Meet Christian Springub, co-founder of an international startup called Jimdo.

He and his two business partners are not millionaires. But they turned down over $10 million of VC funding.

The five-year old Jimdo does Web site hosting for people with no programing experience. It offering two flavors at $7.95 a month and $20 a month and has two claims to fame. It supports 11 different languages and its websites look great on mobile phones.

I often recommend business networking as the most effective way for a startup founder to find investors, advisors, and even key executive candidates. But what if you are an introvert, or new to this game, and don’t know where or how to start?

I have learned over the years that there is an etiquette to this process, just like there is for social networking. Here are a few of the “do’s”:

Post your profile on LinkedIn and Twitter, and join in relevant discussions. There are other networks that also work, depending on where you are in the world, like Ryze, Plaxo, and Facebook, but setting up an account on MySpace probably won’t help you.

Understanding lectures can be a challenge for foreign students, since they may not be fluent in the language used in the classroom. But Alex Waibel, a computer-science professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, one of Germany’s leading universities, has helped develop a computer program that could eliminate the problem.

The professor has helped build a simultaneous-translation computer program that allows students to use a laptop to gain access to real-time translations of lectures as well as any slides or presentations that a professor might use. Students can see both the original transcript of the lecture as well as the translation. Moving the mouse over the original text produces a pop-up window with the translation.

Rock The Post launched as a crowdfunding platform in November 2011, in order to help small businesses and entrepreneurs overcome the tough economic conditions that limit their access to funding.

Small businesses are in desperate need of money and without access to accredited investors, loans from banks may be the only option. In 2009, U.S. banks posted the sharpest decline in private lending since 1942. Without help from the banks, entrepreneurs are strictly limited to accredited investors and VC money, which say NO to entrepreneurs 95% of the time.

In a global, hyper-connected economy, where security failures in one corner of the world can lead to an economic catastrophe on the other side of the world, it's in everyone's best interest to promote greater security and prosperity everywhere. Especially in the world's most fragile states, economic development is critical to stability.

For countries that are struggling to recover from war, negative economic shocks of just 5% can increase a country's risk of civil war. Foreign aid, which can account for to up to 97 percent of a nation's GDP, is neither a long-term nor a sustainable solution to help the citizens of these fragile countries. Promoting entrepreneurship, particularly among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), fosters more lasting, stable economic growth in the world's most vulnerable economies. Boosting SME growth has the power to diversify economies and make them far less vulnerable to sector-specific shocks and fluctuations in private capital flows.

Many ways of making a living that once seemed safe can become endangered remarkably quickly (as anyone in the photography, publishing or recording industries can tell you). People inside are often the least able to see what's happening on the outside. Your industry or company could be on the cusp of a disaster and you may not know it. If disaster were to hit, you'd like to believe that you could find another job. Well, as the cliché goes, hope is not a strategy. Especially in this job market.

Here's what we believe, surveying the landscape: It would take something like 1,000 hours — and maybe a lot longer — to recover from a forced career change.

For the past several years here in the U.S., supporting entrepreneurship has been touted as a high priority by President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and numerous leaders in the private and NGO sectors. There have been countless symposiums, conferences, white papers, speeches, and programs dedicated to understanding and then finding ways to support entrepreneurs.

With this much attention at the senior leadership level, it is all the more troubling that our policies -- and specifically our visa policies -- are actually working against our stated priorities. Rather than encouraging and welcoming entrepreneurs, America is turning them away in droves, and our competitive edge, not to mention our smart power reserves, will pay the price.

Venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners is set Thursday to announce a new $1 billion fund, one of the industry's largest in years.

Despite a trend of decreasing investment in venture capital, IVP has recently seen a number of its portfolio companies -- including Buddy Media, HomeAway and Zynga -- go public or get acquired, which may have encouraged outside fund managers to trust the firm with more money.

"The better you perform over a number of years, the easier it is to raise a big fund," said IVP partner Norm Fogelsong. The

John van Leeuwen found himself facing a country of skeptics when he first tried to raise venture capital funding for his Burlington, Ont.-based green technology company, EcoSynthetix Inc.

“All Canadians are from Missouri,” he said, invoking the slogan from the “Show Me” state, and that left him no choice but to look south of the border, where investors are willing to accept the higher risk that often comes with big ideas. In Mr. van Leeuwen’s case, the idea was a plant-based, latex product that was a cheaper, environmentally friendly alternative to the petroleum coating found on glossy paper and packaging.

Save for the money he secured from a venture capital fund he himself was involved in, not a cent of Canadian VC money was available to help him bring this idea to market.

The way the Ohio Board of Regents sees it, there’s a whole lot of research coming out of colleges and universities around the state that could be “monetized,” but it’s not happening. Yet. Which is why the Board issued a report today encouraging commercialization at the state’s higher education institutions.

Or, as the board itself put it using education bureaucracy speak, the report’s goal is “to improve the technology transfer pipeline to turn research innovation into the next great products and services in the market.”

