President Barack Obama’s new space policy puts a lot of emphasis on the development of “game changing” technology that will allow us to explore and settle the cosmos.

The approach will get an early test run next month during the 2010 Rice Business Plan Competition in House. NASA’s Johnson Space Center recently announced the addition of a $50,000 “Game Changer” Commercial Space Innovation Prize to the contest.

“The new $50,000 NASA ‘Game Changer’ Commercial Space Innovation Prize will recognize the team’s business plan with the best idea related to commercial space innovation,” said David Leestma, director of the Advanced Planning Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “The award encourages the identification and development of new breakthrough technologies and business models in the commercial space market or market creation to realize this value.”

The ranks of temporary help workers have increased for the past five months in a row, according to recently released Department of Labor figures. The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of Americans employed in temporary jobs rose 47,500 in February to 2 million—but at the same time, overall employment declined.

While staffing firms nationwide are reporting increased business as firms prepare for economic recovery, they say hiring is still nowhere near pre-recession levels.

In past recessions, temporary hires have been a leading indicator that companies are getting ready to hire permanent employees. The Associated Press reports that after the recession of 1990-1991, for example, temporary hiring picked up in August 1991 and permanent hiring increased almost immediately after that. After the recession of 2001, temporary hiring increased for three straight months in summer 2003, and permanent hiring began in the fall.

But things may be different this time around. At least right now, it doesn’t appear that many temporary employees have a chance of becoming permanent hires.”I think temporary hiring is less useful a signal than it used to be,” John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo, told the AP. “Companies aren’t testing the waters by turning to temporary firms. They just want part-time workers.”

The New York digital scene has had a major renaissance in recent years.

We've written a lot about this, as well as the differences between New York and the Valley and the reasons many entrepreneurs have foregone the west coast and instead launched their startups here.

And now it's time to focus on the companies themselves.

In the past few weeks, we've consulted with New York VCs, entrepreneurs, and tech journalists, and compiled a list of NYC's current rising stars.

Thousands of starfish have been washed up on a Devon beach after becoming exhausted spawning.

A line of the creatures stretched for more than a mile across the pebbles at Budleigh Salterton.

One expert said the process of reproduction had left the starfish "tired out" and they had been left "susceptible" to tides and the wind.

Similar events happen once or twice a year in the UK, but it is the first time for Budleigh Salterton.

AOL Inc. (NYSE:AOL) today announced a significant expansion of its focus on local content that will complement its hyper-local offerings with the relaunch of City’s Best to major U.S. metro areas.

AOL’s 2010 plan to digitize towns across America includes an aggressive expansion of Patch, the growing hyper-local news and information platform already available in nearly 40 communities. The company also intends to relaunch its City’s Best properties in 25 cities later this year and add high-quality, city-specific content to its “best of” entertainment options for each of these metro audiences.

Today in Biofuels Opinion: “The fuel of the future is going to come from that sumach out by the road.”

Henry Ford – 1925: “The fuel of the future is going to come from that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.”

Humera Fasihuddin is director of the Invention to Venture program at the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance. She works with high-potential student teams to help them secure funding. She also runs the NCIIA’s I2V workshops, which teach basic and advanced entrepreneurship, and manages BMEidea, a national student competition in biomedical engineering.

ID: What sort of practical information is offered at Invention to Venture (I2V) workshops?

HF: Experience, contacts, money and luck are just some of the ingredients cited by successful serial entrepreneurs, who speak to the mostly student audience at Invention to Venture workshops. They’re all things that come easy to someone who’s been in the working world for a few decades, not as much for students. Most students have never held a job, but their networks can span 1,000 or so Facebook friends and the folks they know back home. And, they’re always cash strapped.

Cisco took CRN editor in chief Nate Cochrane on a behind-the-scenes tour of its proof-of-concept centre.

The St Leonards, NSW, facility is a proving ground for customer equipment to be qualified against Cisco gear. It includes access to a wide range of networking equipment including optical kit, network traffic generators and state-of-the-art proprietary fabric computing.

