In the last episode of TechStars, we watched a pair of teams pivot toward new concepts and deal with the consequences of that decision.

In this episode, we’ll see why a good name and brand design can go a long way in selling a successful company. Some teams have developed winning products, but under less memorable names, which is why rebranding is sometimes a good idea.

A good product and a solid, engaging pitch is what will sell your company to customers, but a good name can get you in the door. If potential customers don’t feel inspired by its brand, a startup may lose that business before it gets a chance to sell.

Federal grants can be a lifeline that allows life sciences startups to refine their technologies before they commercialize, but the nondilutive government funding can be hard to get.

The success rate for companies seeking grants through the government’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs hovers between 11 percent and 15 percent, according to Bhramara Tirupati, of BBCetc, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based business consulting group.

Tirupati shared these tips in a presentation she dubbed “SBIR/STTR 101″ that could help biomedical startups improve those odds.

The universe is a marvelously complex place, filled with galaxies and larger-scale structures that have evolved over its 13.7-billion-year history. Those began as small perturbations of matter that grew over time, like ripples in a pond, as the universe expanded. By observing the large-scale cosmic wrinkles now, we can learn about the initial conditions of the universe. But is now really the best time to look, or would we get better information billions of years into the future – or the past?

New calculations by Harvard theorist Avi Loeb show that the ideal time to study the cosmos was more than 13 billion years ago, just about 500 million years after the Big Bang. The farther into the future you go from that time, the more information you lose about the early universe.

“I’m glad to be a cosmologist at a cosmic time when we can still recover some of the clues about how the universe started,” Loeb said.

Sumit Gangwal, left, and Pete Geisen with Xanofi distill the process solvent for recycling at the company's laboratory. Xanofi, a Raleigh nano-fiber company started 1.5 years ago, has received funding from one of the angel investors, organized groups of affluent individuals who invest in startups.

Angel investing is in vogue once again.

Cooperation, whether it takes place among the hunter-gatherer tribes of Africa or the meme-spreading users of the Internet, works pretty much the same way: It depends on social connections, the existing and the newly forged, between individuals. If you map out social networks, they're going to look pretty much the same no matter what you're mapping: an explosion of overlapping hubs and spokes, with nodes emerging as pulse points of influence and virality.

The same is true for the networks that form the root system of the tech startup ecosystem: venture capital firms. Using data from 279 firms, the network analysis company Activate Networks mapped the connections that form between and among VCs -- based on the overlap of those firms' nearly 14,000 investments. As CEO Larry Miller explains: "If Firm 1 invests in Company A, and Firm 2 invests in Company A, then that's a connection."

Leaders the world over including those at this week’s G8 Summit are calling for economic growth, not just budget tightening, in an effort to combat world market instability and speed recovery. But for all the talk in policy circles, this growth will ultimately come from the private sector and especially here in the U.S., from small to medium sized businesses that create many of the jobs and employ many of the workers already in our economy. Here’s a look at the economic growth G8 leaders are calling for and six things you can do to promote growth in your business today.

Leaders Call for Growth

G8 leaders come together on growth agenda. President Barack Obama said recently he sees emerging consensus for an agenda promoting growth among some of the world’s largest economies after a meeting of the G8 Summit. Leaders are, however, still focused on cutting debt to handle the European financial crisis. Associated Press

Dan Blake makes money from garbage. Literally.

After scarfing down French toast at a restaurant in Provo, Blake asked what was being done with the leftovers. When he saw Dumpsters full of rotting food, he had an idea.

“One thing led to another and I started Dumpster diving to experiment with food waste,” Blake said. “Then I stumbled across a recipe that made for really good garden soil.”

This experiment led Blake to where he is today. He started the company EcoScraps by turning food waste into a compost soil that’s good for the environment. But running a highly successful business and attending classes didn’t seem to run hand-in-hand.

