Electronics retail company Best Buy decided to forgo the regular celebrity spokesperson for its annual Super Bowl commercial in favor of highlighting mobile technology innovators.

During this year’s Super Bowl game, the company aired a 30-second commercial titled “Phone Innovators. The commercial  featured a handful of heavy hitters, including camera phone inventor Philippe Kahn, text-to-speech inventor Ray Kurzweil, SMS message innovator Neil Papworth, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, Square founder Jim McKelvey, and Shazam creators Chris Barton and Avery Wang.

Thirteen years ago I found myself standing in my closet, madly searching for clean clothes in a last minute attempt to pack before yet another business trip, when I noticed my 4-year old son standing at the entrance. In one hand, he held a small blue wand, in the other -- a plastic bottle of soapy water.

"Dada," he said, looking up at me. "Do you have time to catch my bubbles?"

Time? It stopped. And so did I.

In 2003 Martìn Casado found himself with no small challenge on his hands: he needed to reinvent the technology that underpins the Internet. It had been developed decades earlier and was proving unsuited to an era of cyberwarfare.

Casado, then a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had been approached by a U.S. intelligence agency with a thorny problem. Computer networking technology allowed intelligence agents and other government workers worldwide to stay connected to one another at all times. Field agents could instantly share data seized in a raid with experts anywhere in the world. But the fact that so many computer networks were enmeshed also aided enemy hackers. Once they gained entry to one system, they could hop across networks to search for other treasures. The agency (Casado won't say which one) told him it wanted to keep its large network but reserve the ability to temporarily close off parts of it for crucial transmissions, creating a data equivalent of the dedicated telephone hotline that used to link the White House and the Kremlin.

Late this January, some 75,000 people around the planet sat in front of their computers and pondered how to make anagrams from a bowl of alphabet soup. They were participants in the Hacker Cup, an international programming battle that Facebook organized to help it find the brightest young software engineers before competitors like Google do.

After three more rounds of brain teasers, Facebook will fly the top 25 coders to its head office in Menlo Park, for an adrenaline-soaked finale this March that will award the champion $5,000. In return, Facebook gets a shot at hiring the stars discovered along the way.

There are tons of startup accelerators in Silicon Valley — which give startups seed funding and mentorship to help them get off the ground — but Tandem is a little different.

It's run by co-founder Doug Renert and two other guys, and the team focuses on being exclusive. While Y Combinator — one of Silicon Valley's most popular accelerators — attracts more than 20 teams each "semester," Tandem limits it to only a few teams that focus on mobile products.

The results are pretty amazing — 8 of the 9 startups that Tandem has helped get off the ground have either seen positive exits or raised boatloads of money.

Employers often seem to flout the Labor Department rules about unpaid interns, but college students keep lining up for these positions year after year.

Should government intervene, because the downsides of unpaid internships outweigh the benefits? Or should officials step back, assuming that this arrangement mutually benefits employers and interns?

For an entrepreneur who has floated almost all his ventures during recessions in the past, Romesh Wadhwani, founder of Symphony Technology Group and chairman of Wadhwani Foundation, says he loves recession which is a great time to buy companies and build discipline in one's organisation. In a chat with Kalpana Pathak, Wadhwani shares how his foundation plans to help Indian entrepreneurs. Excerpts:

You donated Rs 32.5 crores to two centres in India for research in biosciences. Why? Yes. Both the centres-- the Shanta Wadhwani Centre for Cardiac and Neural Research at National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore and the Wadhwani Research Centre in Biosciences at IIT Bombay are part of the innovation initiative of the Wadhwani Foundation where we have pledged Rs 32.5 crore in total---Rs 7.5 crore at NCBS and Rs 25 crore at IIT Bombay. The opportunities for innovation in India are very broad. And we have chosen biosciences and bioengineering as the initial focus. We think it can help health care in India and also across the world. It takes advantage of the great Indian mind and talent. And focuses on areas where most other Indian foundations and corporations don't seem to be investing enough.

Entrepreneurial education today is incomplete. It is no wonder that so little of the new knowledge produced from institutions of higher learning is commercialised; there is no formal methodology for teaching students how to transform their business acumen into value-creating enterprises.

