For people who spend most of their days within a few blocks of tech start-up epicenters such as South Park in San Francisco, University Avenue in Palo Alto or the Flatiron district in New York, last week’s jobs report must have created some cognitive dissonance. After all, we’re in a boom/bubble right? It’s really hard to hire good people isn’t it? But take a moment to step outside the world of high technology and a dramatically different picture emerges of what’s going on in America.

The number of unemployed now eclipses 14 million nationwide. Underemployment is scary too with U-6, the government’s official measure of under-utilization,rising to 16.2% in June from 15.8% in May. But the worst number of them all might be mean duration of employment (the length of time that the average unemployed person has been out of work) which has spiked to 40 weeks. As a Wall Street Journal article this week pointed out, if you factored in those who’ve dropped out of the labor market (and therefore aren’t counted in unemployment numbers), the situation would appear even worse.

It can be tough to get a social enterprise off the ground. Green business owners may find it tough to qualify for traditional loans (not to mention the paperwork), and borrowing money from friends and family has its own set of problems. An intriguing option for social entrepreneurs is crowdfunding: leveraging the power of the Internet and social networks to raise funds.

Crowdfunding can work with all types of businesses (as well as projects, art, expeditions, etc.) It’s important to have a good story, a polished idea, and lots of marketing savvy to get a project funded. Here are a few tips we’ve developed after scouring the Internet for success stories.

In 2008, the number of devices that connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people. That number continues to rise, thanks to a growing number of connected devices and gizmos, ranging from televisions to soda machines. Folks at Cisco have put together this infographic to showcase the growth of the Internet of thing

By many accounts, Rochester is on the cusp of rebranding itself. Rich in talent and innovative research, the region could join the ranks of Boulder, Colo., and Austin, Texas, flourishing hubs with technology identities.

But some entrepreneurs and local tech industry officials say something is missing, perhaps a maestro, someone who can get all the disparate elements to play together.

For many students and young professionals in particular, starting a company is the easy part. Web-based startups require little seed capital since things like office space and several employees aren't always needed.

Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson have written a book with this title. It is now available on Amazon.

I got a preview copy and gave it a read. It's a textbook on venture capital deals. If you plan to do one of them, as an investor, advisor, or most importantly, as an entrepreneur, you should get this book and read it.

In honor of Twitter’s fifth anniversary the folks at Visually have made the following graphic plotting out key milestones on it’s path to 200 million tweets a day. Following Twitter, get it?

People love their cars. They're willing to maintain a car even when it's expensive and difficult. In the Spanish city of Murcia, which had become crowded with vehicles, the government decided to try to pry people's hands off the wheels by offering a little economic incentive. Not only would you not have the inconvenience of trying to park, you could ride the city's public transit for free for the rest of your life.

To promote the campaign, the city made a series of adorable advertisements showing how unpleasant it is to be stuck in traffic and looking for parking all the time.

The “green” or “clean” or low-carbon economy—defined as the sector of the economy that produces goods and services with an environmental benefit—remains at once a compelling aspiration and an enigma.

As a matter of aspiration, no swath of the economy has been more widely celebrated as a source of economic renewal and potential job creation. Yet, the clean economy remains an enigma: hard to assess. Not only do “green” or “clean” activities and jobs related to environmental aims pervade all sectors of the U.S. economy; they also remain tricky to define and isolate—and count.

Serial entrepreneurs are the stuff of legend in the entrepreneurial world. Whereas launching a single startup drains most people, serial entrepreneurs thrive on the chaos. Wences Casares and Meyer Malka, serial entrepreneurs themselves, discuss what it is that has kept them going through the years in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture given at Stanford University.

“I think to figure out the answer to that, I should go to a shrink and I’m afraid they’ll fix me,” says Casares.

When it comes to customer service, some things are better handled by phone. You’d expect a headset manufacturer like Plantronics to understand that.

Apparently not.

I refer to the recent exchange between the company and author Sharon Drew Morgen. She’d ordered several headsets from Plantronics that didn’t work, and the company tried to replace them with a refurbished model.

That provoked the following rant on her blog:

Why would a vendor have me pay for a faulty phone, send me a refurbished phone to replace the new one, and then want me to pack everything up for them and get it all back to them? Not to mention that this has all taken three weeks, and I need my damn phone! Asking a bit much from a customer, no? What am I missing here?

Are you an entrepreneur? If you’re reading this post or found it in a Google search, perhaps the answer should be obvious. Whether the business you plan to start or get into is large, small, or somewhere in between, the skills you will use to evaluate the market, competition and risks of the venture are, in part, skills belonging to an entrepreneur. If you fit into this category, you’ve come to the right place. So sit back and enjoy the links below.

Entrepreneurship Basics

Differences between big and small business? Is there a real difference between building a big versus small business? Maybe not, according to Liz Strauss who had the opportunity to visit with billionaire Clay Mathile and hear the story of his life as an entrepreneur. Check out some of Liz’s takeaways and ask yourself, is this any different than the way you would build your business? Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

The Skydeck Innovation Center, planned for the top floor of the tallest building in Berkeley, received a $50,000 grant from the Chancellor’s Community Partnership Fund this week. The Skydeck, a project of the Berkeley Startup Cluster (BSC), will be a 10,000 sq. ft. incubator for fledgling technology companies. The grant was the largest award in the $260,000 distributed by the university fund for the 2011-12 fiscal year.

