How desperate is BP? CEO Doug Suttles finally agreed to purchase 32 of the miracle oil-cleanup machines touted weeks ago by Kevin Costner, according to ABC News.

"We were confident the technology would work but we needed to test it at the extremes. We've done that and are excited by the results," said Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer. "We are very pleased with the results and today we have placed a significant order with OTS [Costner's Ocean Therapy Solutions] and will be working with them to rapidly manufacture and deploy 32 of their machines."

Apple's new iPhone 4 will be its biggest iPhone launch ever. We expect Apple to announce 2 million shipments or more after its opening weekend, including pre-orders.

This would be double the size of the last two iPhone launches -- iPhone 3GS in 2009 and iPhone 3G in 2008 -- when Apple announced 1 million shipments during each of those opening weekends.

Why 2 million this year?

• It's the best phone Apple has ever made, and is a big update from the iPhone 3GS. The low price matched with impressive feature set -- gorgeous new display, HD video recording, better camera -- means it should be an easier purchase decision to make.

Even in a down market, job seekers and employees are not powerless or without recourse.

In fact, they have more control over their career circumstances than they might think.

Here are 20 specific strategies and tactics that consistently generate powerful results for job seekers, even when it seems like no one is hiring.

We should have anticipated the question.

Last time, we talked about how to construct your innovation portfolio. And as you will recall, we said the analogy to keep in mind is personal financial planning.Just as you divide your personal holdings among various asset classes—stocks, bonds, and cash—you want to divide your innovation efforts among different approaches. And then we rattled off the four to use:

1. Evolutionary Innovation. (Technically easy and a clear customer benefit.) This is where you keep current cash cows fresh and incubate brands in the market.

2. Differentiation. (Technically difficult and a clear customer benefit.) This portion of your innovation budget is used for making a distinction between your products and those of your competitors.

3. Revolutionary Innovation. (Technically difficult, and there's no way of knowing ahead of time if the customer will accept it.) Here you search to find groundbreaking ideas for products, services, and business models.

4. Fast-Fail Innovation. (Technically easy but no way of knowing if the customer will accept it.) This is the activity for which you go to market and do your testing and learning there.

A new report from a Chinese state-backed research institute claims the introduction of "triple play" services for the nation's cable operators will generate roughly $100 billion in opportunities during the next several years.

Network upgrades, set-top box development, construction of information systems, and upgrading of broadband technology are expected to be worth $36 billion, while sales of services and terminals are expected to contribute $64 billion.

Furthermore, digital content development and set-top box production and installation should create up to 200,000 new jobs, according to a paper published by Wu Hequan, VP of the Chinese Academy of engineering. The large scale project is expected to boost GDP growth by 0.8%.

From Unified Command: The crew of one of the thousands of Vessels of Opportunity (VOO) working in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill recently recovered approximately two tons of tarball material in the Gulf of Mexico.

The recovery was the result of the kind of creative thought and innovation at work among the more than 27,000 people working around the clock in the Gulf of Mexico in the largest oil spill response in U.S. history.

Designed by Gerry Matherne, a BP contractor and nearshore task force leader, the idea is simple. A shrimp boat with outriggers on each side drags mesh oil-collection bags made of perforated webbing near the ocean surface. As the boat trawls to collect oil patches, the bags, attached to an aluminum frame, collect oil. When filled, the bags are disconnected from the frame by crew on support vessels, and then towed to a lift barge for hoisting into a collection barge.

In our never ending quest to learn more about Microsoft and what it's like inside the company, we spent a half hour chatting with a former high level employee at the company yesterday.

There's two basic problems at the company, according to this ex-Microsoftie. The management style is all screwed up, and there's just too many people working there.

An entertainment business is different from a mobile business, which is different from enterprise software business. Yet, they're all run with the same managerial style at Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer runs each division of Microsoft similarly because it helps him simplify what is an incredibly complex organization, says our source. For an example of how it should be done, our source pointed to IAC, which is a diverse group of companies with a very loose upper management, allowing each company to operate differently.

Who’s Inspiring Today’s Young Entrepreneurs?I’ve always believed in the importance of helping young people become entrepreneurs. The innovation and energy of youth are the building blocks of small-business success. The good news is, there are more and more organizations out there helping America’s kids, teens and young adults thrive as entrepreneurs.

