06/14/2010 To ease the strain population growth places infrastructures and governments, IBM is combining business analytics with cloud computing and smart grid technologies to help urban systems operate more efficiently.

I'm a surfer but I'm not crazy. I wouldn't go anywhere near these waves. But I really like this video by iamkalaniprince capturing a seemingly relentless set of 25+ foot peaks rolling in at Jaws on the North Shore of Maui. These monsters come barreling across the deep water trenches of the Pacific then heave up onto the Hawaiian reef creating some of the biggest and fastest waves in the world. The slow-motion (and the glorious Canon optics) underscores, to me, the majesty of this great dance and the strange harmony we human apes find amidst the power of nature.

Canon 5D Mark II Slow Motion + Jaws ( Peahi ) 12-7-09 from iamkalaniprince on Vimeo.

One of the great traps of technology-based economic development is the herd mentality. Everyone wanted to be like Silicon Valley. Then everyone want to be the leader in bio-tech. Then nano-tech. Now its "green." The simple fact is that not everyone can be a leader in the hottest fad. In fact, chancing the hottest technological fad is a sure way to accomplish nothing.

But, there are still specific parts of any new technology where localities can gain an edge. One example is high-tech in New York City -- sometime incorrectly referred to Silicon Alley when it should be called Digital Alley. As a recent story in the Economist notes:

Today, much tech innovation focuses on the media and advertising industries--both of which, for all their recent troubles and changes, remain lucrative and largely New York-based. That is why, for example, the bulk of Google's 500-odd advertising staff, the source of a large chunk of its profits, are in New York, not in the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

When the business review site Yelp added badges and royalty titles to its check-in features earlier this month, it seemed clear that it was doing so in response to those very features made popular by the location-based network Foursquare.

Of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

And in some cases, imitation might be a good business strategy as well: take something your competitor is doing and do the same thing, but (hopefully) better.

But when it comes to proprietary product features, imitation isn't necessarily flattering. It's cause for litigation.

OutCast PR cofounder Margit Wennmachers is now a partner at one of the more powerful and active VC firms in the valley, Andresseen Horowitz.

The New York Times's Claire Cain Miller, who broke the news, says the gig puts Margit in rare company:

"Ms. Wennmachers will become one of the few female venture capital partners. Just 14 percent of venture capitalists are women, according to the National Venture Capital Association, and an even smaller percentage are partners at firms that are actively investing."

I think we can all agree that early stage investing has changed significantly over the past 10 years and I don’t see it reversing any time soon. And by “changed significantly” I mean it is increasingly difficult to raise the $100K – $2M necessary to move from the pre-seed stage (where you likely raised $10-$100K from friends and family or your 401(k)) to raising institutional venture capital (~$2M +). This gap straddles two stages of financing - seed stage and early stage. For purposes of this post, I’ll refer to this gap as the “early stage gap”. The companies looking to raise money in this early stage gap are generally past the proof of concept stage, are not yet ready to blow it out with institutional venture financing or growth capital, and are looking for additional capital to continue building out their product or service and gain the elusive “traction” (see my earlier thoughts here on the “traction” concept) necessary for raising larger sums of money at a decent valuation.

"People are the crucial factor" behind Flanders winning development strategy and its successes in research centers like imec, VITO, VIB and the Holst Center, according to Nathalie Cogghe of the Flanders Investment & Trade investment promotion agency.

As Director of Inward Investment, Europe & The Americas, Cogghe is part of a global economic development team based in Brussels, that includes a number of technology specialists deployed around the world.

Like all such agencies, FI&T offers companies and prospective investors the usual tax, real estate and location incentives, but it also offers special knowledge-based incentives, including "incentives for people working in R&D" where employers get a tax benefit that amounts to a "very significant cost saving."

CANBERRA - Australian cities have been given an environmental thumbs-down in a new assessment of their green qualities.

Despite rating highly for quality of life, the Australian Conservation Foundation's sustainable cities index says the 20 urban centres included in the report performed poorly in international terms.

Only two of the biggest cities - Brisbane and Melbourne - made the national top 10 and Western Australia's capital, Perth, came last.

