What was intended when President Barack Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act on April 5, 2012, is here. It has taken three years to start thanks to the SEC taking its time to put out its regulations, but for the first time in 82 years, anyone with capital can invest in any private business in the country. Nonaccredited investors and anyone who is not a millionaire, which is to say 98 percent of the population, can put hard-earned money to work helping entrepreneurs build this country back to where it was years ago when that privilege was taken from them by the 1933 Securities Act.

This proposed rule describes how articles the President determines no longer warrant control under Category XII (Fire Control, Range Finder, Optical and Guidance and Control Equipment) of the United States Munitions List (USML) of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) would be controlled under the Commerce Control List (CCL) by creating new “600 series” Export Control Classification Numbers (ECCN)s 6A615, 6B615 and 6D615 for military fire control, range finder, and optical items, by revising ECCN 7A611 and by creating new ECCNs 7B611, 7C611 and 7E611 for military optical and guidance items. In addition, for certain night vision items currently subject to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), this rule proposes to expand the scope of control, eliminate the use of some license exceptions, and create new ECCNs for certain software and technology related to night vision items. This proposed rule would also expand the scope of end-use restrictions on certain exports and reexports of certain cameras, systems, or equipment and expand the scope of military commodities described in ECCN 0A919.

Karen DeSalvo has a vision for health care in the United States. It’s one in which sick patients don’t have to interrupt their drug treatments every time they switch hospitals, and in which health care providers aren’t hindered by bureaucracy and outdated file keeping. Digitizing medical records, she believes, enhances the work doctors already do.

As the national coordinator for health IT, it’s DeSalvo’s job to inch her vision closer to reality. The internal medicine specialist took office a little over a year ago -- 10 years after President George W. Bush's administration created the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and five years after the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 gave the Department of Health and Human Services authority to promote electronic health records and the exchange of digital health information.

Image: Karen DeSalvo, head of HHS' Health IT Office // HHS

We all have a tolerance for risk. Some of us need to build up courage to try something new, while others face fears head on, skydiving through life. The biggest risk, however, is avoiding risks altogether.

Leaders cannot stay safe and let the world pass them by, says Ram Charan, author of The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty Into Breakthrough Opportunities. "At the right moment, you need the inner strength and conviction to take a leap when the outcome is uncertain," he says.

BY LOLLY DASKAL

Firing someone is one of the most difficult things many managers ever have to do in their careers. But what about when the person isn't doing anything wrong exactly, but she's just not the employee you had hoped for?

Leadership coach Lolly Daskal helps guide us through this difficult conversation.

BY JANE PORTER We've all got those filing cabinets or drawers filled with stuff we can't bear to throw away or look at—items that seem simultaneously useless and important. If I dug around my files, I'd find defunct credit card statements and notes from stories written nearly a decade ago.

And then there are the personal items: the crusty bouquet of dried roses I've kept for more than 16 years (a relic from my first boyfriend), the giant stack of anatomy books from my yoga teaching days now gathering dust in the corner, the endless piles of birthday cards.

BY VICTOR KOTSEV

It’s both one of the world’s strangest bicycles and astonishingly popular on Kickstarter: Halfbike II by Kolelinia has raised $973,764 on a $50,000 goal.

Halfbike II looks like an odd crossover between a unicycle and a skateboard and is ridden standing. Riders turn by using their weight and leaning one way or another. The experience, illustrated in videos of people jumping obstacles and performing acrobatics with the contraption, is something in-between skiing, biking, and skateboarding. The bike is also foldable and weighs less than 18 lbs, to make it more transportable.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

BY SARAH KESSLER

IBM and Apple today announced a plan to provide an iPad support service to seniors in Japan. The iPads will come loaded with a suite of "quality of life apps," including those that allow seniors to coordinate medical reminders, shopping, doctor appointments, household maintenance, household cleaning, and transportation.

Japan Post, which provides postal service, banking services, and insurance services in that country, will distribute the iPads through a "watch over" service that it launched in 2013 in which, for a monthly fee, an employee will check on an elderly customer and report back to their relatives about their well-being.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

The rioting that swept Baltimore the past few days, sadly, was no exception, but part of a bigger trend in some of our core cities towards social and economic collapse. Rather than enjoying the much ballyhooed urban “renaissance,” many of these cities are actually in terrible shape, with miserable schools, struggling economies and a large segmented of alienated, mostly minority youths.

