All cars are filled hundreds of sensors, measuring everything from tire pressure to brake pad condition. Right now, though, you’re only aware of those sensors if something goes wrong and the car wants to notify you. That’s starting to change. Since 2010, the USC School of Cinematic Arts and BMW have been working on Nigel, a Mini Cooper outfitted with 230 sensors that creates a log of everything that happens in the vehicle, letting users see it all via an iPhone and iPad app. Now USC’s Center For Body Computing is getting in on the Nigel project, looking at how the car could be used to monitor driver health as well as vehicle health.

Nigel’s beginnings can be traced back to the Million Story Building, a project consisting of an iPhone app that let inhabitants of the School of Cinematic Arts building engage with the structure by tapping into its huge sensor network and displaying the information from within on the app. The idea: to figure out how the building could tell a story using data from sensors.

In a year that has seen tech accelerator DreamIt Ventures expand to Israel and Austin, Texas, it may not be surprising that it’s raising a $50 million venture fund.

So far it has raised about $1.5 million, according to a Form D filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The accelerator is using the money to make follow-on investments in some of the 80 companies that have graduated from its programs since its launch in 2008. Startups accepted into its programs can get up to $25,000 in funding in exchange for a 6 percent stake in their companies.

A replacement for needles was being searched since long and as per a recent report, a group of researchers at the University of Queensland is finally a step closer to such a development.

It has been found that the group has signed a deal with Merck, which is an international vaccine manufacturer. The same legalizes the manufacture of a painless skin patch, which has been dubbed as Nanopatch.

Picture yourself walking into your dream job. What logo is on the door? Whether it’s a hot tech start-up or a prestigious global accounting firm, some employers are more desirable than others. For companies, this affects how easily they can recruit, and for employees it’s tied to your professional reputation. Using our massive professional data set, LinkedIn has identified which companies are most attractive to potential candidates. Today at our Talent Connect event in Las Vegas, we unveiled LinkedIn’s Most InDemand Employers, a set of rankings of the most sought-after companies on LinkedIn.

The $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize recognizes individuals who translate their ideas into inventions and innovations that improve the world in which we live.

Dubbed the "Oscar for Inventors," the Lemelson-MIT Prize is awarded to outstanding mid-career inventors, who have developed a patented product or process of significant value to society, which has been adopted for practical use, or has a high probability of being adopted. By recognizing and funding younger, mid-career inventors, the prize is designed to spur inventive careers and provide role models for future generations of inventors.

There are too many new startups coming out each day to keep track of, but today we stumbled upon three which are actually pretty cool – world changing even.

Here they are, in order of world-changingness, from "oh, handy" to "wow, that'll shake up humongous industries." Silvercar makes business trips easier. One of the more annoying parts of a quick business trip is the hassle of dealing with renting a car. It's expensive. There are hidden fees. It takes forever.

SIlvercar, which just raised money from Michael Arrington and others, wants to make it simpler. It will rent just one kind of car, Audi A4s, and it will rent them to you through a mobile app. That's it.

Crowdfunding is a term generally reserved for raising money to support the next new startup, but it can also be used to define a new kind of workplace giving. This growing trend combines gamification and social media to boost employee engagement and increase community impact. Mix these elements together and you get corporate competitive crowdfunding.

Corporate competitive crowdfunding is the hot new buzzword helping to define one aspect of corporate giving, a charitable category that has been on the rise.  In fact, according to a 2011 report by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, 65% of corporations increased their corporate giving from 2009 to 2010, and 53% gave more in 2010 than they did before the economic downturn in 2007. With so many companies jumping on the corporate philanthropy bandwagon, it’s important to not be left behind.  Crowdfunding is an excellent tool to lead the way.

Immigration has always been the engine that drives the American economy. In Silicon Valley, foreign-born entrepreneurs have founded half the region’s startups in recent years - and kept the U.S. economy moving forward. So what happens if that innovation engine stalls? We’re about to find out.

A new study shows the number of immigrant-founded startups in Silicon Valley has tumbled from 52.4% to 43.9% since 2005. The study was sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation and conducted by Vivek Wadhwa, who’s the director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University.

Relaxing immigration rules by just 3% in developed countries would generate more than $150bn for the world’s economy.

Leading economist Professor Sharun Mukand, from the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, presented a policy paper this week at Chatham House in London.

Professor Mukand said: “As a tool for development and poverty reduction, the potential gains from the globalisation of labour far outweigh those from foreign aid or the liberalisation of trade and capital flows across borders.

Wharton‘s not the only breeding ground for entrepreneurs at Penn.

Since 1993, Penn’s Engineering School has offered an Engineering Entrepreneurship program in hopes of showing engineering students the practical applications of what they’re building in the lab. Three thousand students – both undergraduate and masters – have gone through the program, started by professor Tom Cassel, says associate director of the program Jeffrey Babin, and it’s continued to grow.

This year, the program hired another faculty member to help accommodate student demand (last year 500 students took the courses): Elliot Menschik, founder of Callowhill coworking spot Venturef0rth.

GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK) committed to provide researchers with unmatched access to patient-level data from its clinical trials--including studies that failed. The move is among several steps the London-based drug giant announced today to promote open innovation and collaboration with external groups. Yet commentators are skeptical about whether fellow drugmakers will be as bold in opening their data vaults to outsiders.