The most sustainable city was Darwin, ahead of Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

Converting algae to biofuel remains an intractable problem, even when a company has the resources of a Sapphire Energy or an Algenol.

Imagine the magnitude of the challenge facing Bio Architecture Lab. The secretive company confronts the same battle with high costs as it tunes its bioengineered microbe to convert seaweed to ethanol on a commercial scale. But money is nowhere near as plentiful.

In a rare discussion of its business, the Berkeley company says it is about halfway to its 90 percent fuel conversion target. Confidence is high, says Vineet Rajgarhia, senior vice president of research, who joined the firm in May when it appointed former Shell executive Daniel Trunfio as its CEO.

In the early 1980s, the San Diego regional economy was in crisis. Traditional industries were on the decline, the business attraction efforts of economic development professionals were challenged and regional leaders were searching for a path to economic renewal and growth. The research institutions on the Torrey Pines Mesa had been quietly incubating innovative companies such as IMED, IVAC, LINKABIT, SAIC and Hybritech. At that time, community visionaries posed the provocative question, “Based on the strength of our research institutions, could we build a technology and life sciences industry for San Diego similar to the hub in Silicon Valley?”

Twenty-five years later, the San Diego economy has been transformed into one of the leading innovation hubs in the world. Today our city is home to thousands of technology and life science businesses representing fully 25 percent of the wages paid and a median income equal to leading business centers like New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

How did this exciting transformation happen? In 1985, a small group came together to create the CONNECT Program as a way to translate San Diego’s growing research capabilities into commercially viable products and businesses that would ultimately increase the prosperity of the region. In 1986, Bill Otterson, chairman of Lexocorp, was hired to head the program. He created a culture of collaboration that has become a hallmark of San Diego’s innovation economy and built the volunteer core that helped us address the many challenges our region faces in technology commercialization including a severe lack of management talent and venture capital, particularly for research discoveries.

Bob Young is a self-confessed contrarian with a strong desire to change the world by allowing people to share and collaborate. The approach has served him well and has helped turn the Canadian into a multi-millionaire.

Bob YoungFrom the outset, his software company Red Hat bucked the trend set by the big players like Microsoft which stubbornly guarded every line of code and charged whopping fees to maintain it.

Red Hat's approach was unusual at the time and relied on free software developed by an open-source community. Customers were given the right to change the code any way they liked and Red Hat sold services to make sure it all worked.

Normally when I see another black Website I say to myself, ‘Oh no, not again. Didn’t black Websites die in 2003?’ John Cooper of Vancouver Island Real Estate pulls it off though and does it with style. John uses a combination of earthy colors, especially a cool lime green that makes the site classy and tells me I’m on an island and he has some nice properties to sell me there. The use of color on a Website can do just as much to narrate a story than the text sometimes and that’s what John has done with his Website. I was bought-in to learn more about Vancouver real estate because of how the Website looked for sure.

John created his site using WordPress and customized a nice theme to create it. At first glance not many people would know it was a WordPress site because the assumption is that WordPress is just for blogs. John shows us that WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) so he can update his site fast and from anywhere, which can be very important in the real estate business as listings come and go and descriptions & prices change. This is a very nice choice indeed which more small businesses should think about. Using the right tools to create your Website will not only reduce your work but will help your site tell the story of what you are about. One of my favorite things about the Vancouver Island Real Estate Website is John himself. The use of his photo as one of the main elements of the site is what I want to see as a visitor. Real people on a Website personalize the experience and add a much higher level of trust, especially when they are photographs of the team or the owners. Using photographs and testimonials of customers will add another layer to this and that would be a great addition to John’s site as well.

How desperate is BP? CEO Doug Suttles finally agreed to purchase 32 of the miracle oil-cleanup machines touted weeks ago by Kevin Costner, according to ABC News.

"We were confident the technology would work but we needed to test it at the extremes. We've done that and are excited by the results," said Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer. "We are very pleased with the results and today we have placed a significant order with OTS [Costner's Ocean Therapy Solutions] and will be working with them to rapidly manufacture and deploy 32 of their machines."

