Last week, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (the “JOBS Act”), designed to help new companies raise capital and go public. As FORBES contributor John Wasik wrote here, “The jury’s still out on whether the new JOBS Act will empower the next Steve Jobs or the next Bernie Madoff.”

To some extent that will depend on how well the Securities and Exchange Commission protects investors. Today it announced that it will begin accepting comments from the public as it begins making rules required under the law. For those who want to comment, the SEC has provided a series of links on its website organized by titles of the JOBS Act.

You’ve probably heard of a few newish venture-operator groups out there — Betaworks, Churn Labs and Science, Inc are some examples. They’re basically organizations that take the idea of incubation to the next level, by being professional venture firms that build companies to be run by seasoned entrepreneurs. But Minor Ventures was doing this back in 2005, and quietly won big over the years with hits like GrandCentral (now Google Voice), OpenDNS and Scout Labs.

Today, its namesake, Halsey Minor has become embroiled in various other issues, but Ron Palmeri has been putting together a new firm, called MkII Ventures (“mark 2” meaning new model or variant, such as for military hardware). The word among Minor Ventures CEOs has been that despite Palmeri’s low profile as managing director, he was a major factor in the firm’s success. So, he’s well positioned for this next move.

SANTA CLAR, Calif. (KGO) -- Big multi-national companies like Apple see China as a fast-growing market. Small start-ups have had more difficulty making in-roads there. But a new initiative in Silicon Valley could change that.

It's so new; the painting contractor is still applying finishing touches. Innospring is Silicon Valley's first U.S.-China technology incubator. Engineers are already hard at work.

Lucas Wang has a PhD. from Columbia, but his roots are in China. He has created a cloud-based animation platform he plans to market in both countries. The incubator will help him connect to funders and mentors.

Your passions aren’t worth anything says Mark Cuban:

Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. Think about all those passions that you considered making a career out of or building a company around. How many were/are there ? Why did you bounce from one to another ? Why were you not able to make a career or business out of any of those passions ? Or if you have been able to have some success, what was the key to the success.? Was it the passion or the effort you put in to your job or company?

The Startup Genome project setup a year ago to gather comparative data on startups around the world. Its Startup Compass allows entrepreneurs to compare statistics on their companies with others in their locality and around the world.

A post on Techcrunch provides a great summary of some of the data gathered in the almost 12 months since the launch of the project.

I was particularly interested in the rankings of startup cities around the world, reproduced below. There is no question that the US is no longer the predominant startup country in a world in which economic and entrepreneurial activity is increasingly global.

Admissions panels have unforgiving standards for new medical students. That scares Jacob Scott.

Scott, a radiation oncologist and cancer theoretician, told an audience of doctors, scientists, government officials, and others at TEDMED 2012 this morning that these standards threaten to kill creativity in biology and medicine.

Scott said the tremendous growth of biological knowledge in the last 15 years or so has separated biological experts into disconnected pigeonholes. While it's necessary for true experts to focus on their particular area, it's also scary: "There's a disconnectedness we've never seen before."

A recent study provides one more argument against government officials who tout “industry clusters” as the Holy Grail of regional growth and innovation.

The formula for creating these clusters is always the same: Pick a hot industry, build a technology park next to a research university, provide incentives for businesses to relocate, add some venture capital and then watch the magic happen. But, as I have noted before, the magic never happens. Most of the top-down cluster-development projects in the United States and around the world have died a slow death in relative obscurity. Politicians who held the press conferences to claim credit for advancing science and technology are long gone. Management consultants have cashed in their big checks. Real estate barons have reaped fortunes, and taxpayers are left holding the bag.

The arrival of eLife, a new open access journal, together with new science networking sites and new metrics to measure the impact of research publications may force the pace of change facing the business of scientific and academic publishing. We may be witnessing a tipping point in collaboration, faster access and new opportunities.

The protection of intellectual property is vital to virtually every aspect of the U.S. economy, according to a new report released by the Department of Commerce.

The report, titled “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Industries in Focus,” highlights many industries and exports that intellectual property supports, concluding that nearly every sector of the U.S. economy relies on or uses some aspect of intellectual property.

Autonomy, liberty, divergence are innovation drivers, but are they opposite to management rules? In other words, “Can innovation or innovative design be managed?” asks Gilles Garel in his “Innovation Chair” speech.

Management science is the way to lead a collective action, by setting up an efficient framework for teamwork. As innovation is a collective adventure, it can definitely benefit from management: innovation can be managed!

The advances in technology and the digital marketplace mean that creative enterprises have an opportunity to take their business from a local to a global market. We are a small market here in Tasmania, with a high level of creative talent and capability, within the relatively small market of Australia. Now is the time to take advantage of the business opportunities enabled by the National Broadband Network (NBN).

