We may be closer to Thanksgiving than Halloween, but I hope this piece scares you. A lot.

Today, we take for granted that we will have full Internet access and connectivity to the world 24/7/365 on our smartphones, tablets and notebooks. We expect to be able to check a sports score or connect with a loved one in 10 seconds or less.

However, we don’t really consider that our smartphones and wireless device are connected to cell sites and cell towers. Which in turn are connected to the wireless operator’s main switching facility. All that needs lots of power, which after a blackout is provided by backup systems. If and when those systems run out of juice, at about 96 hours, we have a big problem.

Where will the next billion-dollar startups come from? The tech world and most VCs tend to be parochial, looking at Silicon Valley, maybe New York, and a few other hot markets like China and Brazil. But what about the Old Country?

Yesterday, I was having coffee with Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures and co-founder of Seedcamp. He believes that in every major city across Europe, Russia, and Israel, there are “a legion of companies that are capable of achieving billion dollar valuations and in some cases are likely to be able to do close to a billion dollars in revenues over the next 3 to 5 years.”

Revolutions often spring from the simplest of ideas. When a young inventor named Steve Jobs wanted to provide computing power to “people who have no computer experience and don’t particularly care to gain any,” he ushered us from the cumbersome technology of mainframes and command-line prompts to the breezy advances of the Macintosh and iPhone. His idea helped to forever change our relationship with technology.

A strong commitment to innovation and R&D by both the public and private sectors has played a crucial role in Finland's development into one of the leading knowledge-based economies in the world. Finland's R&D expenditure has consistently been above 3% of GDP since the turn of the millennium. As a result, Finland is now ranked among the most R&D-intensive countries globally.

In 2008, total R&D expenditure in Finland was €6.871bn – or 3.72% of GDP – in 2008, according to Statistics Finland. The share of business enterprises from the total expenditure was 71.4%, or €4.847bn, while the share of the university sector was 18.9% and the public sector 9.7%.

Finland and Sweden are the only countries that have reached the 3% target for research intensity set by the EU. In 2009 and 2010, Finland's R&D expenditure has been around 4% of GDP, which is also Finland's target rate for the year 2020. The private sector takes the lead in financing domestic R&D activities; in 2009, Finland had the highest gross domestic expenditure on R&D financed by business enterprises at 2.7% of GDP. Private sources contributed 68.1% of the gross R&D expenditure in Finland, compared to the EU average of 54.8%.

Iʼm writing this white sitting in a hotel room. To my left is the Pacific Ocean and all the magical San Francisco fog stuff people kept whispering to me about. About 12 floors downstairs Claudia is doing yoga in the gym.

About four feet directly behind me is a woman that is a complete stranger to me who is having an unbelievably long orgasm. Thereʼs a wall between us. Hold on a second while I take a glass and listen against the wall.

If there was no wall there then this whole thing would probably have been pretty awkward. I probably would not have been able to keep staring at the computer screen, for instance.

During the past 25 years, I've asked more than 10,000 people where and when they get their best ideas. I get all kinds of answers, but the one that has always fascinated me is "the shower" -- maybe because I also get so many of my good ideas there.

And so, at the risk of overstating my case, I hereby offer you 20 reasons WHY the shower is so conducive to new ideas.

1. Showering signals "a new day" or "new beginning."

2. You're usually alone, with time to reflect.

3. Interruptions are rare.

4. The rush of water creates a kind of "white noise" that makes concentration easier.

5. Shower stalls look like little incubation chambers.

It’s not about one marketing piece, it’s about the whole thing. To be effective, your business needs a presence both offline and online. It needs to use print and digital marketing tools. It needs both advertising (paid) and publicity (free). It’s the marketing mix that gets and keeps your company message “out there” in front of your target audience.

Here are five marketing mix tips to seriously consider and implement:

1. Brochures & Business Cards

Print marketing items are not dead yet. Sometimes our technology doesn’t work like it should, and having that business card and brochure as a backup could save your marketing opportunity. Besides, there are a lot of people who just need to have something in their hands in order to remember you, so give it to them.  Have your calling card ready.

Henk Manschot, a Professor of Ethics and Sustainable Development at the Kosmopolis Institute in the Netherlands, shocked a global gathering at a conference in the Hague late last year when he revealed how `global footprint’ increases as people move up the human development index. As people consume resources to go up on the index, their ecological footprint stretches on additional hectares of land on the planet. `If the resource poor billion plus were to gain improved access to basic services such as health, education and portable water, the planet will run out of its hectares,’ warned Manschot.

The warning is imminent although there is no international consensus on how to reach out to the deprived billions. While global food security has yet to be achieved, the outlook for freshwater scarcity and improved sanitation looks bleak. Collectively, these crises are severely impacting the possibility of sustaining prosperity to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for reducing extreme poverty. Top it with growing fossil fuel and energy demand and the cup of woes will spill over like a never-before tsunami of unprecedented nature. The signs are ominous!

The world has made lacklustre progress in meeting most of the commitments it made 20 years ago to safeguard the oceans, says a report.

At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, agreements were made on issues such as sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, capacity building, and biodiversity; later, the Johannesburg Summit in 2002 in South Africa set targets and timetables to achieve those goals.

