Two years ago, as the world flirted with a second Great Depression, Gregg Easterbrook was in the midst of writing a book about the coming economic boom. A less confident writer might have abandoned the project in despair. But Mr. Easterbrook, a graduate of the New Republic's school of contrarian journalism, forged on regardless. The result is a book that is both a pleasure to read and a valuable corrective to the gloom that currently envelops us.

The big idea behind "Sonic Boom" is that globalization—celebrated, reviled and analyzed for at least a decade now—has hardly begun. The world, Mr. Easterbrook believes, is on the verge of a period of pell-mell integration that will dwarf anything before now, and a good thing too: The coming age of global integration, he argues, will produce riches that none of us can imagine and scatter them more widely than ever before. But it is a good thing that comes wrapped in a paradox: Growing prosperity will also produce growing anxiety. If the besetting malady of the 19th century was "quiet desperation," as Henry Thoreau wrote in "Walden," then the besetting malady of the 21st will be noxious nervousness—a pervasive sense of anxiety about job security and impending disasters.

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver has named Bret Mills as the state's new director of economic development.

Culver announced Mills' appointment on Monday, filling a position that has been the center of controversy over the handling of a tax credit program for movie makers.

Mills replaces interim director Fred Hubbell who was named to the position following the resignation of Mike Tramontina.

Tramontina resigned in September after Culver suspended the program after allegations of improper spending and sloppy bookkeeping in the Iowa Film Office.

Don't get bogged down in a price war or a race to imitate a rival's product. Redefine your market instead, says entrepreneur-academic Richard Mammone

The nuthatch and brown creeper are different bird species that look a lot alike and eat insects in the same wooded areas in North America. You might think they compete, but they don't. In accordance with a common arrangement in nature that ecologists call the competitive-exclusion principle, the brown creeper starts searching for insects at the bottom of a tree while the nuthatch starts from the top.

Entrepreneurs can learn from this evolutionary process, which unfortunately isn't very common in the business world. Business competitors will normally compete in a death match unless one finds a new market niche or a new process to address the existing market. The best strategy is to invest a modest amount of energy into an innovation, as the nuthatches did in moving to the higher branches. To start the innovation process that could lead to such a breakthrough, entrepreneurs should perform a detailed competitive analysis.

Fulton Innovation (Fulton), the creator and exclusive licensor of eCoupled™ intelligent wireless power, has released their second white paper to continue providing education on wireless power. The initial white paper, “Making Wireless Truly Wireless: The Need for a Universal Wireless Power Solution,” demonstrated why a universal wireless power standard is so crucial to mass adoption and ease of use for consumers. The most recent white paper, “Understanding Wireless Power” explains the different forms of wireless power and reviews important considerations with the various features including efficiency and safety. Due to the strong consumer demand for wireless power and movement in the industry, this white paper aims to enhance the knowledge of consumers and product developers that would utilize wireless power technology and clear many of the common misconceptions about the viability and safety of using wireless power.

According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we're just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet's first boom cycle.

At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.

This year was one of financial turmoil and retrenchment. Consolidation and rationalisation were rife, as were fears of closures, liquidation and redundancies.

Given all this, you might assume that innovation was put on the back burner, but in many cases the opposite was true. During these lean times many firms took the opportunity to both scale back and innovate, with many taking advantage of relatively new technologies such as virtualisation, hosted services and videoconferencing to cut costs.

The long standing struggle between Israel and the Arab Middle East is certainly well known. But did you know Israel has produced more NASDAQ-listed publicly traded companies than Europe, Korea, Japan, Singapore, China, and India combined? Moreover, Israel has more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country?

Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle is a nonfiction look at the reasons behind these facts and more. It examines Israel’s technological and venture capital industries through the prism of its economic, political, and social culture, as well as through events such as the airlift of Ethiopian Jews in Operation Moses.

Start Up Nation makes for an interesting read, particularly for business owners who draw metaphors from the example of business leaders. In this case, however, the leader is a nation with no natural resources and a short history marked with shorter yet intense periods of war.

Income stemming from research hits $7.1 million despite the economic downturn

An economy deep in recession didn’t prevent the University of Oregon from racking up another gain in technology transfer revenue this year.

For the 14th year in a row, the UO saw an uptick in what it earns from licensing inventions and services stemming from faculty research. Income for 2008-09 was $7.1 million, up from $6.8 million the year before.

The increase comes despite a bad economy and reduced state support for universities. Very little state revenue goes to support research, and what there is goes to a limited number of targeted programs.

Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn’t begin until 2001. Do we really care?)

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

ROMULUS, Mich. — As Detroit’s airport was rattled on Sunday by a second frightening incident in three days, passengers at airports in the United States and around the world encountered stiff layers of extra security, with international travelers undergoing newly required bag inspections, body searches and questioning at security checkpoints and before they boarded planes.

At the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport here, officials detained a passenger who caused a disruption aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam, the same flight involved in a terrorism attempt on Friday, when a Nigerian man caused a fire by injecting chemicals into a device taped to his leg.

AS we become increasingly dependent on the Internet, we need to be increasingly concerned about how it is regulated. The Federal Communications Commission has proposed “network neutrality” rules, which would prohibit Internet service providers from discriminating against or charging premiums for certain services or applications on the Web. The commission is correct that ensuring equal access to the infrastructure of the Internet is vital, but it errs in directing its regulations only at service providers like AT&T and Comcast.

Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include “search neutrality”: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.

I just finished "Art of Innovation", by Thomas Kelly, last week. These are just a collection of points that resonated with me. Obviously this book covers much more, but I figured I'd share some of the things that struck me about IDEO and their process from a designer's perspective. My background is coincidentally industrial design, so most of the subject matter they covered is, in a word, refreshing.

If there's one thing I'd take away from this book, it would be for designers to be more observant and take more risks through prototypes. And try to have fun. Though I'm sharing notes from my own perspective, I believe everyone should skim through this book, regardless of what industry you're in.

Our mission is to know who our clients are and where they want to be not just today but in the next 12 months and beyond.

We pride ourselves in offering affordable professional service in a timely manner while providing excellent work product.

We look for the same in our partners and professional associates. Below you will find useful documents for download and links for small business assistance.

In Washington, the US Department of Energy announced the launch of three new “Energy Innovation Hubs,” one to be focused on “Fuels from Sunlight Energy,” and said it will award $122 million over five year to support the project, including $47 million in the first year of operation.

The objective of this Hub is to accelerate the development of a sustainable commercial process for the conversion of sunlight directly into energy-rich chemical fuels, likely using mechanisms based on photosynthesis, the method used by plants to convert sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into sugar.

The constrained venture capital markets and difficult environment for IPOs, will make 2010 a big year for M&A transactions. The leaders in hot new software sectors will be swallowed up at a premium, along with entrepreneurs tired of running on the treadmill as they get closer to retirement, will drive more M&A transactions than ever. I see these theses trends emerging:

1. Emergence of “Social Commerce”
2. Greater Performance for Online Advertising
3. Better Online Privacy Controls and a Move to Mobile Devices
4. Broad Adoption of Energy Management Applications
5. Software to Manage Food Safety
6. Technology to Manage Water Use

[Editor's Note: more detail for each of these items is available on the original post]

The National Venture Capital Association has released Venture View 2010, its annual survey of more than 325 venture capitalists across the U.S. Among the findings: most respondents predict slightly more dollars going into more companies in 2010. But the prognosis for the entire asset class is a gradual pullback in size, over the next five years.

Among the areas most likely to enjoy increases in investment activity are clean technology, with 54 percent predicting growth. Other favored industries include Internet (46 percent), Media and Entertainment (33 percent) and Software (32 percent). No surprise – a whopping 70 percent of respondents believe there will be more venture capital investment flowing into Asia, particularly into China-based companies.

This morning’s roundup of the latest venture capital news and analysis across the Web:

Corporate Acquirers Hitting The Post-Holiday Sales - While tech and social networking IPOs are at the top of bankers’ wish lists for 2010, VentureWire reports the exit climate is also favorable for health-care VCs, as corporate acquirers seek to strike deals while valuations are still favorable. “They’re going to go on a shopping spree,” said Claremont Creek Ventures Managing Director John Steuart. However, the year may also bring about fire sales of companies which limped through 2009.

Venture Dollars May Be Found In Translation - Outside of Israel, venture capital and tech growth has been all but non-existent in the Middle East and much of the Arab world. The Los Angeles Times posits that the September purchase of Maktoob.com by Yahoo has paved the way for other start-ups - search engine Yamli, for instance - to start drawing in investors. However, the region’s start-ups face a host of unique obstacles, including “censorship, corruption and weak infrastructure.”

If your children happened to be born since the year 2000 in developed countries, they will most likely live to be 100, and they will be healthier than elderly people in previous generations, according to a recent article in the medical journal The Lancet.

The implications are enormous for everything from retirement planning and health care costs to new models for the workplace and innovative approaches to education. As Olivia Mitchell, professor of insurance and risk management, states: "This is a demographic revolution the likes of which we have never seen before on earth."

About a month ago, I mentioned Esquire’s coverage of a nuclear reactor design called PRISM, for an efficient, modular nuke that could potentially be mass-produced. It seemed like Esquire had taken extra effort to sugar-coat and glorify PRISM, repeatedly presenting it as a world-saving technology.

Thumbing through my December cope of Wired, I’ve found another piece that could be the twin of the Esquire article. Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke, blares the headline at the top.

Innovation is a priority of all Member States and of the European Commission. Throughout Europe, hundreds of policy measures and support schemes aimed at innovation have been implemented or are under preparation. The diversity of these measures and schemes reflects the diversity of the framework conditions, cultural preferences and political priorities in the Member States.

PRO INNO Europe® is an initiative of the Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry (DG ENTR) which aims to become the focal point for innovation policy analysis, learning and development in Europe, with a view to learning from the best and contributing to the development of new and better innovation policies in Europe. Run by the Innovation Policy Directorate of DG ENTR, it pursues the collection, regular updating and analysis of information on innovation policies at national and European level.

INNO-Policy TrendChart serves the 'open method of coordination' approach laid down by the Lisbon Council in March 2000. It supports policymakers and innovation support measure managers in Europe by providing summarised and concise information and statistics on innovation policies, performances and trends. It is also a European forum for benchmarking and the exchange of good practices in the area of innovation policy.