There hasn’t been much to crow about for years in the world of biotech financing. There’s no getting around the fact that new drugs still take a long time and a lot of money to develop, and they usually fail. It doesn’t fly in an instant-gratification economy, where people take extraordinary technical achievements—like, say, streaming video on your laptop—for granted.

No technology has emerged to improve drug development in the profound way that cheap cloud computing and broadband has done for high-tech startups. Until that happens, the industry is going to have to get by on channeling creative energy into new biotech business models that are better at sharing risks and rewards. And the good news is that despite the challenges with drug development, there are ideas emerging that could keep long-term, committed money flowing into life sciences innovation.

Could you imagine a job interview during which your interviewer asks you for your Facebook password? Well folks, it’s happening and you should know what to do when it happens to you.

The reason why companies are doing this is to get better insight into who you really are. They will strategically ask you to look at Facebook with them — right there, on the spot. You would think there would be some type of HR regulation in place to prohibit this type of conduct during an interview, but currently there is not — although the state of Maryland is starting to take action in a case regarding the Facebook profiles of student athletes.

You can’t turn around without seeing something cloud-related from IBM these days. IBM SmartCloud Enterprise Plus, IBM SmartCloud Provisioning…the list goes on and on. But what you might not know is that some of the technologies in these products got their start in IBM’s biggest internal cloud environment. The Research Compute Cloud (or RC2 as it’s known to us) has been through several generations since its start nearly four years ago.

Conceived at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, it’s proven itself a valuable incubator for cloud technologies. RC2 has experienced phenomenal growth since it’s start. With nearly 70,000 VMs provisioned, RC2 has experienced more rapid growth and usage than even our wildest expectations.

Plant geneticist Harry Klee always assumed that, after finishing his postdoc, he’d pursue an academic career. But one afternoon in the mid-1980s, he opened up an issue of Science to find a paper reporting the first “transgenic plant in the history of mankind,” he recalls. It wasn’t the accomplishment so much as the fact that the paper was written by scientists at Monsanto that blew him away.

At the time, industry was considered the career path for scientists who couldn’t cut it in academia, he says. Yet, although he’d gotten a job offer as an associate professor, when the time came to set out on his own, Klee decided to join the agricultural science company. “All the stuff Monsanto was doing was what I wanted to do,” he says—and when he visited the facilities, his inclination was confirmed: “It was clear that they were the best lab to do plant molecular biology in the world, bar none.”

A Board has real work to do. In addition to the most important work which is providing strategic advice, accountability, and feedback to the CEO and the management team, the Board is required to provide oversight on the Company's financial statements, the Company's compensation plans, and the ongoing maintenance of the Board.

As such when a Board gets big enough to justify them, it makes sense to create committees of the Board to deal with these specific responsibilities. A good question to start with is "when is a Board big enough to need committees?". A three person Board should not have committees. The Board will be the default committee for all of this stuff. A five person Board could have committees and should have them if there is a lot of work required for audit and compensation. A seven person Board and larger should most certainly have committees.

The President has issued an innovation challenge, and the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) can help you answer it! Join the FLC at its 2012 national meeting, Bridging Federal Technologies and Industry, in Pittsburgh, Pa., April 30-May 3, at the Sheraton Station Square Hotel.

The meeting offers technology transfer (T2) training, as well as informational sessions such as:

• Partnering with federal laboratories 
• Leveraging social media • Available entrepreneur programs 
• Case studies 
• And much more!

Can women succeed in IT?

Women have recently taken several notable positions at the forefront of big tech companies. Unfortunately, they remain the exception to the rule.

Learn about the presence – or lack thereof – of women in technology, from dismal numbers to inspiring success stories and resources for supporting ambitious, tech-minded women.

Strategy. Unfortunately, it suffers from a bad reputation among startups. It is associated with consultants who are paid millions of dollars only to come back with a two-by-two matrix of animals. Not that there is anything wrong with it. Some of my best friends are consultants.

However, strategy is crucial for startup success. Startups usually operate in an environment of constrained resources while competing with strong incumbents. Hence, the right strategy can be a matter of life and death. This post is the first in a series of posts that will explore concepts in strategy and how they apply to startups.

Tropical fish tanks in restaurants, hospitals and homes evoke feelings of tranquility and beauty. They even lower stress levels prior to medical procedures and encourage Alzheimer's patients to eat sufficiently. But what's good for humans may be bad for the sea.

Most tropical fish sold in pet stores come from reefs in Indonesia and the Philippines, where fishermen stun the colorful dwellers with squirts of sodium cyanide. The potent nerve toxin causes the fish to float up out of the reefs so they can be easily scooped up, but it can also injure or kill them as well as trigger coral bleaching.

The New York Times reported last October about Romania´s sparkling start-up scene and its pool of technology talent. Microsoft, Intel and Oracle have long seen this and invested here, working close to thousands of tech startups that breathe innovation into their companies. Although it ranks negatively (61st) in the Global Innovation Index which measures a government’s ability to encourage innovation through policy, it seems that Romania´s business culture is breaking the shackles of the communist regime that ruled until only two decades ago.

This has not come easy for Romania. While cultural barriers are fading away with each younger generation, entrepreneurs still have to face anti-entrepreneurial attitudes and policies. For example, according to serial entrepreneur and angel investor Marius Ghenea, who has been on the Romanian entrepreneurial scene since 1991, the education system still shows vestiges of inertia when it comes to business education. Entrepreneurship classes are compulsory in Romanian high schools, but practical experience is missing, according to Ghenea, who proposes earlier and more hands-on exposure to entrepreneurship for the young.

