What’s likely to be the “next big thing?” What might be the most fertile areas for innovation? Where should countries and companies invest their limited research funds? What technology areas are a company’s competitors pursuing?

To help answer those questions, researchers, policy-makers and R&D directors study patent maps, which provide a visual representation of where universities, companies and other organizations are protecting intellectual property produced by their research. But finding real trends in these maps can be difficult because categories with large numbers of patents — pharmaceuticals, for instance — are usually treated the same as areas with few patents.

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Friday marks exactly three decades since Steve Jobs launched the Apple Macintosh, two days after the now-iconic 1984 commercial teased the computer to the world during Super Bowl XVIII.

Three decades and hundreds of Macs later, Apple is not only still cranking out innovative machines in personal computing, but has outlasted many of its original competitors.

SEE ALSO: 8 Vintage Mac Reviews That'll Make You Appreciate Modern Tech

“Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they’re all gone,” Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing Philip Schiller told Macworld. “We’re the only one left. We’re still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over.”

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On this day thirty years ago, Steve Jobs presented the new Macintosh to a roomful of Apple investors.

Apple’s computer would go on to put the power of technology in everyone’s hands, all the while changing the face of personal computing for decades to come, upending whole industries, challenging the status quo and eventually leading to the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Image: http://www.apple.com 

Forward-looking startups will have a chance at $50 million later this year when Singularity University, an education center and accelerator based at Mountain View’s NASA Ames Research Center, launches its first venture fund.

The university will begin raising capital during the second quarter of 2014, according to managing director of new venture development Sandy Miller. The fund will focus on companies launched by SU students, alumni and faculty.

Image: Signe Brewster 

Starting a new business is an exciting process.  It’s easy to get carried away with your ideas and overlook some of the boring stuff, like legal agreements.  But, making legal mistakes can set you back significantly down the road and reduce your chances of success.  For that reason, it’s important to avoid making legal mistakes at all costs.

Here are the top 5 legal mistakes made by startups, and an explanation of how to avoid them.

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The Cyclodrone will fly in front of and behind cyclists to warn them of upcoming danger and help alert drivers. Maybe a drone-filled future isn't so bad after all.

Someday in the not-too-distant future, you might take a bike ride with a couple of drones--one flying in front, one in back--to protect you from nearby cars. As you ride around tight corners, the “Cyclodrone” will shine a beacon of light to warn drivers that you’re there, hosting a tiny camera to record any accidents.

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The world's best surfers are gearing up for Mavericks International, an elite surf competition that pits big-wave riders against the monster swells at a Northern California Beach.

The competition happens every year in the winter at Pillar Point in Half Moon Bay, Calif., at a time when the waves and weather align. When the forecast looks good, surfers have just 48-hours to make it to the competition.

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I have been talking with Dr. Brad Stuart on the topic of innovation in health care.  This is the third installment in that series. Our topic in this conversation is “accountable care” and the implications this movement has for cost control, for quality of care, and for fostering innovation.  In the first part of this series, here, I set up the health care issue as one that is as much about paradigms and conversations as it is about medicine.  In the second, here, I talked with Dr. Stuart about what he sees as some of the more critical high-level challenges in health care and his views about what we as a country should focus on as we continue our work to improve health care delivery.

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Tech-industry executives say they have an extremely difficult time finding technical talent and that this shortage  hurts their company’s performance. They claim to look far and wide, including abroad, yet they overlook the lowest-hanging fruit: women and minorities. The percentage of women in engineering jobs is so embarrassingly low—in the single digits or low teens—that many tech companies refuse to release diversity data. Their excuse is that the pipeline of women studying engineering is shrinking.

Will China achieve technological dominance over the United States, surpassing us in scientific and engineering innovation?

A lot of people seem to think so. China’s recent landing of an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon, its advances in renewable energies and high-speed rail, its increasing number of patent filings and its vast spending on research and development have contributed to a perception — held across much of the world, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted last summer — that China is poised to overtake America as the world’s leading power, if it hasn’t already done so.

Image: Dan Stafford 

Pause for a moment.  And ask yourself some simple questions you probably don’t think about every day.  Why do we build companies?  Why do we innovate?  Why do we care about creating new inventions, products, and solutions, when we could simply leave things as they are?

These are questions that I think a lot about.  On the surface, the answers might seem deceptively easy.  For instance, some people want to make money.  Others like the thrill of the hunt, like a form of legalized gambling.  And others like the independence, the freedom.

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Sensors and apps designed for seniors and their caretakers may be able to detect when falls occur, but Dr. Yonatan Manor wanted to take that a step further.

