Economists and politicians who are waiting for small business owners to resume their role as job creators are likely to be waiting a long time. The oft-touted role of small businesses as job creators is changing.

Here’s how a friend of mine (also a small business owner) puts it, “This may be blasphemous to say,” he said in a recent email conversation with me, “but today’s small businesses don’t generate jobs like they used to.”

Technology is addictive and it’s making us terrible at our jobs. It’s not your fault though, it’s part of our evolutionary wiring.

That’s according Excite founder and Google Ventures Investment Partner Joe Kraus. He argues that the more access we have to the internet the more distracted we’re becoming.

The numbers seem to back him up too. The average internet user visits 40 websites a day and switches between applications more than 36 times in just an hour. But your brain can’t handle all the information it’s being asked to process, which is why the more things you’re doing at once, the more mistakes you make.

Top industry investors, innovators and executives will come together on August 15th at Investorfest Media's LifeScienceFest Americas in Redwood shores, CA. The full-day conference will bring together leading investors with prior history and active focus on the healthcare and medical devices sector to hear directly from a broad range of entrepreneurs delivering cutting edge solutions and seeking growth capital for their business.

Only select, pre-screened companies will be able to present at the event and, as such, companies seeking capital must apply for consideration as a presenter. Applications to present must be submitted before July 25. Companies from all sectors of the life sciences and healthcare space seeking capital are encouraged to apply, including promising innovators from mhealth/wireless health, telemedicine, medical devices, diagnostics, personalized medicine and bio-informatics.

Who better to guide an emerging “new economy” than Bob Massie, the celebrated former executive director of Ceres—among the first organizations to bring together the business, investment and activist communities for a sustainable future—and a father of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) that continues to transform how companies conceive and report sustainability initiatives?

In his new role as president of the New Economics Institute (NEI), Massie is bringing to bear the full scope of his wide professional experience and personal strength—as leader of those groups, as well as business professor, Episcopal minister, apartheid rights activist, political veteran (most recently in his race for the U.S. Senate candidacy in Massachusetts), and healthy survivor of hepatitis, HIV and a liver transplant, recounted in his new book A Song in the Night.

There's a change coming at the top of BioEnterprise, the business accelerator often credited with shaping Greater Cleveland into a hotspot for biomedical investment in the Midwest.

Baiju Shah, who has lead the nonprofit agency since its inception in 2002, is leaving to become the chief executive of a Cleveland start-up that BioEnterprise helped nurture.

Arizona State University’s Venture Catalyst has announced that a special version of its successful Rapid Startup School program will be launched in September that will target military and defense industry professionals, along with members of the U.S. veterans community.

The new Military/Defense/Veterans (MDV) program will be a free, pracademic program, run in the evenings at ASU SkySong. The program is designed to help participants to launch new startup companies in areas such as military technology, homeland security, border protection and consumer protection processes. It is expected, however, that other non-military startups may also be created. This is part of a concerted effort to target these core groups over the winter months.

Becoming an entrepreneur is a career path more young people are seeking out than ever before. It’s not a path everyone excels or succeeds at, yet many colleges now offer students the option to major or minor in entrepreneurship. With it being such a highly sought-after career track, there are plenty of organizations for entrepreneurs to join and network with fellow entrepreneurs.

I want to talk about just one: The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), probably the most exclusive and elite of those organizations.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) President John L. Anderson announced that IIT is building a 100,000 square-foot Innovation Center at the university’s south side campus. The state-of-the art building will house workshops and media labs and offer students and faculty a centralized facility with a singular purpose of promoting the basic elements of innovation and transitioning new ideas into products and processes.

“The new Innovation Center promises to be an investment in both the education offered at IIT and the future of Chicago,” said Mayor Emanuel. “It will help unlock the potential of thousands of students while providing Chicago businesses with a pipeline of new products, processes and talented graduates to hire.”

We don’t need to memorize things any more, but we still need teachers to guide our students toward learning the best ways to problem solve. The question is: How do you measure that? 

As you read this, students all over the country are sitting for state standardized exams. Schools spend up to 40% of the year on test prep, so that, shall we say, no child is left behind. Schools’ futures and funding depend on the number of students who fall into performance bands like “Advanced," “Proficient,” and “Approaching Basic” based on bubble sheets and number two pencils.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Kickstarter failures that were difficult to find because Kickstarter intentionally prevents failed campaigns from being indexed by the search engines…and how I managed to find (what turned out to be) about 59% of the unsuccessfully funded projects.

My article generated a lot of attention, including from Mashable and VentureBeat (which republished my post). I’d like to think that it was all this attention that finally led Kickstarter to launch a stats page with data and basic metrics about the projects.

In the small town of Cotacachi, Ecuador, Dan Prescher is living out his retirement dream. Prescher, a native of Omaha, Neb., lives with his wife in a condo in a gated community overlooking the Andes Mountains. They eat fresh fruits and vegetables year round. They spend their free time hiking to hot springs and frequenting local restaurants. They keep up with their families and friends back in the U.S. via Skype and Facebook. Their costs are modest: They bought their condo three years ago for $50,000. Food is inexpensive. They don't own a car, so for a night out they take a 25-cent bus ride into town. Although Prescher is not officially retired -- he and his wife are both writers -- he has no plans to return to the U.S.