When I arrived in Georgia in May 2002, I quickly sensed that I had landed in the most entrepreneurially oriented place among my various tours of duty with the U.S. Small Business Administration. Many people I encountered, even casually, were thinking about starting a business, were starting a business or had an established business. Even individuals who held traditional jobs also operated their own enterprises. Statistics have supported my initial observations. Ninety-five percent of the businesses have fewer than 50 employees, with 87 percent employing five or fewer individuals. The Kauffman Foundation ranks Georgia second among states for increases in entrepreneurial activity over the past decade. The Atlanta-Marietta-Sandy Springs Metropolitan Statistical Area tied for second nationally in entrepreneurial activity among metropolitan areas.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter work well because people enjoy sharing their lives with friends. At the office, however, social networking with colleagues can feel forced. Many businesses are adopting social-networking tools in hopes of fostering collaboration, but if employees don't sign up or participate, the effort fails.

To get around this problem, HP Labs has created a workplace social network that builds itself. The Web application, dubbed the Collective Project, tracks internal documents created or opened by about 10,000 Hewlett-Packard employees. It assigns topic words to each document by mining its content, and then computes similarity to create knowledge maps and family trees centered around employees and subject areas. The project's goal is to show how people within a large organization can automatically be connected based on "inferred expertise," providing a resource that staff can tap into for answers to questions.

A generation of young entrepreneurs from Hungary is off to conquer the global market despite the country’s current economic troubles. Related

To Czech Industry, Everything Is Nano (May 23, 2012) Made in China, but Assembled in Bulgaria (May 23, 2012) A Slovakian Start-Up Looks to Cable for Its Media Model (May 23, 2012) Many young Hungarian entrepreneurs are trying to emulate firms like Prezi, which makes cloud-based software for more dynamic presentations. The software allows a presenter to zoom in or pan across an image, among other things. It has been adopted by more than 10 million users worldwide.

“In Budapest there is certainly a trend toward creating an innovation hub for Central Europe,” said Peter Arvai, Prezi’s chief executive, during a recent video call from San Francisco, where the company set up an office in 2009.

Like a good consultant, I had 106 slides on best practices in innovation — too many to digest. So I whittled them down to an executive summary with four simple points, each tied to an individual: an "Innovation Mount Rushmore." The virtual monument worked as an effective way to synthesize a complex field, and served as the basis for chapter 3 of The Little Black Book of Innovation.

The original Innovation Mount Rushmore had four faces:

1. A.G. Lafley, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Procter & Gamble, whose "consumer is boss" mantra urges innovators to always take an external perspective. Get out in the market and invest the time to understand the customer better than they understand themselves.

Traditionally, the roles of employee and entrepreneur represent two completely different professional archetypes, each with their own ideal skill set. For example, success for an employee is often measured by how well they take direction from superiors, act within the scope of their job responsibilities or function, and reinforce the mission, vision, or values of the organization. Success for entrepreneurs is typically determined by their ability to direct their own work and act without precedent, to expand and grow their job responsibilities and functions, and to envision and support a mission, vision, and set of values on their own. Another way to look at it is to think of the role of an employee as implementing the tactics of an organization--the individual actions that contribute to the success of the larger strategy. The role of an entrepreneur is to develop that larger strategy, and implement it themselves or oversee its implementation.

Finalists and winners of the first Grow America (www.GrowAm.com) Springboard™ business competition for 2012 are $250,000 richer in cash awards and services following this week’s Live Pitch and Final Pitch events at the Utah Salt Palace. Early Monday afternoon, the 100 Round 2 finalists met to participate in Live Pitch judging, culminating in the Final Pitch event that KUTV recorded and is producing into a one-hour broadcast show.

“Thanks to the involvement of our community, our tremendous entrepreneurs and our great sponsors, our first Springboard competition has been a historic event,” said Founder Alan E. Hall. “We look forward to the continuing series, and we invite all entrepreneurs who qualify, as well as investors, sponsors and mentors to continue our expansion of this program through the rest of 2012 and beyond.”

