Over the past year, the number of patients visiting Sharwan Kumar, a 33-year-old rural health practitioner in village Neem Taal Khusrupur in the North Indian state of Bihar, has almost doubled. Kumar holds diplomas in acupressure, acupuncture and naturopathy. There is no qualified doctor in his village, and Patna Medical College, the nearest hospital, is almost 35 kilometers away. When Kumar got an opportunity to start a SkyHealth center as a franchisee of World Health Partners (WHP), a New Delhi-based non-profit, he decided to take it. “For a villager, however much he may want to, it is next-to-impossible to consult a doctor in the city. Technology has now made it possible. I took up the WHP franchisee because I was sure it would work,” says Kumar.

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One Monday morning two years ago, Wharton marketing professor Cassie Mogilner and then-Wharton PhD candidate Amit Bhattacharjee were discussing what they did during the past weekend. Mogilner talked about her fabulous and productive weekend getting things done around the house and enjoying a Sunday brunch with her husband. Bhattacharjee then described his weekend, one filled with excitement and travel.

In the annals of product launches, the advent of 3-D TV won’t go down as a high point in consumer love at first sight. The product first drew hype, then modest sales. But after five years on the market, the format has stalled. One mass-market manufacturer, Vizio, announced with the new year that it has pressed the pause button on 3-D. Major content providers ESPN and the BBC have discontinued 3-D TV program development.

Scientists have found a new way of creating stem cells, which are cells that have the ability to turn into any type of tissue, using mouse cells. If the method works for human cells, it could ultimately be used to create tissue for people who need organ transplants, and to study diseases such as cancer.

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About 88 percent of Silicon Valley chief technology officers plan to add to their IT staffs during the first half of 2014, new survey data show. That hiring forecast reflects a 10 percent increase from the last six months of 2013, according to the new report by Robert Half Technology.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com - Robert Half Technology - A new survey of 100 San Francisco Bay Area chief information officers (CIOs) reveals that 88 percent of the company tech gurus are looking to hire during 2014. 

Researchers at the University of Wollongong and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) have developed the BioPen, a tool that allows surgeons to repair injured bones and joints by laying down customized implants during surgery with high precision and ease.

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These new offices of 2013 are the foundations for dreams. If you’re someone whose work environment dictates their productivity, these offices will put you into overdrive.

GitHub

"The front waiting area of GitHub’s new headquarters in San Francisco conveys a sense of quiet strength superpower, in fact as it is an actual replica of the White House Oval Office.

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In 2009, Farhan Thawar joined mobile development firm Xtreme Labs as VP of Engineering. At the time, it handled accounts for some of the biggest brands in the world — a roster including the largest social networks and popular sports organizations. And they all had one thing in common: They all sensed the urgency to break into mobile in a big way.

This trend has borne itself out. Facebook reported last year that 78% of its daily users in the U.S. access the site from their phones. For Twitter, the figure is 75%, with mobile representing 65% of its ad revenues.

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I remember seeing an episode of Desperate Housewives during the show’s first season called Running to Stand Still. In the episode, Lynette, working mom of many, takes her kid’s ADD medicine in order to be supermom and create costumes for the school play while balancing all of her other tasks. It was a classic self-prescribed “off label use” for a drug intended for a serious medical condition but used instead to improve a desired skill to improve performance.

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In 2009, I applied to the Venture Initiation Program (VIP) at the University of Pennsylvania. I was a graduate student in the physics department, with a half-baked prototype of a radiation analysis software package. I considered our product a home run in the making, and figured we’d exit within 6 months.

Our product, grayCAD, helps physicists working in a hospital’s radiation oncology department ensure that they were complying with radiation safety regulations. We had spent all of our time thinking of features that would make the software useful, like color-coded heat maps showing problem areas on architectural drawings. Any time not spent building features (which wasn’t much) was spent making contact with executives at companies that sold medical radiation sources. We had some positive feedback, but no one knocking down our door to write a check.

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China's venture capital fundraising totaled $1.97 billion in 2013, only half the amount raised during 2012, according to a report released by Dow Jones & Company.

Venture-backed IPOs also experienced massive declines. A total of 15 venture firm-backed IPOs were completed in 2013, a drop of 67% from 2012 and 85% fewer than in 2011.

