ONE day, when my children are a little older, I will gather them close and I will tell them about how I lived through the Great Format Wars.

I will recount to them a seemingly endless cycle of battles. From LP to cassette to minidisk (oh wait — not to minidisk) to CD. From Betamax to VHS to DVD to HD-DVD to Blu-ray. From punchcards to magnetic tape to floppy disks to zip drives to DVD-ROMs.

Some were dirty little skirmishes, like the Eight-Track Incursion of the late 1960s. But, oh, there are epic tales to be told as well: How my children’s hearts will leap and dive (assuming they are not the kind to be bored to distraction by what Dad is droning on about) as they hear about VHS and Betamax, each bringing the other ever closer to oblivion, and how only one of them left the battlefield — only to fall victim to a far nimbler opponent, DVD, which was waiting in the wings.

Why is Facebook's stock getting hammered?

Former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst, and current Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker blames NASDAQ.

Speaking at the AllThingsD conference she said the big problem was that NASDAQ got overwhelmed by orders. Then traders weren't sure if they had the shares or not. They got spooked and stopped buying.

Once the stock started cratering, it was curtains for Facebook, says Meeker.

TopCoder®, Inc., the world's largest competitive Community of digital creators today announced that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has selected the TopCoder Open Innovation platform to launch a Challenge series of competitions to develop applications capable of reducing inefficiency, improving quality and lowering overall cost of the screening process at the state and national level of the public healthcare system.

The CMS Provider Screening Innovator Challenge will apply the process of Open Innovation to the goals of improving the abilities of states to streamline operations, screen providers, and reduce overall fraud and abuse by developing a multi-state, multi-program provider screening software application which would be capable of risk scoring, credentialing validation, identity authentication, and sanction checks, while lowering burden on providers and reducing administrative and infrastructure expenses for States and Federal programs. More information about the Medicaid and CHIP programs and CMS Provider Screening Challenge, visit www.medicaid.gov .

Last week, a post over at Forbes blared the headline “Richard Florida is Wrong About Creative Cities." The post, written by Adam Ozimek of the Modeled Behavior blog, reviews University of California Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti's book The New Geography of Jobs.   

Moretti’s book devotes several hundred pages to the roles that clustering and concentration play in innovation, firm formation, and job creation, echoing observations made by Michael Porter, Edward Glaeser, and me. Then, in about two or three pages, he criticizes my alleged theory that, as Ozimek puts it, “making a city an interesting place to live is a good prescription for economic development.”

In the Innovator's DNA we discussed whether innovators are born or made. Research has shown that creativity is not a genetic predisposition but a result of a pattern of behaviors -- so it can be concluded that all innovators must share a certain set of characteristics that have lead them to success. While innovators speak different languages, come from different cultures and various industry backgrounds, they all have fundamental traits in common.

Robert's Rules of Innovation suggests three key traits that all innovators possess right off the bat.

1. Innovators are not afraid to fail. Fear of failure is the first innovation killer. In order to achieve a culture of successful, sustainable innovation, leaders are always searching for ways to break down the barriers that derail innovation, encourage creativity and introduce new procedures that lead to breakthrough products. Make failures learning experiences...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced a research initiative to tame so-called Big Data, sets of information that are so complex and fast-growing that they defy traditional methods of analysis. Examples are the data involved in online financial transactions of major banks or collected by social networks.

Key to the effort will be the creation of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data, which will reside at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The computer-chip maker Intel will contribute $2.5-million per year for up to five years to support the research center. The lab also plans to work with other companies, including AIG, EMC, SAP, and Thomson Reuters, in the project.

Compared with the hustle and bustle of waking life, sleep looks dull and unworkmanlike. Except for in its dreams, a sleeping brain doesn’t misbehave or find a job. It also doesn’t love, scheme, aspire or really do much we would be proud to take credit for. Yet during those quiet hours when our mind is on hold, our brain does the essential labor at the heart of all creative acts. It edits itself. And it may throw out a lot.

