Where exactly is all the water on Earth’s surface? Stand-alone satellite images have their limitations, but using artificial intelligence to examine them can now glean precise levels of water around the world and how they are changing week by week.   

Palo Alto startup Orbital Insight uses freely available images taken by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat 7 and 8 satellites, much like the images you see on Google Maps. The startup feeds the images into a neural network, which pinpoints the exact location and area of surface water.

There's a lot of conflicting information about the best times to buy plane tickets, since airline prices can fluctuate for no obvious reasons, but the general guidelines have mostly remained the same for the past few years. 

Buying tickets really far ahead of your trip will cost you but provide more selection; buying really close to your trip will get you a last-minute surcharge; and somewhere in between is the airfare that's just right.

Working at Google is seen by many as the dream job, with more than two million people applying for a job at the internet giant each year.

Today, Google employs thousands of people in London, working on everything from Google Maps to Android Wear. But some of them are leaving to get a taste of startup life.

“Growth” would be a good word to describe North Dakota State’s Research and Technology Park.

The research center located north of NDSU’s main campus received a Department of Commerce award in 2006 for technology based economic development and is a member of the Association of University Research Parks. Several programs find their home at the Research and Technology Park, including nanoscience technology, the center for computationally assisted transactions and the Innovation Challenge.

In his Feb. 10 Congress Blog post “Congress should protect American innovators, not Chinese infringement,” Erik Telford starts off by getting our association’s name wrong — we changed our name to the Consumer Technology Association three months ago. The errors cascade from there.  

He also contradicts himself by suggesting the CTA doesn’t respect patents, but then describes how we worked closely with federal law enforcement to enforce patents at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show — the world’s largest annual innovation event.

In March and April, entrepreneurs can take a tour of Baltimore-area incubators, and pick up some knowledge on running a startup in the meantime.

Camp Inc. is a six-stop event that’s set to move through Baltimore, Towson, Baltimore County and Columbia.

The Emerging Technology Centers received funding for the program through TEDCO’s Incubator Assistance Grant, and decided to open it up to the entire area.

Image: Startup Grinders in action at the ETC. (Photo courtesy of Emerging Technology Centers)  

The grand vision of Walt Disney -- one of the most innovative entrepreneurs of all time -- was simply to make people happy.

Walt further believed that if you can dream it, you can do it. While the priorities and technologies have changed, it was Walt's original vision that led to Disney's greatest innovations. Think about them: from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world's first full-length animation feature (1937), to Tiki Room opening and introducing the first electro-mechanical robots (1963), to modern Disney stores adopting Apple Pay.

The Economist noted that there are three general types of innovation – incremental, radical and open. Of the three, open innovation (OI) appears best-suited for the fierce global competition among firms of all sizes as innovation cycles shorten. Open innovation refers to the practice of looking outside of your organization for ideas and technology to accelerate and improve business solutions. Formally conceptualized by Henry Chesbrough, the methodology is gaining a foothold in entrepreneurially-minded corporations even as it challenges organizational cultures.

Amid global concerns about economic growth, countries without natural resources like Estonia or Israel have converted technology into their main source of prosperity.

The Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week (22-25 February) offered tech giants like Samsung, Huawei and Nokia a global stage to showcase their latest gadgets and innovations.

But among the hundreds of stands with colourful devices, robots and crowds of people queued up to try out the virtual reality experience, others have brought to Barcelona something more discrete but far more desirable: the entrepreneurial spirit of a nation.

NASA billed it as a year in space, but Mr. Kelly’s trip will actually be a few weeks short of that. (An unexpected delay could extend his stay slightly.) Still, it dwarfs the previous NASA record, held by Michael López-Alegría, who spent 215 consecutive days in space in 2006 and 2007.

But it is far short of the all-time record of almost 438 days. That was achieved by Valeri Polyakov on the old Russian Mir space station back in 1994 and 1995.

This is Mr. Kelly’s fourth mission, so his cumulative time in orbit will be 540 days, assuming an on schedule return.

