When Vint Cerf talks about Google’s upcoming global Science Fair, you can hear the infectious enthusiasm in his voice.

“I just am a huge cheerleader for getting kids interested in science and technology,” he told VentureBeat in a phone conversation yesterday.

But the Father of the Internet, who is also now a Googler, isn’t simply being patronizing. Oh, look at the kiddies playing with their toy volcanoes, how cute. He truly expects great science and fresh thinking to come from the fair’s crop of intelligent teens.

By now it is common knowledge that being severely overweight puts people at increased risk of suffering from heart disease, stroke and diabetes and that obesity—defined as weighing at least 20 percent more than the high side of normal—is on the rise. According to one estimate, the U.S. will be home to 65 million more obese people in 2030 than it is today, leading to an additional six million or more cases of heart disease and stroke and another eight million cases of type 2 diabetes. Many clinicians have already begun seeing families in which the grandparents are healthier and living longer than their children and grandchildren.

The New Year is always a great time to reflect on the many challenges and successes we’ve had, and of course, set some new goals for the future.

At the turn of 2008, I decided I was going to become an entrepreneur and made that my key New Year resolution. The problem was that I really had no idea how or where to get started. Since then, I’ve learned a lot and mostly by trial and error. Now, I’m now on my fourth venture (I’ve documented my ventures on my personal website if you’re interested: tonynavarro.me). To wit, I wanted to share some of my key lessons on getting started for those aspiring entrepreneurs who have decided to make 2012 the year of entrepreneurship.

Rich Bendis has been nominated as a "Top5 Speaker" for 2012 in the Innovation/Creativity category by Speakers Platform. Recognition is based on: expertise. professionalism, innovation within the topic area, testimonials and references, presentation skills and online votes. Rich has spoken over 30 times this year in many Countries, Provinces, States, Regions and Cities around the world on Building Innovative Economies and other Innovation topics. ALL VOTES MUST BE CAST BEFORE JANUARY 14TH, 2012.

Rich would appreciate your vote and asks that you please go to the voting page at: http://speaking.com/top5/ to cast your vote.

Thank You,

Rich Bendis

A flurry of articles have been written on the “women and startups” problem. The same issues are brought up again and again, but one issue that hasn’t been given much attention and scrutiny is the significance of the fact that there are practically no female VC’s.

The fact that females are underrepresented in finance is a given, but the venture capital industry specifically is an egregious perpetrator of maintaining a well-balanced gender ratio. Let me provide you with some statistics. Only 2 females were listed on the 2011 Midas List, an annual list of the top tech investors. A quick-and-dirty analysis of the gender ratios of the most active VC firms of 2011 as well as some of the most visible VC firms out there today reveals that almost half of the firms have no female investment professionals within the firm, and the average percentage of females in these firms falls at 8%.  On top of this is the fact that the most visible investors out there — the Fred Wilsons of the world — are male.

A lot of today's entrepreneurs are working on products people want, not products people need.

While a few exist that solve major problems and annoyances, there are a few pet peeves startups aren't working to fix.

For example, why isn't there a guest mode option on cell phones? And why don't mobile ID cards exist?

The U.S. military.

That's according to a study done by Millennial Branding. The study involved 4 million Facebook profiles of people ages 18 to 29, which had been pulled from Identified, a startup that has been billed the LinkedIn for the Facebook generation.

Another interesting finding is that only 7 percent of people in that age range work for a Fortune 500 company -- more work in startups.

Identified gave us extra data that shows which companies are most commonly listed as new employers by individuals on Facebook in 2011.

Patent wars dominated tech news in 2011. One in particular, between Samsung and Apple spanned the globe and with suits and countersuits in the US, South Korea, Australia and a number of nations throughout Europe. Things don’t look like they’ll be much different in 2012. Patents came about with best of intentions: rewarding and protecting ingenuity, but can they actually do more harm than good?

A large part of the battle between Apple and Samsung arose from the fact that the latter was responsible for manufacturing a number of the former’s products. Add in other outsourcing partners in the manufacturing process and it becomes pretty clear that the world of patents can become a tangled web of complicated legalese.

In the world of software, where abstract ideas and fragments of code can be vital to the final product, the situation can be even more confounding.

Silicon Valley is the tech epicentre, where venture capital firms churn out the “next big thing”. eBay, Google, Adobe, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and SanDisk all call Silicon Valley home. But is the USA, specifically California, the only region capable of being the home of tech?

Globally, tech hotspots have begun to converge in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. In this infographic, care of Gist.com, you can see which countries have the potential to become the next Silicon Valley, what their best attributes are, and how they contribute to the global tech economy.

Online crowdfunding platform Kickstarter raised just shy of $100 million in pledges in 2011, and successfully funded nearly 12,000 projects, or 46 percent of those launched. The categories that raised the most funding were film, with $32.5 million in pledges, and music, with $19.8 million pledged.

Kickstarter launched in 2009, and the number of projects funded and dollars pledged has risen steadily since then. The company is the most well-known site in the crowdfunding space, though several niche sites have launched in recent months—including FundaGeek, for tech and research projects, and ProFounder, for small businesses.

