As a CEO of a startup, my online voice – a blog called Greg’s Corner — is the place where I share my company news, try to differentiate myself from competitors, and showcase the value I’m offering. But until about a year ago, my online voice wasn’t saying much.

I knew what I wanted to say in these posts but I struggled to find the right words to express my thoughts. I knew my blog needed an objective — a common thread between my posts that would drive home the bigger message. But finding the right chemistry between that objective, the words on the screen, and the tone and attitude that would define my voice was no easy task. Increasingly, it took more time and effort than my schedule allowed.

So I hired a journalist.

More and more people around the world are becoming entrepreneurs, according to a Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2011 report released Thursday. The world’s so-called “innovation-driven” economies saw an increase of 22 percent in early-stage entrepreneurship in 2011 over the year before, as measured by the number of people operating a business that’s less than 3.5 years old. “One of the most surprising things is that the entrepreneurship rates were up in most of the economies we measured,” said Babson College entrepreneurship professor Donna Kelley.

For the study, GEM randomly sampled at least 2,000 adults in each of 54 economies. “Chile and China are have recently become more entrepreneurial countries, and when you look at the wealthier economies like the U.S. and Western Europe, you’re seeing a huge increase in entrepreneurship.”

The San Diego biotech industry has been buzzing this week with the grand opening of Johnson and Johnson’s new incubator, Janssen Labs. But already plans for another San Diego incubator are being laid, this time at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.

Paul Laikind, Sanford-Burnham’s chief business officer, told BioWorld Today the facility will house six start-ups in an open-lab format similar to the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). Companies will have access to lab space and can use Sanford-Burnham’s 33 core facilities in animal care, high throughput screening, metabolomics or other areas on a pay-as-you-go basis, Laikind said.

Fortify Ventures LLC    and at least a dozen of its portfolio companies are immigrating to D.C. in a mass headquarters shift, launching the District’s only bona fide startup accelerator with the help of $100,000 from Mayor Vincent Gray.

With the 1627 K St. NW accelerator — dubbed “The Fort” — the region’s newest venture fund aims to correct one of the D.C. tech scene’s most glaring deficiencies: the lack of a centralized, intensive and collaborative hub for startups that offers a mix of office space, mentorship and money.

Elana Fine, who heads an angel investor network organized by the University of Maryland    ’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, has been promoted to replace Dingman’s longtime managing director, Asher Epstein.

The leadership shuffle comes at a time when the Dingman Center Angels is sharply stepping up its investment activity, inking eight early-stage deals in 2011 — twice as many as it signed in 2010. The angel group was formerly known as the Capital Access Network but rebranded last year.

There has been a lot of talk recently about a phenomenon called crowdfunding, a new type of fundraising that relies on social media and the Internet to raise small amounts of capital from large numbers of individuals. Despite the talk, crowdfunding remains impermissible under the securities laws absent a costly registration with the SEC and with state securities administrators. Last year, two people created a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account to solicit funds to be used to purchase Pabst Brewing Company. They received over $200 million in pledges from more than five million individuals, but were later subjected to cease-and-desist proceedings initiated by the SEC. Crowdfunding would seem to be a viable approach to small company capital formation, if only it were legal.

Every startup with any traction quickly reaches a point where they need to hire employees to grow the business. Unfortunately, this always happens when pressures are the highest, and business processes are ill-defined. At this point you need superstars and versatile future executives, yet your in-house hiring processes and focus are at their weakest.

The result is a host of hiring mistakes that sink many young companies, or take years to fix. The solution is to never forget that hiring is a top priority task for the CEO, which should never be delegated, and which often has to supersede the urgent crises of the day.

There has been a huge amount of growth in the outsourcing industry over recent years, so much so that it has become engrained in the way many large enterprises run their business. As the industry matures and the range of outsourcing services extends to higher value activities, client firms raise the bar regarding their expectations, seeking the delivery of high impact innovation from their vendors.

Innovation is and always has been the engine that drives economic growth in the United States. Economists believe that innovation—new technologies, products, processes, and the industries they create—is responsible for between half and 80 percent of all economic growth.

Indeed, U.S. companies and industries, with the help of federally funded research, have invented many things that the world wants to buy—think light bulbs, assembly line automobile production, computers, Internet applications, handheld wireless devices, photovoltaic solar cells, Global Positioning System satellites, and the list goes on. This innovative spirit of the American people, protected by the rule of law, keeps us in the world’s top position in innovation, and subsequently ensures we are home to the world’s best-paying jobs and highest standards of living.

People are the most valuable resource. We see this most clearly among entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, and innovators. Creating wealth and new ways of doing things drive economic growth. This is especially true in the technology sector. Encouraged by free markets, individual liberty, and the right incentives, innovators can achieve technological wonders. But unfortunately, our immigration system limits their number.