But a report entitled 'Oceans at Rio+20' has rated both the effort and the achievements to date in protecting oceans and meeting these commitments as 'low to medium'.

Despite all the talk of an unfavorable IPO market, venture firms fleeing the space and an uncertain regulatory environment, there are still plenty of investment dollars sloshing around in the healthcare industry.

Healthcare investment may be trending down for the time being, but the industry did pull in $1.7 billion last quarter, and a number that large shows that there’s still lots of activity in the sector.

Still, that doesn’t mean that every investable company or idea is swimming in cash.

An important change is taking place in the world of innovation. Put simply, innovation can be done very cheaply.

It used to be that innovation was relatively expensive. For example, one case taught in Harvard Business School's entrepreneurship program describes how Robin Wolaner came up with an idea for a high-quality magazine targeting parents in the mid-1980s. Wolaner's original plan suggested that it would cost $5 million to develop the idea. Before she attempted to raise that amount of capital, she decided to run a simple market test. She sent a sample issue of her magazine to a set of parents. Each test issue included a reply card that people could return to indicate interest in subscribing. High levels of response validated the market interest in the idea, and Wolaner was off and running. She eventually sold her magazine (Parenting) to Time Life, Inc., for about $10 million. This test cost Wolaner about $150,000 to run.

Millions of pacemakers have been successfully implanted in the past half century to regulate erratic heartbeats, but the electrical leads, which connect the device to the heart, complicate the surgery and increase infection risks. The heart's continuous and vigorous beating also creates strain on the leads and can damage them over time.

Now researchers seek to go wireless. In a new pacemaker called the Wireless Cardiac Stimulation (WiCS) system, a wireless electrode replaces one or more leads. California start-up EBR Systems, working with English technology-development firm Cambridge Consultants, recently announced their system was successfully implanted in 100 patients needing cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) during a series of human clinical trials in Europe. (Wireless signaling is not entirely new to pacemakers—doctors have for the past few years been able to communicate with them via the Internet or even smart phones.)

It's no exaggeration to say that, sometimes, anonymity is a matter of life and death. Which is why it's important to know just how trivial it is to track down an "anonymous" blogger using their Google Analytics code.

Andy Baio, who runs the popular linkblog Waxy.org posted Wednesday about using simple tools like eWhois and Statsie to unmask several bloggers.

Baio says that tracking down a blogger by GA is less likely than by IP address or another slip-up, but "it's also more accurate. Hundreds or thousands of people can share an IP address on a single server and domain information can be faked, but a shared Google Analytics is solid evidence that both sites are run by the same person."

Women and minorities are fighting for a place in fast-growth science and engineering-driven industries, and the struggle is stoking a heated dialogue, especially at its epicenters in Silicon Valley and the emerging New York City tech hub.

VentureBeat recently debunked the myths about women at the helm of technology companies and conducted a roundtable about the issue.

A new generation of chief executives of giant technology companies illustrates the point amply: Virginia Rometty at IBM, Meg Whitman at HP, Carol Bartz at Yahoo, Heather Bresch at Mylan and Ursula Burns at Xerox.  Their successes alone should inspire the rising generation to believe the glass ceiling has been broken.

What happens when more than 800 million people across the world join the same social network and start friending each other? People become more connected. “Sure,” you say with a long eye roll, “that’s the de facto mantra of every social network.” But Facebook has actually proved it.

The world’s largest social network teamed up with researchers at Università degli Studi di Milano to study the social graph. Together, they analyzed 721 million active Facebook users and those users’ 69 billion relationships, and found that any two people on Facebook are, on average, separated by no more than 4.74 connections.

The Top Site Selection Factor series offers in-depth analysis of the factors that ranked high in importance by the executives responding to Area Development's 25th Annual Corporate Survey (2010). Find out why and how these factors should be evaluated in your next move...

The above image is a very good metaphor for business. There's something hidden in it that most people don't see at first glance. Looking at it the same way you always look at things won't help.

I talk with a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs who are interested in being their own boss but wonder if they “have what it takes.” I always answer the question the same way: Of course they do. Anyone can be an entrepreneur. Really, all it takes is perseverance and a willingness to learn.

Still, it can feel daunting to know where to get started—especially with hyped-up language like “leap of faith” and “take the plunge.” But guess what? Entrepreneurship has a shallow end, and it’s perfectly fine to wade in there as long as you’d like. There’s no need to incur a lot of risk or endure a lot of anxiety. There are plenty of ways to ease into the transition, experiment, and move slowly. In fact, doing so will likely help you gain the confidence, information, and resources you need to be even more successful.

I was recently in London for the Tech City UK Entrepreneurs Festival, as part of Britain’s Global Entrepreneurship Week with over 300 tech entrepreneurs from around the globe. The experience was educational, to say the least, and gave me some insight into what any initiative aimed at developing entrepreneurship in the tech sector should be doing.

Throughout the course of the week long conference, it became evident that emerging market initiatives like Silicon Cape in South Africa and the iHub in Kenya are definitely on the right track. There were, however, a number of guidelines I took away from Tech City UK that could easily be replicated by any entrepreneurial programme in the emerging world. A number of initiatives may already be implementing these guidelines, or at least ones like them. These insights are, nonetheless, worth taking note of.