Infrastructure for electric transportation is heating up. Companies like Coulomb Technologies and Ecotality are already deploying electric vehicle charging stations region by region. And just today, general Motors said it was gearing up to announce a charging partner for its forthcoming Chevrolet Volt.

Now in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most progressive regions when it comes to advanced transportation, the Air Quality Management District is funneling $5 million into an initiative to roll out 3,000 home chargers, 2,000 public chargers in commercial areas, and as many as 50 rapid charging stations along nearby highways (capable of juicing car batteries in 30 minutes or less).

The goal is to spur wider adoption of plug-in vehicles, which are only expected to capture a sliver of market share in their first few years. The key will be to make charging stations accessible wherever people need to go, allowing them to quickly and efficiently extend the range of their green cars without high prices or the hassle of long waits.

A U.S.-based researcher has claimed to solve the sexiest problem in computer science. On the line are a million-dollar prize, a host of scientific breakthroughs and the secure cryptographic systems used for everything from e-mail to banking.

The 100-plus-paged proof was posted on August 6 and has computer scientists and mathematicians around the world buzzing. "It's definitely an approach that we haven't seen before," says Richard Lipton, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who dropped everything to take a look at the new paper. "It's complicated and it's not clear that it's going to work. But it's certainly not clear in my mind that it's going to fail."

Vinay Deolalikar, the author of the proof and a researcher at HP Labs--the research arm of computer company Hewlett-Packard--in Palo Alto, Calif., was unavailable for comment. "My email is currently backlogged; please bear with some delays in responding," Deolalikar wrote in an automated response.

“Every system is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results it achieves.”

Dr. Don Berwick may have been talking about the health care system, but he could have just as easily been talking about economic development in Memphis. Repeatedly, we act as if our economic challenges just happened or were driven by forces beyond our control. And yet, our economic development strategies are perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results they achieve. Unfortunately.

As if often the case, the people who should be sending up warning flares are too invested in the current system to be objective or honest. Maybe it’s our own fault. We seem unprepared to tackle the really tough problems before us, so we pay people a lot of money to lie to us about the state of things.

Aug. 11--President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed an authorization for an additional $129 million to reform operations at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an agency that admits it has stifled American innovation and impeded the creation of millions of jobs by failing to keep up with a huge backlog of patent applications.

Despite its central role in safeguarding and promoting American innovation, the agency has long been neglected in Washington, where Congress siphoned its funding for many years in order to pay for unrelated federal projects. As a result, examiners were unable to keep pace with the volume and complexity of the applications they received.

As documented last year in a Journal Sentinel investigation, some 1.2 million applications were gathering dust at the Patent Office, a backlog the agency estimated could take until 2015 to get under control. Starting five years ago, it began rejecting patent applications at an unprecedented pace in an unsuccessful effort to catch up.

In the past year, we've written a lot about the similarity between the rally of early 1930 and the one we had through April of this year.

The early 1930 rally came after the market had fallen nearly 50% in the fall of 1929.  The spring 1930 rally took the market up nearly 50% again, to a level that was only about 20% below the previous peak.  

That rally, of course, was also the biggest sucker's rally in history.  After the market peaked in April 1930, it crashed again, eventually ending up down 89% from the 1929 high and more than 80% from the 1930 high.  The market did not reach the 1930 high again for another quarter of a century.

A t our request, Marc Stoiber, the vice-president for green innovation at Maddock Douglas and a veteran in the relatively young field of sustainability, sat down and created a list of what companies and marketers need to do to make "greenness" (consideration for the welfare of the planet) take hold within their firms and, more important, in the marketplace.

We have absolutely no doubt, as Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston pointed out in their book Green to Gold (Wiley, 2009), traditional green priorities (reduce, reuse, recycle) will be surpassed by the two new priorities of sustainable innovation: reimagine and redesign. But our question to Marc was, what could companies do to get in front of the curve?

With that by way of background, here are Marc's (with a little bit of help from us) Five C's of Sustainability Branding.

IBM recently surveyed 1500 CEOs across 60 countries and 33 industries, and these executives said that creativity - more than rigor, management discipine, integrity and even vision - was the most important competency skill for effective leadership. According to the survey, 80% of CEOs expect their work environments to grow significantly more complex but less than half believe their organizations are equipped to deal with this successfully - "the largest leadership challenge identified in eight years of research."

