Offering incentives, goals, and prizes to users through game mechanics is hardly new. Most of us have long been accumulating points towards rewards with various frequent flyer plans, for example.

But perhaps due to the success of companies like Foursquare and Gowalla, it certainly does seem as though every new site, service, and application now includes some sort of game feature in order to encourage adoption and use. In a recent blog post, Mojopages CEO Jon Carder calls game mechanics "the new black" and argues that game mechanics will become more and more ubiquitous as companies realize that customers are drawn to sites that make interaction "fun, rewarding, and even addictive."

So, will incorporating game mechanics into the design of a new product, service, or application become a requirement for startups?

When I talk to angel investors, the most common complaint I hear is that the CEO’s of the companies they invest in do not provide regular status reports. And most provide no formal reports at all, even though they have a moral, legal, and fiduciary responsibility to do so.CEO not reporting to investors?

The question is, why? Is it their intent to mislead? Are they lazy? Are they hiding something?

I don’t think it is any of those things. Having had the opportunity to sit on both sides of the table, as a CEO of a privately funded company and later, as an angel investor, I would boil it down to four main issues:

1. Waiting for good news. For most companies, the good news is just another day or another week away. And even when some good news finally arrives, there is some even better news another day or another week away. So (thinks the CEO) why not wait and send the report when you can announce the new customer, the product release, and the astounding financial performance all at once? The problem is, the stars usually do not align that way and that perfect reporting moment never seems to arrive.

This is the ideal forum for any entrepreneur seeking information, help, ideas or feedback. Being an active member of the forum, I know first hand that they have one of the most helpful communities out there.

Is there an entrepreneur inside of you waiting to escape? Have you been laid off and are thinking about starting your own business? Are you ready to make your first million? Do you know that you can build a better mousetrap? Do you want to work at home, be your own boss? There are countless reasons why people want to start a business. Some people who want to start their own business jump right in. They are risk takers. Others are more thoughtful planners who analyze the market and develop a comprehensive business plan. And still others have the dream but never take the plunge. How do you know if starting your own business is right for you; if it is what business and where do your begin?

The Right Stuff:

Do you have the “right stuff” to be an entrepreneur? Google “am I an entrepreneur” and countless tests and quizzes and assessments pop up that intend on answering that question for you. The assessments will have you check answers to questions that ask you if you are: Extrovert or introvert? Social butterfly or Loner? Risk taker or Low risk profile? Goes by the book or writes my own book? Self-starter or likes direction? and so on.

A small digital microscope that costs just a few dollars can plug into a cell phone and perform basic medical diagnostics that would ordinarily require expensive lab equipment. The microscope, which uses no lenses, saves on cost and weight by using algorithms to get more information from images. The device can generate blood counts and identify disease cells and bacteria from simple images sent through a USB cord to a cell phone that uses software to processes the data. The latest version of the microscope integrates an interference-based contrast method to provide better images in addition to diagnostic information.

The researchers developing the device hope it will bring better medical diagnostics to parts of the world where cell phones are prevalent but access to expensive clinical diagnostic equipment is not. Even basic cell phones now have significant processing power that can be used to analyze images of blood smears and other samples on the spot, enabling a patient to get on the right tuberculosis drug faster and enabling health-care providers to identify drug-resistant strains faster. What sets the new microscope apart from other efforts at integrating optical diagnostics with cell phones is the effort to make it as simple and cheap as possible. That means eliminating expensive lenses, and using software to get medical information from blurry images.

Here’s a simple question for you…which metro areas did prospered the most during the past business cycle? (2000-2008) Were the winners the highly-educated communities that make up the Creative Economy? Or did someone else zoom ahead?

I asked myself these questions when I was preparing for a talk that I was giving at the Rochester Institute of Technology on innovation and economic development. Being a man of numbers, I calculated the gains in real-per capita income for all metro areas. Who do you think was #1, and who do you think was #366 (out of 366)

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New Orleans native Kenneth Purcell and his wife have called 911 about 20 times in the past year to report break-ins and other crimes near their home and his business, located just three blocks apart in the city's Warehouse District. But that hasn't driven him from the inner city. His 25-employee software firm, iSeatz, is thriving, with sales last year of $38 million, up from $28 million in 2008. That success has been helped by what Purcell calls the "social capital" gained by creating local jobs when he moved back from Manhattan two years after Katrina. "In the midst of hearing about all these big businesses that were abandoning the state in which they were founded, I said, to hell with that," the 35-year-old founder and chief executive says. "I wanted to go home and do the opposite of everyone else."

