Women entrepreneurs are making progress in obtaining investment capital; minority entrepreneurs still have a ways to go; and the overall angel investment news is cautiously optimistic. So says Q1 Q2 2011 Angel Market Trends, the latest report on angel investing from the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire.

First, the positive news about women. In the first half of 2011, women angel investors represented 12 percent of the angel market, and women-owned businesses accounted for 12 percent of the entrepreneurs seeking angel capital. While these numbers aren’t outstanding, they do represent progress. More impressive is that 26 percent of the women entrepreneurs seeking angel investment in the first half of the year received it. In fact, the report notes, the percentage of women actually getting angel investments is above the overall average.

Over the last six years, while 85% of countries are improving their gender equality ratios, for the rest of the world the situation is declining, most notably in several African and South American countries. The sixth annual World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2011 shows a slight decline over the last year in gender equality rankings for New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom this year, while gains are made in Brazil, Ethiopia, Qatar, Tanzania and Turkey.

Nordic countries (Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) continue to hold top spots having closed over 80% of their gender gaps, while countries at the bottom of the rankings still need to close as much as 50%.

With health reform looming over the U.S., the healthcare industry is coming under pressure like never before to reduce costs while at the same time increase quality.

So finding companies that can do just that will take on increasing importance for healthcare investors. But identifying those companies, as any healthcare investor would tell you, is much easier said than done.

Business incubators are designed to help technology companies grow in all sorts of ways.

Often, those companies need help with management issues, sales and marketing and protection of intellectual property.

Many also want the incubator to help them find enough working capital to realize their dream of commercializing their technology.

BCC (originally an acronym for Biomedical Commercialization Canada) is an incubator funded by contracts with the National Research Council-Industrial Research Assistance Program and the provincial government and is located beside the NRC building on Ellice Avenue.

For researchers working in technical fields, inventions are to be expected.  Unfortunately, many university inventors receive little, if any, training on what to do once they have an invention on their hands. Our team has put together a handy FAQ to help orient inventors to the world of university-industry technology transfer.  We’ve also put together a quick overview of what we see as the key steps for inventors to transform their ideas into commercial solutions.

It's hard to find something that isn't crowd-sourced these days. Restaurant recommendations? Check. Movies? Check. Everyone's favorite workday timesuck? Yup, that too.

But not everyone's been tapping into the power of the cloud. While popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Spot.us have been a game changer for aspiring journalists and creatives, they've yet to be a budget resource for scientists.

There are lots of trends people have been talking about in tech financing--"superangels"; delayed IPOs; secondary market sales; and more.

But so far, few people have been putting the dots together: the entire financing landscape for companies is changing.

And, excitingly, it's increasingly not just technology companies.

The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act (H.R. 2930) was introduced to foster relationships between investors and entrepreneurs.  Specifically, it permits crowdfunding issuances that offer an equity stake (securities) to investors.

What is Crowdfunding?

The basic idea is to raise money through relatively small contributions from a large number of people - combining the best of microfinance and crowdsourcing.

It was painful to watch. Jon Bond, the former ad giant turned social media honcho, was actually getting heckled at the Pivot Conference. When faced with what was a feisty crowd to begin with, Bond admitting that he “didn’t like Twitter” was like throwing fresh meat at rabid dogs. But rather than raise their voices, they let their fingers do the shouting. So while Bond continued to speak, a steady stream of snarky tweets projected on the wall behind him, acting like foghorns and essentially drowning him out.

The Blackstone Group has completed its take-private buyout of Emdeon (NYSE: EM). Blackstone paid Emdeon stockholders $19 per share, putting the total transaction value at $3 billion. Emdeon provides healthcare revenue and payment cycle management and clinical information exchange solutions. One of the company's existing investors, Hellman & Friedman, has retained a minority stake in the company. Hellman & Friedman has backed the company since 2008.

Since the beginning of 2007, PE investors have invested in 100 companies primarily involved in the Healthcare Technology Systems industry, according to the PitchBook Platform. Deal flow in the industry has held steady over the last few years, little impacted by the financial crises, unlike many other industries. While platform buyouts accounted for the majority of the activity in both 2007 and 2008, they've taken a backseat to add-ons during the last three years. Buyouts, like the Emdeon deal, have been relatively rare this year, accounting for only 16% of 2011's deals to date, compared to a 63% share held by add-ons.

There are two general types of economic development efforts that state government participates in:

--Those that are intended to expand or retain jobs in Wisconsin or attract jobs from outside.

--Those that are intended to assist start-up companies, some with new ideas for products or services, by investing “venture capital” in them.

In a suburb of Beijing, 800 workers arrive each day to a glass-and-masonry office block and a shared mission: to create China's version of the Internet cloud.

Known as Cloud Valley, the 7,000-square-meter technology campus is the creation of Edward Tian, a 48-year old entrepreneur credited with bringing broadband Internet to China in the 1990s. On the campus, millions in investments from Tian's enterprises now fund engineers to wire-up servers into refrigerated shipping containers and all-night coding sessions by young programmers. These are components of what Tian hopes will become a complete supply chain for cloud computing—all of it Made in China.