Image: The International Space Station in February 2010. Credit NASA 

Silicon Valley veteran Mike Maples Jr. shares heartfelt advice urging aspiring entrepreneurs to "only do things that you think have a chance to be legendary." By committing to always doing exceptional work and being around inspiring people, Maples says you will reap the cumulative benefits of a lifetime of excellence, and be able to enjoy it again whenever you look back.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Stockton City Councilman Michael Tubbs expresses concern that Silicon Valley has  ecome indifferent to humanity's greatest injustices in its bid to be a hotbed for startups. The Stanford alum calls on the tech industry to turn its innovative efforts to solving society's biggest challenges, such as racism, poverty and failing educational systems.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Stanford University President John Hennessy defines entrepreneurship as transforming an idea into something real that can have wide impact, not just starting a business. In conversation with Tina Seelig, professor of the practice in Stanford's Department of Management Science & Engineering, Hennessy also discusses some of the essential ingredients in Silicon Valley's "secret sauce."

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Moncton, February 25, 2016

Venn Innovation is launching a new corporate innovation program called V-Lab; part of an enhanced focus on corporate innovation services. Based in VennCentre in Moncton, the V-Lab program is designed to provide corporate clients with a methodology to identify potential external disruptions, while triggering controlled internal disruptions, helping them gain a competitive edge in their organization and deliver new innovation to their customers.  

V-Lab clients will be immersed in a collaborative, innovation-driven space that transcends the corporate ladder and co-locates client teams with tech companies of all sizes, from early stage startups in the Vennture Garage program to growth stage tech SMEs and other enterprise clients. They will also have regular interaction with academic partners and service providers.

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On a Saturday night in April Scott Kraus is getting ready to take out his boat from Sandwich, Mass., to spend the evening on Cape Cod Bay’s calm waters. Kraus, vice president of research at the New England Aquarium, and his two-member crew are not out for a leisure sunset cruise but are on a mission—they want to find out what North Atlantic right whales are doing at night. “It is like pulling an all-nighter in college, without the beer,” says Kraus, who has loaded an arsenal of militarylike night vision tools on the boat, including a high-resolution infrared camera, a light intensifying scope and a mirrorless, low-light digital camera. Kraus has been studying right whales for more than 35 years.

Image: A North Atlantic right whale and calf surface in the Gulf of Maine. Photo: Isabelle Groc 

The authors of Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically with Society explain why organizations must look beyond corporate-social-responsibility initiatives to truly engage with consumers and communities.

Antibusiness sentiment is nothing new. Yet mending the rift between big business and society isn’t merely a worthy goal—it may represent a new frontier of competitive advantage, profitability, and longevity for today’s organizations. In Connect: How companies succeed by engaging radically with society (PublicAffairs, March 2016), L1 Energy chairman and former BP chief executive officer John Browne, McKinsey’s Robin Nuttall, and entrepreneur Tommy Stadlen offer a practical blueprint for reconciling companies and communities.

Too many entrepreneurs tackle starting a business as a random walk into a business minefield, and they count on their street smarts, thick skin and pure determination to get them to their destinations alive. That does work once in a while, usually with some serious collateral damage, but a less painful approach is to prepare and plan for each step along the way.

Beste Yuksel could soon put a lot of piano teachers out of work.

The Ph.D candidate at Tufts University in Massachusetts has created a tool that helps students learn the instrument faster and with more accuracy than they would under the watchful eye of a traditional teacher, or while practicing on their own. Called BACh, for Brain Automated Chorales (and an obvious nod to one of history’s most prolific composers), the system has one major advantage over human teachers: It can read your brain.

Image: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), German musician and composer playing the organ, circa 1725. From a print in the British Museum. Photo: Rischgitz, via Wikimedia Commons

In the 70s, New York's vital and chaotic fashion industry sustained over a million manufacturing jobs. The daily interplay of designers and makers happened organically. Community, cross pollination, produced start ups on a daily basis.

That is, New York City itself was a fashion incubator.

The first time I remember hearing about an incubator (in Silicon Valley) was in the 1990s. Since then, incubation-like opportunities have propagated. While many incubators have much to offer, their rise is indicative of an underlying want. Also, new industries now have an interest in prolonging stages of development entrepreneurs once sought to grow out of quickly.