Innovation is blossoming in India - and at the heart of the subcontinent's startup culture lies Bangalore. As the innovation ecosystem develops, tech professionals who left the country to study and work overseas are returning home to become entrepreneurs.

Even recent graduates from top global engineering and business schools are opting to start companies in Bangalore, which is seen as the prime destination for returnees.

Creating a company in the city has distinct advantages. Bangalore is perceived as a base for innovation. Historically, the success of Bangalore-based technology services outsourcing companies such as Wipro and Infosys, as well as the more recent valuations of online retailer FlipKart and mobile advertising network InMobi, has reinforced that image.

People often write to Fixes telling us of cool new devices made for the poor:  the sOccket soccer ball that stores energy as children kick it; the neoprene LifeWrap that hospitals can use to save women hemorrhaging in childbirth; adjustable eyeglasses.

We love devices — but we don’t like to write about them.   It’s cheating.  The technology is the easy part of solving problems.  There are zillions of cool ideas.   Plenty of college students have come up with a great new technology for the poor.

The bigger challenge comes from the questions around any new device:  How do you build a market for a technology focused on people with no money?   How do you physically get it to where it needs to be?  How do poor people acquire it?   How can it be adopted on a wide scale?   How do you make it last?

PitchBook and Merrill DataSite have published the Annual PE Breakdown 2012. Powered by PitchBook and sponsored by Merrill DataSite, this report was compiled from the PitchBook Platform and covers trends in U.S. private equity investment, exits and fundraising, with a focus on activity and trends emerging during 2011.

Click Here to Download the PE Breakdown (PDF)

This complimentary report includes:

• U.S. PE deal flow since 2000
• Breakdown of investment by U.S. region and industry
• Debt percentages used in buyouts
• U.S. PE exit activity since 2000
• Trends for liquidity transaction types
• U.S. PE fundraising activity since 2001
• First-time fund trends
• Investor and service provider league tables

The U.S. must increase the access to three elements help small businesses thrive and restore U.S. competiveness, according to a new report from the Center for Public Policy Innovation (CPPI) — Restoring U.S. Competitiveness: Creating Jobs and Unleashing the Potential of Small Businesses through Technology and Innovation. The key elements include:

• Access to Capital — Gaining access to capital is an obstacle for all small businesses. However, the U.S. must work to connect local startups with regional investors to boost local investments and make the capital gains tax exemption permanent for investors in qualified small businesses.
• Access to Modern Technology — U.S. small business must have access to cloud computing, mobile technologies and virtual global supply chains to invest more into their products, to collaborate on a global scale and to expand their presence to foreign markets.
• Access to Global Markets — The U.S. government must make existing programs, that help domestic small business enter foreign markets, easier to find and navigate.

The Michigan Strategic Fund (MSF) and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) announced public hearings for the Pure Michigan Venture Match Fund — a new program that will match early stage investments from eligible venture funds in Michigan-based technology businesses. MSF and MEDC intend for the program to attract venture funds, within and outside of Michigan, to consider investments in early stage and pre-revenue technology companies and to mitigate some risk for venture fund investments through the matching MSF funds.

Canadian tech entrepreneurs will lag behind their American rivals if Canada doesn't mirror U.S. moves to allow online crowdfunding for startups, the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance warns.

Under current U.S. and Canadian laws, startups can only accept equity investments from venture capital funds or small angel pools like friends and family. Any large scale equity fundraising outside of those sources requires a company to go through the lengthy and expensive process of filing a prospectus with securities regulators.

We in the innovation community should consider a new certification for consumer electronics:  Fair Trade Electronics.   Do you have a cell phone, TV, iPad, GPS or laptop?  Odds are good that about 75% of the consumer electronics you rely on are the product of an elaborate, global chain of suppliers who contract with brand name original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), such as HP, Dell and Apple.  As described in a recent fantastic series of New York Times articles, “Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.”  Like Fair Trade coffee, Fair Trade Electronics would call consumer attention to the environmental impact and working conditions of the supply chains that provide us electronic goods.

