Most Americans still don't use the mobile Internet, but it's growing rapidly, according to new research from Pew.

Some 34% of cellphone owners polled this year send and receive email on their mobile devices, up about one-third from 25% last year. Some 38% "access the Internet," also up from about 25% last year.

And a third of cellphone owners play music on their devices, up more than half from last year. Thank Apple's iPhone -- and Google Android phones with better music players -- for that one.

Business-plan competitions have fostered a "contest economy" that promotes start-up activity and much-needed innovation.

Puneet Mehta, Archana Patchirajan, and Sonpreet Bhatia all had lucrative day jobs as technologists at big Wall Street firms when they learned about the NYC BigApps competition last October. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was calling on software developers to create mobile apps based on newly released city data. The two-month deadline gave the three Indian-born developers the incentive to build out an idea they had only talked about before. After 40 days, they had a one-stop application called NYC Way, which puts a compendium of city information at users' fingertips.

Their efforts were rewarded with $5,500 in cash prizes, a meeting with the mayor, and an overwhelmingly positive public reception for their product, which has become a popular download through Apple's App Store. Encouraged, the three partners quit their jobs and co-founded a business called MyCityWay, which now markets similar apps for seven additional cities and multiple platforms, earning revenue through partnerships. In April, the company received $300,000 in seed money from the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a new city fund set up to invest in start-ups. The company expects to make its first hires this summer.

As large parts of the world economy lurch from the slings and arrows of outrageous financial and fiscal crises, the inevitable question is what is to be done.

The pamphlet of the same name   ⁴, written by Lenin in 1902, called for the formation of a revolutionary vanguardist party.

Well, it is claimed that we live in revolutionary times as these crises have turned our economic complacency on its head, as all that was formerly solid seems to have melted into air.

An innovation tool is a cognitive prosthetic that helps individuals and groups overcome their human limitations to innovate more capably. Just as an artificial limb or hearing aid compensates and augments a missing or impaired part of the body, a thinking tool does the same – it compensates and augments for a variety of cognitive deficiencies in all humans.

Yet there is an aversion to using a structured tool to be creative:

• The Arts: Musicians, poets, and graphic artists shun the idea of using a standard tool or template because it makes them appear less creative to their fans and the public. But consider Paul McCartney who sold more albums in the U.S. than anyone. In his biography, he confided: “As usual, for these co-written things, John often had just the first verse, which was always enough: it was the direction, it was the signpost and it was the inspiration for the whole song. I hate the word but it was the template.” Listen carefully to artist, Jackson Pollock, describe his approach:

Google's ability to operate any kind of Internet business in the world's largest market hangs in the balance as China weighs whether it will renew Google's Internet license, which officially expired June 30.

China has expressed dismay at Google's rerouting of search traffic to an uncensored site in Hong Kong, but has not yet disclosed whether it will try to shut down Google in China. "Given that they've not said anything so far, it probably indicates that decisions at fairly high levels are involved and that [the Chinese government] understands that whatever decision gets made is going to get a lot of attention globally and will send a signal that goes well beyond China's relationship with Google," says Rebecca MacKinnon, a China Internet expert and a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

"Their inclination will be to punish Google so that everybody stays in line," MacKinnon adds. "But on the other hand, not renewing the license would send a broader signal about just how open the market is, or isn't, in China. You've got President Hu Jintao getting ready to travel to the U.S. for a summit. A refusal of Google's ICP [Internet Content Provider] license would certainly add to the pile of negatives in the relationship, so I imagine they are weighing that."

In the era of Skype, web conferencing tools and collaboration software conventional wisdom says that distributed startup teams can be just as effective as those that are in person.

Conventional wisdom is wrong. Or more precisely the people espousing the benefits of distributed startups teams are often distributed and therefore self rationalizing it. Been there.

The reality is that a certain magic that happens when you’re in person is critical in a startup. You attend five customer meetings together over a two-week period and after each meeting you replay the results in the office about what it meant. The CEO weighs in with his perspectives, the head of product management disputes his conclusions and the marketing VP has a different take.

