63 fledgling startups demoed their big ideas in front of investors and members of the press at Y Combinator’s Demo Day on Tuesday.

Of the massive batch — Y Combinator’s largest to date — 32 companies now have products in the wild. With so many choose from, we decided to feature the five most practical consumer applications best suited for Mashable readers.

“Out of 63, statically, there’s probably an Airbnb or Dropbox in there,” Y Combinator founder Paul Graham said to the crowd. “Question is, which one?”

Outsourcing of university science experiments has now become possible through a new online exchange that connects researchers short of resources at one institution with laboratories elsewhere with capacity to spare.

The service, Science Exchange, recently launched by a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, boasts Princeton, Duke, Stanford and Johns Hopkins universities as users. Scientists post details of an experiment they want to conduct and can then evaluate bids based on price, timeliness and the experience and equipment of those offering to carry it out.

Business incubators for sharing services were all the rage back in the days of the dot-com bubble (700 for profit, many more non-profit). About that time the bubble burst, causing more than 80% of them to disappear. Now they are coming back, and the best even provide networking, technical leadership, and seed funding, as well as investors waving money at graduates.

Incubators I hear mentioned most often include YCombinator, led by Paul Graham in Silicon Valley, and TechStars, located in Boston, Boulder, New York City, and Seattle. TechStars has several excellent mentors on staff, led by founder and CEO David Cohen. Both provide excellent networking to investors, and on-site technical leadership, which I believe sets them apart.

In the wake of Steve Jobs's resignation, let's consider the greatest decision he ever made. It didn't happen in a garage in Cupertino, sweating with Steve Wozniak as they dreamed up a computer for the common man. Or in a conference room, as managers told him that no one would ever pay $500 for a portable music player. Or in another conference room, as new managers told him no one would ever pay $400 for a cellphone. Rather it was in an almost forgotten annex on the Apple campus.

Jobs had just recently come back to the company, after a 12-year lay off working for two of his own start-ups: NeXT, which made ultra high-end computers, and Pixar. He was taking a tour of Apple, becoming reacquainted with what the company had become in the years since he'd left. It must have been a sobering, even ugly sight: Apple was dying at the hands of Microsoft, IBM, Dell, and a litany of competitors who were doing what Apple did, only cheaper, with faster processors.

While the spotlight of the latest technology boom has been focused on a cluster of popular consumer applications like Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, investors are increasingly taking a shine to the start-ups building the infrastructure for those Internet powerhouses.

Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms are raising their stakes in so-called enterprise companies, which provide software, analytics and other services to business customers.

They are betting that the emerging players in this space, typically considered the least sexy part of technology, will siphon market share from lumbering giants like Oracle and Microsoft.

Nebraska angel investors and a national investing expert on Wednesday shared mixed feelings about the state's new Angel Investment Tax Credit Act, which will give a 40 percent state income tax credit for high-risk investments in startup businesses.

A number of angel investors attending a seminar at the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Thompson Alumni Center said the law will do some good but won't spur the kind of deals in high-growth startups necessary to expand Nebraska's economy or provide more opportunity for investors.

The seminar, organized by the Nebraska Angels, the state's largest angel investment group, was aimed at sparking interest in angel investing and exploring how the new law will affect investors.

There will be plenty of time for analysis of what now happens at Apple and whether the company can retain is extraordinary leadership of the world of technology, but my first reaction to the resignation of Steve Jobs as its chief executive is sadness.

Mr Jobs, at the age of only 56, stands as one of the great business leaders – arguably the greatest – of the postwar era. For the past 30 years, he has not only led the wave of technological change emanating from Silicon Valley – the personal computer, the internet, the tablet – but stamped his aesthetic on the world.

On a civic scale, health brings wealth. And no society can be healthy without the proper disposal of human waste. The filthy fact is that what might seem like common convenience to many folks in developed areas is still out of reach for a significant portion of Earth's residents. The World Health Organization predicts that in four years 2.7 billion people around the globe will still lack access to basic sanitation. Diseases transmitted via contaminated water include diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid and hepatitis A. Worldwide, diarrheal diseases are the second leading cause of death—after pneumonia—for children under the age of five.

Most of those deaths could be avoided with proper sanitation. Many people have a basic understanding about how to dispose of their waste, but poverty, politics and prejudice often get in the way.

New research from ABI says 1.8 million home automation systems will ship around the entire world this year. Given the number of homes in the world, that's really not that many. Things are about to change, though--ABI's five-year prediction sees the figure rising to 12 million. It's all about new providers enabling the tech, the rise in smartphones and tablets, and the push to save energy by wiring our homes into the smart grid.

Phone companies, looking for regular subscriber income, see home automation technology as a natural fit for the future of their business: Smart homes are all about remote control, and now that we're all carrying smartphones and tablets, the phone companies want to be the channel for that data. Communications tech makers see an avenue to build their tech throughout your home, in a totally new market--it's why Cisco, better known for making routers and wireless tech, has invested over $10 million in Control4 (which automates heating, air conditioning, and lighting) this year, and also made a deal with maker Zigbee to sell its home automation gear around the world.

It's four days before a major flash flood will hit your local river. Authorities notify you and your neighbors, giving you all ample time to prepare, or at least enough time to move to higher ground. This isn't just a disaster preparedness obsessive's fantasy. IBM and researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a piece of flood prediction technology that can accurately warn of impending disaster at up to a hundred times faster than other flood prediction models.

