Doctors who are away from the hospital can remotely control this robot and use it to videoconference with patients or medical colleagues. The RP-VITA (short for Remote Presence Virtual and Independent Telemedicine Assistant) can also call up patient medical records and display them to the remote doctor on an iPad or PC. Unlike earlier telepresence robots, this one doesn’t have to be manually sent around the hospital by the remote doctor; it can be fed a map of a hospital’s layout and instructed with a single click to go to a certain spot on its own, using sensors and obstacle-detection technology developed by iRobot.

IN the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day.

Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.

Large companies contribute disproportionately more to a country’s economic performance than smaller ones, according to a new EU-funded survey. Bigger corporations are more productive, they pay higher wages, enjoy higher profits, and are more successful in international markets, said the report by European Firms in a Global Economy (EFIGE), an EU-funded project.

Therefore, a country's economic performance can be linked to its number of big corporations, says the survey, which was carried out under the supervision of Brussels-based think tank Bruegel.

Viral marketing and word-of-mouth are not enough these days to make your product and brand visible in the relentless onslaught of new promotional media out there today. Innovation in marketing is perhaps more important than product innovation. Yet in the business plans I see, the marketing content and budget are smaller than ever.

More than just spending, you need to create an “experience” in this digital age which sets you apart from the banner ads, email blasts, and old-school websites out there today. According to a book a while back by Rick Mathieson, these have morphed into a digital universe of augmented reality, advergames, and virtual worlds – that are highly personalizable and uniquely shareable.

“Today, for only a few hundred dollars, we can hold in the palm of our hands smart devices with computing power that 10 years ago would have cost more than $1 million. With gigabytes of storage capacity, anyone with a smart phone, a laptop, or a tablet computer can generate and analyze huge streams of data for just a few hundred dollars – data that would have cost billions of dollars in the 1970s. Smart devices today are a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than anything available 30 years ago.”

Ray Kurzweil, famed technologist and author of The Singularity Is Near – a controversial book predicting that machines will best human intelligence by 2025 – spoke these words in an October 2011 speech at the World Technology Network conference in New York City.

Are the days of economic prosperity in America behind us? They could be, according to economics professor Robert Gordon of Northwestern University. He argues in a new working paper Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds, that robust economic growth may be a thing of the past. The rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well prove to be a unique success tale for the history books, but not a sustainable path for the future.

A lot of people in Silicon Valley are down on job-hoppers these days. They’re flaky, they’re bad employees, they steal all the Sharpies when they leave, blah, blah, blah. But it turns out that all that job-hopping is an important part of what makes the Valley so special. 

Everyone loves a good game of musical chairs. The tune kicks on, everyone jumps up and runs in a circle laughing and the party is good. That’s Silicon Valley over the past few years. A lot of people whirling around and having a grand old time. But what would happen if the music started and nobody got up to play? What if companies want to hire but all the workers stay firmly seated in their current positions?

Hands up if you spent months researching a new product or service, invested too much, and had everything riding on one big idea. Then within weeks of launch, you realised your venture needed significant change to survive. So much, in fact, that most of your research was redundant.

You wish you spent less time researching the idea and more time testing it on customers – in real market time – and letting their comments shape the product. Next time you will get your product to market much faster and cheaper, and quickly nuke the idea if it fails.

The U.S. workforce lost 407 million days of work to illness in 2005, and workers without paid time off to see a physician were more likely to report missing work. That’s a lot of days — but that number would probably be much higher if it weren’t for some fundamental innovations in medicine.

The industrial workers that Labor Day was meant to honor still deal with more physical occupational hazards than the office-dwelling folk, the most common among them being muscle strains and sprains, cuts and punctures, and pain. As we salute the labor force today, let’s also take a moment on Labor Day 2012 to hail these and other medical innovations that have made life better for the modern working man and woman.

Over the weekend, the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) and Citi teamed up to offer interactive live video chats, weekly email lessons, an eBook club, and access to YEC’s complete library of how-to articles and videos. The YEC was recently focused on the #FixYoungAmerica campaign, which was meant to shift the conversation about joblessness and underemployment in our country. The YEC’s newest effort focuses on helping organizations develop resources to increase their members’ chances of success.

#StartupLab will offer a virtual mentorship program to enable top young startup founders to help America’s workforce adopt a more entrepreneurial approach toward their careers. Established entrepreneurs participating in #StartupLab include Catherine Cook of MeetMe, Jennifer Fleiss of Rent the Runway, Ryan Allis of iContact, and Matt Mickiewicz of 99Designs, just to name a few.

