Apple just filed a patent application for technology that would integrate your iPod or iPhone with a smart bike.

Call it the iBike?

Patently Apple, which is great at tracking this stuff, picked up the story first.

The bicycle patent is similar to the Nike + iPod system, which tracks your workouts.

There's plenty of companies making little sensors to track information on bicycles, but we imagine Apple will offer the cleanest, most comprehensive software solution.

For serious bike riders, this will probably be pretty attractive.

California has long been a destination for those seeking a better place to live. For most of its history, the state enacted sensible policies that created one of the wealthiest and most innovative economies in human history. California realized the American dream but better, fostering a huge middle class that, for the most part, owned their homes, sent their kids to public schools, and found meaningful work connected to the state’s amazingly diverse, innovative economy.

Recently, though, the dream has been evaporating. Between 2003 and 2007, California state and local government spending grew 31 percent, even as the state’s population grew just 5 percent. The overall tax burden as a percentage of state income, once middling among the states, has risen to the sixth-highest in the nation, says the Tax Foundation. Since 1990, according to an analysis by California Lutheran University, the state’s share of overall U.S. employment has dro

pped a remarkable 10 percent. When the state economy has done well, it has usually been the result of asset inflation—first during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and then during the housing boom, which was responsible for nearly half of all jobs created earlier in this decade.

A startup monitors the spread of information on Twitter to identify users with the most influence.

It's not the number of followers you have on Twitter that counts--it's how you influence them. That's the message from a new service called PeerIndex that analyzes the flow of information through Twitter. It offers a way to find people who are particularly authoritative in certain domains.

The users it turns up may have relatively few followers but can still wield a huge amount of influence-- in particular subject areas.

Some graphic designers believe that creativity is innate while others think it is learnt. I, for one, consider both to be equally essential in graphic design. This is because, nature and nurture, both play a significant role in building our creative instincts. Almost every human being is born with relatively equal capabilities, but with their own set of creative faculties. They just need to be properly nurtured in order to reap the desired fruit.

Likewise, all graphic designers, no matter how small or big in magnitude, have a certain level of creativity embedded in them. Let me make it clear at this juncture that creativity is never static. There is always room for improvement and there are absolutely no bounds to a graphic designer’s resourcefulness. Creativity can be enhanced to levels unimagined.

A new European-funded initiative is advocating an entirely new system of science publishing, in which scientists avoid the hassles of traditional peer review by taking a quietly radical step: post their results on their websites.

As the news release for LiquidPublication simply states: "Don't print it; post it." To disseminate the information, the program has a software platform that lets other scientists search for what's been posted, leave comments, link related works, and gather papers and information into their own personalized online journals -- all for free.

"I think it's exactly what is needed -- a paradigm shift," said peer-review critic David Kaplan of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. "This is a different system that utilizes the unique characteristics of the web [to provide] a different way of looking at manuscripts [and] a different way of evaluating them."

From a deliciously geeky inside view of construction on the Eiffel Tower to a road map to Mars, this slide show of great moments from 165 years of Scientific American is worth flipping through.

Is it the new widget or new idea or the people behind the new widget or new idea that really excites venture capitalists?

Virtually every company says its success hinges on the people they employ. And of course it’s people first, then planet and profit in the triple bottom line. What is not entirely clear is where venture capitalists prioritize that hierarchy as they put together their deals, at least beyond the anecdotal or intuitive, and who the people they fund are.

Apparently people – or human capital as the term of art goes – figure quite prominently when the venture mavens pencil out where to send their funds.

It all started when it occurred to me that we were missing a nice visual map of Silicon Alley’s early-stage ecosystem available for everyone to use. Entrepreneurs were always asking me about various angels and VC’s and I just thought that such a map would be a good resource to which I could refer people. I also thought that adding the twitter addresses of all these investors would be a nice feature as well. So one night I did just that and mapped out New York’s early-stage tech investor ecosystem and posted it here on my blog.

After receiving so much great encouragement and so many submissions and corrections, I thought I’d do the same for our neighbors to the north- my old stomping grounds- Boston! That took me a bit longer, of course, because the ecosystem is quite a bit larger than NY’s coupled with the fact that I couldn’t do most of it from memory. I haven’t lived in Boston for over nine years now!

To fuel game-changing ideas and generate excitement for the unique challenges Department of Defense encounters now and in the future, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected 33 researchers at 24 U.S. universities to participate in DARPA’s Young Faculty Award program.

The YFA program combines funding and mentoring, with industry and DoD networking early in awardee’s careers to aid them in framing their research in the context of DoD’s needs. The YFA program is one initiative DARPA has put together to create the next generation of academic scientists, engineers and mathematicians in key disciplines. The aim of the program is to encourage these researchers to focus a major part of their careers on defense and national security issues.

NEAR LAKE TAHOE, Calif.--Bill Gates says it's gratifying to see the computer industry that he helped start turn some of its attention to broader societal challenges.

"I think there's increased awareness of using innovation to help in more than just profit making," Gates told CNET in an interview on Friday, following his speech at the Techonomy conference. "When I think back to the conferences I went to earlier in the industry, we were pretty darn focused on popularizing software and personal computing. Nothing wrong with that, but it's nice to see the evolution."

At the conference, the first in what organizers hope will be an annual series, Gates spoke about the need for better software modeling and his disappointment in the U.S. political system.

1. Go online only when you have something specific to do. Till then stay offline. Sitting on the Internet, you could end up wasting a lot of time chatting or visiting sites that are not relevant.

2. Don’t keep checking your mail all day long. Check only twice or thrice a day after having focused on work for sometime.

