Mayor Bloomberg detailed the wide array of affordable workspaces available to small start-up businesses through New York City's incubator program on Thursday while visiting the Entrepreneur Space, a 12,500-square-foot City-sponsored food-manufacturing and business incubator in Long Island City, Queens.

The incubator program was launched in 2009 to promote entrepreneurship and make it easier to start businesses and create jobs. The City has opened nine incubators in the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens, featuring 125,000 square feet of affordable space, with additional projects in the pipeline.

If you believe the numbers, it’s hard to deny that we’re in the midst of an incubator bubble.

An Xconomy survey recently found that the number of venture incubators in the U.S. has risen to 64 in 2011, nearly double the 34 of the prior year, and more than triple the amount in 2009.

Ohio has seen its share of entrants into the competition, including one incubator in Hudson that recently opened. LaunchHouse came to Shaker Heights earlier this year, while even the state itself has gotten into the act with an incubator-like summer venture competition it called OneFund that was sponsored by the Ohio Department of Development. Add those to several existing incubators in the state, such as one that was established at Ohio University in 1983, and it’s clear that Ohio has no shortage of incubators — though the number recently dropped by one when a Cincinnati biotech incubator shut it doors.

“This is a $2.4 trillion industry run on handwritten notes,” says 33-year-old Dr. Jay Parkinson. “We’re using 3,000-year-old tools to deliver health care in the richest country on the planet.” His prescription: a Facebook-like platform that uses technology, from IM to video chat, to restore the traditional doctor-patient relationship that has been lost in today’s high-pressure, high-volume, eight-minute-appointment practice model, which is often blamed for the shortage of primary-care physicians.

Global spending on information and communications technologies is fueling higher valuations for public software companies, according to a quarterly report released by the San Diego-based Software Equity Group. Much of that increased spending, however, reflects an intensifying demand for cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS), as big-company CIOs increasingly accept the notion of outsourcing many programs that were previously installed on corporate networks.

As a result, valuations of public SaaS companies have continued to climb, and more SaaS companies got acquired during the second quarter that ended in June.

Researchers at Stanford University are using computers and genomic information to predict new uses for existing medicines by analyzing genomic and drug data.

The scientists drew their data from the NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus, a publicly available database that contains the results of thousands of genomic studies on a wide range of topics, submitted by researchers across the globe.

The database catalogs changes in gene activity under various conditions, such as in diseased tissues or in response to medications.

The researchers focused on 100 diseases and 164 drugs. They created a computer program to search through the thousands of possible drug-disease combinations to find drugs and diseases whose gene expression patterns essentially cancelled each other out.

Now that email has been around for 30 years or so, you’d think that common messaging activities — like using the Reply and Reply All buttons — would just be common sense. Alas, based on all the pain I see at work, in email from BNET readers, and out there on the Web in general, it’s clearly not the case.  Here’s my take on when and how you should use Reply and Reply All to avoid causing problems in the office.

Use Reply All

In general, all the time. What? That’s crazy, right? Nope. Someone crafted the addressees in the email you are reading for a reason, and respect that. I’m referring, of course, to typical email threads with a small group of people — there are exceptions, and I’ll get to those in a moment.  But if you click reply to a mail with a bunch of addressees on it, you identify yourself as either clumsy and thoughtless or someone who doesn’t respect the people on the CC line enough to include them in the conversation. Which of those would you like to be known as?

Today, many companies offer their employees the option to work from home, even if they live relatively close to the office. But common sense tells us that for some employees, this may not be the best option. As you can imagine, some unsupervised employees would sooner fill their day playing World of Warcraft than actually working. This decision tree will help you decide if you should let your employees work remotely, or if they should be required to work in-house.

In the September issue of Scientific American, Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser describes how education and entrepreneurship can make or break cities. In a series of case studies around the Web, Glaeser has explored how those factors and others have allowed some U.S. cities to thrive as others continue to struggle. Below are links to his writings, plus related articles, on five American metropolises.

DETROIT Detroit's mayor David Bing has adopted a promising strategy to save his city: shrink it to a sustainable size. By focusing public services on healthy neighborhoods and pulling back from the others, the plan acknowledges that Detroit and other cities of the Great Lakes region will never return to their former greatness (pdf). Those glory years depended on specific historical factors conductive to heavy industry, such as proximity to mines and waterways. But Detroit can become a vibrant, livable smaller city.

Minneapolis has launched a unique service that helps connect inventors with lawyers who will work on their case pro bono.

Each participant needs to attend a training program on intellectual property and is required to do a patent search to see if their ideas are new.

There is a list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, and the last time it was updated, back in June this year, Fujitsu’s “K” (pictured) came out on top, taking the No. 1 spot from Tianhe-1A (a supercomputer from China).

It was the first time since 2004 for Japan to get to claim those bragging rights, and now the country’s largest business newspaper The Nikkei reports that the government is already thinking about what will happen in 2020: by then, the plan is to develop a computer that handles exascale computing or, in other words, one million trillion operations per second (that computer would be 100 times more powerful than K).

Apple plans to leave a lasting mark in Silicon Valley, giving the place a real landmark for innovation. That’s the impression I get from the latest details about its planned spaceship-like circular headquarters, as revealed by Apple Insider.

The city of Cupertino, Calif., where Apple is based, has released more details and drawings of Apple’s plan to create a 2.8 million-square-feet headquarters in the city. The circular building is located on land that Apple has purchased from Hewlett-Packard, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based tech giant.