The high-tech devices of Silicon Valley depend on tiny, hard silicon chips. Yet in an imagined future in which walls, windows and clothes act as computingdevices, the hardware components would have to be soft and flexible. One research group has taken a first step toward that flexible future, combining a conductor and an insulator in the thinnest sheet possible ― just one atom thick.

"This work shows that it is possible to bring together these two materials. What we believe that opens the doors to is the ability to create these atomically thin electronics, or more-complicated stacked electronics," said Mark Levendorf, a graduate student who worked on the new material. Levendorf studies nanotech chemistry at Cornell University. 

Accomplished Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla likens modern healthcare to witchcraft, and says technology will replace 80 percent of doctors.

His views, offered up in a talk last week in San Francisco, sparked outrage from doctors.

Khosla is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and made his mark as one of the most successful investors during the Internet boom of the late 1990s with his backing of networking equipment companies.

He made the healthcare comments during the Health Innovation Summit, hosted by Rock Health, a seed accelerator company focused on health care. Khosla’s keynote talk is nicely summarized by Davis Liu, a doctor who attended the event.

For too many American technology start-ups, Europe is a dirty word.

Classically, US start-ups have pursued the European market after their Series B or C funding rounds, or even later. Many companies only consider Europe when their US growth begins slowing down.

Then, they might target Europe by either hiring a European industry visionary, or by transferring a top sales person to London and hoping for the best. Sometimes this approach is successful, but it’s often not.

There’s a spot in Cleveland that is becoming what many had hoped for: a bit vibrant, a bit hip, with breweries, local retail, and farm-to-table restaurants turning that hard rawness of a disinvested Rust Belt city strip into a thing less raw.

Actually, the current mix of grit and slight refinement works well on Cleveland’s W. 25th St in Ohio City. Characters abound. The racial and class mixing feels both natural and unforced. Place authenticity is there, aided no doubt by the presence of the 100-year old West Side Market anchoring what is an emerging neighborhood identity of an area where one can get a bite or sip of Cleveland amidst its architectural integrity. And the distinctive Cleveland-ness of it all is becoming ever more attractive, especially to those looking for something beyond that sea of cities sanitizing their urban terroir.

From Benjamin Franklin to Ben & Jerry, William Penn to Bill Gates, Eli Whitney to Oprah Winfrey, famous entrepreneurs, both historical and contemporary, offer insight and inspiration through their stories.

I first encountered Chris Guillebeau at the most recent South by Southwest Interactive conference, where he presented his new book  The $100 Startup to an appreciative crowd of would-be entrepreneurs. As an aficionado of "bootstrapped" operations, I listened to his talk with avid interest. The core idea is that you may not need a bank loan or a group of investors to launch your business -- just $100 and a burning desire to make your first sale as quickly as possible.

When you need to do research about your business, where do you turn? If you're like me, your first stop is probably the web. Google, Wikipedia, and then let's face it, I check Facebook and my email (don't we all?).

But what has been exciting to discover in the past few months is how many amazing resources exist for me locally, especially through my local public library.

Every business knows how important it is to capture and develop innovative ideas. Every business will tell you it is a priority to focus on innovation and high on everyone’s agenda. However, in reality not many companies can honestly claim to do innovation well. Maintaining their innovation ecosystem is one of the common characteristics amongst those companies that do.

There are three main components of an organisation’s innovation ecosystem. Getting the balance right between these three components is crucial:

I have been asking a pretty straightforward question for the past few weeks, via Twitter and e-mails to especially well-connected sources: Who has been most active in 2012 to make Boston’s innovation economy better? I’ve curated that list and woven in names of my own to come up with 25 people who are dialing up innovation. A key criteria was whether they were involved with starting something new, taking over an existing entity, or expanding something. In no particular order, they are:

The theme of the first day of the Republican National Convention was "We Built It," a rallying-cry from entrepreneurs who insisted that they didn't need government to start their businesses. This week, we can expect the Democratic response to highlight the ways Obama's administration has empowered job creators.

But what would an entrepreneur-first platform, stripped of party politics, really look like? Last week, I asked readers for answers. From hundreds of comments on the original article and  notes on Hacker News, here are 19 comments that paint a big picture, even if some of the smartest comments disagree with each other: First, we need the economy to come back. Second, we need tax reform that both simplifies and refocuses on helping small companies rather than established corporations. Third, there was broad support for a universal health care option -- or at the very least, a move away from employer-sponsored insurance subsidies, which put large and start-up companies on unequal footing. Finally, readers pointed to an array of regulatory, paperwork, and patent rules that needed tinkering.