President Barack Obama says it. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), says it. University and research leaders elsewhere are saying it, too.  The number one current rationale for extra research investment is that it will generate badly needed economic growth.

“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said Obama, addressing the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC last year. Getting down to the details, Collins has recently cited a report by Families USA, a Washington DC-based health- advocacy group, which found that every US$1 spent by the NIH typically generates $2.21 in additional economic output within 12 months.

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The Australian government has announced that the country's largest energy supplier and retailer, EnergyAustralia, will lead a $100 million "Smart Grid, Smart City" project in the state of New South Wales that will begin later this year. The project will be a little bit of everything when it comes to smart grid, from substation automation and charging stations for electric vehicles to home area networks and time-of-use pricing.

The focus for this demonstration will not be world-renowned Sydney, but rather the small city of Newcastle, about 100 miles to the north. The consortium led by EnergyAustralia also includes IBM Australia, AGL, GE Energy, TransGrid, Newcastle City Council and the NSW Government.

Although Newcastle is the center point of the project, there will also be trials in Scone, downtown Sydney, Ku-ring-gai and Newington. There will be a total of 50,000 smart meters and about 15,000 homes that will be given in-home energy management systems to track electricity, water use and CO2 emissions.

The National Science Foundation has released the first data from its new Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS). Dr. Arden Bement, Director of NSF, and Dr. Thomas Mesenbourg, Deputy Director of the U.S. Census Bureau, announced the release via a webcast on May 26, 2010. Read more in the report, U.S. Businesses Report 2008 Worldwide R&D Expense of $330 Billion: Findings from New NSF Survey (NSF 10-322).

Fifteen teams of Babson College students and recent alums are spending ten intensive weeks of their summer vacation taking part in Babson’s Summer Venture Program to strategize, shape and accelerate their entrepreneurial businesses. Eighty-one teams applied to the program.

The program’s organizer, the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson, is providing open work space for the teams to develop their business projects, network, assist one another and share resources. Many of the students live in Babson dorms so they can work around the clock to refine their ventures.

By 2015, it's estimated there will be one trillion connected devices. People with pacemakers will be monitored by wireless systems. In the near future, automobiles will run on 64-bit, multi-core processors, running millions of lines of code.

It's a future that IBM believes will be increasingly dominated by a "system of systems," where software scales on devices that interconnect to create a convergence of mechanical, electronic, and digital technologies.

It's another example of how data is changing all aspects of how products are developed. It's also a grand view of our future that almost seems like science fiction.

(Media-Newswire.com) - Espoo, Finland - Nokia today published its 2009 Sustainability report. The report contains facts, figures and examples of sustainability initiatives and provides a new level of transparency regarding social and environmental responsibility.

"This report gives some great insights into the work Nokia does to enhance sustainability," says Esko Aho, EVP Corporate Relations and Responsibility. "We believe that mobile technologies can contribute to economic growth while offering considerable opportunities to address climate change and sustainability."

Highlights from 2009 include the honor of being ranked as "World Technology Supersector Leader" by the widely recognized Dow Jones Sustainability Index, positioning Nokia as number one in sustainability across the entire global technology sector on the basis of a detailed corporate sustainability analysis.

Whole Foods has the most Twitter followers but Starbucks’ huge Facebook audience makes it the highest-ranking brand on social media, according to a ratings study done by London-based Famecount, a media measurement service that aggregates popularity across social media channels.

No surprise that Coca-Cola is second, but Famecount ranks it well behind Starbucks. Whole Foods came in at No. 3, based almost entirely on its 1.7 million followers on Twitter.

In just five months, a new economic development initiative funded last year by the Florida Legislature and administered locally by the Economic Development Council (EDC) of Collier County is already reaping benefits by helping established Florida companies get the tools they need to succeed and grow new jobs.

Thanks to the leaders of this year’s legislative session, in both the Florida Senate and House, which voted to include additional funding, this program will continue to positively impact Florida’s existing businesses.

