San Francisco-based biotech industry maven Steve Burrill said today his investment firm has raised $313 million for a new life sciences fund.

The Burrill Capital Fund IV started operations on December 1 with $313 million to make a wide variety of early and late-stage investments in companies working on drugs, diagnostics, and medical devices, as well as healthcare delivery technologies, wellness, and digital health. Burrill said in a statement that the financing represents the first close for the fund, which he hopes will reach a final goal of raising $500 million by June.

Let us imagine that “innovation” is a person, a vibrant and dynamic person who is most interested in the new, the exciting, the useful, and through these qualities, is also very interested in creating new wealth for individuals, companies, nations, and societies. Indeed this is exactly the role that innovation plays in the global economy. Langdon Morris reflects on 2011 and what’s to come.

The McKinsey Institute published the results of their fifth annual survey on how organizations use social technologies, it surveyed 4,200 executives to understand the developments and progress throughout the years and benefits of these social technology applications. They are being deployed for the purpose of process enhancements and operations. Secondly they’re being used to find new growth opportunities. Surprisingly, a large percentage of organizations did not maintain the benefits of using social technologies that they had achieved earlier.

In a world of economic gloom and crisis in Europe, Africa’s performance and potential provide huge opportunity. Its growth and other performance indicators are strong. It needs entrepreneurs, innovation and investment to make it happen.

We’ve reached the end of 2011 – and it’s time to look back on the winners and losers of the year. Those who made our gadget life more awesome, and those that ruined it for everyone. Those that rock, and those that suck. So, without further ado, Gearburn’s Geared and Burned personalities of 2011.

BURNED

Leo Apotheker of HP He was bounced out of HP in disgrace, consoled only by the $25-million payout he trousered for less than a year’s work (a healthy wedge of the US$84-million HP has paid to revolving door chief execs in the past six years), but not before he’d kicked a massive hole in HP’s PC business pipeline by announcing that HP would follow IBM’s lead and get out of making personal computers. He also over-paid for a software business acquisition (Autonomy), and spent a fortune buying Palm, launching the TouchPad tablet, then killing the lot – costing HP US$3.3-billion. Thank goodness Meg Whitman restored sanity.

Earlier this month, SoundCloud founder Alex Ljung gave a presentation at LeWeb where he explained why sound would surpass video. He's got a horse in this race: SoundCloud lets users record and upload audio snippets for sharing.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson, whose Union Square Ventures is an investor in Soundcloud, posted the video on his blog this weekend. Here's a summary:

• Simplicity. Twitter is popular because it gives users a way to express themselves in only 140 keystrokes. But now everybody with a smartphone has a microphone in their pocket, and it takes only one click to record something. A lot of smartphones are getting video recording as well, but it's a lot less intrusive to record a conversation or sound snippet than it is to point a video camera in somebody's face.

In last week's MBA Mondays, I wrote about burn rates at three stages of a startup. The first stage is what I called "Building Product Stage" and I suggested that a burn rate of $50k/month was appropriate for that stage.

I got a fair bit of pushback in the comments for that part of the post. My favorite push back came from The Kid, who said:

50k a month?!?!??! maybe it is such in venture world, but if you're a broke ass fool bootstrapping his/her way, try 5k per founder a month until you have paying customers. if you're hardcore (translation: desperate broke ass fool), cut that number in half -- it's definitely possible.

Pharmaceutical companies spend more than US$200 billion on research every year producing between 20 and 25 new drugs. It’s an increasingly expensive exercise and one that is ultimately paid for by society. Industry watchers want drug-makers to cut research budgets, noting internal R&D groups have been notoriously unproductive and expensive to maintain. Bernard Munos, a 30-year executive with Eli Lilly, has spent the past decade studying pharmaceutical innovation and says the drug industry is hitting a crisis point with a lack of quality research focusing on too much incremental and not enough breakthrough innovation. Plainly said: drug companies are not making money fast enough with new products to cover the cost of researching. Outsourcing, claims Munos, could change that.

No more than 25 percent of economic activity is truly global, yet visions of a borderless planet entrance many senior executives. To grasp the realities of a world where distance and differences still matter, they should develop “rooted” maps, which correct the misimpression that a viewer’s vantage point doesn’t influence the way things look.

The starting point for rooted maps is to create a reference map depicting your industry environment, but not your own company’s or country’s place in it. An executive at a film studio, for example, might develop a map in which the size of countries reflects their total box office revenues and the color depicts the market share of domestic movies.

A number of universities across the country have decided to do away with licensing fees charged to industry companies, citing the fact that the deals don’t provide much payoff to the schools. Both Pennsylvania State University and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities are withdrawing the requirement in the hopes that it will attract more industry funding, which it deems more beneficial to the faculty and students.

We’re mere weeks from the dawn of a new year, and yes, it is definitely the time to be thinking about what kind of amazing new things are going to happen in tech over the next 365 days. Digital design agency Fjord got out its crystal ball and let us have an early preview of its annual rundown of what it sees as the breakout themes in tech next year. What they see is that a lot of what’s to come is going to be a continuation of trends or ideas that have started to gather steam in 2011.

