Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don't. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more personal, or to make tools for travelers.

In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts. In a second demonstration, Soong used his software to grant Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, the ability to speak Mandarin.

The Digital Agenda aims to deliver benefits to consumers and businesses based on ultra-fast Internet connections and interoperable applications.

The European Commission's blueprint, unveiled in May 2010, aims to provide broadband Internet access for all citizens by 2013, with access to much higher Internet speeds (30 Mbps or above) for all by 2020. By that time, the Commission hopes at least half of European households will subscribe to Internet connections above 100 Mbps.

Want to become a billionaire? Then you should try building one of the following seven companies, says Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham.

Graham knows a thing or two about building companies. Y-Combinator is a startup school that helps young entrepreneurs get their companies rolling. He's seeing thousands of applications to Y-Combinator annually, so he knows what people are trying to build.

Over the years Spam has evolved from consisting of annoying but otherwise harmless advertisements, to becoming a carrier of viruses and malware that can damage your computer and make you vulnerable to identity theft (a.k.a. “phishing”).

Despite major developments in the area of anti-spam software and measures such as filters, blocks and blacklists for dubious senders, the negative effects of spam are still being felt by individuals and businesses alike.

Many great innovators build what they know, for who they know. Aaron Sorkin caricatured this concept with his treatment of the Facebook story: Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) built an online social network drawing from his own experiences and social network in real life. With consumer web products, given how young the industry is, domain expertise rarely refers to years of experience. An expert might be someone who has loved internet technology since childhood, tinkering with Javascript and LED displays after school. More often than not, a consumer web entrepreneur identifies pain points that he wants to solve as a user first. Technophiles, founders, and early adopters are all drawn from the same pool, often by design.

Over the past couple of years, some of these entrepreneurs have begun building products focused on the quantified self. A thesis for the quantified self goes as follows: a modern young professional likely knows his Twitter follower number, Facebook friend count, as well as the market cap, IPO date, and vital data of a half-dozen companies in his industry. But if you ask for his resting heart rate, genetic disease markers, blood pressure, or body mass index, the chance that he knows more than 2 out of 4 of those is vanishingly small. Technology is the answer to this problem. Today, the pedometer, imagined 400 years ago by Leonardo Da Vinci and first developed in 1965, has evolved far beyond a "step counter" and into a suite of full-service health tracking devices.

The White House last week took a big step in answering businesses’ call for a more effective and efficient interface with federal government programs by launching the new Business USA portal. This single online resource enables businesses large and small to easily discover and research the wide array of federal programs and services provided by dozens of federal agencies to help them innovate and increase their competitiveness.

This is the latest step by the Obama administration toward breaking down bureaucratic silos, increasing interagency collaboration, and making the federal government leaner, more efficient, and more customer-friendly. But much still must to be done to build the modernized government that American workers, businesses, and industries need to stay cutting-edge and to compete for the jobs of the 21st century.

In a November blog post, I mentioned the myriad of activities that are impacting our Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, one of which was the congressional effort to reauthorize these programs. Well, Congress voted on the reauthorization, and it was signed into law last December 31. I’ve been waiting until the Small Business Administration (SBA) released their interim guidance so I could give you the details of how the reauthorization will impact NIH small business grants.

The SBA guidance can be found in this blog  by Sean Greene, Associate Administrator for Investment and Special Advisor for Innovation at the SBA. It discusses the timeline Congress gave the SBA for revising the existing regulations and policy directives. They are targeting the end of 2012.

US universities remain the most prolific international patent filers among higher education institutions worldwide, accounting for 30 of the top 50 institutions. The US is followed by Japan and South Korea with seven institutions each, the UN World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO, reported on Monday.

Israel has two universities in the top 50, and Australia, China, Denmark and Singapore have one each.

With reference to the WIPO-administered Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which facilitates the process of seeking patent protection in multiple countries and now has 144 member states, a release on the report stated that the University of California was the world’s largest patent filer among institutions.

This is the fourth post in a series that explores the critical question of what works in economic development? Previous posts have focused on business incubation and suburban revitalization.  For one analyst, the most obvious answer to the question of what works can be summed up in one essential concept: innovation.

In a paper recently published (Feb. 2012) by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, Robert Atkinson calls for a new “doctrine” to guide state and regional economic development efforts.  He advocates and sets forth a policy framework based on “innovation economics” that, at its core, is about creating an environment conducive to the formation of new ideas, new firms, new products and services, new technologies, new skills, and new ways of doing nearly everything.  Atkinson supports his argument with empirical evidence that demonstrates a positive connection between various innovation indicators (e.g., patent activity, business R&D expenditures, share of knowledge-based industries, college educational attainment) and levels of economic growth (e.g., income and wage gains).

When I started my first tech company in 1999 I had pretty good tech chops and had led teams but had very little exposure to many other things that matter in a startup including sales, marketing & business development. Like most first-timers, I learned the hard way.

Negotiating was a subset of every activity in a startup – it really was a way of life.

