I first met Derek Sivers (who most people know best as the founder of CD Baby) at the Business of Software conference, but I’d heard about him long before that.

In a world full of entrepreneurs who have done any number of incredible things, Derek has two accomplishments to his credit that are remarkable: He created a successful business, from scratch – then gave the business away to charity when he was done.

Derek recently spoke at the Business of Software conference.  If you’ve got the time, you should go watch his presentation.  It’s inspiring. Even if you don’t, you definitely should pick up his book.

Several Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms are reaching out to their investors to raise China-focused funds rather than invest from their existing global pools of capital, VentureWire has learned.

Firms like Lightspeed Venture Partners, DCM and others are raising these new funds in part to take advantage of the opportunities in China and in part to retain and recruit talent by improving the compensation for teams working in China, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the fund-raising process.

Some limited partners and venture capitalists with knowledge of the firms’ fund-raising plans said that both Lightspeed Venture Partners and DCM were seeking between $150 million and $200 million for their new funds.

Meanwhile, one limited partner said that Redpoint Ventures was raising $250 million to $300 million and merging its China operation with a local firm led by an ex-partner from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The recession isn't new to the mill towns of the Northeast; they hit the skids long ago. Decades before the most recent economic collapse, proud, river-encircled cities from Maine to Pennsylvania had faded to mere shadows of the engines of productivity they were during the Industrial Revolution. In place of idle smokestacks and shattered windows, Shoe Town to Brew Town--billed as "a friendly forum over food and drink" to be held at New York's Brooklyn Brewery--imagines another scene: historic manufacturies throbbing with the yeasty vapors of craft beer, and producing not only brew but sustainably raised fish, hydroponic produce, and enough natural gas to meet their own energy demands.

The project began as a notion hatched in the mind of New York restaurateur Jimmy Carbone. Imagining himself elected mayor of his hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts, he had a vision of the city's moribund shoe factories transformed into breweries. A co-creator of the "Good Beer Seal," which certifies bars that show a commitment to craft brewing and local stewardship, Carbone was aware of the need for resource-intensive breweries to focus on sustainability. Working together, Carbone realized, beer producers, developers, and community groups could churn out a heady brew of opportunity and sustainability. The event, on July 19, gives brewers a chance to come together with activists, architects, and designers to talk about the catalytic potential of craft brewing.

Ebay's scrappy startup days are years behind it, and like any other billion-dollar company it faces distinct challenges that stem from being ginormous: How can it launch new products that don't get nibbled into oblivion by bureaucracy? How can it make sure the best ideas emerge, when all its managers have slightly different visions? How can you do all that nimbly enough to stay ahead?

To solve such problems, eBay is leaning on design with Previz, a new internal consulting business staffed by its cracker-jack designers. In addition to lending their creative juices to whomever needs them, the hope is that they'll spread a process for innovation. "The real challenge is to get out from under the tactical, day-to-day stuff," says Dane Howard, who heads the Previz team. "So our designers had the idea of creating workshops to imagine the near term future."

The concept of the “accelerator” program for would-be technology entrepreneurs finds its most prestigious earthly form in the U.S.-based incubation laboratory Y Combinator.

Paul Graham’s brainchild has nurtured, work-shopped and, ultimately funded, over 300 start-ups with purposes, and names, as angular and 21st century as Airbnb, Posterous, Xobni and Dropbox.

Idealab, a Pasadena (Calif.)-based technology incubator, has formed 75 startups in the past 15 years, selling or taking public 30 of them. More than a dozen are currently in development or operating privately with advice—and in some cases, investment—from Idealab. From highs such as Overture.com to lows like EToys.com, the incubator’s founders have learned valuable lessons about what makes a startup succeed, says Douglas McPherson, vice-president of corporate development and general counsel at the company. McPherson and Andres Castañeda, Idealab’s director of recruiting, spoke about making better business decisions at an entrepreneur roundtable at Idealab’s offices in June.

