Thanks to the most devastating recession in decades and dramatic shifts in the venture industry, finding investors to write those first checks is a frustrating, time-sucking process for entrepreneurs – but that doesn’t mean they can’t be particular.

If you’re startup owner, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to take money from just any VC.

Venture capital, at its core, is the business world’s equivalent of a long-term, nearly inseparable, relationship.  You are marrying your investor.

Like any good relationship, it’s best if the two parties have a lot in common. They should have experience in the same areas. They should be good communicators. There should also have good give-and-take skills, as well as mutual tolerance, because periodic disagreements are inevitable. What counts when that happens is whether those disagreements can be resolved amicably and successfully. If these situations aren’t met, the venture capital you attract is just fool’s gold.

States throughout American history have done everything they can to cultivate, attract, retain, and grow the businesses that comprise the most fundamental building blocks of their economy. Even in today’s volatile global economy states with severe unemployment and budget woes can point to policies, programs, and investments that foster new economic opportunities and create jobs.

Read the full report.

Wikipedia is easily one of the most visited sites in the world, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. This morning, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a number of changes it has made to make the experience for visitors and contributors better.

Most apparent is the new look and feel, which includes a refreshed puzzle globe logo, which was originally created in 2003. The Foundation goes into more detail about the logo update in a separate post, if you’re interested in its history and all that.

Here’s what else has changed:

Navigation

Improved for reading and editing pages. The tabs at the top of each page now more clearly define whether you are viewing the page or discussion page, and whether you are reading or editing a page.

Although being overwhelmed by email is a fairly common complaint, entrepreneurs would be wise to take note when two renowned VCs - recipients perhaps, of your email pitches - speak out about their struggles with overflowing email inboxes. On Monday, Fred Wilson declared email bankruptcy. And Mark Suster followed suit a few hours later.

Wilson's blog post describes how three hours of his Sunday evening were spent wading through 400 or so non-spam emails - only a third of his 1200 or so unread messages. After that, Wilson checked to see if he had any pending messages from those with whom he communicates most regularly and who are his most important email relationships. For the rest, "I select all and hit archive. It is a tremendously satisfying feeling."

Wilson contends it's not simply a matter of efficiency or time management - "the more efficient I get with email, the more of it that comes in." And Suster's blog post expands on this, explaining why the norms of email itself make it unsustainable.

How the Nordic countries have become a green tech powerhouse

Approximately 80% of all U.S. firms with employees have less than $1 million in sales, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.  It’s a goal that most entrepreneurs would love to achieve, and one that frequently remains as elusive as it is attractive.  But it’s a brass ring well worth reaching for. “If they can get to $1 million, they reach a level of sustainability and have a much higher chance of survival,” says Sramana Mitra, consultant and author of the Entrepreneur Journeys series of books. We recently spoke about the three biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make when they’re starting and growing companies:

Failure to validate an idea. “They will spend a month in the lab or the garage and try to build a product in isolation without validating the idea with the customer,” says Mitra. Instead, she says, you need to develop your products along with the customer, know what the pain points are and what problem you’re solving. “Cold call as many customers as possible before developing anything so that you get a visceral feel for what your customers are looking for.” What happens if, in that process, you inadvertently tip you hand to the competition?  “If your idea is that easy to copy, then don’t bother,” advises Mitra. “If you’re not in a position to share ideas with potential customers, you really have a problem.”

Second only to tightrope walkers, social innovators are people who often have to block out the world around them in order to get from point A to point B. The process of creating a successful social enterprise requires nothing less than total concentration, often at the expense of getting to know one's peers and following their progress. This blog post is an effort to reverse the trend by crowd-sourcing a directory of individuals and organizations who make up Canada's social innovation sector.

Please use the comments section below to highlight three or more people on this (very informal) Who's Who of Social Innovation in Canada. Add their names, organizational affiliation, and where they can be found online. If you feel inclined, contact the people you highlight and ask them to add additional names. I encourage you to select people whose work you are aware of but not intimately familiar with. The process of adding them to this page will serve as a reminder that we can all find a few minutes each day to step away from our respective tightropes in order to familiarize ourselves with the work of our peers.