The Kauffman Foundation (which has funded or guided many entrepreneurship programs itself) recently took a look at some of the top efforts.

• Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) has more than 7,000 members who grow their companies by sharing their experiences and learning from each other.

Last month, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they had made the first synthetic cell by piecing together a genome made from bottled chemicals and transplanting it into a recipient cell. The landmark accomplishment represents a new level of control over the substance of life at the molecular level and one that could lead to ways to make cells that produce vaccines in large quantities and cleaner fuels.

Though researchers emphasize that it will be years before scientists can demonstrate the true potential of these techniques to engineer life, they're now using the experiments to increase the fundamental understanding of cell biology.

During a tour last week of the institute's Rockville, MD, facilities, where the experiments are taking place, scientists explained that the synthetic cell was created as a result of a project to learn how to make a cell with the minimum number of genes possible to live. "The hope is that by understanding the basic principles of cellular life, we will be able to make cells make more stuff," says John Glass, a professor at the institute. Cells designed to make a particular chemical will make it more efficiently if researchers can eliminate every other nonessential metabolic process. "I've always wanted to know how cells work, and now we have the tools," he says.

Scientists at Europe's leading research universities have expressed concern over the growing trend towards linking EU funding with pre-defined outcomes. Researchers fear political priorities will curb their scope for creativity and free thinking.

EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has pledged to simplify European funding programmes and proposed asking scientists to meet certain goals in return for European support.

However, in a detailed analysis published this week (7 June), the League of European Research Universities (LERU) offered a mixed response to the European Commission's recent efforts to streamline the Framework Programme for science.

Stijn Delauré, EU policy advisor at the

A few weeks ago, an innovation team was painstakingly working through a meticulously crafted spreadsheet detailing the growth potential of their idea. Executives trying to look smart lobbed in "gotcha" questions about specific assumptions in their calculations. Much discussion ensued.

I was an observer in this meeting. I sat quietly and took some notes. After the meeting the team leader said, "That was a really good review. The executives were really involved and we have deeper buy-in to our plan."

I had a different perspective.

"I don't think a single executive could tell you the essence of the idea, or what makes it compelling," I said. "You survived the meeting, but I don't think you are any closer to convincing executives that they should invest in this idea."

African higher education faces a crisis. The quality of university teaching and research has declined drastically as institutions across the continent contend with budget cuts, growing enrollments, repeated strikes, a crumbling infrastructure, and a migration of the most talented professors to developed countries.

In response, universities from America and Europe, government aid agencies, and charitable foundations have started major efforts to help rebuild higher education in Africa. While those projects have dedicated substantial funds and human resources to the cause, they so far have produced mixed results. The problem is that representatives of universities from developed countries and other well-intentioned people come to Africa with basic assumptions that undermine their work.

Those assumptions about how to assist the region are not always explicit. They are manifested in subtle ways in the behavior and speech of higher-education officials who come to Africa. What's more, the officials often fail to examine their own assumptions, some of which are obviously unrealistic. To be sure, not all Europeans and North Americans make such mistakes. But as the former and current directors of the Office of International Education and Partnerships at the University of Botswana, over the past four years we have seen such assumptions ruin potentially promising endeavors.

You have the idea and you have the motivation, but do you have the money? The credit environment right now stinks and you aren’t thrilled with the idea of applying for business loans. Fortunately, you have other options for raising seed capital. If you are creative-minded and determined, you can locate the money you need to start your businesswithout asking a business bank to help.

Tap angel investors

Angel investors are wealthy individuals who deploy their money in business start-ups. They don’t do it because they’re nice people; they do it to make money. A successful small business start-up can provide an investment return that’s well in excess of what exchange-traded stocks or bonds might produce.

Angel investors do not hand over their money casually. Expect to provide potential angel investors with all the documentation you’d give the bank when applying for a loan, such as your business plan, financial projections, market research, product data, etc.

There are lots of entrepreneurs and start-ups with great ideas that, on paper, have the potential to be world-beaters.

Many of these ideas never see the light of day because they fail to make the leap from innovation to commercialization. It’s one thing to come up with a better mousetrap, it’s another to actually manufacture it and then sell it.

This is probably a sweeping statement that may get a lot of people up in arms but Canadians need to get a whole lot better at commercialization. This country is teeming with world-class engineers and major amounts of research and development but our ability to turn ideas into products can be significantly improved.

Last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office proposed a new three-track system to expedite filings rather than maintain the standard first-come, first-served basis. This move comes in response to the average review time soaring to nearly 35 months last year from an average of 27 months as recently as 2003.

This accelerated process marks an important step to defend national innovation leadership and promote economic growth. To see where the U.S. stands internationally, consider the results of last September's report from the World International Patent Organization (WIPO) describing global patent filing trends.

Of course, the overarching story last fall was the fallout from the financial crisis: In 2008, there was zero growth in patent filings at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), compared to 7.1 percent the year before. Similarly, filings through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), a system for recognizing patents internationally, increased by only 2.3 percent, compared to 5.9 percent the previous year.

The Leaning Tower was supposed to stand straight and plumb, an imperious monument to the trading power of 12th century Pisa. Built on soft clay, however, the tower began to list only a few years after construction began. Upon completion in 1350, the tower leaned about four and half feet, but as time passed, the angle of the 16,000-ton tower became more precarious. By 1990, the tower leaned about 13 feet off kilter, and nearly two million pounds of lead ingots had to be placed on one of its sides to prevent its collapse. But the nearest the tower has been to destruction had nothing to do with its famed tilt. Allied forces ordered an American sergeant to blow it up during World War II when they thought the Germans were using it as an observation post. Only the reticence of the 23-year-old American saved the tower.

The financial media's coverage of China tends to focus on trade-related topics such as U.S. demands that China revalue the yuan, or the recent 48% rise in Chinese exports.

But to really get a handle on the possible risks and opportunities in China, investors need to keep track of powerful cultural and governance trends that could dramatically alter the financial and economic landscape in the years ahead.

Here are four longer-term trends that will change China, significantly affecting the finances of both its residents and trading partners in potentially unpredictable ways.

1. The Rise of the Labor Movement

Strikes at Honda Motor plants and unrest at tech manufacturing giant Foxconn are not isolated incidents, but rather examples of the growth of a new labor movement in China that seeks higher wages, better working conditions and meaningful respect for labor laws. Whereas in the past, the government's security forces broke up labor demonstrations, the new migrant workers know their rights and are tech-savvy, making use of China's 787 million mobile phones to send text messages about demonstrations and labor-law rights.

Does your startup company culture really matter? It sure mattered to Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, as we noted last week, who describes in an article in Inc, the battles he waged with investors who dismissed his efforts to cultivate a supportive, worker-friendly environment at the company. The importance of preserving that company culture, Hsieh suggests, led in part to his decision to sell his company to Amazon.

Company Culture: A "Meaningless Platitude"?

A startup has to have a lot of things in place: a strong team, a good product, and a market interested in it. Is the company culture another thing that startups need to have situated in order to succeed? Or is it, as Dan Shapiro writes in a provocatively titled post "a meaningless platitude"?

Now that U.S. utilities have taken federal stimulus funds and seamlessly built out two-way advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) connecting utility control centers and end users (OK, not completely, but let's assume that the "stall-ulus" becomes a true stimulus in the near future), the question becomes, what's next? At the moment, this new "comm layer" or "platform" has utilities planning in two directions: upstream and downstream from the smart meters. First, they are examining whether and how to leverage these new communication networks to support distribution automation (DA) and grid optimization -- some have argued that it's the embedding of sensors and IT onto the distribution grid that is, in fact, the true sense of what's meant by 'smart grid.' Second, utilities are asking -- and in many cases, piloting to discover -- how best to involve the customer in energy efficiency and demand response programs via home-area networks (HAN) and/or consumer web portals.

[Last Thursday] was entirely frustrating. At least for me.

As you probably saw, Google decided to get away from its core and spice things up. In her post the art of a homepage on the official Google blog, Marissa Mayer lets us in on a new ‘feature’ they added long enough for people to complain and have it removed. We got background images! The new addition was (I assume) designed to promote the fact that Google now allows users to add their favorite photo or image to the background of their Google.com homepage.

It was silly, it took away from Google’s brand identity (simple search) and, quite predictably, the media had a field day with it.