Here are some of the "thinking traps" Idealab tries to avoid:

• Confirmation bias: Rather than being purely rational actors, research shows that individuals often unknowingly fall into gaps in their reasoning, McPherson says. One of the strongest is confirmation bias, the tendency to favor data that confirms our preconceptions or hypotheses. "In business, teams have to fight the temptation to take new information and see it as fitting into certain sets of facts," he says.

Fred Wilson wrote a post on Sunday with the following advice for entrepreneurs raising money:

raise 12-18 months of cash each time you raise money. Less than a year is too little. You’ll be raising money again before you know it. Longer than 18 months means you may well be sitting on cash that you raised when your company was worth a lot less.

My advice is usually a little more conservative than that.  For me the best way to figure out how much money to raise is to work back from your next funding round, with the objective of making sure there is a decent appreciation in value.  The first step in this approach is to estimate the time and money it will take to get to the next value appreciation milestone (and remember startup valuations move in step functions) and then add another 6-9 months burn on top of that.  That way you can begin the fundraising process with the good news in the bag and have six to nine months to raise the money.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or an angel investor, the topic of convertible note vs. equity impacts you. For the most part, startups favor convertible notes and angels prefer equity, but which one is the right choice for your startup?

Here, we review the benefits of each.

Convertible Debt

Convertible debt was most commonly used as a bridge loan between two rounds of financing. For example, if you raised $1,000,000 in series A funding and you were going to raise $5,000,000 in a series B round, you might use a bridge loan if you needed $250,000 until the funding was completed. However, convertible debt has recently become a popular seed round financing instrument.

For a lot of business owners, $1 million in annual revenue is a milestone objective. So today I’m going to tell you about a way of thinking and planning to get to that seven-figure target.

Use something researchers call “trade-off analysis” — a simple way of pitting one choice against another where the winning choice goes on to be tested against another option. Think of it like a tennis tournament in which the winner moves on and the loser goes home.

LinkedIn is the social media platform of choice for many entrepreneurs and business owners.

Too bad most of their LinkedIn profiles, and in particular their  ”summaries,” do little to create those business connections.

I definitely fall into that category.  I set up my profile long ago and haven’t touched it since.  That’s why I asked Matt Scherer of Sherer Communications for advice on creating a great LinkedIn summary.

Why focus on the summary instead of the full bio?  Think of LinkedIn summaries like bait; if you can’t attract and hook potential clients with your summary, you’ll never get them in the boat to check out your full profile.

Where the rest of us see subway walls, Tesco's South Korean supermarket chain Home Plus sees grocery shelves. In a trial run, Home Plus has plastered a subway station with facsimiles of groceries, labeled with a unique code for each product. As commuters pass by on their way to work, they can use a mobile-phone app to take pictures of the products they want, then check out. The groceries are automatically delivered to their doorstep by the end of the work day.

The virtual grocery store has been a hit among more 10,000 customers, with Home Plus reporting a 130 percent increase in online sales. The experiment is just one of the increasingly innovative ways mobile devices are being used in retail. Location-based smart-phone advertising is seen as a potentially valuable way to reach new customers. Some companies in the United States are also using indoor positioning technology as a way to guide shoppers to products and show them special offers. And software makers are exploring different ways of paying for products by smart phone.

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With all the press coverage devoted to new high tech company founders, you'd think that young entrepreneurs are the only successful entrepreneurs. But the latest research suggests otherwise.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, people over the age of 35 made up 80 percent of the total entrepreneurship activity in 2009. That same year, the Kauffman Foundation conducted a survey of 549 startups operating in "high-growth" industries -- including aerospace, defense, health care, and computer and electronics -- and found that people over 55 are nearly twice as likely to launch startups in these industries.

Like a mongoose stalking a cobra, the Obama administration and Congress sit transfixed by the debt ceiling debate.

In the meantime, we look away from the millions of jobless.

Our economic toolbox seems bereft — even Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has taken to shrugging his shoulders — and that’s disheartening.

Amid the heat of summer, economic headwinds fanned by uncertainty are only blowing harder. That uncertainty inhibits business investment and consumer demand.