I [Terry Young] recently found a webs te launched in the Fall 2009 that is truly amazing in its potential impact upon entrepreneurship and subsequent national economic development. ImagineNations Network is a social networking platform for young entrepreneurs to connect to their peers, suppo ters, NGOs, financing sources, and others committed to helping young people build businesses and livelihoods around the world. ImagineNations Network helps educate, mentor and empower young entrepreneurs within the age limits of 15-29.

A young person registering as an "Entrepreneur" builds a profile describing the current idea or project and all background and contact information.  The advantages for a young entrepreneur to join are to (i) find individuals or groups with sim lar interests, (ii) find mentors to help them launch their project or to grow the new start-up business, and (iii) obtain answers to crucial business questions.

With Hewlett-Packard’s recent acquisition of Palm, the lines are now been being drawn for an innovation war of epic proportions. While today, the situation may appear as merely a battle over competing smartphone paradigms, it will inevitably escalate into a full-out war in the tablet space and other future domains.

Each brand boasts its own benefits. Palm’s WebOS carries obvious advantages in terms of multitasking and data integration. Apple leads with the extraordinary success of the App Store and its understanding of how power users want to move from screen to screen; iPhone to iPad to PowerBook. The tech giant also offers the mixed blessing of a closed universe of Apple stylishness, while Android—a Google acquisition, interestingly enough—works the other side of the street with a platform strategy designed to bring the smartphone experience to a variety of handset manufacturers. Research in Motion (or RIM), meanwhile, is striving to maintain its leading and increasingly vulnerable franchise, while others look to re-hone the value proposition of their technology. (Microsoft, anyone?)

Frederick Hess talks with Education Next about the best and worst ways to fund innovation.

For more on this topic by Frederick Hess, see “Fueling the Engine: Smarter, better ways to fund education innovators,” which appears in the Summer 2010 issue of Education Next.

“Fueling the Engine” is an excerpt from Frederick Hess’s new book, Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling (pp. 114–125), published by ASCD.

Being in business is hard work, from the IT to staffing, financing, sales, distribution, marketing and everything in between -- but you don't have to do it alone.

All over the country, there is expert help to be found to improve your business, from IT to processes to production and more, through a vast network of technology and business incubators that have been created to help businesses thrive and grow and learn how to do things better.

And now is a great time to take advantage of this as the nation continues to battle out of the Great Recession.

How can tech incubators help you?

WITH the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf, talk has once again turned to clean energy. What few people appreciate is that the demand for everything from solar panels to energy-efficient light bulbs is already booming. Worldwide, $162 billion was spent in new clean-tech investments in 2009 alone.

The United States, with its expertise, capital and entrepreneurial spirit, is well positioned to dominate what could easily be the biggest market of the 21st century. But as the most recent delay over the Senate energy bill shows, the country is missing a key ingredient in shaping an effective clean-tech policy: the political will to encourage the innovation, manufacturing and investment necessary to bring these new technologies to market. And the longer America drags its feet, the more it cedes this enormous potential source of national wealth to the only other country able to capture it — China.

True, China has a long way to go before it can claim the mantle of global market leadership in clean technology. Unlike the United States, however, it has spent the last few years shaping its industrial policy to achieve precisely that goal.

On the heels of announcing the graduation of 25 companies from Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute East Coast outposts, the startup incubator is launching in another East Coast hub: Boston. Announced in March 2009, the Founder Institute offers entrepreneurs and very early stage startups an environment designed to help foster their growth and education. The program, which is now active in ten cities worldwide, holds two four-month long sessions annually in each location, which include mentorship sessions from experienced tech entrepreneurs. The program also has a unique structure that allocates some equity to each of the founders involved, so that they have an incentive to work together.

Many research groups are trying to develop materials with similar properties to muscles. One of the big difficulties is creating anything with just the right muscle-like elasticity--its ability to change shape while withstanding a large strain. Now researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, have synthesized a protein-based material that stretches exactly like the real thing.