ABOUT seven months ago I was name-jacked. Enlarge This Image

Laurie Rosenwald I hadn’t looked at my Web site in a while, but I figured that, with a novel coming out, I should bring it up to date. So I Googled deliaephron.com (I never had gotten around to bookmarking it) and it wasn’t there. Instead there was a message: This domain is for sale.

I called the person in charge of my Web site, who happens to be a family member, and found out that he had neglected to renew the domain for reasons having to do with changing his e-mail and credit card. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We have a day left to get it back.” But we did not. When we tried to buy it, someone else already had.

Each day brings another article, TED video, or grand treatise opining how we must revitalize education to encourage entrepreneurship.

This is wrong.

We’ve decided as a tech community and a policy community that the way to flood our society with budding entrepreneurs is simply increase education. So we’ve started spending millions and millions to teach entrepreneurship at all levels. Organizations such as the Kauffman Foundation dedicate their mission to teaching people how to become entrepreneurs. With nearly religious zeal, we’ve decided we need to convert the next generation to Entrepreneurship-ism.

According to Transcend, Canada’s Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Hon. Jason Kenney disclosed that the system for immigrating to Canada under the Entrepreneur stream of Business immigration will be re-introduced by the end of the year. The new program allows the overseas Canadian consulate to be able to attract the type of business immigrant “who can do much more in terms of adding value to the economy than opening up a convenience store.”, thus creating a win-win for both the economy and the immigrant.

Canada's business immigration program includes Immigrant Investor and Entrepreneur streams. The entrepreneur program was suspended in July, 2011 in advance of introduction of a revamped program.

Effective leaders are the key influence in bringing about innovation and opportunity. Their search for ways to advance and grow the organization takes them far beyond the traditional structures, methods and concepts that have worked in the past. In today’s fast-paced market climate, empowering members to test new approaches and ideas is critical. This creates the innovation, creativity and opportunity needed to drive change.

The forces of change come from both inside and outside the organization: customers are the source of demand for product and service innovation; process innovation generally comes from within the organization itself and through its employee members. There are definite factors needed to create the innovation—in essence a willingness to break from past methods—to effect positive change and incremental transformations.

Most governments would hope to foster innovation, but which ones actually support big ideas, new companies and economic growth? A new report by the Kauffman Foundation and the Information Technology and Innovation Council pegs the following 18 countries as having the most effective pro-innovation policies in the world.

The greatest entrepreneurs follow their gut and as a result are perceived as difficult at best and abrasive at worst.

Most people who know me say I’m too diplomatic, but last week my advisor told me that someone asked him if I was “difficult”.  His answer was “if Ash was difficult, I wouldn’t work with him.” I was going to write something on the matter, but felt that doing so would make me come across as, you know, difficult.

But after a recent brief discussion this week with a fellow executive ended in disagreement, I thought to myself: “well that guy’s definitely going to think I’m difficult”, even though only a fool would have accepted his offer.

There's a mystique around successful entrepreneurs, and how they grow from people like us into extraordinary successes. Dragons' Den has more viewers than Hockey Night in Canada, and our media tell and retell the stories of men and women who once seemed like ordinary kids but took an idea and built it into a great company.

Brian Scudamore is one such Canadian story. He started selling candy to his school friends on Vancouver Island. In the late 1980s, when he couldn't find a summer job, he saw a junk pickup truck in front of him at McDonald's and thought he could earn some money hauling rubbish. Today, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has over 1,000 trucks picking up scrap across North America and Australia, and Scudamore is a celebrated entrepreneur whose story is repeated count-less times.

Looking for venture capital? The Small Business Administration    may soon have more money to put to work through its Small Business Investment Companies program.

Two key senators introduced legislation that would increase the amount of debt that the SBA could guarantee for SBICs from $3 billion to $4 billion. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who chairs the Senate Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee, and Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, the committee's ranking Republican. President Barack Obama has called for this expansion of the SBIC program.

This history of the economy in many ways is quite simple. The numbers below are approximates and a bit of a mash up taken from several sources to illustrate trends and shifts in our economy.

Here’s a brief 10,000 year summary of the economy in North America and to a certain degrees the Western Hemisphere. Since the dawn of civilization, there have been three drivers of wealth and job creation in the economy. The Agrarian Age, The Industrial Age and now the Creative Age.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration holds more than 2,000 meetings a year with 1,800 companies who are all trying to get the information they need to get a drug approved or a medical device cleared.

Meetings happen at various stages, typically at key milestones of a product’s development. With so many FDA meetings, it can be hard to get on the FDA’s calender. But it’s not enough to get the meeting, said Mark Baumgartner, senior director, global regulatory affairs for GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK). You’ve got to make the most of the meeting time that you have. A growing number of these meetings are with “emerging sponsors,” typically smaller, venture capital-backed companies that have never taken a drug to market. The FDA realizes that emerging sponsors need more guidance than large pharmaceutical companies. If you’re one of them, a little preparation — actually, a lot of preparation — goes a long way.