Sharlene Fair had tried for years to lose weight, but nothing seemed to work until she found her answer after breathing into a tube at her local gym.

It was an irritating 10 minutes of breathing, but one that Fair said ultimately helped her drop what she calls the equivalent of a "small child" in pounds.

The tube was connected to a machine at LifeBridge Health & Fitness in Pikesville that used Fair's breath to measure her metabolic rate, or how fast she burns calories while resting. Her personal trainer used the data to help determine the exact number of calories Fair should be eating to lose weight and then tailored an eating and exercise plan to fit her body composition.

The trigger for the widespread and systematic deployment of personalised healthcare was pulled last month with the announcement by the US company Life Technologies of a desktop machine that can sequence an individual’s genome at a price of $1,000.

This has long been seen as the price point at which genome sequencing could start to become a regular part of healthcare, alongside measuring blood pressure and heart rate, and unlocking the door to personalised medicine.

There’s a lot still to do to shift from the old paradigm of medical practice to the new, believes Robert Wells, Head of Biotechnology Unit at the Science and Technology Policy Division of the OECD, but the field is advancing in a number of different ways. Over the past 15 years or so, “It’s gone from if to when, and how to now,” Wells told the Science|Business conference ‘Personalised Healthcare: from Theory to Practice’ held in London last month.

R&D may be the engine of growth and innovation, but it is also an expensive enterprise. In this time of austerity, policy makers and funders need to consider how to increase R&D productivity and ensure they get the most out of the money that is invested in science.

In my book, How Economics Shapes Science, I explore the ways in which public research organisations and scientists respond to incentives.  From a policy perspective, it is both good news and bad news that they respond.  Get the incentives right, and research productivity is enhanced; get them wrong, and it is dampened.

Many of the examples in the book are drawn from the US, which, because of my experiences on advisory boards at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, I know reasonably well. While the US science system is typically invoked as the frontier, there are many ways in which the incentives have begun to turn against US science.  There are clear lessons here for others that aspire to be at the frontier.

If your startup can’t be bothered with social media, or has no plan to take advantage of it, then you are definitely at risk these days. But simply jumping in is not enough. Before you start spending money and time being a user, you need to understand how it can help you and your business. Using it randomly or incorrectly is a waste of your precious time.

Sherrie Madia and Paul Borgese have addressed the positives of this challenge in their book, “The Social Media Survival Guide,” on “everything you need to know to grow your business exponentially with social media.” They also identify clearly the five key social media mistakes that I often see, along the following lines:

Diving in without a strategic plan. Don’t start podcasting, blogging, tweeting, “friending” on Facebook, and posting YouTube videos until you know what your messages are, who will manage them, who your audience is, and how they and you are going to benefit from the content and relationship.

I’ve learned a lot about parenting from being an entrepreneur and vice versa. I detailed some of my lessons a few months ago here. I’m a big fan of crossover advice and transferable lessons. Really, who wants to have to learn the same thing twice? During a recent conversation that I had with a few pregnant entrepreneurs I found myself really driving home the value of leveraging the lessons that entrepreneurship has taught you for parenting. This made me curious about more “crossover” advice. What else do experts see to be true about not only their area of specialty but also their experience of entrepreneurship? Over the next couple weeks, we will explore how parenting, design, and wellness advice also applies to your business.

The echo-chamber has flooded the web with all the details following the filing of Facebook’s IPO. It will raise $5 billion in the listing. It will be valued somewhere between US$75-billion and US$100-billion. We even know that the graffiti artist who took stock instead of cash for painting the walls at Facebook’s first HQ is now worth US$200 million. But what’s behind the numbers and how do they compare?

1. We’re all going mobile

Out of 825-million monthly users on Facebook, more than half — 425-million active users — access the site via mobile. These are people who use the site via a mobile app (its app is the most downloaded on the iTunes App Store) or via a mobile-optimised version of the website. Mobile users grew by 21% over the last four months. As many point out, the company doesn’t currently serve any advertising on its mobile site or apps.

A brand new incubator has opened up in Silicon Valley with the aim of fostering cross-border US-China startups. The facility will reportedly cover a “broad range of technologies” including mobile, software, health, and renewables.

The incubator claims to be the first operation of its kind “to focus on nurturing American and Chinese start-ups to expand beyond their home countries”. It believes that this focus “will increase technology development, commercialization, investment and job creation in both countries”.

The incubator, which is housed in 13 500 square foot building, will reportedly house between 30-50 early-stage startups. It claims that it will provide these startups with “comprehensive incubation services” and physical space.

As venture capitalists in recent years pulled away from backing risky start-up companies, entrepreneurs noted a serious financing gap that threatened Connecticut's position as one of the country's most innovative states.

"The whole innovation ecosystem depends on capital," said Frank Marco, an attorney for Wiggin and Dana in New Haven.