The new material achieves the elasticity of muscle by mimicking the microscopic structure of a giant muscle protein called titin. The structure of titin resembles a string with beads--globules of folded protein sequences are connected by floppy, unstructured sequences. Hongbin Li, a chemist at the UBC, and his colleagues constructed the new material that imitates this structure. They chose a mechanically stable protein sequence that folds in on itself to form globules, and another protein called resilin to serve as the floppy connectors.

Europe's new Research and Innovation Strategy will be "fundamentally different to what we've done before," EU Innovation Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn told EurActiv in an exclusive interview.

The plan, due to be published in the autumn, will have a holistic definition at its core, according to the Commissioner, who says social innovation, industrial policy, design, and a new method for measuring the impact of R&D spending will be part of the strategy.

Work on earlier drafts of the document began in 2009 at the EU executive's enterprise wing but this has been broadened considerably thanks to input from commissioners responsible for education, regional policy, internal market and others.

When you're on your deathbed, you're never going to say you wish you'd attended more meetings. But at work, meetings are a necessary evil. Sometimes the only way to make a decision or convey information is to get people together to talk. But too many organizations suffer from meeting-itis: poorly-run and inefficient meetings that go on too long, happen too often and include more attendees than need to be there. When you calculate the true cost in person hours, you quickly see how meetings waste more time than they save. An hour-long meeting with 10 attendees actually costs an organization 10 person hours, an entire workday worth of productivity.

Keeping meetings brief, small, and productive isn't easy. But a few companies use unconventional techniques to make it work.

Offering incentives, goals, and prizes to users through game mechanics is hardly new. Most of us have long been accumulating points towards rewards with various frequent flyer plans, for example.

But perhaps due to the success of companies like Foursquare and Gowalla, it certainly does seem as though every new site, service, and application now includes some sort of game feature in order to encourage adoption and use. In a recent blog post, Mojopages CEO Jon Carder calls game mechanics "the new black" and argues that game mechanics will become more and more ubiquitous as companies realize that customers are drawn to sites that make interaction "fun, rewarding, and even addictive."

So, will incorporating game mechanics into the design of a new product, service, or application become a requirement for startups?

When I talk to angel investors, the most common complaint I hear is that the CEO’s of the companies they invest in do not provide regular status reports. And most provide no formal reports at all, even though they have a moral, legal, and fiduciary responsibility to do so.CEO not reporting to investors?

The question is, why? Is it their intent to mislead? Are they lazy? Are they hiding something?

I don’t think it is any of those things. Having had the opportunity to sit on both sides of the table, as a CEO of a privately funded company and later, as an angel investor, I would boil it down to four main issues:

1. Waiting for good news. For most companies, the good news is just another day or another week away. And even when some good news finally arrives, there is some even better news another day or another week away. So (thinks the CEO) why not wait and send the report when you can announce the new customer, the product release, and the astounding financial performance all at once? The problem is, the stars usually do not align that way and that perfect reporting moment never seems to arrive.

This is the ideal forum for any entrepreneur seeking information, help, ideas or feedback. Being an active member of the forum, I know first hand that they have one of the most helpful communities out there.

Is there an entrepreneur inside of you waiting to escape? Have you been laid off and are thinking about starting your own business? Are you ready to make your first million? Do you know that you can build a better mousetrap? Do you want to work at home, be your own boss? There are countless reasons why people want to start a business. Some people who want to start their own business jump right in. They are risk takers. Others are more thoughtful planners who analyze the market and develop a comprehensive business plan. And still others have the dream but never take the plunge. How do you know if starting your own business is right for you; if it is what business and where do your begin?

The Right Stuff:

Do you have the “right stuff” to be an entrepreneur? Google “am I an entrepreneur” and countless tests and quizzes and assessments pop up that intend on answering that question for you. The assessments will have you check answers to questions that ask you if you are: Extrovert or introvert? Social butterfly or Loner? Risk taker or Low risk profile? Goes by the book or writes my own book? Self-starter or likes direction? and so on.