The FDA planned a public workshop for mid-September to discuss the recently released draft guidance regarding regulation for mobile medical apps.

The guidance includes a fairly narrow subset of medical apps, covering those that are used as accessories to medical devices and those that transform a mobile platform into a regulated medical device.

Many young African American leaders are giving the economic foundations of the African American community a reboot through entrepreneurial success. One standout is Dante Lee (@dantelee), CEO of Diversity City Media and founder of BlackPR.com and BlackNews.com.  His book Black Business Secrets: 500 Tips, Strategies, and Resources for the African American Entrepreneur breaks new ground by fusing insights from past leadership with those from new entrepreneurs who have staked successful claims.  I learned about his book while browsing a bookstore, and picked up a copy for review.

All-in-one small business coaching

Lee opens the book with history and statistics on minority startups, then  segues into a Q&A with established business leaders such as Bob Johnson, founder of BET, Wally Amos of “Famous Amos” cookies, and George Fraser, founder of the FraserNet conference.  He also wisely highlights Frarah Gray, the youngest black business millionaire outside of entertainment; Tom Burrell of Burrell Communications; Nadine Thompson, founder of Warm Spirit; and Gwen Richardson, founder of Cushcity.com.  There’s also a foreword by Randall Pinkett, author of Black Faces in White Places (see the review), so a cross-generation of leaders appears throughout the segment and book.

RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES are the world’s great venture capitalists for investments in human capital—that is, knowledge. Harvard enrolls thousands of students, each of whom is a “project.” Students acquire human capital, an asset that they turn to account as scientists, composers, financiers, politicians. Harvard also supports thousands of studies, each of which is also a “project”—an analysis of Bach’s compositions, an investigation of poor families’ expenditures, the mapping of the human genome. Like venture capitalists, research universities have the expertise to recognize projects with huge potential—the ablest students, the best experiments. Like venture capitalists, they not only fund projects but guide them and match them with specialized resources. Like venture capitalists, they retain an “equity share” in their projects—though they do this in a special way.

Global opportunities are massive; however there are dangers with expanding a business without the proper foundations to support growth. Many companies expand opportunistically without appropriate strategy planning infrastructure and capability to maximise the opportunity and deliver real business results.

In our experience, profitable global expansion happens when;

• A stable and profitable domestic business that will continue to thrive as focus and resources are channeled into global expansion

As a former primary patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and as a registered patent agent in private practice, I take exception with the editorial’s advocating a “first to file” system in favor of the current “first to invent” practice, for the following reasons: First, the number of patent applications involved in controversies regarding “first to invent” is minuscule relative to the total number of patent applications filed annually and thus cannot be accurately characterized as stifling American innovation.

Second, the “first to invent” practice, admittedly tedious and expensive, ensures fundamental justice in awarding patent rights, inasmuch as an earlier inventor who filed an application as little as one day after a later inventor’s application is not denied legitimate patent rights conferred by the U.S. Constitution.

A few years ago in a study of top-performing managers for Best Buy, I had the chance to interview Ralph Gonzalez. Ralph had successfully transformed one of Best Buy’s lowest-performing stores into a repeat award winner. On virtually every metric, from revenues to profitability to employee engagement to “shrink,” he had taken his team from the bottom 10 percent to the top. What had he done, I asked him, to effect such a dramatic transformation? He told me that he had played on his likeness to a young Fidel Castro, that he had called his store “La Revolucion,” that he had posted a “Declaracion de Revolucion” in the break room, that he had made the supervisors wear army fatigues, and then, as I was scribbling all this down, he told me about the whistle.

Whenever I’m about to make a new investment, I always think about the 2×2 matrix I learned from Andy Rachleff, a former partner at Benchmark Capital.

The idea is that if you make a new venture investment (or start a company), you can either be “right” or “wrong” and you can either be “consensus” (following the crowd) or “non-consensus.” Everyone knows that if you’re wrong, you’re not making any money. But the interesting part of the chart above is that being right and consensus isn’t great for your returns either. The big money, as any horse racing handicapper can tell you, comes when you’re right and you don’t follow the crowd.

The mobile application business is projected to reach $38 billion by 2015, but will the boom be global or will it be confined to a handful of innovation hotspots? A recent study of Android app creators that my company, AppsGeyser, conducted indicates that it will be both.

We drew the data from a sample of 10,000 apps that were created using appsgeyser.com between June and August, 2011. From that information, we collected the App makers’ IP addresses and used then to create this map.

New entrepreneurs who want to survive, and optimize the growth of their startups, need to think globally, and act locally, from day one. This approach, popularly known as “glocalization,” means you have to design and deliver global solutions that have total relevance to every local market in which you operate.

Recognizing this is as much about culture as about language, ensures an understanding of regional motivators, cultural taboos and local customs – so that your solutions are ideally designed and marketed to deliver value that has genuine local relevance.

Hispanic Americans believe business ownership is the key to harnessing the much- sought-after "American Dream."

More than any other segment of the population, Hispanic Americans view entrepreneurship as a way to pursue the American Dream, take control of their lives and support their families.

That's the finding of new research that reveals about two-thirds of Hispanic business owners (versus only 36 percent of the general business-owning population) said they started their businesses to pursue the dream of bettering their lives and providing for their families.

