Once again, the tech team at BusinessWeek is preparing our annual list of the best under-30 entrepreneurs. Who would you put on our list of the brightest young stars in the tech industry? Check out our online poll and nominate who you think are the most deserving start-up founders.

We've written about well-known entrepreneurs like Aaron Patzer, Bret Taylor, Christophe Bisciglia, and Max Ventilla in past reports, so we're looking for fresh faces. Tell us your nominees by March 19. We'll publish a report based on the results in late April.

Seeking startup funding may soon get easier. A group of venture capital firms led by Andreessen Horowitz on March 1 unveiled a Web site www.seriesseed.com designed to streamline the way startups apply for seed funds, cutting the number of documents young companies need to fill out.

The Web site, formed with the help of startup lawyer Ted Wang, contains 30 pages of free documents entrepreneurs can fill out to apply for $300,000 to $1.5 million of initial funding. Typically, such documents run about 100 pages and have to be customized by lawyers. The 30-page term sheet would have to be customized as well, but it would dispense with some sections typically unnecessary for early-stage investments, such as those dealing with prior investors. The idea behind the effort is to “save start-ups time and money,” Wang tells Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “The negotiations process will also be shorter.”

Ten well-known venture firms have committed to accepting these so-called Series Seed Documents. They include Charles River Ventures, SV Angel, Polaris Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, which is an investor into Web-calling company Skype and social games maker Zynga. “We are committed to making deals on these terms,” says general partner Ben Horowitz.

The venture firms hope others will end up supporting this effort as well. “I think this will become a new standard, and people will be able to raise money more quickly,” Wang says. Bloomberg LP or one of its subsidiaries is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz. Bloomberg LP also owns BusinessWeek.com.

Shock jock Howard Stern likely gave Sirius XM executives a shock on Feb. 8, when he told his radio listeners that he is considering leaving Sirius to become a judge on 'American Idol' when his lucrative Sirius contract expires at the end of the year.

A few weeks ago, Stern also said he'd been approached by terrestrial radio executives who want him to work for them. Radio giant Clear Channel recently told Bloomberg BusinessWeek it might be interested in hiring Stern.

By disclosing these negotiations, Stern may be trying to up the pressure on Sirius to offer him another lucrative deal. Sirius currently pays Stern, his agent and his staff $100 million a year to air Stern's radio show on Sirius exclusively. But in the years since that contract came into effect, Sirius's growth has slowed. And its renewed focus on financial performance may forbid writing another large check.

So, if he wants to make as much money in the future, Stern may, indeed, have to look elsewhere. 'American Idol' would certainly offer a lot of money -- and tons of exposure.

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime says don't count on Nintendo introducing an update to its hit Wii videogame console, or new system, in the coming months.

Sony and Microsoft plan to challenge rival Nintendo's dominance of the current console generation with add-ons they hope will deliver a more sophisticated take on motion control than the motion-sensing technology in the three-year-old Wii. But Fils-Aime, in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, said: "We are confident the Wii home entertainment console has a very long life in front of it."

The Japanese videogame maker is betting that upcoming installments of its franchise hits Metroid Prime and Super Mario will reinvigorate the red-hot sales that kept the console in short supply for the first two years of its life.

Nintendo in October issued its first profit warning in six years as sales slowed sharply and the strength of the Yen, relative to the currencies of the U.S. dollar and other countries where it sells its products, sapped profits.

Industry watchers and analysts have been speculating for months that Nintendo is prepping an update to the Wii that offers more sophisticated high-definition gaming. Sony, which already has HD gaming on its PlayStation 3, this year also plans to release software that will allow PS3 owners to watch movies and play games in 3-D. The PS3 has seen a surge in sales after Sony cut the price of its base model and introduced a slimmer version of the game system.

Nintendo on Jan. 13 hoped to counter recent moves by Sony and Microsoft to transform their consoles from gaming consoles into home entertainment platforms by announcing that it will let members this spring stream Netflix movies and TV episodes to the televisions via the Wii console.

To watch content, Wii users will need a special "instant-streaming" disc that Netflix will mail out to members who request a copy. They will then be able to use the Wii's motion controller to navigate through their Netflix account and pick what they want to watch.

Microsoft has long offered the ability to stream Netflix through the Xbox 360 as part of a premium service plan in its Xbox Live online platform, while Sony recently began delivering the same service under similar conditions to the Nintendo agreement.

With the outcome of this generation's console wars still very much in doubt as each manufacturer races to up the ante, many analysts believe it's only a matter of time before Nintendo is forced to add new technology instead of new software to the Wii.

