Click to enlargeThe University of Florida announced two new buildings in the works for Innovation Square, a 120,000-square-foot home for existing science and technology companies and a dormitory for students interested in starting tech companies.

The first, to be known as the Infusion Technology Center, is being built by Gainesville development company Trimark Properties and will include ground floor space for retail, restaurants and cafes.

Luck, in our everyday understanding, is a random gift of the universe. The superstitious might go in for rabbits’ feet and four-leaf clovers and the religious for prayer, but otherwise there’s nothing you can do to attract good fortune or repel bad luck. Or is there?

Believe it or not, this is something science has looked into. Experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman has spent over a decade investigating whether lucky and unlucky people actually do anything differently.

To do this he used a newspaper advertisement to solicit hundreds of volunteers who felt they were exceptionally lucky or unlucky then conducted a series experiments to determine what, if anything, set one group apart from the other.

Apr. 18, 2011 (Business Wire) — A 3-year-old child born without fingers on the dominant hand is able to use a pencil, thanks to a device created by a FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL®) team comprised of all girls, ages 11 to 13. The device earned the team, known as the “Flying Monkeys,” the inaugural FIRST Global Innovation Award, presented by the X PRIZE Foundation.

FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a not-for-profit organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen to inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology, today announced the selection of the winning team and runner–up teams of the Global Innovation Award, presented by the X PRIZE Foundation. All three teams will participate in a private awards ceremony in June at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in Alexandria, Va.

Take a quick look at your schedule. Most of us have calendars that are packed to the gills with endless appointments, meetings, conference calls, and deadlines. When, in this insanely-busy schedule, are you planning to come up with your best ideas?

In today's always-on, 24/7 business world, when are we supposed to generate creative breakthroughs? In-between checking our iPhones, responding to email, and updating our Facebook status? We're so busy being "heads down" on our to-do lists, that we fail to spend time being "heads up" to explore the possibilities.

In fact, very few people actually schedule time to think, create, and invent. But those that do are the ones that make history.

Trends on the Internet are fun to watch and move very quickly compared to some other markets. For instance, while the Web’s trends tend to go in cycles of one or two years, trends in food and restaurants tend to go in cycles of nearly a decade. So the fast-changing world of the Internet can be exciting.

The latest trend to be noted amongst those who watch such things is that social media is losing some of its lustre with some users. A visible decline has been seen starting in February of this year, denoting a possible plateau during the Christmas Holiday and now falling steadily.

The Trend Itself

The trend is a 10-day moving average in terms of number of tweets on Twitter using The Daily’s iPad application. The app’s usage peaked at about 220 tweets per day in early February, then dropped quickly and significantly down to about 85 per day by the end of the month.

MENLO PARK, Calif.—Travis Kalanick is the founder of a start-up that lets people order up a car service from a cellphone. Recently, the 34-year-old found himself in the driver's seat.

Several major venture-capital firms were vying to fund Uber, his fledgling company. While presenting his business plan at the offices of Benchmark Capital, Mr. Kalanick briefly excused himself to phone three other potential investors. His message: They needed to move fast.

One Benchmark partner, Bill Gurley, wouldn't have it. "No need to talk to those guys," he told Mr. Kalanick. "Let's get the deal done here."

TNG Pharmaceuticals from the University of Louisville took home the grand prize at the Rice Business Plan Competition.

TNG won a $300,000 Investment Prize from the Goose Society of Texas, a $100,000 Owl Investment Prize and other cash awards for a total of more than $500,000. TNG is developing a vaccine that greatly reduces the damage caused by the horn fly on cattle.

The competition is hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, and the winners were announced over the weekend.

Gary "Big Fat Lie" Taubes wrote a long feature for the NYT Magazine analyzing the claims made by UCSF childhood obesity expert Robert H. Lustig in his infamous lecture Sugar: The Bitter Truth , which has gotten about a million YouTube views (it's also had other exposure: I watched it last year on UC cable access while in LA).

Lustig claims that sugar is a "chronic toxin" -- a poison that will make you sick if you eat it for long enough -- and he blames it for everything from cancer to heart disease. Taubes traces the history of this theory about sugar through the past century, and concludes that while not conclusive, the evidence is worrying. I've tried to eliminate sugar from my diet with varying success since 2003, when I did a year of "strict Atkins" and lost 80 lbs, most of which I've kept off since by avoiding processed carbs where possible. I find that eating a little sugar (or high-carb food like bread) generally leads to cravings for a lot more, which means that slight slips tend to snowball.

A state-backed venture capital fund that’s widely praised by supporters for helping lure 10 out-of-state venture firms to Ohio could be on its last legs.

The Ohio Capital Fund‘s future is hazy because it isn’t clear whether the fund is much of a priority for Gov. John Kasich and the Republican-dominated legislature. The fund, which was established as a “fund of funds” by the legislature in 2003, has committed $125 million of a possible $140 million to 23 venture firms and is expected to be tapped out in terms of investment commitments within the next few months, according to Tarik Adam, investment manager with Fort Washington Capital Partners Group, which was hired by the state to administer the Ohio Capital Fund (OCF).

New legislation is needed to continue the fund, but a House bill that would do just that hasn’t gone anywhere since it was introduced in January. A similar proposal passed the House by a vote of 98-0 in the state’s last legislative session, but didn’t make it to a vote in the Senate.

