The past 70 years have seen the way we live and work transformed by two tiny inventions. The electronic transistor and the microchip are what make all modern electronics possible, and since their development in the 1940s they’ve been getting smaller.

Today, one chip can contain as many as 5bn transistors. If cars had followed the same development pathway, we would now be able to drive them at 500 000km/h and they would cost just R60 each.

Image: http://www.techcentral.co.za

Have you ever been in a meeting when someone starts dominating the conversation and they won't stop? And they go on and on about that same old pet idea of theirs? And it's not a particularly good idea, but you've been told there's no such thing as a bad idea. So you have to sit there and not criticize. If you're like most people, these typical brainstorming sessions can be frustrating, one person talks while the rest of you listen. People start mentally checking out. They start looking at their smartphones, sending text messages. The ideas are either really weird, or really boring, and you come away from these meetings feeling unsatisfied.

America’s baby boomers, even as they increasingly enter retirement, continue to dominate our political economy in ways no previous group of elderly has done. Sadly, their impact has also proven toxic, presenting our beleaguered electorate a likely Hobbesian presidential choice between a disliked, and distrusted, political veteran and a billionaire agitator most Americans find scary.

Throughout the campaign, boomers have provided the bedrock of support for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders may have devastated Clinton among millennial voters, by almost 3-1, but she has more than offset that gap by winning overwhelming support from older voters.

Our second annual roundup of the most influential people online

For our second annual roundup of the most influential people on the Internet, TIME sized up contenders by looking at their global impact on social media and their overall ability to drive news. Here’s who made this year’s unranked list:

Kanye West

The artist and entrepreneur has perfected the art of the Twitter spree, sharing candid thoughts that are often just as provocative—if not more so—than his music. His tweets can be controversial (see: his comments on Amber Rose and Bill Cosby) and confusing (like his revelation that he’s $53 million in debt), but many do offer constructive criticism of the fashion and music industries. West also used the Internet to shake up the idea of an album as we know it, treating his latest LP, The Life of Pablo, like a work in progress by refusing to sell it (it’s only available on the streaming service Tidal) and promising alterations to its “final” version.—Nolan Feeney

Measuring Innovation

When there is no agreement on what are the important activities an organization should take to meet its strategic targets, goals are left up to chance. This is especially true when speaking about innovation projects. It is necessary to measure innovation at the process and project level and at the portfolio level. This helps ensure alignment among management that the company is taken on the appropriate amount of risk, as well as that the individual projects will take the organization where the strategy dictates. Innovation portfolio metrics assist in the aligning of organizational priorities.

MADISON – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is best known for its work around global health and development, education and energy, but it’s also home to the equivalent of a venture capital fund that invests in emerging biotechnology and health companies.

Erik Iverson, who will become managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation this summer, helped get that fund off the ground during his seven-year stint at the foundation. Launched with about $400 million, the fund is now in the billion-dollar stratosphere and reaping returns on its early investments.

The tech industry is sometimes lambasted for making frivolous apps — do we really need a dating app for bacon lovers? But that's not all the next crop of entrepreneurs is working on.

In fact, during a marathon two-day session of startup pitches in Silicon Valley, I got a first-hand look at how ambitious, potentially impactful and "serious" the next batch of tech startups are.

The Lloyd’s List website posted an address by Kirsi Tikka to a shipping industry audience on some of the innovation and sustainability challenges facing the shipping industry and how they might respond: “If we are truly to tackle the innovation challenges that confront us, the shipping industry needs to open itself up to much wider pool of ideas and be more open-minded to outside influences. I propose that we embrace ‘open innovation’ in our industry. More and more companies in other industries are doing just that. They are complementing their in-house research and development with open innovation efforts, which both share and draw ideas from multiple sources, such as start-ups, universities, research institutions, and customer pools.”

When governments implement and scale innovative social programs, they face two large hurdles: funding the program and managing the risk. Although the pay for success (PFS) model addresses both—while spreading important principles and practices of improved performance management—shifting risk is how PFS adds significant value for governments.

Traditionally, if governments want to implement a new and potentially impactful social program, they bear all the risk of the program’s potential failure. Using evidence to identify successful programs helps defray—but doesn't eliminate—some of this risk. Risk of failure can discourage governments from pursuing the program altogether, particularly in the tight fiscal environments many governments face today.

From their earliest days, the loosely confederated research efforts that came to be known as behavioral economics spawned a large quantity of studies centered on securities investment. This was not because the field’s pioneers were especially interested in stocks and bonds, nor was the early research commonly underwritten by financial services firms.

