Many parents have experienced the angst of a crying baby with an ear infection. Some 30 million medical visits in the U.S. alone are due to pediatric ear infections each year.

A startup called CellScope has developed a device that could make such visits unnecessary. It connects to an iPhone and produces a view inside the ear magnified by a factor of 10. Users can capture and upload images to CellScope's Web platform. After adding notes about other symptoms, parents could ask their own doctor to conduct a remote exam. In most cases, that would be enough information for a prescription to be called in, says CellScope CEO Erik Douglas.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it will serve as the lead federal agency for a White House Initiative called US Ignite, which aims to realize the potential of fast, open, next-generation networks.

US Ignite will expand on investments in the NSF-funded Global Environment for Networking Innovation (GENI) project which lays the technical groundwork for this initiative.

"NSF is proud to be the lead agency in US Ignite," said Subra Suresh, director of the National Science Foundation. "NSF has a proven legacy in funding the fundamental research that leads to technological advancements that spur economic development. As a result, NSF is uniquely positioned to attract our country's best creative thinkers and researchers to build, test and explore the potential of next-generation networks."

When Optiflame opens its U.S. office in the University City Science Center's Port business incubator later this month, it will become the first Russian company to take residency in the Port. The Science Center worked with Select Greater Philadelphia, the Mid-Atlantic - Russia Business Council, the City of Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Department of Community and Economic Development to bring the Russian wind power generating company to Philadelphia. A formal announcement is scheduled for 3:30 p.m., Thursday, June 14 at the Mayor's Reception Room at Philadelphia City Hall as part of the 16th Semi-Annual Russian-American Innovation Technology Weeks (RANIT-BIO).

Optiflame, which is based in St. Petersburg, Russia, has invented and developed a novel approach to urban wind power generation. According to the company, its environmentally safe wind power generator can be installed on any roof and generate power safely, effectively and silently. Optiflame (USA) will be located in the Bullpen, the Science Center's co-working space at 3711 Market Street in Philadelphia.

I’ve been directing or advising innovation and commercialization efforts in Silicon Valley for most of my career. While the popular stories we tell about innovation usually focus on eureka moments and brilliant individuals, anyone involved in successful innovation knows that getting a new product to market is often more about convincing smart people to back your idea, corralling lots of different agendas, aligning incentives, and navigating bureaucracies.

In a previous blog post reporting in after the 2012 AusMedTech (Australia Medical Technology) conference, we discussed the need for healthcare technology companies to quickly demonstrate how their innovations add value.

My presentation at AusMedTech stressed four important elements that are driving the industry now, and that will continue to do so over the next decade. We believe that addressing each of these areas – as outlined below by me and my colleague Ken Walz – will be vitally important as healthcare innovators seek to demonstrate the value of their technologies.

As an entrepreneur, I have traveled to more than 30 countries around the world. Throughout my journeys, I’ve learned how to make travel as inexpensive and painless as possible. Here are some tips that help me keep money in my pocket:

I purchase flights when they’re the cheapest. When I know I need to travel to a particular country, I book a flight as far in advance as possible. By booking trips at least two weeks in advance, I can save upward of 50-75 percent. Airlines tend to charge their highest prices within two weeks of a travel date. If I find a cheap airline ticket without knowing my exact travel schedule, I book the flight anyway. It’s worth the risk, even if I have to cancel or reschedule the flight at the last minute. Sure, I’m charged anywhere from US$100-200 for cancelling or re-booking a flight, but the amount I save by booking early far outweighs the cancellation fees.

President Obama signed an executive order Thursday aimed at linking high-speed broadband Internet providers and application developers with communities to design and test new applications in medicine, engineering and other fields.

The idea behind the U.S. Ignite program is to use the broadband communities as test beds to develop applications that eventually can be scaled nationwide, according to a White House blog post.

During a launch event, researchers at Case Western Reserve University demonstrated a broadband-based simulated surgical theater, which they said could eventually be used at broadband-equipped medical schools across the country.

