SAN FRANCISCO — The phone call, at home one night last week, came from a student seeking donations for the University of California, San Francisco.

“Well,” Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann told the caller, “I’m actually the chancellor at U.C.S.F.”

The student, seemingly unaware that chancellor meant head of the university, kept up her pitch: The doctor and her husband had given $5,000 in the past, so how about another donation?

Dr. Desmond-Hellmann said they had already made another donation. The student kept trying.

Recently Under30CEO ran a poll to find out what the best cities in the United States were for young entrepreneurs. The poll asked the Under30CEO readers to place their vote or submit the city of their choice if it wasn’t listed. We asked everyone to not only think about the business climate and resources but to also consider the social scene and even weather. Young entrepreneurs want to run a successful business but they also take into consideration their lifestyle and where they can find both personal and business happiness. The results are below for the top cities for young entrepreneurs in 2011.

1. New Orleans

New Orleans tops the list with a surge in entrepreneurial activity in recent years. The city has seen numerous incubators and events catered to assisting entrepreneurs come to town which has boosted the resources the city has available. It’s also well known that New Orleans has an amazing, vibrant and inspiring culture that attracts the creative entrepreneur types. But the main driver for young entrepreneurs may really be that for all of this the cost of living in the city is extremely low especially when compared to places like New York, Boston or Chicago.

In his opening remarks at this year’s Summit on the Global Agenda, World Economic Forum founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab placed the need for new models to support effective use of technology innovation firmly on the table.

This is the fourth year I have participated in the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Summit – an intense two-day meeting of over 700 thought leaders from around the world to explore global emerging issues and opportunities and to begin developing possible solutions.

On the Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies, we have been working hard on getting the opportunities and challenges presented by emerging technologies on the radar of top-level decision-makers.  Not because we think they should know about the latest cool technologies, but because we feel that effective solutions to complex challenges demand an integrated and proactive approach to technology innovation.

It can be challenging for unknown startups to garner press attention — budgets are tight, relationships with journalists may not be that strong and explaining a new concept is difficult. Not to mention, early-stage startups usually only employ a few people focused on product and development. Therefore, marketing and public relations are often tackled piecemeal by whomever has time.

Good press, though, can be one of the biggest drivers for startups looking to grow their user bases, and as a result, a pretty important component for success.

As a tech journalist, I’ve been pitched by hundreds of companies and have developed a taste for what works and what doesn’t. Read on for my startup tips.

When you have been on the startup firing line, you quickly learn that any insight from experts and entrepreneurs who have been there before you can make the difference between failure and success. Yet, many new entrepreneurs brazenly assume they are bulletproof, and march blindly into the fray. The result is that well over 50% of startups fail in the first two years.

I don’t think anyone proclaims to have any silver bullets, but there are common failure threads that appear all too often. There are many books written about failure in startups, and I don’t recommend any of them. I prefer the more positive approach of getting you better prepared up-front, like the new book “It’s Your Biz” by Susan Wilson Solovic.

Startups can be a lot like first girlfriends (or boyfriends). You fall madly, passionately in love, think of them 24/7, talk, walk, eat, drink, breathe them, put everything into them and beyond, but sometimes, despite the passion, it just doesn’t work out. And, actually if you’re willing be to be brutally honest, in retrospect the person was often a serious pain in the ass.

So given that you’re going to start a startup, despite the risks of financial ruin, public humiliation, and watching years of your prime swirl down the drain, here are a few things you should consider NOT doing along the way! I realize of course, that these thoughts are going to be totally useless if that glint of love is already shining in your eye—nothing is going to stop you from trying your idea, and nothing should, least of all a blog post! But maybe if it doesn’t quite pan out and you’re still one startup away from being the next Zuck, then you might dust this posting off when you’re looking for that next big idea.

