We’d all be forgiven for imagining that TechCrunch Disrupt and the DEMO Conference were the only regularly held innovation competition events worth talking about, as far as the tech media were concerned. So imagine my surprise…

…when I turned up at an innovation competition which I had never heard of, primarily because, as far as I could tell, it had no coverage in any of the usual places that report on the startup scene.

“So what?” You may ask, “I’ll bet the prize was much smaller than the TechCrunch Disrupt Cup‘s $50,000”. And I’ll bet the whole thing was run on a shoestring, the venue was in the middle of nowhere and the entrants were mostly no-hopers.

The sky is falling.  The sky is falling.  Seems like every day there’s another piece of news about the drop in Life Science venture capital (and here), with bouts of flagellation around each new quarterly press release from NVCA/PwC MoneyTree, Dow Jones VentureSource, or CB Insights. Everyone repeats the news with the same grim perspective and soon enough it just becomes well accepted fact, and runs the risk of being self-fulfilling.  We all deride public investors for being too focused on quarterly numbers and yet here we are in the long-term venture industry whining about quarterly ups and downs. The reality is over the past decade Life Sciences venture capital has been incredibly stable source of capital.

Are Innovators born or made? That is the question authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen address in their new book, “The Innovator’s DNA”. Through an eight-year study with data collected from 500 innovators and 5,000 executives in 75 countries including leaders from Amazon, Apple, Google, Skype and Virgin Group, the authors attempt to find the common denominator of what makes an Innovation leader. They unearthed a key finding: that innovation is not just a product of the mind but also of behaviors. Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen found specific patterns of behavior exemplified by top innovators around the world. These five behaviors can be emulated to improve innovative thinking - proving that creativity is not just a genetic predisposition.

Despite a stagnant global economic environment, Taiwan's high-tech businesses, including those in the semiconductor and IC design sectors, have stepped up efforts to recruit top-notch research and engineering talent, major local newspapers reported Monday. As part of the campaign, Vice Economics Minister Francis Liang is scheduled to head a delegation of corporate and research institute executives to visit major U.S. high-tech hubs, such as Silicon Valley and Boston, in search of high-end professionals, the reports said.

Entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley say all it takes is one success story to spawn a startup culture.

As such, Groupsmore may be Malaysia's poster child.

"We have a million subscribers and even my mom uses it," says Joel Neoh, the 28-year-old head of the Malaysian internet trading firm that was recently acquired by the US-based internet giant Groupon for an undisclosed amount, according to a report in BBC.

I wasn’t paying attention as I took a diagonal shortcut across Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square this August. My mind was on remembering the directions from my hotel to my client’s office, where I would be working for the next two days.

I almost stumbled over the guy in a black business suit who was down on his hands and knees on the concrete of the immense plaza, the tip of his necktie dragging along the ground. He was holding a fat stub of blue chalk in his hand and scrawling a message on the concrete “Thanks, Jack, you inspired all of us”.

Queen of the Net, Mary Meeker, presented her “Internet Trends” for the year at the Web 2.0 Summit 2011 in San Francisco earlier this month. Meeker’s vision has not changed radically from last year, with an increased emphasis on how much of the tech market is now driven by users outside of the United States. In this article, I’d like to take a look at some of her key points and investigate what they mean for emerging markets, especially within the BRICS countries.

Mark Suster (GRP) reminds all of us to check our laptops, iPhones, Blackberries, and other electronic devices at the door at board meetings. CEOs should enforce this, as should the other VCs and board members in the room.

No “full partial attention” – just full attention.

Cloud computing is one of the hottest buzzwords in technology. It appears 48 million times on the Internet. But amidst all the chatter, there is one question about cloud computing that has never been answered: Who said it first?

Some accounts trace the birth of the term to 2006, when large companies such as Google and Amazon began using "cloud computing" to describe the new paradigm in which people are increasingly accessing software, computer power, and files over the Web instead of on their desktops.

Living in the Silicon Valley, I have heard this argument for a while now.  To be a real creative force in the technological world or to create jobs to better the economy, you have to drop out of college, sometimes the best colleges in America (Zuckerberg and Moscovitz dropped out of Harvard ) or not even go at all  (Gates and Allen).  Many other big names can also be mentioned, Flickr, Twitter and Etsy among them, as being founded by college dropouts.