2013 saw the fewest Chinese venture firm-backed IPOs since 2008 when just 12 were completed.

Daniel Kahneman has claimed the following as his favorite equation:

Success = talent + luck

Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

Kahneman’s implication is that the difference between moderate and great success is mostly luck, not skill. Chance plays a much greater role in our careers than we might wish or even realize. Most of us can live with the upside of this observation: we tend to claim credit for good luck anyway. But the downside — the thought of our careers as the playthings of fate — is almost unbearable. Fortunately, we can make decisions that help minimize the influence of bad luck on our lives.

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The things we put into our bodies have a gigantic effect on the way that we feel. While it's obvious that a salad for lunch will give us more energy in the afternoon than a plate of cheese fries, there's a whole range of consumables--via eating, drinking, or otherwise--that can boost your alertness, awareness, and productivity.

Some of these things you're probably already doing, like drinking tea. Some of these things you're not getting enough of, like sunshine. Some of these things you didn't expect.

MACH37™, the new cybersecurity accelerator at the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), is announcing that beginning with the start of its upcoming cohort in March that participating companies will receive a $50,000 investment in conjunction with accelerator services. This investment doubles the previous amount of $25,000. Rick Gordon, MACH37™ Managing Partner, said, “This additional financial investment will not only help Mach37 entrepreneurs attract complementary team members, but also will provide them with additional resources necessary to expand target market validation and further accelerate technology development.”

Primary care physicians' adoption of electronic health records increased significantly  between 2009 and 2012, but there continues to be a "digital divide" between large and small physician practices, according to a new study by the Commonwealth Fund, FierceHealthIT reports.

Study Findings

The study found that EHR adoption by primary care physicians increased from 46% in 2009 to 69% in 2012 (Hall, FierceHealthIT, 1/26).

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LOS ANGELES-Real estate crowdfunding websites are plentiful, and with the SEC’s recent lifting of the ban on general solicitation of funds, potential investors and real estate operators may find themselves inundated with pleas for their business from these platforms. GlobeSt.com spoke with David Manshoory, CEO and founder of Asset Avenue, who gave us these five questions to ask when evaluating crowdfunding sites, from the perspective of both real estate operators trying to raise funds for a project and the investors looking for deals.

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Dragon Innovation, a Massachusetts company that consults with hardware startups, built a crowdfunding site last fall to help aspiring gadget makers fund their projects. In exchange for its $5,000 upfront fee and a 5 percent cut of the funding, Dragon promises lots of hand-holding to help entrepreneurs succeed in the difficult business of manufacturing complex electronics. Now Dragon is pitching another enticement: It will offer any project that raises at least $1 million from supporters another $100,000 in seed investment.

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Palestine’s first startup accelerator, Fast Forward, announced its second class on January 20th. The new group of startups focuses on tech-based solutions to a variety of issues, ranging from digital music distribution to bringing the cash economy into the digital age.  

Four teams were selected from a pool of 75 applicants in a rigorous, two-phase application process. They are now embarking on an intensive, four-month long acceleration that aims to bring the nascent businesses to market readiness.

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Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and The Commonwealth Fund have concluded that electronic health record systems and other digital tools are likely to curb the demand for physicians in the future.

Based on their analysis of recent trends in digital health care and a review of the scientific literature, the authors conclude that patients’ future use of physician services will change dramatically as electronic health records and consumer e-health “apps” proliferate. The findings appear in the issue of the journal Health Affairs.

Image: http://www.healthcareitnews.com - Jonathan Weiner, professor of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins 

A recent study from the Brookings Institution University Start-Ups: Critical for Improving Technology Transfer received a lot of coverage in the national media.  While the title implies the focus is on expanding academic start-up formation (a laudable goal), The New York Times headline accurately reflects the real message: Patenting Their Discoveries Does Not Pay Off for Most Universities.

The report makes some good recommendations for increasing support for start-up formation, but implies that most university technology transfer offices (TTO’s) are not worth their cost because they are not self-supporting through patent licensing income.  As Brookings acknowledges, universities spend the vast majority of their licensing revenues rewarding inventors or funding new research, not in supporting technology transfer operations.  Brookings recommends that universities shift focus from patent licensing to start-up formation.