Fils-Aime suggested no such announcement would be make at the upcoming Game Developers Conference in March in San Francisco but did not elaborate on the type of announcements Nintendo will make at the annual gaming confab, the E3 Expo, in mid-June.

The Federal Trade Commission has sued Intel, the world's largest manufacturer of computer chips, alleging that the company has "illegally used its dominant market position for a decade to stifle competition and strengthen its monopoly."

In its complaint, the FTC accuses Intel of waging what it calls a "systematic campaign to shut out rivals," in particular, Intel's main rival, Advanced Micro Devices, but also other smaller players in the market for PC chips, from access to the marketplace.

The FTC also accuses Intel of misdeeds against other rivals. As first reported by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the commission is looking into the nature of Intel's relationship with Nvidia, a company that makes graphics chips or GPUs, which enhance the graphics and imagery in computer games. More recently, they've become increasingly useful in general purpose computing, making them a potential alternative to Intel chips.

"These products have lessened the need for CPUs, and therefore pose a threat to Intel's monopoly power," the FTC said.

The commission accuses Intel of "smothering potential competition" from GPU chips such as those made by Nvidia, saying in a statement that Intel "misled and deceived potential competitors in order to protect its monopoly.

As Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported on Dec. 3, the FTCs inquiry had homed in on a pair of dueling lawsuits between Intel and Nvidia concerning a patent and contract dispute. Having previously agreed to allow Nvidia to create graphics chips that are compatible with Intel's processors, Intel, the commission alleges, has sought to hold Nvidia back from becoming a competitive threat. "Intel’s apparent willingness to allow Nvidia to interoperate with Intel’s [chips] has dissolved as it has begun to perceive Nvidia as a threat to its monopoly position in the relevant markets," the complaint reads.

In an email statement, Nvidia applauded the decision: "We are particularly pleased to see scrutiny being placed on Intel’s behavior toward GPUs, which have become an increasingly important part of the PC industry."

AMD, in an emailed statement, called the FTC's action "good for consumers," calling it "yet another example of regulators around the globe acting to protect consumers by enforcing competition laws."

In a statement Intel called the FTC's suit "misguided," and said it has "competed fairly and lawfully," and that "its actions have benefited consumers." The FTC's case, Intel said "is based largely on claims that the FTC added at the last minute and has not investigated." Additionally, Intel said the complaint is not based "not on existing law but intended to make new rules for regulating business conduct," that it says would reduce innovation and result in higher prices.

Intel General Counsel Douglas Melamed said in a statement that the case "could have, and should have, been settled." Settlement talks had progressed, Intel said, but stalled when the FTC insisted on "unprecedented remedies -- including the restrictions of lawful price competition and enforcement of intellectual property rights set forth in the complaint -- that would make it impossible for Intel to conduct business," Melamed said.

The case comes on the heels of a Nov. 12 settlement of a private lawsuit filed against Intel by AMD in 2005, the terms of which of hammered out in a two-day session with a mediator in Maui.

FTC officials emphasized that their mandate may go further than that of antitrust regulators. Intel engaged in behavior that violates a section of law that is "broader than the antitrust laws and prohibits unfair methods of competition, and deceptive acts and practices in commerce."

After 21 years at BusinessWeek, I'm leaving today, the day Bloomberg's purchase of the 80-year-old magazine closes.

It has been one heck of a ride. I've had the opportunity to track technology and the people creating it all the way from the silicon (covering Intel and semiconductors) to computers (following Sun, Silicon Graphics and others during their ups and downs) to the Internet, including Netscape, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, countless startups, and virtual worlds (that's me and my Second Life doppelganger in the photo). I've also written about many other things, from politics to retail to earthquakes.

Most of all, I've had the chance to work with really smart, dedicated people--including the many sources and readers who took so much time to help educate me. I'm hopeful that BusinessWeek's new owners, who are clearly an energetic bunch steeped in the same journalistic ethics that kept me at BW, will maintain those standards and also help the colleagues they hired build a new magazine for these new times.

This isn't really a farewell, because I expect to be writing on many of the same topics and companies in a variety of other venues. I've got a number of ideas I'll be pursuing, but meantime, I'd love to keep in touch on
Twitter, as well as LinkedIn and my new email address: robert.hof@gmail.com. I've also set up a bare-bones blog at robhof.wordpress.com. Yeah, it's bare-bones all right, and I hope to upgrade to better digs soon. But for now, this will serve as my home on the Web and the place I'll be blogging on a wide variety of topics as I get settled into new roles.

