The advent of cheaper sensors and wireless transmitters, along with ubiquitous computing power in the form of smart phones, is making it easier and easier for patients with chronic diseases to track their conditions at home. But many health-care providers seem reluctant to adopt these technologies.

Experts say this is, in large part, because of the reimbursement system in U.S. health care, where physicians are paid for each test or office visit they provide. Outside a few specialties, doctors won't get paid for monitoring data that's been gathered remotely.

The Lumoback, a Band-Aid-like sensor that is affixed to the back, could soon stand in for the legions of mothers commanding us to sit up straight. This wearable sensor monitors posture and sends vibrations to your lower back if you slouch. It connects wirelessly to a smart phone app that helps guide correct posture and tracks posture over time. It also connects users to other resources for a healthy back. The app won a competition for best health app at the Body Computing conference at the University of Southern California last week.

Next time your boss is extra snippy and impatient, take note of whether he or she has to take the stage any time soon.

A new survey out of the U.K. shows that public speaking has a marked negative effect on higher-ups (via Management Today).

It makes 41% of them irritable, 42% of them report losing their sense of humor, and 40% say they lose their appetite too. Almost half experience insomnia before a big speech, according to the survey, conducted by The Aziz Corporation, a communications consulting firm.

UK Conservative MEPs Marina Yannakoudakis and Vicky Ford called for more support to allow working mothers and other women to start up or grow their SME at their party's annual conference in Manchester yesterday, echoing similar calls made in the European Parliament.

Yannakoudakis recently drafted a report adopted by the European Parliament calling for seminars and training sessions to help women exploit the European Progress Microfinance Facility, a fund designed to help women and other under-represented groups.

The call came as new data supported the view that women – and especially those in rural areas – are better placed than men to exploit social media and the internet to set up businesses.

In 2009, according to data from the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), companies sponsored over $4 billion worth of university research in the United States.  Universities, rather than industrial labs, conduct the majority of federally-funded research in cutting-edge fields such as biotech, clean energy, and nanotechnology, often giving them a clear lead in the race to create ground breaking new initiatives in these fields and at the same time making them high-value open innovation partners.  Some corporate innovation managers are surprised to discover that U.S. universities own large and diverse patent portfolios that originate from the cutting-edge scientific research that goes on in university research labs.  Today, universities own nearly one-quarter of new U.S. patents on the fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology.[i] How do you tap into university know-how?

Northern European countries are reaping more than twice the benefits than their crisis-riven southern counterparts from the internet as a contributor to their net GDP, according to a new survey.

Between 5.8% and 7.2% of total GDP in Denmark, Sweden and the UK can be attributed to the internet-based economy, but Spain and Italy are lagging on 2.2% and 1.9% respectively, according to the Boston Consulting Group report, called 'Sizing the digital economy'.

The calculations were made on the basis of the consumption, investment and exports attributable to internet activity and display wide varieties in performance across the continent as well as untapped potential.

Special commercial embassies in Brazil and other fast-growing economies, easier terms for banking credit, and new investment funds designed to assist innovative businesses are likely to be touted in a European Commission action plan due later this year.

Drafts of the plan for SMEs' access to finance will be circulated next month with a view to final publication in December, EurActiv has learned.

The plan is a joint initiative of Michel Barnier and Antonio Tajani, commissioners for the internal market and enterprise respectively.

The main thrust of the action plan will involve the introduction of a long-touted initiative to facilitate venture capital for SMEs across Europe.

Clayton Christensen says that the most disruptive things start out as "toys." I was reminded of that yesterday as I was standing at the counter of a bike store in Calistoga filling out a list of bikes I was renting for our family and a few others. I had guessed the heights of everyone on my list and I wanted to take a copy of the list back to our house and make sure I had guessed correctly.

Former Google Engineer Gareth Jones is a number whiz, as you might expect.

Jones used "open sources of information on the internet" to create TechCompanyPay, a list of averages representing how well the biggest companies in Silicon Valley compensate their employees.

It only took Jones three hours to hotwire the site.

Inside this year's Digital 100, we found a number of companies that are ripe for an acquisition.  Content distribution, sports blogs, and e-commerce are all areas where the big guys could use their hefty balance sheets to snatch up some smaller companies.

If you get a virus on your computer, you’re not going to start sneezing right there in your bedroom or office (thank goodness). But a ruined reputation online can follow you and your business, just as a successful online reputation can help you get more business. The Internet carries opportunity as well as the risk of digital mayhem.

“This magical world is as fragile and vulnerable as your new car parked on a dark street in a bad part of town,” says John Mariotti in “The End of Your Digital Life as You Know It.” “Come back to it and it might be covered with graffiti or have parts missing.” He adds that “hackers are the modern equivalent of malicious vandals and criminals.”

To bring some order to the fuzzy world of cloud computing, the U.S. government's National Institute of Standards and Technology has created a standard definition  and a Cloud Computing Reference Architecture. Both are in the form of "Special Publications," which are not official U.S. government standards but are designed to provide guidance to specific communities of practitioners and researchers.

The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, currently in draft form, is based on NIST-sponsored workshops and public comments. The single definition helps ensure that government workers, industry, and other groups are talking about the same thing when they use the same words.