In a provocative new theory about the purpose of sleep, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has proposed that slumber, to cement what we have learned, must also spur the brain’s undoing. As the conscious mind settles into sleep, the neural connections that create a scaffold for our knowledge must partially unravel, his theory suggests. Although this nightly dismantling might seem like a curious act of cerebral self-sabotage, it may in fact be a mechanism for enhancing the brain’s capacity to encode and store new information.

Did you know that almost one-fourth of all new hires leave their companies within one year of coming on board? A new study of 500 HR professionals by Allied Van Lines, reported in Business News Daily, found that the blame for this high turnover can’t be blamed solely on the economy or demographics. Instead, Allied found that failure to properly train, mentor and acclimate new employees to the workplace was a key reason behind their moving on.

Employee turnover costs companies substantially, the survey found. The average cost for filling one position was $10,731. But despite the financial hit from high turnover, the majority of companies still spend far more on recruiting and advertising for new employees than they do ensuring that the employees receive proper training. Allied Van Lines found that the average company spends just $67 per employee on “onboarding.”

If you are an entrepreneur starting a business for the first time, I recommend that you find a product concept that is already accepted and improve on it, rather than tackling that ultimate disruptive technology. Notice that I’m not suggesting that you steal someone else’s idea, but simply limit your risk by adding innovation to a proven entity.

Evidence of success using this approach is all around us. Look how the Japanese entered the auto industry, or how McDonalds imitated White Castle, or how Wal-Mart “perfected” the low-price high-volume approach. Once you have experience in running a successful startup this way, you may decide that the disruptive technology of your dreams was a bad idea in the first place.

Central Iowa is better positioned to create a technology park than North Carolina was before Research Triangle Park blossomed into a 170-company area with 38,000 employees, Iowa State University President Steven Leath told Iowa. 

“North Carolina didn’t have nearly the assets in place that Iowa has” when leaders decided to try to create a research and development center that eventually became one of the best in the country, Leath told the Iowa Innovation Council in Des Moines.

Entrepreneurship is on the rise at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), according to data released by the school on Tuesday.

Sixteen percent of the class of 2011 started their own companies immediately after graduation, which is a three-fold increase from the 5% that started companies after graduating in the early 1990s, according to the data, marking an all-time high for the school.

The report also indicates that graduates are looking for high-impact positions upon graduation, as “growth potential and early responsibility are increasingly priorities for students while money and job security are lower priorities.”

Students in the University of Michigan’s MBA entrepreneurship school have just participated in a huge round — $25 million altogether — for Sonitus, a biomedical devices startup.

The students manage the Wolverine Venture Fund, a $5.5 million fund that generally does small, early-stage investments. Interestingly, quite a few of the fund’s 20 portfolio companies — all hand-picked by students — have been in the life sciences and medical fields.

The Wolverine Fund previously invested in Sonitus in March 2011. Other investors in the previous round included Arboretum Ventures and Affinity Ventures.

European Union lawmakers approved a draft law on Thursday making it easier to channel funds into start-up companies from next year, inserting a safeguard the venture capital industry fears will make the regime too expensive.

The European Parliament's economic affairs committee voted in favor of the law which creates the first pan-EU "passport" for venture capital (VC) funds, allowing them to market themselves to potential investors across the 27-country bloc.

The sector is currently small, raising only about 4 billion euros ($5 billion) annually because it is fragmented along national lines. There are private placement rules in some countries and none in others, making it harder to persuade investors to step forward and build up funds of size.

