Venture fundraising raised $4.88 billion in the first quarter, the industry's third-highest tally since the recession ended, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

Forty-two U.S. venture funds were created in the first three months of the year, the NVCA said Monday. The amount raised was down 35 percent from the year-ago period, when 46 funds reeled in $7.56 billion.

Menlo Park's Andreessen Horowitz raised the biggest single fund in the quarter, bringing in $1.5 billion from its limited partners.

Cambridge, MA-based Flagship Ventures said today it has formed a partnership with Merck Research Ventures Fund—the $250 million fund the Whitehouse Station, NJ-based drug giant set up last year to foster biotech startups. The two companies will collaborate to find and back new companies that are developing drugs to address unmet medical needs. As part of the deal, Merck Research Ventures Fund (MRVF) became an investor in Flagship’s fourth venture capital fund, which closed in January. The financial details of the Merck partnership were not disclosed.

Merck (NYSE: MRK) established its fund in the fall and has made four fund-to-fund investments so far. MRVF’s managing director, Reid Leonard, who works out of the Boston-based Merck Research Labs, says the company was looking to team up with a Boston-area VC firm that was well-connected in the startup community. “We have excellent relationships with all the firms here, but we had a strong feeling Flagship would make the best partner,” Leonard says. “We had to be alligned on whether the firm had an open fund, whether the size of that fund would meet our needs, and how the relationship would work.”

Gangs are an important factor in the world’s underground economy, but they’re not just about selling drugs and breaking kneecaps. When run well, they have a lot in common with some of the world’s most successful companies.

Two young drug dealers awe at the ingenuity of their Chicken McNuggets and imagine the innovator who must have become incredibly rich off his invention. An older, more experienced dealer, D’Angelo Barksdale, mocks their naiveté, explaining that the man who invented the McNugget is an unknown at the very bottom of the McDonald’s corporate ladder who dreamed up a moneymaking idea for those at the top. What does this story tell you? It’s essentially a debate on the provenance of innovation: Is it driven from the top, by the big hitters? Or from the bottom, by the unknown, underground “misfits.”

What is the government's role in driving innovation?

Listening to Senators during the recent Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearings on the Energy Department loan guarantee program (specifically loans to the now-infamous Solyndra), you'd think the federal government has no role in American innovation. The lawmakers love it when they can show up at a ribbon cutting or jobs creation announcement at a successful company they supported, but are quick to criticize when the pendulum swings the other direction (especially for the other party).

Clearly, there is a role for government in innovation, or there would be no DARPA, no ARPA-E, no National Institutes of Health, no NASA, no Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants and no Congressional Committees on the topic, such as the Subcommittee on Competitiveness, Innovation and Export Promotion. Even the Department of Energy's mission statement pointedly refers to "ensuring America's security and prosperity... through transformative science and technology solutions."

H.I.G. BioVentures, a Miami-based venture firm with ties to Maryland’s biotech cluster, has raised a fresh $268 million to invest in drug, medical device and diagnostics companies.

Managing Director Bruce Robertson, who lives in Maryland and is a familiar face in the I-270 life sciences community, said he’s “very optimistic” the firm will be able to deploy some of that capital in the D.C. region – something that hasn't happened with H.I.G’s last $150 million bio fund.

Over the past few decades, women have overcome tremendous obstacles and have made a lot of progress in the area of gender equality in America.

We now make up 46% of the workforce and over 50% of college graduates, yet when we look at the number of women pursuing high-growth startups, there still exists a very apparent gap in numbers.

According to an article published by the Kauffman Foundation earlier last year, women only make up 35% of startup business owners.

NY has a new startup incubator program that caters to female entrepreneurs in the mobile industry.

Women Innovate Mobile has a structure similar to the TechStars set-up. It’s three-month program provides mentoring and a $18,000 investment in exchange for a 6% stake in equity. The first round includes four companies—each with a female founder. Two of the startups, Loudly and AppGuppy, hail from Boston.

In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it's time for you to "be strategic."

Whatever that means.

If you find yourself resisting "being strategic," because it sounds like a fast track to irrelevance, or vaguely like an excuse to slack off, you're not alone. Every leader's temptation is to deal with what's directly in front, because it always seems more urgent and concrete. Unfortunately, if you do that, you put your company at risk. While you concentrate on steering around potholes, you'll miss windfall opportunities, not to mention any signals that the road you're on is leading off a cliff.

Name: MassChallenge.org

Big Idea: MassChallenge is the largest startup accelerator in the world, working with 125 companies each year in an effort to catalyze a startup renaissance.

