KNOW HOW TO WIREFRAME

“Being able to wireframe a page is an incredible important skill for technology development. It’s critical for being able to properly and ideally communicate with your technical and product teams. While not a coding skill per se, it requires understanding how sites or apps are designed, and the more advanced wireframing can involve complex software. Be sure to develop this skill before starting up.”

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Becoming an intrapreneur isn’t something people typically fall into. If you want it to happen, you’re going to have to get out there and make it happen. And to do that, you’ll need a plan.

Item number one on your list is to master your job. This is actually a two-parter. First, become an expert in your current role. Second, you’ll need to hit certain milestones if you want to pull this off. The first one is being at your job long enough for you to learn your role and feel that you could teach everything you do to another person. You need to prove your worth and demonstrate that you can handle the responsibilities you were hired to do.

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For the third time in its history, Quebec City has been selected as one of the Smart21 Communities of the Year. This international honour was awarded by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), an independent New York-based organization dedicated to studying the economic and social aspects of communities using innovative new technologies. The announcement was made by one of the ICF’s co-founders, Louis Zacharilla, at a symposium organized by Walsh University’s Institute for the Study of the Intelligent Community in Ohio. Some 400 applications were received from cities and regions around the world.

Time travel has been a standard of science fiction since H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" came out in 1895, but fictional people have been hopping through time and space for hundreds of years, from the Hindu sacred text the "Mahabharata" to the 12th-century medieval text De nugis curialium.

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So it turns out that, contrary to what your SAT scores told you, we can actually get smarter day by day--depending on what we do with our days. As Annie Murphy Paul reports, intelligence isn't set in stone--it's fluid.

This fluidity comes from all sorts of things: the way we think about ourselves, the expertise we develop, the people we surround ourselves with. In short, the way we live our lives shapes our minds, in some seriously mysterious ways.

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With mHealth becoming the norm instead of the exception, a panel at Partners HealthCare's 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium last week concluded that EHR vendors will have to find a way to modify their products to focus on data that the patient and his or her care team want, or they'll become obsolete.

Important information for a patient's care actually exists outside the electronic medical record, panelists said.

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SALES of President Obama masks at Party City in Augusta, Me., are down this Halloween season, way down. “It’s not that popular an item,” said a sales clerk when I visited a few weeks ago. You’d think this would be a bad sign for the Democrats, but on the other hand, there weren’t any John Boehner or Mitch McConnell masks in the store. The public has spoken: no one fantasizes about being a politician anymore. The most popular costume at that Party City? The minions from “Despicable Me.”

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Charlotte Deutsch, who will be 2 years old next month, has a look of pure delight as she swipes the screen of her mother’s old iPhone, and finds a picture of herself.

“Baby Chacha!” she crows, swiping again to encounter another treasure. “Dada!”

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A one-meter-square gray box studded 
with green lights sits in a hallway near the laboratory of materials scientist Eric ­Wachsman, director of the Energy Research Center at the University of Maryland. It is a mockup of a fuel-cell device that runs on natural gas, producing electricity at the same cost as a large gas plant.

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Last year more than 1,000 people in four countries sat down and watched 115 television ads, such as one featuring anthropomorphized M&M candies boogying in a bar. All the while, webcams pointed at their faces and streamed images of their expressions to a server in Waltham, Massachusetts.

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Ed Moody carved his first pumpkin at age 6. He is now one of the premier pumpkin carvers in America reports The Chicago Sun Times.

Moody has carved 23 giant pumpkins — weighing more than 200 pounds — that sit in his front yard.

It is a Halloween Stonehenge.

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The government shutdown is thankfully behind us, but this needless crisis certainly damaged the economy -- particularly small businesses and entrepreneurs who lost sales and access to programs to help them expand. It’s now time to move our economy forward and focus on the key economic question before us: How do we create strong middle-class jobs and continue our economic growth?

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The World Economic Forum has just come out with their latest data on global gender equality, and the short version could well be this old Beatles lyric: “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better. A little better, all the time. (It can’t get more worse.)”

I talked with Saadia Zahidi, a Senior Director at the WEF and their Head of Gender Parity and Human Capital. Yes, it’s getting better. Out of the 110 countries they’ve been tracking since 2006, 95 have improved and just 14 have fallen behind (a single country, Sweden, has remained the same). But that’s partly because in some places, there was nowhere to go but up.

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There is not much agreement about what makes an idea innovative, and what makes an innovative idea valuable.

For example, discussions on whether the internet is a better invention than the wheel are more likely to reveal personal preferences than logical argumentation. Likewise, experts disagree on the type and level of innovation that is most beneficial for organizations. Some studies suggest that radical innovation (which does sound sexy) confers sustainable competitive advantages, but others show that “mild” innovation – think iPhone 5 rather than the original iPhone – is generally more effective, not least because it reduces market uncertainty.

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I truly love cars, and, having turned 40 recently, I went on a year-long search for the perfect car to celebrate with. I had given up for a while until I came across the amazing Tesla Model S. Tesla Motors TSLA +0.32% represents everything I appreciate in life – innovation, technology, and even tax policy.

In my last post I discussed how corporate tax credits and other incentives can fuel innovation. Tesla is one example of this that’s gotten a lot of attention lately, along with other recent success by the U.S. auto industry with projects in clean energy.

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Rx&D, Canada's Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies, has taken note of the new Quebec policy on research and innovation, as presented by Pierre Duchesne, Minister of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology. While recognizing the value of certain measures, Rx&D has concerns about the applicability and scope of others and the weight the government intends to place on ensuring new pharmaceutical innovations are recognized and integrated in the Quebec market, notably through improved access..

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In September, Title II of the JOBS Act, which permits general solicitation to accredited investors, became law. Title III, which expands this right to non-accredited investors is expected to become law next year. These sections of the JOBS Act have generated a great deal of discussion, and new web based services, focused on the crowdfunding concept.

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Eelke Folmer and Vinitha Khambadkar think blind people could do without their white canes and instead navigate with a camera around their necks that gives spoken guidance in response to hand gestures.

Folmer and Khambadkar, researchers at the University of Nevada, presented the technology last week at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Known as the Gestural Interface for Remote Spatial Perception, which they abbreviate as GIST, the system utilizes a Microsoft Kinect sensor to analyze and identify objects in its field of view. “GIST lets you extract information from your environment,” Folmer says.

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Ann Winblad, who will be honored on Oct. 23 by Silicon Valley's VC Taskforce, says women have come a long way in venture capital and tech since she started in the 1970s and 1980s.

In a conversation about being this year's Innovation Catalyst Award winner, Winblad recalled a tech conference in the early days. The organizers told her that since she was the only woman speaker they were putting her up with one of the entertainers—who turned out to be a stripper.

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For the third quarter, total venture capital spending in the U.S. rose 12 percent to $7.8 billion compared to $7 billion for the previous quarter.  Total number of deals rose five percent to 1,005 from 956 over the previous quarter, according to the latest MoneyTree tally from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

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