Current and former MIT students gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, Tuesday night to hear one of San Diego’s most renowned venture investors, Avalon Ventures founder Kevin Kinsella, share insights from a long and adventurous career.

Fresh off Avalon’s huge Zynga payout—the firm invested $5.3 million and saw the value of its stake skyrocket to $340 million after Zynga’s December IPO—Kinsella and his partner Rich Levandov are looking like certified Midases. Their investment strategy, which cuts across tech and life sciences, today seems as canny as it is quirky. Which helps to explain why the audience sat rapt as David Schmittlein, dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, interviewed Kinsella about his investing philosophy and his views on markets like biotech and games.

Paul Graham (PG) is one of the most prominent figures in Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial community, and his reputation is well-deserved. He's an honest leader, a talented computer scientist, and has an uncanny passion for entrepreneurship. Most importantly, he’s an entrepreneur himself.

The first time I met PG was in the summer of 2010, when my co-founder and I were selected to participate in Y Combinator (YC), the startup accelerator program PG founded that helped to create many successful companies, including Reddit (acquired by Conde Naste), Heroku (acquired by Salesforce), OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga). He’s known to be extremely particular about teams over ideas and, despite what you might think, is often pushing teams to radically change their ideas. In fact, we did exactly that almost immediately after starting YC.

New startup companies have long been an important driver of innovation and economic growth in the U.S., and few of them would have grown to maturity without early-stage financing. This study, based on a survey of almost 200 angel investors and interviews with 20 prominent venture capitalists, analyzes the extent to which this financing might be affected by the copyright regulatory environment.

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The entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Philadelphia region is gaining momentum despite the belief by some that pastures are greener in places like New York or Silicon Valley, according to Mike Krupit, head of Novotorium, a suburban Philadelphia business incubator. Based on this assessment of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, Novotorium is committed to supporting entrepreneurs with increased sponsorship of regional events for entrepreneurs along with its regular programs designed to help emerging businesses, Krupit said.

“We live in a region of bright, passionate people who want to collaborate with others to create businesses and build long-term, sustainable operations that will produce jobs and real profit,” said Krupit. “We want to encourage and support entrepreneurs throughout the region, and partner with others like us who are committed to helping these entrepreneurs. We see great opportunities right here in Southeast Pennsylvania, Lehigh Valley, South and Central New Jersey, and Delaware.”

Y Combinator recently announced that for the next batch, the incubator will accept applications from groups and individuals without an idea. That same night, I received a breathless call from a friend currently finishing up his MBA at an elite east coast business school, asking me for help putting together his “Without Idea” Y Combinator application.

This friend is smart, dynamic, and an all-around great person. But he’s not someone I consider to be entrepreneurial. He was a management consultant at a big firm for years before business school, and loved it. He’s the first to admit that his interest in startups conveniently coincided with the premier of The Social Network a few years back. So on the call, I asked him, “why jump into entrepreneurship now. You are someone who likes to be on a stable path. Why do you suddenly want to start a startup?”

Officials at UC San Diego are seeking to build a new “Center for Innovative Therapeutics” that would serve as a hub for a variety of academic research collaborations, as well as an incubator for accelerating private life sciences startups.

University officials described their proposal for the first time at the end of an annual cancer symposium held yesterday at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center. They said they plan to present their plans for the project, which carries an estimated $110 million pricetag, to the University of California Regents in May.

Documentary filmmaking — the medium of Dziga Vertov! Richard Leacock! Werner Herzog! Errol Morris! — has struggled as much as any medium to find its place in the Internet age. Does the linear narrative have staying power in this crazy, mixed up, disaggregated world?

“There’s this perception that documentary is this staid medium,” said Sarah Wolozin, a longtime filmmaker and director of the new Open Documentary Lab at MIT. “It’s not. It is this place of innovation. And I think a lot of documentary filmmakers have lost their connection to that history.”

The Venture Michigan Fund II is investing $15 million into the Ann Arbor office of Venture Investors Early Stage Fund V.

Venture Investors Early Stage Fund V is an early stage venture capital firm that is headquartered in Madison. It specializes in investing in life science and tech start-ups. It's Ann Arbor office has invested in four Michigan-based companies, totaling $13 million. Jim Adox, who heads up the Ann Arbor office, is very active in building the local venture capital community, participating in things like the Michigan Venture Capital Association.

Today, 40 million workers across advanced economies are unemployed. Yet businesses can't fill job openings because they can't find qualified workers.

This labor market dysfunction is a manifestation of the rapid evolution of the nature of work and the inability of worker skills — and labor institutions — to keep up with the pace of creative destruction in business. As a result of these changes, many jobs that were lost during the recession may be gone for good. To meet the long-range challenge, wealthy nations will need to find new approaches that go beyond simply stimulating growth.

