Brazilian surfer Carlos Burle road a storm surge off the coast of Nazare, Portugal on Monday that may have been the largest wave ever surfed. According to Deadspin, early reports have estimated that the wave was somewhere in the range of 100 feet high. If that’s the case, Garrett McNamara’s record of riding a 78-foot wave at the same beach in 2011 would be easily broken.

A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and Ingolstadt. I’m in the driver’s seat, watching cars and trucks pass by, but I haven’t touched the steering wheel, the brake, or the gas pedal for at least 10 minutes. The BMW approaches a truck that is moving slowly. To maintain our speed, the car activates its turn signal and begins steering to the left, toward the passing lane. Just as it does, another car swerves into the passing lane from several cars behind. The BMW quickly switches off its signal and pulls back to the center of the lane, waiting for the speeding car to pass before trying again.

Brussels – On a popular Linked-In discussion group, someone recently asked how to get hold of the detailed planning documents for Horizon 2020, the European Union’s new, €70 billion research programme. The answer from one colleague?  “Just ask the Internet.”

Indeed, when it comes to getting EU money, the Internet is a bigger help than you might expect. Through some carefully constructed Google searches, our news editor, Joanne O’Dea, was able to find almost all of the key Horizon 2020 documents, the so-called work programmes, scattered across university and member-state Websites around the EU – in fact, seemingly everywhere except the European Commission’s own Website.

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Money knows no boundaries, the saying goes.  Apparently, no one bothered to tell venture capital.  Despite the fact that money can theoretically go almost anywhere in the world, venture capital to fuel growing companies is still strongly correlated to geography.  And most regions have little to none.

The Obama administration’s disastrous rollout of the new online health-care marketplace healthcare.gov gives citizens one more reason to despair of ever being able to use computers to improve government.

City of San Francisco San Francisco City Hall But technology entrepreneurs are not so pessimistic—at least not according to Rahul Mewawalla, who’s in charge of a new Entrepreneurship in Residence program for the City of San Francisco.

It’s no easy feat becoming an entrepreneur in emerging markets, especially since one’s entrepreneurial potential is so often stunted by the onerous bureaucratic processes involved in setting up a business and raising capital. For this reason, the advent of micro-finance has ignited hopes that micro-entrepreneurs would now have one less obstacle in their way.

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Forbes:

1. Control yourself well, but don’t try to control others.

2. Don’t try to do everything, or you may accomplish very little.

3. Making the time to organize yourself will save you time.

4. Aim for achieving excellence, but reject perfectionism.

5. Understand and overcome procrastination.

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Every Halloween, millions of surrogate zombies, vampires, and goblins take to the streets, looking to fill the fluorescent orange brainpans of their plastic pumpkins with individually wrapped, fun-sized candies. It seems like a custom immemorial, but trick-or-treating wasn't always an inseparable part of Halloween: in fact, little more than 60 years ago, many Americans had never even seen a trick-or-treater.

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PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 30, 2013 — Mayor Michael A. Nutter officially launched FastFWD, an Urban Innovation Refinery, a partnership between the City of Philadelphia, GoodCompany Group, a social enterprise accelerator, and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. FastFWD, formerly known as the Philadelphia Social Enterprise Partnership, is an initiative that seeks to recruit and support entrepreneurs in developing solutions to urban challenges. In its inaugural year, FastFWD will focus on public safety.

The MassChallenge start-up accelerator program crowned 15 winners and awarded $1 million in cash prizes Wednesday night, capping four months of intensive business training in a ceremony at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center.

The biggest checks were for $100,000 and went to Hemova Medical, maker of a medical device for improving kidney dialysis; MoneyThink, which offers personal finance courses to urban teens; RailPod, maker of a robot that inspects railroad tracks; ViralGains, a digital marketing firm; and 99Degrees Custom, which manufactures personalized apparel in Lowell and Lawrence.

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If you're a budding entrepreneur in college, it's likely that the Bay Area is your go-to destination for getting your start-up off the ground.

And while Silicon Valley is still the top destination for start-ups and tech innovators, a number of cities typically thought of as second-tier are drawing college entrepreneurs and recent grads.

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To learn about how to think globally as an entrepreneur, I spoke to Steven Strauss, who is often called "America's leading small business expert". His USA Today column is one of the most highly syndicated business columns in the world. He is the author of the new book,Planet Entrepreneur: The World Entrepreneurship Forum's Guide to Business Success Around the World (Wiley, 2013). Strauss has written more than a dozen other books and isthe President of The Strauss Group, Inc., a multi-media content creation business. For more information, visit TheSelfEmployed.com.

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Between Lady Gaga working as creative director at Polaroid, Alicia Keys acting as BlackBerry's new global creative director, and Will.i.am heading up Creative Innovation at Intel, there's no shortage of celebrities "working" at technology companies. Now we can add Ashton Kutcher to the list, because he's just been named Lenovo's newest employee. That's right. Ashton, who recently played Steve Jobs in a movie about the Apple founder's life, is now Product Engineer at Lenovo.

UC San Diego has occupied a significant role in creating, nurturing and growing the life science and technology industries in the region. Serving as an educational institute, a research hub and an integrative community leader, the university has been instrumental in the formation of the innovation ecosystem in San Diego.

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In an age when you can reliably network with just about anyone, anywhere in the world, Hunter Weeks made the connection of a lifetime very much offline. It was at an old folks' home in Great Falls, Montana.

A director and producer of documentaries, Weeks had just wrapped his fourth film Ride the Divide, about the world's most difficult mountain-bike race, and was working at a creative agency part time until the next burst of inspiration came along. Gathering information for a retrospective of the state’s denizens, Weeks came across an article about Walter Breuning. At age 113, Breuning “wasn’t just oldest person in Montana,” Weeks says, still shaking his head in disbelief, “He turned out to be the oldest man in the world. I was hoping he was still alive.”

Three billion people, six hundred million of them middle-class aspiring for better lifestyle, hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists trained annually, along with tens of thousands of graduates of world-ranked Asia-based business schools, collectively offer ingredients for limitless types and numbers of innovations in Asia.

As an example, consider Indonesia, a country of around 300 million people who happen to have the largest collection of Blackberries and as a nation are among the top five users of Facebook, Twitter and SMS globally. How can innovators and entrepreneurs around the world leverage this infrastructure to create innovations that are relevant to that country? And remember, any solution developed there could be adapted for China, India, African and Latin American countries.

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Within a few years, Asia will not only be the world’s largest producer of goods and services, it will also be the world’s largest consumer of them. In the future, it will also be home to the majority of the world’s middle class. It is the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic region. Welcome to the Asian Century.

To put it more graphically (in more ways than one), by 2030 the size of the ‘middle class’ customer market in the Asia Pacific region is estimated to be twice that of all the other major markets combined (Fig. 1).

In Q3’13, deal activity by corporate venture arms reached the highest levels since the start of 2011. And driving the growth in corporate venture deals are a small band of CVCs more active than the rest.

Peeling back the most active corporate venture arms in U.S. companies last quarter reveals that Google Ventures tops the list of most active CVCs, followed by Intel Capital, Samsung Ventures and SAP Ventures. With massive cash positions on the balance sheets of public tech companies, the top 5 most active CVCs in Q3’13 all came from tech sector.

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) moved one step further in enlarging the pool of capital available to entrepreneurs when it unanimously voted to propose regulations to allow unaccredited U.S. investors to invest in startups and small businesses for equity, as set out in Title III of the JOBS Act. I took a look at reactions to this latest step and how it compares to a couple of other nations on a similar mission.

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