At the heart of the famously overpriced Hong Kong housing market, Severn Road is once again the most expensive street in the world, according to Financial News.

One square meter of real estate in Severn Road goes for $78,200.

Paris' Avenue Montaigne fell off the radar this year only to make room for Quai Anatole, also in the French capital.

The 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan is causing problems for at least one of its fleet of nuclear reactors—and authorities have shut down 10 of the country's 55 units. Tokyo Electric Power confirmed that pressure had been rising inside reactor No. 1 at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast, one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. That means cooling water is not getting to the reactor core, causing a build up of steam inside the containment vessel. The problem, according to Japanese media reports, is a loss of grid electricity to run the pumps that bring in cooling water. The backup diesel generators that are supposed to provide emergency power in that case are out of order, according to the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, but replacements were being taken to the plant. (Similar diesel generators were providing power to the nation's Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which recycles spent nuclear fuel.)

‘THE FIRST step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation,’’ President Obama said to a concerned nation in his State of the Union address. Our nation has a remarkable record of rising from the ashes of crisis, and education and research in science and engineering have often led those revivals of prosperity and morale. Of the world’s top 20 research universities, the United States claims 17. As leaders of two, we know our institutions must play a central role in helping America to rebuild.

The nation has suffered profound dislocations before — the Civil War, countless cycles of boom and bust including the Great Depression, two world wars, and the Cold War. The letters and documents of each period make clear that in every case, many felt that America’s time was up, and this bold experiment of a nation could not long endure. Yet in each case contemporary observers underestimated America’s capacity for self-renewal.

An electronic suggestion box is not as good as an idea management system. In fact it might be worse than doing nothing at all.

Unfortunately for those organizations unwilling (or shy of proper budget) to jump into innovation all the way; afraid to get a purpose-built idea management system… they decide instead to just offer employees a place to submit their suggestions. These electronic suggestion boxes are not much better than the real metal box with a slot. They accept suggestions. The question is: what you are going to do with the ideas you get.

I just posted this at Quora in response to a question about social innovation business models (note: I have edited a couple issues, but the posts are relatively the same–at the moment this document is more extensive & insightful):

1) Association Model: Collaborative Consumption (think Zip Car & Netflix)–but a similar model is used by mobile entrepreneurs who sell use of their phones. [similar to affordable co-working spaces for new businesses & group buying in principle]
2) Association Model: training, networking, events, etc. (Social Enterprise Alliance & the B-Corporation organization). Encourage best practices. (I don’t know how lucrative Co-ops are or can be, but they are relatively similar in nature–it seems that the association model is slightly better–but I’m sure its different on a case by case basis)

About 300 Stanford business students showed up to listen to a guest lecture this week — even though it was the last week of the quarter and they had projects due.

But when the speaker is Skype Technologies co-founder turned venture capitalist Niklas Zennstrom talking about the long, hard process of building a company – well, schoolwork can wait.

Although he steered clear of discussing Skype’s IPO, which is expected later this year, Zennstrom did talk Tuesday about how Skype was a third attempt at building a company: Its free Internet phone service evolved first from a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called Kazaa that ran afoul of the music and film industries, and then from a distributed database company called Joltid that was running out of money and needed a way to make free phone calls.

The pitch. It’s the life blood of entrepreneurs, and if you’re shy about telling your company’s story to potential investors, you better get over it fast.

“There’s a process you have to go through to raise money,” said Cairn Cross, a founding partner of FreshTracks Capital, a venture capital firm based in Shelburne. “You need to pitch a lot, and you need to pitch to a lot of people. You get a lot of nos.”

FreshTracks was one of the sponsors of the Vermont Peak Pitch 2011 event last week, an event that brought together aspiring entrepreneurs and investors at Sugarbush Resort in Warren to take the lift ride together and ski back down. It’s on that six-minute ride up, and on top before the ski down, that entrepreneurs have the ears of the money folks to sell their ideas. It was the first time for the annual event at Sugarbush.

PsychTest has created the Entrepreneur Personality Test. It is a unique test that can assess whether you’re entrepreneur material

The test covered seven key business traits, namely Self-sufficiency, Conscientiousness, Drive, Social Skills, Optimism, Risk-taking, and Networking Ability. With over 12,000 test-takers to date, PsychTests data revealed that entrepreneurs who took the test outscored those without business experience on every scale. When comparing female vs. male entrepreneurs, men were more driven than women (score of 67 vs. 62 on a scale from 0 to 100), while women had better social skills (70 vs. 67) and tended to be more optimistic (72 vs. 67).

If you’re starting on your entrepreneurial journey, here’s one book you must definitely consider: Elizabeth Edwards’ Startup: The Complete Handbook for Launching a Company for Less is an excellent resource and step-by-step guide for the aspiring and budding entrepreneur.

The problem with most books that cover entrepreneurship is that they tend to either get extremely preachy (how you must have passion etc), overly delve into the author’s own personal experiences which you’re never ever likely to go through), or just comprise of confusing how-to templates (that can be meaningless, or are pointless exercises).

10 Harvard professors. 10 fascinating ideas. 10 minutes each. That was the gist of Harvard Thinks Big, a TED-esque event held on February 11th. Now fast forward several weeks, and the talks all appear online for free. Find them on YouTube, iTunes, or Harvard’s dedicated web site.

Of all the 10 talks, we decided to feature one: Daniel Gilbert, a psych professor known for his book Stumbling On Happiness, presents a talk called “It’s the End of the World as We Know it, and I Feel Fine.” (Yes, a nod to R.E.M.) And it tries to make sense of a baffling question. Our planet is on the brink of an ecological catastrophe and we’re calmly sitting here watching videos. Humans have thrived because we take threats seriously. But why not this one?

