At any moment, someone in the U.S. most likely is having an asthma attack. The breath-robbing disease afflicts around 25 million Americans, and every year about half of them lose control of their asthma. They may rush to the emergency room or reach for a rescue inhaler, a source of quick-acting drugs that can relax constricted airways in minutes. Predicting who is at risk of such crises is difficult, however, because the relevant statistics that would identify trends come from the patients' own recollections days or weeks after the emergency.

In several U.S. cities, a new technology may change that. In Louisville, Ky., in parts of California and in Washington State, asthma patients are using rescue inhalers topped with a small sensor that wirelessly broadcasts when, where and how often the device is used. The data pass through a secure server to patients' mobile phones and a physician's Web dashboard, providing an instant record of how well a patient is doing and archiving the information for future reference.

Amid the hullabaloo about New York’s growing innovation scene lurks a big question about the future. “Is New York’s rise in technology a combination of the mayor’s exuberant personality, things that are happening organically, and the overall growth of tech?” asked Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net. “Or is there a fundamental shift happening?”

Last Thursday during the many Social Media Week events happening across the city, he moderated a panel that included local entrepreneurs, representatives of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, and a pioneering venture capitalist who offered a few opinions on the matter. Rosenbaum’s company Magnify.net is a provider of cloud-based video curation service. He is also entrepreneur-at-large with the New York City Economic Development Corp. (NYCEDC).

I read the announcement today that Canada has just launched a startup visa program. By doing so, they are saying to the world, “Welcome, immigrant entrepreneurs — please come start your business in Canada.”

It’s brilliant, well executed, and modeled after the startup visa movement that a number of us have been trying to get started in the U.S. since 2009.

I continue to be really discouraged by the U.S. government activity around the startup visa movement, and more specifically around immigration reform as it applies to entrepreneurs. After trying for the past three years to get something passed, nothing has happened beyond administrative changes to the existing laws.

Mobile phones and apps are taking over quicker than anyone imagined. Smart phones opened up a whole new world for people to connect with each other. Many people, young and old, are starting to rely on their phones more heavily than their computers. Businesses are taking note of the mobile future in a big way.

Expectations for 2013

Mobile ad revenue has been on a steady incline. It’s estimated that global mobile ad revenue will top $11 billion this year and closet $24 billion by 2016.

There are a few different reasons businesses are investing in the mobile future.

Yesterday, Zendesk was hacked and the personal information of an unknown number of Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr users was stolen. Last year, 12.6 million U.S adults were the victims of identity fraud.

Who’s committing these crimes?

Most of them are between 29 and 49 years old, and three-quarters are male. They work in organized groups, half of which have six or more members. And they live all over the world, but especially in Asia, notably China and Indonesia.

Joyful adventures are what make up Frenchman Philippe Petit's tightrope-dancing, daredevil career. Similarly engaging lives, he says, await anyone who gets off their duff and stops Googling.

On a summer day in 1974, a 24-year-old Frenchman stepped onto the world stage with one of the most astonishing performances in modern history--walking back and forth on a wire illegally rigged across the void between New York’s World Trade Center Towers, three quarters of a mile above spellbound onlookers. It all began six years earlier when the young Philippe Petit was inspired by a rendering of the not-yet-constructed towers he saw in a magazine. He spent the following years refining his wire walking skills and making countless visits to the towers to plot how to surreptitiously enter the buildings and solve the complicated logistics of rigging his wire between the swaying towers. Petit has gone on to perform many other spectacular wire walks, authored over half a dozen books, was the subject of the acclaimed documentary Man on Wire, and singlehandedly built a barn using eighteenth-century tools and design. Whether on the high wire or not, Petit’s philosophy is epitomized in his response to reporters shouting “Why?” after his dramatic Twin Towers crossing. Petit’s answer: “The beauty of it is, there is no ‘why.’”

