Startups ask me “How much money should I ask for?” The simple answer is the absolute minimum amount you need to make your plan work. Some entrepreneurs try to start with a huge number, hoping they can negotiate and close on a smaller one, while others understate their requirements, in hopes of getting their foot in the door with an investor.

Neither of these strategies is a good one, as both are likely to damage your credibility with potential investors, even before they look hard at your plan. Here are the parameters you should use in sizing your request, and be able to explain in justifying your request to investors:

• Consider implied ownership cost. If your company is early stage and has a valuation under $1M, don’t ask for a $5M investment. The investor would be buying your company five times over, and he doesn’t want it. If your valuation is around $1M, you can validly ask for $200K-$300K, and offer 20%-30% of your company in exchange.

OTTAWA, July 8 (Reuters) - Canada's economy created a surprisingly high number of jobs in June, but dismal U.S. data and lack of wage inflation may mean the central bank keeps its foot on the accelerator for a while longer with low rates.

Net employment gains in the month totaled 28,400, Statistics Canada said on Friday, compared with the 15,000 expected by markets. The transport and warehousing industry did the most hiring and overall gains were mostly in part-time and public sector jobs.

The unemployment rate held steady at 7.4 percent as more people entered the labor market.

Mercy Julia Obukwa, 21, will not be knocking at anybody’s door in search of employment when she leaves the university in a few years.

The Third Year arts student at Kenyatta University is already making a living from her school work and the institution is promising to help her make more money.

Her career mentor, Ken Monari, describes Mercy as a well grounded student with a good head on her shoulders for managing shillings and cents.

“I was very touched recently when, on making a good sale from her paintings, she used the proceeds to pay for her mother’s hefty hospital bill.

It all starts with an idea. An idea that could not only change the lives of consumers, but could make you a ton of money. But even if you manage to turn that brainstorm into a prototype—whether it’s a killer app or a game-changing gadget—you still need funding and guidance to take your company to the next level. Previously, the only legitimate route for a startup was to seek out a venture capital firm. But today’s Apples and Googles in the making have powerful new tools at their disposal.

A host of unconventional services such as Indie GoGo, Kickstarter, Peerbackers, and ProFounder promise to help ambitious startups quickly raise funding via the web, with little risk and plenty of creative freedom. Are these new methods for building a successful company really better than working the venture capital circuit?

An estimated two billion people in the developing world heat and cook with a biomass fuel such as wood,

but the practice exposes people — especially women — to large doses of small-particle air pollution, which can cause premature death and lung disease.

In a study just published online in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have associated indoor air pollution with increased blood pressure among older women.

In a remote area of Yunnan Province, China, 280 women in an ethnic minority called the Naxi wore a portable device that sampled the air they were breathing for 24 hours. The Naxi live in compounds including a central, free-standing kitchen that often has both a stove and a fire pit, says Jill Baumgartner, who performed the study with National Science Foundation funding while a Ph.D. student at UW-Madison.

I have a friend who runs a nationwide “traditional” business, and business has been down, like it has been for most people. I suggested that he add some social network marketing initiatives, and his answer was he is “too busy.” He is not alone, according to a recent study, which concludes that only 47% of companies use social media today for marketing, despite the fact that 78% of executives polled feel it’s critical for success.

What’s the problem? It seems to me that there is abundant proof in the marketplace of the financial returns to both large and small businesses, the low cost of entry, and the ubiquity of social networks. Dell announced years ago that it had earned $3 million in revenue from using Twitter, and other businesses report daily on increases in web traffic up to 800%.

While the United States government seems incapable of producing a jobs bill much less a green jobs bill, China and the European Union have been developing green economies for the past several years.  The U.S. has talked about climate change but mostly in an effort to deny that it exists.  Meanwhile other countries have accepted climate change as a fact and have been developing the technology and jobs to reduce pollution, and capitalize on renewable energy.

