Files on a home computer could soon be accessible from anywhere, even when the computer holding them is switched off, thanks to a prototype file-synching system developed at Microsoft's research labs.

The system is designed to demonstrate an alternative to a growing array of cloud services. "One of our underlying principles is that you don't always want to put all of your data in the cloud and give it to Google or some other corporation," said Michelle Mazurek, of Carnegie Mellon University, presenting the technology at the Usenix File and Storage Technology conference in San Jose, California, last week.

Cloud systems can synchronize data between computers to provide access from anywhere, but users have to plan in advance which data they want to sync, and they have to trust a third party with their files.

With consumers on the move, companies need leaders who are not only socially aware, but are prepared to keep innovating and adapting their products to meet changing demands. “I’ve always been fascinated by transformational leaders because they change the way things are,” says Hal Gregersen, INSEAD’s senior affiliate professor of leadership. According to Gregersen great entrepreneurial leaders, like Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs, question everything, scrutinise everyone and experiment with new ideas. “They get great ideas which disrupt entire industries and create lots of jobs.”

And they inspire their employees to follow suit. Waleed Al Somali, administrator of personal development at Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s US$8 trillion oil producer (and the largest in the world), told Knowledge that great leaders were able to transform a company through their charisma and spark. “Having vision that ties and ignites the passion of members of an organisation towards success is important for any leader for transformation to take place,” Al Somali says.

With large companies not stepping up to the plate as “job creators,” small business owners have been under a microscope, with polls and surveys monitoring our hiring actions and intentions as closely as Punxsutawney Phil gets watched on Groundhog Day.

For what seems like eons, there’s been little change in small businesses’ intent to hire. But now, it looks like we can finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. A recent Gallup/Wells Fargo poll pegs small businesses’ plans to hire as the best they’ve been since January 2008—that is, back before the recession began.

Brussels, 21 February 2012 – Seven start-up companies from across Europe were recognised at an awards ceremony here today as two programmes came together to hand out prizes to entrepreneurs. Start-ups from the UK and Germany lead the list of winners, which also includes Spanish and Hungarian companies.

Together, the cluster of awards make a powerful statement about the promise and importance of entrepreneurship in reviving the European economy. The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), an EU institution, launched its first entrepreneurship awards there, for three start-ups. At the same time, the Science|Business Innovation Board, a not-for-profit association, awarded four prizes in its fourth annual Academic Enterprise Awards (ACES) competition.

Ohio is getting more business boot camps following the success of Ohio State University    ’s 10x program. The Ohio Third Frontier Commission on Wednesday approved $760,000 for the Ohio’s New Entrepreneurs fund toward another round of 10x and to establish accelerators in Cleveland and Cincinnati. The department in July had sought “statements of interest” from existing or potential business accelerators, but warned that it wasn’t yet committed to expanding the fund. 10x started last summer and is in the midst of its second class.

I recently read an article in The New York Times about a program that had been proving for many years what lots of people had long suspected — that SAT scores are not necessarily great predictors of college success. The piece got me thinking about my own observations about the relationship between college success and entrepreneurial success. Or perhaps I should say the lack of a relationship.

Choosing entrepreneurship might be one of the most simple and pure adventures you can take. No permission needed, no essays to write, no tests to take, no interviews to get through, no one to tell you what to do or what not to do — and of course no one else to take the credit or blame.

Health IT in Northeast Ohio could get a boost as life science initiative BioEnterprise introduces a new accelerator for emerging health technology companies.

The Health IT Accelerator, announced today by BioEnterprise in partnership with a number of Cleveland healthcare, research, medical payer organizations, will offer mentorship, access to key customers, and business development and fundraising support for area healthcare IT companies with market-ready or in-market products and services.

We’re on post-PC watch here lately, tracking the many warning signs that we’ve crossed the imaginary line separating PC’s heyday from that of a new landscape scattered with multiple mobile devices; it’s a place where the traditional desktop and laptop computer is seeing decreasing importance. That’s why this new Forrester report on mobile devices in the workplace caught my eye, as it highlights the disruption those devices have caused in the business world, seemingly right under the noses of I.T.

Before diving into the data, the report notes that today’s I.T. departments think they have only a handful of devices out in the field: a PC and smartphone for most users, and maybe a tablet for a handful of execs. But in reality, one-half of info workers report using multiple devices, often behind I.T.’s back. Post-PC era? Sounds like it… whether I.T. is ready or not.

You’d expect the founder of one of the world’s largest venture firms to be bullish about the industry.

Dick Kramlich does not disappoint.

Wrapping up an interview Saturday at Harvard University with Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor who’s a force in the VC industry himself, the co-founder and chairman of New Enterprise Associates asked for the last word.

The common wisdom over the past few years is that biotechs are having a rough time attracting venture capital financing thanks to changing priorities for exit strategies and the vagaries in successful drug development and approval. A new analysis, though, suggests that perhaps a shift may be under way - biopharma VC financing totaled nearly $3.5 billion last year, a gain of almost 16 percent over 2010.

Most of that increase occurred in the fourth quarter, when there were 41 deals and financing amounted to $825 million, a 90 percent jump from the last quarter of 2010, when there were 28 deals according to OnBioVC, a research firm that tracks venture capital doings. Overall, there were 160 deals in 2011, compared with 153 during the year before.

Entrepreneur Matt Mullenweg recently said that his motivation isn’t to make money, it’s to change the world. Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic and Audrey Capital, as well as a founding developer behind popular blogging platform WordPress. He says he believes that everyone who has changed the world is a type of entrepreneur. “It’s about drive and ambition, not owning a business or being a boss,” he said in an interview.