Asking if CEOs and executive leaders are "really willing to make the transformational moves necessary to foster cultures of real creativity and innovation," The Energy Project CEO Tony Schwartz has an article in The Harvard Business Review, offering the "Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation."

An entrepreneur recently sent me an @ reply message on Twitter asking for some help with a decision coming up in his business. I get these frequently via Twitter, Facebook or email.

I don’t mind. I can’t always get to them. Basically a request like this is stacking on top of my already large to-do list. But I do like to try and make time for some and I’ll admit I’m a bit random about it. I do it when I’m in the mood, am avoiding something else or have a bit of free time. I wish I could do more.

I provided my email address and he sent me a 688 word email (e.g. loooong) with a very broad question. I felt I had committed so I read and responded to the email.

RALEIGH, NC – IBM (NYSE:IBM) and North Carolina State University say they are teaming on a new project matches university-invented technologies and scientific advancements with global business opportunities. The project is designed to encourage economic growth and get new inventions from NC State researchers into the marketplace quickly.

Commercializing new technologies is a multi-phase process that involves matching academic research with potential investors and then working closely with the inventors to provide counsel regarding patents and copyright to assist in determining the most effective methods to take the inventions to market. The biggest challenge in this process is the ability to quickly sort through massive volumes of data to uncover potential investors and partnerships.

To address this challenge, NC State will use IBM’s advanced analytics technology to streamline the time consuming process of searching and matching potential university research projects with investment and partnership opportunities.

Pop City Slide Show: The Pittsburgh Flight of the Falcons

No. 1: Excluding the self-employed from health-care tax breaks

The new health-care law extended the use of cafeteria plans to small businesses with fewer than 100 employees. Cafeteria plans allow employees to choose and pay for health benefits with pre-tax dollars, which can result in as much as a 30% savings. But the new law failed to eliminate the requirement that all cafeteria plan participants be “employees.” This precludes participation by the self-employed, which comprises 25% of the working population, according to the Kelly Services staffing firm.

No. 2: Continues to stall on Small Business Lending Fund

It was early 2009 when the first proposal was floated to use $30 billion of the TARP money that bailed-out banks had paid back to the government to create a Small Business Lending Fund. The money would be used to address the severe credit crunch that continues to constrict small businesses. It took until mid-March 2010 for a formal proposal to emerge. Despite widespread, lip-s

ervice support in Congress, debate has only just begun. According to the NBSA’s 2009 Year-End Economic Report, 39% of small businesses cannot obtain adequate financing.

Venture Capital firms screen through hundreds--if not thousands--of investment "opportunities" each month. To differentiate yourself from your competitors, it's important to avoid the classic mistake companies make while trying to sell themselves to VC firms--not presenting a solution to a consumer need--and to learn what steps you can take to have VCs wanting to invest in your idea. As both an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I've sat on both sides of the table. Here are the seven secrets to what VCs are looking for as they consider who to invest in:

1. Track Record

Which team would you bet on if the LA Lakers played a Division III team? The same holds true for venture capital firms; VCs prefer to bet on experienced winners. This means that if you're a kid right out of college, even if you have a great idea you'll most likely be written off as "likely to fail." This is because already established winners tend to win, while unknowns are far more likely to lose.

But even if you

are an unknown just starting out, there's still a chance that you could score VC money -- but the hurdles are going to be higher.

A selection of untinted vintage color photographs, dating to 1906, of locations in Europe. The set was marked: "Institute for Color Photography, Carl Weller, Berlin/Verlagsanstalt für Farbenfotographie, 1906."

Say it with me now: It’s OK to delegate. It’s OK to delegate. It’s OK to delegate.

Now if only doing it was as easy as saying it.

When you’re a small business owner who prides yourself on doing everything on your own, delegation is hard. Your business is your baby and your blood; it seems unnatural to trust someone else to take over your responsibilities, even if that person is a long-time employee, business partner or, perhaps even worse, a family member. I mean, surely, there’s no way they could do a task better or more thoroughly than you could, right?

As your business begins to grow, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to become comfortable with delegating tasks. It’s impossible to think that you’ll be able to continue to do everything in your business and still grow at the pace you want to. Below are 6 steps to help you successfully delegate. This can be a touchy area, so if you have your own best practices, feel free to share them.

The latest organization to spring fully formed from the brow of San Diego’s Life Sciences community was not Athena, but the San Diego Entrepreneurs Exchange, which Denise profiled in March when the SDEE was preparing to hold its first meeting.

I’d guess close to 140 people turned out earlier this week for the group’s second meeting, which was organized around a case study presentation and discussion among local biotech entrepreneurs who were successful in winning Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health. These are small grants. David Larocca, the founder, CEO, and principle scientist of Mandala Biosciences, says a Phase I SBIR “proof of principle” grant is usually limited to $150,000, while a Phase II “commercialization” grant is typically limited to $1.2 million.

U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire teamed up with inventor Dean Kamen this morning to unveil a new bill she hopes will funnel new federal funding to extra-curricular educational programs focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Kamen, best known as the inventor of the Segway and various medical devices, started such a program in 1989, Manchester-based FIRST, that operates robotics competitions for more than 250,000 kids each year.

Shaheen’s bill would create a competitive grant program, called the Innovation Inspiration School Grant Program, that would help fund programs like FIRST. “The vision is to look at some of the things that are working to get kids excited about STEM subjects,” Shaheen told me in a phone interview just after this morning's announcement. (STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math.) “That leads to more people going into those fields and it will help keep the country competitive.” The grant program will give top priority to schools in low income urban and rural areas, she said, and will require members of the community to be involved in the programs as mentors (as they are with the FIRST robotics program). Grant applicants will also need to find their own funding to match the federal contribution, 50-50.

A depth-sensing camera and palm-top projector turn an ordinary work surface into an interactive one.

When Ryder Ziola places a bell pepper on the kitchen work surface in front of him, the tabletop springs to life, suggesting recipes and other information. He can also use the work surface like a touch screen, selecting options with a finger--to see, for example, what ingredients might go well with his pepper. Ziola, a graduate student at the University of Washington, developed the system, dubbed Oasis, with researchers at Intel Labs Seattle led by senior scientist Beverly Harrison. Ziola is demonstrating Oasis at the ninth annual Intel Research Day, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

In August of 2007, Lewis Weinstein launched the beta version of ReferralKey, a site intended to help digitize the process of sending referrals from one professional to another. If a real estate agent sent one of his clients to a mortgage broker, the site would track that ? and also keep tabs on whether the mortgage broker ever returned the favor. Weinstein envisioned building a new kind of social network for small businesses that would provide continual streams of leads to its members, in a way that sites like LinkedIn and Facebook do not.

But the site didn't immediately take off. Weinstein, a serial entrepreneur and third-generation tax accountant in Needham, found that professionals using the site felt it just wasn't helping them generate enough new business. "The common response was, 'I thought you were gonna send me referrals,'" he says.

That's where the steaks come in.

The phrase "building a green economy" means different things to different people, but in general it refers to encouraging economic development that prioritizes sustainability.

Sustainability is working with nature in the quest to meet people's needs and wants, instead of disregarding environmental concerns in the process of growing the economy.

The primary way governments around the world are trying to "green" their own economies today is by increasing investments and growing jobs in industries on the cutting edge of non-polluting renewable forms of energy, such as solar and wind power.

President Obama has repeatedly invoked his vision of a green economy as a tool for helping the U.S. lift itself out of recession and position itself as an economic powerhouse in a carbonconstrained future. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the $787.2 billion stimulus package that Congress signed into law in 2009, was chock full of provisions to boost renewable energy, energy efficiency and environmental restoration initiatives.

The fast-growing use of cell phones in Africa — where many people lack the basic human necessities — has made headlines worldwide the past few years. The surprising boom has led to widespread speculation that cell phones could potentially transform the impoverished continent.

But new research by economists Isaac M. Mbiti and Jenny C. Aker has found that cell phones — while a useful and powerful tool for many people in Africa — cannot drive economic development on their own.

Mbiti, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and Aker, at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., say that while there is evidence of positive micro-economic impacts, so far there’s limited evidence that mobile phones have led to macro-economic improvements in African countries.