China’s mobile Internet users may more than double within five years as smartphones that can browse the Web and download music become more affordable, Lee Kai-fu, the former head of Google Inc.’s China division, said.

The number of people accessing the Internet on their mobile devices in China may grow to 800 million within three to five years, from about 300 million now, Lee said today in an interview at the Beijing headquarters of Innovation Works, the technology business incubator he set up after leaving Google.

Lee’s company is investing in a mobile-software maker and 11 other businesses in the country to benefit from booming demand for Web technology. Lenovo Group Ltd., China’s biggest maker of personal computers, expects products aimed at the mobile Internet market may comprise as much as 20 percent of Lenovo’s sales in five years, President Rory Read said in April.

WASHINGTON — Newly installed Medicare chief Donald Berwick, keeping a low public profile after encountering controversy over his appointment, is moving quickly behind the scenes to seed the US health care system with 100 to 300 sites to test new models of caring for patients.

Since July 6, when President Obama bypassed the Senate confirmation process and named Berwick with a recess appointment, the Cambridge health guru and former Harvard professor has made launching the sites a high priority, according to officials and industry executives.

In recent years, the rate of new business formation by women has significantly outpaced the rate of new business formation by men across all ethnic groups in the USA. Similar trends are found across the developing world. However, women still own and manage significantly fewer businesses than men. The explanation for this phenomenon, the behaviour of female entrepreneurs in terms of traits, motivations, and success rates, and their gender-related distinctiveness are complex and multifaceted. Despite a growing literature we still need more research on female entrepreneurship—particularly in developing countries where we are seeing a growing number of initiatives aimed at promoting entrepreneurship and empowering women in the process. The latter tendency reflects a generally growing interest in female entrepreneurship in developing countries, which, in turn, is due to greater interest in the role played by entrepreneurship in the economic development process. Women have been assigned a special role not only because they stand to benefit from entrepreneurship being the poorer and more discriminated against gender, but also because they are seen as a critical driver of entrepreneurship in light of their unique role in the household and the rise in female-headed households across the developing world.

Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, VC, angel, Facebook board member, and hedge fund manager, penned a long and thoughtful piece about the possibility of an impending apocalypse and how that might lead to financial bubbles. It was written in 2008 but I only came across it yesterday (on Hacker News). He calls it The Optimistic Thought Experiment. I you are an investor and haven't seen it before, I suggest you go read it in its entirety.

For those who would rather have the cliff notes, Peter's argument goes like this (Peter's words are in italics, mine are not):

Rapid advances in technology are nothing new; what is new in recent decades is rapid advances in the kinds of technology that require intellectual skills. This has increased the returns to people who have high IQs and good technical education. In addition, fulfilling Max Weber’s prediction that modernity would see ever more activities regulated by rational methods rather than by authority or personality, even low-tech activities, like management and marketing, have become ever more scientific, requiring a high level of intelligence.

High IQ and technical education are complements. But people who have modest IQs also benefit from education, as does society. Education even at its lowest levels helps to instill good work habits, respect for knowledge, simple communication and analytical skills, social skills, and civic values.

Every country, therefore, can benefit from having a good educational system, including pre-collegiate, collegiate, and postgraduate education. How to organize such a system and what the optimal level of resources to allocate to it is are of course difficult questions. There probably are diminishing returns to providing higher education, because IQ provides a ceiling beyond which educational effort is wasted on students. The United States may be in that position today. Many colleges offer what amounts to a remedial high school education, postponing the students’ entry into the work force. If we had better high schools, we might have fewer colleges (or more—if better high schools improved intellectual motivation and performance). With ever-increasing specialization of the workforce, there is an argument for making education increasingly vocational.

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

A growing number of people are looking for ways to green their current jobs or find careers in environmentally responsible sectors of the economy.The green economy is just beginning to unfold. The transition from business-as-usual to a new sustainable economy is opening up a wide range of opportunities that are …by Carol McClelland, PhD. By Carol McClelland, PhD. Make a good living in the emerging green economy The green economy is just beginning to unfold.

The EU's relative shortcomings on business research and development compared to the US can be explained by it having fewer and less R&D intensive young innovators, write Reinhilde Veugelers and Michele Cincera in an August policy brief for Brussels-based think-tank Bruegel.

The following extracts were taken from a commentary authored by Reinhilde Veugelers and Michele Cincera for Brussels-based think-tank Bruegel. 

"A common explanation for the EU's tame business R&D performance is its specialisation in medium-tech rather than high-tech sectors. Compared to the United States, the EU has fallen behind particularly in key information and communications technology (ICT) sectors, which were the drivers of US growth in the late 1990s.

So where are the jobs? And if they're nowhere to be found, how are economic developers supposed to do their jobs?

There's a lot of evidence these days that the economy is recovering from the big crash in 2008. The stock market is much stronger than it was back then, and the housing market seems to have bottomed out. Retail sales are still sluggish but appear to be creeping upward.

But jobs are another story. From a peak of 146 million jobs in 2007, employment in the United States has dropped to around 139.8 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- and has stubbornly remained at that level for the last 18 months, despite aggressive efforts by the Barack Obama administration to keep the economy afloat. In every previous recession over the past 50 years job growth has slowed to a halt, but it has never really gone down.

Sundown: Nighttime Timelapses of South West France from Jon Bryant on Vimeo.

