Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, has released her latest compilation of eye-popping data concerning trends on the web and in mobile. Meeker’s analysis and data points are well-known for giving a comprehensive overview of what’s happening now in tech.

Meeker presented the report this morning at the All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

September 11th was a traumatic event for the psychology of the nation but also for its innovation capacity. After 9/11 the United States started admitting fewer highly skilled immigrants, invited fewer students to come study here, and companies and consumers cut back on their travel budgets. 

These factors, along with many others, combined to reduce the amount of face to face collaboration and created new innovation headwinds for the country.

In 2001, Michael Porter of Harvard Business School published a report ranking the United States as #1 in terms of innovative capacity. By 2009,the Economist Intelligence Unit had dropped the United States in its innovation rankings from #3  between 2002 - 2006 to #4 between 2004 - 2008. The most recent Global Innovation Index has the United States falling from #1 in 2009 to #7 in 2011 -- behind Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, and Denmark. 

Fabled for entrepreneurs launching companies in garages, Silicon Valley now may have a new legend: the phantom of AOL.

To save money for two months, 20-year-old Eric Simons surreptitiously lived inside AOL’s Palo Alto, Calif., office, sleeping on its couches, showering in its gym, sneaking its snacks and laboring there all day to develop his dream — the Internet site ClassConnect, which he launched to help teachers create and share lessons plans with students and other educators.

Simons said he managed to avoid detection because AOL regularly lets budding innovators not affiliated with the company use its building to work on their projects.

Until recently, the idea of holding a conversation with a computer seemed pure science fiction. If you asked a computer to "open the pod bay doors"—well, that was only in movies.

But things are changing, and quickly. A growing number of people now talk to their mobile smart phones, asking them to send e-mail and text messages, search for directions, or find information on the Web.

"We're at a transition point where voice and natural-language understanding are suddenly at the forefront," says Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance Communications, a company based in Burlington, Massachusetts, that dominates the market for speech recognition with its Dragon software and other products. "I think speech recognition is really going to upend the current (computer) interface."

Progress has come about thanks in part to steady progress in the technologies needed to help machines understand human speech, including machine learning and statistical data-mining techniques. Sophisticated voice technology is already commonplace in call centers, where it lets users navigate through menus and helps identify irate customers who should be handed off to a real customer service rep.

Many entrepreneurs dream of starting their own company so they can be their own boss, call the shots, get the corner office nicest table in the co-working space. Turns out, being in charge is a lot harder than just ordering people around and having someone fetch your lattes. To make a startup successful, you have to encourage an atmosphere of constant innovation.

We asked these upcoming entrepreneurs for their best tips on how to be a boss boss.

Allow for change and spontaneity Working hard to keep your company from becoming rigid helps keep innovation flowing. The longer you have a business, the easier it is not to try new things — such as payment systems or even where an afternoon meeting should be held. Changing things up every now and again because of suggestions from your team shows you care about keeping your workplace full of ideas.

One out of five young Europeans are looking for work and the unemployment figures are not likely to improve until 2016, while policymakers are not doing enough to reverse the trend, said EU youth organisations.

According to latest figures released by the International Labour Organization (ILO), youth unemployment in the EU and other developed countries soared 26.5% from 2008 to 2011, the steepest increase from all the world regions ranked by the ILO. Most of this increase occurred in 2008-2009 and resulted in historically high rates in several developed economies, the organisation pointed out, stressing that in comparison joblessness among young people decreased by 12% between 1998 and 2008.

The numbers seem to prove the assumption made by some economists and politicians, like Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, that today’s youth generation in the EU will be, for the first time since the second world war, worse off than their parents’ generation.

Are you stressed at work? You’re not alone: A recent Gallup poll indicates that on-the-job pressure is the top reason for employee dissatisfaction in the American workforce, and nearly half of American workers say their job is “very or extremely stressful.”