Larta Institute, est. 1993, is a private non-profit “innovation hub” based in the U.S with a mission of accelerating the transition of new technologies to the marketplace, where they can better people’s lives and enhance economic opportunity. Larta helps regions maximize the return on public funding dollars invested in high growth enterprises.  These range from companies developing lifesaving treatments and diagnostic tools for rare diseases to renewable sources of energy to new methods to make food production more productive and sustainable.  Larta is actively involved in all stages of entrepreneurial development and capacity building through various services that include:

A model for entrepreneurship education and early-stage funding for startups, born in a community college in northeastern Ohio, will make its way to the national stage with the support of a $1 million grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

The partnership with Lorain County Community College Foundation (LCCC) aims to replicate nationally the Ohio community college's very successful model for mentoring and funding high-growth startups, educating new founders and, in turn, spurring regional economic growth. The project, named Innovation Fund America, will begin with a pilot in three communities around the country, to be selected in the coming months. Kauffman and LCCC aim to eventually scale the model to more schools around the country and build a national network to support them.

In interesting article in the Washington Post, The Identity Crisis of American Capitalism, Stephen Pearlstein tries to make sense of the political food fight between “Romney’s role in job destruction at Bain Capital” and President Obama’s “hostility to free capitalism”. Pearlstein seeks to illuminate the food fight with the idea that capitalism comes in different “flavors”.

The varieties of American capitalism Pearlstein’s principal varieties of capitalism are:

Robber baron capitalism: is “capitalism under the control of a handful of clever entrepreneurs and financiers who ruthlessly used their economic power to enhance their political power, and vice versa. It was an era generally characterized by rapid technological progress, big booms and big busts with widening disparities in income and wealth.” It failed to generate continuous growth or widespread prosperity.

I like analysis as much as the next left-brain MBA type person, but over time, I have learned to avoid analysis paralysis.

What is analysis paralysis?  It is when you are paralyzed by your desire to keep doing analysis until you’ve analyzed every possible variation and outcome.  You end up doing nothing because you don’t want to take a risk, even a small step, without having looked at potential problems from all angles.  It is a true sickness and it runs at epidemic levels among engineers, MBAs and other analytical types.  I speak from experience, as I’m a recovering (over)analysis addict.

So how does one get over the desire to analyze everything to death, and in the process, overcome being afflicted by analysis paralysis?  I don’t think there is one, single recommended path, but here are some ideas.

While much of southern Europe is struggling with soaring unemployment rates, a robust Germany is desperate for educated workers, and it has begun to look south for the solution.

In the last 18 months, it has recruited thousands of the Continent’s best and brightest to this postcard-perfect town and many others like it, a migration of highly qualified young job-seekers that could set back Europe’s stragglers even more, while giving Germany a further leg up.

Back in February 2009, Kristian Hiiemaa, then 29, bootstrapped Erply, a business-software startup, with three other developers in Tallinn, Estonia. They applied to Seedcamp, the London-based mentoring and investment programme, and were selected for Seedcamp Week -- in which startups are mentored -- the following September. There, they dazzled investors at the pitching stage, known as Demo Day.

A tour of the US with other Seedcamp winners to meet investors and advisers ensued, and Hiiemaa's life changed. "Between the Monday and the Friday (of the US trip), Kris had two or three unsolicited term sheets to invest from tier-one Silicon Valley VC firms," recalls Saul Klein, Seedcamp's founder and a partner at Index Ventures. "He spent the next week or two in Tallinn fielding Skype calls from 20 VCs, including an investor in Microsoft."

With the recent passage of the JOBS Act, crowdfunding is about to get even hotter. Serial tech entrepreneur, speaker and consultant Scott Steinberg, author of The Crowdfunding Bible, explains how to make crowdfunding work for your startup.

Steinberg, CEO of TechSavvy Global, answered ReadWriteWeb’s most pressing questions with these 10 insights into successful crowdsourcing:

ReadWriteWeb: Are particular types of tech startups better suited for crowdfunding than others, and why is that so?

Scott Steinberg: It’s best for (startups) with a strong consumer focus that can easily communicate their value proposition. Crowdfunding works for creative projects - apps, consumer products, software - that resonate with average, everyday people.