In a move that combines an interest in improving health outcomes with a desire to create jobs and boost the state economy, the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and the New York State Department of Health (DOH) have partnered with the New York City Investment Fund to launch the New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA). The program will subsidize health IT startups and link them with "senior advisors" from New York healthcare organizations to accelerate the development of useful new products.

Within the next few months, the program will choose 12 "early- and growth-stage companies" that are developing products in the areas of care coordination, patient engagement, data analytics and message alerts for healthcare providers. In addition to the mentoring, each selected company will receive up to $300,000 to help create solutions designed to improve quality of care for the state's Medicaid recipients, according to a NYDHA announcement.

The most successful companies are ones that are never satisfied with the status quo. They are too busy looking for ways to improve their products, personnel, and experience for their customers.

There are many approaches a company can take to improve itself. For us, it meant trying something revolutionary that would arm our employees with a new skill set, bring our technical and non-technical teams closer together, and provide the entire company with a deeper understanding and appreciation of what we do.

To accomplish this, we set an ambitious goal of having all of our employees learn how to write code in 2012.

Tiny sharks about the size of a human hand have a superpower of sorts: their bellies glow, according to new research that also showed these smalleye pygmy sharks use the glow to hide from predators lurking below.

Scientists had proposed the smalleye pygmy shark (Squaliolus aliae) sported light-emitting organs called photophores for use in camouflage, but that was never really tested, said study researcher Julien Claes of the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. "It wasn't even known if these organs were really functional, able to produce light," Claes added.

David Brennan's move to retire as AstraZeneca's (NYSE:AZN) CEO in June did not come as a surprise to those who had been urging for a change at the top over the company's drug development shortcomings. In an industry that walks a tightrope between innovation and regulation and the financial considerations that frame them, there are two critical characteristics that can undermine a CEO:being too bold or not bold enough. Brennan was a bit of both.

His leadership was bookended by two acquisitions -- a $15.2 billion deal for MedImmune, a drug developer with a focus on influenza vaccines and the $1.26 billion purchase of biotechnology business Ardea Biosciences.

There is a disconnect between the thriving Canadian startup community and the financial community.

It’s a simple supply and demand problem: As more startups are created, the amount of financing to support them has not kept pace. It means there are many promising startups that struggle to succeed or, for that matter, survive.

For Canada’s New Economy, this is troubling, which helps explain why the federal government committed $500-million to support venture capital activity in the last budget.

The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development joined the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Technology Development Corporation (TTDC) to announce today the creation of a new, five-year strategic initiative: LaunchTN.

The initiative names TTDC as the lead advocate for the state’s innovation agenda. As a public-private partnership, TTDC will work with the department to see Tennessee’s potential on the innovation front realized.

“LaunchTN is another piece in our plan to make Tennessee the No. 1 location in the Southeast for high-quality jobs,” Haslam said. “This initiative will help set Tennessee apart as a state where entrepreneurship and innovation are valued as key economic development tools in our effort to make our state even more business friendly.”

If you’re looking for angel investors, there’s good news afoot. The latest 2011 Angel Market Analysis, recently released by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, shows not only that there are more angels around, but that they are investing more money in more companies.

Here’s a closer look at what angels are thinking and doing - and some ideas on how you can leverage their growing confidence to fund your business.

Overall, angel investments in 2011 reached $22.5 billion, 12.1% more than in 2010. About 66,230 entrepreneurial businesses got angel funding in 2011, up 7.3% from 2010. Finally, 2011 saw 20% more active investors (318,480 in all) compared to 2010.

Investors and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area pride themselves on being the first to identify and exploit new technologies with huge commercial potential. And they’ve earned the right to be a little cocky. Since 1960, Silicon Valley companies have been the pacesetters in four consecutive infotech revolutions (semiconductors, personal computers, the Internet, and mobile).

It’s strange, then, that the Bay Area innovation community seems content to let the next big technology revolution happen elsewhere.

In the same way that smart young people from all over flock to New England to get smarter, the region is now becoming a destination for first-time founders who come to participate in “accelerator’’ programs. They come from Philadelphia, Paris, and Tel Aviv for three-month stints, soaking up advice from more experienced entrepreneurs, honing their products or services, and eventually presenting in front of an audience of investors.

Incredibly, some accelerators are pickier than Harvard about who gets in. This year, Harvard accepted about 6 percent of applicants. TechStars Boston, an accelerator program in its fourth year, takes fewer than 1 percent of the entrepreneurs vying to get in.

University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman and Foundry Group's Jason Mendelson also Part of the Program for the Midwest's Leading Venture Capital Event

Today, organizers of the Michigan Growth Capital Symposium announced that Noubar Afeyan, founder, managing partner and CEO of leading early stage venture capital firm Flagship Ventures, will deliver the keynote address to begin the second day of the 31st annual event. University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman will provide opening remarks to introduce Dr. Afeyan and also share her thoughts on how the University's commitment to research and development and entrepreneurship is helping to deliver on the promise of Michigan as a hotbed of innovation and investment activity.