The city is reviewing the proposed plan from Apple and is doing an environmental impact report. It will look at traffic, noise, air quality and other impacts. Apple still has to get through a development review and publiic hearings at the planning commission and city council. As you can see from the images, Apple’s building will be like no other and it will be surrounded by greenery. Apple says it will exceed “economic, social, and environmental sustainability” goals.

As financial turmoil swirls in the wake of the S&P’s recent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, it is evident that our economy needs help.  Much of what we need as a nation lies in the hands of our elected officials.  However, we also need a steady crop of new entrepreneurs to boost employment by creating more businesses. And with respect to these entrepreneurs and their businesses, I say the more boring the better.

In the modern era, entrepreneurship conjures up exciting notions of high-tech, consumer-oriented software that will change the way of life for people across the globe. Indeed, many brilliant startup founders have made dramatic technological or scientific contributions to the world, as well as made a mint along the way.  Think cancer-fighting drugs, Google, Facebook, and Netflix. Countless entrepreneurs are motivated by these high-risk, high-return opportunities, and we need more such individuals to keep our economy on the cutting edge of innovation. However, in a flailing economy with discouraging employment data, it is worth recognizing that these are not the only entrepreneurs we need.

From a whimper to a shout out! Such is the history of university business incubators over the past decade. From the existence of a countable few before the year 2000, universities, colleges, and even community colleges have “manned up” on the issue of creating incubators at every crossroad and in every community. It’s all about community engagement and prosperity through innovation and economic development. And as might be expected, the “incubators” come in so many varieties that they are no longer countable. Is it an incubator or an accelerator, virtual space or leased real estate, profitable or subsidized? It’s certainly a career path for those people who enjoy definitions and taxonomy!

Many people surf the Web while they watch television. Soon­­­ the websites they visit could adapt in real time themselves to the shows being watched—automatically presenting information relevant to the show, or even tuning their ads in response to what you're watching.

A new type of Internet-connected television, due out before the end of the year, has built-in software and hardware that send data about what is on-screen to an Internet server that can identify the content. Web pages being viewed using the same Internet connection as the TV set can then tap into that information. The system can identify any content onscreen, whatever the source, whether live TV, DVDs or movie files playing from a computer.

Earlier this year Microsoft completed renovations on its new “Garage,” a site in Redmond, Washington, that encourages innovation among small groups of employees. Throughout the building are “pods” like those shown here. In these temporary work spaces, teams of two to five employees can collaborate on projects for weeks at a time—something that can otherwise be tough in a company with almost 90,000 employees.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the award of $74 million to create four new Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) that will advance interdisciplinary research and education in partnership with industry.

During the next five years, the ERCs will share the goal of creating knowledge and innovations that address significant societal issues such as health and sustainability challenges while advancing the competitiveness of U.S. industry. The centers will support research and innovation in solar energy, water infrastructure, neural engineering and energy transmission.

It is often the case that new media formats are greeted with suspicion amid fears that the changes they herald will undermine important creative aspects of society.  Often these fears are misplaced and it is the distribution channels of the old format that are under threat rather than the media itself, and after a period of decline the industry returns to growth and often hits a new peak.  Earlier this week I saw a chart which showed how the music industry evolved according to this pattern as the physical format shifted from vinyl through cassettes to CDs, and today I’ve seen data showing that ebooks are now driving growth at the overall market level in the book industry.

Last Tuesday the Association of American Publishers released a study which found that total US industry sales grew 3.1% to $27.9bn from 2009-2010 and that ebooks were 5.7% of the total at $1.6bn.  The press release gave ebook sales for the trade portion of the market and assuming a similar growth rate in consumer ebook sales then it is accurate to say that the overall industry growth is down entirely to ebooks, and that physical book sales declined.

The U.S. debt ceiling has been making news for weeks (really months), but women business owners have debt ceilings of their own that could be holding their business growth back, the recently released PNC Women Business Owners Outlook survey reveals.

Overall, women business owners are optimistic. The survey found that almost half (48 percent) of U.S. women business owners believe their own companies’ sales will grow in the next six months, and 37 percent expect profits to rise. Six in 10 say their businesses are meeting or exceeding their sales expectations, and eight in 10 are optimistic about their businesses’ future prospects.

There is a big difference between your “brand” and your “branding.”

Your brand is you: who you are , what you do, what you stand for, your DNA personality. You are a tangible artifact, which you create into a brand–an image that lives in the minds of the people you interact with and who come to know you. Are you…

• A watercolor nature artist?
• An NBA athlete?
• A criminal trial attorney?
• An eighth-grade science teacher?
• A cupcake baker?
• A cardiologist?

We often talk about all the things businesses are doing right with environmental sustainability. And that’s how it should be: Being an environmentally conscious company is a positive thing and worthy of applause. But there’s also value in evaluating what’s not working so well – what can be done better.

In that spirit, here’s a list of five common mistakes that small businesses make when going green:

1.      Not rolling out sustainability broadly enough. Sustainability can’t be a one-trick pony. Consumers are becoming leerier of companies branding themselves as “green” because they, say, installed energy-efficient light bulbs. They’re looking beneath the surface and seeking validation that companies they support are incorporating green practices across the board – from office energy use to water use to supply chain management. To avoid being accused of “greenwashing,” you need to show a commitment to lowering your carbon footprint as much as you can.