At the recent Angel Capital Association (ACA) Summit in Austin, Texas, the Angel Resource Institute reported on angel group activity in 2011 in the first annual Halo Report. I found some of the results quite interesting. For example:

The median round of investment by group was about $700,000 but less than $300,000 was invested by the local group leading the deal. Over two-thirds of angel group deals were syndicated with others (mostly other angel groups) who provide the majority of the capital in each round. Furthermore, the median round size was about 40 percent larger in 2011 than in 2010, a really significant increase to me. Only 21 percent of angel deals were done in California, which captures about 40-50 percent of venture capital.

‘Tech-savvy’ means something completely different today than it did 10 years ago. Today’s new professionals aren’t just searching job sites and emailing resumes; instead, “social” is their native habitat. They use social and professional networks to research companies, explore trends, and get the inside scoop on careers from classmates, friends and family.

So in this dramatically changed environment, which companies have attracted the attention of today’s students and recent grads? To find out, we crunched LinkedIn data. Our results are based on their LinkedIn activity including job search behavior, the companies they follow, and their views of company pages and member profiles.

Hewlett-Packard started in a garage. Facebook in a dorm room. General Electric in a barn. Point is, innovative businesses almost always start small – tiny even, sometimes seemingly insignificant. Their business cases might initially seem mystifying or obscure to most people; innovation, after all, is about finding new ways of doing business.

But in the end, companies like these can and do become the engines that drive economies forward, incrementally adding jobs, creating hubs around new industries, keeping the area’s best and brightest at home, even becoming global leaders.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s move to approve the first obesity drug in 13 years seems to reflect a calculated risk by the regulator that the health hazards associated with weight loss drugs are eclipsed by the urgency of escalating medical costs associated with widespread obesity in the country.

The healthcare costs associated with obesity include an increased number of people with type 2 diabetes and complications derived from that condition, as well as gastrointestinal and cardiovascular problems, which all amount to more hospital stays.

A new report says Ohio is below average when it comes to taking university research and turning it into viable commercial products.

The Ohio Board of Regents report proposes a statewide commercialization effort to create jobs, promote economic growth and increase wealth in the state.

Regent Vinny Gupta, the chairman of the Regents’ Technology Transfer and Commercialization Task Force, says Wednesday that Ohio has done well seeking out and winning important research dollars but must be more effective at turning research into commercialized products.

U.S. cities are growing faster than their suburbs for the first time in decades, but how does that break down from city to city?

Below is a chart of the 51 U.S. metropolitan areas that have one million or more people. The most dramatic suburb to city shift has been in the New Orleans metro area, most likely due to distortions caused by Hurricane Katrina. The city has grown 3.1 percentage points faster than the suburbs, as people continue to return to an area ravaged by the natural disaster.

The Atlanta, Denver, Washington and Charlotte metro areas have all seen their urban core grow faster than their suburbs, as well.

Battery Ventures has promoted Chelsea Stoner from principal to partner, VentureWire has learned, making her the first female partner in the history of the nearly 30-year-old firm.

 Stoner joined Battery in 2006 from Key Principal Partners, a private equity firm, and specializes in later stage investments and buyouts in software services and health-care IT.

Her portfolio companies include Glassdoor, Groupon and Marketo, whose chief executive told VentureWire this week that his company is in the early stages of preparing to go public. Most recently, she led a $20 million round in Avalara, which provides sales tax automation services over the Web.

The Supreme Court on Thursday largely let stand President Obama’s health care overhaul, in a mixed ruling that court observers were rushing to analyze.

The decision was a striking victory for the president and Congressional Democrats, with a majority of the court, including the conservative chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., affirming the central legislative pillar of Mr. Obama’s term.

Many observers called the case the most significant before the court since at least the 2000 Bush v. Gore ruling, which decided a presidential election. In addition to the political reverberations, the case helps set the rules for one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the economy, one that affects nearly everyone from cradle to grave.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the selection of 27 recipients in rural communities for loans and grants to spur economic development and create or save jobs.    

“The funding I am announcing today will help rural businesses, entrepreneurs and tribal communities obtain the financing they need to grow their businesses and create jobs,” Vilsack said.     

USDA is providing the loans and grants through Rural Development’s Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant (REDL/G) program, the Intermediary Relending Program (IRP), and the Rural Business Enterprise Grant (RBEG) program. The three programs are designed to help rural communities attract capital investments that lead to successful business development, job creation, infrastructure improvements, and economically vibrant communities.

Introduction It’s certainly not news that times have been tough across America’s cities in recent years. The Great Recession may be officially over, but many communities are still suffering a painful hangover.

Not these MSAs, though. Area Development's Leading Locations have found a way to thrive in the midst of adversity, to prosper while so many places have struggled. More than 9 million jobs vanished during the course of the downturn, and of the 365 MSAs — Metropolitan Statistical Areas — studied here, more than three-quarters still have fewer people working now than they did five years ago. But even amid that gloom, there were blooms of prosperity, and there are some places that have gotten back on their feet faster than others.