Four U.S. Senators today introduced Startup Act 2.0 – bipartisan legislation designed to jumpstart the economy through the creation and growth of new businesses. Startup Act 2.0 builds upon the original Startup Act, introduced by Senators Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) in December 2011, and the AGREE Act, introduced by Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), in November 2011.

Startup Act 2.0 creates new opportunities for American-educated and entrepreneurial immigrants to remain in the United States where their talent and ideas can fuel economic growth and create American jobs. The bill also alleviates regulatory burdens that make it more difficult for businesses to expand and create jobs. Finally, Startup Act 2.0 makes changes to the tax code to encourage investment in startup companies.

While Initial Public Offerings like Facebook's make front page news, life after an IPO and its impact on the broader economy have not been looked at in-depth. A new Kauffman Foundation report released today examines the little-studied employment and revenue growth performance of all domestic operating companies that have made IPOs over the past 15 years and offers insights for policymakers.

According to the report titled "Post-IPO Employment and Revenue Growth for U.S. IPOs, June 1996-2010," the volume of initial public offerings fell nearly 70 percent in the past decade from the average volume in the prior two decades. This drop – from an average of 298 domestic operating companies per year during 1980-2000 to an average of only 90 per year during 2001-2011 – was even more precipitous among small companies.

Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation will invest $46 million to build a 222,000-square-foot Green Manufacturing Center at the 300-acre Industrial park on the Brooklyn, New York City, borough’s waterfront, initially creating more than 300 jobs and an estimated 400 construction jobs.

"This project is an example of how the New York City Regional Economic Development Council initiative is helping the state invest in a productive and sustainable innovation economy that will put New Yorkers back to work now and for years to come," Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

Sometimes tweaks aren’t enough. Sometimes nothing short of reinventing yourself, your organization, or your community is called for. The start of the 21st century is one of those times. If anything is certain about the new millennium it’s the pace of change. New technology relentlessly hurdles into our lives. Ideas and practices travel around the world at Internet speed. Social media enables individuals to self organize and reorganize in ways unimaginable in the 20th century. We also live in anxious times marked by economic uncertainty but one thing is clear, relevancy is more fleeting than ever. How to stay relevant in a changing and uncertain world is one of the most important questions of our time.

Thriving in the midst of today’s frenetic pace of change requires a new set of approaches and tools. Incremental change may have been enough at the end of an industrial era marked by me-too products and services, process re-engineering, best practices, benchmarks, and continuous improvement. We have built institutions that are far better at share taking than at market making. We have become really good at tweaks. There are tons of books, experts, and tools to help us make marginal improvements in the way things work today and to fight it out with existing competitors for one more share point. But how do we become market makers? Incremental change may be necessary but it isn’t sufficient for the 21st century defined by next practices, disruptive technologies, market making, and transformation.

Startups, listen up.

GE’s nearly two-and-a-half-year-old, $250 million Healthymagination Fund still has a “lot of dry powder” and executives are looking for promising startups to invest in.

Noah Lewis, managing director of the Healthymagination Fund, and a colleague were out broadcasting the fund’s capabilities while meeting new companiesat the IBF MedTech Investing Conference in Minneapolis last week. In the midst of that, Lewis took some time to talk about the fund, the investment criteria and what GE brings to the table. Below is an edited version of the interview.

For years, U.S. Internet speeds have lagged far behind many developed nations. But this isn’t deterring Americans from logging online.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index shows the U.S. accounted for a sizeable chunk of global Internet traffic -- about 31 percent in 2010.

The U.S. Telecom Association crunched a few sets of numbers (shown below) and found the country also ranks near the top in terms of data usage per user. The nation’s estimated 245 million Internet users consumed a monthly average of 25.7 gigabytes per user, according to the trade association. Only South Korea, which boasts the world's fastest speeds in many studies, transfers more data, with a monthly average of 49.1 gigabytes.

One of the biggest mistakes made by innovation-seeking companies is to place a premium on the development of the perfect idea. They should instead follow the guidance of two-time Nobel Prize winning scientist Linus Pauling: "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."