A relatively young term in an entrepreneur’s vocabulary is “product-market fit” (PMF). Attributed to Marc Andreessen in 2009, this term, has a relatively simple meaning but one that’s hard to really get a sense of:

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

If you go after an awesome market – growing fast, has excellent demand and a great growth curve, then you’ve got 90% product-market fit, even though technically 50% of the challenge in any startup is coming up with a good product.

Lets assume you are going after a great market.

How do you know its a great market? Besides the fact that its large (obvious) the speed of adoption is tremendous.

The 17-country eurozone risks falling into a “severe recession,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned on Tuesday, as it called on governments and Europe’s central bank to act quickly to keep the slowdown from dragging down the global economy.

OECD Chief Economist Pier Carlo Padoan warned the eurozone economy could contract by as much as two per cent this year, a figure that the Paris-based think-tank had laid out as its worst-case scenario in November.

In its twice-yearly global economic outlook, the OECD — which comprises the world’s most developed economies — said its average forecast was for the eurozone economy to shrink 0.1 per cent this year and grow a mere 0.9 per cent in 2013.

Every time I think TC Disrupt’s Startup Alley can’t get any better, it does. TC Europe Editor Mike Butcher and I ventured into the chaos, accosted at every turn by startups from across the world. We even had a startup, iLiftOff, fly all the way in from Mumbai on a 21-hour flight.

It’s almost a shame that we can’t have all the Startup Alley companies in the Battlefield, but at the same time, the beauty of the alley is that we can talk to them for far longer than six minutes. And we often do.

There’s all sorts of data that the government has, but very little of it is actually accessible by developers. But the U.S. Government is trying to change that: Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel announced a new initiative within the government to open up data that was previously locked up in government documents and arcane backend systems. That will allow developers to create new applications and services based on that data.

The digital road map is based on the following five ideas:

• Open Data as the new default 
• Anywhere, anytime on any device 
• Everything should be an API 
• Make government data social 
• Change the meaning of social participation

I recently co-authored a book called the Startup of You. I know that you all know this, because in honor and respect of your achievement of graduating today, I have gifted a copy to each of you. In it, I began with a quote from Mohammed Yunus. I will begin today with the same quotation:

“All Humans were born entrepreneurs. In the caves, we were all self-employed. Finding food, feeding ourselves. That is how human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us “You are labor.” ”

I begin with this quotation because entrepreneurs are important. Here in the U.S., we have always known this because we have an entrepreneurial nation.

We have founding “fathers” of the nation; in parallel, entrepreneurs are founders of companies.

The vast majority of people in the U.S. are descendants of immigrants who took a huge gamble to cross an ocean and come to a new land; in parallel, many entrepreneurial companies emerge from immigrant founders and immigrant talent who come here to build these companies.

The American dream is the ability to make your own destiny, through hard work, perseverance, and some combination of intelligence and luck. In parallel, new entrepreneurial companies succeed on the same basis.

We, the leadership and delegates of the 2012 Group of Eight Young Summit representing over twenty countries and six continents including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America, met in Washington, DC on 4, 5 and 6 May 2012. In this period of global change with increasing social and economic challenges we affirm the commitment of our generation to sharing and fostering the values of freedom, democracy, education, peace and long term economic stability and development. We value the principles of a truly global network of nations united, which lives up to and exemplifies the guiding principles of the UN at its formation.

During our three-day Summit we discussed issues, challenges and victories that have been achieved in the most important areas of Global Security, Global Governance, Global Infrastructure, Global Entrepreneurship, and Global Health. Some common themes that emerged across these think tank areas include: 1) the need for more strategic partnerships between public and private entities and stakeholders at all levels, 2) the global crisis of unemployment with one billion youth currently entering – or seeking to enter - the workforce, 3) the need for access to capital, 4) leveraging technology to disseminate information across global networks, 5) the need for integrity at all levels of private and public sectors and increased transparency, and 6) activating systems and networks to address these global challenges.

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