Education-technology companies are hot these days. So are online programs by universities. Pennsylvania State University hopes to tap into both trends with a new effort to turn its campus into an innovation hub for ed-tech companies.

The effort is called the EdTech Network, and officials hope it will spark entrepreneurship around the campus geared toward improving services for online students, said Craig D. Weidemann, the university’s vice provost for online education. That could help Penn State reach its 10-year goal of increasing enrollments in its online World Campus to 45,000 students.

“In a nutshell, what we’re trying to do with Watson Health is enhance expertise,” Kathleen McGroddy Goetz, vice president of IBM Watson Health, said Wednesday during the closing keynote presentation at MedCity CONVERGE in Philadelphia.

“What we’re trying to do with Watson is kind of augment knowledge. We are not trying to replace people,” Goetz continued.

Image: Kathleen McGroddy Goetz, vice president of IBM Watson Health

One of Australia's most successful tech startups, Atlassian, has been named the "Best Place to Work" in Australia on the coveted annual list by Business Review Weekly (BRW).

Atlassian, founded by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar in 2002, is the darling of the startup scene in Sydney, and is also the most envious place to work — for the second year running. The company creates hugely popular tools for software developers and project managers, and is used by companies big and small across the globe.

The phrase Type A personality was originally coined by two cardiologists in the 1950s, based on observations of how middle-aged men with heart conditions behaved in the waiting room. Doctors labeled patients who couldn’t sit still, sat on the edge of their seats, or jumped up frequently "Type A," and subsequently conducted research that showed those people were more likely to develop heart disease and high blood pressure.

The modern day venture capital industry has come a long way since the early 1960s when venture legends Bill Draper and Pitch Johnson founded Draper & Johnson Investment Company. No longer are we a cottage industry tinkering around the edges of our economy. Although we remain small in size compared to the broader private equity industry, we play an outsized role in the U.S. economy through company generation, job creation and overall economic growth.

In recent years, innovation, entrepreneurship and private sector involvement has emerged as a favoured route out of poverty for many development organisations and funders. Its potential to reduce unemployment, tackle societal challenges and stimulate economic growth has sparked significant interest and investment.

We all know that Silicon Valley is the global powerhouse for innovation and entrepreneurship. This is the place where many of the most successful startups are created, but it is also the place where established companies can set up innovation outposts to tap into new opportunities and expand their innovation capabilities.

It has been a turbulent few months for the markets, led by China's economic rebalancing.

But with all the talk of Asia's slowing growth, it's easy to forget about two of the other big drags on the global economic outlook – Brazil and Russia.

HSBC put together a few handy maps to illustrate how the world is doing.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

The palette of materials that can be used as 3-D printing “ink” is quickly growing in diversity, but one ubiquitous material has, until now, been absent: transparent glass.

It’s already possible to use tiny granules of glass in a powder bed with conventional 3-D printing techniques like jetting and sintering, but the products turn out opaque. Now researchers at MIT have demonstrated the first-ever machine that can print molten glass through a nozzle and make transparent glass objects layer by layer according to digital instructions.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Still pining for the days when snapping a Polaroid and instantly (well, almost) showing a finished printed photo to your friends was a hot thing?

Well, Polaroid is still here (more precisely, at IFA Berlin) and it just announced the Polaroid Snap, a digital camera that can immediately print out a photo, and it doesn't even need ink to do it.

The MIT Technology Review’s annual list of 35 Innovators Under 35 aims to illustrate the most important emerging technologies of the moment. Released this August, the 2015 list features a number of robotics and AI visionaries. Check them out.

"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without." - Buddha

"There is no path to peace. Peace is the path." - Mahatma Gandhi

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." - Jimi Hendrix

Image: http://www.ideachampions.com

I can start this edition by saying that I have seen this talent, this special something, in people from all walks of life. Being able to rise up to the occasion is, often, what sets the winners apart from the losers. Rising to the occasion isn’t a quality that defies definition, in my opinion, it’s actually quite simple.

Ask any small business owner and nine times out of ten you’ll hear, ”If you want something done right, you’ll have to do it yourself.”

This is an accepted mantra among many, and at times, it’s true. When you have a lean staff and limited resources and talent, sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves and put your shoulder to the grindstone.

The vast majority of crowdsourcing efforts fall flat, because companies don’t do enough to cultivate individual contributors.

When it comes to crowdsourcing and open innovation, we only ever seem to hear success stories. To be sure, the statistics can be impressive: Dell, for example, claims its IdeaStorm community website has fielded nearly 24,000 ideas since its 2007 launch, more than 550 of which were deemed good enough to act upon. Numbers like these would seem to indicate that there’s a world of innovative ideas out there for just about any company to tap into.

Kansas City’s top business accelerator is now accepting applications for a wider applicant pool after a recent — albeit minimal — name change.

The Sprint Mobile Accelerator — formerly the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator — lightened up its name to better reflect its broader focus on boosting mobile-centric startups. Led by Boulder-based Techstars, the accelerator is welcoming applicants for its three-month, Kansas City-based program, which takes place Feb. 22 through May 24.

Image: http://www.startlandnews.com

Recently I saw a commercial promoting wind turbine technology from General Electric (NYSE: GE). GE is heavily invested in wind energy, continually seeking patents on various improvements. What caught my attention, however, was the fact that the commercial said that these new wind turbines can “follow the wind,” which is a lay way of saying that there is sophisticated software at play that is capable of improving the efficiency of windmills that employ the technology.

In the past 30 years, I’ve given more than 3,000 speeches to audiences across the world. Presentations have been such a central part of my work that many who know me best have been surprised to learn how much anxiety they used to cause me. After my fourth root canal, my dentist pointed out that I appeared to be grinding my teeth at night.

There has been a lot of hype recently surrounding startups from Palestine, but they aren’t working in a vacuum.

There’s a thriving ecosystem of incubators and accelerators that are supporting startups, such as Yamsafer which closed its latest $3.5 million Series B round, and bringing Palestine’s startup scene to international attention.

Image: Dr AlJaber Receiving Best Angel Investor in MENA 2014 from EBAN. (Image via Arabreneur)  

No equation is more famous than E = mc2, and few are simpler. Indeed, the immortal equation’s fame rests largely on that utter simplicity: the energy E of a system is equal to its mass m multiplied by c2, the speed of light squared. The equation’s message is that the mass of a system measures its energy content. Yet E = mc2 tells us something even more fundamental. If we think of c, the speed of light, as one light year per year, the conversion factor c2 equals 1. That leaves us with E = m. Energy and mass are the same.