There's no such thing as the perfect idea. The best ideas in fact almost always emerge out of a process of trial-end-error experimentation. Re-watch the movie The Social Network for a simple reminder of this. Facebook didn't start as Facebook. It started in October 2003 as Facemash, a simple tool that Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg created to allow people to rate the relative attractiveness of pairs of students. Then Zuckerberg created (or borrowed from the Winklevoss twins) the idea of a social network for Harvard students. It expanded to other Ivy League universities and then other universities before finally branching out to a mass-market platform. Anyone who tells you that what unfolded was mapped out on day one is trying to sell you something.

Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture capital firms, has closed its fifteenth investment fund.

The company announced today that it has raised $525 million for KPCB 15, which will invest in “early-stage digital consumer and enterprise, green tech, and life sciences companies.” Kleiner Perkins notes that it has been investing in enterprise technologies for decades, but it’s emphasizing this sector even more with the latest fund.

The fund’s 10 managing partners will be Mike Abbott, Chi-Hua Chien, Amol Deshpande, John Doerr, Bing Gordon, Wen Hsieh, Randy Komisar, Matt Murphy, Beth Seidenberg, and Ted Schlein.

I know what you’re thinking.  You are thinking there has been a lot of talk about women in venture capital, or rather, the lack of women in venture capital. You can read about it, here, here, here, and here.  You can read the outrage about how there are only 5 women on Forbes’s Midas 100 List. You can even see tweets by men who are VCs  talk about the dearth of women who are VCs.

What you haven’t been reading are articles about the women who ARE in the investing community. Sure, there are articles about a few of them, and there was a wonderful Twitter campaign started by Cindy Gallop entitled “Female VC’s Everyone Should Know,” which listed over 50 female venture capitalists; however, thanks to Twitter’s API cap and Cindy’s prolific tweeting, there is nothing to link to for your reference.

In a small restaurant in New York last week, I watched an attractive 30-something woman interact intensely with her smart phone the entire time she was at the table with a clearly irritated spouse/partner and two other bemused couples.

It was a mesmerizing display of bad manners in the modern age, performed by someone who by all appearances should know better.

My daughter and I couldn't quit watching the scene unfold - we thought it was a "Candid Camera" episode - and have been talking about it since.

Before Friday, almost every Silicon Valley insider was saying Facebook stock would finish its first day between $50 and $60 per share.

In reality, the share price at the closing bell was a pathetic $38.37.

How were these masters of the universe — some of them the most powerful investors on the West Coast — so woefully inaccurate in their predictions?

I founded MoveableCode back in 2009, initially to do some mobile Augmented Reality research on a National Science Foundation SBIR grant. We quickly learned that we could make cool things but no money and pivoted. Two years later, we are all about innovative mobile entertainment. We have a grand vision to build a kickass company and Incantor is a big part of that.

Post pivot, I’ve been lucky enough to lure in two good friends, Kevin Mowrer and Trivikram Prasad. Kevin used to run all of R&D for Hasbro and founded their entertainment division. He used to be a client of mine. Triv was an engineer at a company I worked for when I first came to the US as a product manager. He went on to lead teams for Intel and Intuit and is now based in Bangalore, India. I’ve known both of them for 15+ years and we immediately clicked as a team. We’ve raised a modest amount of money, just enough to get some proof points and are now getting in to high gear.

When Facebook went public last week, the company was valued at $104 billion, an astonishing figure for an Internet company. Is the figure preposterously high? That depends on how you look at it. The value in Facebook lies in its enormous audience—901 million people every month who are potential viewers of advertisements and buyers of virtual goods. So you could think of Facebook this way: it is worth about $116 for every user it has. On that basis, the company isn't being valued as highly as Google ($200 per user) or even the question-and-answer service Quora ($145). This metric also reveals that investors are much less optimistic that Twitter (worth less than $60 per user) or Tumblr (about $8) will profit handsomely from their very large audiences.

