After you've been working on your business blog for a while, there are a number of great things that you can do to give it a boost. When you were first getting started with blogging, your primary concern was probably just getting content shipped on a regular basis so you could generate your initial momentum and begin to build an audience and readership. But after a few months of regular publishing and generating growth, it can be beneficial to give your readers some variety by creating and publishing different types of content in various formats to help your blog grow and keep the content exciting. There are many possible ways to do this, and today we'll cover three of them: integrating video content, incorporating interviews, and incorporating weekly posts covering lighter topics.

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Stanley Hainsworth has been a catalyst for the great brands of modern times. He was creative director at Nike and then Lego. He was vice president global creative at Starbucks in an era when the coffee purveyor was experiencing phenomenal growth. Starbucks has been hailed, acknowledged, and praised again and again for its excellence in branding and marketing, in creating a branded experience that can satisfy the connoisseur, bring in new converts, be accessible to all, and irresistible in its appeal. Stanley defined the very feel of Starbucks in an era when the brand was becoming a cultural icon.

Stanley has a reputation for being extremely rigorous in his work, comprehensively rethinking brands when necessary, and helping them to expand into new areas of endeavor while remaining true to their original identity. As he had done at Nike, he helped Lego expand into entertainment properties that allowed the company to gracefully enter the brand multiverse. At Starbucks, he created an innovative criteria of five filters--handcrafted, artistic, sophisticated, human, and enduring--that defined the work for the company. Stanley's extraordinarily thorough approach to design and branding is complemented by an equally good nature; he has been a revered colleague and mentor at the companies where he worked.

Sep 25 2011 Moneyball For Startups Dan Frommer wrote an interesting post on SplatF yesterday talking about the possibility of a quantitative assessment of founders/founding teams, like they use in baseball. Bottom line is that Dan talked to some leading VCs and none of them use quantitative methods to measure teams. It seems like gut instinct is alive and well in VC land.

A few days ago I answered a question on AsktheVC about modeling cap tables. After a quick email conversation with Jeff Boardman (founder of LearnVC), I realize I had left his product off the list.

Jeff has done a nice job building a site that both models a cap table and provides a lot of information to empower entrepreneurs both with educational resources and software tools. In addition to modeling a cap table and ownership of the company, Jeff’s software helps answer questions like “if I sell for $100M, how much money does everyone receive.”

A new emphasis on extracting more economic value from sponsored research and intellectual property at Purdue University will help move more Purdue research to the marketplace faster and reduce the university's reliance on tuition and tax dollars.

Purdue President France A. Córdova announced Wednesday (Sept. 28) a three–part Decadal Funding Plan that will increase sources of revenue beyond tuition and state appropriations - the traditional sources for public university funding - by doubling financial capacity through continued cost-cutting, expanding online degree and professional education offerings, encouraging more robust use of campus facilities through summer teaching, and ramping up research commercialization.

Amid its wide avenues and towering skyscrapers, it’s easy to forget that New York City began as a small collection of homes outside an unimposing Dutch fort nearly four centuries ago. Though New York’s ascension to world city status might seem inevitable to modern observers, its present success is, in large part, the result of many conscious historical decisions. Whether this meant the building of harbors, the financing of canals or the laying of railroads, New York took the necessary steps to remain at the cutting edge while comparable cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston fell behind.

One decade into the 21st century, however, New York’s preeminence is threatened. The firms that have dominated the digital age are overwhelmingly anchored elsewhere, particularly in Silicon Valley. As Stanford bids against other universities for the right to operate a New York campus, Stanford’s appeal rests largely on the idea that it can create a hub of engineering innovation in the Big Apple in the mold of the University’s Silicon Valley milieu.

Cleveland BioFund, a new venture group in Cleveland, is launching a partnership with Newsummit Pharmaceutical Group, a Shanghai-based biotechnology development company, to fund and support revenue-stage US medical device companies looking to enter the China market, and Chinese medical device companies looking to enter the US market.  The partners announced that $30 million of a targeted $100 million in funding is available now.  BioEnterprise will assist the groups in identifying and supporting opportunities.  Cleveland BioFund is a new project launched by the group behind the Cleveland International Fund, a real estate investment fund.

Startup companies are developing a wide range of new — and sometimes exotic — sustainable-energy technologies to help countries move away from their dependence on dwindling and greenhouse-gas producing fossil fuels. In this special report from the 2011 Wharton Global Alumni Forum in San Francisco, Knowledge@Wharton surveys the role and limitations of venture capital in contributing to this transformation.