What is the difference between a startup and a small business?

We focus on startups and define them as companies that are lead by founders.  We’re focused on high growth; we think of it as top-line growth.  And companies that are typically less than ten years old.   (This is) verses small businesses which are typically run by owners and tend to focused much more on profit orientation.  It doesn’t mean the startups won’t get to be a profit place, but that’s the distinction we make.

My wife was upset at me. “You spent all weekend responding to comments on TechCrunch,” she said, “and it was the one weekend without the kids and you were either on your head phones or playing chess or responding to TechCrunch comments.” And then she walked away. Upset. There would be no way to make it up to her. The weekend was over.

And I had big plans that weekend. My article was coming out 6am TechCrunch time on Saturday and I have two Kindle Singles (i.e. “small books”) that I am putting out in the next few weeks. One: “How to Be President of the United States in Ten Easy Lessons”. And two, “Scams”. Plus I’m in the middle of starting three different businesses.

I took a two day trip Thursday and Friday of this past week. When packing for the trip I debated about bringing my laptop (an 11" macbook air) with me. In the end, I decided to bring it.

I didn't use the laptop on the trip except to write yesterday's blog post. I do a lot of cutting and pasting of links, quotes, etc when I blog and I find that it is still pretty inconvenient to do that on a mobile.

Start, a new $6 million program in Massachusetts, is aimed at providing additional support to technologies that have received Small Business Investment Research II (SBIR) grants and are on a path to private sector commercialization.

We would have assumed that Massachusetts would have felt fairly self-satisfied in having the SBIR process down pat. After all, the state is second in the nation in number of SBIR awards received (18,390 totaling $4.3 billion) since 1983. Massachusetts also reports that more than $3 billion in commercial sales of SBIR technologies have been generated to date.

However, the Bay State thinks there’s more to be gained.

For some entrepreneurial ventures, startup capital needs are minimal. If an entrepreneur has a low risk profile (and an idea that doesn’t require a lot of startup capital), this could be the way to go.

For other ventures, startup capital requirements are more involved. While there are entrepreneurs who are able to finance their startups themselves - either from savings and investments or by continuing to work at least part time - most of us need to investigate other sources of financing.

As nanotechnology finds new uses ranging from engineering to medicine, a growing number of early stage companies are forming to bring new nanotech innovation into those markets.

But nanotech companies are clamoring for financing at a time when investor purse strings remain tight. Some investors are showing interest in nanotechnology investments, but that interest doesn’t mean that they approach these deals with any less caution. Nanotechnology investing was the topic of a panel discussion at the NanoTech Commercialization Conference in Durham, North Carolina. Here’s what two venture capitalists, a strategic investor and an angel investor had to say.

Yesterday, United States President Barack Obama signed into law the JOBS Act, which may be the most significant update to securities regulations since Sarbanes–Oxley was passed in 2002.

One portion of the new law, the CROWDFUND Act, has been creating a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley for months, as it will make it legal for startups the ability to raise money in small chunks from large numbers of non-accredited investors.

The CROWDFUND Act has plenty of supporters who believe crowdfunding could revolutionize startup investing. Skeptics argue that crowdfunding will have unintended consequences, from fraud to a bubble of epic proportions.

One of the natural consequences that comes with being in an “up” part of the tech boom/bust cycle is that there are an almost overwhelming amount of tech conferences, trade shows, and events that a startup could attend. These events offer opportunities to network with potential business partners, users, venture capitalists and customers, but they can also place a huge demand on a startup’s always scarce resources of time and money. So, the natural question is: which events should you attend and/or sponsor?

First, let’s understand the landscape (hat tip to Phil Becker for discussing this bit at length with me back in 2005): Imagine the entire range of tech trade shows and conferences on a spectrum. On the left hand side of the spectrum is the pure “expo/tradeshow” – you know the type — held at Moscone or in Las Vegas, hundreds of exhibitors on a concrete floor – think CES or Dreamforce. Sure, there’s often content at a “pure expo/trade show,” but normally the “expo floor” is something you can walk on to for free or very cheap ($100 bucks – usually less if you snag a discount code). The easiest way to identify an expo is to ask: who is the event organizer’s customers? If you’re walking around for free or nearly free, then it sure isn’t you (the “attendee”) — it’s the exhibitors. That’s important to note.

Accelerator and seed investor 500 Startups is expanding its investment team and raising a $50 million second venture fund.

Founded in 2010, 500 Startups was initially best known for Dave McClure, the angel investor and former PayPal executive who lives on social sites like Twitter and has an affinity for cursing and opinionated blog post rants. But the firm now has nine people (see the infographic below) and now is announcing the promotion of Paul Singh and Christen O’Brien to partners, in addition to partners McClure and Christine Tsai. Singh manages the accelerator and makes investments with a focus on data and metrics. O’Brien is a non-investing partner who heads business development and the firm’s conferences, events and its “Geeks on a Plane” trips.

For decades, inspired by the wisdom of Alex Osborn, he of the vaunted BBDO Agency, conventional wisdom has banked on the idea that innovation comes from brainstorming. And it’s not just any kind of brainstorming, but rather the type where quantity is valued over quality, and where everyone has an equal voice. The underlying tenet of brainstorming is that there should be no criticism because innovation is a delicate flower to be nurtured and encouraged. In the face of criticism, innovation would wither and die, and we would be stuck with old stuffy, inefficient, uncreative processes. But that was then. Now, conventional wisdom is about to turn its back on brainstorming. Out with “Groupthink,” they say. Groupthink thrives on the notion that everyone should stay positive and get along. But innovation may not come from such a happy place.