Today is my last day at BusinessWeek and this will be my last post on the Tech Beat. While I consider my next move, I'm starting up a new blog at least for now at swildstrom.wordpress.com. Nothing there yet but a welcome message, but stay tuned.

If you want to get in touch with me, I can be reached by email at steve@wildstrom.com. And you can always follow swildstrom's tweets on Twitter.

Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff has never been shy about borrowing a bit of other companies’ mojo. On Nov, 18, he introduced the software company’s latest product, a business collaboration tool that takes pages from the playbooks of Facebook and Twitter.

Salesforce will begin selling the new software, called Chatter, next year at a price of $50 per user each month. The software works with Salesforce’s core customer management software to display “profiles” of employees and posts about projects they’re working on or customers they’ve visited. “I know more about these strangers on Facebook than I do about my own employees and what they’re working on,” Benioff said during a speech at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. “I know when my friends went to the movies, but not when my VP of sales visited our top customer.”

Chatter pushes Salesforce, expected to reach $1.3 billion in revenues this year, into the crowded field for collaboration software. Salesforce is trying to expand beyond the customer management software that’s been its bread and butter. Microsoft’s SharePoint Server, an IBM product called Atlas that works with its Lotus e-mail software, and Google’s recently introduced Wave all offer business users the ability to share information and hold conversations on the Web.

Software developers will be able to use Chatter to build their own applications, Salesforce said. The move comes as some of the tech industry’s largest vendors are releasing tools that let programmers create cloud computing applications delivered over the Internet. Microsoft on Nov. 17 launched Windows Azure, software for letting Windows developers build cloud computing applications using familiar Microsoft technologies. Google and Amazon.com also offer tools for developers to build cloud applications.

Look for updated coverage on BusinessWeek.com, including excepts from an interview I’ll conduct with Benioff later today.

In this week's issue of BusinessWeek, we published the inaugural list of "The World's Most Intriguing New Companies." I am thrilled that we launched the package right as Global Entrepreneurship Week kicks off, taking place Nov. 16-22, in 85 nations.

In my lead story for the package, "Fertile Ground for Startups," I made two big points:
1. Startups are playing an increasingly important role in American business
2. Startups may play a central role in any recovery.

There was one startling new study, based on 2007 Census data, I was unable to work into the story that I want to highlight now, which provides some empirical evidence supporting the second point.

According to a new study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which was co-written by the respected economist Robert Litan, companies less than five years old generated nearly two-third of the net new jobs created in the U.S. in 2007. Without these startups, "net job creation for the American economy would be negative in all but a handful of years."

The upshot: It is clear more than ever that new companies and the entrepreneurs that lead them are the engines of job creation and economic recovery.

It is well known within economic circles that new companies produce the majority of new jobs in the U.S. economy. What this reports reveals for the first time is extent of that trend, and the fact that startups play a particularly important role in growing jobs out of a recession. New companies have produced all of the net new jobs in the U.S. from 2001-2007, and also from 1980-1983, the last big American downturn, according to the study.

This has huge implications for the Obama Administration as it tries to get the economy growing again. It also suggests a shift in focus and policy. Instead of focusing on saving large and dying industries (i.e. automakers and banks), the Obama Admin. should "begin paying more attention to removing roadblocks to entrepreneurs who will lead us out our current (well-founded) pessimism about jobs and sustain economic expansion over the long run," wrote the authors of the report.

One idea the authors float: granting a payroll tax holiday for new companies. This is a great and timely idea, especially since the expected health care reform law is supposed to increase the cost of doing business for new companies. Such a targeted tax cut could help offset the pain of health care reform and give new employers more of a reason to ramp up hiring.

This isn't to discount the role that big companies play in job creation. Large companies with 10,000 or more employees account for more than 10% of net job creation. But even then the authors note that those new net jobs may stem from the process of big companies acquiring young ones. "One of the only ways for big companies to add net jobs is to acquire younger companies that are not only generating jobs, but also are responsible for a good number of innovations that will keep the bigger company's revenue from diminishing," write the authors.

- Spencer Ante also publishes the Creative Capital blog. Click here to read more.

Where Will the Jobs Come From? Startups!

On Sept. 1, BusinessWeek put out a call for entries to help us on an exciting new package called "The World's Most Intriguing New Companies."

We were heartened by the strong response to our call. More than 200 companies were submitted over the Web. We also received dozens more entries submitted by several groups we reached out to such as the National Venture Capital Association, the Kauffman Foundation, YouNoodle and Endeavour.

The response was so great that we needed additional time to work through the list. Consequently, we have a new publication date for the project. Instead of closing the project on Oct. 21 as originally planned, we have pushed up the publication date until Nov. 11 to coincide with our Future of Technology report.

