Beyond merely tracking where you've been and where you are, your smartphone might soon actually know where you are going—in part by recording what your friends do.

Researchers in the U.K. have come up with an algorithm that follows your own mobility patterns and adjusts for anomalies by factoring in the patterns of people in your social group (defined as people who are mutual contacts on each other's smartphones).

The biological mechanism of sunburn – the reddish, painful, protective immune response from ultraviolet (UV) radiation – is a consequence of RNA damage to skin cells, report researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and elsewhere in the July 8, 2012 Advance Online Publication of Nature Medicine.

The findings open the way to perhaps eventually blocking the inflammatory process, the scientists said, and have implications for a range of medical conditions and treatments.

New vaccines promote weight loss. A new study, published in BioMed Central’s open access journal, Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology, assesses the effectiveness of two somatostatin vaccinations, JH17 and JH18, in reducing weight gain and increasing weight loss in mice.

Obesity and obesity-related disease is a growing health issue worldwide. Somatostatin, a peptide hormone, inhibits the action of growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), both of which increase metabolism and result in weight loss. Vaccination with modified somatostatin causes the body to generate antibodies to somatostatin, effectively removing this inhibition without directly interfering with the growth hormones and subsequently increasing energy expenditure and weight loss.

Eager to lure (and keep) a strong high-tech workforce, the capital of country music resorts to some unconventional recruiting strategies. Among them: going after middle school kids.

To most people, Nashville is a one-note town: Music City, home of the American country scene. That's not necessarily a bad thing, says Liza Massey, president and CEO of the Nashville Technology Council. "It's great because it shows we have a creative, vibrant community." But now another type of creative professional is stepping into the spotlight: the tech entrepreneur. Not only have the big technology leaders like Microsoft, Dell, and HP come to town, but frisky social media startups such as Emma, Moontoast, and Populr, are sprouting up here, too. Plus, there's a burgeoning healthcare industry with high-tech needs. Which poses one of the best problems a city can have: Nashville now has 1,200 vacant tech jobs and not enough qualified workers to fill them.

One of the few business success stories in recent years is unfolding in the loft of a nondescript garage along a dead-end street in the McKee City section of Hamilton Township.

At first glance, it would appear to be the domain of college undergrads. The main room is crowded with dorm-room furnishings: pinball machines, a Foosball table, a pingpong table and a futon for midday naps. In the back room, a tennis match blares — thwack, thud, thwack — from a flatscreen TV.

“I try to have a work ethic other people can look up to, so most of the time I’m working,” says Joshua Davidson, a 19-year-old with a knowing smile and a nervous laugh. “Don’t get me wrong — we have some epic pingpong tournaments.”

There’s a particular barrier that needs to be broken to become an entrepreneur.  Some have wasted their savings, their family and their lives to attempt getting through it – and have not succeeded in doing so.  Any average person can be a business owner if they’re willing to put forth an above average effort; but to be an entrepreneur – a true entrepreneur, one must transcend the mental barrier in order to gain a sense of, clarity.

I don’t read nearly as much as I’d like to, but I do as much as I can.  One of my early inspirations in the form of ink and binding comes from a book entitled The Power of Unreasonable People – How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World.  I won’t lie – I was forced to read it.  And had I not been, I’m sure I wouldn’t be in the position I am today; so thank you, Professor Gebissa (no thanks for the D on my final paper though).  As I extracted the information from the words on each page, I felt as though I had a connection.  A connection to the people who wrote the book, the case studies within its pages and to the ideas that would, from the outside looking in, seem utterly – unreasonable.  The thesis for the book is that it’s these kinds of ideas that change the world.  Just the other day I saw a post on Google+ from an inspiration in the form of flesh and bone known as Richard Branson.  It said: “The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do.”

5 Reasons nerds make good entrepreneurs

Advice columns are awesome. Really. Especially entrepreneurial advice. Especially advice on how to be a great CEO.

This is my revenge on every one of those articles. Not so much because they don’t have great advice (they do), or because they aren’t helpful (they are), but because, well, they are always trying to kill off my favorite nerdy hobbies.

Now I know that when you think of CEO hobbies video games, jamming on your electric guitar in the garage, and waiting in line for two hours on opening night for the new Batman movie don’t usually make the list.

In the previous posts in this Series we established the mindset and awareness required, the immersion you need to inititate in your local startup ecosystem, what you need to do to acquire subject matter expertise, how to develop a social media presence, and the importance of finding a mentor, all with the objective of greatly increasing your chances of success as an entrepreneur.

In the second post in this series I encouraged you to immerse yourself in your local startup ecosystem so as to get out of that “school bubble” and into the action.  I am going to elaborate here, specifically with regard to cultivating relationships with angel and venture capital investors.

In 2009, during the tumult of the economic downturn, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight decided that, despite the risks, he would not downsize his company.

Goodnight announced that there would be no layoffs at any of SAS’s roughly 400 worldwide offices. The company implemented hiring freezes and cut costs, but Goodnight refused to follow the path of SAS’s competitors. That year, the company reported 2.2 percent revenue growth and increased profits. In January 2012, SAS reported that growth had increased to 12 percent and revenue was a record $2.73 billion.

In Silicon Valley, Goodnight would be considered an outcast. His company would be called a “lifestyle business” and he would be ridiculed for not having taken it public. That’s because Silicon Valley, like Washington, D.C., believes that the IPO is Nirvana for tech companies.

U.S. venture capital firms raised $5.91 billion in the second quarter, but the total went to just 38 funds, underscoring the continuing trend of concentrating cash in the hands of top funds.