For the book I’m writing on 3D printing, I’ve been digging into research about the interplay between jobs and the manufacturing supply chain.  Unless you live in an isolated hand-built cabin in rural Montana, grow your own food, wear couture or vintage clothing and use decades old household products, you’re buying offshored goods.  Apple, for example, has 700,000 people all over the globe working in its global supply chain, engineering, building and assembling iPads, iPhones and other products.  Just try to buy a cellphone or laptop that bears the “Made in the USA” label.  I haven’t been able to find one.  Have you?

As the CEO of the world’s largest social networking website, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quite social himself over the last eight years sitting for interviews, meeting world leaders, hosting the company’s annual developer conferences and (on more than one occasion) taking to Facebook’s official blog to apologize for various website updates that angered users. Below, a collection of some of the best Zuckerberg quotes.

On Partnerships and Competition

“So our strategy is that we want to go wherever people are building apps so we can make all of those apps social if they want that.” (TechCrunch Interview, Sept. 22, 2010)

The rapidly changing biotechnology environment, influenced by globalisation, competition, financial pressures and the advancement of new technologies, has had a dramatic impact on the small to medium biotechnology firm.

Commercialisation is the process of taking an idea and turning it in to a successful outcome in the market, whether it is a product, service, process or organisational system.

The Australian Institute for Commercialisation (AIC), a division of QMI Solutions, believes that commercialisation should also include knowledge diffusion, consulting services and contract research rather than just the linear transfer of technology or intellectual property (IP).

Today, the key factors needed to ensure small to medium biotechnology firms survive the discontinuous change are: entrepreneurship, innovation and collaboration. The following five strategies for successful commercialisation are founded on these the three key factors of success.

As Eastman Kodak begins to adapt to the challenges of bankruptcy, David A. Glocker's company, Isoflux, is expanding -- thanks to technology he developed in Kodak's research labs. He didn't steal anything. In fact, before he founded Isoflux with Kodak's blessing in 1993, Glocker approached his managers at the company and suggested they market the coating process he had developed.

"In a nutshell, I went to them and said, 'I think this is valuable technology and it's not being commercialized.... I'd like to do that if Kodak is not interested,'" he recalls. "And they said, 'Fine, do it.'" So he did, in his spare time, for five years while still working at Kodak, then full-time after leaving in 1998. Today, several patents and innovations later, Isoflux is a growing company in Rochester, N.Y., that coats a range of three-dimensional products, from drill bits to optical lenses to medical devices.

Researchers were able to reverse engineer the sounds of human speech using only patterns of neuron firing measured in subjects listening to such sounds.

They measured nerve impulses in one of the auditory regions of patients’ brains while playing them a recording of words and sentences.  After feeding the electrical impulses through an algorithm that interpreted certain characteristics of the sounds, such as volume changes between syllables in a word, the computer could recreate the words or sentences.  The research, published in PLoS Biology on Monday (January 31), could help improve treatment for people with aphasia, or locked-in syndrome.

California is home to two of the world’s largest biopharma clusters in the San Francisco and San Diego regions. However, the financial squeeze on startups and the combination of federal and state red tape have tarnished the Golden State’s image in the eyes of biopharma CEOs, if a recent survey is any indication.

Nearly three-quarters (74.2%) of some 100 CEOs surveyed said their companies were forced to delay a research or development project in the last year. When asked why, 40.2% cited the lack of available financing, while 27.8% of CEOs blamed regulation by FDA, its state counterpart called the California Food and Drug Branch, and other state and federal agencies.

“You can’t be afraid to fail,” says Tony Giordano, president and CEO of TheraVasc Inc., a company reformulating an existing drug to help peripheral artery disease sufferers. Serial entrepreneur Giordano should know—he has taken risks and raised angel and VC funding (from Innovation Fund, North Coast Angel Fund, JumpStart and others). In fact, his venture-backed biomedical startup was just featured in The White House Blog.