We are only building half of the bridge to entrepreneurial utopia and we need to finish the job. Some entrepreneurs work it out for themselves and cross the shark-infested waters to entrepreneurial success, but too few. And if we look beyond the headline-grabbing start-ups, innovation within existing companies is not exactly going well either. Such innovations, either within large corporations or in start-ups, are the work of entrepreneurs and are what create wealth and employment.

Richard Florida’s writings on the creative class have underpinned much of the urban regeneration work in Europe, Australia and North America over the past decade. The creative sector is also getting increasing attention in India, Brazil and China. A new publication from ESPON shows regional patterns and trends in the creative workforce across Europe. It argues that the ability to attract creative workers is highly linked to the qualities of places, and that the opportunities are not confined to the urban centres.

The Creative Class The idea that economic development policies should look beyond their traditional focus on attracting manufacturing jobs was fundamental to Florida’s case. A decade on from the publication of his book on “The Rise of the Creative Class” this view has become widely accepted. Thus the ESPON report observes that the ability of cities and regions to attract creative workers “is usually associated with place-based qualities such as cultural and recreational amenities, diverse neighbourhoods, architectural quality, access to nature, etc.”.

Brrriiinnng. The alarm clock buzzes in another hectic weekday morning. You leap out of bed, rush into the shower, into your clothes and out the door with barely a moment to think. A stressful commute gets your blood pressure climbing. Once at the office, you glance through the newspaper, its array of stories ranging from discouraging to depressing to tragic. With a sigh, you pour yourself a cup of coffee and get down to work, ready to do some creative, original problem solving.

Good luck with that.

Super Bowl 46 is history now and here’s a roundup of all of the internet-related reports. Roughly 100 million watch the Super Bowl every year, making it one of the most viewed events in the world.

Twitter reported that there were an average of 10,000 tweets per second in the final three minutes of the game. That beats the Royal Wedding at 3,966 tweets per second and Osama Bin Laden’s death at 5,106 tweets per second.

Social TV startup Bluefin Labs said it saw 11.5 million comments during the game, up six fold over last year.

The official Super Bowl Twitter account has just 37,871 followers. Some 50 employees and volunteers manned the Super Bowl Command Center for social media.

The NFL has about 2.8 million Twitter followers and 4.5 million Facebook NFL page likes. Verizon added 400 additional 3G and LTE antennae for 3G and LTE service. AT&T added 200 new cell sites in Indianapolis.

I was just reading about how Barack Obama and George W. Bush are the most polarizing presidents of the past 50 years, meaning they had the largest gap in approval ratings between democrats and republicans. Some think there's a chicken and egg aspect to the question of which came first, our divisive leaders or our divided nation, but I think it's entirely a function of leadership. If Obama and Bush were effective leaders, the nation wouldn't be so divided.

That's because, by definition, leadership is about somehow getting people with disparate views to coalesce and execute on goals and plans they would never agree to on their own. Clearly, that's not happening in Washington and that's why America's so divided. Makes sense, right?

At present, a key question in Austrian science and research remains unanswered: what are the chances that the efforts of recent years to catch up in R&D were not in vain? In the field of research, technology and innovation (RTI), Austria made impressive progress by international standards until 2008, both in terms of the amount invested and the quality of effort. Austria's research and development (R&D) expenditures totalled some €7.8bn in 2010, boosting R&D investments to nearly 2.8% of Austria's GDP. The latter figure rose by 0.63 percentage points between 2000 and 2007, thus earning Austria a top position among other European countries.

In basic research, Austria is characterised by particularly strong individual fields of internationally recognised excellence, and our scientists have enjoyed remarkable success in the highly competitive procedures of the European Research Council (ERC). There is broad political consensus in Austria regarding the great importance of education, science and research. Despite the financial crisis and the resulting austerity measures, there is also widespread agreement that these areas must be considered high priorities and be funded appropriately. Accordingly, the federal budgets presented included proactive funding for education, science and research.