It is not often that entrepreneurs get presented with a big opportunity with a lot of white space waiting to be filled by the next bunch of smart start-ups. Big Data is one such opportunity that comes around once in a decade and is ripe with possibilities. The first step is of course to understand the market landscape to see where there is already activity and where white space still exists that can be exploited.

Over the last 20-30 years with the implementation of enterprise applications, there is a tremendous amount of data that has been captured. The early wave of business intelligence tools have attempted to provide reporting and analysis of this data. Enterprise data is one important category of Big Data.  Traditional vendors have staked a claim on fast, effective ways of processing this data to enhance their product portfolios with in-memory computing, faster batch-based architectures and integration of products such as Hadoop. Hence all the interest in SAP HANA, IBM’s Netezza, and Oracle’s Exadata. While this is an opportunity for traditional service providers and consulting companies to provide new services to their customer base, it’s not a great area for start-ups to focus on.

Want to get ahead in the world? Rise in the eyes of your peers and colleagues? Then don't start a graduate program. Upward mobility for graduate programs typically means a higher ranking by the National Research Council or by U.S. News & World Report. But raising the ranking of a graduate program is like building a tower in the fog. You can erect a fancy edifice, but it will be hard for observers to see, so they'll just remember the old building that used to stand on that spot.

Nor will they always remember correctly. Malcolm Gladwell, writing for The New Yorker, recently cited a case in which the Pennsylvania State University law school received a solid ranking in an informal poll—even though Penn State doesn't have a law school. Respondents reacted to the reputation of the Penn State name. (This was before the university's recent notoriety.) Imagine the frustration of a dean whose law school finishes lower than a nonexistent rival. How slippery the rankings pole, when greased by reputation.

Woody Allen is often quoted as saying 80 percent of life is just showing up. This past week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a decent check, and just as important, he showed up for life sciences. It’s a small gesture, but a start.

The social-networking wizard took some time out of his week to stop by UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay research campus, for a press conference to unveil the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

This new prize, worth $3 million to each winner, went to an inaugural class of 11 of the biggest achievers in biomedicine. Billionaire Yuri Milner came up with the idea after establishing a similar award for physics. Besides Zuckerberg, he enlisted Google billionaire Sergey Brin, and their wives Priscilla Chan and Anne Wojcicki, to help join the cause for life sciences.

Traditional Strategy, the dominant model of doing business for nearly half a century, is fast becoming a thing of the past, pushed aside by the fast-moving forces of social business – which include innovation, collaboration and co-creation.

Traditional Strategy, who played a significant and meaningful role in how organizations operated to win in the industrial era, died earlier this week in Boston.

He was forty-three. The cause of his demise was the numerous complications arising from a collision with the Social Era, the context for business in the twenty-first century.

A contentious question on the California ballot in 2008 inspired a simple online innovation: a website called Eightmaps.com. The number in the name referred to Proposition 8, which called for the state’s constitution to be amended to prohibit gay marriage. Under California’s campaign finance laws, all donations greater than $100 to groups advocating for or against Proposition 8 were recorded in a publicly accessible database. Someone (it’s still not clear who) took all the data about the proposition’s supporters—their names and zip codes, and their employers in some cases—and plotted it on a Google map.

After finding themselves on the map, several supporters of the gay-­marriage ban said they were harassed or their businesses were boycotted. This unsettled even some opponents of Proposition 8; surely it wouldn’t be long, they said, before, say, religious fundamentalists created a similar tool to call out supporters of a gay-rights measure. The committee that had backed Proposition 8 asked a federal judge to strike down the disclosure law or raise its threshold beyond $100 so that more people could give anonymously. But he refused, arguing that ballot measures need the “sunshine” that donation disclosure provides. His ruling was aligned with the idea that as much data as possible about the political process should be revealed.

