IBM has made its Watson cognitive computing technology available as a cloud-based app development platform, and healthcare vendors are already getting in on the act.

Company officials they hope to encourage new uses of the fast-evolving technology and spur a slew of innovative apps. In this new marketplace, they say, developers of all sizes and industries can access resources – developer toolkits, educational materials and access to Watson's application programming interface – for developing Watson-powered technology of their own.

Image Courtesy of watcharakun / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

MEF, the global community for mobile content and commerce, recently held a conference in Silicon Valley that focused on innovation, monetisation and growth. At the heart of the tech universe, emerging market entrepreneurs connected and networked, hoping to soak up some of the success secrets this place holds. For tech entrepreneurs Silicon Valley is hallowed ground. It’s where you come to pay homage to great companies, tech giants started from harebrained ideas. This is the home of Google, Yahoo, eBay, Apple and so many more. It’s hard not to be beguiled by what the place has to offer, between Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Cupertino. Everyone wants to walk down Hacker Way or at least build their own, or something close to it.

Image Courtesy of pakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The wisdom of collectives is prolific and ubiquitous in the world of open innovation, where crowds are tapped to surface and solve problems, discover opportunities, create new products and design creative experiences. Most people don’t realize, however, that crowdsourcing, as a technique, has been around much longer than our current digital history

Image Courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

More efficacious malaria vaccines and those that could eliminate the disease in different settings should be available by 2030, according to the 2013 Malaria Vaccine Technology Roadmap, announced today in The Lancet.

The roadmap has been endorsed by the WHO and is expected to act as a blueprint for development of malaria vaccines, and it will be launched today at the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene’s annual conference in Washington DC.

Image Courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A patient with abdominal pain dies from a ruptured appendix after a doctor fails to do a complete physical exam. A biopsy comes back positive for prostate cancer, but no one follows up when the lab result gets misplaced. A child’s fever and rash are diagnosed as a viral illness, but they turn out to be a much more serious case of bacterial meningitis.

Image Courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Download the PDF

After lingering in its birthing bay for nearly six months, an Antarctic iceberg the size of Singapore is finally heading out to sea.

Strong winds blowing off the continent are pushing the giant floe away from its parent, the giant Pine Island Glacier, and the warming Southern Hemisphere's has melted the thick winter sea ice that held the block in place since July, said Grant Bigg, an ocean modeler at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The latest satellite images show several kilometers (a couple of miles) of open water between the iceberg and the glacier, Bigg told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Image: NASA Modis

Gwynn Guilford reports in Quartz that while China plans to become “an ‘innovation-oriented nation’ by 2020″ and “a ‘world science and technology power’ by around 2050,” engineers have already been producing “world-class patents” to the benefit of foreign companies:

“Our study suggests that the increase in U.S. patents in [China] are to a great extent driven by [multinational companies] from advanced economies and are highly dependent on collaborations with inventors in those advanced economies,” says the report’s authors

Image Courtesy of KEKO64 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began developing the algorithm behind the Google search engine in the mid-1990s in a Stanford dorm room. The university earned $337 million from licensing the search algorithm to Google and bragging rights for its affiliation with yet another high-tech home run.

Rick Stafford, inventor, outdoorsman and former oil-field worker on Alaska's North Slope--the kind of guy "who will take three hours to build a tool to turn a two-hour job into 30 minutes."

"Aha" moment: An avid snowmobiler (or, as they call them in the 49th state, snowmachiner), Stafford wished to create an easy-to-pack means to walk away from vehicles that break down in deep snow. He was inspired, he says, by two people who were stranded less than a mile from a lodge "but couldn't walk in the chest-deep snow, and ended up spending the night out there under a tree. They were found the next day by a rescue group and helicoptered to Anchorage suffering from hypothermia and frostbite. It was time to do something about that." Airlite inflatable snowshoes were born.

Image: www.entrepreneur.com

According to a MoneyTree report by a special partnership between PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, venture capitalists had shifted its sight from making expansion-stage investments to placing seed investments. The report was based on data compiled by Thomson Reuters, who is also the publisher of Venture Capital Journal.

Innovation has become the buzzword of the decade in the worlds of business and education. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, Fortune 500 companies, universities, and local school systems all agree that it is the key to the future. Like Miss America contestants wanting world peace, the term “innovation” has become the canned response of executives, politicians, and educators to the question, “What do we need to be successful?”

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Perhaps because I have a sales/marketing/product background, or perhaps because sales/marketing/product development are such a focus of conversation when you hang around with entrepreneurs, I am often asked what business book I would most recommend on these topics.

Mark Cuban’s comments about personalized health may have turned a few heads but as one source soberly reminded us, he is not the first or the only billionaire investor in healthcare. Not by a long shot. Several people who have nine zeroes in their net worth have invested in the space. They’re motivated by emerging mobile health technology to help reduce healthcare costs and see it as playing a critical role in the future of healthcare technology. There are also philanthropic considerations to increase access to healthcare in underserved populations.

Elementary school students in Finland could be adding coding and programming to their nightly homework routine in the near future.

Potentially following in the footsteps of neighboring country Estonia, Alexander Stubb — the Finnish Minister of European Affairs and Foreign Trade — told Mashable that teaching basic programming skills to young kids in the classroom is on the country's radar.

Image Courtesy of Naypong / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti might be the most tech-focused mayor in America. His family car is a hybrid, he’s a self-taught coder, and the 42-year-old native Angeleno even developed his own smartphone app, which lets residents submit municipal requests for graffiti removal and pot hole repair directly to city hall.

Image: mashable.com

It looks like a trashbag coming out of a finely patterned neck pillow. But if you find yourself colliding with a car while on your bike, it could actually save your life.

Meet Hövding, the invisible bike helmet. It's a real, actual thing. But it won't be so easy for it to come to market in the United States.

Here's a three-minute documentary about the Swedish helmet and its founders:

Image: mashable.com

While Wisconsin continues to lag in the creation of net new companies, directions in sectors that are sources of young, high-growth companies promise to help over time. Here are 10 trends shaping the future of Wisconsin's tech-based economy:

Interim CEO John Chen says BlackBerry isn’t dwelling on the past, but looking to the future . Unfortunately for the languishing smartphone maker, some of its big clients are doing the same, even in spite of Blackberry’s new products.

Image Courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

University Research Park and the MG&E Innovation Center on its campus were cited yesterday, November 15, by Forbes Magazine as among the top breeding grounds for compelling high-tech startups.

Image: Jeff Miller