While GSK is taking an unprecedented step to make its clinical trial data transparent, not everyone is likely to gain unfettered access to its clinical trials info. Glaxo is forming a panel to judge the scientific merit of requests for the anonymous patient data, which is far more detailed than any of the clinical trial information and results posted on the company's website.

Here in Silicon Valley, we’re all about using lottery slogans with Ivy League veneer. After all, isn’t talking about “optionality” just a fancy way of saying “ya gotta be in it to win it?”  And “asymmetric payoff” is just a spiffy way of saying, “hey, you never know,” right?

That’s why I was taken aback when I got invited to give a talk at the CFA Institute’s Annual Financial Analyst’s Seminar this summer. I mean, these are the cats that studied Greek during B-School so that they could do better in Advanced Derivatives class. Meanwhile, I’ve made a career of using ten-dollar words with my five-dollar brain; what could I possibly say about what is perhaps today’s least-loved asset class: venture capital? After all, a witty intro, a hoodie and a bag of Silly Valley pixie dust can only get you so far with that crowd.

Next year, medical researchers will test in patients a one-of-a-kind brain implant that can sense electrical activity in the brain while simultaneously emitting electric pulses, says device developer Medtronic.

Deep-brain stimulators are mainly used to regulate the movement problems associated with Parkinson's and other diseases, but they are also used in Europe and Canada to treat epilepsy and are being used experimentally to treat severe depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But doctors must use trial and error to determine the best parameters for the electrical stimulation programmed into each patient's chip.

Big banks are back in small business lending.  During a month in which the overall volume of loan applications increased by 5.6%, the Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index revealed that approval rates jumped 30% at big banks during in September 2012.

The Index found that 14.2%.of funding requests were approved by big banks ($10B+ in assets) in September — a 30% jump from 10.9% in August 2012. The figure represents the highest approval rating percentage for big banks since the Index began in 2011.

A spin-off is merely a startup spawned by a mature parent (company), and conventional logic would dictate that it has a survival advantage over the lowly startup. Yet spin-offs seem to most often fail to launch in the real world. I was part of one myself a few years ago, and felt the pain, so the phenomenon has intrigued me ever since.

My first thought is that spin-offs are like struggling adolescents with over-protective parents. When companies spin off a division (sometimes called a demerger or deconsolidation), they naturally want it to grow and succeed on its own merits, just as they have. But like protective parents everywhere, they tend to shelter it in ways that stunt its growth in the long run.

To help turbocharge civic startups — companies that develop tech-focused products specifically for local governments — the Code for America fellowship program earlier this year launched its own accelerator program. 

“The purpose is to truly accelerate — to find companies in what we call the civic technology space,” said Ron Bouganim, the director of Code for America’s accelerator program. “That’s the intersection of technology and government.”

Code for America representatives selected top companies from hundreds that applied to participate. While some of the selected companies have not yet been publicly announced, the companies are slated to participate in a demo day during the end of October, for the purpose of highlighting the work they’ve done in the accelerator program. The end goal is to attract potential investors.

Recently, I wrote that leaders should be readers. Reading has a host of benefits for those who wish to occupy positions of leadership and develop into more relaxed, empathetic, and well-rounded people. One of the most common follow-up questions was, "Ok, so what should I read?"

That's a tough question. There are a number of wonderful reading lists out there. For those interested in engaging classic literature, Wikipedia has a list of "The 100 Best Books of All Time," and Modern Library has picks for novels and nonfiction. Those interested in leadership might consult the syllabus for David Gergen's leadership course (PDF) at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government or the syllabus his colleague Ron Heifetz uses for his course on adaptive leadership (PDF).

Vinod Khosla is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists. So if he is willing to bet millions on OneID, a start-up that promises to replace your user name and password for all your accounts with a single digital identity, OneID may be on to something big.

On October 5th, I interviewed Alex Doll, OneID’s CEO and co-founder who was former CEO of PGP. (OneID’s founder is Steve Kirsch, who founded InfoSeek.) Doll was an entrepreneur in residence with Khosla after PGP.

A cutting-edge business doesn't necessarily need cutting-edge technology to be successful. For some businesses, especially ones that are just getting started, the most sophisticated tools may exhaust already scarce resources. The more features a device has, the more it typically costs and the more time it takes to set up, maintain and train employees to use.

You may be better off with a technology solution that does one or two things well instead of more complicated products that require expertise to use and technical support when they stop working.

Here are seven easy-to-use tools that can help make your start-up process as easy and efficient as possible.

The Jitterbug Plus basic cellphone

For the last year and a half, I’ve been working with one of Europe’s top accelerators, HackFwd, as their marketing geek. But now it’s time to make the entrepreneurial leap: I’m founding Vuact, a platform for finding and delivering interesting video to the right audiences. Suddenly being outside the accelerator world means I’m starting to look at what I’ve gained over the past 18 months — and having seen loads of startups, pitches and early-stage investments, I wanted to share what I’ve found out.

So what have I seen?

The fact is that accelerators and early-stage investment programs, particularly in Europe, are not really very differentiated yet. As the market matures we’ll see more vertically-focused programs. In fact, this is already starting. The U.K.’s Springboard, for example, just launched Springboard Mobile. There’s also GameFounders in Central and Eastern Europe, which focuses on the games industry.