On December 24, 1968, astronauts aboard Apollo 8, making the first human trip around the moon, stumbled upon a most beautiful scene – an “Earthrise.” Almost 40 years later (in 2007), Japan’s Kaguya satellite captured footage of the same scene unfolding: an Earthrise and also this time an Earthset. If you click on the preceding links, you will see some pretty wonderful still shots in HD.

Google has stated that the “market of conversations” are growing to a point that businesses will either jump in or fall out. The way Google positions the need for enterprises to engage is in their statement which says  “Bottom line: More and more business is going to transact via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other applications yet to be developed.  This train is too important to miss.”

Has Google Failed?

Social media is here to stay. More personal communications are being sent via social media than email, which is mindboggling. Technological developments are on the horizon. Google has launched numerous “social trial balloons and many have failed. Failure is part of success. The determining factor is learning from failure and moving to new ground using lessons learned from your failure and others. Google is nothing more than a great big incubator of “trial and error” and they use their failures, and that of others, to predict market behavior. However their predictions are not based on past references rather future indicators of “market shifts”.

Startups that enter the Y Combinator program don’t generally do it for the money alone — most companies receive $20,000 or less in seed funding. Instead, they do it for the exposure, connections, mentors, and resources that the YC program affords. And they just got one more major perk: Facebook has announced that it will be working to help YC companies create “transformative social experiences”, and it’s going to give them preferential treatment and access to company resources. From the Facebook post:

We’ll provide product, technical and design resources to support new Y Combinator companies interested in working with us to build deeply social products, whether a website or an application on Facebook.com. These companies will have priority access to our technologies and programs such as Facebook Credits, Instant Personalization and upcoming beta features. Y Combinator will be publishing a “Request for Startup” focused on social startups and is now looking for interested entrepreneurs for their winter 2011 funding cycle.

I visit a lot of startup websites. A lot. And as a journalist, I am perhaps more prone than others to click on a company's "About Us" page. Of course, my motivations for doing so typically involve finding pertinent facts and figures, FAQs and anecdotes to round out a ReadWriteWeb story. But I don't think I'm alone in my desire for company websites to do more than just talk about the products they offer.

While it's well known that investors care a lot about the composition of your founding team, arguably visitors to your website - customers and potential customers - are also interested in reading more about who you are.

We read about them in the newspaper and watch them on television every day: people who have the creativity to develop an idea, the confidence to take the risks, and the tenacity to turn the idea into a successful business. Many parents hope that one day their own child will enjoy the level of success that is attainable through entrepreneurship - not only the potential financial rewards, but also in terms of personal development and fulfillment. Here are six tips to help steer your child down the road to entrepreneurism.

IN PICTURES: 6 Millionaire Traits That You Can Adopt

1. Teach Kids about Money
   By teaching your child about money, you help them discover the relationships between earning, spending and saving. In doing this, children also begin to understand the value of money. This financial literacy can begin at a young age with simple money concepts like counting coins and making change for purchases. Older children can learn about savings accounts, balancing a check book and creating a personal budget. The key is to teach a concept and let them try, even if it means a little extra time in the grocery store while a youngster painstakingly counts out coins from the piggy bank. (For more tips, check out 5 Money Skills To Teach Your Kids.)

Lots of talk these days about new forms of angel/seed capital. But less talk about the most vexing issue facing the venture ecosystem over the past decade - that being the shrinking amount of liquidity on the way out.

If you look at how much money has been raised by venture firms, including the seed and super seed categories, versus how much money has been returned in the past ten years, the ratio is not good. At some point the investors who fund the venture capital asset class will not be able to keep funding it.

The asset class needs to focus on liquidity. M&A continues to be the one bright spot and although I have not seen the data, I suspect M&A activity around venture backed companies in the past ten years has not shrunk and may have actually increased (if you take out the bubble years of 98-2000).

I’ve read hundreds of articles on how to corral your employees in social media. Posts on how to make sure they don’t reveal too much, waste too much time, or annoy people to the point that customers hate you.

However, all that assumes that your employees and your team are comfortable stepping into social media and that they WANT to be there.

It doesn’t account for the people who aren’t. The people who are fearful of the new tools, of casting bad light on the company they work for, or, even worse, accidentally getting themselves fired.

RESEARCH: DURING THE boom years, Ireland witnessed a blitz of building. As well as the supermarkets and housing estates we were also investing in research infrastructure, constructing and kitting out labs.

We also enticed researchers – many of whom had trained here but had to leave due to under-investment – from around the world back to Ireland. When they came home, they brought not only expertise to the new buildings but also networks of contacts and collaborators.

A decade on, it’s time to build on that biomedical research groundwork. We need to reflect and build on what has been achieved, to strengthen those areas where Irish researchers have demonstrated ability to compete on the international stage – such as gastrointestinal disease and immunology – and to convert good ideas into the products and services that are the economic tangibles of State investment and the foundation of future enterprises, especially indigenous companies.

The Wired cover story, "The Web is Dead," has driven a lot of discussion in the tech world this week -- probably due more to the provocative title than anything else. In many ways, it's like the conversation earlier in the year sparked by Steve Jobs' comment that the tablet would eventually supplant the PC, and that the PC was dead. Note that PC sales look likely to grow by 20 percent or so this year.

These kinds of discussions remind me of a PC Magazine Editors' Day we held about a dozen years ago. We had a panel of columnists on stage, and someone asked about OS/2. John C. Dvorak, always one for a quick answer, said, "It's dead." There was a bunch of arguing on stage. The next question asked about Apple, which was then in a very tough period, and Dvorak's reaction was: "It's dead." And so on through the rest of the panel -- whatever the question was, John had the same answer. It was quite amusing.

But in general, such conversations haven't been particularly enlightening. Once you get past the headline, the Wired story points out the growth of Apps on things like the iPad and the iPhone, and how video is now taking up more bandwidth than "Web" content. That's disregarding the fact that most video is accessed through Web sites like YouTube and Hulu. If you add that back in, my guess is you'll find that Web traffic as a percentage of Internet traffic has actually grown in the past couple of years because peer-to-peer client traffic is a somewhat smaller percentage.

I walked along the mud-caked fringe of farmland and tried in vain to make out the profiles of a quarter of a million baby tomato plants. It was hard to believe that in just a few months this perfect rectangle of endless muck would burst into three million pounds of ripe red fruit, and even stranger to think that this vast monoculture just might be leading the world toward agricultural sustainability -- particularly considering that not one of the plants before me was organic, heirloom, or pesticide free.

"When I see my fields, I see a canvas," said Frank Muller, the sunburned avatar of agri-technology who sold 60,000 tons of last year's tomato harvest to transnational food giant Unilever, which subsequently processed the lot into bottles of Cheesy, Chunky, and Robusto-style Ragú spaghetti sauce.

The 918 Spyder will be the world's fastest plug-in hybrid.

For years, as Toyota and Honda toiled away at hybrid-electric vehicles, German manufacturers largely ignored electric-drive technology. But times have changed, and last week, Porsche committed to making a production version of what will likely be the world's fastest plug-in hybrid: a rip-roaring two-seat supercar with a top speed of 198 miles per hour and a zero-to-62-mph acceleration of 3.2 seconds.

The Porsche 918 Spyder was first shown as a concept car at the Geneva Motor Show last March to demonstrate Porsche's research into battery-powered hybrid powertrains. Its racy styling was combined with the greenest of features: a zero-emissions "E-Drive" mode that gives it up to 16 miles of electric-only range. With some European cities expected to institute emissions-based entrance fees or congestion charges, the 918 Spyder will offer a few rich buyers both supercar performance and environmental peace of mind.

Maybe there's something for hippies to love about ecological disaster, after all. Chris Combs, photography editor at National Geographic News, took these amazing shots while on assignment in the Gulf of Mexico. Via Submitterator, he says:

...researcher Ping Wang pointed me towards his grad student's work with UV light. Turns out that the oil glows bright, head-shop fluorescent orange under UV light. Rip Kirby's ultra-powerful $1800 "Klingon Death Ray" ultraviolet spotlight lit up every particle of oil-stained sand, even in seemingly clean areas, and our footprints showed up Day-Glo orange.

British rail hasn’t reached the stature of French, German, Japanese, or Spanish high-speed trains, but if PriestmanGoode’s plans for a new high-speed double-decker train system are any indication, things in the UK will reach a global level soon.

