Science and technology parks are increasingly an important part of the new global technology revolution, aiming to bring together creative entrepreneurial ideas together with the constituents necessary for commercial impact.

Next month, IASP Annual World Conference on Science and Technology Parks (STPs) comes together for its 29th conference in Tallinn, Estonia, between 17-20 June, with three days of debate and discussion on how science parks can serve companies and the innovation community. With 400 delegates from 52 countries already signed up, the conference will look at the evolution of STPs as bridging institutions between universities and other R&D bodies, business entities and services, governmental offices, and the wider public community.

Today's technology scene seems overheated to some. Apple is the most valuable company on earth. Software apps are reaching tens of millions of users within weeks. Major technology names like Research in Motion and Nokia are being undone by rapid changes to their markets. Underlying these developments: the unprecedented speed at which mobile computers are spreading.

Presented below is the U.S. market penetration achieved by nine technologies since 1876, the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Penetration rates have been organized to show three phases of a technology's spread: traction, maturity, and saturation.

Though the purchase price is an anomaly, the message behind Facebook's $1 billion agreement to buy photo-sharing application Instagram is not: apps are where the money is.

It's a sentiment echoed by countless startups now writing software applications for smart phones and tablets. All are hoping for a share of the $6 billion in revenue that Forrester Research says apps generated in 2011 from purchases and ads. Forrester expects app revenues to double this year, to $12 billion—an incredible figure for a market not yet four years old.

When the list is longer than the time you have, it’s easy to sacrifice some important things just to get through the day. For the small business owner, communication with your team is one of those things that can get lost.

It takes time to convey your dream and your standards for taking care of clients. And some of us truly believe that no one can do it better than we can. Well, it’s probably true for certain areas of your business but not all of it.  If you’re awesome at sales but you do all of your own administrative work, chances are there’s an administrative wiz right under your nose.

Created in 2010, STEMinist focuses on women in Science, Tech, Engineering and Math. By aggregating and featuring stories about women in STEM from across the web, we hope to:

• Increase the visibility of women in STEM 
• Promote and elevate the perspective of women in these traditionally underrepresented fields 
• Encourage younger women and girls to pursue careers in STEM 
• Capture a social media snapshot of what’s trending for women in STEM

There are some who suggest that the venture capital model is broken since the returns for many VC firms are quite low according to some reports. In light of these findings, anyone hoping to profit by investing in a startup company will need to seek expert advice before cutting a check. Here are some tips from a number of leading VC experts:

Invest in Talent More Than Ideas

Passion Capital, a successful VC firm in London, has shifted its focus <http://gigaom.com/europe/five-lessons-from-londons-hardest-working-vcs/ from ideas to the quality of the teams on a startup. Gigaom reports, “What started as a factory for backing ideas quickly became a talent agency: aimed at getting people who have ability and chutzpah together, in a way that almost trumps the quality of the ideas they have — because the ideas will inevitably morph.”

Summary

National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2), an organization of entrepreneurial universities creating and funding university startups, has just announced the launch of their crowdfunding website: YouCrowdfund.org. The mission is to provide information, education and intelligence to the crowdfund community. Description

YouCrowdfund.org was created from the need to provide relevant information and education to investors and companies. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups(JOBS) Act of 2012 creates legal obligations which require in-depth knowledge to successfully comply with the new law.The JOBS Act specifies that investors and companies possess an understanding of the standards established by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the risks involved in crowdfund investing.

The impending Facebook initial public offering is pushing already-expensive Silicon Valley real estate to frenetic new highs.

The two months prior to the IPO announcement saw only 840 sales in the region. In dramatic contrast, sales in the last two months have almost doubled to 1,531, according to Guy Wolcott, the co-founder and chief executive of the company behind real estate app HomeSnap.

It’s not just sales. The median sales price is up 15 percent in the same time period, and the number of million-dollar-plus prices is up a staggering 159 percent since the Facebook IPO announcement.

We already knew Facebook was huge, but did you realize it has as many monthly active users are there are people in Europe? The company is headed toward an IPO, but where does it stack up against the tech titans that came before it?

The company has been on its roadshow since earlier this week, talking to bankers about potentially investing in the company’s available shares. Facebook is expected to be valued at $10 billion when it makes its stock market debut, making it one of the biggest IPOs in U.S. history. With total revenue for 2011 sitting at $3.7 billion, it is almost a mouse in Google’s $37.9 billion 2011 revenue shadow.

By Michael Glessner

Considering an open innovation initiative? Don’t take it lightly. For B2B companies, who face unique additional challenges, identifying and achieving value can be especially difficult (see The Value of Open Innovation for B2B Companies for more detail). If your company sees the value and is ready to get started, here are four critical steps that will help ensure success.

