A GOOGLE CAMPUS IN LONDON FORGOES GIANT SLIDES AND GAME ROOMS FOR A NEW WORKING PHILOSOPHY THAT INVOLVES FLEXIBLE CO-WORKING SPACES AND INTIMATE MEETING NODES.

Contradictory attitudes towards work are endemic to the tech community: Work 16 hours a day! But do so while sitting in a bean bag chair, because, you know, that’s fun! Don’t be evil! But remember that you’re privileged to work here!

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act was signed into law on April 5, 2012 to help early-stage and emerging companies get easier access to capital.

The legislation, which is sweeping in nature, contains various provisions crafted to ease capital raising for privately-held companies. The provision that has generated perhaps the most buzz is a new securities exemption that allows companies to raise up to $1,000,000 per year from large numbers of investors through funding portals. The ability companies will have to crowdfund equity financing greatly expands their potential sources of capital. But startups will want to think carefully before taking the crowdfunding route.

Cambridge’s most prolific life sciences entrepreneur, Andy Richards, says the local cluster is attracting more cash and global kudos than at any time in its history.

Dr Richards says a number of ‘secret’ investments in the UK sector have created a far healthier funding environment than available figures would suggest.

A serial angel investor in Cambridge’s European-leading BiomedTech cluster, Dr Richards is also its most passionate evangelist and believes it has never ridden so high in its quarter-century evolution.

More than 60 percent of young adults between the ages of 19 and 22 received some financial help from mom and dad, according to a new University of Michigan study. The average amount they received – including help with college tuition, rent, and transportation – was roughly $7,500 a year.

The study is the first to use nationally representative data to calculate parental assistance to young adults and to analyze how help varies by family and individual characteristics.  It is based on data from 2,098 interviews conducted between 2005 and 2009, with young men and women and their families, part of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Transition to Adulthood Study at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

It’s no secret to any government contractor that the current budget tightening initiatives in Congress will mean less business to go around. That doesn’t mean, however, that opportunities are no longer available and worthy of pursuit.

Case in point – 14 continuing resolutions later, Congress finally reauthorized the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer grant programs for an additional six years. Offered in two phases, the initiatives give between $150,000 and $1 million to help companies bring new technologies to reality. While that’s great news for firms that pride themselves on delivering cutting-edge systems, but it by no means indicates a return to the days of old. Budgets are still going to be scrutinized more than ever as increased emphasis in spending controls continues to take hold in Washington.

In the last episode of TechStars, we saw what happens to team dynamics when when founders don’t have the same level of passion about their startup and one founder isn’t ready to go all-in.

In this episode, we watch as $1 million in funding for one TechStars company leads to cockiness that some business veterans think could be a hindrance to success in the long run.

On global and local scales, there is a large shift in how novel ideas and discoveries can quickly establish market relevance and commercial significance. The acquisition of Instagram by Facebook for US$ 1B may seem aberrant, but it clearly marks recent trend boundaries. As a co-founder of a small biotech, informatics based, academic startup company, this has led me to wonder how a young company like Instagram could have achieved such stunning success so quickly.

Klaus Schwab gave the opening speech at the 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos. In a synopsis of this speech, Dr. Schwab posted this observation that caught my attention:

When Facebook agreed last month to spend $1 billion to buy Instagram, a 12-person company with no revenues, technology watchers had to recalibrate their speedometers.

Facebook, the social network created for personal computers in February 2004, is now planning an IPO that could value it at $100 billion. Instagram, which began giving away its photo-sharing app for the iPhone only in October 2010, represents something new: a shift away from the Web and the PC to a kind of consumer experience built expressly for mobile devices, particularly smart phones.

Few ideas hold more sway among entrepreneurs and investors these days than "Big Data." The idea is that we are now collecting so much information about people from their online behavior and, especially, through their mobile phones that we can make increasingly specific predictions about how they will behave and what they will buy.

But are those assumptions really true? One doubter is Peter Fader, codirector of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a professor of marketing. Fader shared some of his concerns in an interview with reporter Lee Gomes.

Thin off-white threads of human cellular material spiral around the spindle of a machine that is braiding them into a sturdy rope. It sounds macabre, but the inspiration for the material, made by San Diego–based Cytograft Tissue Engineering, is health, not horror: the biological strands could be used to weave blood vessel patches and grafts that a patient's body would readily accept for wound repair. The process is faster and could be more cost-effective than other methods of producing biological tissue replacements.

Much of today's tissue engineering depends on biodegradable but synthetic scaffolds for cells that will rebuild a piece of organ or tissue. Typically, the scaffolding is eventually destroyed by the body. Cytograft's woven tissues, however, seem to remain in the body and become populated with cells. "A long time ago we decided we were going to make strong tissues without any scaffolding," says Nicolas L'Heureux, Cytograft's cofounder and chief scientific officer. "Once you get it in the body, your body doesn't see it as foreign."

Creativity expert Michael Michalko recently wrote an excellent article, "How Geniuses Think" that explains what separates geniuses from the rest of the world.

Michalko points out that geniuses don't necessarily have the highest IQs, but they simply know how to think differently.

