The robots handle the saliva with care. They group scores of tiny, rubber-capped test tubes into orderly racks and position them under plunging needles. An articulated arm moves some of them from one automated track to another, and all of them eventually get loaded into a small, box-shaped device whose sole job is to vigorously shake things. This separates patients' DNA from their spit. Everything that this huddle of roughly 200 robotic components is doing is about extracting valuable genetic signals from raw physiological noise.

Earlier this year, both Apple and Google presented competing visions for how we'll use apps and wearables to gather data about our bodies and share it via our phones. Apple called its software HealthKit, while Google presented Google Fit.

If things had gone according to plan on Wednesday, Apple would be enjoying a head start over Google, with HealthKit released along with iOS 8, its new mobile software for iPhones and iPads. (Google Fit is still unreleased beyond a "developer preview.") 

John joined a hot enterprise startup, backed by a top VC. His job: close pilot deals with enterprise customers. Jess joined a SaaS company backed by the same investor, to develop an inside sales process to convert individual users into enterprise clients.

Two years later, both John and Jess had closed key early clients, confirming their business’s customer acquisition assumptions and helping secure premium Series B valuations. Jess was leading a department of 10 reps, but John was replaced by an experienced sales director — quickly becoming the most junior member of his team, with the least responsibility and the least extensive list of customer prospects.

Image: Free Digital Photos

One day, in the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to walk into a car dealership, choose a design — including the number of seats — and have a 3D printed car by the end of the day.

This is Jay Rogers’ vision. Rogers is the CEO of Local Motors, the company that just built the world's first 3D printed car known as the Strati. The electric, pint-sized two-seater was officially unveiled last week at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago, Illinois.

Image: The Strati 3D-Printed Car - Local Motors

A new report by the Brookings Institution puts another public spotlight on what it calls U.S. Department of Energy’s chronic lack of initiative to push technology commercialization at its 17 national laboratories.

The report, released last week, says the DOE has failed “to aggressively and fully seize the opportunity to turn federally funded research into new products and services.”

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Some MOOC skeptics believe that the only students fit to learn in massive open online courses are those who are already well educated. Without coaching and the support system of a traditional program, the thinking goes, ill-prepared students will not learn a thing.

Not so, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The researchers analyzed data from a physics course that MIT offered on the edX platform in the summer of 2013. They found that students who had spent significant time on the course showed evidence of learning no matter what their educational background.

Image: Free Digital Photos

“My dad taught me an important lesson. If you rehearse every maneuver ahead of time, people don’t panic when things get really intense.” So says, Peter Hancock, CEO of AIG when discussing how competitive sailing led to his management philosophy.

The worst is likely the last thing you want to think about when you are preparing for a job interview or new business meeting. It’s the last thing you want to imagine before going on camera or leading a presentation. And, it certainly isn’t how you visualize each day at work, when it seems everything is going all right.

One of the murkiest areas of Internet commerce is the international trade of personal information gathered by certain companies who monitor our behaviour online. This kind of third-party data gathering is ubiquitous on the web thanks to the humble “cookie”.

A cookie is a small piece of data that a website loads onto your browser. Every time you visit that site in future, the browser sends that cookie back to the server so that the website can correlate this with your previous activity.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

The Global Top 10 by UBI Index is the first and the most reliable ranking of Top University Associated Business Incubators. After extensive research and quality assurance process throughout June, July and August, we are now ready to announce the Global Top 10 University Associated Business Incubators of the year 2014.  

For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with tiny, musclelike coils. She would then plug in to a spacecraft’s power supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap the garment around her body.

The skintight, pressurized suit would not only support the astronaut, but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration. To take the suit off, she would only have to apply modest force, returning the suit to its looser form.

Image: http://scienceblog.com

A number of research universities in the UK, and no doubt elsewhere, are considering setting up medium sized investment funds (around £50m) to support and enhance their technology transfer activities, specifically the formation of successful spin-out companies.

This is a natural progression for universities in the development of technology transfer activities, and like most things in life there are advantages and disadvantages for those involved.

Image: Tom Hockaday of Oxford University's TTO Isis Innovation discusses the pros and cons of the university investment fund.

The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning announced on Sept. 16 that it selected 25 future leaders to participate in the Korea-U.S. Biotechnology Creative Economy Leader Training Project that starts this year in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This program’s purpose is to help Korean researchers to conduct joint studies at the NIH while taking part in technology transfer education sessions so that they can enhance their start-up and technology transfer capabilities as venture entrepreneurs. Up to 65 million won (US$62,385) is provided for two years for each of the beneficiaries, who are scheduled to join research activities at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institute on Aging (NIA), and the like and learn about intellectual property rights, technology marketing, and business negotiations at the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) of the NIH from December this year.

Image: http://www.businesskorea.co.kr

All the cool kids write Node.js. But the rich kids? They're into COBOL. 

According to an ITWorld report, college students that take COBOL classes earn as much as $10,000 more in their first jobs than their Go-slumming hipster friends. Even though COBOL is a programming relic of enterprise systems gone by.

Image: http://readwrite.com/

Investor purse strings loosened to fund North Carolina companies to the tune of $266 million in the first half of 2014, up more than 31 percent compared to the same period last year, according to a new report. But perhaps more surprising than the dollars are the investment trends suggested by the report. Angel investment seems to have stepped up in North Carolina to fill an investment gap left by venture capitalists. And for the first time in recent memory, total technology investments have eclipsed life science investments—by a wide margin.

This week. On the phone …

Me: So, you raised venture capital?

Him: Yeah. We raised a seed round. About $1 million.

Me: At what price?

Him: It wasn’t priced. We raised a convertible note.

Me: With a cap?

Him: Yes, $8 million.

Me: Ah. I see. So you did raise with a price. It’s just a maximum price. You’ll find out the minimum when the next round is raised.

Him: Huh?

Few things can sap productivity like a day filled with meetings and conference calls. Conventional wisdom says to work on eliminating them, but sometimes, the organizational culture or nature of the work just lends itself to having a lot of meetings.

If you work in a meeting-heavy environment, take heart. It’s still possible to get stuff done. Here’s an 8-point attack plan:

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SYDNEY — The Lean Startup Machine rolled into town in September.

With only 1000 tech startups in Australia and little contact with startup hotspots such as Silicon Valley or Tel Aviv, Lean Startup Machine wants to give local entrepreneurs the skills needed to compete and succeed.

Based on the Lean Startup movement founded by Eric Reis, which advises companies to work backwards from the business results rather than forward from the technology, the Lean Startup Machine is a three-day bootcamp based on the same principles. These principles can be put to use helping Australian startups succeed by looking at the way they are managed in their initial phases.

Image: Free Digital Photos

A £10m start-up accelerator, MassChallenge UK, is to launch in London to support “hundreds” of British entrepreneurs and early-stage businesses.

The UK programme intends to build on the success of the US MassChallenge accelerator in Boston, Massachusetts, which claims to be the world’s largest business accelerator with over $1m awarded to winning start-ups each year since it began in 2010.

Image: Free Digital Photos

One of the realities of being an entrepreneur is that you have to keep learning and changing to survive. Everyone on the startup team knows there is no buffer, and no personal isolation from impact based on your job description that can save you. Thus everyone has to make sure they are focusing on what is important, and making leadership decisions to save the business.

Washington state’s Providence Health & Services today said it is launching a $150 million venture capital fund to help spur innovation across the healthcare system that lowers costs and leads to better outcomes.

Coincidentally, it’s the second VC fund announced in as many days on the West Coast, following yesterday’s announcement from the University of California.

Image: Free Digital Photos