In an effort to expand broadband access and create jobs across the United States, President Obama has announced the awarding of $765-million in grants and loans to recipients that include public and private colleges.

The money, distributed through the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture, will go to 66 projects led by colleges, Internet-service providers, libraries, communication companies, and counties. All pledge to stimulate the economy by expanding high-speed Internet to neglected communities.

“This is going to have an enormous impact on the country,” said Gary Bachula, vice president for external relations at Interne 2, the high-speed networking consortium for colleges and universities.

It's now a little over 6 months into 2010, so a good time to reflect on the highlights of the year so far. At the beginning of the year, we identified some key trends to track: (in alphabetical order) Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Mobile, Real-Time Web, Structured Data.

Mobile and Real-Time Web have been particularly eventful in 2010, as you'll see below. Augmented Reality and Internet of Things are both early stage trends, but have continued to edge towards the mainstream this year. The movement towards Structured Data has made significant progress in 2010, primarily thanks to RDFa and the adoption of that Semantic Web format by Facebook, Google and other big companies.

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are on a rise, as the returns produced by conventional VC networks continue to be lower than expected. They are, in fact, growing so fast that a “big bang” seems imminent as startups become a public asset class.

The lack of female entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley has been a hot topic recently.

The New York Times reports that, although around 40% of private companies in the US are owned by women, there is still a significant lack of female entrepreneurship in the tech sector -- only 8% of American venture-backed tech startups are founded by female CEOs.

Cyan Banister can attest to these stats out of her own personal experience. During her 4-year tenure as an investor in the Valley, so few female entrepreneurs have approached her that she can count all of them on one hand.

Paul Kedrosky recently speculated that there might be seed fund “crash” looming. Liz Gannes followed up by suggesting seed investors are a fad akin to reality-TV celebrities:

In many ways, what [prominent seed funds] are saying is that they’re just smarter, and as such will outlast all the copycat and wannabe seed funders as well as the stale VCs with a fresh coat of paint. But then — Kim Kardashian is the only one who can make a living tweeting. At some point it will be quite obvious whether the super angels’ investments and strategy succeed or fail.

Heated debate surrounds the ethics of the universities' decisions to analyze student DNA

This week, the University of California, Berkeley will mail saliva sample kits to every incoming freshman and transfer student. Students can choose to use the kits to submit their DNA for genetic analysis, as part of an orientation program on the topic of personalized medicine. But U.C. Berkeley isn't the only university offering its students genetic testing. Stanford University's summer session started two weeks ago, including a class on personal genomics that gives medical and graduate students the chance to sequence their genotypes and study the results.

The idea behind the two novel projects is that students will learn about optimizing treatment based on one's genetic profile most effectively if they are studying their own DNA—an idea that has met with both praise for educational innovation and criticism centering on potential ethical issues.

Talk, talk, talk—but the White House is pushing appliance makers and technology companies for a Kumbaya moment

It takes time to hammer out an agreement, but progress is occurring.

That's the word from John McDonald, the general manager of the transmission and distribution business at General Electric and the chair of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel Governing Board at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Last September, NIST announced plans to establish 77 smart grid standards over the next few years and finalize 14 priority standards in 2010 alone. A few months later, the number of standards to be set for 2010 jumped to 16, including a standard for communication protocols for household appliances. Setting that many standards in a relatively short time is unprecedented in the technology world: often it can take several years -- and the opinion of the marketplace -- to achieve even one standard.

Everybody knows that men and women think differently in a lot of ways. But do those differences matter when it comes to working remotely and managing remote teams? According to Sally Helgesen, it matters a lot. Managers who don’t appreciate those distances can do themselves, their companies and those employees a great disservice.

Sally is the author of “The Female-Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work”. She cites scientific studies that show how a woman’s brain functions in different ways than a man’s.  How they differ is important, particularly for managers who might not be aware of these conflicting world views or assign value to behaviors that don’t get the desired results.