"Every now and then, (my wife and I) think it would be nice to have a place in the states, so we run the numbers," says Prescher, who is in his late 50s. "But because of the high taxes, medical costs and insurance, we just can't figure out a way to live as affordably as we do here. The cost of living is half of what it would be in the U.S."

It’s hard to have a conversation about what Yahoo is without cracking the requisite joke about everything it’s not. So when news broke yesterday that Google employee No. 20, the company's first female engineer Marissa Mayer had resigned as VP of local and maps to become Yahoo's new CEO starting today, the irony was not lost on the tech world. (A second surprise broke late yesterday, when Mayer told Fortune she was pregnant.)

Mayer, after all, is largely responsible for the spartan comfort we've come to associate with the Google aesthetic and user experience across products from Gmail to Google Maps to that timeless, stark-white Google.com homepage--in other words, everything we don't associate with Yahoo.

Soon after he took office last summer, the new chancellor of Georgia’s university system warned that the state could no longer afford the status quo. Hank Huckaby talked about using Georgia’s 35 public campuses more efficiently, and rigorously reviewing the designs for new facilities. But the suggestion that generated the most interest—and controversy—was his call to merge several Georgia colleges.

“We must ensure that our system has the appropriate number of campuses around the state,” Huckaby said. “We in the university system should be the first to ask questions of ourselves to make sure we are serving the state in the best way.”

Accelerator 500 Startups held its demo day for its fourth batch of companies to pitch to investors Tuesday.

A couple hundred investors attended at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, Calif. to hear about educational apps, honeymoons, Japanese anime and neck ties.

The startups targeted areas of interest for the firm including education and families, as well as a variety of other companies in web and mobile. They also had business models that were relatively clear, which is an emphasis for the firm.

Today, FEGS Health and Human Services, one of the largest and most diversified health and human service organizations in the country, and its subsidiary company, All Sector Technology Group, a provider of advanced technology solutions to the nonprofit sector since 1998, announced the launch of Center4. This New York City accelerator will drive technology innovation to strengthen the capacity of nonprofit health and human service agencies to deliver high-quality, effective and cost-efficient services, improving the lives of the people served.

Center4 is a social enterprise named for the emerging fourth sector -- the convergence of the private, public and nonprofit sectors to facilitate innovation and investment for social good. Scheduled to open this fall in Hudson Square, New York, Center4 will offer the following key features:

Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) continues its commitment to innovation, health and well-being by partnering with Blueprint Health and working together to spark change and make a meaningful impact on the health care community.

As the exclusive health insurance platinum sponsor of the summer 2012 Blueprint Health Accelerator, Humana will work closely with program participants and other health care entrepreneurs, investors, executives and innovators that serve as mentors to the community. Blueprint Health kicked off its summer session on July 16; the intensive program provides seed capital, office space, and most critically, access to a broad range of mentors with deep healthcare, start-up and technology experience.

There are several companies, such as FreshDirect and Tesco, that are reinventing the grocery shopping experience in an effort to make procuring food a convenience, as opposed to a time-sucking errand. But even though most would agree they don’t care for the weekly trip to the grocery store, 98% of groceries are still bought that way.

This may be why companies are using new technology to make the shopping experience better at traditional supermarkets. Here’s a look at some of the creative ways they’re doing this.

Entrepreneurs often have formidable technical expertise, key to developing a new product or service, but a great naïveté in management skills. They run into difficulty when their business reaches the $1-2 million annual sales range, or their employee count exceeds 5-10. It’s here that entrepreneurs must shift their thinking from tactical and operational, to strategic and managerial.

I’m convinced that management is a learnable skill. It can come from experience, or from training in a prior company, and it can even be self-taught from the Internet by smart entrepreneurs, just like they learned the skill of establishing a company, negotiating a contract, or filing a patent.

Antarctica is cold, foreboding and extremely hostile to human life. But there’s something about it that’s been drawing people there for years.

Now you can try to figure out precisely what is that’s sent explorers and scientists to the ice continent, all without having to leave your chair.

Google today launched a series of extra StreetView images of historic locations in Antarctica. The locations — which include the South Pole Telescope, Shackleton’s hut, Scott’s hut, Cape Royds Adélie Penguin Rookery and the Ceremonial South Pole — adds to the images of the continent it first posted in 2010.

Kelly Arnold, artist/art teacher for the past 18 years was recently interviewed by Aviv Shahar, business consultant.

He had been watching the unfoldment of his wife’s artistic painting abilities and became curious about the process that enabled his wife, Sara, to discover and continue to liberate her artistic talent.

He recently had an opportunity to ask Arnold about her teaching secrets.

"How do you help people liberate their creative potential and realize their gifts? This a question I've been working on for 30 years. This is my subject. I am in the learning-mastery business. I help executives learn and innovate faster, and create new futures for themselves and their organization.”