Step 1 – Frame the Context of your Initiative

The open innovation journey begins as the manager contemplates the context of a solution. Let’s break the context down into three key areas of focus:

• Determine the key drivers. Are teams stuck due to technical hurdles in a specific, non-core discipline? Is vetting new products with real customers a challenge for development teams? These drivers may not require crowds to find a solution, but rather a more targeted group of collaborators.
• Identify the broader context of industry challenges and longer term vision. If regulatory compliance is a key factor in development efforts, that needs to be considered upfront in the design.
• Gauge the company’s comfort with sharing information. Will the company share important project information such as research data and potential commercialization hurdles with partners (with or without non-disclosure agreements)?

Download the PDF

Can lack of sleep make you fat? A new paper which reviews the evidence from sleep restriction studies reveals that inadequate sleep is linked to obesity. The research, published in a special issue of the The American Journal of Human Biology, explores how lack of sleep can impact appetite regulation, impair glucose metabolism and increase blood pressure.

“Obesity develops when energy intake is greater than expenditure. Diet and physical activity play an important part in this, but an additional factor may be inadequate sleep,” said Dr Kristen Knutson, from the University of Chicago. “A review of the evidence shows how short or poor quality sleep is linked to increased risk of obesity by de-regulating appetite, leading to increased energy consumption.”

The number of internet users in South Africa is growing massively. That’s a good thing. After all, the World Bank reckons that every 10% growth in internet connectivity equates to a one percent growth in the GDP.

In fact, there are now an estimated 8.5-million internet users in the country, nearly 60% more than there were two years ago and around 90% of those access the web using mobile at some point.

The world’s most important company -- the one that revolutionized our whole idea of geography -- is located smack-dab in the middle of the nation’s most innovative region. Well, not exactly smack-dab. And that’s the problem.

As anybody who has ever used Google Earth knows, the Internet company’s world headquarters are in Mountain View, Calif., located in Silicon Valley near San Jose. But its campus isn’t exactly in the center of Mountain View. Rather, Google, as well as LinkedIn, Intuit and the local operation of Microsoft, are based in North Bayshore, an ’80s-era office park two miles north of downtown Mountain View. It’s a classic example of the business campus most often favored by tech barons: blocks of attractive but low-slung, auto-oriented office buildings, just a little too far away from one another for walking.

In sports, on a game show, or just on the job, what causes people to choke when the stakes are high? A new study by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) suggests that when there are high financial incentives to succeed, people can become so afraid of losing their potentially lucrative reward that their performance suffers.

It is a somewhat unexpected conclusion. After all, you would think that the more people are paid, the harder they will work, and the better they will do their jobs—until they reach the limits of their skills. That notion tends to hold true when the stakes are low, says Vikram Chib, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and lead author on a paper published in the May 10 issue of the journal Neuron. Previous research, however, has shown that if you pay people too much, their performance actually declines.

Developments of Kazakhstan scientists are very popular abroad. Moreover, they bring big profits to foreign companies, who bought the rights to these projects. Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, the commercialization of know-how is not yet so developed.

Large companies are now willing to pay for new technologies to 25% of future profits. They say that developments of Kazakhstan scientists can save a lot of money, while significantly increase the profitability of a company.

When President Obama signed in to law the Jumpstart Our Startups, or JOBS Act as it is better known, business startups all over the country become instantly excited. Finally, there would be a new funding source that allowed new businesses to find the funding they needed without having to rely on banks or venture capital firms that rarely loan to businesses without a proven record of success.

The modern version of crowdfunding uses social media and other technologies to bring together larger amounts of investors that can invest smaller amounts of money. If a business needs $100,000, they are more likely to get the funds from 100 investors committing $1,000 than they are from one angel investor committing the full amount alone.

How friendly is your state toward business? The graph above breaks down the states using a grading scale. FeedFront went into further detail:

Some key findings from the survey:

Texas had three of the top five cities (Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin), while California was home to the bottom three (Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento).

The future of Europe rests on the ability to think creatively, to break new ground, and to encourage risk-taking in all walks of life. And the capacity to innovate and implement the changes necessary to achieve this ultimately depends on the readiness of European universities and research institutes to open up to fresh thinking, listen to independent voices, and to develop a climate of mutual learning.

Europe can only be successful in establishing and maintaining a globally competitive knowledge-based society if it continuously strives to enhance the quality of the research base, strengthen the structural dynamics of its various research and innovation systems, and to support frontier research in carefully selected areas.

Chevy Chase-based New Enterprise Associates    Inc. has raised $2 billion for its 14th fund and may raise another $500 million before it’s done, the venture giant disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission    filing on Wednesday.

NEA, which originally signaled its intention to raise $2.3 billion in March, increased the forecasted size of the latest fund to $2.5 billion.

Silicon Valley may still be the biggest tech hub in the U.S., but New York City is now the fastest growing tech sector in the country — surpassing Boston for the top spot, according to a new study.

A report by The Center for an Urban Future found that thousands of tech jobs have been added in New York City over the past few years when other industries have been hurting amid a struggling economy. Over the past five years, tech-related jobs in the Big Apple have increased by 28.7% from 41,100 to 52,900.