Despite it being an election year and a period in American history of great political divide, the prospect that Washington, DC might actually get something done to make the path easier for nascent entrepreneurs and young firms is looking more promising. This past week saw lots of activity at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. First, on January 31st –the one-year anniversary of both the White House Startup America Initiative and the private-sector Startup America Partnership—President Barack Obama sent a “Startup America Legislative Agenda” to Congress. The following day, I took part in an official Senate roundtable on Capitol Hill focused on developing more high-growth entrepreneurship legislation. Add to this the efforts to support new and young firms announced in late 2011, particularly the Startup Act, and you have the most active pro-startup focus Washington has ever seen.

Accelerating the emergence of new high-growth firms is mostly about helping cities and educational institutions foster new communities of bottom up nascent entrepreneurs. However, government sets the rules and incentives and can play a vital role in encouraging more Americans to take risk from the top. This is

When the president needs advice on technology policy, he calls onAneesh Chopra. As the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States, a post created by Barack Obama as the manifestation of a campaign promise, Chopra is charged with advising the president about where technology and innovation can spur job growth, boost industry, and improve quality of life for 21st century Americans when it comes to energy, education, health care, and more. After two and three-quarter years in the U.S. CTO seat, Chopra, 39, who holds joint titles as assistant to the president and associate director for technology in the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the Executive Office of the President, is leaving the president's service Wednesday. Chopra cut his teeth in the consulting world, as managing director of the Washington, D.C., health care and education think tank the Advisory Board Company (founded by Atlantic Media Company Chairman David G. Bradley). He moved into government to do a stint as Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia, but there was still plenty he had to learn on the job once in the White House, he says, when it comes to how you go about pushing the country towards innovation from that perch.

CustomMade Ventures Corp. is a Cambridge Internet start-up that had a problem: 97 percent of visitors to its website weren’t ordering anything.

Another Internet company - one that knows a thing or two about attracting users - found a solution. Google Inc., whose Cambridge office is nearby in Kendall Square, helped redesign CustomMade.com so that wherever someone clicks, they know exactly how to get handmade goods from the site, which is designed to connect customers with crafters.

A week after the makeover, CustomMade saw a 200 percent jump in the number of people logging in to start projects, cofounder Seth Rosen said.

SDTBC client services administrator Pam Boehm says the program is designed to assist entrepreneurs in developing a new business and advancing business activities for a recently developed company.

“The National Network for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (N2TEC) was established to help start-up business,” Boehm says. “We hosted the N2TEC Accelerator program in our building for three years. During that time we realized that the goal to bring start-ups to South Dakota was a valuable endeavor. When the N2TEC program funding ended, we decided to continue that program’s mission on our own, using the same local resources that made N2TEC possible.”

In your secret soul, do you harbor a belief that bigger is more? That more is better? Does something deep down cry out for family size, even though the nest is as empty as a candidate's eyes?

See also: Best places to live the simple life. Take yourself by the hand, and turn away from the habits of a lifetime, in favor of a new life. Take the shackles from your wallet and the shades from your eyes and repeat with joy: I'm not paying for economy size anymore!

Once you hit 50, there's no need to get that family size pack of paper towels. — Photo by Getty Images It's not economical to buy a bag of chocolate chips that can make enough cookies to stock all the airline lounges in the Western Hemisphere until 2014. It's not economical to have more trash barrels than the doggy day care.

Raising money is time-consuming and frustrating, particularly when you're not looking for millions upon millions to scale up your operations. Bankers often aren't inclined to lend. Investors may hold out for opportunities to put more money into a company, and might want too much equity in return for what they do provide.

This is where crowdfunding has opened a new frontier for business owners. This still relatively new form of raising capital leverages dedicated social networks of entrepreneurs with companies and investors looking for opportunities. It couldn't be easier to launch a crowdfunding campaign; launching a successful one is a different story.

DETROIT — Three companies in TechTown’s Thrive business accelerator program have secured startup capital from the State of Michigan.

The Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund Investment Program matched $250,000 in startup capital raised by Angott Medical Products, and matched $210,000 in startup capital raised by Clean Emission Fluids.

To qualify, both companies successfully completed the concept development and analysis phase of their business plans, and achieved specific commercialization milestones.

Similarly, TechTown clean-tech company ENRG Power Systems LLC secured a $50,000 loan from the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund Micro Loan Program.