Nowhere is the positive impact of immigrants more noticeable than in high tech startups. According to a survey by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants have started nearly half of the top 50 venture-funded companies. Software, semiconductors, and biotechnology are the most common venture-backed startup firms started by immigrants. According to another report by Vivek Wadhwa, roughly 25 percent of all engineering firms founded between 1995 and 2005 were founded by immigrants.

Dublin’s case to become Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley is ‘come for the money and stay for the supports and networking’ – and it’s working, writes GORDON SMITH

WAS IT JUST a coincidence that the winners of two Irish technology start-up competitions in 2011 both originated from outside Ireland? Maybe, but in the same year that a €10 million fund was launched to attract international entrepreneurs to these shores, it starts to look like part of a bigger plan.

In December Adjuno, whose principals are from Canada and Bulgaria, won the National Digital Research Centre’s LaunchPad LiftOff award. May’s winner, B-Smark, was founded by Italians. Profitero, winner of the IBM SmartCamp competition in London last month, is headquartered in Dublin and was started by a team hailing from Belarus.

Everybody is talking about mobiles. If the trends in 2011 were anything to go by, 2012 will revolve around mobile phones and tablet computing. So making predictions and talking about what there is to look forward to is pretty easy if you just want to stick to safe topics. Of course, with Solar Maximum all set for 2012, major solar storms could make it a tricky year for the mobile. So I’ve decided to take a look at non-mobile related technology to see what other positive things we should look out for.

1. Cheaper hardware

Flooding in the far-east made 2011 a very tough year if you were interested in buying cheap hardware. In particular, hard disks were drastically affected after Thailand was heavily flooded. That halted production for a good portion of the world’s major hard disk manufacturers. For the first time in a few months, hard drive prices are finally coming down again. While we’re not through the storm yet, it does look like the worst is over and manufacturers are starting to step up production again.

Jeff Clavier, managing partner at SoftTechVC, has his hands in many startups.

He's closed 114 deals. He's invested in the likes of NetVibes, Mint, and SocialMedia, and five of his startups have been acquired by major companies like Yahoo, Intuit, and AOL.

We talked to him about what entrepreneurs need to keep in mind when pitching him.

Business Insider: What do you look for?

Jeff Clavier: It's really important to understand how you get in front of people. We only meet with 15 to 20 percent of the teams that talk to us.

The way we do business is changing fast and in order to keep up, your entire mentality about work has to change just as quickly.

Unfortunately, most people aren't adapting fast enough to this change in the workplace, says marketing guru Seth Godin in an interview with the Canadian talk show "George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight" (via Pragmatic Capitalism).

According to the founder of Squidoo.com and author or 13 books, the current "recession is a forever recession" because it's the end of the industrial age, which also means the end of the average worker.

A new conflict of interest program at the University of Minnesota addresses concerns that arise when Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and/or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants could be used to fund a startup company based on a university technology.

The new program helps facilitate the creation of startups by enabling U of M faculty members to have a more active role than they had previously. It also gives the startup the ability to contract for use of university facilities while undertaking phases of an SBIR/STTR grant.

Funding for startups rose 19 percent in the fourth quarter as venture capitalists fueled money into more companies in the Internet, clean technology and other sectors.

According to a study released Friday, startup investments grew to $6.57 billion in the October-December quarter from $5.52 billion in the same period in 2010. The volume of deals, though, did not keep up with the amount of money invested. There were 844 deals completed in the fourth quarter, down from 861 a year earlier.

2011 was likely the best ever for Cleveland Clinic Innovations in its more than a decade of existence.

The Innovations group, which is charged with commercializing medical inventions by Clinic health providers, last year enjoyed its largest-ever exit, pulled in its biggest-ever donation, signed what was touted as a first-of-its-kind deal to provide commercialization services to another health system and made several new hires.

ADVERTISEMENT So what’s on tap for an encore in 2012? It appears Innovations will have a tough time matching last years’ impressive success, if only because it was such a strong year. (The Innovations group declined comment for this article.)

Blake Hannaford and his colleagues at the University of Washington are about to release a flock of medical robots with wing-like arms, called Ravens, in the hope of stimulating innovation in the nascent field of robotic surgery.

The Raven — originally developed for the American army by Dr Hannaford and Jacob Rosen of the University of California, Santa Cruz as a prototype for robotic surgery on the battlefield — is compact, light and cheap (relatively speaking) at around $250,000.

A cycling android, a remote-controlled orb, and a robot sweeps or mops floors were among the robotic (and non-robotic remote-controlled) curiosities from last week’s CES.

Earth observation satellites have completely mapped the entire land surface of Earth for the first time in a German Aerospace Center (DLR) project designed to create the world’s first single-source, high-precision, 3D digital-elevation model of Earth .

The radar systems on two satellites views the ground from two different points in space, achieving depth perception in a manner similar to binocular vision in humans. By mid-2013, the satellites will have imaged the complete land surface area of Earth, roughly 150 million square kilometers, several times.