Researchers have made stretchable, ultrathin electronics that cling to skin like a temporary tattoo and can measure electrical activity from the body. These electronic tattoos could allow doctors to diagnose and monitor conditions like heart arrhythmia or sleep disorders noninvasively.

John A. Rogers, a professor of materials science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has developed a prototype that can replicate the monitoring abilities of bulky electrocardiograms and other medical devices that are normally restricted to a clinical or laboratory setting. This work was presented today in Science.

Entrepreneurs are often considered the stars of business, the rebels that redefine mundane realities. Both developed and developing countries acknowledge the role they play in spurring economic growth. But the term entrepreneurship is often loosely defined.

It is the amount and speed of wealth creation, high risk and innovation that separates real entrepreneurship from small business or the self-employed. Entrepreneurs challenge basic notions of the market by taking risks that many people would consider irrational. They are willing to go to great lengths to build their businesses even if that means selling their own homes. Successful entrepreneurs are the ones that may initially be ridiculed but later are applauded for the positive changes they instill in markets.

There is an old adage that leaders are born and not made.  If your 3 year old complains that you are trying to dilute her when you add more milk to her chocolate milk, you just may have a budding startup founder on your hands.  So here are 10 signs that your child has the startup founder gene:

1.   Understands the Value of a $ – She doesn’t stop crying when you give her a bottle and yet she does stop crying when you give her a dollar.

What: Ben Franklin Technology Ventures

Where: 125 Goodman Drive, Bethlehem, PA 18015-3715

610-758-5200

800-445-9515

When: There's no set time for a company founder to apply for funding or a lease.

Who: Startups and entrepreneurs looking for early-stage funding, mentorship, and the opportunity to work with other new companies. You must be located in Pennsylvania or have plans for a significant portion of your operation to be in Pennsylvania.

AngelList, the Silicon Valley-based community that connects startups with investors, is opening up shop in New York.

Next week, three of its ten employees will move into startup incubator DogPatch Labs.

Dave Zohrob, an AngelList developer who will be moving into DogPatch, says his company is attracted to New York because of its hyperactive startup community.

"A lot is happening around New York, and a lot of companies have raised money on the east coast," Zohrob says. "They've raised more per capita via AngelList than startups on the west coast."

Although the world is dependent on personal computers, making them has not been a great business for most American companies for almost a decade.

The announcement on Thursday by Hewlett-Packard that it was considering offloading its PC business, even though it is the undisputed worldwide market leader, was a clear sign of the difficulties.

If H.P. goes through with the idea, it would follow I.B.M., an early PC maker, which was one of the first to recognize the long-term problems and, in 2005, sold its business to Lenovo, a Chinese company. Other American makers like Compaq (acquired by H.P.), Gateway and Packard Bell were absorbed by others or just faded away. Depending on how H.P. sheds the unit — it could sell or spin it off as a separate company — only two American PC makers would remain.

In retrospect I think it’s a lot like driving: no matter how well the other person drives, I always feel safer it I’m behind the wheel.

Thinking about risk and entrepreneurship: There is risk, perceived risk, and the difference between real risk and perceived. And I know that I always feel less risk if I’ve got my hands on the wheel. Do you?

This helped me a lot while I was in the high-risk high-growth stage of growing a company, with my wife and I signing second and third mortgages and liens on our house.

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

I would just hate to have to be the one to break this to the President (er, scratch that. I would probably relish it.), but when the President returns from Martha's Vineyard to present his highly anticipated economy-and-jobs plan, I hope for both his and the American people's sake that it doesn't contain more dreamy outlines for the creation of 'green' jobs. Because when you've lost the zeal of the Gray Lady, you know something's up:

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream....

PRINCETON, NJ -- Gallup's Job Creation Index shows that Washington, D.C., as well as energy- and commodity-producing states continue to dominate the 10 best job markets during the first half of 2011, as they did over the same period in 2010.

These results are based on aggregated data from nearly 100,000 interviews with employed adults during the first half of 2011, conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking. Gallup asks those who are employed whether their companies are hiring workers and expanding the size of their labor forces, not changing the size of their workforces, or laying off workers and reducing their workforces. The figures reported here represent the net difference between the percentage reporting an expansion and the percentage reporting a reduction in their workforces.

If you are one of the many people who lost your job during the recent depression, you should be working on starting your own business, in parallel with looking for that ideal replacement job. Let me explain why this is a win-win deal, no matter what the outcome.

You have probably secretly always wanted to run your own show, but with a full-time job, never had the time to consider a startup. Then there was always the risk of failure, which of course doesn’t apply now since your real job is gone. Also, for most of us, not having done it before, we have no idea where or how to start.

