Greensboro, N.C, Hartford, Conn., Las Vegas, Nev. to receive $1 million each

Acting U.S. Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank today announced that Greensboro, North Carolina; Hartford, Connecticut; and Las Vegas, Nevada are the winners of the Obama administration’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2) Challenge. The goal of the competition is to generate innovative ideas, strategies, and perspectives that cities can use to develop long-term economic and job growth plans.

The Strong Cities, Strong Communities Challenge is being led by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA).

The Challenge will consist of two phases in each winning city. In the first phase, multiple teams comprised of experts in fields like transportation planning, economic and community development, business incubation, and engineering will submit economic development proposals for their city and/or region. Each city will evaluate the submitted proposa

Cravings for chocolate reflect something more than a desire for comfort—namely an addiction triggered by a brain chemical, according to newly-published research.

The result is irresistibility to chocolate that is comparable to a drug addiction. Surges of a natural, opium-like chemical produced by the dorsal neostriatum—a brain region primarily linked to movement—contributes to generating intense consumption sweet treats and other “palatable” food, according to a study in rats by four University of Michigan, Ann Arbor investigators published in the journal Current Biology.

The drastic melting of Arctic sea ice has finally ended for the year, scientists announced Wednesday, but not before demolishing the previous record — and setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region.

The apparent low point for 2012 was reached Sunday, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which said that sea ice that day covered about 1.32 million square miles, or 24 percent, of the surface of the Arctic Ocean. The previous low, set in 2007, was 29 percent.

When satellite tracking began in the late 1970s, sea ice at its lowest point in the summer typically covered about half the Arctic Ocean, but it has been declining in fits and starts over the decades.

Hop on the bus, Gus -- the startup bus. 

Have you seen this thing driving around Maryland this month -- it's a big bus draped in the colors of the Maryland flag. It's hard to miss.

The Startup Bus is part of a national and state initiative to promote startup company formation and entrepreneurship. The bus has its own video recording studio built into it, where entrepreneurs are recording their business pitches.

People can vote for the best business pitches online and the top 8 vote-getters will get to pitch their businesses -- in person -- at the Maryland Entrepreneur Expo in November. Two winners will be chosen then, and they'll receive invitations to the Mid-Atlantic region's top venture capital conferences.

The goal of UMass Boston’s Entrepreneurship Center is simple: to get students out and working in the city’s startup community. Since opening four years ago, the Center has grown to offer 99 paid — yes, paid — internships with nearly 45 Massachusetts-based companies, including Buzzient, peerTransfer, Acquia and MassChallenge.

The added bonus? About 70 percent of those students are getting hired full-time when they graduate, according to the Center’s Founder and Director Dan Phillips, the former CEO of SilverBack Technologies and COO of Concord Communications.

Because the Center only opened four years ago, Phillips says it’s “a startup to begin with” and that they’ve “been growing this incrementally.” At the core of the program rests a hands-on approach to learning, which is reflected in both the internship program and the Center’s two cornerstone courses.

Daniel Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need conveys a number of principles about the world of work that everyone should take note of. Why? Though Pink doesn't bog the story down with academic research, all of his core ideas are backed up by plenty of studies, many of which I've posted about in the past.

This week I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote presentation to a group of new car dealers in British Columbia. The conference was held at a unique resort called Sparkling Hill. Although it had spectacular views of the Okanagan valley from every room,

I was captivated by the crystal architecture that inspired every part of the property (the hotel has 3.5 million Swarovski crystals). The man driving me to the resort said, “Everyone who comes here seems to leave profoundly changed.”

“Why do you think that is?” I asked the driver.

Middle-market executives have a mixed opinion on the performance of the US economy, which can affect their attitude towards innovation within their company. This was one of the key findings by Forbes Insights, who in association with BMO Harris Bank, surveyed more than 300 senior executives to produce its latest study, Harnessing Innovation to Jumpstart Growth: Lessons from Middle Market Companies.

A third of the executives surveyed thought that the economy was very weak or weak, a third had a neutral view, and the remainder perceived it as strong or very strong.  This mixed opinion makes it difficult to make any prediction for the future, but what is clear is that companies with a positive or optimistic view of the US economy will be more likely to want to drive innovation and change.

If you work for someone else now and are thinking about starting your own business, there is a way to measure your readiness to make the jump. You need only look at your current conduct to accurately assess your chances of entrepreneurial achievement.

There are specific behaviors that successful entrepreneurs tend to engage in, and certain filters through which they evaluate and respond to business challenges. This mindset, while partly innate, can also be learned, practiced and expanded. It can be assessed as well, and you are about to measure your entrepreneurial inclination in the next 5 to 10 minutes.

Raising money is one of the biggest challenges an entrepreneur faces when starting a business. So, in the late '80s, the state of Maine decided to help by creating the Seed Capital Tax Credit program. It's administered by FAME - the Finance Authority of Maine - and it gives investors a tax credit up to a 60 percent on investments in qualified businesses.