He assembled a team of doctors and engineers to prototype a smart shoe that they think might be able to prevent falls when they’re about to occur.

Image: http://medcitynews.com 

Open borders brought Andrew Carnegie and Andy Grove to the U.S. They also brought Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, a slew of German theoretical physicists to work on the Manhattan Project, and countless investors and entrepreneurs, including me.

Immigrants to the U.S. have been transforming the industrial geography and the technology landscape since the 1860s when Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie launched Keystone Bridge Company, which became the cornerstone of his mammoth steel empire. A century later, Palestinian-born Jesse Aweida launched Storage Technology in Colorado, spawning an ecosystem of storage companies in the region. Shanghai-born An Wang turned a $600 investment into Wang Laboratories in Boston in 1951, and nearly five decades later Russian-born Sergey Brin co-founded Google.

The Intelligent Community Forum has announced the 2014 Top7 Intelligent Communities of the Year. The Top7 list includes three from Canada, two from the United States, and two from Taiwan. "This year's Top7 group is unusual in that they represent only three nations. However, they collectively are a canvas that represents our movement. Each made it to the list by demonstrating how they have begun to fuse technology, culture and collaboration for economic sustainability. They have set a new course for other cities to follow. We look forward to welcoming them to New York in June for the selection of the Intelligent Community of the Year," said Lou Zacharilla, Intelligent Community Forum co-founder as he announced the Top7 at a conference hosted in Taichung City, Taiwan, the 2013 Intelligent Community of the Year.

Love it or hate it, your success this year and beyond depends on your ability to shape a brand: your career’s, product’s, department’s, or company’s.

Here are some counterintuitive lessons from a man who built a popular snowboarding brand as a college sophomore, knowing little about his industry, marketing, or business. Shaun Neff, founder and CEO of Neff Headwear, now has his products in 3,500 stores in 40 countries, and his gear is sported on ski slopes and streets, by celebrities from Holly Madison to Lil’ Wayne.

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What do you get when you cross your grandmother’s advice with the latest research in neuroscience?

According to Eric J. McNulty, this unlikely intersection holds the key to being a good leader. As the director of research at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, McNulty is often asked to recommend the latest and greatest reads on leadership. What he’s discovered is that books on brain science serve up sage insights more often than the traditional title penned from the corner office. He’s also observed that scientific research on the brain reveals what his grandma knew all along.

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A group of researchers at MIT have developed a proof of concept transparent display that portends a future of clear displays that are inexpensive to make and easy to acquire.

The team said that some of the limitations of current transparent technologies include the inability to see projected images from more than one specific angle as well as the complexity and expense of glass equipped with built-in electronics.

Image: http://hothardware.com 

What sorts of trait information do people most care about when forming impressions of others? Recent research in social cognition suggests that “warmth,” broadly construed, should be of prime importance in impression formation. Yet, some prior research suggests that information about others’ specifically moral traits—their moral “character”—may be a primary dimension. Although warmth and character have sometimes been conceived of as interchangeable, we argue that they are separable, and that across a wide variety of contexts, character is usually more important than warmth in impression formation. We first showed that moral character and social warmth traits are indeed separable (Studies 1 and 2). Further studies that used correlational and experimental methods showed that, as predicted, in most contexts, moral character information is more important in impression formation than is warmth information (Studies 2–6). Character information was also more important than warmth information with respect to judgments of traits’ perceived fundamentalness to identity, their uniquely human quality, their context-independence, and their controllability (Study 2). Finally, Study 7 used an archival method to show that moral character information appears more prominently than warmth information in obituaries, and more strongly determines the impressions people form of the individuals described in those obituaries. We discuss implications for current theories of person perception and social cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

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Earlier this month, Google made headlines by acquiring Nest Labs, the connected home startup, for $3.2 billion in cash. Although Nest has received significant fanfare for its smart products, some have argued that the price is a very generous premium for a small company that only a year ago was valued at $800 million. But, perhaps more importantly, why would Google — given its track record of market successes, strong design and engineering talent, and unique brand reputation — choose to buy its way into the Internet of Things (IoT)?

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Hub Launchpad has started its Accelerator programme – which is focusing on public services – under its contract with the Cabinet Office for social enterprises, with a pre-accelerator 16-week programme (dubbed ‘Scholarship’). A hundred and twenty people were selected (out of around 250 applicants) – to meet about once a week, to discuss their personal missions around public services, to hear lectures and make visits, to share ideas – about possible objectives, to form teams, and to talk about possible learning journeys.

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