Whether gas, liquid or solid; radioactive or stable, reactive or inert; toxic or in your vitamin pill, the 118 building blocks each have its own chemically idiosyncratic characteristics, along with certain commonalities. See what makes your favorite element unique on this interactive periodic table

In a new fundraising landscape, many photographers are turning towards a new wave of fundraising to get backing for their projects,  crowd funding.  Websites such as Emphas.is and Kickstarter provide a platform for creatives.   Conservation Photographer Neil Ever Osborne is one such creative who is exploring crowd funding.  He is working with Emphas.is to fund his latest project, Return of the Black Turtle.

Tina Ahrens, the COO of Emphas.is, took the time to answer a few of our questions about this new fundraising model.

The City of Los Angeles said this morning that it will be officially launching its Cleantech Incubator tomorrow, as it attempts to create a cluster of clean technology companies downtown. According to Mayor Villaraigosa, the effort is to help develop new businesses and create jobs in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator was created by the Los Angeles Cleantech Alliance, a group created by the Mayor's Office, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Community Redevelopment Agency for Los Angeles, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, UCLA, USC, CalTech, and Arts Center College of Design.

It’s very rare that a joint effort between the public, private, and education sector comes together to produce meaningful results. However, The Varick Street Incubator may be a shining example and roadmap for other cities to follow on how to foster tech innovation.

After spending time at various incubators in the city, it very well may be that the Varick Street incubator is the top place in NYC for new entrepreneurs to call home. If you get the opportunity to be at Varick Steet, you enjoy a lot of benefits. The incubator does not ask for any equity in your company. The rent is really affordable and includes a lot of amenities that are not free at other incubators. Best of all, you get access to high quality interns / employees from NYU, potential seed investors, NYU faculty advisors, and assistance from dozens of other private partners involved with the incubator. Probably one of the best benefits is that several serial entrepreneurs call the incubator home and serve as mentors and motivation for first time founders. For example, Stephanie Sarka (founding member of Overture), Jeff Giesea (Founded and sold FierceMarkets) and David Sudolsky (Experienced Entrepreneur in the biotechnology space) are just some of the heavy hitters at Varick Street.

This looks to be the fourth year in a row where venture capital investment will surpass fund-raising–and that has some people worried that start-ups are facing a hard winter.

“That is exactly the trend you would expect if you saw the venture capital industry shrinking, which is exactly what it is doing,” said Paul Maeder, a general partner at Highland Capital Partners and chairman of the National Venture Capital Association. “We’re in a shakeout. I don’t know whether it’s the beginning, the middle or the end.”

U.S. venture firms closed on $10.6 billion through the first nine months of this year, only slightly ahead of the $9.7 billion in the first nine months of 2010. Fewer funds held closings–90 compared with 115 a year ago. The numbers are the latest from Dow Jones LP Source, a unit of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes VentureWire.

The next time you find yourself seated in a roomful of strangers, take a close look at your nearest neighbor. Does he or she resemble you in subtle ways? The answer is most likely yes, according to a recent study published in the July issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Although psychologists have long known that humans tend to associate by race, sex and other broad-brush categories, the latest work is the first to suggest that the impulse runs even to the picayune. “Sometimes we either gravitate toward people or away from them not because of a large prejudice but just because there’s something a little bit more—or less—familiar about them,” says Anne Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier Univer­sity in Waterloo, Ontario, and a co-author of the study. “Most of these processes are not really conscious.”

As innovation is a necessity for any organization today, the ability to assess and measure the progress and impact of your innovation efforts might be a true source of competitive advantage. This in-depth article offers fresh experiences, best practice and insights from how a number of multinational companies within the MedTech, telecom and manufacturing industries are working with establishing and implementing innovation measurement programs.

In the June issue of Harvard Business review, Intuit, the American software company, was labeled “a design-driven innovation machine.” InnovationManagement talked to Roy Rosin who was Intuit’s first innovation leader, building the company’s innovation programs and working with teams on creating new products and services.

If small businesses are the engines driving the Canadian economy, those engines are running out of gas.

When the dot-com bubble burst, venture capitalist funds and angel groups worldwide were hit hard. While many have recovered in the ensuing decade, Canada’s startup funding continues to experience a drought.