When IBM loosened its restrictions on the smart phones and tablets its employees could use for work, the company got a lesson in IT management of the kind it usually sells to clients.

In 2010, like many large companies in recent years, IBM adopted a "bring your own device" policy, meaning that employees who want to work outside the office don't have to use a smart phone provided by the company. Although IBM still gives BlackBerrys to about 40,000 of its 400,000 employees, 80,000 other workers now reach internal IBM networks using other smart phones and tablets, including ones they purchased for themselves.

The European Commission is set to launch a substantial review of rules governing personal documents with the aim of making electronic identities take off across the EU. But the proposal faces likely opposition from civil rights groups and member states where identity cards do not exist. Neelie Kroes, the EU's Digital Agenda Commissioner, will present by the beginning of June a new legislative proposal which aims “to facilitate cross-border electronic transactions” through the adoption of harmonised e-signatures, e-identities and electronic authentication services (eIAS) across EU member states, according to an internal document seen by EurActiv.

“A clear regulatory environment for eIAS would boost user convenience, trust and confidence in the digital world,” reads the paper. “This will increase the availability of cross-border and cross-sector eIAS and stimulate the take up of cross-border electronic transactions in all sectors.”

Technology is helping communication companies merge telephone, television and Internet services, but a push to deregulate may leave some customers on the wrong side of the digital divide during this convergence, according to a Penn State telecommunications researcher.

“Moving away from copper lines is an example of abandoning obsolete technology and embracing technology that is faster, better, cheaper and more convenient,” said Rob Frieden, Pioneers Chair in Cable Television and professor of telecommunications and law. “But the risk is that we may be creating a digital divide — not necessarily a divide between the rich and poor, but between the information rich and information poor.”

These data show the compensation received in the 2010-11 fiscal year by 199 chief executives at 190 public universities and systems in the United States. Fiscal years typically end June 30.

The Chronicle surveyed institutions to collect compensation data. Our analysis included public colleges and their affiliated systems that were classified as research universities by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2010. The four-year institutions included here comprise universities with total fall enrollments of at least 10,000 and universities with smaller enrollments that are state flagships. The cohort was set based on fall 2009 enrollments because more recent figures were not available at the time of the survey’s distribution.

Almost half (48%) of the computer users in the EU admit they have acquired pirated software, according to a new report by the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Some users say they pirate all or most of the time. 22% say they do it "occasionally" and 26% say they do it, but only "rarely". The study also found that admitted software pirates in the EU predominantly are males aged between 25 and 44.

"The sheer volume of software piracy remains alarming, considering the security risks posed by illegal software and the importance of the industry to the digital economy in the single market," said Thomas Boué, director of government affairs at the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an industry association.

Several years ago University of California at Davis professor Dean Simonton conducted a study that examined more than three hundred creative geniuses born between 1450 and 1850. The list included thinkers Liebniz and Descartes, scientists Newton and Copernicus and artists Vinci and Rembrandt. He compared the relationship between their education and eminence, a metric he determined by an array of criteria. He plotted the graph and found an inverted U sparking the following conclusion: “The most eminent creators were those who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about the middle of college.”

Simonton’s research highlights a commonly held notion: too much familiarity can be detrimental to creativity. The problem, Simonton hypothesizes, is that creativity benefits from an outsider’s mindset. “Too much experience…” on the other hand, “may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should be done that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.” It seems reasonable, then, to suggest that, “if you want a creative solution to a problem, you’d better find someone who knows a little about the situation but not too much.”

I’m seeing a renewed appreciation of culture and values in business these days. Maybe it’s just another example of nature abhorring a vacuum, but I prefer to think it’s a natural evolution of the pervasive social networking communities, where people relate to and expect to interact with businesses and products they like. They drive the market, rather than the other way around.

Your values as you create a startup are the key to creating an enviable culture that attracts more customers, according to Ann Rhoades, in her book “Built on Values.” She would assert, and I agree, that you need to get it right the first time, because first impressions are critical, and changing your values and culture in the eyes of customers and employees is extremely difficult.