His company landed second place in this year's Inner City 100 ranking of the fastest-growing inner-city businesses in the U.S. The list—based on five-year compound annual growth rate—is a Who's Who of high-potential private ventures in downtrodden urban areas.(Bloomberg Businessweek is the media partner.) Think multimillion-dollar manufacturers and construction companies (these industries make up 31 percent of the 2010 ranking), not mom-and-pop bodegas.The annual roundup is compiled by the Boston-based not-for-profit Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School competitiveness guru Michael Porter. The ICIC's goal is to show that not only can companies thrive in the inner city, but there are also competitive advantages to locating there. Over the past 12 years, winners have created 71,000 new jobs and employed 40,000 inner-city residents.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: an academic novel, set at a fictional (but prestigious) American research university, portrays tenured faculty who are indolent but querulous; students whose main activities include protesting, avoiding classes, and popping pills; and an administration that’s disorganized, secretive, and ineffectual. Money and status are the primary concerns of professors and administrators alike; the community as a whole is characterized by lassitude and petty squabbling, while education is of minimal importance to anyone.

So what’s different about Tech Transfer, the new book by Daniel S. Greenberg?

For one thing, Greenberg himself. While Tech Transfer is his first novel, Greenberg's journalism career has spanned well over four decades and has primarily focused on science – specifically how it is justified, funded, and conducted in the United States. All three of his nonfiction books address these themes, and the title of the most recent – Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism – might also function as a brief synopsis of Tech Transfer.

To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone.

In a paper titled, "Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea (PDF)," Wharton operations and information management professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive marketing strategies.

Terwiesch, Ulrich and co-author Karan Girotra, a professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD, found that a hybrid process -- in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers -- resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process. More importantly for companies striving for innovation, however, the trio says the absolute best idea in a hybrid process topped the Number One suggestion in a traditional model.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signs SB1254 into law; modifies current R&D tax credit to allow small technology companies to receive a refund of 75% of their eligible tax credit

The National Venture Capital Association, trade group for an industry dominated by men, has a female leader – Kate Mitchell, co-founder and managing director of Scale Venture Partners. Surprisingly, she’s not the first woman to hold the one-year chairman’s post – the others were Kathy Behrens, who took office in 1998, and Patricia Cloherty, who assumed the post in 1994 – amounting to three women on a list that goes back to 1973.

“It probably reflects, when you think of the number of years we’ve been in business, pretty close to the ratio of women in the industry,” Mitchell said in an interview last week at the NVCA’s annual meeting in Burlingame, Calif., where she took the baton from prior Chairman Terry McGuire.

LONDON, May 10, 2010 (Reuters) — Efforts to develop a vaccine triggered by human sweat, and to control mosquitoes using carnivorous plants, were among 78 science projects that won backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday.

The foundation, a $34 billion fund that is run by the multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and invests in scientific projects broadly aimed at improving global health, said each project would get a $100,000 grant for further study.

Other winning projects include developing a low-cost cell phone microscope to diagnose malaria, using ultrasound as a reversible male contraceptive, insecticide-treated scarves and using imaging systems to seek and destroy parasites with a targeted laser vaccine.

"We are convinced that some of these ideas will lead to innovations and eventually solutions that will save lives," Tachi Yamada, of the Gates Foundation's global health program, said in a statement.

Barely a week after the mighty St. John River overflowed its banks in Fredericton, the stately New Brunswick capital was invaded by another unstoppable force of nature: entrepreneurs on a mission.

More than 80 business owners from across the province attended the one-day New Brunswick Entrepreneurs Summit to learn each other's success secrets and hone their networking skills. But founder Rivers Corbett, the owner of Fredericton catering firm Chef Group, has his own mission: To turn his province into "the Davos of entrepreneurship."