I was a huge fan of comic books growing up, but what I always found amusing is that there tended to be certain archetypes of super heroes that would keep showing up. For example - the “simple-minded strong dumb guy” is well represented by the Hulk, The Thing, Collossus, and Mr. Incredible.

As early stage investors will all tell you - the quality of the founders is incredibly important. Some investors have pretty methodical ways to determining the quality of a founder, others go more by gut feel. But I think all investors have some set of entrepreneur “archetypes” that they tend to like, and they gravitate towards entrepreneurs that fit some or many elements of these archetypes.

When I run strategy seminars, I usually do a session on long-run trends in the macroenvironment. While firms can’t usually influence macro-trends such as interest rates, demographics and legislation, changes and trends can open up strategic opportunities and threats. While some of these can be predicted with a degree of certainty, such as an aging population in Europe, others are harder to estimate (oil prices for example).

I don’t put a lot of faith in predictions regarding these trends. Our psychology means that we have a tendency to extrapolate from the past to predict the future and this means that we continually miss discontinuous change. Some of the famous predictions about the future of technology are part of business folklore:

The internet calling service Skype is finally gearing up for an Initial Public Offering. In a registration statement with the SEC, the company (whose CEO, Josh Silverman, is pictured to the right) announced that it intends to raise a maximum of $100 million through the offering, and that it will list the stock on the Nasdaq. The filing leaves some details ambiguous, so the actual IPO amount may end up being much more, or less, than $100 million.

The news comes after eBay finalized the sale of 70 percent of the company in November 2009 to an investment consortium led by Silver Lake Partners. It included participation from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Joltid — the peer-to-peer technology company founded by Skype’s founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The sale left eBay with 30 percent of Skype, Joltid with 14 percent, and the rest of the investment group with the remaining 56 percent. The deal valued Skype at $2.75 billion, and eBay was paid $1.9 billion in cash, and received a note from buyer worth $125 million.

At some point in their lives, every young adult realizes that they no longer want to ask for Mom and Dad's permission to purchase their latest "need," like that new outfit, or the latest awesome video game. Or just lunch.

So they go out and get a job of their very own.

One day, those same young adults will look back and consider that first job more than just an insignificant side step taken to collect a few extra dollars -- it could have been the beginning of a gradual ascent toward the C-Suite.

From flipping burgers, to teaching in public schools, to working in the rice fields of China, some of the world's most powerful CEOs started out their careers in humble places.

As drug makers face an increasingly competitive landscape and development costs continue to rise, biopharmaceutical firms big and small are seeking every advantage to maximize the value of their R&D efforts. As a result, many companies have flocked to Asia-Pacific for better access to patients, lower costs, and operational efficiencies.

Beyond meeting the needs of global pharma in simply providing access to patient pools and lower operational costs, the region is also poised to realize the potential of a thriving biotechnology sector that is driving innovation on its own. From China to India, Singapore to Malaysia, to Sri Lanka and beyond, Asia is gaining the experience and infrastructure needed to support the global biotech industry by performing work and fostering innovation that moves higher and higher up the pharmaceutical value chain.

You don’t have to be an economist to recognize America’s economy is in trouble.

Ten years ago, America’s economy was booming. American business was the envy of the world. Stock prices were soaring. Dozens of new companies were created every day. Private sector investments were at an all-time peak. Most importantly, the federal government had generated budget surpluses for three consecutive years.

What happened?

Two successive administrations and the Federal Reserve shifted the focus from investment to stimulating consumer spending with low interest rates, easy money, high leverage, low personal tax rates and increased government spending. The result? The federal deficit will hit $1.4 trillion this year, with cumulative debt reaching $18 trillion by 2015. That’s $60,000 for every American.

With nearly all net job growth in our country coming from companies less than five years old, Congress has debated this year what the role of government should be in developing programs and interventions that support entrepreneurship. While the World Bank’s Doing Business project reported a record number of new pro-entrepreneurship legal and regulatory reforms around the world in 2009, governments and multi-national institutions continue to be tempted to develop entrepreneurship development programs.

Legal and regulatory reforms clearly provide impetus for new business creation. For example, after accounting for differences in per capita income across nations, countries with easier and less expensive procedures for registering new businesses have higher rates of new business creation, according to an analysis of the World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey. However, there is less clear evidence as to which interventions or “programs” to equip potential entrepreneurs with the skills they need to start and grow successful companies work.  At a time when it seems daily we report on this blog about new “SME programs”, there should rightfully be concern about whether government programs for “small business” or SME development help much. Too few entrepreneurship programs are developed from robust research and frequently conceived and run by people who have never been entrepreneurs. And, as the adage goes, sometimes more is less.

BLACKSBURG, Va., Aug. 5, 2010 – Virginia Tech announced today the establishment of the National Tire Research Center (NTRC), an advanced tire research and test facility to be established in Southside Virginia.

The facility is a partnership between the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, General Motors (GM) Company, the Department of Mechanical Engineering in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research (IALR), the Southside Virginia community, and the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Relations Revitalization Commission.

Funding for the center will total $14 million with $5 million provided by GM, $5 million from the Tobacco Commission and $4 million from Virginia Tech.

When you’re one of the youngest entrepreneurs to ever receive venture capital, inevitably there will be comparisons to a certain wunderkind who was only 20 years old when he convinced VCs to invest in his start-up.

“People start thinking of me as the next Zuckerburg,” said Brian Wong of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “I can use that to my advantage.”

At only 19, Wong spills with confidence, even through his iPhone as he dashes around San Francisco to pitch investors. It’s no wonder, since he skipped four grades in school, graduated from college at just 18 and a year later received $200,000 from True Ventures for his new mobile advertising start-up, Kiip.me.