The purpose of this funding opportunity (FOA) is to improve hearing health care outcomes and reduce health disparities through the development and commercialization of improved devices for hearing health care (HHC).  For the purposes of this FOA, “hearing health care” is defined as assessment and access to hearing aids and nonmedical treatment, including hearing screening and hearing assessment as well as acquiring an appropriate device and services for the individual’s hearing loss and communication needs.  Appropriate technologies must have the following basic characteristics: easily affordable, effective, culturally acceptable, and accessible to those who need them. 

This announcement calls for applications to develop devices and other technologies that address the HHC needs of the nation, including health disparity populations.  Generally, health disparity populations include racial and ethnic minorities, the rural and urban poor, and other medically underserved populations.

A few months ago, free online courses from prestigious universities were a rarity. Now, they are the cause for announcements every few weeks, as a field suddenly studded with big-name colleges and competing software platforms evolves with astonishing speed.

In a major development last week, a dozen highly ranked universities said they had signed on with Coursera, a new venture offering free classes online. They must overcome skepticism about the quality of online education and the prospects for having the courses cover the costs of producing them, but their enthusiasm is undimmed.

The Association of University Technology Managers is a nonprofit organization with more than 3,000 members from more than 300 universities, research institutions and teaching hospitals as well as well as numerous business and government organizations. As the leader in education and benchmarking data and statistics for the technology transfer profession, AUTM is informed and well positioned to advise on matters of public policy affecting the profession.

AUTM appreciates the interest in improving the effectiveness of technology transfer in the United States, and the association works hard to provide its practicing members in academia and industry with professional development opportunities, benchmarking and many proven methods to improve the technology transfer process.

More angels are coming to the aid of Canadian startups these days.

Angel investors made 134 investments totaling $82.4 million in 2011, up from 90 investments worth a combined $35.3 million in 2010, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) in Toronto.

“Angel investor groups invested significantly more capital in 2011 than in 2010,” said NACO chair Michelle Scarborough in a news release.

"For investors looking to go off the beaten track to find quality deals, Ohio might be the answer," Mitchell Rosich, partner at Athenian Venture Partners, writes in VentureBeat.

"According to the most recent Ohio Venture Capital Report, venture capital activity in Ohio was up more than 80 percent in 2010, surpassing the national average, which was up only 20 percent."

An increase in pre- and seed-stage investments amounting to $183.8 million is paid to angel groups and state programs.

A strange thing has happened during an otherwise bleak time for biotech venture capital. Life science venture capitalists are apparently hitting more of their investments out of the park.

There were 17 so-called “Big Exits” for investors in privately held biotech companies, and 18 in the medical device business in 2011, the most of any year since 2005 in a new set of data analyzed by Silicon Valley Bank. For this analysis, a “Big Exit” was counted each time a venture-backed life sciences company was acquired, and the up-front payment was worth at least $75 million. Although many of these “Big Exit” acquisitions are structured to include milestone payments that can make the deals more lucrative over time, those future payments often don’t materialize, and they weren’t factored in to the SVB analysis of investment returns.

"Silicon Valley is not a place but a state of mind," legendary venture capitalist John Doerr famously observed.

As a  state of mind the Valley's a destination that's attracted unequalled recognition and also exerted a powerful force of attraction for generations of engineers, techies, entrepreneurs and investors from around the world.

Today, the state of mind in the Valley is vastly different from the Valley of Gordon Moore, Steve Jobs and the legions of entrepreneurs and VCs who have flocked here for decades to turn their disruptive silicon and software visions into reality - and stock options.

There was a time when cities use to rate and rank their economic prowess by the number of big-business headquarters within city lines. Earlier this week, our own Nate Berg took a look at the geography of U.S. corporate headquarters, ranking the largest American cities by their number of Fortune 500 headquarters per city.

New York led the list with 18, followed by Houston with 6, and then Minneapolis and Atlanta with 4 each.

With the U.S. unemployment rate stuck at over eight percent, one would expect a laser-like focus in Washington on simple tools that would increase growth. One key tool is the federal R&D tax credit: increasing the rate of the Alternative Simplified Credit (ASC) from 14 to 20 percent would increase annual GDP growth by $66 billion and create at least 162,000 jobs. Yet despite its efficacy, the United States continues to fall behind other nations in the generosity of its R&D tax incentive. Other countries, including Brazil, Canada, China, France, and India, have implemented R&D tax incentive schemes that far exceed that of the United States in generosity. In fact, in 2012, ITIF estimates that the United States ranks just 27th out of 42 countries studied in terms of R&D tax incentive generosity, down from 23rd just five years ago.