According to Helgesen, one major difference is that women tend to be highly skilled multitaskers, while men are able to concentrate on one thing for more concentrated periods. Neuroscientific research confirms this, and women often take pride in their ability to handle a ton of things at once. This is a plus and a minus, for women and for those who manage them.

Are any good products still made in America?

Conventional wisdom says U.S. companies have shuttered their factories and moved manufacturing abroad for cheap labor. During the recession, 2 million manufacturing jobs vanished. Here’s the story you don’t hear: The United States is still the world’s largest manufacturing economy, producing $1.6 trillion of goods each year, or 21 percent of global production. That’s nearly as much as Japan (13 percent) and China (12 percent) combined.

In addition to U.S.-based industrial giants such as Boeing, Intel and United Technologies, which build some products here, thousands of smaller companies are churning out best-in-class products around the country. In honor of the Fourth of July, we’re celebrating 10 American companies that still make signature consumer products with American ingenuity — and leaving foreign-made competitors in the dust.

Mercer's annual cost of living survey is designed to help corporations set salaries for international employees. For the rest of us, it provides a fascinating comparison.

Who knew a hamburger cost $7 in Honolulu?

New York rent is expensive, but who knew it was THAT much more than the rest of America?

Residents of these cities can take heart in one fact, however: these eight cities rank nowhere near the top of Mercer's international list.

Early-stage investing has long been the problem child of European venture capital, with too few investors willing to finance untried technologies. Without government intervention, not much would get done in this area.

Now German serial entrepreneur Lars Hinrichs - founder of the business social networking site Xing, who sold his company to Burda Media last year for an estimated €48.3 million - is stepping into the gap with his own twist on the incubator concept. He recently launched Hamburg-based Hackfwd, a pre-seed investment company that will target European software entrepreneurs.

Although many of the ideas put forward by Hinrichs are not unlike those of a standard incubator - equity in exchange for advice and coaching to help speed the process of starting a company - Hackfwd does have a new take on finding people to back. Its tenet is to, “put geeks first”. It does this by seeking out software coders who perhaps aren’t even looking to start a company. Using the extensive network Hinrichs built up while at Xing, the company will track down entrepreneurs before they have even have a business plan or a prototype.

There are several stages of grief and they are well documented. It comes down to this: someone gives you some bad news. Depending on how bad it is you go through the following stages pretty quickly, or over a period of a few months:

1. Denial and Isolation.
2. Anger.
3. Bargaining.
4. Depression.
5. Acceptance.

I’m noticing a similar set of stages when it comes to innovative ideas. Nobody just accepts them. Most people actually start with rejecting anything thats new. That isn’t unreasonable either: most ‘new’ stuff fails. Hundreds of thousands of new things are tried out all the time and most don’t go anywhere. If you just react negative to most of it and declare “That won’t work” you will be right most of the time.

Abdullah Muhaseen has an academic pedigree that would be the envy of many. He graduated from one of Canada's top universities, earning bachelor's degrees in both neuroscience and psychology.

A professional career in medical research or graduate studies seemed to be in his future, but Mr. Muhaseen choose a different path: He enrolled in a public college to become a paramedic.

The University of Toronto graduate is part of a growing trend in Canadian higher education. Driven in part by the slouching job market, the country's colleges are seeing a rise in applications from people who have already received degrees from leading universities.

A coalition of San Diego County business organizations is forging a new business cluster, focused on robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, interoperability and cyber technologies.

The nascent Southwest Regional Innovation Cluster will compete for a total of $300 million in FY 2011 federal funding to be divvied up among 15 regional innovation clusters, said Gary Knight, CEO of the San Diego North Regional Economic Development Council. The first step, though, is to submit a funding proposal to the Small Business Administration, to get up to $600,000 to design the RIC.

The council and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International–San Diego, is helping the group to get organized, and recruit leaders.