Childhood obesity has increased dramatically throughout the past 40 years and has been tied to many health problems. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found that children’s weight is associated with their math performance.

“The findings illustrate the complex relationships among children’s weight, social and emotional well-being, academics and time,” said Sara Gable, associate professor in the MU Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, who led the study.

It started with a question, "Where are all the Ph.D.'s?"

Karen L. Klomparens, dean of the graduate school at Michigan State University, wanted to find out where 3,000 doctoral students who had graduated in the last 20 years were living and working. Knowing what kinds of jobs students are getting, she says, would help her learn more about how well the university's graduate programs are teaching students the professional skills they actually need.

There are many reasons to fear that the healthcare crisis in this country is going to get worse—a lot worse—before it gets better. More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, with costly knock-on effects from heart disease to diabetes. The overall cost of care seems to be spiraling upward unstoppably. The FDA is so weighed down by bureaucratic caution that it’s slowing drug and medical-device innovation to a standstill. The Supreme Court might be on the verge of striking down the only real attempt to fix healthcare delivery in decades.

And yet—when you look around places like San Francisco and Silicon Valley, you see so many passionate young entrepreneurs with ideas for improving the system that you can’t help feeling a little better about the future. Last night I went to the 2012 demo day for Rock Health, the San Francisco- and Boston-based startup accelerator focused on the healthcare industry. In a two-hour session held at Practice Fusion’s new downtown headquarters, 13 companies (pictured above right) shared their ideas for helping consumers lead healthier lives and making care delivery easier for healthcare professionals. Maybe it’s just a case of infectious enthusiasm, but I came away feeling that if even half of these ideas take hold, the U.S. will be a healthier, happier place.

While chatting with a CEO based in San Francisco recently, he commented on the talent shortage for software engineers in his area. "Unemployment is at zero percent for those folks," he said with a grunt. "Twitter, Google, and Facebook have sucked up all the decent ones."

It's hard to imagine a talent shortage in this economy. However, for some in-demand skill sets, it's tough to identify good candidates, let alone woo them away from their current employers. And if you're thinking, "I don’t have that problem," studies show you may soon.

Over the course of a half-century, the Draper family has carved out a name (and a fortune) in a place where breeding and ancestry are thought to be irrelevant. Now it's time for the debut of the youngest generation. 

Bill Draper's salt-and-pepper eyebrows grow like weeds. They are the one feature on the venture capitalist's handsome, square-jawed 84-year-old face that give away his age; they're also a mark of the Draper gene pool, an optometric family crest. Bill's son, Tim, also a venture capitalist, has similarly unruly patches. And Tim's sons, Adam and Billy, both entrepreneurs, have a tamer twentysomething variation. "Those are some power brows," Adam says of his dad's and granddad's facial hair. "You meet them and you just look at their brows for a little bit--they're like visors."

Sometimes a piece of advice, no matter how well-meaning or earnestly proffered, is instantly forgotten, or, perhaps more frequently, quietly resented.

But, once in a while, whether you’re looking for it or not, you get a gem that sticks. For one reason or another, some wise words become more than food for thought and become guiding principles, if not life changers.

Creative Social, an organization of creative professionals working in the digital marketing space, has assembled its members’ favorite bits of advice into a new book, Best Piece of Advice Ever. The book, a collaboration with artist management agency, Bernstein & Andriulli, presents the wise words along with art work from a range of contemporary illustrators and designers including Ray Smith, 12Foot6, Stan Chow, Ilovedust, and Shotopop.

"Disruption" expert buys into the investment industry's next big thing.

FORTUNE -- Last month we noted that CircleUp, a new crowd-funding platform for small retailers and consumer brands, had launched with $1.5 million in venture capital from Maveron and individuals like David Topper. What we didn't know at the time was that the round's largest investor actually was Clayton Christensen, the noted Harvard Business School professor and author of books like The Innovator's Dilemma.

He did the deal via Rose Park, an investment vehicle Christensen and his son launched around five years ago. Other Rose Park portfolio companies include Coupang and BioLite.