The FDA planned a public workshop for mid-September to discuss the recently released draft guidance regarding regulation for mobile medical apps.

The guidance includes a fairly narrow subset of medical apps, covering those that are used as accessories to medical devices and those that transform a mobile platform into a regulated medical device.

Many young African American leaders are giving the economic foundations of the African American community a reboot through entrepreneurial success. One standout is Dante Lee (@dantelee), CEO of Diversity City Media and founder of BlackPR.com and BlackNews.com.  His book Black Business Secrets: 500 Tips, Strategies, and Resources for the African American Entrepreneur breaks new ground by fusing insights from past leadership with those from new entrepreneurs who have staked successful claims.  I learned about his book while browsing a bookstore, and picked up a copy for review.

All-in-one small business coaching

Lee opens the book with history and statistics on minority startups, then  segues into a Q&A with established business leaders such as Bob Johnson, founder of BET, Wally Amos of “Famous Amos” cookies, and George Fraser, founder of the FraserNet conference.  He also wisely highlights Frarah Gray, the youngest black business millionaire outside of entertainment; Tom Burrell of Burrell Communications; Nadine Thompson, founder of Warm Spirit; and Gwen Richardson, founder of Cushcity.com.  There’s also a foreword by Randall Pinkett, author of Black Faces in White Places (see the review), so a cross-generation of leaders appears throughout the segment and book.

RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES are the world’s great venture capitalists for investments in human capital—that is, knowledge. Harvard enrolls thousands of students, each of whom is a “project.” Students acquire human capital, an asset that they turn to account as scientists, composers, financiers, politicians. Harvard also supports thousands of studies, each of which is also a “project”—an analysis of Bach’s compositions, an investigation of poor families’ expenditures, the mapping of the human genome. Like venture capitalists, research universities have the expertise to recognize projects with huge potential—the ablest students, the best experiments. Like venture capitalists, they not only fund projects but guide them and match them with specialized resources. Like venture capitalists, they retain an “equity share” in their projects—though they do this in a special way.

Global opportunities are massive; however there are dangers with expanding a business without the proper foundations to support growth. Many companies expand opportunistically without appropriate strategy planning infrastructure and capability to maximise the opportunity and deliver real business results.

In our experience, profitable global expansion happens when;

• A stable and profitable domestic business that will continue to thrive as focus and resources are channeled into global expansion

As a former primary patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and as a registered patent agent in private practice, I take exception with the editorial’s advocating a “first to file” system in favor of the current “first to invent” practice, for the following reasons: First, the number of patent applications involved in controversies regarding “first to invent” is minuscule relative to the total number of patent applications filed annually and thus cannot be accurately characterized as stifling American innovation.

Second, the “first to invent” practice, admittedly tedious and expensive, ensures fundamental justice in awarding patent rights, inasmuch as an earlier inventor who filed an application as little as one day after a later inventor’s application is not denied legitimate patent rights conferred by the U.S. Constitution.

A few years ago in a study of top-performing managers for Best Buy, I had the chance to interview Ralph Gonzalez. Ralph had successfully transformed one of Best Buy’s lowest-performing stores into a repeat award winner. On virtually every metric, from revenues to profitability to employee engagement to “shrink,” he had taken his team from the bottom 10 percent to the top. What had he done, I asked him, to effect such a dramatic transformation? He told me that he had played on his likeness to a young Fidel Castro, that he had called his store “La Revolucion,” that he had posted a “Declaracion de Revolucion” in the break room, that he had made the supervisors wear army fatigues, and then, as I was scribbling all this down, he told me about the whistle.

Whenever I’m about to make a new investment, I always think about the 2×2 matrix I learned from Andy Rachleff, a former partner at Benchmark Capital.

The idea is that if you make a new venture investment (or start a company), you can either be “right” or “wrong” and you can either be “consensus” (following the crowd) or “non-consensus.” Everyone knows that if you’re wrong, you’re not making any money. But the interesting part of the chart above is that being right and consensus isn’t great for your returns either. The big money, as any horse racing handicapper can tell you, comes when you’re right and you don’t follow the crowd.

The mobile application business is projected to reach $38 billion by 2015, but will the boom be global or will it be confined to a handful of innovation hotspots? A recent study of Android app creators that my company, AppsGeyser, conducted indicates that it will be both.

We drew the data from a sample of 10,000 apps that were created using appsgeyser.com between June and August, 2011. From that information, we collected the App makers’ IP addresses and used then to create this map.