Amazon. It is a household name. It has become so synonymous with Internet companies that the French have invented a disdainful term including Amazon: “les GAFA,” which they refer to as Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon to talk about American dominance of the Internet.

Try to imagine if you *didn’t* already know Amazon and the company walking into VC meetings telling people they were going to disrupt the selling of all goods starting with books but then extending into electronics, apparel, toys and so forth. It would hardly get a frothy reception for the first few years until it showed drones delivering the goods some 15 years later.

Two ocean hot spots have been found to be the potential drivers of the hottest summers on record for the Central US in 1934 and 1936. The research may also help modern forecasters predict particularly hot summers over the central United States many months out.

The unusually hot summers of 1934/36 broke heat records that still stand today. They were part of the devastating dust bowl decade in the US when massive dust storms travelled as far as New York, Boston and Atlanta and silt covered the decks of ships 450km off the east coast.

How well do you understand science?

Jon D. Miller, director of the International Center for the Advancement of Scientific Literacy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has been asking people in the United States and abroad that question since 1988.

Click through the quiz below and see how you compare with American citizens. About 29 percent of American adults scored 70 or above on a 100-point scale, according to results from 2008.

Somewhere in rural America, an entrepreneur’s dream of making farming easier, faster, and better just got a bit more realistic.

In April, the USDA announced two new “Rural Business Investment Companies,” or RBICs, headed by venture capital firms Innova Memphis of Memphis, Tenn., and Meritus Kirchner Capital, which has offices in Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama.

WASHINGTON – Monday, May 4, 2015 - The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) today released an update to two critical state policy reports which identified gaps in coverage and reimbursement, and physician practice standards and licensure.

“After ATA issued the State Telemedicine Gaps Reports last September, many state regulating bodies responded by looking at how their laws and regulations impact healthcare delivery in their state,” said Jonathan Linkous, CEO of ATA. “As a result of state actions across the nation, ATA reevaluated the indicators for each state and issued new reports.  As before, we anticipate that these reports will serve as an incentive to increase the utilization of telemedicine to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare.”

Melbourne’s longest running start-up accelerator AngelCube is doubling the size of its investment -- to a total of $40,000 per company -- for its 2015 intake.

In exchange for 8 per cent equity (down from 10 per cent in previous years), AngelCube start-ups receive 6 months of free office space, 13 weeks of business training and access to a network of mentors and partners in Australia and the US.

At DC Inno we are constantly on the look out for the next innovative local company. Over the past several months, one of the most interesting industries we have had the opportunity to cover is the virtual reality (VR) sector. Virtual reality is immensely cool and as a medium, it offers a host of exciting applications and uses. In the past, the technology was so expensive that it offered little to many consumers, but that is now changing. With the proliferation of new, consumer-targeted devices—like the Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear and Google Cardboard—more people are finally getting the opportunity to experience VR.

Nobody wants to think about knowledge management, but everybody needs it. Here are the basic things an organization should have covered as part of its KM system.

1. Establishing an information architecture for multiple user groups, permission levels, and knowledge sharing environments.

2. Maintaining the architecture, adding and removing people from user groups.

3. Locating and archiving institutional knowledge.

Self-driving cars are expected to revolutionise the automobile industry. Rapid advances have led to working prototypes faster than most people expected. The anticipated benefits of this emerging technology include safer, faster and more eco-friendly transportation.

Until now, the public dialogue about self-driving cars has centred mostly on technology. The public has been led to believe that engineers will soon remove humans from driving. But researchers in the field of human factors — experts on how people interact with machines — have shown that we shouldn’t ignore the human element of automated driving.

It’s one thing to privately negotiate a deal over a cocktail or in a hallway after a South By Southwest Interactive panel. It’s another thing to talk terms while bathed under a phalanx of television studio lights on a reality TV show, with high-profile investor Mark Cuban staring you down.

Though there were some scary moments, that intimidation factor didn’t slow down Mikaila Ulmer and her father Theo one bit when they appeared an episode of ABC-TV’s “Shark Tank.”