish would be a great achievement, there could actually be a few other languages you should consider — like JavaScript, Python or Ruby. And you should probably get started… right now.

In a world where the number of developer jobs is growing fast and free online resources like Codeacademy are flourishing, it’s hard to deny the value in knowing how to code. Shereef Bishay, founder of Developer Boot Camp, is teaching people how to program and running a startup that profits off commission from his graduates’ job offers. He thinks there is a misconception that only super-intelligent wizzkids can master a programming language. “I think everybody should learn to code,” he says. “It is the new literacy. Software is eating the whole world and in 10 or 20 years, if you don’t know how to program it (will be) like 50 years ago not knowing how to read and write. People need to do this.”

EMSI recently developed a methodology for calculating expected wages for occupations by region. The analysis is aimed at helping us better understand what regional earnings should be given the performance of a set of standardized occupations that are ubiquitous, stable, and diverse across the US economy. It’s a bit like the consumer price index, just for occupations.

To illustrate how enlightening this can be, we produced a high-level summary for architecture and engineering occupations (SOC 17) to see what cities rank above and below where you might expect. In this case, we limited our analysis to metros with greater than 190,000 jobs. Also note, we are using 2011 wages in this model, and most of the occupations in the group are related to engineering.

The private equity industry provides important capital that benefits a variety of U.S. businesses. However, debate has surfaced about whether private equity plays a legitimate role in fostering entrepreneurship and creating jobs – particularly as a funding source for early-stage innovative startups. Based on years of experience working with entrepreneurial organizations at all stages of development, my answer is a resounding “no.” Here’s why.

PE firms have traditionally used the formula of buying companies, loading them up with debt, restructuring them through layoffs, outsourcing, and other cost-saving moves, draining the cash generated by using it to repay the debt, and then reselling the company in public or private markets for a hefty profit. PE often relies on such financial engineering to realize outsized returns, regardless of the target company’s industry, innovativeness, growth potential, or other metrics. This strategy stifles a company’s potential to invest in new job creation and innovation and pursue other growth opportunities – two critical success factors for innovative startups.

NVCA is pleased to announce that the annual review of our model legal docs is now complete and the revised documents have been posted to our website.  You can find the docs here.

There were very few changes this year, mostly because these documents have now undergone years of road-testing, fly-specking and legal review.  To call out a few of the updates: Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Data Privacy reps were added to the SPA, in response to changes in the business landscape, and an alternative “lite” Open Source rep was also included.  Because Delaware Chancery Court arbitration has been called into question in a recent case, that is no longer included as a suggested method of dispute resolution. 

Two suburban Philadelphia legislators introduced a bill last week designed to generate at least $140 million for cash-strapped biotech firms and other high-tech companies in Pennsylvania.

The legislation, introduced in the House by state Reps. Warren Kampf, R-Chester/Montgomery, and Joe Hackett, R-Delaware, calls for the creation of the “Innovate Pennsylvania Program” that would create a pool of state money that would be used to invest in high-tech industries and spur job growth while promoting entrepreneurship.

The program would not rely on any additional general fund expenditures.

If you didn’t make it past MassChallenge’s judgment day, you still have a shot at a $100,000: The Lemelson-MIT Program is seeking nominations for the 2013 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation.

Nominations can be submitted via the Lemelson-MIT Award’s website from now until Nov. 2.

In the competition’s 18th year, Lemelson-MIT is looking to reward technological breakthroughs that help improve lives in the developing world, particularly from mid-career innovators who can serve as an inspiration for others even as they continue tackling challenges around housing, energy, and environment.