Why It’s Working: MassChallenge is mission-driven and works with “high-impact” startups. The accelerator doesn’t take equity in the companies it works with and it’s helped the startups raise more than $100 million and create 500 jobs.

Next time you see a dog lapping thirstily at a toilet bowl, pause for thought – next time, it could be you.

A new invention – funded by Bill Gates – aims to turn used toilet water into drinking water.

Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. This one had better grab their attention, or they won’t look further.

You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary. They all offer a list of requirements that might take 50 pages to address, but of course they ask you to write concisely. Take a look at my website for the Sample Executive Summary, which shows what can be done in one page (both sides).

The virus struck in an e-mail 81 days ago, flagged by a federal team that monitors cyberthreats. The target was a small job-development bureau in the Commerce Department. The infiltration was so vicious it put Commerce’s entire computer network at risk.

To avert a crisis, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) unplugged its operating system — and plunged its staff into the bureaucratic Dark Ages.

LANSING — The Michigan Economic Development Corp. is sponsoring a series of entrepreneurial services presentations at 15 locations around the state, from the southwest and southeast corners of the state to the farthest reaches of the Upper Peninsula, on April 16-17 and April 23-25.

The presentations are designed to help owners and executives of high growth, early stage technology companies find growth opportunities through the business services and financial support that are available through MEDC-supported business incubators and accelerators around the state.

Companies and small businesses are not just hiring bodies anymore, that seem to fit and might move the needle. The right people, the best personalities for the culture, who not only have the skills but bring the intangibles that can impact that culture are getting hired.

Hiring managers tasked with combing through resumes are seeing a disproportional amount of resumes from people who are not qualified for jobs and in many cases the job postings are not specific and focused either. Hence, it’s attracting non qualified people.

I’m sure you’ve heard the term BRICs and the hype surrounding these and other rapidly developing emerging markets. Your company may already be doing business with companies in these countries, or thinking of entering them. They can offer great return on investment and growth to businesses in saturated, mature and post-recessionary markets.

Internet penetration is growing at an extraordinary pace in these markets which makes it easier for marketers to reach companies and contacts via online marketing.

Sometimes knowing exactly what to avoid is just as important, if not more so, than the provisions you’re taking to maximize your web marketing. Here are 10 surefire ways to anger the most powerful search engine in the world:

Unoriginal Content – Google loathes duplicated content.  Their complex filtering systems will automatically ignore content they find to be too similar to others, say for example through automated content generators or web templates. Invisible Text – Some sites include content hidden from view of actual page website visitors aimed solely at driving up those search engine rankings.  Google is on to these sneaky tactics and will discover these methods sooner than later.

KARACHI: As Seth Goldin stated in an article on US economic history that the 1800’s were about who could build the biggest and most efficient farming methods. 1900’s were about the race to build the most efficient factories and now the 2000’s are all about ideas and innovation. The Neoclassic and Keynesian economic theories which drove economic growth over the last 200 years are now outdated. What is now emerging is a global “innovation economy”, proven by China and India, that adding value via innovation can disproportionally drive prosperity and economic growth.

Having missed the boat on creating efficient farming models or factories to drive our economy, this knowledge based innovative economy gives us an opportunity to catch the ranks of developed nations rather than ending up as bystanders watching others nations gaining speed and improving their standard of living.

Georgia is one of the fastest growing states for technology. Home to13,000 technology companies that employ more than 250,000 people, the state offers incredible opportunity to grow your career and enjoy an unmatched quality of life. Watch and learn why tech companies thrive here and why the people love to live here.

Forty-two U.S. venture capital funds raised $4.9 billion in the first quarter of 2012, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). This level marks a 35 percent decrease by dollar commitments and an 9 percent decline by number of funds compared to the first quarter of 2011, which saw 46 funds raise $7.6 billion during the period. The top five funds accounted for nearly 75 percent of total fundraising this quarter as the number of funds raising money during the quarter fell to its lowest levels since the third quarter of 2009, when 36 venture capital funds saw new capital commitments.

The prospect of federal dollars going toward advanced research – including for hybrid and electric car development – has caught its fair share of criticism, but according to a recent twin panel discussion on Capitol Hill, American competitiveness also hangs in the balance.

Objections have included philosophical disagreement with the government “betting taxpayer money” and “picking winners and losers” but what happens when bets pay off?

According to a March 16 discussion sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and nine other professional societies, many federal bets have fundamentally improved life as we know it.