One of these opportunities will be an increased demand for creative and digital skills, a result of other sectors recognising the innate need to deliver their products and services online. This demand could include generating screen content, a web presence, e-commerce, digital marketing strategies, mobile platforms and applications.

Digital distribution channels are also changing the way artists broadcast their work while simultaneously expanding the way audiences interact with and consume art. As a result there will be an increased demand for creative digital content that tells stories, presents new talent and engages an international audience.

Download the PDF

1."Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2. "There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth -- not going all the way, and not starting." - Buddha

3. "Be willing to be a beginner every single morning." - Meister Eckhart

4. "All great ideas and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning." - Albert Camus

5. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao Tzu

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) on Wednesday said he plans to introduce legislation to help spur job growth in the high-tech sector.

The senator said his bill, the “America Innovates Act,” would help universities, researchers and private companies turn discoveries into marketable products.

When Chika Ekeji enrolled in the MIT Sloan School of Business' full-time MBA program, he was ambivalent about actually finishing his degree. What he was really in school for, he'd decided, was a chance to found his own company.

"I used to joke that I was on the dropout path," says Mr. Ekeji, who while at Sloan helped develop mobile-phone technology that diagnoses impaired vision and an app that helps researchers find field workers in low-income countries. "As soon as I got the right idea, the right team, I was gone."

That's a remarkable attitude for a student at a top-ranked business school, where costs can exceed $85,000 a year. Most MBAs seek steady, jobs in finance or consulting where they can quickly recover their cash and start building wealth. Nevertheless, Mr. Ekeji is part of a rare but growing breed of student: the MBA-entrepreneur who shrugs off anti-MBA snobbery from the entrepreneur community.

So sometimes social media gets all the attention for being a shiner medium, but that doesn’t mean email is dead. Not by a long shot. In fact, according to a new survey from ExactTarget, its email NOT social media that customers seek out most for promotional messages. Interesting, right?

But hold that thought, let’s back up.

ExactTarget’s data comes from the 2012 Channel Preference Study, an ongoing research series that uses data collected through focus groups and online surveys to discover how real consumers interact with brands through email, Facebook and Twitter. None of this “theory” or “assumptions” stuff. They look at the real data behind what’s going on. For the 2012 survey, a total of 1,481 respondents completed the survey between January 27, 2012, and February 1, 2012, answering questions about overall Internet usage, devices owned, personal communication habits, permission, and purchase-behavior related to marketing. You can check out the PDF linked above for the full responses, but it was that last segment that I was most interested in.

Facebook, Zynga, and other hot companies use Interview Street to recruit programmers. Interview Street posts programming challenges and invites contenders to solve as many as they can.

According to their message board, nine of Interview Street's top ten hackers are all from China. One is from an unknown country.

A hacker called ralekseenkov, who is ranked number 11, is from the United States.

What does that say about the talent crunch here?

Any new startup, scratch that, any business should be solving the universal issue of “what problem can my company solve?” Crowdinvest, a venture by three ambitious Cape Town locals aims to address the need of the burgeoning startup in a distinctly un-Kickstarter like way. How so? By crowdfunding projects through social networks, word of mouth and whatever else fits the bill.

Anton Breytenbach, Jay Thomson and Jaco van der Bank are the trio founders behind Crowdinvest. Breytenbach is the CEO, Thomson the CTO and Van der Bank the SBA.

The late Steve Jobs was a prime example of an overconfident CEO who was also a wildly successful innovator. Not interested in focus groups or feedback from his colleagues, Jobs stuck to his perfectionist vision for such revolutionary inventions as iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad.

Was Jobs an anomaly, unlike any other CEO? The conventional wisdom is that overconfidence in a CEO is a liability, associated with terrible business decisions that do harm to a company. But an upcoming paper in the Journal of Finance suggests that in fact, like Jobs, overconfident CEOs foster greater levels of innovation, in the form of riskier projects, larger investments in research and development, and more innovation.

When Navneet Dalal listens to music on his computer, he doesn't want any keyboard taps or mouse-button clicks to interrupt the experience. He'd rather just hold up an open palm to play or pause the tunes.

Dalal is cofounder of Flutter, a startup that offers simple software that lets users control ordinary computer apps with such simple gestures. Flutter emerges as gesture controls are becoming increasingly popular on consumer devices: Microsoft's Kinect motion sensor brought it to the Xbox, and the company now sells a Kinect for Windows setup that encourages users to build applications using the technology. Samsung, meanwhile, has added gesture-control technology to some of its TVs.

The historian of technology discusses the remarkable story that inspired his latest book, Turing’s Cathedral.