Since the housing crash of 2007, the decline of the Sun Belt and dispersed, low-density cities has been trumpeted by the national media and by pundits who believe America’s future lies in compact, crowded, mostly coastal and northern, cities. But apparently, most Americans have not gotten the memo — they seem to be accelerating their push into less dense regions of the Sun Belt.

An analysis of population data by demographer Wendell Cox, including the Census report for the most recent year released late last week, shows that since 2000, virtually all the 10 fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States are located in Sun Belt states. The population of the Raleigh, N.C., metropolitan statistical area has expanded a remarkable 47.8% since 2000, tops among the nation’s 52 metro areas with over 1 million residents. That is more than three times the overall 12.7% growth of those 52 metro areas.

Blink  . . .  and ten years pass by.  It’s now 2023.  A brand new generation of business and institutional leaders is taking the reins.  The world has continued to shrink and is much, much smaller.  Technology has continued an unabated, unchecked progression; what is now futuristic has become commonplace.  Complexity is the daily norm, and change the only constant.  Opportunities, problems and grand challenges abound.

Will this new generation of leaders be innovators, or followers?  Strong, resilient problem solvers, or servants of the status quo?  The answer has everything to do with education  . . . or how education is adapted to the realities and wonderful opportunities of the not-too-distant future.

A rich, but untapped trove of whale calls hides in decades of recordings collected by geologists surveying the ocean floor.

The recordings come from seismic studies that shoot powerful air guns underwater to jiggle the Earth and learn more about its makeup. Sensors listen to acoustic waves in the water before, during and after the shots, capturing the reflections from the ground. But they can also pick up songs from any passing marine life that chats on the same frequency — fin whales and blue whales, in this case.

Every day it seems like some new discovery is revealed ab0ut the microbial life on our bodies, in our bodies and around our homes. The tendency in writing about such studies is to make sweeping conclusions about what is and is not and, of course, how we should live and what we should do. But the truth is that these new studies are part of a big lunge science is making into a great darkness. The lights we are shining are revealing treasures and discoveries, but no one has a lens big enough to see the whole picture, not yet anyway. The temptation is to stand at the site of each new discovery and try to make the prediction about what is next. I’m going to do something else here. I’m going to try to predict not the next discovery but instead the next ten years. You can check back in ten years to tell me whether I was full of it. I probably am, but what fun is a blog if you can’t speculate a bit. For what it is worth, these wild ideas come largely from extrapolating what we know about ecology of non-human species in general and applying it to humans and the microbes around us. In other words, if humans obey the ecological regularities the last fifty years of ecology have revealed then it will be discovered that…

It’s one thing to be wrong on the merits of legislation; it’s another to be wrong on the facts. Regarding Robert Robb’s column in The Arizona Republic, “Tobin venturing into corporate welfare,” he is wrong on both.

Arizona has one of the best “angel” investor and research-and-development programs in the United States, resulting in hundreds of small high-tech firms residing here. These companies are inventing the next generation of cancer drugs, military hardware, computer chips and software. Companies like these are heavily investing in high-paying jobs, which generate other tangential industries.

The Georgia State Senate voted 49-3 earlier this month to approve a $100-million venture capital fund to invest alongside private investors in that state’s emerging companies.

In Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper — an entrepreneur and former mayor of Denver — announced two weeks ago that his state is forming a $150 million venture capital fund with public seed dollars and a hefty private match.

One of the most important things you’ll do when starting your business is to pick where to setup shop. You want to find a place that offers business resources but also the lifestyle and culture that you want. The below list breaks down 30 cities across the United States into three different categories based on the population of the cities. Then Under30CEO readers were asked to vote on the locations they thought were the best places for a new company to open shop based on local resources, culture, atmosphere and overall appeal to a young twenty-something. Did your city make the cut?

WiSeed is a French equity-based crowdfunding site that funds innovative startups. The platform, which launched in 2009, allows users to invest as little as €100 ($130) in return for a company’s shares.

At the end of last year, WiSeed announced that the crowdfunding raise for a company called Antabio resulted in a profitable exit for the crowd investors. We spoke with WiSeed co-founders Thierry Merquiol and Nicolas Seres to find out more about the funding round and about the regulatory landscape in France.

Antabio is a French drug discovery company that relies on fundraising to keep its operations going, as it lacks a “fee for service” arm. In 2010, the company’s leadership team decided to raise a seed funding round to the tune of €300,000 ($390,000). Antabio tried raising funds from angels and VCs, but they deemed the startup to be too risky. Seeing few other options, Antabio's founders decided to try out crowdfunding.

At the 2007 EG Conference for youth and young adults, Kevin Kelly told the audience that 10 years ago no one would have believed the Internet was coming, least of all him.

If someone told us that we would all be connected and have access to literally all of the world’s information, we would have said that it was impossible. What I’m here to say today is that education is being transformed by technology. The future is here, but educators and deans, the ones who hold the gauntlet, are choosing not to believe it.

I continue to see stories of really young entrepreneurs, like this article on Business Insider, with pre-teens as young as 9 years old who make millions more than their parents. This makes me wonder what starts that entrepreneurial drive in kids, and how early parents and schools should start teaching the basics.