Resellers can come through the data centre with their customers in tow to speak to Cisco engineers about their requirements and put with virtualisation hardware and software solutions through their paces.

Late yesterday, Boeing's 747-8 freighter prototype number three lumbered into the Spring sky above Everett's Paine Field on its maiden flight. It then flew about successfully for two and a half hours before swooping heavily down on the tarmac at Boeing Field in Seattle. The beast checked out okay during this trip, topping out at 30,000 feet an a maximum speed of 280 mph, and is the latest success for the new marque of jumbo jet. But what exactly is exciting about this airborne monster?

Philly Startup Leaders has thrown down the gauntlet for a gigabit.

The group voted at a meeting Wednesday night to take all of its money not committed to its upcoming Entrepreneur Expo and put it toward a prize to award to the person with the best idea for an application of a super-high bandwidth network.

The impetus for that was Google Inc.’s announcement last month that it plans to build a super-high bandwidth network in one or more locations to test new network deployment technologies and see what applications will be inspired by the network’s speeds, which will top one gigabit per second.

Google gave places interested in hosting the network until March 26 to submit online responses saying why they would be a good host site.

It’s hard enough to catch a venture capital company’s eye, but convincing them to give you funding is even harder. Beth Seidenberg, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, runs down the five metrics she uses to decide which companies will get money in this lecture given at Stanford University. As it often does, it comes down to leadership – and while passion is critical, you need to be able to communicate that clearly.

You think the idea of user-generated content as a business model was invented in the Aughts? No way. Media outlets have been drawing on material created by amateurs, consumers and customers for generations and repackaging it for your entertainment.

Folksy as it may sound, our history is driven not strictly by the polished content produced by a class of citizens with a slew of degrees and many years of training - a surprisingly amount has been generated in a largely unfiltered form by the masses.

Necessity meant that user-generated content was packaged and presented through very structured channels. That's not that different from today, where the stuff that we produce is presented through some slick content management system on websites like Blogger or Square Space or through podcatching software like iTunes.

MADISON – The debate over how to create more jobs in Wisconsin will be virtually non-stop during the 2010 election year, as candidates for governor, the Legislature and other statewide offices trade ideas – and a few jabs – about what works.
 
An opening salvo was fired recently when Republican candidate for governor Scott Walker promised to create 250,000 jobs and 10,000 businesses by 2015, the end of the four-year term for whoever is elected Wisconsin’s next chief executive.
 
Democratic candidate Tom Barrett called Walker’s goal a “random” number but offered an estimate of his own – 180,000 jobs over three years. Not to be outdone, Republican candidate Mark Neumann made a light-hearted guess when asked about Walker’s goal: “I’ll bid 350,000.”
 

If you took a guess at what sites get all the traffic online, you'd might guess that Google searches and social networking suck all our time online, and the rest goes to shopping. Actually, no.

To get a rough estimate of how the Internet is actually being used, the BBC charted the top 100 sites by unique users in January 2010, encompassing the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, U.S., and Australia.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, commonly referred to as “SOX”, was enacted in 2002 as a response to Enron and the Enron-like financial scandals of the time.  I’m in the enviable position of (1) being an ex-accountant and auditor, and (2) selling software that among other things is used to track compliance with SOX, which gives me some perspective on the impact SOX has had on companies.

Without getting into the boring details, SOX can (and has) be generalized as forcing companies to document their risks (i.e. “what can go wrong”) and ensure that they have controls in place to prevent, or worst case detect, when something does go wrong. While it was a response to accounting abuse, SOX is sometimes interpreted by companies or their auditors more broadly to include virtually anything that could go wrong with the business. It can reach into the HR department, legal, IT, operations – everywhere.

Small- and medium-sized businesses, the lifeblood of our nation's economy, were hit hard by the recession.

