The dream of Silicon Alley, New York's first attempt at crafting a tech hub competitor to Silicon Valley before the "Web 1.0" dot com crash of 2000 to 2001, has been resurrected in the form of a new website called Digital.NYC.

Officially launched on Wednesday by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, the website is hoping to become an online hub for everything tech in New York, including venture capital, technology jobs and incubators.

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Heineken has become the latest brand to tap tech firms for help, launching the Frontier accelerator to fund and partner with companies that can make beer shopping more fun. Heineken is offering "at least" €50,000 (£40,000) to tech firms that successfully pitch ideas for one of four briefs - making drinking in moderation cool; innovative music events; a better beer experience at bars, and informed shopping choices.

The Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest freshwater lake, is down to just 10% of its peak capacity. NASA released dramatic photos showing its rapid disintegration over the past 14 years, as the lakebed has given way to cracked soil and rusted, stranded boats. A new paper in science journal Nature, published Wednesday, found that the nations that straddle the Aral Sea, including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have some of the highest per capita water use of anywhere in the world.

Image: ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The exact moment when computers got better than people at human tasks arrived in 2011, according to data scientist Jeremy Howard, at an otherwise inconsequential machine-learning competition in Germany. Contest participants were asked to design an algorithm that could recognize street signs, many of which were a bit blurry or dark. Humans correctly identified them 98.5 percent of the time. At 99.4 percent, the winning algorithm did even better.

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Meanwhile, those of us without an ocean view can tell you that it's slim pickings for the rest of the country.

Last year, 70 percent of all venture capital investment in the U.S. went to companies in either California, Massachusetts or New York. California companies pulled in roughly 50 percent of those dollars all by themselves.

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BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON – For more than a century, the United States has been the dominant global force for innovation. But China and other Asian countries are now testing that dominance, and the West should welcome the challenge. China’s move from imitation to innovation has been a matter of national policy in recent years. In 2011, for example, the government established a set of ambitious targets for the production of patents. Almost immediately, China became the world’s top patent filer.

Mark Rolston used to be CCO at Frog Design. Now he runs his new consultancy, Argodesign. And as part of our Wearables Week, his firm generated a series of concepts based upon our simple mandate: No watches.

What Argodesign presented in response was “a provocation”--four wearable concepts that would not just track your heartbeat or put your email on your wrist, but give you what Rolston calls “superpowers.”

When crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo emerged in 2008, many people dismissed them as a novelty. But six years later, it’s pretty clear that the doubters were wrong. Successful projects like Pebble, Coin and the Coolest Cooler have raised tens of millions of dollars. In the aggregate, billions of dollars have been raised for creative projects, new companies and personal causes. Crowdfunding is at the center of a new economic revolution, one that democratizes the capital raising process and makes it accessible to anyone with a dream and a computer.

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Max Strzelecki was born with no arms, but this hasn’t stopped him from becoming a game programmer.

Strzelecki codes entirely with his feet, using a regular mouse and keyboard. He’s currently working on a magical action-platformer called Warlocks that’s tantalizingly close to hitting its $25,000 Kickstarter goal with less than 48 hours left to run.

Image: Max Strzelecki is the sole programmer on action-platformer Warlocks. Image Credit: Kickstarter

The adoption of IT in healthcare systems has, in general, followed the same pattern as other industries. In the 1950s, when institutions began using new technology to automate highly standardized and repetitive tasks such as accounting and payroll, healthcare payors and other industry stakeholders also began using IT to process vast amounts of statistical data. Twenty years later, the second wave of IT adoption arrived. It did two things: it helped integrate different parts of core processes (manufacturing and HR, for example) within individual organizations, and it supported B2B processes such as supply-chain management for different institutions within and outside individual industries. As for its effects on the healthcare sector, this second wave of IT adoption helped bring about, for example, the electronic health card in Germany. It was also a catalyst for the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act in the United States—an effort to promote the adoption of health-information technology—and the National Programme for IT in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Regardless of their immediate impact, these programs helped create an important and powerful infrastructure that certainly will be useful in the future.

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Across Europe, retail banks have digitized only 20 to 40 percent of their processes; 90 percent of European banks invest less than 0.5 percent of their total spending on digital. As a result, most have relatively shallow digital offerings focused on enabling basic customer transactions.