Rather, the hive of activity that evolved into its own field — behavioral finance — reflected that investment markets provide unusually robust data sets for analyzing “judgment under uncertainty” (the title of a seminal textbook co-edited by the winner of a Nobel in economic science, the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman) and “decision under risk” (a phrase in the subtitle of his Nobel-winning “Prospect Theory”). Every day, global securities markets provide researchers with billions of data points for understanding how people make choices when resources are at stake and the outcome is unknown.

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments.

The visual speech recognition technology, created by Helen L. Bear, PhD, and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA’s School of Computing Sciences, can be applied “any place where the audio isn’t good enough to determine what people are saying,” Bear said. Those include criminal investigations, entertainment, and especially where are there are high levels of noise, such as in cars or aircraft cockpits, she said.

Image: (credit: MGM) - http://www.kurzweilai.net

After working for months to years on your great idea, it’s time to bring it to market. But where is that money for manufacturing and sales support going to come from? With the advent of crowdfunding, entrepreneurs have more access to capital than ever before, but there is a lot more to crowdfunding than just making a great video and page.

Here’s what I learned from four successful campaigns and raising over $2 million in crowdfunding:

I think … not too much in the “middle” — Series A, B and C.  But the decade after that will see huge change from the seeds planted the past ten years and the coming ten.

Funds last 10+ years.  And just this quarter, Accel, Bessemer, Sequoia, Lightspeed, etc. etc. have all raised billions in funds that will, for the most part, be run as they have in the past.  For the most part.

Virtually all successful startups have taken venture capital and the majority of startups who strictly bootstrap either fail or never make it big. But an equally big mistake is seeking outside investments too soon.

It's cheaper than ever to launch a business, and bootstrapping for a longer length of time is more viable now. But budding entrepreneurs may not know that their own funds can be supplemented with money than doesn't come with the many strings of a venture capital firm's.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Founders Fund announced today the close of a $1.3 billion sixth fund. This fund brings the firm’s total amount of capital under management to over $3 billion.

Founders Fund VI will be led by partners Lauren Gross, Ken Howery, Geoff Lewis, Scott Nolan, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, and Peter Thiel. Members of the team have been founders and early employees of prominent technology companies including PayPal, Google, Palantir Technologies, and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). All of the firm’s partners are generalists, investing across sectors and at every stage, though the firm is known for making large, concentrated investments.

I'm getting tired of the modern work-life conversation—including the "can women have it all?" question—because so much of it is self-defeating. That's because it often starts from the premise that we either need to choose between being good parents and being good workers or else have to make strategic sacrifices in order to keep both sides of that equation properly "integrated" or in "balance."

Aside from the outsize harm that does to working mothers in particular, it implies there's a division of skills, if not of spheres, that simply isn’t true to life.

Despite the current crop of presidential nominees’ xenophobic obsession with limiting immigration, a new study shows that American business would take a major hit without the innovation that immigrants bring to its shores.

Recent research from non-partisan nonprofit National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) reveals that of the 87 American startups that are currently valued at $1 billion+, 44 of them (51 percent) were created by immigrants.

We are now solidly in the era of big data, where computers are capturing and processing the details of everything we do with all our interconnected devices in real time. Businesses see this as the Holy Grail for finally being able to predict who, where, and when customers will buy their existing solutions, and what their future solutions must look like to be attractive.

By some estimates, humankind now captures the same amount of data in any two days than in all of history prior to 2003. That’s a lot of data, but the jury is still out on whether technology can make any sense of the data, or derive new meanings from it in our fast-paced and rapidly changing world. So far, we haven’t been very good at predicting the future in life or in business.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

What do enormously successful entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson, John Chambers and Charles Schwab have in common? Of course, they are highly intelligent. But I’ll bet you’ll never guess what else they share: Each is also dyslexic, a genetic disorder that makes it difficult for those who have it to read and to interpret visual cues, such as charts and graphs.

The business superstars aren’t alone. One 2007 study by Julie Logan, an emeritus professor at the City University in London, found that 35 percent of American entrepreneurs show some signs of dyslexia.

At this year’s SXSW in Austin, TX, I sat down with Steve Case to talk about his thoughts on innovation and entrepreneurship in America, the Rise of the Rest, and his new book The Third Wave. In our exclusive Steve Case SXSW interview (which you can watch below), Case touches upon his theory regarding this “third wave” of the Internet.

During the first technology boom in the 1990s, America got online thanks to a startup based out of Northern Virginia called America Online. Led by Case, the company’s efforts created the first wave of the Internet – with Americans across the country dialing to connect via phone lines and using the Internet metered by the minute.

Image: Steve Case - by Frank Gruber