Venture capital in my country is conspicuous by its absence. If you’re an entrepeneur in Spain and you don’t have enough money to run your company by yourself, you’re pretty much screwed. No one will invest in your equity, and no bank will want to lend you money.

Of course this is a harsh generalization. A few startups do manage to raise capital and there are indeed some business angels and small venture capital firms out there, but the truth is that many innovative and sustainable ideas die because their creators lack the financial backup to launch them.

Perhaps the tools provided by CapLinked will help local entrepeneurs find foreign investors to allow them to grow and generate a much needed stream of revenue. Because at over 20% unemployment, unless we create our own jobs, no one is going to hire us.

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It’s time for a new innovation bit! In previous posts I featured Kaggle and SwipeGood, both of which are awesome startups based on great, sustainable ideas.

Today I’d like to introduce Dwolla, a startup from Iowa that defies every single established payment system out there.

The company was founded in 2010 and it has raised nearly $1.3 million from Veridian Credit Union and The Members Group.

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A few days ago I introduced this section talking about Kaggle, an interesting startup that turned data science into a competition sport in order to deliver high quality prediction models in a cost-effective way.

Today I’m going to present you a startup that offers a way more simple idea, SwipeGood. I like a lot what they’re doing because it shows that sometimes, the most innovative concepts need not be intrincate technological revolutions, and perhaps even the smallest things can cause a huge impact on society.

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A few weeks ago I enrolled in an Innovation Management course sponsored by the Bankinter Foundation of Innovation. In only two sessions my approach to innovation has changed radically, realizing there’s much that can be improved in every single aspect of our lives. I’m very glad that I got into this program, because I feel that most universities have a huge gap in innovation education, and that definitely needs to be amended.

Because of this, I’d like to inaugurate a new section in my blog, where I’m going to share innovative ideas that I come across. I’ll call this section “Innovation Bits”.

The first idea I want to share with you is an amazing approach to revolutionize data mining. Today I’m going to introduce Kaggle, a startup company founded in 2010 that intends to turn data science into a sport.

They have raised around $11 million in their first round, which was led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Their chairman, Max Levchin, was the co-founder and former CTO of PayPal.

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