In a conference room in downtown Baltimore, F. Blix Winston compared the Food and Drug Administration to a "slow-moving bulldog."

"You don't want to get bitten," Winston, an expert on the federal regulation of medical devices, told a crowd of about 50 entrepreneurs and academics recently.

"You don't want to tangle with the FDA," he warned. "The FDA has the power to come in and padlock a company's doors."

The article is based on the book Innovation & Gender, the result of a collaboration project between two countries, Norway and Sweden and three different public agencies, Innovation Norway, the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth and VINNOVA. Common to all these agencies is a mission to increase growth by innovation. As globalisation increases, an ability to attract investment and competence assumes more importance and our region faces fresh challenges. The Nordic region cannot compete with low wages, so to sustain economic development and growth, we must bring to bear all our competencies and be innovative.

The innovation performance and competitiveness of the Nordic region has been explained by such factors as the welfare model and high levels of trust, cooperation, education and R&D funding. Important parts of the welfare model are measures for increased gender equality and our countries are often regarded as two of the most gender-equal countries in the world. The majority of Nordic women and men are active in working life but we have a horizontally and vertically segregated labour market. One of our conclusions is that the most gender-segregated industries in Norway and Sweden face unprecedented challenges. We must be able to utilize all our capabilities so that companies, clusters and regions will be able to attract and keep a highly skilled workforce. Many young women and men today expect to be able to develop their full potential at work and achieve a work-life balance. The business sector must increase its capacity to connect innovation and gender in relation to the labour, product and financial markets.

Winning margins in the Tour de France can be tight – last year just 39 seconds separated the top two riders after more than 90 hours in the saddle. When every second counts, riders do everything possible to gain a competitive advantage – from using aerodynamic carbon fibre bikes to the very latest in sports nutrition.

Now there could be a new, completely legal and rather surprising weapon in the armoury for riders aiming to shave vital seconds off their time – beetroot juice.

Research by the University of Exeter, published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, has shown drinking the juice enables competitive-level cyclists to cut down the time it takes to ride a given distance. This is the first study which has shown that beetroot juice can be effective in a simulated competition environment.

For all entrepreneurs, starting a business is the route to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” no matter how risky. It’s the American dream that has been the goal of people in this country for over 230 years. If you are here in the U.S., I hope you are all able to take some time off this holiday weekend, to contemplate what you do, and why you do it.

According to an article and poll by Startups.co.uk, having the independence to make your own decisions is considered the key benefit of being an entrepreneur. Nearly 90% of respondents said decision-making independence was very important, closely followed by more flexibility for a better work/life balance. Job creation and innovation are the results, not the drivers.

The new common strategic framework for research, now dubbed 'Horizon 2020', will absorb existing research funding such as the European Institute of Technology (EIT) and the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).

The EIT is currently administered by the Commission's education department, whilst the CIPs are administered by DG Enterprise and DG Energy. Some or all of these departments' controls could disappear depending on how the funds are positioned within Horizon 2020, the full details of which will be revealed in October.

The draft MFF does not specify a separate line of funding for the programmes, leading to uncertainty over how much they will receive and how they will be administered internally within the Commission.

Ah, the joy of long holiday weekends. They re-energize, revitalize and send you back to work... feeling you like you've slept in late and got a term paper due at noon. The reasons for this are unclear--vacations are planned for, coworkers notified to pick up the slack, email generally avoided--but just one extra day off can throw your entire week out of sync.

There are ways to enjoy the long weekends without paying for it on the other end. Here are a few tips to help you avoid emergency maneuvers on your way back to the office.

Set Up a Calm, Clean Space for Your Landing

You'll have plenty of chances to freak out about returning to work--11 p.m. the night before is a generally accepted starting point. Returning to a messy desk, a computer desktop full of unsorted files, and a few coffee mugs with brews of unknown vintage will reinforce the feeling that everything's gone South while you were sleeping in. So put in some dedicated custodial time before you split, or early when you return.