There are already a couple of good books out there for youth entrepreneurs, such as one from my friends Adam and Matthew Toren, Kidpreneurs: Young Entrepreneurs with Big Ideas. They assert, "It's never too early! Even children can be introduced to basic business principles and the rewards of entrepreneurship”. Another one is The Little Entrepreneur by Michael H. and Jay Arrington.

TECHBELT REGION - PITTSBURGH, PA (February 20, 2013) The TechBelt Initiative, a network of technology and innovation stakeholders collaborating to accelerate economic growth within the Northeast Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, and Northern West Virginia region, has recieved $5,000 from the Raymond John Wean Foundation, $25,000 in grant funding from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, as well as $100,000 in funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. This support will enable the TechBelt to organize collaborative economic development activities and to identify new opportunities to attract investment to maintain the momentum of growth in the TechBelt region. 

Indonesia is awesome. Its capital city of Jakarta is one of the biggest social media users in the world. And a McKinsey report believes that the country is on track to becoming the world’s seventh biggest economy by 2030, placing it ahead of currently more developed countries like the UK and Germany.

Indonesia is also the third biggest democratic country, and it has held smooth presidential and parliamentary elections too. While many would prefer to make their living in a more developed country, maybe like the US or Australia, you should seriously consider building your business here in Indonesia.

Many entrepreneurs seems to be convinced that the “crowd” of regular people using the Internet will somehow solve their startup funding needs, when they sense a lack of interest from accredited investors. Professionals maintain that there is plenty of money for equity in qualified startups, and funding marginal startups via any source will only make more people unhappy.

Well-known crowd-funding platforms on the Internet, led by Kickstarter and Indiegogo, have worked for years to provide non-equity “funding” for many startups, as outlined in my previous article Will the Real Crowd Funding Model Please Stand Up?. But safely seeking equity investments from the crowd via the Jobs Act of 2012 is problematic and has still not been defined.

Project Glass is a perfect example of what Google calls “moonshot thinking” – the type of thinking required to take on global-scale problems, define radical solutions to those problems, and succeed in solving those problems through the development of breakthrough technology.

For Google, Glass is a device that could potentially change the way we search, the way we share and the way we interact with the world around us. Make no mistake, Project Glass is extremely ambitious which is part of the reason that it is so exciting. And if Glass succeeds, it could change the way the world sees Google. And no one should be more worried about this than Apple.

When it comes to employee benefits, small businesses have a tough time competing.

Big corporations have the luxury of dangling premium benefit packages to snag top talent, while smaller companies have to make do with low budget programs that don’t come with nearly as many perks.

This makes finding quality employees much harder.

The good news is, today’s employees aren’t necessarily looking for corporate level health and retirement packages. There are other ways to make your company a great place to work.

A new crowdfunding platform aimed solely at local sporting clubs has highlighted the growth of niche crowdfunding websites, suggesting there are opportunities for other start-ups to specialise.   Sportaroo, which has a team of six based in Australia and the United Kingdom, allows sports teams to raise funds for team projects by offering merchandise, experiences and sponsorship.   According to Sportaroo spokesperson Jim May, it’s been an exciting few weeks.

Established in 2002, OIP-ISR’s internship program has evolved to offer two different tracks for current and recently-graduated students and Post-docs interested in exploring technology transfer or intellectual property management as a career path: the Technology Transfer Internship and Technology Fellows Program. Both programs are available year-round.

Benefits of the OIP-ISR Internship Program

Internships at OIP-ISR represent an opportunity for UCLA students and Post-docs to gain exposure to the business of university technology transfer and intellectual property management. Interns will have the opportunity to interface with UCLA inventors and OIP-ISR staff. In addition, interns may attend meetings with prospective licensees, investors, and visiting law firms, and will have exclusive access to an internal OIP seminar series.

Imagine a skyscraper that floats. Or one that slowly rebuilds the polar ice caps. These concept towers all find bizarre ways to house everyone who is moving to cities--but they’re a lot more than just places to live. 

As the world’s population moves into cities in the coming decades, tall buildings will become ever more important. Each year, eVolo Magazine challenges architects to predict what that skyscraper-filled future will look like. Since its launch in 2006, the Skyscraper Competition has attracted over 5,000 entries.

Every year, my organization sponsors an awards ceremony that highlights creative applications of technology that create jobs, attract capital and generate long-term economic impact. One of this year’s recipients sells a revolutionary way of testing for heart disease; another turns waste into electricity or fuel; and yet another makes superabsorbent nanofibers that help wounds heal better.

These technologies are vastly unique. What they have in common is that they were driven by passionate innovators who had the courage to pursue their ideas despite uncertainty for success. Such innovators have made America the world’s leader in the development of technologies. We honor them because it’s important that as a country we never lose that drive for innovation.

Every startup and every big business wishes that all their employees were star performers, but wishing doesn’t make it happen. Some coaches and leaders seem to have the magic for bringing out the best in everyone. Research has shown that it isn’t magic, but a focus on engaging people in their work, so that their work triggers the same emotions as play does for you.

Some of you cynics may think that such a thing isn’t possible, but Shawn Kent Hayashi, who has worked for years with entrepreneurs, as well as Fortune 500 giants, argues otherwise. In “Conversations for Creating Star Performers,” she offers examples and ten strategies to leverage conversations into game-changing moments for team members and your company: