With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 upon us, and the recent financial woes, there seems to be a growing population out there worried about all the people and companies watching to hurt them. Why is everyone so paranoid these days? My plea to entrepreneurs is to recognize it as an opportunity, and go the extra mile to make people’s life better rather than stoke the fires.

I must be the only one who believes that most of the “watching” in the real world, and on the Internet, is done by businesses to help you find what you want, protect you, and improve your experience, rather than invade your privacy or scam you.

JUST outside this prairie town, seven vast buildings, each painted brick red, are lined up along a highway bordered by grain fields. These single-story structures have no smokestacks or any other indication that they are, in fact, very busy factories.

Three shifts of workers produce machines that bale hay, dig trenches, reduce tree branches to wood chips, grind stumps into sawdust, and drill tunnels to run electric wires and pipes underground. Most were the creations of Gary Vermeer, a farmer, tinkerer and inventor who died two years ago, at the age of 91.

(Reuters) - The Chinese government will give money to some venture capital investment firms in its latest effort to boost the development of what it labels strategic emerging industries.

According to a new policy published by China's Ministry of Finance over the weekend, the government is prepared to be a minority shareholder in a venture capital fund if the fund focuses on startups in designated sectors from environment protection to new-energy vehicles.

The policy, co-developed with China's economic planning agency, is meant to "accelerate the implementation of emerging industry investment plans," the finance ministry said.

E-mail is far from dead, if my packed inbox is any indication. But not being dead isn’t the same as being alive in the way we’ve come to understand the web. While the web is interactive and dynamic, e-mail reflects very little of that evolution.

But a New York company is trying to breathe new life into e-mail marketing by making e-mails real-time and context aware. Movable Ink offers advertisers and publishers a way to push out e-mails that remain current whenever a user opens it instead of existing e-mails that become increasingly irrelevant and stale the longer time goes on.

A couple months back, I couldn’t help but notice an editorial on Canada’s innovation problem in Canadian Business magazine. In it, James Cowan wrote about how Canadians like to talk about innovation providing the economy of the future, but we aren’t actually doing much to promote it.

Rather than dwell on the problems, however, the magazine launched a special “Economy of the Future” series that aims to spotlight case studies of people and companies who were doing things right, and how they could act as examples to others. Staff writer Rachel Mendleson kicked things off with a great story about how some teachers are bringing a different approach to the classroom.

Mobile devices are shifting many individual computing behaviors, perhaps none more significant than how we search for and receive information. Right now, it’s moving at warp speed. In between the time I finish this draft and its posted, it’s entirely possible another company or service launches in this space. Every time we “swipe open” our mobile devices, we seek out dopamine hits from receiving new emails, texts, notifications, or other bits of digital media. A good chunk of this current mobile activity revolves around the personalized search and Q&A space, which leverages these behavior in new ways.

By now, on traditional computers, we know how to find the information we seek, whether via sites like Google, Wikipedia, or through social networks. On mobile, however, our information needs and habits shift. On the go, we typically want smaller bits of information quicker, usually calibrated to our location. We are less likely to engage in longer discussion, and more likely to add questions in the hopes that machines, crowds, or some combination can produce relevant information. This shift has opened the floodgates of activity in the personalized search and Q&A space, with an impressive number of new applications vying for user attention in a crowded marketplace.

As the Senate is poised to vote on the bipartisan Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, U.S. Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank and Patent and Trademark Office Director David Kappos will celebrate another remarkable milestone tomorrow morning — the issuance of U.S. patent No. 8,000,000.

Patent No. 8 million offers a dramatic technological contrast to the very first US.. patent, signed by President George Washington on July 31, 1790, and issued to inventor Samuel Hopkins for a new way of making potash, an ingredient used in fertilizer.  Granted to Second Sight Medical Products, Inc., the new patent is for an apparatus that enhances vision for people who are going blind due to the degeneration of light-detecting cells in their eyes.  It uses a miniature video camera mounted on a pair of glasses to do the work of the eye’s retina, transforming incoming light into electrical stimulation that in turn creates visual images in the brain.

This paper takes a closer look at the role of location advantages in the spatial distribution of MNE R&D activity. In doing so, we have returned to first principles by revisiting our understanding of L and O advantages and their interaction. We revisit the meaning of L advantages, and offer a succinct differentiation of L advantages. We emphasise the importance of institutions, and flesh out the concept of collocation L advantages, which play an important role at the industry and firm levels of analysis. Just because a country possesses certain L advantages when viewed at a macro-level, does not imply that these are available to all industries or all firms in that location without differential cost. When these are linked to the distinction between location-bound and non location-bound O advantages, and we distinguish between MNEs and subsidiaries it allows for a clearer understanding of the MNE’s spatially distributed activities. These are discussed here in the context of R&D, which – in addition to the usual uncertainties faced by firms – must deal with the uncertainties associated with innovation. Although prior literature has sometimes framed the centralisation/decentralisation, spatial separation/collocation debates as a paradox facing firms, when viewed within the context of the cognitive limits to resources, the complexities of institutions, and the slow pace of the evolving specialisation of locations, these are in actuality trade-offs firms must make.

Searching the Internet has become an almost reflexive act. Each day, tens of millions of global citizens fire up their personal computers and handheld devices to troll for information on products or to glean insights that will help guide business decisions. Yet the economic value of this enormous current of search activity remains largely unknown. Current estimates rely mainly on brute measures, such as the number of searches performed or advertising revenues reported by search companies themselves. These estimates fail to take account of how trillions of clicks combine to boost productivity, open new pathways to problem solving, or simply make life easier.

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“Dress for success,” sounds good, but sometimes you need to take the opposite approach.

We all have things that hold us back: Apprehension, uncertainty, lack of confidence, or simply a fear of looking stupid. The older and more “successful” we get, the more of those fears we tend to have. (When you were 25, karaoke was oddly exhilarating; as a 40-year-old CEO, there’s no way you’ll sing “Don’t Stop Believing” to a crowd of strangers.)

How do you move past the fear? Get naked — kind of. Here’s how.

When I first started riding a bicycle to get in better shape I felt like a poser. The last thing I ever want to be is that guy: The guy who, say, decides to start playing tennis and buys expensive shoes and rackets and bags before he’s even stepped on a court.

China’s massive increases in spending on R&D and on developing the scientific infrastructure have been well documented, but until now it was considered that the West still had the edge in terms of innovation.

While China is increasing its innovation capacity, the common view is that inward investment and trade patterns show it still lags in terms of technological sophistication, with more focus on the lower end of R&D.

But a study published this week, using patent activity to assess innovation activity in China, presents new evidence on how technologically advanced the country is. While other research has used patents as a tool for studying innovation, this work goes beyond counting patents, to look at citations from patents to the scientific literature.

The world is big, and Silicon Valley is no longer the center of innovation. This means a lot of innovative, strong startups are getting founded outside the US. And, maybe, just maybe, they're coming over to eat your lunch.

Social media is not the end-all, be-all of your business. It’s not the magic bullet that will allow you to take a struggling business to the height of success simply by claiming your Twitter account. But what social media can do is make you a better company by allowing you to listen, react and build faster and more efficiently than ever before. Below you’ll find 18 quick reasons that your SMB may want to get involved in social media. These are the benefits you can achieve faster in social media than most other mediums.

Is this a complete list? Not by a long shot. But perhaps it will demonstrate the power of these channels and why social media is far more than simply “playing on your computer.”

Let nobody say that Seedcamp lacks ambition.

Since launching in 2007, the organization has become Europe’s premier training grounds for startups, linking some of the continent’s top young companies to a broad network of advisers and investors. It’s already invested in dozens of businesses, and this week pushed forward with more as it brought 16 companies to London for a week of intensive mentoring. But it doesn’t stop there.

Today's announcement that there was zero net job growth last month is troubling indeed. I am very interested, as is the rest of the country, in the President's planned jobs speech to Congress next Thursday.  One the areas I would expect him to highlight as having the most potential for job growth is the start-up community.  As the country as a whole struggles to avoid a double dip recession, venture-backed start-ups are pulling more than their weight in hiring Americans.   At StartUpHIre.com, an online jobs posting site for venture backed start-ups, there were more than 14,000 open jobs listed in the second quarter of 2011.  From August 1, 2010 to August 1 2011, more than 40,000 jobs were posted on the site.  And that is just a percentage of the total venture-backed universe.

Bryan McLeod remembers one particularly insulting moment well. A few years ago, he was trying to sell his company’s product, a data-backup utility called Clickfree, to a large retailer and had just finished his half-hour demonstration. The store’s buyer turned to him and said accusingly, “Your competitors tell me they wrote your software.” McLeod was shocked. He couldn’t understand why the buyer had sat through the demo without saying a word, only to spring her bombshell on him at the end. “It seriously happened,” he says. “The retailer ended up firing the buyer because the buyer was crazy.”

Bill Gates and Paul Allen were named two of the Tech’s Top 10 Biggest Philanthropists by PeekYou, but surprisingly, tech’s most notable charitable giver isn’t number one.

PeekYou developed the PeekScore, which ranks a user’s internet presence on a scale of 1 to 10. Gates (ranked second on the list) has a score of 10, while Paul Allen (sixth) has a score of 7.2 out of 10.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg followed up on an initiative by Gates and Warren Buffett, pledging at least half of his $6.9 billion fortune to charity. It’s worth noting that both Zuckerberg and Gates had the same PeekScore of 10, but Zuckerberg’s announcement probably pushed him to the top spot.

Everyone knows that Google is the leader of the internet pack when it comes to innovation. They consistently develop intuitive, cutting edge products that do exactly what the user wants.

So how do they do it? How are they so good at developing so many products that are a hit with customers? What’s their secret?

Unless you get a job on a Google product development team, you’ll never know the exact formula, but if you’d still like to learn some of Google’s innovation secrets, here are three priceless innovation lessons that can be learned from the folks at Google.

"Fresh investment in the key sectors of the European economy, such as the transport and energy sectors, is a leading priority in terms of promoting growth and creating new jobs. A recent report by the European Energy Markets Observatory estimated that investment in this sector will reach 1,000 billion euros in the next twenty years. Unless we develop smart gas and electricity networks, some member states could find themselves in a difficult situation.

Substantial investment is required in other areas, such as information and communication technologies (ICT), the environment, health care, agriculture and food safety. The automotive industry is also a key sector of the European economy.