Can Canada's eighth-largest province (pop. 750,000) become a raging source of entrepreneurs? It has happened before. Consider the success of Max Aitken (the financier who became Lord Beaverbrook, the first "Baron" of Fleet Street), not to mention the Irvings and McCains.

There are many different challenges and difficulties facing a start-up business, ranging from cash flows to marketing to protection. This column, the first in a series, deals with the importance of protecting one’s intellectual property (IP).

Many readers will identify with a story about a certain lecturer at the University of Pretoria who started dreaming of a financial empire.

He went to the trademarks office in Pretoria, and did his own searches there to see if the trademarks he wanted to use were available and could be registered. He then set about registering the trademarks he wanted.

This person was none other than Anton Rupert, founder of Rembrandt.

The days of dial-up modems may be gone, but some websites are still surprisingly sluggish. The issue has gained urgency after Google recently introduced a change to its PageRank algorithm that rewards sites that run faster. The search company says that users spend less time interacting with slower sites; adding to the issue are users visiting sites from mobile devices with spotty connections.

Aptimize, a startup based in Wellington, New Zealand, that launches its service in the United States today, says its software can speed up website load times, bringing increases of 200 to 400 percent in some cases. It says it can achieve these improvements entirely in software.

Ed Robinson, cofounder and CEO, says that companies often improve the speed of a website by throwing hardware at the problem. He contends that the fundamental problem is often the structure of the website itself.

Because the recession has been quite severe, a lot of the recent discussion of employment has focused on the time period since the recession began in December 2007. As you no doubt know, over that time period, the jobs picture hasn’t looked pretty in businesses of any size – small, medium, or large.

But if we look at the jobs situation over a longer period of time – since 2000 – the pattern is different, particularly across businesses of different sizes.

In the figure below, I have plotted the number of people employed in small, medium, and large establishments relative to their level in December 2000, using data collected by Automated Data Processing (ADP). ADP reports monthly numbers on employment in small (1-49 employees), medium (50-499 employees) and large (more than 499 employee) private sector establishments that use its payroll services.

Simon Sinek’s TED Talk from TedxPuget Sound (Sept 2009) has been posted and is just awesome. He starts out with the question “Why is Apple so innovative,“ Why is it that Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement,” and “Why is it that the Wright Brothers were able to figure out controlled power manned flight?”

The EU's 20-year-old single market is at a critical juncture and needs to be fully completed to further boost Europe's crisis-battered European productivity and competitiveness, reveals a report presented yesterday (10 May) by former Italian Commissioner Mario Monti, who was tasked with coming up with a comprehensive new strategy.

On the basis of an extensive consultation process, Monti has drawn a map of new legislative proposals to improve the EU's single market that the Commission should present by July.

Presenting his report to European Commission President José Manuel Barroso before the European Parliament's internal market committee yesterday, Monti urged the EU to remove the remaining bottlenecks that are hampering innovation and dampening Europe's growth potential.

"There is now a window of opportunity to bring back the political focus of the single market," he argued.

Debra Gelinas's students want college credit for their internships. Actually, they need it. Companies often insist on credit so that interns might legally qualify as unpaid trainees. So eager students turn to Ms. Gelinas, director of experiential learning at Berklee College of Music, in Boston.

Berklee values practical experience and offers an internship-based course, but students, who intern for record companies and film scorers, balk at the tuition, especially over the summer. So Ms. Gelinas developed a certificate program, a sort of course-lite: fewer assignments, no credit, no fee.

"It was a way to create more opportunity for students," she says. Berklee started the program this semester, employers seemed satisfied, and 36 students enrolled. More than 50 have signed up for the summer already.

Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a member of the Senate Banking Committee, on Monday filed an amendment to the financial reform currently in the Senate that would require all hedge funds, private equity shops and venture capital firms to register with either a state regulator or the Securities and Exchange Commission, Politico reported.

The amendment would mean that funds under $100 million, previously exempt from the proposed regulation, would now also be required to register.

Politico had this:

“Hedge funds, private equity and venture capital funds have played an important role in providing liquidity to our financial system and improving the efficiency of capital markets. But as their role has grown so have the risks they pose. This amendment will shut down loopholes and provide the SEC with long-overdue authority to examine and collect data from this key industry,” Mr. Reed said in a statement to POLITICO.