Lately I am also seeing this argument all over the internet, with authors like Michael Ellsberg, Joel Mathis and Matt Drudge chiming in. Michael Ellsberg authored the new book The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late.

As with anything, there are stages for small business owners who decide to get involved with social media. Mastery doesn’t come all at once. We start at the bottom, we learn new tools and tricks over time, and eventually we work through common issues just as others have before us.

In my experience educating clients about social media and talking to others about their own involvement, I’ve found there are six basic stages that we all must pass through when it comes to getting involved with social media. Below are the six stages I most commonly see. You let me know if you’ve seen any others.

What is the future of social media?

It's different things to different people, of course -- corporations, regular Joes, celebrities, governments, etc.

We asked more than a dozen entrepreneurs, pundits, academics, and avid social media participants to continue the open-ended sentence: "The future of social media is..."

The big success stories in China are about companies like Baidu and Youdao (search engines) and Tencent (social services), companies that have their equivalents in the West. Chinese tech companies are often referred to as copycats – and aren’t the Chinese known for copying just about everything?

For economic growth, innovation is important and analysts worry that the rules and regulations in China paralyze entrepreneurs and smother creativity, leaving China as a place where real innovation can not take place.

The Wellcome Trust website reports that the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst (SBC) is the UK’s first open innovation bioscience campus, due to open at the beginning of next year. They have already started conversations with their stakeholders on how open innovation between them will work in real life. Given the long and risky timelines that are inherent in drug discovery and development, they don’t expect open innovation to be generating quick returns. However, the value it has added in consumer healthcare and other sectors makes them confident the same will happen in this area as well.

With all the hype surrounding social media, it’s easy to take your eye off the ball of what really drives your business. But as an entrepreneur or small business owner, your top two areas of focus should be your reputation and your brand. It takes a great deal of time to build a strong reputation and very little time to destroy it.

Your brand is made up of more than your products and services. It includes the interaction you have with your customers and echoes your values. Your brand is a reflection of you.

Taking on entrepreneurship is one of the most life changing events any person can embark on; it not only impacts the individual, but impacts the community and even the world. An entrepreneur is someone who just does not accept the status quo, but has a vision for the future and makes the impossible happen to arrive at this vision.

Entrepreneurship is not easy anywhere in the world. Each region has its unique challenges, and in the same ways has its unique opportunities. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is in transition. All market indicators whether it is around consumer usage patterns, infrastructure availability, business demand or overall business and political disruptions indicate the MENA is ripe with opportunity. Things are moving quickly and it is clear that it is a major and growing world market.

Not all tech entrepreneurs are as lovely as TNW’s Boris Veldhuijzen Van Zanten. You could end up dating one that closer resembles a robot and leaves you desiring sex, proper dinner dates and wondering who the hell Paul Graham is. Or as Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica Albright learned in the film “The Social Network”–sometimes they can just be downright, selfish nerds.

Our friends at iStrategyLabs put together this hilarious list for us on reasons you shouldn’t date a tech entrepreneur. Find out why here:

One of the most daunting challenges facing companies – especially startups – is access to capital.  But, when you’re in a stalled economy – such as we have today – banks become tentative and venture capitalists become even more exacting and particular.

I was one of more than 200 people who recently met in Arlington, Texas at the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) conference to talk about innovation capital and strategies for managing investment programs and institutions.  It was an interesting and diverse group of public and private stakeholders.  Among those present were venture capitalists, state venture capital professionals, companies looking for funding, federal government officials and innovation intermediaries like NorTech.

The thought that clothing should give something back to the wearer--the ability to keep track of athletic performance or store energy that can be used for electronics--is fairly new. The concept of clothing that can help keep the wearer healthy, well, that still sounds like pseudoscience. Celliant, a company that wants to be "Intel Inside of responsive textiles," aims to change that.

Celliant has been around for a decade, but it's only in the last year that it has teamed up with major sportswear companies like Reebok, Adidas, and Saucony to spread the responsive textile gospel. These companies all sell athletic apparel containing Celliant technology--or, as Reebok calls them, "performance-driven Celliant fibers."

AngelList is an online community that matches startups with investors to streamline the fundraising process.

I’ve personally raised $1 million from AngelList for my startup, and have helped dozens of other startups raise $3 million more. I’ve referred more than 20 startups to AngelList, vouched for a dozen other investors and am ranked as one of the top connectors on the site.