Marco, who helped launch the start-up technology company Autotether LLC, said the funding gap currently is being filled by so-called "angel investors," who are taking advantage of a tax incentive passed by the General Assembly in 2010 to help small state businesses succeed.

Many of Facebook's first employees are no longer at the company.

Some left to join reputable startups like Twitter; others started their own companies like Quora, Asana and YouTube.

Those who remained at Facebook now have executive positions (and many of them just became millionaires).

The graffiti artist who took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls of the social network’s first headquarters made a smart bet. The shares owned by the artist, David Choe, are expected to be worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year.

The social network company announced its $5 billion public offering Wednesday afternoon, which is expected to value the whole company at $75 billion to $100 billion. Ultimately, that offering will mint a lot of billionaires and millionaires.

In the past two years, many seed funds and start-up accelerators in Mexico have sprung up, creating new opportunities for small companies that otherwise would have a though road in developing viable products.

In building a sustainable start-up ecosystem, several key ingredients are needed. In Mexico, funding has been a constant complaint among those who are just starting out and need that small push to go from idea to prototype. For years, seed funding was unavailable for technological companies, but new players are opening opportunities in the country.

For years New York City–based universities have been opening satellite campuses worldwide, whether it is New York University's sites in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv or Columbia University's Global Centers in Beijing and Nairobi. Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa is returning the favor in a big way, partnering with Ithaca, N.Y.–based Cornell University to build a campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island.

The purpose of this high-tech venture is to turn the 52-hectare sliver of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens into a techno island of sorts, an incubator for start-ups akin to what Stanford University has done in Silicon Valley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (M.I.T.) role in the Boston area.

The US is still the country with the highest population of Twitter users and Brazil overtook Japan to climb into second place. The most active country on the social network, however, is still the Netherlands. That’s according to a new study from French-based research firm Semiocast.

The results of the study also put a number of emerging market countries in the top ten when it comes to user numbers. Some of them, however, lag when it comes to engagement on the social network.

Some 107-million Twitter accounts are based in the US, meaning that it represents 28.1% of all Twitter users. It also puts it some distance ahead of the 30-million plus accounts of second placed Brazil.

Other emerging market countries with a place in the top 10 countries include Indonesia, India, Mexico and the Philippines.

The American people bankroll the federal government’s four biggest spending items to the tune of $2.2 trillion annually. Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, and Social Security make up over two thirds of the federal budget.

By contrast, the slivers of the federal budget that go toward innovation are drops in a very big bucket. “We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation,” writes Alex Tabarrok in The Atlantic, “but our government is a warfare-welfare state.”

As Greece flirts with default, the focus in the U.S. is shifting to the capital strength of domestic banks with plenty to lose.

DealBook's Peter Eavis reports that five of the biggest U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, have more than $80 billion exposure to the riskiest European sovereigns — Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. And the credit default swaps the banks bought to protect themselves against a credit event may never pay out.

It's no secret that Americans love fast food.

So when we recently discovered statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that track the number of fast food restaurants per state, we decided to create an interactive map to see where fast food retailers are hawking their fare the most.

Vermont, Washington D.C., Maine, Montana and Rhode Island have the most fast food spots per capita, while less surprisingly, California, New York, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania have the most total fast food locations.

AngelList democratized the funding of startups.

But a new platform launched today called Wefunder wants to open up the funding process to the masses -- as long as a critical bill passes Congress.

Wefunder will take a Kickstarter approach to crowdsource funding. The plan is to pick one company per week. First, accredited investors will do due diligence and put in $25,000. At that point, anyone will be able to invest $100 to $1,000 in the startup of the week.

Michael Pena wouldn’t say the Startup America Partnership saved his business in the past year. But it sure helped—especially with the private contributions of time, knowledge, and services from the companies and people that are part of the initiative that turns a year old today.

“I like to believe that we’re a tenacious bunch, but they certainly have made our lives a whole bunch easier,” said Pena, the 28-year-old cofounder and chief executive of Autoref, a website that helps people make car-purchase decisions. “If we just look at the amount of exposure we have received…it’s like hiring a $4,000 PR person.”

The Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization has released its anniversary report: 20 Years of Innovation.

The report provides a broad mix of Vanderbilt inventions over the past two decades, and outlines the steady growth of technology transfer at Vanderbilt during that time.

Many writers have outlined the critical success factors for product companies, like sell every unit at a profit, patent the design, and continuous product improvement. But recently I was asked about success factors for services startups, and I quickly realized that there is very little published to help the thousands of startups that fall in this category.

The distinction between product companies and services companies is easy to see. Products are tangible and can be consumed now or later, while services are intangible and have no shelf life. A product business can usually be scaled with minimal people, which can lead to enormous profits and “making money while you sleep.” Scaling services means cloning yourself.