TED announced today at SXSW that it is opening all of its online talks to the public. An application programming interface (API) will allow open access to all talks and associated data (topic, location, speaker, etc.) for developers who might use that info to build all sorts of tools and applications.

Speaking before her announcement at TED, June Cohen, Executive Producer of Media for TED, told Fast Company that in keeping with the organization's promise of transparency, "The natural next step is to open up content to the developer community.... Every time we've allowed people to contribute, people have surprised and humbled and delighted us." More to the point, she says, "We know we don't have the monopology on good ideas."

While the idea of an API is to uncover unpredictable uses of data, Cohen says at th

As I’ve explored some of the more confusing terminology of VC term sheets, I have received a number of questions regarding the composition of the Board of Directors – specifically who should control the Board following a Series A financing.

Controling the board, of course, means controling the corporation. Thus, the composition of the Board is an important and sensitive issue to founders. Sadly, we’ve all heard the horror stories of founders being “fired” from the company they founded.

It has traditionally been rare for the founders to control the Board following a Series A financing (despite the fact that Series A investors do not generally acquire a majority stake in the venture). Sometimes the investors push to control the Board, but this is relatively uncommon as well. Instead, there is typically a “compromise” in which neither the investors nor the founders technically control the Board.

We want to help you secure funding for your next idea or innovation, and help you push into new and exciting markets. So last post we started to count down the “Top 10 Things You Must Do To Secure Funding For Your Business”.

If you missed it, here’s a quick recap:

* Number 10: Have a detailed Business Plan
* Number 9: Be clear about your Financial Requirements
* Number 8: Be able to articulate your ideas in an Elevator Pitch
* Number 7: Present the strengths and weaknesses of your Management Team
* Number 6: Define your Business Strategies

Let’s finish the Top 10 …

Andy Didorosi is just back from Manhattan, NY, and full of real estate ideas. Not that it takes a trip to the Big Apple to get him inspired, but, he figured, why not check out what other businesses like his are doing?

That’s the kind of sharp thinking that has catapulted Didorosi, 24, to owner of the nearly 1-year-old Paper Street, a small-business incubator in Ferndale off East Nine Mile Road. Housed in a space that once was the Jarvis Property Restoration building, Paper Street rents office space to some 13 companies.

The idea to open an incubator was actually incubating in Didorosi’s mind for the past two years, yet it wasn’t until a fateful turn of events in his other job in the racing field that Didorosi was inspired to create Paper Street.

Most startups fail. But every once in a while, the stars align and a cool-sounding idea actually works. Incubators try to improve those odds by giving entrepreneurs all the early-stage advice and financing they need. We've scoured the web to find nine internet startups with humble beginnings at tech incubators that are still thriving today.

While some are merely popular, but not yet profitable, others are winners by any measure. Start the gallery to see the nine biggest successses to emerge from an incubator so far.

Every entrepreneur is flooded with information from all directions, but despite their best efforts to absorb it, they likely miss the information really needed to start a business. These days, we all have to rely on a few trusted sources to digest and filter information, net out the relevant messages, and steer us with links to accurate details.

These trusted sources are a new breed of professionals who may soon carry the new title of “information curator,” evolved from the “museum curator” role, where a domain expert filters and communicates the important elements of a past civilization or technology. The evolution and the real value of curator are outlined in a great new book “Curation Nation,” by Steven Rosenbaum.

As the EU prepares to launch a pilot innovation partnership on "active and healthy ageing," patient groups are stressing that the initiative should not only focus on medical innovation, but also address age-friendly environments and access to health care.

The EU's 27 ministers in charge of competitiveness yesterday (9 March) endorsed European Commission proposals to launch a European innovation partnership on active and healthy ageing.

The goal of the partnership, which will involve private and public partners, is to increase the life expectancy of Europeans by an average of two years by 2020.

Federal agencies should focus on selecting and fostering key attributes when developing the next generation of government leaders, human capital experts say.

Such an approach to leadership development is critical to innovation in government, according to a report released Thursday from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and Hay Group, a consulting firm. Attributes found in an innovative leader can be learned and fostered over time if the employee is committed and receives constructive feedback, the report found. But the process can bog down if there is an inability to foster new ideas, gaps in communication, a system that rewards the status quo, or limited funding.

Researchers who have spent the last two years studying the security of car computer systems have revealed that they can take control of vehicles wirelessly.

The researchers were able to control everything from the car's brakes to its door locks to its computerized dashboard displays by accessing the onboard computer through GM's OnStar and Ford's Sync, as well as through the Bluetooth connections intended for making hands-free phone calls. They presented their findings this week to the National Academies Committee on Electronic Vehicle Controls and Unintended Acceleration, which was brought together partly in response to last year's scandal over supposed problems with the computerized braking systems in Toyota Priuses.

WASHINGTON — The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America’s energy and global warming challenges may have evaporated as quickly as confidence in Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors.

Until this weekend, President Obama, mainstream environmental groups and large numbers of Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed that nuclear power offered a steady energy source and part of the solution to climate change, even as they disagreed on virtually every other aspect of energy policy. Mr. Obama is seeking tens of billions of dollars in government insurance for new nuclear construction, and the nuclear industry in the United States, all but paralyzed for decades after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, was poised for a comeback.

Now, that is all in question as the world watches the unfolding crisis in Japan’s nuclear reactors and the widespread terror it has spawned.