A part of an online presence for any business is maintaining awareness of your own popularity. Are you influencing the people who follow you or does your business need a new look?

Business Standard recently reported about a system that a search engine marketing firm has created to help determine Internet influence.

Wondering just how influential you are in the online world? Log on to sites like PeerIndex and Klout to find out.

These sites use algorithms to measure overall online influence, using data from popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Ignite100 has launched a £1m startup accelerator programme that will invest up to £100k for each of ten teams in the North East of England.

Building upon the success of its predecessor, The Difference Engine, ignite100 will deliver a 13-week acceleration programme alongside £100k of investment capital.

Funding has been provided by the Finance for Business North East Technology Fund managed by IP Group plc, Finance for Business North East Proof of Concept fund managed by Northstar Ventures, and angel investors including Hotspur Capital Partners and Green Lane Capital.

It’s not quite the $150,000 offered to Y Combinator companies, but DreamIt Ventures is dangling some cash of its own to its startups in an attempt to keep them nearby and ensure the accelerator program stays competitive.

The Philadelphia-based organization, which recently launched a New York class, said it is teaming with venture fund Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania to launch DreamIt Plus, a program for graduating startups that allows them to potentially receive up to about $60,000 in total funding. The money, along with additional support from Ben Franklin, is designed to help startups that are still looking to lock up their Series A round of funding.

GREENVILLE, SC – June 30, 2010 – SCRA’s Knowledge Economy development program SC Launch has now supported over 188 companies that have secured more than $130 million in follow-on funding. The recent announcement by SC Launch Company Proterra, Inc. of an additional $30 million investment helped the program to reach new heights.

Since its inception by SCRA in 2006, and with initial funding of $12 million in SCRA earnings, SC Launch has supported and funded 188 start-ups in SC, helped draw 11 business relocation landing parties to the state, provided business services to 230 early stage technology companies in SC through a powerful Resource Network and helped position emerging South Carolina Knowledge Economy companies to secure more than $130 million in follow-on funding from angel, venture and other private capital sources. SC Launch has been recognized regionally, nationally and internationally for leadership in entrepreneurial support and technology-based economic development.

The Iowa Legislature beat a midnight deadline with hours to spare on Thursday, finishing work on a $5.99 billion state budget and resolving a dispute over taxpayer money that could be used to pay for some Medicaid abortions.

But the 2011 session adjourned without an agreement on property tax reform, considered by Gov. Terry Branstad and lawmakers from both parties as a priority. That sparked immediate speculation the issue could be revived in a special session or be considered again next year.

Legislators agreed to continue paying some for universal preschool, but refused to increase basic state aid to kindergarten through 12th-grade programs for the coming school year. They did approve a 2 percent increase in school aid for the following year, however.

Would-be entrepreneurs need cash to launch new businesses, but countries are far from equal when it comes to funding young, innovative and growth-oriented companies, according to a new OECD report.

Venture capitalists in Israel allocate more financing to young companies than any other country in the OECD, with the equivalent of 0.18% of GDP dedicated to seed, start-up and early development capital. The United States, Sweden and Finland are among the other leading providers of venture capital, and are not surprisingly also among the most entrepreneurial nations.

These are among the insights in the inaugural edition of Entrepreneurship at a Glance 2011, which gives an overview of enterpreneurship in OECD countries. Using indicators developed  with the European Union’s statistical arm Eurostat, as well as those from national statistics offices, the report shows how access to finance, market conditions, regulatory frameworks and cultural perceptions can boost or harm entrepreneurial activity.New data on enterprise creations and bankruptcies shows the major impact that the economic and financial crisis has had on entrepreneurial activity. After a significant decrease in the second half of 2008, the number of new enterprises started to recover around the first half of 2009 in most countries. However, by the second quarter of 2010, the number of newly created enterprises was still below its pre-crisis level in most countries.

In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes), growing by a factor of 9 in just five years, according to the fifth annual IDC Digital Universe study released Tuesday.

By 2020 the world will generate 50 times the amount of information and 75 times the number of “information containers” while IT staff to manage it will grow less than 1.5 times.

In the next five years, these files will grow by a factor of 8, while the pool of IT staff available to manage them will grow only slightly.

Word leaked out Wednesday that LivingSocial is preparing for a $1 billion dollar IPO. (LivingSocial co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy is the son-in-law of Washington Post Co. chairman Donald Graham.) The Washington Post also has a marketing partnership with the firm. LivingSocial follows on the heels of its competitor Groupon, and other hot tech companies, namely LinkedIn and Pandora. That the door has finally opened to IPOs for tech companies should be a cause for celebration. This will provide these companies with growth capital, and give venture capitalists the exits they need so that they can start investing in the next generation.

But I am worried — really worried.

The valuations are inflated beyond reason, and there are clear signs of another technology bubble—just like the dot-com bubble, which, when it burst, caused an ice age in the technology sector. Venture capital firms lost significant amounts of money during that time, so they slowed down their investments. Technology companies were starved for financing, so they didn’t have the funding to bring their innovations to the markets. It took a decad

Bankrupt telecom company Nortel Networks announced on Friday that it had sold its juggernaut patent portfolio to a consortium made up of the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and RIM for a hefty sum of $4.5 billion cash.

“The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world,” said George Riedel, Chief Strategy Officer and President of Business Units at Nortel, in a statement.

The consortium—which also includes Sony, Ericsson, and EMC—will now have access to more than 6,000 patents that relate to all manner of technologies, including 4G LTE wireless capabilities, Wi-Fi, semiconductors, and social networking. The six companies beat out Google and Intel, which were both also bidding.

For a while now I’ve been predicting that we will see a wave of consumer oriented health startups at some point over the next five years.  At this stage it is difficult to say how big, but I think it will be pretty big as the drivers are powerful.  On the one hand you have increasing demand from an ageing, increasingly affluent and increasingly health aware society and on the other hand you have new technologies and falling costs making novel services possible and affordable for the first time.  Smartphones, ubiquitous networks, cheap sensors and social are the most important technologies.

Rock Health is a new startup accelerator designed to kick start/take advantage of this trend and their inaugural programme launches today.  Eight of their eleven startups are profiled on Techcrunch (strangely not the Rock Health site) and a look at what they do and how they group gives an indication of the sorts of companies that will be at the forefront of this wave.

The days of viewing everything in the cloud through an application lens is nearing its end. Now, we are evolving into a world where quantity, processing speeds and distribution of data will make us see the world through a data lens, according to Gavin Michael, global managing director for R&D and alliances at Accenture, during GigaOm’s Structure on Thursday.

“We see data taking its rightful place as another platform inside enterprise,” Michael said.

Michael was on hand to present the Accenture Technology Vision 2011, a cross-industry research project that takes stock of the evolving trends in IT and how they will impact business and society as a whole. The research team looked into 400 hypotheses based on input from scientists, architects and engineers.

President Barack Obama visited an energy plant in Durham this week to tout the job-creating potential of a green economy. However, he didn't talk about just how much each of these jobs would cost taxpayers. A generous estimate by the Council of Economic Advisers suggests 225,000 clean energy jobs were created or preserved through the third quarter of 2010 at a cost of $80 billion from the economic stimulus package. That amounts to over $355,000 per job. Those are some awfully expensive green jobs.

With unemployment at 9.1 percent, Americans can't afford to pay for expensive government subsidies. According to a recent Congressional Research Service study, renewable subsidies were 49 times greater than fossil fuel subsidies. Renewables received a 77 percent share of federal energy incentives in 2009, while fossil fuels received a 13 percent share but produced more than seven times the energy.

In 1980, immigrant entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa came to the United States and stayed, starting two companies that created more than a thousand American jobs. Now an academic, Wadhwa sees first hand that today's immigrants are not following his lead. Every year he asks foreign students in his classes at Duke University how many intend to stay permanently in the United States. "It used to be that everyone raised their hand," Wadhwa says. "Now they look at you funny. They say, 'What does that mean?'"

For a majority of highly skilled immigrants who want to start companies, the promised land is no longer the United States, writes Wadhwa and four co-authors in a recent report from the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo.-based non-profit that supports research on entrepreneurship. In "The Grass Is Indeed Greener in India and China for Returnee Entrepreneurs," the researchers surveyed 153 professionals who returned from the U.S. to India or China to start a business. They found that 72% of Indians and 81% of Chinese said the opportunities to start a company in their home countries "were better or much better" than in the United States.

Across the nation, biotech companies are faced with many challenges, most significantly the continuing arduous economic climate and increasing difficulty accessing capital. While companies in New Jersey are not immune to these factors, the state's companies, supporting organizations, and government entities are finding some success in addressing these issues by developing creative strategies to support continued innovation and growth in what Ernst & Young has termed the "new normal" in its 2010 analysis of the industry.

Collaboration and partnerships within the biotech community and between biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies are, and will continue to be, a critical component of the evolving biotech landscape. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that state, regional and national lines are no longer relevant.

A few companies in existence offer a unique water bottle with a filtration system included in the bottle, but what if you want to use a variety of different bottles? There is now botlfilter.

Created by Canadian entrepreneur, Emily Wilkinson, all you have to do is put the filter back inside the botlfilter case and drop it into the water within any water bottle. A few good shakes help speed up the filtration process, and your water is ready to drink, reports The Toronto Observer.

Yesterday I wrote Part 1 of the series on the changes to the software industry over the past decade that has led to changes in the venture capital industry itself.

If you don’t want to read that post, the summary is:

• Open source computing drove computing costs down 90%, which spurred innovation in technology
• Open cloud led by Amazon with their AWS services drove total operating costs down by 90%. This led to an explosion in startups.
• Amazon in turn led to the formation of an earlier stage of venture capital now led by what I call “micro VCs” who typically invest $250-500k in companies rather than the $5-7 million that VCs used to invest.

The European Commission is proposing a big rise in research and innovation funding, to €80.2 billion for the 2014-2020 financial period, in an effort to harness innovation to produce more jobs and growth.

The research proposal is part of a broader EU budget plan agreed by the Commission – but is likely to be a contentious issue. It falls short of the nearly €100 billion sought by some research advocates in the European Parliament. But it comes at a time of unprecedented austerity in most EU member-states. The final size of the budget will be debated among the Commission, Parliament and member-states over the next year.

A while back I talked about how and where to find a co-founder in “Ten Steps in Choosing the Right Startup Partner”. The feedback was good, but some readers asked me to be a bit more specific on attributes that might indicate an ideal startup partner. Even if you are looking in all the right places, it helps to know what you are looking for.

In this context, I’m broadening the definition of partner from co-founder to “business partner.” The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO.

In all cases, the challenge is the same, of finding people that you can work with and enjoy in the business relationship. The relationship has to have trust, communication, and respect in order to work. Otherwise, like a marriage, it will be doomed to constant conflict, second guessing, and unhappiness.

The fourth annual global ranking of innovation - taking into account such criteria as technological readiness, GDP, public policy and access to capital - shows European countries dominate the top 10, while Asia and the Middle East are making strong gains. The survey is prepared by INSEAD, the leading international business school, with Knowledge Partners Booz & Company, Alcatel-Lucent, Confederation of Indian Industry, and World Intellectual Property Organization.

Wharton Business School's West Coast campus is moving to a beautiful new site, to the historic Hills Plaza building on the San Francisco waterfront.

MBA students will be attending the new campus by early 2012.

The school needed more space for its San Francisco MBA students, since there has been such a surge in demand from Silicon Valley and West coast executives.

The new site has sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. Amazing.