As a firsthand witness to the impact the Economic Gardening program has already made on our region’s growth-oriented businesses, I applaud our legislative leaders for recognizing the potential of this program to create thousands of jobs in Florida.

The GrowFL Technical Assistance Program was unveiled by the Florida Economic Gardening Institute (FEGI) and partners, including the EDC of Collier County, Florida Economic Development Council, Enterprise Florida, Workforce Florida, the Florida High Tech Corridor Council and others late last year as a statewide effort to cultivate what are known as “second-stage” growth companies. These are companies that have grown beyond the entrepreneurial stage to become successful, but which could use some additional assistance to reach the next stage in the business growth cycle.

The question of whether immigrants are more likely than people born in the United States to start high technology companies has been receiving a great deal of attention since Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar introduced the Start-up Visa Act bill in Congress.

To justify the need for this program, several authors have argued that immigrants are more likely to become high tech entrepreneurs than people born in the United States. For example, in his BusinessWeek column, Vivek Wadhwa wrote “I published a research report back in 2006 showing that over 50 percent of Silicon Valley engineering and technology startups were founded by immigrants (as were 25 percent of such startups nationwide), I concluded that immigrants were more likely to be entrepreneurs.”

Recently I took a look at what data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (which collects data on the entire U.S. labor force) show about the odds that immigrants and non-immigrants become the self-employed heads of incorporated businesses. (I focused on incorporated self-employment because it is a better representation of business formation than unincorporated self-employment.)

The economics for sustainable development is one of the fastest growing economic growth models. Often referred to as the green economy, this model integrates economics with culture, society and politics, emphasizes the importance of biodiversity and generally is based on the principle of renewable resources.

While the outer edges of what counts as the green economy are still forming, its philosophic antecedents extend more than two hundred years and include the works of such prominent economic thinkers as Kenneth Boulding and Karl Polanyi.

Today, the green economy model remains unconventional, which is responsible for the uncertainty of growth forecasts even though it already involves a substantial amount of consumer and industrial demand. The drivers of the green economy are among the critical growth elements of the economy as a whole and their value is steadily increasing. In addition to emerging green markets, these drivers include energy security, climate change and resource scarcity.

Hydropower is the world’s largest renewable source of power generation, accounting for around 20 per cent of global electricity supply, a new report said.

The world’s installed capacity of hydropower increased to 888.8GW in 2009 from 695.8GW in 2001, registering a compound annual growth rate of 3.1 per cent, new figures in Global Data’s Global Small Hydro Power Market Analysis and Forecasts to 2020 showed.

Cumulative additional installed capacity of small hydropower is expected to reach 140GW in 2015 and 201GW in 2020, it forecasted.

Annual installed capacity surged during 2004 mainly due to the rise in new installations in China. In addition, rising interest in the sector has led to increased government support policies which will derive installations in many countries.

At a time when online privacy concerns have forced Facebook and Google to back down, it might seem audacious to ask for 10,000 volunteers to allow the government to monitor every bit and byte of their home Web use. But that is exactly what the U.S. Federal Communications Commission did last week.

Anyone can volunteer for the program at its dedicated website. Selected participants will receive a box made by U.K. firm SamKnows that will monitor their Internet data consumption and connection uptime. The box will also perform hourly tests of connection performance, using dedicated servers to conduct speed tests and loading pages from common Web destinations to track latency, delay, failure rates, and the performance of the ISP's DNS servers, which convert each Web address into the IP address that locates a server. Users will be able to access detailed results from a box profiling their connection.

"We hope that by providing consumers more information on the nature of the service efforts like this new project might push the marketplace towards better performance," says FCC analyst John Horrigan.

You know what a clown car is, right? It’s a circus act where a very small car motors to the middle of the ring, its doors fly open, and out tumble dozens of clowns from a space seemingly no larger than a glove compartment.

My public presentations are often clown cars, I’m afraid, stuffed with with ideas, numbers, concepts, and clever quotes that stun the audience like a blow from a maul. I realized the error of my ways as I read Nick Morgan’s recent blog on why it’s so difficult to retain information given at a presentation.