The latest results compared with 45 funds raising $2.61 billion a year ago, and 49 funds raising $5.26 billion in the first quarter, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Thomson Reuters.

The biggest funds raised in the second quarter included a $2.08 billion fund from New Enterprise Associates and a $1 billion fund from Institutional Venture Partners.

If you want to have a polarizing conversation about the state of American innovation, you can do no better than sitting down George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen, who thinks the last 40 years of innovation have been "meh," and MIT's Andrew McAfee, who's adamant that technologically innovation is accelerating at a pace most people aren't even comprehending. That's what happened today at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. 

In Cowen's opening remarks, he compared the technological changes in the second half of the 20th century to those of the first half. "In 1900, most American lived in farms," he said. "By 1950, we had a fundamentally different world." If he were to introduce his grandmother to a modern American kitchen, it wouldn't be all that earth-shattering for her, he insisted. "My grandmother, who was born in 1905, spoke often about the immense changes in electricity, automobiles and household appliances," he said. "We have simply not had that many life-altering innovations since 1973." 

The deadline for the $26 million Advanced Manufacturing Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge has been extended to July 11, 2012. The multiagency competition is engineered to strengthen advanced manufacturing and clusters and to create jobs across the nation. Approximately 12 projects are expected to be chosen through a competitive interagency grant process. Guidelines for submissions are accessible here.
 
The Advanced Manufacturing Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge is a key component of President Obama’s plan to ensure we build products here and sell them everywhere. In June 2011, the president announced the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership and, this year, a $45 million pilot program aimed at promoting collaboration between government and industry in order to encourage innovation in manufacturing. The White House launched the Taskforce for the Advancement of Regional Innovation Clusters a few years ago to accelerate cluster growth, particularly in manufacturing. 

While the startup genome in Silicon Valley is always mutating, some formulas are becoming basic tenets in the science of startups. A critical mass of email about my use of the word “iterative” in my blogs prompts me to revisit one such startup fundamental—the so called “Lean Startup” formula.

Eric Ries, an engineer, entrepreneur, author and now an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Harvard Business School, coined this new concept, which has became a movement in the startup world. Steven Blank, a serial entrepreneur, lectures at Stanford about the model. In short he says: experiment in the marketplace from day one with the lowest-cost possible viable product and improve the product or service according to how customers react—the critical ‘pivot.’ This approach is less linear in the sense that students are no longer encouraged to follow the process of first drawing up a business plan, building a final product and then taking it to the marketplace. It is a lower-cost, much more “iterative” approach that quickly transforms mistakes and failures into business insight.

Today, the President signed into law S. 3187, the “Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act.”  This legislation, which passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan majorities, will help speed safe and effective medical products to patients and maintain our Nation’s role as a leader in biomedical innovation.

S. 3187 is the culmination of the work of the administration and Congress, in partnership with patients, the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, the clinical community, and other stakeholders, to provide the Food and Drug Administration with the tools needed to continue to bring drugs and devices to market safely and quickly and promote innovation in the biomedical industry, and to help secure the jobs supported by drug and device development.

On July 4, scientists working with data from ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced the discovery of a new particle "consistent with" the Higgs boson -- a subatomic particle also colloquially referred to as the "God particle." After years of design and construction, the LHC first sent protons around its 27 kilometer (17 mile) underground tunnel in 2008. Four years later, the LHC's role in the discovery of the Higgs boson provides a final missing piece for the Standard Model of Particle Physics -- a piece that may explain how otherwise massless subatomic particles can acquire mass. Gathered here are images from the construction of the massive $4-billion-dollar machine that allowed us peer so closely into the subatomic world.

A couple of years ago, it seemed that everybody in the external innovation business aspired to be a "partner of choice." That is, they wanted to be the company that external partners would preferentially approach with unsolicited new opportunities. 

I am pleased to report that a number of companies have really stepped up their external partnering "game."

Whatever your role, personally or professionally, as Bob Dylan once sang, "You're gonna have to serve somebody."  Here are some "best practices" some companies employ to attract and cultivate business partners.

On May 22nd, Sens. Moran and Warner were joined by Sens. Rubio and Coons in introducing Startup Act 2.0, a revised version of legislation proposed last December that contained questionable provisions to allow university professors to choose their own agents to help transfer their technology rather than be tied to their home university’s technology transfer office (TTO)—the so-called free agency provision.

I dug into the new legislation, comparing it to the original wording, to figure out exactly what’s changed (besides the fact that the accelerated commercialization of research provisions are now part of Section 8 rather than 7). Here’s what I figured out.

SOME budding entrepreneurs and computer whizzes based here in the Pacific Northwest are starting to turn heads down in Silicon Valley.

They are professors and students at the University of Washington, home to what may be the best computer science department you’ve never heard of.

Although Stanford is considered the Hogwarts of techdom, U.W. has quietly established itself as the other West Coast nexus of the information economy. And while Seattle-area tech icons like Microsoft and Amazon have long relied on U.W. — pronounced “U-dub” by locals — as an incubator of talent and ideas, the Valley’s hottest companies have been getting the message, too.

If you are just plain tired of working so hard, or your startup is not getting the traction you expected, should you shut down cleanly, or just file for bankruptcy and walk away? For those who think that bankruptcy is the easy way out, think again. Bankruptcy should always be the absolutely last resort.

The “advantage” of filing for bankruptcy, of course, is that it gets creditors permanently off your back, with no continuing lawsuits, based on funds derived from selling all assets. You can hand the stressful job of liquidating assets and negotiating with creditors over to the court.