Neither customers nor digital upstarts are likely to wait for retail banks to catch up. Recent analysis shows that over the next five years, more than two-thirds of banking customers in Europe are likely to be “self-directed” and highly adapted to the online world. In fact, these same consumers already take great advantage of digital technologies in other industries—booking flights and holidays, buying books and music, and increasingly shopping for groceries and other goods via digital channels. Once a credible digital-banking proposition exists, customer adoption will be breathtakingly fast and digital laggards will be left exposed.

BioHealth Innovation Inc. is launching a new $50 million fund to support early-stage medical and health IT companies in central Maryland. BioHealth, which is based in Rockville and has operations in Baltimore, hired veteran venture capitalist Tania Fernandez as a strategic advisor to help manage the new fund. Fernandez has 16 years of experience in the business and most recently worked for Burrill & Co., a $1.5 billion fund with more than 100 biotech and life science companies.

Image: Nicholas Griner - Richard Bendis is CEO of BioHealth Innovation, Inc.

EMERYVILLE, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/30/14 -- Global Clusters of Innovation, released in the UK today by Edward Elgar Publishing, takes a new tack in examining the growth of our global innovation economy -- gathering together an international team of experts to examine the reasons for growth in their home areas.

The book, edited by Berkeley Research Group's Jerome Engel, a senior fellow and the founding executive director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of California, Berkeley, provides in-depth looks at how cities, countries, a corporation, and a nonprofit provide the basic nutrients necessary to spur explosive innovation. David J. Teece, chairman and principal executive officer of Berkeley Research Group and an authority on matters of industrial organization, technological change, and innovation, delivers a foreword to the book.

GlaxoSmithKline has just launched a $5 million Innovation Challenge Fund to advance open-access technology in the bioelectronics space.

The funding’s aimed toward biz-savvy academics and startups that are working to create a new class of treatments that aren’t necessarily pills or injections, but rather are mini implantable devices. GSK says:”The hope is that these devices could be programmed to read and correct the electrical signals that pass along the nerves of the body, to treat disorders as diverse as inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, asthma, hypertension and diabetes.”

Put down that phone and open a map — it’s time for an adventure. For many of us, wanderlust is a constant presence in our lives. Countless minutes are spent daydreaming at our office desks, thinking about packing up our car and setting out on the road.

For James Fisher and Tatiana Parent, married cofounders of Roadtrippers, this dream is a reality. Their job is to travel and to inspire others to take the plunge.

"What started (Roadtrippers) was my family, and the family business," Fisher says. "I was growing up with an African safari company. I actually grew up in the back of a truck — didn’t go to much school or university — and we would do these epic road trips in South Africa.”

Image: ROADTRIPPERS

The Wayne Brown Institute, a Salt Lake City-based venture capital accelerator focusing on technology companies, is looking to increase its presence in Idaho. The accelerator will seek to add up to 40 Idaho mentors to counsel new entrepreneurs and find more startups seeking venture funding. WBI will be hosting a seminar for entrepreneurs on how to ...

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As part of a national recruiting effort, the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator is hosting a reverse pitch offering area entrepreneurs a shot at solving health care providers' conundrums. The accelerator, led by Techstars of Boulder, Colo., will welcome professionals from the University of Kansas Medical Center to share their organization's problems 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Oct. 8 at the Crossroads Arts District facility. Organizers hope to attract entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals, medical students, administrators and researchers to the event, which aims to not only to recruit talent to the accelerator's 2015 program, but also build a relationship with KU.

Image: Bobby Burch | KCBJ John Fein, managing director of the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator

The University of Central Florida’s Business Incubation Program has pumped nearly $2.5 billion into the economy over the last 15 years. The program — which turns 15 years old on Oct. 1 — has created 250 early-stage companies, according to a press release sent out Sept. 30. Those companies have added 3,600 total jobs, sales of $1.51 billion and $2.48 billion in regional economic output.

The White House said that President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative is generating interest from companies and philanthropies in a sign of what it calls a wider partnership developing around the U.S. administration’s most prominent science initiative, first unveiled in 2013.

The White House had committed to spending $100 million this year on the project, which seeks to develop new technologies for studying the brain. As part of that, today the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced $46 million in awards to 58 research groups.

Image: The retinal nerve cells shown in this close-up transmit information to the brain.  - http://www.technologyreview.com

Mirror your interviewer's body language. This technique, known as "mirroring," is widely used in the psychological world as a means to gain an interlocutor's trust and make them feel at ease. Good salesmen often use it to increase their chances of closing.

By mirroring an interviewer's movements, tone, gestures, breathing pace and so on, you're basically communicating a message of, "Hey, we're playing the same tune here. We're akin. You can trust me."

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