Today, in two of the world’s top medical journals, scientists are publishing the results of a $173 million government-funded project to sequence the vast bulk of bacteria, fungi, and viruses in and on the human body.

The results might at first seem anticlimactic. There’s no news about which germs cause or prevent disease, or even a clear message about how they make people different from one another. What we know is there are a lot of them. We have ten times as many microbial cells in our body as human ones, and though they are tiny, that still means that a 200-pound man is carrying two to six pounds of microbes, mostly bacteria. And there are tantalizing hints that they might play a role in all sorts of diseases. Patients who are at risk for difficult-to-treat hospital infections might have a particular kind of bacteria in their digestive systems; those who are obese might have another; children who can’t get enough nutrition might have a third. Microbes might even play a role in mental illness. And scientists hope that in the future differences in what microbes live in us and on us will be used to diagnose and prevent disease. We might even learn how to modify our microbiomes, as the sum total of all these germs are called, to treat illnesses. In fact, this is already being attempted, with probiotic supplements and, in more extreme cases, fecal transplants.

The University System of Maryland is about to adopt a new policy to formally give credit in tenure and promotion decisions for faculty work that leads to patents and other intellectual property applied in technology transfer.

The new policy, slated for final Board of Regents approval on June 23, is part of the system's broader push to promote the commercialization of academic research.

By Rodney W. Nichols

Just as students must master the 3R’s, non-profit organizations must master the 3C’s of curiosity, competition, and compassion.  It’s easy to glibly roll out these words. It’s much harder to master the fusion of these attributes, essential for success.

Curiosity means not only the capacity to imagine better social circumstances – a mission of change -- but also the wit to conceive how to make change happen. Competition always winnows the better ideas for that process.  And it is compassion – the capacity for empathy about the people who need change, who are to be served – that drives almost all non-profit activity.

Conscience calls for society to support education, food, housing, and health care. But when countries undergo economic upheaval – all too widespread these days – citizens often doubt whether the social imperatives of conscience can be reconciled fairly with the unnerving demands of individual curiosity, upsetting the status quo, and with the relentlessly unsettling rigors of global markets, demanding higher productivity. 

So many tech startups begin the same way: One founder, one dream and a plan to make it happen. Most businesses stay that way - there are many more solo entrepreneurs than business owners with employees. But to succeed, most startups need a much broader set of skills and experience.

If you intend to build a scalable business, you know you can’t do it alone. If you plan to get funded, you need to build a team - a complete, kickass team - that will both get the job done and impress the money people. And you need to do it sooner rather than later.

Over the next few years, we’ll likely be seeing more stories about things like Merck’s $90 million translational research center for scientists, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists; Sanofi’s partnership with Third Rock Ventures to launch a new biotech company; and Johnson & Johnson, GSK and Index Ventures’ new fund.

That’s because open innovation and cooperation in the pharmaceutical industry will continue to gain traction as patent losses and R&D cutbacks force drug companies to look outside of their own walls for promising technologies, according to a new report from GBI Research.

SouthsideVirginia is a stretch of five rural counties along the North Carolina border on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains clustered around the aging industrial cities of Danville and Martinsville. The implementation of an innovative technology-based economic-development strategy in the region over the past few years offers valuable lessons for those who are trying to solve the paradox of rural economic development in a global, knowledge-based economy. Simply put, the paradox is that in a U.S. economy that prides itself on developing and exploiting technology and talent, we have not figured out how to use technology and public investment to spread the wealth to rural areas.

Like many rural areas, the decline in tobacco growth and the closing of textile mills and furniture factories in Southside left the region with a diminished economic base and a largely semiskilled and unskilled workforce. Danville is typical of micropolitan areas in the United States, many of which have been deteriorating since the 1950s. The combination of depopulation, agricultural mechanization and consolidation, and the decline of low-skilled manufacturing jobs due to increasing productivity and global labor market arbitrage have left rural areas bereft of sources of wealth creation and gainful employment. The effect of these economic trends on Danville was a population loss of 25 percent between 1980 and 2010.