I've never been much of a fan of incubators. Some have made the model work. My favorite of the bunch is Betaworks, based here in NYC. Betaworks is more than an incubator, but they have shown that they can make the incubation model work with projects like bit.ly and chartbeat.

Don't miss part I of this interview with Woody on trends enabling start-ups right now, how these trends are affecting the VC market, and Woody's position on the angel market.

AlwaysOn: So what markets do you think are hot right now? 

Woody: Distressed European assets. No – that’s a good question. I think innovation markets are hot. Really innovative new ideas that take advantage of the consumer being in charge, time shifting, society trends, and that have a mobile element are hot. It’s really based on the ingenuity and creativity of the entrepreneurs.I think the things that are hot are bigger ideas. The thing to be careful about taking less capital to start something is that there are a lot of very thin ideas out there - too many small ideas that can actually get to the market place because of the lower capital requirements. The really innovative things happen when there’s a bigger idea at play.

As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, “Gosh, I could do a lot more investments if I had a fund.” And so the super angels became micro-VCs (or “institutionalized super angels”). Everyone was excited and on the seventh day they did another deal instead of resting.

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its first annual AlwaysOn Mid-Atlantic 100 competition. We're looking for the top emerging companies from the mid-Atlantic region that are creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors: 

I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. It’s a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. This is one of the Silicon Valley organizations that remind you why this is a company-town whose main industry is entrepreneurship, (and a great example of an industry cluster.)

Don't miss part I or part II of this interview with Nexage CEO. Let's jump right back in:

Andrew: I totally agree with you that this industry is changing very rapidly, even in the online advertising sector. Can you talk about some of the changes you're seeing and how you are responding?

Ernie: Sure. If you look at things in the mobile world, it's similar to what was happening online in the late 1990's when there were no standards and multiple browsers, kind of like the wild wild west. Compare that to the mobile world right now and it makes that seem like a pretty calm sea. The reason for that is the fragmentation of platforms on the handset side and no standardization across platforms. There are even different browsers from platform to platform and publishers have a real challenge managing that complexity. Part of what we bring to the publishers in value is removing significant layers of that complexity by managing those layers.

If you look at how much money has been raised by venture firms, including the seed and super seed categories, versus how much money has been returned in the past ten years, the ratio is not good. At some point the investors who fund the venture capital asset class will not be able to keep funding it.

The asset class needs to focus on liquidity. M&A continues to be the one bright spot and although I have not seen the data, I suspect M&A activity around venture backed companies in the past ten years has not shrunk and may have actually increased (if you take out the bubble years of 98-2000).

My two daughters are now in college and have put their toes in the working-world with summer jobs. As they’ve grown older, they’ve heard their parent’s advice about women in the workforce.

This post is not advice nor is it a recommendation of what you should do. It’s simply my interpretation of what I observed watching my daughters grow up. Our circumstances were unique, times have changed, and your conclusions and opinions will most certainly differ.

When you want to look up information on publicly traded companies, it helps to know the ticker symbol. Microsft's ticker is MSFT, Google's ticker is GOOG, Apple's ticker is AAPL. Every publicly traded company has a ticker.

But private companies don't have tickers. And as more and more private companies are attaining status and drawing the attention of mainstream media and the investment community, it is time for that to change.

Yesterday Stocktwits and Second Market proposed a set of tickers for popular privately held companies. The proposed list of tickers is here.