Apple's new iPhone 4 will be its biggest iPhone launch ever. We expect Apple to announce 2 million shipments or more after its opening weekend, including pre-orders.

This would be double the size of the last two iPhone launches -- iPhone 3GS in 2009 and iPhone 3G in 2008 -- when Apple announced 1 million shipments during each of those opening weekends.

Why 2 million this year?

• It's the best phone Apple has ever made, and is a big update from the iPhone 3GS. The low price matched with impressive feature set -- gorgeous new display, HD video recording, better camera -- means it should be an easier purchase decision to make.

Even in a down market, job seekers and employees are not powerless or without recourse.

In fact, they have more control over their career circumstances than they might think.

Here are 20 specific strategies and tactics that consistently generate powerful results for job seekers, even when it seems like no one is hiring.

We should have anticipated the question.

Last time, we talked about how to construct your innovation portfolio. And as you will recall, we said the analogy to keep in mind is personal financial planning.Just as you divide your personal holdings among various asset classes—stocks, bonds, and cash—you want to divide your innovation efforts among different approaches. And then we rattled off the four to use:

1. Evolutionary Innovation. (Technically easy and a clear customer benefit.) This is where you keep current cash cows fresh and incubate brands in the market.

2. Differentiation. (Technically difficult and a clear customer benefit.) This portion of your innovation budget is used for making a distinction between your products and those of your competitors.

3. Revolutionary Innovation. (Technically difficult, and there's no way of knowing ahead of time if the customer will accept it.) Here you search to find groundbreaking ideas for products, services, and business models.

4. Fast-Fail Innovation. (Technically easy but no way of knowing if the customer will accept it.) This is the activity for which you go to market and do your testing and learning there.

A new report from a Chinese state-backed research institute claims the introduction of "triple play" services for the nation's cable operators will generate roughly $100 billion in opportunities during the next several years.

Network upgrades, set-top box development, construction of information systems, and upgrading of broadband technology are expected to be worth $36 billion, while sales of services and terminals are expected to contribute $64 billion.

Furthermore, digital content development and set-top box production and installation should create up to 200,000 new jobs, according to a paper published by Wu Hequan, VP of the Chinese Academy of engineering. The large scale project is expected to boost GDP growth by 0.8%.

From Unified Command: The crew of one of the thousands of Vessels of Opportunity (VOO) working in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill recently recovered approximately two tons of tarball material in the Gulf of Mexico.

The recovery was the result of the kind of creative thought and innovation at work among the more than 27,000 people working around the clock in the Gulf of Mexico in the largest oil spill response in U.S. history.

Designed by Gerry Matherne, a BP contractor and nearshore task force leader, the idea is simple. A shrimp boat with outriggers on each side drags mesh oil-collection bags made of perforated webbing near the ocean surface. As the boat trawls to collect oil patches, the bags, attached to an aluminum frame, collect oil. When filled, the bags are disconnected from the frame by crew on support vessels, and then towed to a lift barge for hoisting into a collection barge.

In our never ending quest to learn more about Microsoft and what it's like inside the company, we spent a half hour chatting with a former high level employee at the company yesterday.

There's two basic problems at the company, according to this ex-Microsoftie. The management style is all screwed up, and there's just too many people working there.

An entertainment business is different from a mobile business, which is different from enterprise software business. Yet, they're all run with the same managerial style at Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer runs each division of Microsoft similarly because it helps him simplify what is an incredibly complex organization, says our source. For an example of how it should be done, our source pointed to IAC, which is a diverse group of companies with a very loose upper management, allowing each company to operate differently.

Who’s Inspiring Today’s Young Entrepreneurs?I’ve always believed in the importance of helping young people become entrepreneurs. The innovation and energy of youth are the building blocks of small-business success. The good news is, there are more and more organizations out there helping America’s kids, teens and young adults thrive as entrepreneurs.

The Kauffman Foundation (which has funded or guided many entrepreneurship programs itself) recently took a look at some of the top efforts.

• Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) has more than 7,000 members who grow their companies by sharing their experiences and learning from each other.