“There’s too much venture money: it’s a bubble.” “It’s so hard to raise VC capital these days.” Depending upon one’s perspective, the early stage venture world is a vastly different place. From my seat I see several trends that are giving rise to this seeming disconnect, the outgrowth of which is frustration among both entrepreneurs and investors across the early-stage venture ecosystem:

• Starting a company is easier and cheaper than ever before. The proliferation of incubators and the like have further reduced the friction. The barrier to creating a start-up is virtually nonexistent.

There may have been money flowing into China, but Europe certainly wasn’t feeling the venture capital love. The continent sustained its lowest deal count in history in Q3 2011, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. A mere €951 mn was put to work across 219 transactions. Invested capital plunged 12 percent, with deal flow off 13 percent year over year. That’s the worst performance since Dow Jones VentureSource started keeping score back in 2000

As you read this article, perhaps on your smartphone or iPad, try to remember what the world was like on October 20, 1986, when the first issue of The Scientist was published.

Apple’s Macintosh computer was just two years old. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was celebrating its first birthday, while GenBank, all of four years old, held just under 10,000 sequences (a total of 9.6 million bases). The NCSA Mosaic web browser was still seven years away, and it would be another two years beyond that before J. Craig Venter and colleagues at the Institute for Genomic Research would first be able to read the genetic sequence of a “free-living organism,” Haemophilus influenzae.

Analyzing return on investment, the Center for American Progress (CAP) has just released an issue brief about the Obama Administration’s $37 million  Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge which notes that the competition “is providing a compelling answer to the issue of unemployment.”

According to the Center for American Progress, “With unemployment stubbornly stuck at around 9 percent, and with the global economic picture threatening more difficult times ahead, the biggest question is what we can do in the public and private sectors to spur job creation. The Economic Development Administration’s Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge is one federal program providing its own compelling answer. This new program is a great example of doing what works—leveraging existing resources to do more with less. The program brings together three previously unrelated programs in separate agencies to make available approximately $37 million in joint grants for coordinated economic development, small business, and workforce-training investments in 20 regions around the country.”

CAP also notes, “This approach offers a uniquely American way to develop bottom-up economic growth strategies that are in sync with the business and economic realities in local communities nationwide.”  Thecompetition to support the development of 20 high-growth industry regional innovation clusters leverages funding from three federal agencies and technical assistance from 13 additional agencies to support the development of 20 high-growth industry clusters across the country. Funding for workforce training and technical assistance is provided by the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration, the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, and the Small Business Administration.

Download this issue brief

In today’s VC market, it’s age before beauty. This is according to a new study released today by Shareholder Representative Services (SRS), the company that represents shareholder interests during the post-closing process in mergers and acquisitions deals. In other words, SRS is an independent advocate for shareholders that offers communications, accounting, and dispute resolution services to an impressive list of clients, which includes the likes of Accel, Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Khosla, and more. (Basically, the list is a who’s who of venture firms.)

The study, which looks at the 196 transactions SRS was involved in between July 2010 and September 2011, identifies trends in these M&A deal terms: One of which is that startups are today raising significantly more outside financing before exit than they were three years ago.

The U.S. tech industry has a race problem.

Anyone who’s worked in Silicon Valley for any length of time will have noticed the alarmingly large number of white guys occupying positions of power. There are good-sized groups of Asian entrepreneurs among the entrepreneurial and venture capital classes. But there are not many women and there are almost no black or Hispanic entrepreneurs or VCs.

Despite the incredible diversity of the Bay Area, the people at the top of the Silicon Valley power pyramid have a depressing sameness. An upcoming CNN documentary called Black in America looks at the issue by following a group of black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Thanks to early previews, the show is already making waves, and it hasn’t even aired yet. Check out Soledad O’Brien’s update on the controversy, which is as good a place to catch up as any. (If you want to watch the show, VentureBeat’s Chikodi Chima will be moderating a discussion at an upcoming screening of Black in America, while the show will be broadcast on November 13.)

Where will the Internet’s next greatest business be born?

While most people immediately associate the phrase “start-up” with Silicon Valley, or New York, the fact is that there are millions of budding entrepreneurs outside of America’s existing technology centers.

As broadband spreads into rural areas and small towns across the United States, economies are emerging in places that haven’t been considered viable markets by traditional investors and hardware manufacturers looking for areas to expand.

Boston Dynamics, a Waltham company that three years ago introduced the four-legged BigDog robot, a beast of burden designed to traverse rough terrain, is unveiling its newest creation: an improved version of a walking machine that is shaped like a human being.

The mule-like BigDog created a sensation three years ago, when it was shown climbing snow-covered hills, keeping its balance on slippery ice, and withstanding the kicks and shoves of its engineer creators. Boston Dynamics’ video of BigDog in action has attracted more than 12 million viewers on YouTube.