The H-1B visa program allows employers to hire foreigners to work in specialty occupations on a temporary basis. Visas are granted in three-year increments with the option to extend up to six years. With sponsorship from their employers, H-1B visa holders may apply for permanent residence, and their H-1B visas can be renewed for one year extensions until their green card is issued. There is a cap on the number of H-1B visas that can be issued each fiscal year. Academic and research institutions are not subject to this cap. Steps in the H-1B application process are outlined below.

One of the defining narratives of modern China has been the migration of young workers—often girls in their late teenage years—from the countryside into sprawling cities for jobs in factories. Many found work at Foxconn, which employs nearly one million low-wage workers to hand-assemble electronic gadgets for Apple, Nintendo, Intel, Dell, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony.

So it was a surprise when Terry Guo, the hard-charging, 61-year-old billionaire CEO of Foxconn, said last July that the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant would add up to one million industrial robots to its assembly lines inside of three years.

I’ve long noted how openness to new people and ideas can power innovation and economic growth. “The Open City,” a new study by Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow, offers new insight on this issue.

A large body of literature shows that highly creative people - artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and the like - are highly likely to be open to new experiences. An earlier study by Rentfrow and his colleague Sam Gosling of the University of Texas, titled "The New Geography of Personality," tracked the five major personality types across states. They found open-to-experience people were more likely to "attempt to escape the ennui experienced in small-town environments by relocating to metropolitan areas where their interests in cultures and needs for social contact and stimulation are more easily met."

Need. Idea. Project. Healing innovation.

Those are the steps behind a new platform for taking the problems doctors encounter in healthcare and developing solutions that are vetted, pushed across the valley of death, developed and placed into the hands of physicians.

ScrubStorm LLC is a cloud-based marketplace where clinicians, investors, companies and contractors go to collaboratively brainstorm, develop and commercialize solutions for unmet medical needs.

The Akron Accelerator sounds like a machine and it sort of is -- one that grows businesses from the ground up.

On Thursday, the 28-year-old business incubator celebrated a new milestone. It now has more than 400 employees and 53 startups under its roof.

More than 200 of those employees met for a picnic lunch to get to know each other and share ideas across their different industries.

The three-month long DreamIt Ventures accelerator program is landing in Austin in December, running for a full three months before unleashing the chosen startups on the crowds at SXSW in March 2013. DreamIt is also running events in Philadelphia and New York. This additional program will be run by Austinite Kerry Rupp.

Citing Texas’ “vibrant” start-up community, Rupp will help launch a portion of the 45 companies running through the DreamIt gauntlet over the next year.

The Kickstarter website has moved crowd funding into mainstream media. There is virtually no news site, newspaper or TV network left out there that has not reported on recent funding success stories. You may have heard about Double Fine Adventure's million Dollar ride that got the ball rolling for some serious game funding on the site, or Pebble, the e-paper watch for iPhone and Android that managed to rake in more than $10 million.

People who pledge a certain amount of money often get something in return. In the case of Double Fine it is a copy of the adventure game that the developers want to produce with the money, and for Pebble, it is one of those iconic watches. Pledges can be retracted for as long as the funding has not ended. Afterwards, the money is only transferred if the funding has reached the desired goal. If that is not the case, backers are not charged a single dime. It gets fuzzy when a project has crossed the funding goal and reached the end of the funding stage. Once the money has been transferred, there is not really any transparency as to what happens with the money from that moment on forward.

Most startup founders know exactly what they want to design and sell, and they are personally convinced that everyone will buy one. Yet they often fail to realize that their view is likely biased, and will be instantly discounted by potential investors. Business plans with no “industry expert” data on your target opportunity size and growth are routinely rejected.

Your business plan must have an “Opportunity” section, where industry market size and growth projections are included. Within this section, investors look for footnotes referencing external sources, or quotes from notable domain experts. Absence of these raises a big red flag.

The health app startup is attempting to use technology to make you better understand what your body is saying to you. In the future, founder Aza Raskin hopes your phone will tell you you’re getting sick before you even know it.

Have you ever forgotten to take your antibiotics? Started a diet only to find yourself hitting the ice cream hard? Seen a loved one fail to get the medical support they require? Have you ever wondered why?

Aza Raskin According to Massive Health founder Aza Raskin, one of the biggest flaws in our health care system isn’t procedural or scientific, it has to do with design. “Let me give an analogy,” Raskin says. “If you can’t program a VCR, whose fault is that: yours, or the guy that designed the VCR? If one out of five people don’t finish their antibiotics course, whose fault is it? Is that the fault of people, or the fault of the design of our intervention?”

Companies in the Boulder Valley received more venture-capital investment — $375.7 million — than any other region of its size in the nation in 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association, using data from news company Thomson Reuters.

Overall, the Boulder Valley received about $100 million more in venture-capital investment for the most recent five quarters than similar technology hub regions such as Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at $276 million; the Portland, Oregon/Vancouver, Washington, region at $271 million; and Baltimore at $165 million, according to Thomson Reuters data.