And whether you notice it or not, you’re broadcasting clear signs that should indicate to your employer that you are overworked and need a change of pace. The infographic below, developed by Column Five in conjunction with employee wellness company Keas, shows exactly how employees behave when they’ve been pushed to their limits. Workers tend to develop classic symptoms when their workload gets too much to bear, such as poor memory, fatigue and bad time management. They also exhibit odd behaviors, working too much or too little in response to the level of stress in the workplace. Employers should be watching for these key symptoms and redirecting overworked employees to a more manageable situation.

Looking at Silicon Valley's startup landscape, where Facebook just raised $16 billion in its initial public offering and newbies like Pinterest and Instagram have commanded soaring valuations, you'd think optimism would be running high among venture capitalists.

But the most recent numbers by the National Venture Capital Association show that venture funding plunged last quarter, even in hot sectors like consumer Internet.

Venture capitalists poured $5.8 billion into 758 deals in the first quarter of the year, according to the MoneyTree report the association prepares with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Thomson Reuters. That was a double-digit drop in both dollars and deals compared with the fourth quarter of 2011, when $7.1 billion went into 889 deals.

I recently delivered a keynote at a conference on modern entrepreneurship. A new entrepreneur asked me, “What three things do you think I should do to start a successful business?”

While there are a million pieces of advice to give to any budding entrepreneur starting with a laundry list of books to read and people to speak with, and ending with  getting used to eating ramen for a year or two, below are the three essential actions that any new entrepreneur will need to truly flourish.

Doing one of these things will help you succeed. Doing all three will turbo-charge your new business and set you on the path to success.

Helpers do what you say, while good help does what you need, without you saying anything. People who can help you the most are actually smarter than you, at least in their domain. Top entrepreneurs spend more time putting the right team in place to accomplish their objectives than they spend on any other components of their job.

Some entrepreneurs are so in love with themselves (narcissistic) that they insist on answering every question, and making every decision. That’s not only impossible, but also counterproductive. Effective entrepreneurs team with or employ people who can provide the answers directly, pertinent to their particular area of expertise.

True leaders also know how to move out of the way to let others do what they do best. If you’re working too many hours and following up on every detail you may want to look closer at your team to ensure you’ve surrounded yourself with the right people.

There has been lots of data indicating that domestic manufacturing is regaining some vigor after years of wasting away. Brookings’ Martin Neil Baily and Bruce Katz, writing in the Washington Post, noted:

Manufacturing employment, output and exports are headed in the right direction: In April, the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs was up 489,000 from the January 2010 low of 11.5 million. The Institute of Supply Management’s manufacturing index has shown 33 consecutive months of expansion.

Several years ago I was in the Thomson Building in Toronto. I went down the hall to the small kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee. Ken Thomson was there, making himself some instant soup. At the time, he was the ninth-richest man in the world, worth approximately $19.6 billion. Enough, certainly, to afford a nice lunch. I looked at the soup he was stirring. “It suits me just fine,” he said, smiling.

Thomson understood value. Neighbors reported seeing him leave his local grocery store with jumbo packages of tissues that were on sale. He bought off-the-rack suits and had his old shoes resoled. Yet he had no difficulty paying almost $76 million for a painting (for Peter Paul Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, in 2002). He sought value, whether it was in business, art, or groceries.

Incubators are like belly buttons: Everybody’s got one.

Or so it seems from where we sit in San Francisco, where if one throws a rock in certain neighborhoods, one is sure to hit an incubator or accelerator or at least a hackathon.

As a result, we tend not to get too worked up about incubators anymore, but every so often, we come across one with sterling provenance or a particularly unique premise.

nReduce is both of those. The program comes from the gigantic brain of Ruby on Rails demigod Jacques Crocker, and he started off by throwing a hand grenade at the hornet’s nest that is Y Combinator. Crocker originally named his program “N Combinator” and claimed it would be nothing more or less than an open-source Y Combinator.