Hear what Giordano and other Northeast Ohio entrepreneurs and mentors believe are important elements to successfully starting a company in this video.

Less planning, more legwork. That's the formula some business schools are using to overhaul the competitions they conduct each year to test their students' mettle as entrepreneurs.

The contests, which have been an academic rite of passage for decades, typically involve teams of students submitting written business plans, then following up with a short presentation to a panel of judges. The winner might receive a cash prize of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars and even the chance to mingle with potential investors.

AMES --- Sometimes a dorm room can double as a corporate board room, if you have people with ideas and perhaps just a bit of support.

That is the case for the partners in ScoutPro, a new company that was born in a classroom at Iowa State University and helped by a new agricultural entrepreneurship initiative on campus.

The idea is simple, yet exciting. The students have developed a software application (or “app” to most of us) that can help farmers and crop scouts in identifying corn and soybean weeds and pests in the field.

Employment in San Diego’s life sciences sector grew by 15 percent over the past two years, as biopharmas, medical device companies, and other employers added roughly 5,550 jobs here—raising employment in the sector to 41,937 in 2011, according to a report released today by Biocom. The report says overall employment in San Diego increased by 1.1 percent over the same period, gaining about 20,600 jobs to reach 1.83 million in 2011.

The 40-page economic study says San Diego’s life sciences cluster also is expected to outpace the nation in terms of job growth and economic impact over the next two years, as another 2,770 jobs are added by 2013. A broader snapshot that includes life sciences companies in neighboring Orange, Riverside, and Imperial Counties projects the region will add more than 6,000 workers over the next two years.

Cambridge, MA-based Flagship Ventures, a $900 million fund known for its successes with companies such as Accuri Cytometers and Acceleron Pharma, is planning to open an office in Michigan in the next six months, says Sean O’Donnell, VP at Credit Suisse’s Michigan office.

The move comes after Venture Michigan Fund II (VMF II), a fund-of-fund which is managed by Credit Suisse, made a $15 million investment commitment in Flagship Ventures Fund IV, which invests in early-stage companies. As part of the agreement, Flagship will invest that $15 million in Michigan companies. Flagship has already found success in local companies with Accuri Cytometers, which is based on technology spun out of the University of Michigan.

A drug developer wants to shake up the clinical trial process through crowdsourcing as well as using telemedicine and greater data transparency. It believes implementing these together can cut the cost of doing clinical trials by 50 percent in the next two years.

Transparency Life Sciences is a New York-based startup that was founded by CEO Tomasz Sablinski, also currently the head of development at Celtic Therapeutics , and Marc Foster, Transparency’s chief operating officer, who previously worked at FoldRx Pharmaceuticals before it was acquired by Pfizer (NYSE:PFE). The company plans to develop refocused compounds before embarking on novel drugs. Foster spoke about the company’s plans in a phone interview with MedCity News.

China has reached parity with Europe in venture capital financing for the first time ever.

According to data from Dow Jones VentureSource, in 2011 Chinese companies received $6 billion in venture capital equity financing, up 8% from the previous year, compared with $6.1 billion in Europe. That’s a sharp drop for European start-ups, who until 2009 were still receiving 86% more in venture capital financing than their Chinese counterparts, and 20% more in 2010.

In country rankings, that puts China in second place. In third place was the U.K., where VC financing for firms fell 32% year-to-year to $1.7 billion, though the U.S. remains, far, far ahead, where VC financing rose 10% year-to-year to $32.6 billion in 2011.

President Barack Obama, one day after holding a very personal interview on Google+ Hangouts, has stayed true to his word and sent an official Startup America Legislative agenda to Congress to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive in the US.

Among the items President Obama proposed as part of the program include tax breaks for small businesses as well as reform around allowing immigrants to stay in the US by handling the current backlog of visa requests.