There’s always a new generation of entrepreneurs who disrupt business categories and create new ones. Here we feature the innovators on the Forbes 400 and the up and comers likeliest to make it into the ranks of the list, such as the founders of highly valuable startups Twitter, Groupon and Dropbox. This year’s Future 400 proves the Rich List is as dynamic as ever.

Mentoring America's Most Promising Companies Forbes aims to help entrepreneurs compete. That’s why we teamed with Clay Mathile, pet food billionaire and founder of the Aileron Institute, a non-profit boot camp for entrepreneurs, to help us in our hunt for America’s Most Promising Companies.

Discussions of improving postsecondary outcomes and increasing educational attainment frequently refer to the changing character of the student body.  It is easy to visualize “college students” as those who who graduate from high school, enroll full-time, and earn a college degree in the prescribed time frame. But many students – and a disproportionate number of those who never make it through – are older, enroll part-time, have dependents, attend two-year colleges.  Unfortunately, efforts to call attention to this reality are too frequently combined with the claim the “traditional” student is an anachronism – that over time students have come less and less to look the way they did in the 1950s and the 1960s. Fewer and fewer students fit the stereotype, the argument goes, so designing policies focused on those rare (and privileged) few misses the point.

Is there really a long-term trend away from traditional college students?  Let’s look at some simple data from the Digest of Education Statistics about fall enrollments over time.

FOR more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and “distributed” learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a videogame. Presumably, for the Friday kegger you go to the Genius Bar.

It’s true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by M.I.T. (The New York Times Company is in the game, too, with its Knowledge Network.) But the Internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world. Our top-rated universities and colleges have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got; thus elite schools have little incentive to dilute the value of the credentials they award.

They call themselves “Silicon Valley in a Box”. They define themselves as an “accelerator”. They are located in a building with a space of 170,000 sq.ft. There are hundreds of people working in the building. They have 250 companies stationed within the building, along with 70 data centres. They have 170-plus investors and venture capital companies among their partners. They have an in-house support system for accounting, book keeping, legal support, recruitment, talent acquisition, banking and technology services and support.

Their ecosystem includes government, universities, corporations and investors. They have country pavilions in the centre from a slew of European, Asian and Latin American countries and are opening similar centres in Egypt, Malaysia, Singapore and Canada. They have diverse partnerships with 100 business associations and corporations from several countries who visit their centre annually. If you go into their building, you will find slogans like “United Nations of Innovative Companies”. In five years, they have incubated 600-plus companies. And you will find in the centre flags of scores of countries, like one sees in UN buildings.

On September 28, 2011, the city of Lisbon hosted the first international crowdfunding event in Portugal. To the 400 attendees and webcast viewers, the event introduced the concept of crowdfunding in its various forms, its potential, requirements and risks, focusing on two of the most successful cases in Europe, Symbid and Crowdcube.

Pedro Oliveira of PPL (Crowdfunding Portugal) kicked things off with a general intro to crowdfunding, followed by Korstiaan Zandvliet’s presentation of Symbid, a reference equity crowdfunding case from Holland. Symbid is an equity-based online investment platform that enables individuals to directly invest in start-ups or existing ventures in exchange for an equity stake in the company. With investments ranging from as little as €20 to as much as €2,500,000, just about anyone can invest through Symbid.

The first of my course touches on the definition on entrepreneurship, the different forms of entrepreneurship, how countries measure growth of entrepreneurship activity, and the first toolkit: how to identify ideas and business opportunities. We also provide some interesting case studies for example, Aravind Eye Centre for social entrepreneurship. This is a series based on a course “MPS 812: Entrepreneurship” I have been teaching in School of Physical & Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University.

Something exceptional is happening here in Finland. However I think that the foundation for that has existed a long time, only to wait its time to come. And it seems that the time is here and now. Let me explain.

I am a startup entrepreneur and I am considering myself very lucky that I have had the opportunity to follow somewhat amazing chain of events happening in the startup scene of Finland. The young crew from the Aalto University, so-called Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, has worked hard for two and half years, and finally this week they publicly proved that their vision and the actions taken truly are a very powerful force.

I’m not aware of VCs using classic financial hedging strategies. In many cases, they are prohibited from doing this by their LP agreements and/or investment documents in the companies when they make an investment. While I’m sure there are some folks that do this, I don’t believe it’s prevalent.

The primary ways VCs mitigate risk are (1) time diversification, (2) stage diversification, (3), sector diversification, (4) pro-rata or over pro-rata investing over time, and (5) number of investments in the portfolio.

1. Time diversification: Most VC funds are committed over a three to five year period. The commitment period for most funds is five years – by spreading out the commitments over a three to five year period, a fund gets time diversity and theoretically smooths out some of the macro cycles. Most VCs who have been investing since the mid-1990′s understand this well as many funds raised in 1999 and 2000 were fully committed in one year. As a result, the funds were invested during the rapid rise and peak of the Internet bubble, resulting in horrible performance for 1999 vintage funds due to their lack of time diversity. The firms that committed their 1999 over a three year period vs. a one year period ended up making a number of investments as the bubble burst, including many that ultimately ended up being successful.