Steve Jobs was one of those entrepreneurs who seemed universally either loved or hated, but not many will argue with his ability to innovate in the technology product arena over the years. He was instrumental in creating Apple, which has pioneered a dazzling array of new products, and even surpassed Microsoft, to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

Carmine Gallo, in one of his secrets books “The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs,” outlines Jobs “insanely different principles for breakthrough success.” I’m not convinced that Jobs’ world was that simple, but Carmine has boiled it down to seven principles, which I suggest every entrepreneur can learn from, as follows:

As startup prices soared in the runup to last year's Facebook IPO, entrepreneurs, investors, and tech observers sometimes griped about lofty valuations. Just mention Foursquare, say, or LivingSocial, and they'd go off. These are tech companies that snagged a lot of press and tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars before solidifying their business models. Investors say they're worth tons of money—but in the end, that's a gamble, and the companies may actually be worth nothing.

Do you want your articles to spread like Gangnam online? You’d better master the art of capturing the micro-attention of your readers. For a bit of help with what that might entail, I went up to Mount Table, and asked those on high for help. I came back with these some commandments. Fortunately they’re not written on stone tablets (so old school since the iPad, really) so we can remix them if and when we need to.

1. Craft a compelling headline

A catchy headline can make all the difference to the success of an article. Content startup UpWorthy has gained millions of readers based on their ability to rewrite headlines about serious and important issues in a catchy, web-friendly way. If you want your content to spread online it is worthwhile to dedicate extra time to crafting an enticing headline.

Most times raising capital is a tough haul. Endless pitching, grueling due diligence and an enormous commitment of time and money is usually required.

But once in a while there is a company that rises up and grabs the attention and the imagination of a swarm of venture capitalists(VCs) in a relatively short period of time. Maybe they stayed in stealth mode, quietly assembled a rock star team and signed a few big name customers and took the stage at an event to showcase their progress. Or it’s possible that there’s already too much business for them to handle or perhaps their technology is world-changing. Whatever the reason, something is clicking that has made the VCs sit up and take notice.

Venture capital investment in mainland China experienced a decline during the fourth quarter, with companies raising $854 million, a drop of 42% from the same period a year ago, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.  The number of deals completed over the three month period also fell, by 52% to 39 in total.

Overall in 2012, investment declined by 40% from 2011 levels to $3.7 billion, with the number of deals falling by 44% to 202. China stayed ahead of the U.K. in terms of investment, where companies raised €1.4 billion, but not in deal flow, as the U.K. completed 295 deals. Europe as a whole collected €4.4 billion in 1074 deals. The U.S. raised $29.7 billion for 3,363 deals.

Government tax incentives for venture capital investment are too low and compare unfavourably with similar incentives in the UK and other countries.

That’s the view held by many in the VC sector and it’s an opinion that has been endorsed in a recently published Forfás review, which supports calls for widening the tax reliefs currently available.

The Forfás report was undertaken as part of the Government’s Action Plan for Jobs in order to identify steps which can be taken to support equity investment in productive firms.

If the number of entrepreneurs keeps rising, we may well find ourselves in a world full of innovators, creators and risk-takers in the not-too-distant future.

New ideas, new ways of doing business, new clients coming in every day… sounds great right?

Well not for the regular employees of the world according to a recent infographic by Funders and Founders.

The infographic argues that not only are startups turning away from traditional employees, but so are large enterprises such as Google, small businesses and agencies.

Its basis for argument is that 30% of current large tech companies have set up seed funds with the sole objective to develop (and provide capital to) startup entrepreneurs. The main thesis is that entrepreneurs will rule the workplace, and regular employees will be left in the dust, replaced by none other than robots, outsourcing and independent contractors to name but a few.

Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs is a European Union pilot programme that pays new entrepreneurs to learn from experienced businesspeople in other member states. The European Commission wants to make it permanent, with a lot more financial fire-power, to boost cross-border trade. 

Europe is often seen as being less entrepreneurial than the United States, where studies consistently show that people are more willing to take risks.