O ver the past several years, Florida's bioscience industry has continued to grow, attracting some of the world's leading research institutes. That momentum began in the mid-2000s when former Gov. Jeb Bush, recognizing biotechnology as a growth industry for the state, successfully attracted an expansion operation for the Scripps Research Institute to Jupiter through $300 million in incentives that were matched by Palm Beach County. Since that time, more than $1 billion in incentive investments has contributed to the attraction of other prestigious research institutes such as Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute, Draper Laboratories, Stanford Research Institute and Max Planck Institute.

These organizations have established or are currently building hundreds of thousands of square feet of new laboratory and office facilities and employ more than 1,000 researchers, administrators and other workers. Over the last six years, when construction cranes have been silenced in many industries and regions, activity in Florida's bioscience industry has remained strong. In fact, Florida is now one of the fastest growing states for creation of biotechnology, medical device and pharmaceutical companies.

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) — Sleeping on a futon and living off about $1,000 per month was how Ryan Allis said he and a co-founder started the email marketing business iContact without startup capital, while still in college.

Allis, whose company now employs about 300 people in offices in Morrisville, was part of a three-person panel of entrepreneurs under 30 years of age who are now running North Carolina-based companies.

The other panelists were Rachel Weeks, founder of the Durham-based collegiate apparel company School House, and James Freeman, a co-founder of Pembroke-based restaurant Mighty J's.

A solution is gaining steam to help spur small-business growth and the anemic state of job creation. It requires updating Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations regarding general solicitation and accreditation so average Americans can choose to invest in small businesses.

Crowd-fund investing is a common-sense solution that has attracted the interest and support of President Obama. Republican Rep. Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina recently introduced H.R. 2930, the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, legislation that aligns with the general framework supported by the president. So here we have a common-ground idea over which both sides of the political aisle agree on many key details. It’s time to move forward quickly so crowd-fund investing can help capital-starved businesses and our gasping economy.

The Institute of Directors yesterday published its response to the Treasury’s consultation document “Tax-advantaged venture capital schemes”. The Institute’s main concerns are as follows.

Growth must be promoted across the board, by keeping tax rates down for all businesses. A new scheme for seed capital may help some, but it is not the most important thing to do.

Knowledge is power - economic power - and there's a scramble for that power taking place around the globe.

In the United States, Europe and in rising powers such as China, there is a growth-hungry drive to invest in hi-tech research and innovation.

They are looking for the ingredients that, like Google, will turn a university project into a corporation. They are looking for the jobs that will replace those lost in the financial crash.

Nike Inc. (NKE), the world’s biggest sneaker company, is taking a page from Silicon Valley’s playbook in an effort to cut production costs and foster a new generation of green-technology businesses.

The company is setting up a venture-capital offshoot called the Sustainable Business & Innovation Lab to back startups focused on alternative energies and more efficient approaches to manufacturing. The lab also will seek out companies that promote healthy lifestyles, according to a description on Nike’s site.

The concept of innovation has been especially trendy at business school over the last decade, with business schools launching everything from design labs to classes devoted to the topic. The Wharton School has been part of this wave of interest, hosting events like the Wharton Sports Innovation Conference and creating the Mack Center for Technological Innovation. They’re now adding to their offerings in this field this fall with the launch of the new Wharton Innovation Fund, an initiative to encourage students, faculty and staff to come up with inventions or services that “show promise for making a substantial impact on business or society as a whole,” according to a Wharton press release. Alberto Vitale, a Wharton alum and former CEO of Random House, has provided the seed money for the fund, which will provide approximately $125,000 worth of grant money each year for projects. Vitale says he views the fund as “a catalyst to stimulate innovation at the school and to surface the brainpower of its students.”

INNOVATION AMERICA IS PROUD TO HAVE ASSISTED THE STATE OF IOWA IN DEVELOPING ITS COMPREHENSIVE INNOVATION ROADMAP AND CONSULTING ON ITS WINNIG i6 PROPOSAL.

WASHINGTON – The Obama Administration today announced the six winners of the i6 Green Challenge, an initiative to drive technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in support of a green innovation economy, increased U.S. competitiveness and new jobs.

Projects in Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, New England and Washington will each receive up to $1 million from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) and up to $6 million in additional funding and technical assistance from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology and United States Patent and Trademark Office.

TIANJIN ECO-CITY, China -- Three years ago, this coastal area fit perfectly into the dictionary definition for "wasteland." Its soil was too salty to grow crops. It was polluted enough to scare away potential residents. Sometimes the few fishermen who lived here saw investors driving in, but they quickly turned around and left, leaving nothing behind except dust.

But then some people showed up to buy a piece of this land. It is about half the size of Manhattan. They restored the soil, cleaned up water pollution and began preparing the once-deserted place for a city that will host green businesses and some 350,000 residents by 2020.