So, if someone invests $100,000 in a company, they could get $60,000 back in tax credits over the course of four years. "I'd say it's important in a couple ways," says Tim Agnew, a principal at Masthead Venture Partners in Portland who wass the CEO of FAME for 11 years.

On Wednesday, the Department of Labor announced $500 million in grants to community colleges and universities across the U.S. to help develop and expand workforce training programs, including programs related to health care and health IT, Healthcare IT News reports.

Grant Details The grants are part of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training initiative, which is administered by DOL and the Department of Education.

As part of initiative, each state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico will receive at least $2.5 million for community college career training programs.

In 2001, the Human Genome Project produced a near-complete readout of the human species’ DNA. But researchers had little idea about how those As, Gs, Cs, and Ts were used, controlled, or organized, much less how they code for a living, breathing human.

That knowledge gap has just got a little smaller. A massive international project called ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, has cataloged every nucleotide within the genome that does something—which, it turns out, is significantly more than the 1.5 percent of the genome contains actual instructions for making proteins. The research, a 10-year effort by an international team of 442 scientists, shows that the rest of the genome—the non-coding majority—is still rife with “functional elements.”

The Human Genome project sequenced “the human genome” and is widely credited with setting in motion the most exciting era of fundamental new scientific discovery since Galileo. That’s remarkable, because in important ways “the human genome” that we have labeled as such doesn’t actually exist.

Plato essentially asserted that things like chairs and dogs, which we observe in this physical world, and even concepts like virtues, are but imperfect representations or instances of some ideal that exists, but not in the material world. Such a Platonic ideal is “the human genome,” a sequence of about 3 billion nucleotides arrayed across a linear scale of position from the start of chromosome 1 to the end of the sex chromosomes. Whether it was obtained from one person or several has so far been shrouded in secrecy for bioethical reasons, but it makes no real difference. What we call the human genome sequence is really just a reference: it cannot account for all the variability that exists in the species, just like no single dog on earth, real or imagined, can fully incorporate all the variability in the characteristics of dogs.

NetWork Kansas invites Kansas communities to apply for a new economic gardening program that would allow them to offer high-growth businesses in their area targeted economic gardening engagements as part of the Kansas Economic Gardening Network. The NetWork Kansas Economic Gardening Community Application process will accept submissions from community partnerships to provide matching funds for economic gardening engagements with 3-7 businesses in an applying community. Additionally, NetWork Kansas has partnered with Mid-American Manufacturing Technology Center (MAMTC) to offer Innovation Engineering engagements to qualified businesses through the economic gardening program. The deadline for initial community applications is Oct. 12, 2012.

The Kansas Economic Gardening Network was launched by NetWork Kansas in 2010 to connect second-stage companies that have the intent and capacity to grow their business with significant sophisticated technical assistance. Selected businesses interact with an experienced national economic gardening team who deliver economic gardening services tailored to meet the needs of each business. Examples of economic gardening services include GIS, market research, SEO tools, social media monitoring, and sales lead generation. Jeremy Hill of Wichita State University has completed certification to provide market research expertise to Kansas companies and is the first Kansan certified to provide expertise as part of the national team.

Last month super-angel Dave McClure told me that one of his hottest areas of investment was education. McClure and 500 Startups are mostly investing in informal education, but all of education is ripe for disruption, as Codeacademy, Khan Academy, and MIT OpenCourseware are teaching us.

Boundless, the free educational content company, looked at the last 10 years of venture capital investment in education.

Overall, it’s not a great track record, with education taking only three percent of VC investment in the past decade, even though the sector is 5.5 percent of the economy. And the total investment has only been $2.8 billion — less than half of what was invested in biotech in 2011 alone.

Entrepreneurs give up 5% of their companies to appear on the ABC reality show Shark Tank. Some might wonder whether such a sacrifice is worth the opportunity to pitch your idea to “rock stars” like Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and a panel of other wealthy investors.

“There is a myth in our culture that being successful in business involves raising money from well known individuals. That’s partially why Shark Tank has taken off. But its not always the case,” says Ami Kassar, founder of MultiFunding, a Philadelphia-area firm dedicated to helping small businesses find money.

Everyone is familiar with a BHAG: A Big Hairy Audacious Goal. It’s a type of strategic business plan that focuses an organization on a shoot for the moon outcome designed, by dint of its desirability, to serve as a catalytic agent to engage the hopes (and energies) of rank-and-file workers. Theoretically, a BHAG helps workers ignore how aggressively they are being pushed to perform by guys in corner offices; an opiate without side effects.  At least that’s what James Collins and Jerry Porras claim in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.

Well, I have a BHAG, albeit a modest one: To convince entrepreneurs to forget about BHAGs. Instead, focus on my 7 Steps to Entrepreneurial Success.