Every entrepreneur wishes that he could predict whether his idea could be the “next big thing,” before he spent his life savings and years of energy on it. Investors, on the other hand, typically don’t even look very hard at the product or service, but prefer to evaluate first the entrepreneur, and secondly the business plan.

I define these products and services as “solutions” (customers buy solutions to a problem), but Guy Kawasaki more generically calls them causes, meaning any new idea, company, or service. Yet we can all agree that the quality of the solution or cause is very important, and there are attributes that reduce the business risk and make it more likely a success in the marketplace.

While I’ve been using the term “Intelligent Crowdsourcing” for a while, I have never given a clear definition of what it is in written form, and, how exactly it is different from crowdsourcing simpliciter.

Jeff Howe, who came up with the term, defines Crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

Groupon just bought Pelago, the maker of iPhone app Whrrl, which tried to compete with Foursquare and didn't get very far.

Pelago's first investor was famed Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins, which is also an investor in Groupon.

It's a great example of "parking", a crucial VC skill that VCs don't like to talk about.

What is parking? It's finding a good acquisition for a startup that didn't do as well as you expected.

With all the messages being sent through the media today, how do you cut through the noise to get yours heard?

These job ads have done it by being funny, interesting, and heartbreakingly honest. They include a reminder that no dinosaurs need apply, a math problem to solve in order to call the proper phone number, and a promise of no health insurance.

Things are tough all over, right?

Well, not really.

While the job market is still pretty weak, the truth is that conditions vary greatly from state to state. For example, in February 2011, the unemployment rate was 13.6 percent in Nevada, but only 3.7 percent in North Dakota.

On top of that MoneyRates found significant differences in a number of other job-related factors. It analyzed all of them and created a list of the best states for making a living.

On a warm summer afternoon in 2005, Bryant Austin was snorkeling in the blue waters of the South Pacific by the islands of Tonga, looking through his camera at a humpback whale and her calf swimming less than 50 yards away. As he waited for the right moment, the playful calf swam right up to him, so close that he had to lower his camera. That’s when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder.

Turning around, Mr. Austin found himself looking straight into the eye of the mother whale, her body bigger than a school bus. The tap had come from her pectoral fin, weighing more than a ton. To Mr. Austin, her gesture was an unmistakable warning that he had gotten too close to the calf. And yet, the mother whale had extended her fin with such precision and grace — to touch the photographer without hurting him — that Mr. Austin was in awe of her “delicate restraint.”

Looking into the whale’s eye, lit by sunlight through the water, Austin felt he was getting a glimpse of calmness and intelligence, of the animal’s consciousness. The moment changed Mr. Austin’s life. It struck him that something was missing from four decades of whale photography: the beauty of true scale. Mr. Austin concluded that the only way to capture the magnificence of whales would be to create life-size pictures of them. “I wanted to recreate the feeling I had when I looked into the eye of the mother whale,” he said.

Entrepreneurs are among the most impactful actors in our economy because of the roles they play in creating new jobs and bringing breakthrough technologies to the marketplace. Despite their importance, female entrepreneurs remain a largely untapped economic force. The number of highly educated women indicates that females have the potential to start high growth businesses, but research shows that women have not pursued high potential entrepreneurial endeavors at the same pace as men. Consider these facts about women from the Kauffman Foundation, Astia, and Babson College, for example:

• They are well educated: Women represent 51 percent of the nation’s PhDs, 51 percent of business school applicants, 67 percent of college graduates, and more than 70 percent of 2010 valedictorians.
• They are in powerful positions but are not leading companies: Women became the majority of the labor force in 2010 for the first time in U.S. history, holding 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs, but only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are female.
• They own low growth, lifestyle businesses, not high growth, cutting edge companies: While data shows that women own 30 percent of all new firms, only 3 percent of female entrepreneurs own high growth firms.
• They do not get their fair share of investment capital: Women-led businesses receive only 5 percent of all equity capital investments and just 3 percent of women-led firms attract venture capital investments.

Israel is one of the most innovative nations on earth. Israelis (approximately 7.6 million in number) are well-educated, have a global outlook, ties around the world, and most importantly, a positive view of entrepreneurship. Most Israeli entrepreneurs understand ways of moving innovations into the marketplace and how to establish themselves as global companies from the get go. It is only natural that there is so much interest around the world in Israel’s entrepreneurship path.

Israel has focused a lot of its efforts on finding and nurturing high-growth entrepreneurial firms, including universities. Granted, many start-ups have failed, but a number have succeeded and grown quickly. The result: Israeli high-growth start-ups have been creating jobs and generating sustainable wealth for the country, and innovations for the world (e.g., the USB memory stick, new generation cardiac stents, and camera pills that transmit pictures from inside the human body). Israel is often referred to as "startup nation" and a high-tech superpower.

Our annual list of the 10 emerging technologies that we think will have the greatest impact.

Ovum’s latest report issues a call for smarter cities. It also states that in the future the more smart they are, the more competitive they can be.

According to Ovum’s “Is your city smart enough?” report, cities should integrate information technologies in their infrastructures making them more sustainable and attractive for investment.

“The timing is right for cities to drive innovation in the next few decades for a number of reasons,” stated Research Director, Dr Steve Hodgkinson.

“Firstly, urbanisation trends compel cities to innovate and prosper – sustainability accommodating a further 2.9 billion people in cities during the next 40 years can’t be done unless we change the way they are built and operated.”