Mullenweg didn’t start a company as a kid, but he did have an obsession with business cards. “I thought all you needed to start a business was a business card, and I loved printing things and those perforated card sheets you could buy,” he said. “I’d make business cards for everything.” He may not be obsessed with business cards anymore, but he has an impressive startup resume. His first claim to fame was being a founding developer behind WordPress, the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world. The inspiration for starting to blog came from reading blogs by Jeffrey Zeldman and Anil Dash. “I ended up using open source software called b2 on my own site, and when that project stopped development it became the base of WordPress,” he said. “In the beginning there were never any grand ambitions, I just wanted better software for my own blog and liked the idea of sharing the improvements I was making.” WordPress now powers over 60 million blogs, 16% of all websites.

It's a big week for Boston when two new professional development programs, both with the potential to have a big impact on the local start-up ecosystem, get announced within the span of 48 hours.

TechStars managing director Katie Rae took the covers off Boston Startup School first, on Tuesday night at the Ruby Riot mixer. It'll be a six-week-long program for recent college grads, focused on making them appealing hires for fast-growing tech companies. Participants will choose one of four tracks: marketing, business development and sales, product and design, or software development. "In six weeks, we want to bring a student to a much deeper level of understanding about what it would take to succeed and be hyper-productive for a start-up on the day they join," says Rae. There will be several opportunities throughout the program for students to interact with potential employers, she adds.

It’s been a long-held belief that 50% of businesses fail in the first year and 95% fail within the first five years. However, according to recent statistics published by the Small Business Administration (SBA), seven out of ten new employer establishments survive at least two years, half at least five years, a third at least 10 years, and a quarter stay in business 15 years or more.

LaunchPad2012 welcomes those successful entrepreneurs, small businesses, professional consultants, and corporate professionals that have been in business for a year or more to "Kick Their Careers and Businesses Into Another Gear"!

LaunchPad2012 will debut in Orlando, Florida April 20, from 9a-5p at the Springhill Suites Marriott Orlando Airport.

Email is broken. There’s too much of it, no one can agree on how to use it, it’s too easy to send, which encourages a glut of CYA CCing, and there are spammers. Online IT Degree (which is apparently the real name of a real website) has ventured into this fray with a lighthearted flowchart, designed to help you decide whether it’s really worth sending an email.

It’s a losing battle–we learn that right up at the top. According to Online IT Degree, Atros, a company that banned email, has managed to only reduce its email volume by 20%. That’s with a ban! What can we mere mortals hope to accomplish?

Positron Corporation (OTCBB: POSC), through its wholly owned subsidiary, Manhattan Isotope Technology, LLC (MIT), is proud to announce that on February 15, 2012, MIT, in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory, was awarded the 2012 Federal Laboratory Consortium 'Excellence in Technology Transfer Award' for "Recycling of Strontium-82 for Use in Medical Diagnostic Imaging".

The Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer is presented annually by the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) and recognizes outstanding federal laboratories along with their industry partners for transfer of technology developed by a federal laboratory to the commercial marketplace.  With a select number of recipients this nomination is of the highest caliber as it recognizes partnerships which have developed strategies and opportunities for linking laboratory mission technologies and expertise with the commercial marketplace.

Increasingly, institutions of higher learning are including faculty member patents and commercialization activities in their calculus for offering tenure and promotion. However, a report published in Volume 13 Number 3 of Technology and Innovation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Inventors® finds that 75 percent of institutions surveyed do not include patent and commercialization considerations in their tenure and promotion criteria.

"Texas A&M University created quite a stir in May 2006 when it added commercialization considerations as a sixth factor to be taken into account when faculty members are evaluated for tenure," said report co-author Dr. Paul R. Sanberg, senior associate vice president for research and innovation at the University of South Florida and president of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). "Surprisingly, their lead has not been followed by other major institutions."

The Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), Maryland's largest technology and biotechnology association with more than 400 biotechnology and technology members employing more than 200,000 in the region, will honor Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), with its second annual Lifetime Achievement Award. Hrabowski will be presented the award at TCM's Lifetime Achievement Black Tie Gala : ctt.marketwire.com/?release=854341&id=128906 .. , which is taking place February 29 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center.

The TCM Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to an individual who has gone above and beyond the excellence expected of a business executive over the course of a career by also serving the community at large. The recipient must have demonstrated generosity and compassion, along with business savvy -- ensuring that his or her lasting legacy encompasses both corporate success and community involvement.

It may be a few days away from the Oscars, but let’s face it, the TechFellow Awards are no Academy Awards.

Still, the awards ceremony — held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday evening — did offer up on its red carpet some flash and glitz: the guy Justin Timberlake played in Oscar-nominated “The Social Network,” Sean Parker, and Emmy-winning “Big Bang Theory” star Jim Parsons. Bazinga!

(Also, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee popped up for a quick shout-out to the techies in da house.)

Just what does it mean to get a green card? To some applicants, about $1,000 each month.

Powerful little bastard, isn't he? A recent study by a Universityof Nevada, Reno economist and a graduate student found that employer-sponsored workers in the United States on temporary visas who acquire their green cards and become permanent residents increase their annual incomes by about $11,860. They studied data from The New Immigrant Survey, a collaborative study of new legal immigrants funded in 2003 by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and other public and private partners.

The study, “The Value of an Employment-Based Green Card,” by associate professor Sankar Mukhopadhyay and former graduate student David Oxborrow in the College of Business, was published this month in the journal, Demography.

The renovations on the Bioscience Connecticut Research Center will bring many new opportunities to UConn as well as many other benefits for the rest of the surrounding area. According to their web site, the update promises to bring an economic growth, a higher innovation on technology and more jobs to Connecticut residents. Governor Malloy approved the project in hopes it will jumpstart Connecticut's economy and generate a long growth in entrepreneurship and commercialization.