With $3,000 of seed capital from Harvard Business School, around 150 MBA teams were tasked with developing their very own micro-businesses in short order. Here's what they came up with.

By John A. Byrne

The idea initially came as something of a joke.

Earlier this year, a team of six Harvard Business School MBA students was brainstorming ideas for a new startup business. They came up with a peculiar takeoff on all the online dating sites: a Facebook application for Jewish mothers to set their children up with potential marriage material.

When the team shared the idea with fellow students, they heard nothing but skepticism. "They said there were a lot of barriers to entry," recalls Jyll Saskin, 24, one of the team members. "Others said they didn't think the market would be that big for it."

Nine Michigan companies recently received investments from the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, totaling more than $2 million.

To date, the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund, a collaborative effort of Michigan’s SmartZones, has awarded 72 Michigan companies with seed funding totaling more than $16 million.

“The Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund is helping businesses across the state bring their innovative products to market,” said Skip Simms, Ann Arbor Spark’s senior vice president and administrator of the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund. “As more companies continue to apply for and receive these funds, we fulfill the fund’s mission of diversifying economic opportunity in Michigan.”

A startup called Planetary Resources has announced ambitious plans to survey asteroids and ultimately mine them for water that could be converted to the liquid hydrogen and oxygen needed to refuel spacecraft in orbit.

The company intends to begin by launching a series of small satellites into Earth orbit with telescopes and instruments to study near-Earth asteroids and identify the most promising candidates for later prospecting missions. The first of these Arkyd-101 satellites, currently under development, will launch within two years, probably hitching a ride into orbit on a larger satellite's launch, the company announced at a press conference held at the Museum of Flight in Seattle today.

If you want to be a better entrepreneur, don’t miss these important tips. We’ve collected from far and wide on the Web to help you make your business better today.

Success Metrics

Ensuring your business success. Simple tips can make your business better, increasing your odds of success. Is success in business luck, skill or a combination of both? Check this list and you’ll see steps every entrepreneur can take. Entrepreneur

If you’re a consultant, you deal with all sorts of customers. Some you’d love to duplicate, while others, well, let’s just say you really earn your money working with them. Have you noticed how customers fall into a few categories?

Read these descriptions to determine which best describe your customers:

Laissez-Faire

You may tend to like this type of customer. They’re laid back and happy to let me run the show when it comes to their marketing. The laissez-faire customer knows you’re the expert, and trusts the decisions you make. For the most part, they’re happy with an occasional check-in from time to time.

It seems no matter how much society evolves women are always left just that little bit behind. No, this is not an article about gender equality — this is a tech site for crying out loud. Google’s Marissa Mayer recently wrote about IBM CEO Virginia Rometty for her inclusion in TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2012. “Women in the workplace and women in technology will be key drivers of global competitiveness and innovation in the future. On both fronts, Ginni provides tremendous inspiration,” said Mayer.

Interestingly, Rometty and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are the only two tech company heads on the list which included 38 women this year, more than ever before — we are growing. So we thought we’d put together a little list to highlight some of the kickass women in tech today, styling up the geek world one Manolo Blahnik at a time. This is not a complete list; these are just the ones we picked, they are many other women out there making their mark in tech.

It seems like many business people are becoming so technology addicted to their iPhones and email that they forget to listen to what their customers want, or even forget to ask. Attention spans have compressed to seconds, and face-to-face conversations, with the hugely important body language, are avoided in favor of texting and anonymous Internet surveys.

It shouldn’t surprise you that a recent Harris survey found that a quarter of all Internet users think it’s okay to stay online during sex. Slightly more said it’s okay to be “plugged in” during their honeymoon, and eight percent think it’s alright to surf the web during religious services. I can’t imagine any of these people taking the time to listen to their customers.

The best revolutionaries eventually find themselves hailed in tributes and enshrined in museums.

So it's almost inevitable that nearly 30 years after the official birthdate of the Internet, some of the net's best-known pioneers, radicals, and troublemakers are being inducted into the Internet Society's Hall of Fame.

The inaugural group includes 33 of the net's most influential engineers, evangelists and entrepreneurs including Internet fathers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf; Internet standards guru Jon Postel; web inventor Tim Berners-Lee; encryption pioneer Phil Zimmerman; and Mozilla's Mitchell Baker.

There are three things that continue to astound me about most organizations: The cro-magnon way performance reviews are done; the pitiful way brainstorm sessions are run and; the voo doo way decisions are made.

What follows is an elaboration of the third -- 12 common phenomena that contribute to funky decision making. As you read, think of the teams you work most closely with, which of these behaviors describes them, and what you can do to change the game.

1. Selective Search for Evidence: Gathering facts that support pre-determined conclusions, but disregard other facts that support different conclusions.

2. Premature Termination of Search for Evidence: Accepting the first alternative that looks like it might work.

3. Inertia: Being unwilling to change old thought patterns.

4. Selective Perception: Prematurely screening out information not assumed to be useful.

5. Wishful Thinking: Wanting to see things in a positive light.