Fjord is headquartered in London (it’s the team behind BBC iPlayer’s mobile app and Flickr’s Windows Phone 7 app, to name a few). Each year they brainstorm and research the future of digital services, interfaces and design. This time last year, Fjord predicted that some of the big accomplishments of 2011 would be better ways to search/manage app overload (see improvements to iTunes/Siri), the reimagining of iPad magazines (Zite launched and was acquired by CNN) the gamification of everything, and the rise in mobile payment options (Square, Google Wallet). It’s also great to see that much of the areas we’ve been writing about here at GigaOM and GigaOM Pro for many months are either predicted to finally explode next year or they’re going to see a much-needed shakeout.

As long as we’ve had computers and gadgets, there’s been a tension between security and ease of use. On one extreme, there are the passwords that are so complex you intentionally can’t remember them, and emails that involve sending an encryption key to your recipients. On the other side, there’s the iPhone that you Slide to Unlock, then use to manage your email, finances, and photos from last night’s karaoke.

The middle space is hard to find. If your devices ask you to update your “virus definitions,” you haven’t found it. If anyone who finds one of your devices can turn them on and start looking through files, you’re not there. Here is a guide to that promised land, culled from one geeky writer’s experience on both sides of the security quandry, and many arguments with friends and relatives about what constitutes a pain in the butt.

They come out in the spring, and each year they spread further – the ticks. Thirty percent of them transmit borrelia pathogens, the causative agent of Lyme borreliosis that can damage joints and organs. The disease often goes undetected. In the future, a new type of gel is intended to prevent an infection – if applied after a tick bite.

For years, Mrs. S. suffered from joint pain and headaches. After an odyssey through doctors’ waiting rooms, one doctor diagnosed Lyme borreliosis – an infectious disease transmitted by ticks. With its bite, the parasite introduced bacteria that then spread throughout the entire body. Mrs. S. is not alone – very often, the disease is recognized too late or not at all, or is not properly treated. Doctors are provided with no clues if the characteristic redness around the bite area is missing. Left untreated, Lyme borreliosis can cause symptoms that resemble rheumatism, damage joints, muscles and nerves and affect the organs.

Cornell University has been chosen by New York City to build a technology campus on Roosevelt Island with a grant of city-owned land and $100 million.

The campus Cornell proposed will occupy 2.1 million square feet, accommodate up to 2,500 students and cost more than $2 billion to build. A $350 million gift from an anonymous donor, the largest in Cornell’s history, will help foot the bill.

Other schools that expressed interest in New York City’s tech campus offer include Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon, and a consortium led by New York University and Stanford, which dropped its bid Friday. But Cornell, an anonymous source told The New York Times, has been the school of choice for a while. And it might not be the last.

Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. The money slide is the graphic below.

The chart shows three scarce resources and their improvements over time. The top line is available storage (S), the middle line represents processing power (following Moore’s law) or (P) and the bottom line is the Network (N).

In it he asserts that the web is dying and in its ashes will see the rise of the “App Internet.” The App Internet is different than the HTML Internet (aka The Web, WWW and in the mobile arena “The Mobile Internet” or short-hand HTML5) because the “presentation layer” and “client side” functionality are defined by applications that run on your mobile device and connect into the open Internet back-end to exchange information with other web services.

It happens at least a few times a day. Students look through our list of 400 Free Online Courses, and ask us whether they can get a certificate for taking a class. And, unfortunately, our answer has been no — no, you can’t. But that may be about to change.

Earlier this fall, Stanford launched a highly-publicized series of free courses that offer students something novel: the ability to take tests and receive a “statement of accomplishment” from the instructor — though not the school itself — if they pass the class. (Stanford will launch 14 more courses starting in January and February. Click link for details.)

For a few years now, small business owners have been waiting for the long-discussed economic recovery to finally happen. While these owners certainly look forward to the uptick in business, stronger top-line revenues and improved profitability could also spur them to finally consider selling their businesses. The fact remains that many proprietors still see their business’s current value as too low to plan a financially successful exit.

We’ve seen some slight improvements in the business-for-sale market recently, but not enough to cause a significant jump in the number of businesses for sale. Many sellers who’ve been waiting for the right time to exit have weathered the downturn and are now ready to sell.

For more than two years, we have been warning about the disappearance of venture capital funds. Now that everyone knows that it is a fait accompli, the industry has split into two factions. The first faction is made up of funds we can call "Zombie funds." These are funds that have run out of capital and whose investors are performing artificial resuscitation. Their offices have been closed, and their partners are searching for a new business model. The second faction is made up of the survivors - those who got lucky, or that still have another million dollars in the bank, which will enable them to survive another two years or so, until they raise the next fund.

It turns out that even the survivors are far from happy with the situation. A partner in such a fund who attended the "Globes" Israel Business Conference last week told us, "It's not pleasant to be alone. In the past, there was a community - there was always somebody to talk with. It was always possible to make deals together, to consult and reassure each other. This has almost completely disappeared. Now, when we need partners for new investments, we only search overseas. It's much less convenient to fly to California instead of getting together for half an hour over coffee."

Why should wheelchairs stay boring when the people using them have so much personality? That is exactly what Bill Lasher when he created his first sporty wheelchair.

In the six years since that first garage tinkering, Lasher has built Lasher Sport, crafting custom wheelchairs and handcycles that can roll on sandy beaches, ski on snowy mountaintops and careen terrifyingly fast down the slopes of the Swiss Alps. The chairs are also one of only a handful of products fully manufactured in Alaska, though Lasher does contract to Lower 48 firms for some processes. They are sold to clients all over the world – from Guam to Germany.