The researchers are currently testing the technology on Texas's 230 mile-long Guadalupe River (and over 9,000 miles of its tributaries), where every hour it has been able to generate 100 hours of accurate future river behavior based on weather predictions and precise maps of the river system. "We're taking in a series of data, running it through a simulation and analytics engine, and getting an output of the flow and depth of the river. If you compare the flows and depths to the topography of the [surrounding] land, you can make a prediction of where flooding will occur," explains IBM researcher Fadi Gebara.

Justice - Responsibility for the Future Date: Thursday, August 18 to Saturday, September 03 Location: Alpbach/Tyrol Working language: English and German; in-ear translation service into English and German available for all plenary sessions

Throughout history, a spirit of innovation has characterized the United States of America. From the Lewis and Clark expedition to the space race to the computer age, Americans have always been innovators. And innovation has always found a home on the American farm.

Take a look at a modern combine or tractor, and you will see American innovation at its best. But innovation on the farm doesn't end there. It can be found in the seeds farmers plant and in the products they use to protect their crops and nurture their livestock. However, the hallmark of American innovation may well be found in agricultural biotechnology.

ASPEN, Colo.--One of the Internet's most influential investors and entrepreneurs is offering a dire prediction: the pace of technological change is stagnating.

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, warned that--despite spectacular advances in computer-related fields over the last few decades--technological progress overall is actually "stalled out."

"There's been insane progress in computers, Internet, and all things related to it," Thiel told a conference here organized by the Technology Policy Institute last night. "It's been offset by incredible failure in energy. To a first order, the two things have cancelled each other out."

Bosses spend the vast majority of their time helping others succeed: Employees, customers, the business itself… the list goes on and on. That’s your job — but it’s also your job to focus on yourself, at least part of the time, if only because your success can create success for others.

The problem is that even though performance, not persona, is what matters most, getting ahead is at least partly based on getting noticed — and getting noticed means being different.

Here are six ways you can get noticed through actions that make you stand out from the pack.

Hawaii continues to hold on to its ranking as the happiest place to live, according to results of a new Gallup poll, which also showed that you don't need the warm sun to put a smile on your face.

The results are preliminary for 2011, with the year's complete rankings for U.S. states by Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index expected to come out early next year.

The well-being Index score is an average of six factors, including included life evaluation (self-evaluation about your present life situation and anticipated one in five years); emotional health; work environment (such as job satisfaction); physical health; healthy behavior; and basic access (access to health care, a doctor, a safe place to exercise and walk, as well as community satisfaction).

ON AUGUST 15th Google bid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility, a troubled American maker of mobile phones. If the purchase goes through, it will be Google’s largest ever acquisition, almost doubling the size of its workforce. The attraction for the internet giant is not the handset-maker’s 19,000 employees nor its 11% share of America’s smartphone market, but its portfolio of 17,000 patents, with another 7,500 in the pipeline. This will bolster Google’s puny arsenal of around 2,000 patents, hugely strengthening its position in current and future legal battles with its more heavily armed industry rivals. Having been defeated in a recent auction of patents belonging to Nortel, a defunct Canadian telecoms firm, Google was clearly desperate to win Motorola’s portfolio: its offer valued the company’s shares at a 63% premium over their closing price the previous Friday evening.

IT IS not, by any means, the world’s oldest company. There are Japanese hotels dating back to the 8th century, German breweries that hail from the 11th and an Italian bank with roots in the 15th. What is unusual about IBM, which celebrates its 100th birthday next week, is that it has been so successful for so long in the fast-moving field of technology. How has it done it?

IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology. Its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses. At first this meant making punch-card tabulators, but IBM moved on to magnetic-tape systems, mainframes, PCs, and most recently services and consulting. Building a company around an idea, rather than a specific technology, makes it easier to adapt when industry “platform shifts” occur.

A few months ago the website, The Next Web published a post called, “The 25 Most Influential People Tweeting About Entrepreneurship”.  While I enjoyed the reading the list, I was a little discouraged by the fact that only 1 woman made the list.

With women starting new businesses at twice the rate of men, and with women dominating the social media realm, I knew that there was no shortage of women tweeting about entrepreneurship.

It's a classic question when a lovely new gadget comes out on the market: when is the right time to buy? Buy the product early, and you get bragging rights and more time enjoying its features, but you almost certainly pay more than if you'd waited.

Case in point: HP's departure from the tablet business, with its announcement last week that it would stop making its Touchpad. Touchpad owners who had paid the full price of $499 for a device unlikely ever to see new apps, peripherals, or support from its parent company were insulted further when HP discounted the Touchpad to $149 for the 32-gigabyte Wi-Fi edition and $99 for the 16-gigabyte model. In one weekend, an estimated 350,000 people bought Touchpads, at more than $300 off the prices they would have paid just a couple of months before.

The world needs new energy resources—not only to offset the decline of our existing reserves but to support the rapid growth of emerging economies like those of China, India, Brazil, and Russia. The International Energy Agency estimates that resources yet to be developed or discovered could be needed to account for 50 percent of conventional oil production by 2035.

Discovering and unlocking those new resources will require a new generation of technology to be deployed at a global scale, and this technology must use existing infrastructure. That's not only a tough technical challenge but one accompanied by often overlooked challenges of industry culture.