When the JOBS Act was signed in April, the startup community gave itself a collective high five. Crowdfunding would enable startups to reach out to the whole world to get access to funding, not just a small cabal of investors living in a 20-mile radius of Menlo Park.

But hidden in the headlines was a much more powerful underlying trend. With the JOBS Act came the creation of an entirely new class of capital that could be far more valuable to startups: customer capital.

Eli Lilly is participating in a new investment fund which will focus primarily on early-stage drug development opportunities in Canada as a whole and Quebec in particular.

The fund, which will be operated by investment investment group TVM Capital, will have an initial size of $150 million. As well as Lilly, other backers include Teralys Capital (which is putting in $65 million), BDC Venture Capital, Fondaction and Advantus Capital Management.

Don’t tell Ted Driscoll now’s a bad time to be a healthcare investor.

Despite frequent industry complaints of an overly burdesome regulatory environment and a soft IPO market, the Claremont Creek Ventures partner says technology and demographics have combined to create favorable circumstances for healthcare investors.

A digital imaging expert with a PhD from Stanford University to prove it, Driscoll holds 40 imaging-related U.S. and foreign patents and has helped found five imaging companies.

Claremont Creek’s healthcare portfolio includes wound closure technology company Zipline Medical, “bionic leg” company Tibion and genomic technology company GigaGen.

Taking a team from ordinary to extraordinary means understanding and embracing the difference between management and leadership. According to writer and consultant Peter Drucker, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." 

Manager and leader are two completely different roles, although we often use the terms interchangeably. Managers are facilitators of their team members’ success. They ensure that their people have everything they need to be productive and successful; that they’re well trained, happy and have minimal roadblocks in their path; that they’re being groomed for the next level; that they are recognized for great performance and coached through their challenges.

Now that Facebook has gone public, there's a lot of newly created wealth on the scene. History has shown that newly created wealth shops the startup scene like a kid in a candy store. Over the course of the lifetime of a new angel investor, they'll do 70% of all of the angel investments they'll ever make in year one. Then they realize that some of these companies will hit a wall, demand a lot of time, and that it's all fun and games until someone gets an eye poked out--or so the saying goes.

With a little patience, forethought, and strategy, you can avoid angel burnout. Here are just a few suggestions:

1) Advise first, invest later. Before you start writing checks, just spend some time with startups. Being a good angel or VC has a lot to do with pattern matching. This takes time--it took me 8 years from the time I evaluated my first investment as an analyst until the first deal I led.  Fred Wilson spent 7 years apprenticing at Euclid before he started leading deals.  You need to see more patterns of success and failure than just the ones you experienced yourself as an entrepreneur. In fact, taking your own startup experience and assuming that all of your lessons learned apply to every startup is probably a really bad idea. Its certainly not a way to become a great advisor. Great advisors help entrepreneurs come up with the answers themselves, versus just giving them all the answers as you see them from your own experience.

Crowdfunding website Kickstarter was used to raise $US340,000 for a project to build a pair of HD-video recording glasses, but almost a year on, people who invested in the project have not received their products and the project creators have seemingly disappeared.

Kickstarter has denied responsibility for a growing number of apparently failed crowdfunding projects, but donors who claim to have been ripped-off are fighting back.

Crowdfunding is a way for individuals to make their dreams a reality, as touted by websites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo which provide the social media tools to tap friends, family, and their extended networks for the capital needed to build a product.

Some investors seem to focus wholly on the strengths of your management team, or your sustainable competitive advantage, and in reality these are the core attributes for every funding equation. While these may be necessary for funding, they may not be sufficient to make your startup the great success embodied in your vision.

I have always struggled to communicate the multiple other relevant priorities, and the other intangibles required for a great execution. I found many of these in a new book, “Great From the Start,” by John B. Montgomery, which does a great job of laying out specifics, but also starts with a good summary of the intangibles, summarized as the five rules of relevancy, by Mark Zawacki: