Right now deficits are all the rage with voters and governments across the world concerned by their ballooning size.

The IMF has its Fiscal Monitor for November out and it points to particular countries at the center of global worries in regards to debt and largess.

In order to get their house in order by 2030, the IMF has made fiscal adjustment recommendations that each country need follow over the next decade.

David Robinson in this Sunday's Buffalo News business had an interesting article titled Think Small to Plant Seeds of Job Growth.

The point of Robinson's article is that the biggest source of job growth locally and statewide comes from businesses that are already here. Yet we spend significant time and resources trying to entice out of state companies to locate in Western New York.

I agree that we should focus more effort and attention on helping local companies grow. Research shows that companies go through several different stages of growth and certain stages produce more good paying jobs than others.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has unveiled how the government intends to create a high-tech hub in east London to rival SiliconValley. The planned new East London Tech City (known locally as Silicon Roundabout) will cover the Olympic village and the East End and has already attracted commitments from companies like Facebook, Google and Cisco.

The government also plans to provide £200 million ($325 million) in equity finance for businesses with high growth potential and £200 million for new technology and innovation centers. A new entrepreneur visa will round out the package.

In a speech to entrepreneurs and investors the prime minister said “We’re not just going to back the big businesses of today, we’re going to back the big businesses of tomorrow. We are firmly on the side of the high-growth, highly innovative companies of the future. Don’t doubt our ambition.”

In a sign of the times, US President Barack Obama faced tough questions last week from a TV comedy show host Jon Stewart, who asked why he ran his presidential campaign with audacity, but was timid about reforming healthcare in office.

It’s a mantra that was applied more broadly to the run-up to the mid-term elections this week, when politicians used the administration’s $814-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) economic stimulus as a lightning rod, with some singling out spending on science.

Under the obfuscation of finger pointing, vitriol, and a record-breaking $2-billion-plus in campaign spending, however, successes of the stimulus remained largely unspoken. White House senior adviser David Axelrod admitted the administration did not do enough to explain the Democrats’ accomplishments to the public over the past two years.

In view of the results of the election, I’ve written an open letter to the Republican House Leadership concerning the Chairmanship of the House Small Business Committee and published it as a column ( “Let’s End “Huggem-Muggem”!) on my blog, The SBIR Coach’s Playbook:  www.SBIRplaybook.com.  Copy attached for convenience, too.

If your District’s seat was won by a Republican, I encourage each of you to express your opinion on the importance of this Committee chairmanship to the SBIR reauthorization efforts to your District’s Representative, whether re- or newly-elected.  Remember, the more seniority they have, the more influential their voice. 

Even if your District seat is held by a Democrat, it’s important to touch base on this.  The Small Business Committee Ranking Member’s voice is important, and we need a friend in that role too.

It’s also important to begin the education process about SBIR’s value, especially to the House newcomers.  Newbies won’t have official addresses until January, but if you’re clever about it, you may be able to find a way to get the message to them.

Please pass this word on to your networks.  Thanks for your support.

Fred

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If you've left the corporate world to strike out on your own in your own home-based business, you'll be acutely aware that your financial success is up to you and you alone, perhaps for the first time in your life. For obvious reasons, therefore, your home-based business is probably run on a shoestring.

This means, of course, that you do everything. Although you are now CEO, you are also secretary, marketing director, receptionist and gopher. But hey, that's the way you like it, right? Just as well too since when you're just starting out you don't have much of a choice anyway.

But sooner or later, if you keep doing everything yourself you'll necessarily curtail the growth of your business. It will grow to a certain point but no further because you're only one person and there are, after all, only 24 hours in a day.

Oshawa, Ont. – Durham College announced today that it has been approved for up to $750,000 in funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) under the agency’s Applied Research and Commercialization Initiative (ARC). The funding will enable the college to pursue additional research partnerships and agreements with local small- and medium-sized businesses in the areas of media design and production, green and renewable energy and health sciences.

“On behalf of Durham College, I would like to thank the federal government and Minister Gary Goodyear for recognizing our growing research agenda with its approval of this funding,” said Don Lovisa, president, Durham College. “The government is providing the financial means necessary to ensure our applied research initiatives with local businesses are successful. Initiatives such as the recent agreement between our Office of Research Services and Innovation and A.B.D. Solar Power Pool Tools to develop a pool debris skimmer/extraction device prototype, a project that was successfully completed this past September.”

Donald Garner Jr. was at his auto-salvage lot shooting the breeze last year when a customer mentioned that her nine-year-old twin sons had just gotten back from computer camp. Great skill to have, said Mr. Garner, who went on to complain about how much he was going to have to pay a pro to build a decent Web site. Why not ask her boys to do it?  the customer asked. He could pay them whatever he thought the results were worth. He thought about it. Why not? he replied.

Mr. Garner had to suppress a laugh when the boys showed up the next day with clipboards and serious looks. But he dutifully gave them a rough idea of what he had in mind, and then waved goodbye without particularly high expectations. A month later, he was stunned and delighted when they delivered exactly the sort of site he had had in mind. He dashed off a check for $2,000, but the boys would accept only $700. “They did a beautiful job — just superb,” Mr. Garner said. (Take a look.)

In another effort to boost quality, Starbucks (SBUX) confirmed earlier this month that its baristas would soon be preparing fewer drinks simultaneously. The news sent shock and fear throughout white-collar culture—longer lines are coming to a world in which queuing up at Starbucks is already a daily ritual.

Waiting for coffee isn't merely a hassle: It's a revealing pastime. "When we go in a Starbucks, we're in charge," says Patti Wood, author of Success Signals: A Guide to Reading Body Language. "Our $5.50 makes us kings and queens of our destiny." As a result, Starbucks lines often showcase postures of excitement, Wood says. A coffee break is also a "transition from one focal point of professionalism to another," says Tonya Reiman, author of The Power of Body Language.

Due diligence should always be a two-way street. A while back, I published an article on “Understanding the Dreaded Investor Due Diligence,” describing what investors do to validate your startup before they invest. Here is the inverse, sometimes called reverse due diligence, describing what you should do to validate your investor before signing up for an equity partnership.

I’ve had startup founders tell me that it’s only about the color of the money, but I disagree. Particularly if you are desperate, keep in mind the person who finds a good-looking partner to take home from the bar at closing time, but then wakes up in the morning wondering “What did I just do?” Taking on an investor is like getting married – the relationship has to work at all levels.

There is a transition in every company from a “seat of the pants” kind of entrepreneurial company to a “process driven” mechanized one. Many people who are successful in the former fare less well in the latter.

Frankly, I’m much more of the former kind of guy and I tire of the routine process & politics required to succeed in a big company.   The reality is that you need to standardize many things in a company if you’re to scale quickly, which is why many founders depart at the time of the transition.

Others resist and continue to run companies that need to scale the same way they ran the company when it was smaller.  This seldom works.  Rarer still is the startup CEO who can make the transition effectively on their own.  The path I went down after a few years was to hire more process driven people and devolved more daily operational ownership to people running individual functions such as product management, sales management, finance, etc.

More than 30 million people in the United States travel to resource-limited areas of the world each year. This global mobility may contribute to the spread of infectious diseases — such as influenza, measles, and meningitis — and may also put individual travelers at risk for malaria, typhoid, dengue fever and hepatitis. Despite these potential risks, a recent study conducted by the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and published in the Journal of Travel Medicine found that 46 percent of travelers to resource-limited countries did not seek health advice or vaccinations prior to departure.

The researchers surveyed more than 1,200 international travelers departing the United States at Boston Logan International Airport. The study was the result of a broad-based collaboration between MGH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Boston Public Health Commission, and officials from the Massachusetts Port Authority, which owns and operates Logan International Airport. Based on the results from this work, the CDC, travel medicine experts and Logan Airport officials hope to develop better tools to educate people about the public health risks associated with global travel.

On Monday there was an article on Techcrunch about a startup called Inkling that has developed an innovative digital textbook platform for the iPad (picture above).  Their technology adds collaboration, multimedia, 3D, quizzes and social interaction to the basic reading experience and they have just released their first book/app – an iPad version of Lights, Camera, Capture: Creative Lighting Techniques for Digital Photographers.  It is priced at $9.99.

The app contains the full text of the original, over 100 videos, and interactive photography simulators which allow you to change one parameter and see how it affects an image.

This is a huge step forward from reading a paper book and will make learning easier and more fun.

Google wants to make the Web faster. As well as optimizing its own sites and services to run at blazing speed, the company has been helping to streamline the rest of the Web, too. Now Google has released free software that could make many sites load twice as fast.

The software, called mod_pagespeed, can be installed and configured on Apache Web servers, the most commonly used software for running websites. Once installed, mod_pagespeed determines ways to optimize a site's performance on the fly. For example, it will compress images more efficiently and change settings so that more of the pages are stored in a user's browser cache, so that the same data doesn't have to be loaded repeatedly. The software will be automatically updated, notes Richard Rabbat, product manager for the new project. He says that this means that as Google and others make improvements, people who install it will benefit without having to make any changes.

The biotech industry is getting a major boost in revenue as the National Institutes of Health awarded $1 billion in grants and tax credits to biotechnology companies with innovative ideas for therapeutic treatment.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner joined NIH Director Francis Collins in announcing the awards during a teleconference Wednesday. Almost 3,000 companies in 47 states and the District received awards of almost a quarter-million dollars, with some companies receiving two or more grants.

"The United States has the most innovative companies, the most ambitious entrepreneurs and the most productive workers in the world," Geithner said. "These grants will help make sure our companies, entrepreneurs, and workers can continue to invest and innovate, which will strengthen our economy now and far into the future."