“We are definitely in a crisis,” said Greg Smith, managing director of Brookfield Financial and president of the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA).

State of Corporate Domicile: If the corporate form is selected, the next issue is where best to be domiciled. Ordinarily one would minimize expense by incorporating the business in the state in which the business is to be conducted, thereby saving the cost of appointing an agent in, say, Delaware, the most popular state for those seeking a flag of convenience. (There is rarely an income-tax advantage to domiciling a business outside of its principal place of operations; the income of a business operated in Massachusetts will generally be subjected to the same Massachusetts income tax whether it is technically a Massachusetts or a Delaware corporation.) Engaging a firm of professional representatives such as the Corporation Trust Company to act as resident agent in Delaware entails a modest, but not so trivial, fee each year. On the other hand, the Delaware corporate statute is well drafted and contains few of the anomalies one finds, on occasion, in the general corporation laws of certain other states. Moreover, the Delaware state secretary's office is well staffed and Delaware bureaucrats process papers at a high rate of speed. It is often frustrating to attempt to merge two New York corporations because the personnel in the secretary of state's office get around to clearing the paperwork only in their own sweet time. Further, Delaware maintains a separate court system—the Court of Chancery—to adjudicate (without the nuisance, for corporate practitioners anyway, of jury trials) issues involving the structure and governance of domestic corporations. Moreover, a modern statute such as Delaware's is generally permissive; the glitches that can frustrate counsel attempting to close on a financing have been ironed out.

The folks at Heller Communications Design have this wonderful "About" page that has some pointers on when a potential client should hire them. The list spoke to me, not because I need a design firm or some other consultant, but because there is a lot there that any entrepreneur can use as warning signs that they need to restart their efforts, or perhaps rethink the direction that they are taking their business. So here is my own top ten list, somewhat modified from Heller's.

• You need to create a future that is far more sustainable than your current business state.
• You're experiencing a decreasing return on your marketing investment.
• You were once the leader in your industry, but competition is coming out of the woodwork.
• You are finding yourself in a commodity business with rapidly decreasing margins and increasing costs.

Innovation is the key to business survival and success in the 21st century. The billion-dollar question is: Can innovation be learned? Can business leaders find answers to important questions such as: How do I find innovators for my business? How can I become more innovative? Can we distill and mimic the traits of leading "disruptive innovators" like Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL)?

Maureen Glabman in a 2009 article in MediMedia gives a succinct example illustrating the meaning of the term "disruptive innovation":

"The phrase described what happened in 1960, for example, when an unknown company, Sony, began selling an affordable transistor television that eventually replaced RCA's vacuum tube. Soon it became apparent the transistor alone -- the disruptive technology -- did not tell the whole story. To achieve success, the technology had to be coupled with a whiz-bang business plan, giving birth to the encompassing term 'disruptive innovations.' Sony, with its coveted transistor TV that many people could afford, and a plan to sell its TVs through Kmart (then a new retail chain), put both the more expensive RCA vacuum tube TVs, as well as the many mom-and-pop appliance stores that refused to sell Sony sets, essentially out of business."

Cloud-based document collaboration is gaining momentum, as companies need to support their mobile, distributed work teams that must securely share information anywhere. Enterprises and smaller businesses alike are seeing productivity gains and cost savings via easy-to-use and -deploy tools that integrate existing communications, processes and content without the heavy implementation burden of previous content management solutions. Cloud-based services are emerging as innovation leaders in this space.

Join GigaOM Pro and our sponsor YouSendIt for “The Future of Work: Collaborating Around Business Content,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 10 a.m. PDT.

Who are the movers, the shakers, the companies that affect profound change? And what products do they bring to market that disrupt all others, making other companies completely re-think their strategies? Let’s take a look at seven of those products whose competitors wish had never existed.

That’s what we’ll find out with this infographic by professional networking site Focus.com. You’ll see how 7 companies such as Skype, Netflix, Apple and Google rolled out products and services that approached their market in such a unique way that they changed everything.