The other day, I had the pleasure of hanging out with a new friend, Ramit Sethi, the author of New York Times bestselling book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich and founder of the wildly popular blog, IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com.

We were spinning on all sorts of topics, from personal finance to behavioral change, the psychology of persuasion, marketing, strategy, media, publishing. All common interests we’re both passionate about. It was a bit like a Vulcan mind meld.

As we wrapped up our convo, I was about to open my mouth to ask Ramit a very specific question. One I try to end every conversation with. And, mean it.

But, I was too slow.

A recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report on entrepreneurship training asks a central question for anyone interested in starting a business: “Does entrepreneurship education make a difference?”

You might think that this question has been resolved. After all, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation reports that more than 2,000 U.S. colleges and universities teach entrepreneurship. How could all those professors teach something that might not matter?

As surprising as it may sound, we don’t know the effect that entrepreneurship training has on start-up company success. Relatively little research has looked directly at the benefits provided by entrepreneurship education; and the results to date are far from conclusive.

The term “Valley of Death” has come to describe the period of transition when a developing technology is deemed promising, but too new to validate its commercial potential and thereby attract the capital necessary for its continued development1. During this transition, there is often a funding gap due to the weariness of risk-adverse investors. This is especially true today with the depressed market, creating limited exit strategies for early investors.

Drug discovery often begins in academic research labs; many of today’s best selling and leading edge products have their roots in academia. These include Byetta, Copaxone, Geldanamycin, Emtriva, Alimta, Taxol, and Rapamycin. But the process of translating a laboratory discovery into a drug is fraught with difficulties. There is a tremendous gap between the time of the original discovery and the time to market.

Seven EU countries and the European Parliament have told the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that the European Commission's plans for a single patent court are unacceptable, EurActiv has learned. The move leaves Europe deeply divided on an issue that goes to the heart of efforts to boost innovation and competitiveness.

Who do you think has more influence, Kim Kardashian or Martha Stewart? If you picked the jail-bird, you'd be wrong: homemaking expertise has nothing on bold badonkadonk. At least on Twitter.

According to a new analysis by social media guru Dan Zarrella (who previously helped us learn Steve Jobs' presentation techniques), the Kardashian sisters are some of the most influential celebrities on Twitter. By studying click-through rates--the amount of clicks a tweeted link receives--Zarrella was able to graph celebs' influence on their followers (see chart below). Some of the names are not so surprising (Ashton Kutcher), but others, including British actor Stephen Fry and poet laureate "Weird Al" Yankovic, may come as more of a shock.

Influence comes in many forms. The Kardashian sisters may gain more clicks because of the many provocative photographs they tweet. On the other hand, someone like Lance Armstrong may reach more fans because of his powerful message. And then there are those who have a perhaps more "nerdy" following, such as "Weird Al," Stephen Fry, and Felicia Day. "Felicia is probably high because she's a web star so her followers are more web savvy and likely to follow her links," Zarrella says.

It ain't gonna happen this year folks. The 111th Congress will be remembered for many things. Reauthorizing SBIR won't be among them.

But, don't worry, they won't let it die. No one wants to be accused of killing a small business program. So it'll be extended as is, with yet another Continuing Resolution, and the 112th will have to start over. With a clean slate. All unresolved legislation is trashed, ya' know.

Hit the Reset Button. It'll be a brand new game.

If the polls are even close to being accurate, there will be a lot of new faces in both the House and Senate. Many of these new legislators are likely to have never even heard of SBIR. So we must start over again with educating, persuading, persisting.

Bob Dylan once said that ‘money doesn’t talk, it swears’, but in Hargeisa the capital of Africa’s Somaliland it stinks. It literally stinks, reeking of rotten paper, like a leaky library in a monsoon.

That’s because there’s so much of it. For every dollar there are almost 17,000 Somaliland Shillings and the highest-denomination note is 500 Shillings, which is by no means the most common note in circulation. Money-changers sit within self-built stacks of money (picture left, video below) and children take wheelbarrows of it from one place to another, reminiscent of 1930s Weimar Germany when the Deutsch Mark became worthless.

By all criteria, cash doesn’t work here. Could tiny, unknown Somaliland become the first nation to become a cashless society? It is not only possible, it is almost certain. There is already a surprisingly strong base for this to happen. Thanks to a cobbled together-by-necessity system of money-transfer posts from Somaliland’s diaspora and a surging mobile banking industry, the country has to do away with cash. But first some background.

Starting your business is an exciting time – one that’s full of new beginnings and endless possibilities. As you focus on the big picture, it’s easy to ignore the minutiae of organizing your company. But those details matter – and ignoring them can be hazardous to your company’s health. In some cases, it can be fatal.

There are plenty of pitfalls startups can fall into, but here are five of the most common – and most dangerous:

Choosing the wrong entity – There are numerous corporate structures, including (but not limited to) sole proprietorships, partnerships, Limited Liability Corporation and C-Corporations.

Fisherman Wily Dean was trying to catch cow-nosed rays in Southern Maryland's Potomac River for a marine biologist this week, but he ended up netting an 8-foot-long bull shark. Unfortunately, the story doesn't have a happy ending for the shark. From NBC Washington:

"We had an interesting morning bringing it in," Dean said. "It was quite a fight."

Once the shark was captured, the next question was: What the heck do you do with it?

"I am probably going to have it mounted, maybe the head," Dean said. "Right now, the shark's in the freezer."