Not only do presenters try to present too much, but the audience is easily distracted by that jerk’s ringing cell phone, the crazy typo on your title slide, and the smell of lunch being set up in the next room.

It's time for a roundup of the latest read/write devices that Internet of Things geeks are using to program our future. We're doing this in part because today IBM announced the free open-sourced Mote Runner Software Developer Kit. This super-simple software runs sensor-communications devices like the Crossbow Iris.

Arrayent, Arduino, Pachube, Logiboxx and Nabaztag are also examples of devices that do what Iris can do. From tracking objects, to objects communicating on our behalf, to objects that gather information about their surroundings for us, our awareness and activity-tracking technologies will soon create a Web with over a trillion nodes.

Yesterday’s Apple keynote was, I think more than ever, a testament to Steve Jobs’s presentation skills. Faced with an audience that had already seen the grand finale, he still had no trouble evoking plenty of gleeful gasps and applause. He even managed to make the now-infamous Wifi glitch amusing and entertaining (if a bit odd), rather than painfully awkward. But despite all of his showmanship and a very impressive new product, the keynote wasn’t quite the game changer that I expected. I don’t mean to say I found the iPhone 4 to be disappointing — it will be incredibly successful, and many of my friends are champing at the bit to get one. But I expected to walk out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center yesterday longing for the next iPhone despite my current allegiance to Android. That didn’t happen.

Last week, Patently Apple, a blog "celebrating Apple's spirit of innovation," noticed that Apple engineers, in 2008, had quietly filed a patent for a technology to embed solar cells under touch screens.

On Monday, CNET's Green Tech Blog reported on Patently Apple's discovery. In the opinion of the blog's editor, Martin LaMonica, the patent signifies that future iPhones and iPads could, with a little help from the sun, produce their own power. It does not, however, signify that we will all soon carry solar-powered mobile devices:

So, apparently, it's not quite time to get really excited about this.

Sorry for the tease.

Until now. The recent Harvard study, first published in April, doesn’t specifically focus on angel credits. But it does prove the value of angel investors to start-ups beyond mere money, something Lenczewski either failed to understand or simply did not want to understand.

Boy, if only this Harvard University business school study came out before February, when Minnesota Tax Committee Chair Rep. Ann Lenczewski argued, somewhat nonsensically, that direct grants to start-ups were superior than angel tax credits.

She even commissioned a much ridiculed report from the House Research Committee to back her claims.

Fortunately, common sense prevailed and Minnesota enacted a five year, nearly $60 million angel credit program. But Lenczewski was right about one thing: there has been little quantitative evidence to support angel credits.

For several years now, I have been keeping a close eye on Brazil and its entrepreneurial scene. From a business perspective, Brazil has been booming for several years, with massive increases in foreign investment and an increasing amount of attention from US- and Europe-based companies. Even though its economic performance may be somewhat less stellar than that of its BRIC-neighbors, it is clear that a potential market of 192 million inhabitants, abundant natural resources and a GDP-rate about double of the EU-average equal a very attractive value proposition for potential investors.

Following a conversation with Diego Remus, CEO of Startupi, one of Brazil’s leading startup blogs, I was surprised to learn that the Brazilian entrepreneurial scene does not seem to be seeing a lot of that investment – foreign business angels and venture capital firms seem reluctant to invest in Brazilian startups. According to a recent blog post, “In September 2009 Naspers Group, already present in Brazil, acquired nearly all of Grupo Buscapé. It had been a while since we’d seen an acquisition as notable as that one here. The whole world waited expectantly for more buys, which didn’t happen for a while but things are picking up again.”

In February, Portland, Oregon Mayor Sam Adams announced the city would put $500,000 towards a seed fund to help encourage regional startups. And on Friday of last week, the Portland Development Commission announced it had finally chosen the five local business leaders to help launch the fund, predicting it would be "open for business" by the fall.

Portland isn't the only city undertaking these sorts of early-stage investments. Last month, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his city was sponsoring an Entrepreneurial Fund, in a partnership with Firstmark Capital that had over $20 million earmarked to fund startups.