Just a few days ago, Xinhuanet, a Chinese news agency reported that President of the Party of European Socialists (PES) Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, had called for greater cooperation between China and the European Union (EU) on energy efficiency and the green economy.  Rasmussen said “the development of the green economy and renewable energy will boost economic growth, benefit people, and in particular, create millions of jobs.”

SOMEBODY IN Boston is about to get burned by the promise of high-tech development. Boston has four major medical and biotech clusters in various stages of assemblage. They’re all competing with Cambridge. Increasingly, it’s looking like Crosstown, the mayor’s last attempt at research-driven neighborhood-building, will be the odd cluster out, a victim of the city’s successes along the South Boston waterfront

Research clusters exist because good things happen when like-minded folks, be they colleagues or competitors, work alongside each other. By definition, clusters demand density. The bigger they are, the better. The opposite is true, too: As interdependent clusters are fractured and watered down, the returns they produce diminish. And since there’s only so much venture capital and government research funding to fight over, their potential size is finite as well.

Should Latin American entrepreneurs necessarily head to Silicon Valley when they go to the US? The answer is ‘no’ according to Buenos Aires startup network Palermo Valley, which chose New York to host its latest event, called Latin America Meets New York to talk Startups. If you missed it, here is what you need to know.

The main highlight of the event, which took place at the incubator of private tech university NYU-Poly last Wednesday, were its two panels, featuring entrepreneurs and investors with a deep knowledge the region, both from the US and from Latin America. The moderators were Vanesa Kolodziej, recently featured in our article Latin American Startups: 10 Women to Watch, and Diego Saez-Gil, an Argentine entrepreneur whose startup Off Track Planet was selected to participate in Start-Up Chile (see our recent story on the program’s new application round.)

Thomas Wailgum, an editor at CIO.com, summed up the enterprise software industry best when he wrote, “It might appear that even tobacco companies enjoy a better level of overall ‘likeability’ than do enterprise software vendors.”

The way successful enterprise software companies have historically operated has been more or less uncontested: licensing costs increase at regular intervals, technology is difficult to integrate, and the user experience is often atrocious. Unlike most other open markets, which force out negative behaviors over time, many of the practices in place today serve the vendor and customer asymmetrically. Amazingly, more than 40% of IT projects still fail to deliver the expected business ROI, yet enterprise vendors come out winning regardless.

We are sending this message to you because you have supported some of our Petition efforts to Congress in the Past.

Please consider immediately signing the petition contained on the link below: www.aboutastra.org/petition/petition.asp If by chance your hyperlink does not work, just paste this link into your Web browser to visit the Petition Sign-on Site. 

WHY SIGN THE PETITION — WHAT HAS HAPPENED?:

Congress is at an impasse in raising the national debt ceiling. Sustainable funding for most science & engineering R&D and STEM education programs is in imminent jeopardy because the government must slash spending. And we are an easy "target of opportunity" because we are not as effectively organized as other interests.

View Senator Pryor's Letter.

Small scale investors wanting a piece of burgeoning private companies such as Zynga, Groupon or Facebook before they go public may have a new friend in MicroAngel Capital Partners.

The alternative fund management company is launching Thursday to offer first-time venture fund investors and those looking to invest smaller chunks of cash a chance to invest anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 in some of the most coveted internet startups.

MicroAngel Capital Partners will pool investments in individual funds for hot pre-IPO technology, social media, green tech and mobile companies. Regional funds will also be available. Once it raises roughly $1 million per fund, MicroAngel Capital Partners will buy up stock via sellers on secondary stock markets and dole out shares to fund participants.

NEW YORK, June 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Venture capitalists from around the world say the current level of IPO activity is too low to support the health of the venture capital industry in their respective countries, according to the 2011 Global Venture Capital Survey sponsored by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association.

More than 80 percent of global venture capitalists surveyed stated that current IPO activity levels in their home countries are too low. The survey, conducted annually, reveals that venture capitalists believe high returns generated by IPOs are critical in providing superior returns to limited partners and growth capital to developing portfolio companies.