So please be a bit more patient. We are excited to share the results and accompanying stories with all of you.

Inside Google’s search quality group, Amit Singhal runs the core ranking team, which is responsible for those algorithms you hear so much about. The team ran some 6,000 experiments last year that tried tweaking those mathematical formulas, ultimately producing between 450 and 500 small and large changes in Google’s search engine.

Singhal, a former researcher at AT&T Labs (the former Bell Labs), joined Google in 2000 and now is a Google Fellow, a title reserved for its most accomplished engineers. For a story on Google’s search efforts in the latest issue of BusinessWeek, he spoke to me about some of the inner workings of the team whose work determines the results you see after you type a query into Google.

This is the second in a series of four interviews with the leaders of Google's search quality team, following an interview posted yesterday with Udi Manber, VP of technology for search. Interviews with Scott Huffman, who runs search evaluation, and Matt Cutts, head of the anti-Web spam team, will run on Tech Beat on Saturday and Sunday. And if you want the big picture, we just posted an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Udi Manber, Google's vice-president of technology for core search, joined the company almost four years ago after stints running Amazon.com’s A9 search project and serving as chief scientist at Yahoo. He, like some other leaders on the search quality team, has 20 years of experience in search going back into academia—meaning before the World Wide Web, when it was known as information retrieval.

I talked with Manber on two occasions in recent weeks for my story on Google’s search operation, which appears in the latest issue of BusinessWeek. Customarily stingy with details about Google’s inner workings, to thwart competitors, Manber nonetheless provided a lot of insight into how Google’s core search quality team does its magic. And while he sounds quite confident about Google’s prospects—at first, I wondered, maybe too confident?—it’s also clear that he realizes the threat always looming for any technology company in the form of some unexpected breakthrough from an upstart. After all, Google was one of those upstarts not so very long ago.

This transcript, like the others to come over the next several days, is fairly long. I opted to leave in as much as possible to provide more details for people who are really interested in the inner workings.

Print has its advantages. In addition to its portability, a magazine or newspaper is easy to flip through to find what you're looking for, or run across articles or ads you didn't know you'd want to read. Whatever other advantages the Web has, and notwithstanding Dave Winer's "river of news" concept, this kind of quick scanning is still tough on a screen, no matter how fast your Internet connection is.

Google is taking a shot at solving this with an experiment out of its Google Labs operation called Fast Flip. A quick description from Krishna Bharat, distinguished researcher on Google News:

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

Google has about three dozen publisher partners, including (full disclosure) BusinessWeek, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Atlantic, and ProPublica, with which it will share ad revenue on pages viewed. There is also a mobile version with tactile page-flipping for the iPhone and Android phones.

As Bharat noted in his blog post, "the publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet." (So I've noticed.) And since Fast Flip won't be just for individual publications, there's no guarantee readers will simply read a newspaper or magazine through, since Google is providing aggregation of many publications with Fast Flip. So even though this is the first time Google is essentially paying publishers for providing news content, I'm doubtful this will go very far in persuading traditional media. Some of them have complained that Google makes money from indexing content it didn't create, that the search giant is really their friend.

But the sooner publishers can make their content online easier to peruse, not just search, the better off they'll be.

BusinessWeek is excited to announce a new editorial project to showcase the most intriguing new businesses on the planet.

To identify these new businesses, we want to tap the brains of our readers and the public at large. So we invite you to send us your ideas.

What defines most intriguing? To us, that means new enterprises that generate the most interest or fascination; the businesses that are working hard to solve the world's most important problems. The game-changers that make you say, "Wow, that's really interesting." They don't necessarily have to be the fastest growing or the most well-known or the most financially successful businesses, though those are desirable qualities.

These businesses could be for-profit ventures or they could be non-profit. They could come from any industry. However, they should not be more than three years old.

Twitter is a perfect example of an intriguing business. The Internet communications tool is having a huge impact on business and politics but it is not yet profitable. Kiva, a Web service that enables individuals to make small loans to one another, is example of an intriguing enterprise in the non-profit arena.

We will place a premium on those companies that readers may not know. We think that will make the list more interesting, useful and surprising.

Over the next month we invite you to send us your best ideas and examples. The deadline for your submissions is Thursday Sep. 24. Your entry should contain no more than 200 words and describe the name of the company, contact info, a description of the business and what makes it most intriguing. Please post your entry on the following Web page:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/polls/intriguing_new_businesses/

Thanks in advance for your interest and help. We look forward to hearing from you.

Spencer Ante
Associate Editor
BusinessWeek