Investing guru Warren Buffett is well known for his penchant for his hometown of Omaha and living a simple and modest lifestyle.

Last month, for CBS' Person To Person show, Warren Buffett took hosts Charlie Rose and Lara Logan on a tour of his Berkshire Hathaway offices in Omaha, NE.

Though entrepreneurship survived the Great Recession and is currently near a 16-year-high level, it hasn’t caused much of a bump in actual job creation in the U.S., a new study shows. That’s because startup founders remained more likely to fly solo than employ others.

The latest Kauffman index of entrepreneurial activity, a leading indicator of new business creation in the U.S., shows that 0.32 percent of American adults created a business per month last year — a 5.9 percent drop from 2010, but still among the highest levels of entrepreneurship over the last 16 years.

Most of us would shy away from making purchases in a foreign country if we didn't know the exchange rate. Yet, if privacy is the true currency of the Internet, as many argue, millions of us are doing that very thing every day. Meanwhile, Internet giants amend their privacy policies in ways that allow them to harvest and sell even more of our personal data. While privacy campaigners protest, users generally vote with their clicks and carry on regardless.

So should we conclude the Internet generation is happy to trade its privacy for free or cheaper Web services? Not according to Nicola Jentzsch of the German Institute of Research in Berlin, and colleagues, who last week published research showing that most people prefer to protect their personal data when given a choice and that a significant proportion are willing to pay extra to do so.

Where is the best place to make a living? In today's tough economy, it's an especially relevant question. A recent CareerBuilder survey found that 44 percent of workers said they'd be willing to relocate for a job opportunity.

For the second year in a row, MoneyRates.com sought to answer this question through a state-by-state look at four things:

• Average income
• Cost of living, based on the ACCRA Cost of Living Index
• State income tax rate (based on the bracket for the state's average income)
• Unemployment rate

While "most groundbreaking innovation" may conjure up images of self driving cars and Minority Report, the most important innovation coming from Silicon Valley is more mundane.

Expect apps to be so usable that you'll never need to read a manual, and for normal things around the house (like doorknobs) to be connected to the Internet.

The European Commission must improve the framework conditions for entrepreneurship to address its self-described ‘innovation gap’ with the rest of the world.

The flagship initiative to create an ‘Innovation Union’, as outlined in Europe 2020, goes some way towards addressing this gap. The ‘Innovation Union’ proposes to create an economy based on ‘knowledge and innovation’ in accordance with a theme of ‘smart growth’. A target has been set of investing 3% of Europe’s GDP on R&D by 2020.

We entrepreneurs are an optimistic set; some would even say we have our head in the clouds. Some of us are cautious, some bean counters by nature and some of us are the dreamers. We are the people that can actually visualize the dream happening. With this near foolish optimism, there are 5 friends that every kind of entrepreneur should have.

The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative's John Adams Innovation Institute has released its 2011 Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy, an annual review of the Commonwealth's high-tech economy through 25 indicators. Each year, the index tracks Massachusetts' progress in these indicators, along with comparisons to other U.S. states and national economies. In addition to Massachusetts, the 2011 edition provides indicator data for comparison from seven leading technology states, including California, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Highlights from the 25 indicators include Industry cluster employment and wages, patenting activity, R&D performed, business formation, funding for R&D, and talent flow and attraction.

All people have a degree of creativity, and there isn't any specific way to discover that one brilliant idea for your new business. Maybe you're a recent graduate, or an unemployed or underemployed worker who is sick of sending out resumes. Either way, you're determined to take your future into your own hands, and that's the very first step.

If you don't have a clear vision about what to do next, don't despair. Try one or more of the following:

1. Solve a problem. One easy way to start a business is to recognize gaps in your community and fill them. Search for what's missing. Think about what could be improved upon. Let's say there are a lot of good restaurants in your town, but none of them deliver. A local restaurant delivery service to nearby offices and homes would most likely be well received. In other words, think about the goods and services that you use in your area. What business could you open that would solve a problem you're having yourself? Do a quick survey and find out if your friends and neighbors have the same unmet need. Dream up a creative solution to this problem, and you've got an idea for new business

Following his second brush with cancer a couple of years ago, billionaire Paul Allen had some time to think about the legacy he’ll leave, beyond being the co-founder of Microsoft. Yesterday, he made clear that he wants to be the guy who helped spark new understanding of the human brain.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the workings of the human brain, and awed by its enormous complexity,” Allen said at a press conference announcing his new $300 million commitment to brain science. “Our brains are many magnitudes more advanced, in the way they work, than any computer software.” He added: “Our dream is to uncover the essence of what makes us human.”