Venture capitalists in the United States, China, Brazil, India and France found it most important to have an active IPO market in their home countries, followed closely by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Israel. In the U.S., where there has been a large and active venture capital and entrepreneurial community for many years, 91 percent of venture capitalists deemed the U.S. IPO market a critical element of the U.S. venture capital industry. In contrast to the global trend, only 36 percent of U.S. venture capitalists said that IPO markets in other geographies were essential to the success of the U.S. venture capital industry.

The lady from the corporate IT department wants to meet with you tomorrow morning. You recall that she wears Anne Klein and has a background in finance. She wants to talk with you about whether her group’s newly launched collaborative innovation program would benefit you. Her group’s senior vice president mentioned to her that you—your business unit—face critical challenges that will affect your P&L in the new fiscal year. Challenges that require you to think of new ways to keep your most important (read: profitable) clients in the fold. Challenges that require you to deliver more with less by identifying and eliminating waste.

You know: the same old, same old—only more of it.

Let’s be honest, you tell yourself, neither you nor the people who know you expected you to remain in your current role for this long. The recession has been rough. However, you told yourself years ago that plateaus were for camping on, not for defining careers—not your career, at least. You have more to offer. Maybe fresh approaches and thinking are just what the doctor ordered for your staff and you. The board seems to be talking the language of innovation of late, as well.

In the future, if ever you find yourself in a house on fire, perhaps a few of your emergency responders will not be people at all.

Rather, they could be expertly programmed circuit boards with a knack for analyzing events around them without any help from humans and cooperating with one another to respond in the most effective manner. In other words, they may be robots that are independent, adaptive and cooperative.

This is what two University of Delaware professors — mechanical engineer Bert Tanner and linguist Jeffrey Heinz — are working on with support from the National Science Foundation.

"If you have an idea about how a fire is likely to spread, you reposition your resources to be as effective and efficient as possible," Tanner told InnovationNewsDaily. "Experienced humans can do that almost subconsciously. If we can enable machines to do that, it can lift the pressure off the shoulders of human supervisors."

I’ve been doing deals as a corporate lawyer for 17+ years, and there are certain fundamental mistakes that I’ve seen entrepreneurs make over and over again.  Accordingly, I thought it would be helpful to share certain basic tips in connection with doing deals.  This is part two of a three-part series.  In part one, I discussed the importance of (i) being careful with letters of intent, (ii) creating a competitive environment and (iii) using your lawyer as a “bad cop.”

Some employees are great starters but lousy finishers. Lousy finishers seem to take forever to move the football across the goal line. They get distracted by other work, or even get themselves assigned to another project before finishing the first.

You could use the whip to get these people focused on completing the job, but there is a more subtle tool that comes out of the world of psychology. We’ll get to that in a minute. (”Geez, can’t he just finish the point without an interruption?”).

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating whether Google is using its dominance in Web search to give its own services an unfair advantage. The FTC is also looking into whether Twitter is abusing its position to lock out competitors. But government intervention here is misguided. These investigations, and whatever results from them, won’t level the playing field. They will only stifle innovation and yank lawyers out of unemployment lines.

The technology sector moves so quickly that when a company becomes obsessed with defending and abusing its dominant market position, countervailing forces cause it to get left behind. Consider: The FTC spent years investigating IBM and Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices, yet it wasn’t government that saved the day; their monopolies became irrelevant because both companies could not keep pace with rapid changes in technology — changes the rest of the industry embraced. The personal-computer revolution did IBM in; Microsoft’s Waterloo was the Internet. This — not punishment from Uncle Sam — is the real threat to Google and Twitter if they behave as IBM and Microsoft did in their heydays.

Friends matter.

He may be the world’s youngest billionaire, but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get to that point without making a few enemies along the way.

From a Harvard dorm room to the courtroom, The Social Network film is based on the Facebook creator’s (played by Jesse Eisenberg) trials and triumphs as he builds the social network into the billion-dollar empire.