Their pitch:

Introducing an entirely new concept in the way we travel, the train will incorporate a flexible, open plan design allowing for interaction, space and relaxation without compromising privacy. Both commuting and longer haul journeys will be more relaxed, comfortable and akin to modern living, featuring traditional commuter seats (designed to incorporate in-transit entertainment systems) alongside private berths – for families, private parties or business meetings echoing the nostalgia of compartmental train travel. A children’s play area will be integrated into the train and a luxury first class section will mirror the choice offered to air travellers with a luxury lounge and bar.

The exterior of the train, designed to emulate design classics such as Concorde, the Spitfire and Rolls Royce, will be 400 metres long and the extended nose section will be one of the most extreme in the world – vitally important for the aerodynamics of a train which will travel at 225mph.

The slower days of summer seem to have also sparked a discussion of how to best cultivate creativity – and not just in the advertising community. After reading a Newsweek piece on why brainstorming doesn’t work (and what does), we found an ideahive post on provoking serendipity particularly timely – and serendipitous.

The piece defines Serendipity as

“The emergence of desirable novelty from a chance encounter, the discovery of something wonderful, unknown and unpredictable. It is the act of unexpected cross-pollination, the seed of something new.”

If you’ve had a great career what happens to all your knowledge and experience when you retire?

My wife and I had dinner recently with a friend of hers from high school and Tom, her husband – whom I had never met before. I took one look at his suit and guessed “high-powered lawyer. “ (I was right, the suit probably added another $250 per billable hour.)

Over dinner we got chatting, and I found out that besides the great suit, Tom was actually a pretty remarkable guy. He was a trial litigator – one of the guys that slug it out in court in front of a judge and jury. And Tom wasn’t just any trial lawyer. He was the hired gun that Fortune 100 companies and hedge funds bring in when billions are at stake. Listening to some of his stories over dinner was entertaining enough, but after awhile I realized I was hearing something else – this guy played strategy while his opponents were using tactics.

Yesterday may well be remembered as a turning point in our nation’s technology innovation policy. The Department of Energy announced that a consortium of more than 90 public- and private-sector organizations based in the Philadelphia region will host the first Energy Regional Innovation Cluster or, E-RIC, a new interagency program to accelerate energy innovation and commercialization. The new E-RIC was selected among many applicants to win $129 million dollars in grants and programmatic support from the DOE and six other federal agencies for investment in energy efficiency technology innovation and commercialization.

The award itself is important because buildings directly or indirectly account for approximately 40 percent of national global warming pollution; technology innovation in this sector has the potential to make a big impact on climate change. CAP has documented extensively how energy efficiency is among the best ways to create jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign fuels, and save money.

In my last post, I mapped the projected growth in service jobs across America's metro regions. Today, I look at a subset of those higher-paying, higher-skill jobs for knowledge, professional, and creative workers that make up the creative class. More than 35 million people are currently employed in creative class work in fields like science, technology, and engineering; business, finance, and management; law, health care, and education; and arts, culture, media, and entertainment. The creative class makes up roughly a third of total employment and accounts for more than half of all wages and salaries in America. Creative class employment has seen relatively low rates of unemployment during the course of the economic crisis. Creative class jobs will make up roughly half of all projected U.S. employment growth - adding 6.8 million new jobs by 2018.

Students who left college before graduating may get a second chance at earning their degree.

The Institute for Higher Education Policy and the Lumina Foundation for Education announced a joint program on Wednesday to find formerly enrolled college students whose academic records qualify them to be awarded associate degrees retroactively.

The three-year, $1.3-million effort, called Project Win-Win, also plans to identify former students who are fell just short of an associate degree, by nine or fewer credits, and re-enroll them to earn a degree.

The project has the potential to be a real game-changer in terms of the nation's efforts to achieve the college-completion goals set out by President Obama, the nation's governors, and Lumina. The president has repeatedly called for more Americans to earn college certificates or degrees so that by 2020 the United States can once again have the world's highest proportion of college graduates.

An academic believes he has found evidence to refute the case that increased university provision of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects is needed to aid the economy.

There is “no significant relationship” between a nation’s economic growth rate and the number of STEM students, according to an analysis by Paul Whiteley, professor of politics at the University of Essex.

In January, the then business secretary in Britain, Peter Mandelson, told the House of Lords that STEM skills were "crucial in securing future prosperity," hence the government was "opening up opportunities in universities and beyond."