That's why some states and cities have made it a priority to establish programs that prevent them from failing -- by providing counseling and support, offering easier access to loans and grants, and encouraging growth in general.

If you're an SMB owner, check out the things that some areas are doing to rescue their small companies -- and perhaps campaign your representative to do something similar in your region.

Los Angeles. People either love it or hate it. All the stereotypes and caricatures are overblown. And we’re left with a city with idyllic weather, major commerce, the media center of the world, and a great emerging technology scene. We have an abundance of ethnicities, culinary options, music and culture. Randy Newman said it best,“I love LA” (Worth a 2 minute watch for pure nostalgia. Go on, have a bit of fun down memory lane!).  I was raised in NorCal (born in Philly – go Eagles!) so I feel I have an unbiased appreciation for BOTH Californias.

I was recently interviewed for an article that appeared in Fast Company titled, “Why you should start a business in LA.”  If you’re interested in the topic it’s worth a read, but I thought I’d elaborate on the topic since it comes up all the time.

First, I’d like to quote (paraphrase) Brad Feld speaking at Twiistup in LA in 2009, “I keep hearing people in LA talking with a chip on their shoulders about building a tech business here relative to Silicon Valley.  I have one message for you, ‘get over it!’ ”  His message was that in 2010 great business can be built anywhere if there is a great team and the will to make it work.

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exoplanet--one outside our solar system--that has a more Earthlike orbit than any alien planet discovered so far using the same technique.

The planet, called CoRot-9b, was discovered by the French-operated satellite CoRot, which has been in orbit since 2006. The spacecraft detected CoRot-9b by measuring the dimming of its star's brightness as the planet passed in front of it, a technique called "transit observation." The small dip in brightness allows the planet's size to be calculated. By measuring the amount of time it takes the planet to complete its orbit, researchers can determine the planet's distance from its star.

The planet travels around its star every 95 Earth days, at a distance about half of that between Earth and the sun. This distance is still 10 times farther than any other planet discovered using this method. Its surface temperature is between -23 and 157 °C and, while its atmosphere could contain liquid water, CoRot-9b is made mostly of hydrogen and helium and therefore is unlikely to support life.

"This is the first time that we can probe the atmosphere of such a cool planet outside the solar system," says Jason Wright, an assistant professor of astronomy at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the discovery. Wright says that the finding is an important step forward in finding an Earthlike planet that could support life, one of the biggest goals in astronomy.

It's been said that successful people either are entrepreneurs - or think like entrepreneurs.

Look around your company. Are you surrounded by entrepreneurs? Is your team comprised of people who take ownership of any project or task that comes across their desk or inbox? Do they embrace challenges, possess the process, and take responsibility - for successes and failures alike?

Some may come away thinking that 'corporate entrepreneur' and 'employee' are contradictory. They believe that entrepreneurs take the ultimate risk - ditching the security of the day-job, as it were, and facing the personal, financial and psychological challenges of business ownership.

That's one definition. Another would be 'corporate entrepreneurship'. This realm is inhabited by people who - though they receive a paycheck signed by someone else - see the organization (or at least their small domain within it) as their turf. This is the most valued type of employee.

Ok. Yet another post which digresses from core style of Pluggd.in. But then that’s the fun part of it! For over decades now we are a part of a society which breathes on technology and even survives by it. Be it over the internet or mobile network or just about anything else. Awesome online bookstores, location-aware stuff, powerful social networks, multi-touch technology and what not. From terminal based access to Lynx browsers to IE/Netscape to emails to IM’s to Mozilla’s & Chrome’s and Facebooks & Twitters we have witnessed evolution of technology from a completely off-line distribution model to now almost a completely online one.

But all this is about past, and let’s not talk about it.

Talk of the town today is real time internet & social media. In fact social media is such a f**ked term over the internet these days that I really don’t feel like using it. But it’’s a living present that one could confirm with every Tom, Dick and Harry on Twitter who is busy selling the social media opportunity to the industry. Whatever, let’s not get into that either.