“The grant will enable us to operationalize the innovation center,” said Michael Cohen, director of the university’s Innovation Ecosystem Development and chairperson of BSC. Cohen said the Skydeck should be open for startups by the end of September.

There is simply no exaggerating the importance of the oceans to earth’s overall ecological balance. Their health affects the health of all terrestrial life. A new report by an international coalition of marine scientists makes for grim reading. It concludes that the oceans are approaching irreversible, potentially catastrophic change.

The experts, convened by the International Program on the State of the Ocean and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, found that marine “degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted.” The oceans have warmed and become more acidic as they absorbed human-generated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are also more oxygen-deprived, because of agricultural runoff and other anthropogenic causes. This deadly trio of conditions was present in previous mass extinctions, according to the report.

In his recent Washington Post article “Innovation’s golden opportunity” Vivek Wadhwa opines that the translation of university research into useful products benefitting the taxpaying American public has largely failed.  I respectfully disagree.

Mr. Wadha writes that if universities were a business, they would be bankrupt based on the return on investment represented by income from patent licensing.  He speculates that results would be much greater if university technology transfer offices were abandoned with each campus researcher turned loose to fend for themselves in the marketplace. The first observation misses the point.  The second wrecks a proven system that is a model for the world in favor of a dubious theory.

DURHAM -- LaunchBox Digital has suspended its Durham-based accelerator program for technology start-up businesses and is shifting focus to provide investments to companies that are in a more mature stage.

The program's former executive director, Chris Heivly, said he resigned from that post in the spring. A team of five partners will continue to direct the LaunchBox Digital investment decisions and activities, said Matthew Jacobson, a LaunchBox partner.

Jacobson said in an e-mail that it's "to be determined" whether LaunchBox will keep its office space in the American Underground, the hub for entrepreneurs at the American Tobacco campus downtown.

I think about competition all the time. Every company we invest in aspires to lead whatever market segment it is in. In many cases, they want to create entirely new markets. Regardless, they always have competition, whether from other startups, existing companies, large incumbents, or companies they don’t even know about yet.

Whenever the startup world heats up, there are many more new entrants. We’re once again in the part of the cycle where there are an abundance of new companies being started. While there are plenty of unique ones, there are a much larger number of “me toos” and “fast followers”. While VCs love to put this on entrepreneurs (for not being innovative / creative enough) and entrepreneurs love to put this on VCs (for just funding me too like things), this isn’t really anyone’s fault as it’s the natural cycle of things and has been going on forever (see Clay Christensen’s excellent “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” for the classic examples of this.)

If you have had some success in a business, I’m sure you bristle just like I do when someone says “You were just lucky…” I’m a strong believer that we all make our own luck, which means that the harder we work, the luckier we get. In reality, “hard work” is just a catch-all term for a list of principles that good entrepreneurs follow, allowing them to work smarter and improve their odds of success.

A short list of these “hard work” principles, published recently by Anthony Tjan in the Harvard Business Review summarizes them as heart, smarts, and guts. I agree with these, and most people recognize them when they see them in others, but the terms are still a bit abstract for learning purposes.

Scientists have figured out a clever way to distinguish one, individual whale shark from another using computer algorithms originally developed for astronomy. That's because whale sharks are spotted, and individuals have unique spot patterns, just like different parts of the sky have unique star patterns. More than simply a one-time ID system, the method works with a database of whale shark photos so that different people all over the world can upload photos and find out where else "their" whale shark has been.

And it's not just for scientists. This is one of those places where laypeople can participate in helping collect data. The next time you're in an area where whale sharks are present, you can take a photo and contribute it to the growing database. Deep Sea News explains how the system, called ECOCEAN works:

Magnets have been promoted through history as having all kinds of mystical healing qualities. Though most scientists think those 'qualities' are bunk, it looks like there might be a way to use magnets to prevent heart attacks and strokes.

Both heart attacks and strokes are the result of blood flow blockages. Heart attacks happen when material, much of it cholesterol, builds up on the walls of the coronary arteries. It blocks the flow of blood, and the muscles of the heart are starved for oxygen and die. Strokes happen when blood clots lodge in blood vessels of the brain, and block oxygenating blood to brain tissue. Both are very serious events, and both could be mitigated by an unusual property of magnets.

The success of Cleveland Clinic Innovations has triggered a puzzling dilemma for the world-renowned health system: how to manage the windfall of its leader.

Innovations’ Executive Director Chris Coburn gets 3 percent from the sale of spinoff companies, according to several sources familiar with Coburn’s contract – including one who has personally reviewed Coburn’s deal. The implication of that number became clear after Boston Scientific bought Cleveland Clinic spinoff Intelect Medical for $78 million.