Regular people think reproductively, he says, which is the concept of revisiting ideas and solutions that have worked in the past. Geniuses, on the other hand, think productively, always looking at problems in new ways.

I saw a Twitter tweet from a penny today.  Not a woman named Penny, but a penny coin.  The Canadian penny, to be exact.

The Canadian government recently announced its intention to eliminate the penny as a cost saving measure.  In a last ditch effort to save face (value), the Canadian penny took to Twitter. And now, the determined discus has launched a media blitz to have its two cents heard.

As it turns out, the penny, while short on purchasing power, is long on class and has only one altruistic message for followers:  Donate me to your favorite charity. At Show Your Roll, visitors are urged to submit favorite penny photos and outline last wishes for their donated Canadian pennies.

A quasi-state agency tasked with investing millions of taxpayer dollars in high-growth, high-risk startup companies has run its course and is headed out of business.

But first, lawmakers wanting to do away with the venture capital investment board say they must unravel a dicey situation that could leave taxpayers with a hefty bill. The Oklahoma Capital Investment Board was created by legislation roughly 20 years ago in an effort to stimulate the state's economy following the energy bust. The state gave the board $100 million in tax credits.

The European tech venture-capital market is struggling but, according to figures published by Dow Jones VentureSource, it could be a lot worse.

“The difficult fund-raising environment and shrinking number of exits means less money is flowing into venture firms and, therefore, less is flowing out,” said Jessica Canning, global research director, Dow Jones VentureSource. “But there are some positive signs. European venture fund-raising rose 8% in the first quarter and financing deals didn’t drop as significantly as investment which means VCs are still finding companies they want to support.”

We can finally estimate how much Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow shareholders are worth.

The social network set the stock-price range for its IPO at $28 to $35, meaning it’s shooting for a valuation as high as $96 billion.

Here are the shareholders holding more than a $1 billion worth of stock at the upper end of the price range:

Buried in Facebook’s amended S-1 is a fun little nugget of information: CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be selling 30.2 million of his shares in the company’s initial public offering, a sale that will net him roughly $1 billion.

In the lead-up to its IPO, Facebook set its opening price range at $28 to $35 a share Thursday — but that could change. Financial data company PrivCo said that underwriters plan to raise the range to $38 to $40 per share prior to the IPO for an initial day price pop.

A just-released Kauffman Foundation study found that fewer than 8 percent of all businesses in the U.S. were new businesses in 2010, continuing a steady decline in startup activity since the 1980s.

That’s bad news for the economy and the job market, since Kauffman also has found that startups create more jobs, on net, than existing businesses.

So what can policy makers in Washington, D.C., do to get the great American startup machine cranking again? Here are five ideas:

Yesterday at the New York Biotechnology Association’s 21st annual meeting, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins was beamed in by videoconference to a keynote lunch at the Times Square Marriott Marquis. Collins, who was the featured speaker, apologized for his virtual appearance at the event, but he had a good excuse: Just two hours earlier he was at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., making an announcement about an ambitious new program being undertaken by the NIH and drug giants Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly. The NIH said it will collaborate with the companies to make existing compounds available to outside scientists who want to find new uses for them.

Last month, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), a trade association representing the U.S. venture capital industry, released the results of its MoneyTree Report on venture funding for the first quarter of 2012.  The report, which is prepared by NVCA and PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP using data from Thomson Reuters, indicates that venture capitalists invested $5.8 billion in 758 deals in the first quarter, which constituted a 19% decrease in dollars and a 15% decrease in deals as compared with the fourth quarter of 2011, when $7.1 billion was invested in 889 deals.

The report notes that the Life Sciences sector (biotechnology and medical device industries) and the Clean Technology sector saw marked decreases in both dollars and deals in the first quarter, with the drop in Life Sciences funding mostly due to decreased funding for the biotech industry.  While the biotechnology industry still managed to place second among the industries tracked by the NVCA in terms of dollars invested in the first quarter, with $780 million invested in 99 deals, this constituted a 43% drop in dollars and a 14% drop in deals over the fourth quarter.  The medical device industry picked up some of the slack for the Life Sciences sector, with $687 million invested in 72 deals, which constituted a 33% increase in dollars and a 6% drop in deals.  The number of deals in the Life Sciences sector dipped to its lowest point since the first quarter of 2009.  Overall, eleven of the seventeen sectors tracked by the NVCA saw decreases in dollars invested in the first quarter.

On September 16, 2011, President Obama signed into law the America Invents Act, the most important modification to U.S. patent law in 60 years—and some even argue, since 1836. Some changes went into effect immediately, such as fee penalties for submitting paper applications and strict rules on when multiple defendants can be joined together in one lawsuit.

These immediate changes were not as important to most inventors and tech companies. Instead, the big focus has been on the switch from the “first-to-invent” guideline for awarding patents to a “first-to-file.” Another change of great interest are the new types of challenges that can be used by third parties to prevent a patent from issuing, or to get it revoked. The changes in patent challenges take effect on September 16, while the new first-to-file rule begins next year, on March 16.