Dan Russell, one of Google's anthropologists, conducted a largeish survey of user behavior and discovered that 90 percent of American Internet users don't know that crtl-F will let them search documents including Web pages. I recently discovered that a smart and technologically literate friend had never heard of alt-tab for application switching; alt-tab being my single most used key combo!

It strikes me that we could probable come up with a list of ten (or even three) things you could teach to the people around you the next time you sit down to help them with a technology problem, "three things every technology user should know."

August 19, 2011 This week, I launched a crowdfunding campaign with IndieGoGo for my short film "Asha,” featuring Manu Dhingra, a friend and 9/11 survivor who suffered second- and third-degree burns to 40 percent of his body after escaping from the World Trade Center.  The documentary captures Dhingra’s battle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and how he discovered a passion for cooking that has aided his recovery and contributed to his sense of hope.

Our primary goal is to get millions of people to watch this seven-minute film. In order to do that, we need to raise money. We have a small budget, only $5,000, from what we hope is a large number of people motivated to help make “Asha” come to life.

The first diamondback terrapin hatchling of 2011 emerged on Friday afternoon after 63 days of incubation under the hot summer sands of Lieutenant Island in South Wellfleet.  Terrapins are medium sized coastal turtles found along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.  They can be found in Southern New England estuaries and salt marsh ecosystems, and are protected as a threatened species in Massachusetts and an endangered species in Rhode Island.  Wellfleet Bay on Outer Cape Cod marks the northernmost habitat in the world for this rare hard-shelled reptile.

In June and July terrapin females crawl ashore from brackish estuaries to lay nests in sandy uplands.  They deposit an average of 12-to-13 eggs in each clutch, and usually lay two nests a year.  As many as 90% of unprotected nests can be devoured by a host of predators, large and small, from raccoons, skunks, foxes and coyotes to fly larvae, red ants and beach grass roots.  Once hatchlings emerge from the nest, they fall prey to these same large predators, augmented by crows, gulls and raptors, as they scramble to the safety of nursery habitat in the salt marsh.  As the tide floods in, crabs and fish join the attack on these tiny, yet tasty critters.

A startup begins with a great idea, but all too often, that’s where it ends. Ideas have to be implemented well to get the desired results. Good implementation requires a plan, and a good plan and good operational decisions come from good people. That’s why investors invest in entrepreneurs, rather than ideas.

People and operational excellence have to converge in every business, large or small. Microsoft found this out last year when their market capitalization, once at $560 billion in the year 2000, had fallen to $219 billion, allowing them to be passed by Apple at $222 billion, who grew from $15.6 billion during the same period. Both had access to the same technology, people, and market.

Whenever I’m about to make a new investment, I always think about the 2×2 matrix I learned from Andy Rachleff, a former partner at Benchmark Capital.

The idea is that if you make a new venture investment (or start a company), you can either be “right” or “wrong” and you can either be “consensus” (following the crowd) or “non-consensus.” Everyone knows that if you’re wrong, you’re not making any money. But the interesting part of the chart above is that being right and consensus isn’t great for your returns either. The big money, as any horse racing handicapper can tell you, comes when you’re right and you don’t follow the crowd.

What kind of business are you creating? Is it one of innovative products or services and unique solutions? Anyone can create what’s required, can see a need and fill it. What sets your business apart? How to you distinguish your brand?

Changing Direction

Small business aims at a new kind of publishing. Great innovation should start simply, like this plan to reinvent the publishing industry with a single book. When innovating, make bold, meaningful and simple changes and then build on that blueprint. Do you have an innovative idea for a product or service? WSJ

Entrepreneurs may need extra help. What can political leaders really learn from entrepreneurs, assuming, of course, that they have the interest in listening? It’s certain that a new and innovative way of looking at the economy may be necessary in these tough times. Can entrepreneurs provide the answer? You’re the Boss

Graduate students in the sciences who both teach and conduct research show greater improvement in their research skills than do those who focus exclusively on laboratory work, says a report to be published in the August 19 issue of Science.

The report, "Graduate Students' Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills," is notable for being among the first to examine gains in the actual research skills of graduate students rather than what they report about themselves.

A question that I often hear debated these days is whether a new startup should focus on growth or profits. First of all, the glory days of “dot.coms” are gone, when investors “didn’t care” about profitability, and all the money went to growth.

In the long run, everyone wants both profitability and growth, but the question is still which comes first. Most startups and investors I know don’t have unlimited funds, so the first question they should ask and do ask today, is “When is your company going to be profitable (self-sustaining)?”

Speaking shortly after her appointment as head of ETUC, Ségol insisted that the FTT should not be seen as a replacement for member states' contributions to the European budget.

"If we have an FTT it should be more for additional investment, growth and jobs, which is our priority, and not to replace income that should be there anyway," she said, alluding to the proposed EU budget for 2014-2020, presented by the European Commission on 29 June.

According to Ségol, social rights have been under attack and even the Commission's recommendations to EU countries on delivering growth and jobs, in the framework of the Europe 2020 strategy, have diminished the European social model.

A growing body of recent research indicates that, in Earth’s warming climate, there is no “tipping point,” or threshold warm temperature, beyond which polar sea ice cannot recover if temperatures come back down. New University of Washington research indicates that even if Earth warmed enough to melt all polar sea ice, the ice could recover if the planet cooled again.

In recent years scientists have closely monitored the shrinking area of the Arctic covered by sea ice in warmer summer months, a development that has created new shipping lanes but also raised concerns about humans living in the region and the survival of species such as polar bears.