In the days after the Heartbleed story broke, Internet users were strongly advised to change the compromised passwords on their online accounts to protect their data.

For anyone who’s been a web user for a significant amount of time, the number of such accounts is high, unmanageable even: email (personal and work), LinkedIn, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, bank accounts, G+, Apple ID, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, news sites, Yahoo!… Hotmail? AIM? ICQ? Myspace? mIRC?

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The last few months have been critically important for the future of Internet freedom and access.

The concept of “network neutrality” has been so central to our experience of the Internet, and such a driving force for innovation and expression, that most of us have taken it for granted. This Op-Doc explains the basic idea: when you visit a website, the phone or cable company that provides Internet access shouldn’t get in the way. Information should be delivered to you quickly and without discriminating about the content.

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Happy 10th anniversary to the National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund! It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since I joined then-NIH Director Elias Zerhouni at the National Press Club to launch this trans-NIH effort to catalyze innovation and speed progress across many fields of biomedical research.

If you think you are the perfect fit for the entrepreneur lifestyle, but you’re not yet sure if you’re ready to start your own, then I recommend that you take a job with an existing startup first to validate the culture realities against your dream. Without risking all your life savings, you may find that corporate desk you have as an alternative is a lot more satisfying.

Innovation can be difficult to define, but it is even harder to measure. A project that is groundbreaking at one institution might be par for the course at another, larger school with expansive resources. Yet each year, the Campus Technology Innovators awards seek out the brightest examples of technology innovation in higher education. We consider each nominated project's scale, uniqueness and impact; what technologies were used and how; and what lessons might be learned by other institutions. We also enlist the assistance of our Innovators Judging Committee, which helps rank submissions in committee members' areas of expertise.

It isn’t quite the golden days of pre-recession financing. But small business lending has reached a post-recession high. That’s the unvarnished optimistic conclusion of the June 2014 Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index. The index is a monthly analysis of 1000 loan applications on Biz2Credit.com. The company says it connects 1.6 million small business owners with more than 1,300 lenders, credit rating agencies and service providers like CPAs and attorneys.

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The portion of first-time U.S. students who return to college for a second year has dropped 1.2 percentage points since 2009, according to a report that looks like bad news for the national college completion push. The findings are the latest from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The nonprofit group regularly releases studies based on the Clearinghouse’s data sets, which cover 96 percent of students nationwide.

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A cadre of venture capital firms could cash in from the wave of Bay Area biotech initial public offerings in the first half of the year. Stalwart VCs such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers of Menlo Park and Domain Associates are among the venture capital firms whose names pop up most often in the IPOs of local life sciences companies through June. Among the other VCs are DAG Ventures of Palo Alto and Essex Woodlands Health Ventures in Palo Alto.

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Twenty-eight venture-backed companies completed initial public offerings during the second quarter, raising $4.9 billion. That was a 45 percent increase in dollars raised compared to the previous quarter, according to an analysis by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. It was the fifth consecutive quarter of more than 20 IPOs at venture-backed companies.

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It was the height of the Gilded Age in 1889, and Andrew Carnegie, a pioneer in the steel industry, laid out why he would be donating the bulk of his wealth – an estimated $350 million (worth about $4.8 billion today).

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Invention and innovation are at the heart of our economy and our democratic society. They’re one of the drivers of the American Dream (flagging as it might be), catapulting lives, changing businesses and shaping our national image. America was founded on a certain brazenness and ingenuity. So we should be good at this, right? Innovation gets a lot of lip service, but success remains stubbornly out of reach for many among even our best and brightest companies.

In my recent speech titled “How SMEs Can Exploit New Digital Technologies To Invent Winning Business Models” at CommunicAsia 2014 in Singapore, I raised the prospect of SMEs around the world and across industries becoming collateral damage in the “Innovation Wars”, or to put it more mildly, “Global Innovation Rat Race”. SMEs are helplessly squeezed between tech start-ups and global corporations in this battle. The stakes are high because in this game, the winner takes all and the victor takes no prisoners.

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The conventional view of innovation is that it is something that just takes place idiosyncratically in “Silicon Valley garages” and R&D laboratories. But in fact, innovation in any nation is best understood as being embedded in a national innovation system (NIS). Just as innovation is more than science and technology, an innovation system is more than those elements directly related to the promotion of science and technology. Rather, it also includes all economic, political and other social institutions affecting innovation (e.g., a nation’s financial system; organization of private firms; the pre-university educational system; labor markets; culture, regulatory policies and institutions, etc.). Indeed, as Christopher Freeman defined it, a national innovation system is “the network of institutions in the public and private sectors whose activities and interactions initiate, import, modify and diffuse new technologies.”

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Has the shine worn off Bitcoin? The euphoria that greeted the cyber-currency last year, which drove prices from $13 to a high of more than $1,100, has given way to a more pragmatic view. Helping to cool down the fervor was the bankruptcy filing of Mt. Gox, once the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world. After getting hacked, the Tokyo-based firm lost a net 650,000 Bitcoins — worth $400 million at the market price of around $620 as of June 8, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index. Two other major exchanges, BitStamp and BTC-e, were hacked as well and had to temporarily suspend transactions.

Economic theories emanating from business schools do not usually draw 6,000-word takedowns in the popular press. But then, few ideas have permeated society as thoroughly as the notion of disruptive innovation. The theory describes the way a new product or service transforms an existing market — and eventually replaces and redefines the status quo — by bringing new simplicity, convenience and affordability. In a June 23 article in The New Yorker, Jill Lepore launched an attack on the soundness of the theory itself and the solidity of the scholarship behind it. She also decried the misappropriation of the concept across a variety of arenas beyond pure business.

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If you’re running a startup, participating in a startup accelerator can help quickly grow your company. But the best ones--like Y Combinator--are very difficult to get into. So how can you get the benefits of an accelerator without being accepted into their program?

To answer this question, we developed our own strategy to either make it into the world’s most competitive startup accelerator or replicate the results yourself.

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Can the key to getting more American women into tech jobs be in the hands of mayors across the country?

It’s an interesting proposition that Anita Garimella Andrews, vice president of client analytics services at RJMetrics recently uncovered when digging into the data surrounding the persistently low percentage of female tech workers. It turns out that in cities with a concentration of technology companies that also have female mayors, there’s more equality among tech workers.

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The very centers of urban cores in many major metropolitan areas are experiencing a resurgence of residential development, including new construction in volumes not seen for decades. There is a general impression, put forward by retro–urbanists (Note 1) and various press outlets that the urban core resurgence reflects a change in the living preferences of younger people – today's Millennials – who they claim are rejecting the suburban and exurban residential choices of their parents and grandparents.

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The Times, They Are A-Changin'

Last year, Paul Krugman aptly blamed our sprawling development patterns for Detroit's fiscal crisis, and in response to Krugman's piece, a blogger for the Streetsblog USA blamed our sprawling development patterns on our region's lack of political will to "change what needs to be changed". Last month, a controversialNew Yorker article about a certain sprawl-loving county executive seemed to affirm the blogger's point. 

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Alexandria-based venture capital firm Columbia Capital is planning a $425 million fund according to SEC filings reported in the Washington Business Journal. The firm invests in information technology, especially infrastructure, wireless spectrum and other related fields. It's done plenty of investing around D.C. in the quarter century since it was founded. Millennial Media, Broadsoft, Virtustream and Summit IG are all on the list of local companies invested in.

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