Silicon Valley's first Sino-American incubator — also known as InnoSpring — has officially been launched.

The Santa Clara-based facility is expected to benefit startups looking to expand into the Chinese and U.S. markets.

The incubator comes as a result of collaboration between Beijing-based university science park developer Tsinghua University Science Park, Chinese property development and construction firm Shui On Group, China-focused venture capital firm Northern Light Venture Capital    , which has an office in Menlo Park, and Santa Clara-based Silicon Valley Bank    (NASDAQ:SIVB).

As many of you know, we’ve been involved in technology-led development (TBED) for about ten years.  One of the most valuable resources for anyone concerned with the topic is the State Science Technology Institute (SSTI).  They’ve just released a new report on the latest trends in tech-led development.  It includes information on:

• The Importance of  a  Regional Approach
• Reorganizing for Technology-Based Economic Development Activities
• Access to Capital
• Tax Incentives
• New Commitments to TBED
• Investing in Research
• Higher Education & STEM Initiatives

Creativity is at the core of building quality in design. People rarely innovate when they simply follow instructions. This led me to think more about creativity – the act of doing something in an unconventional way, the act of creating something meaningful that changes you and hence the world. Traditionally (in an industrial world), only artists were meant to be creative – painters, dancers, poets and so on. In the knowledge world, every professional has an opportunity (and a need) to be creative – to see patterns that others don’t see, to create and initiate.

Around the same time I was thinking about creativity, I stumbled upon a great book titled “Creativity – Unleashing the Forces Within” written by 20th century spiritual teacher Osho. I read the book with great interest and gained some very enlightening insights. Here are a few:

Ego is the enemy of creativity. You are at your creative best when you do things because you find joy in doing it, because it has an intrinsic value to you. When you do things with a purpose of gaining recognition (and hence satisfy your ego), creativity is limited. Our need for external validation for our work stops us from being receptive, open and curious.

Getting to a point where it’s time to hire employees is a huge milestone for startups. But there are lots of things to consider when looking to hire someone to join your startup team, including whether or not that person’s goals are in line with the company goals and how good a fit the candidate is with the company culture. Ultimately, it might just be a matter of what your instinct is telling you about the candidate’s character and motivation.

We asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invitation-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs, this question:

“What are some major red flags that startup management teams look for when hiring new employees?”

2012 will be a transformational year for smartphones in healthcare. It will mark the beginning of an era in which hospitals really figure out how to take these devices beyond their use as individual reference tools and turn them into technology that is truly interconnected throughout the enterprise.

Given this changing environment and the new possibilities of smartphones, we assembled a roundtable of industry and technology experts to compile this list of what 2012 will mean for smartphone use in hospitals.

A sneak peak at some of the 10 predictions:

• An incident involving compromised patient information will cause headlines and fines
• Message traceability will become a requirement, not a luxury
• IT and BioMed will join forces in the name of improved workflows

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Pitching to the press is no easy task. Every day, journalists receive thousands of emails from public relations professionals who are pitching their clients' ideas; sometimes hundreds of mass pitches are sent to unsuspecting journalists from just one person in a given day. With such a high quantity of pitches, it is really easy to make a mistake, but it's a shame when those mistakes could've easily been avoided with just a little awareness.

Take a look at the 7 biggest mistakes, and unfortunately some of the most common ones, that PR and marketing professionals make when pitching their stories to journalists. And next time you're pitching your story, make sure you don't fall victim to these public relations faux pas so you can increase your instances of PR success.

In recent years many policymakers and organizations — the National Research Council among them — have sounded alarms about the need for better science and engineering education in the United States. But what can actually be done to improve it? What needs to change in American classrooms? A new report from the National Research Council offers a framework to serve as the basis for new K-12 science education standards — one that embodies a significant shift in how science and engineering are taught.

“It has been 15 years since the last science standards were developed, and our understanding — both in terms of science itself and how students learn about it — has progressed a great deal since then,” said Helen Quinn, chair of the committee that wrote the report. “We hope the framework we developed will guide improvements in standards and in science education over many years.”

The rate of excess weight among children ages 2 to 5 has doubled since the 1980s. Currently, slightly over 20 percent are overweight or obese, and about 10 percent of children from infancy to age 2 carry excess weight, according to a report by the Institute of Medicine on policies to prevent early childhood obesity.

Concerns about extra pounds on babies and toddlers fly in the face of long-held convictions that a pudgy baby is a thriving baby and that young kids naturally grow out of their baby fat as they learn to walk and become more active. But the same factors that promote weight gain among older children and adults — an increase of sedentary behaviors, overconsumption of calories, and insufficient sleep — are contributing to persistent excess weight among too many of the youngest children.

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,1 found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Each year begins for technologists and geeks with the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for CES. It's easy to write off this massive technology trade show as an outdated, overrated, and overhyped gizmo-fest. But I think it's incredibly valuable, and often results in real marketplace knowledge ahead of the curve.

That said, I go into CES each year with some insights and some crystal ball gazing that often helps me focus on what I'm expecting to see. This year, 2012 CES has a handful of trends that will impact media, content creators, and devices.