The Army wants to develop a massive virtual world populated by 10,000 avatars that are managed by artificial intelligence and operate over a 32-mile square simulated landscape.

Officials at the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command's Simulation and Technology Training Center said they want a systems integrator to put together a virtual world that includes soldiers, vehicles and weapons that can move around a landscape built from Defense Department digital terrain elevation data.

The Simulation and Technology Training Center also said in its request for information that it wants to incorporate technologies used in massively multiplayer online games and offer classified and unclassified versions.

Diagnostics for All, a nonprofit startup in Cambridge, MA, has designed a cheap, disposable blood test for liver damage. The device uses a stack of paper the size of a postage stamp for a test of toxicity for drugs to treat HIV and tuberculosis.

Some antiretroviral therapies and many TB drugs are toxic to the liver. Patients on HIV and TB medication in rich countries are typically monitored every month for liver damage and taken off the treatment if liver damage becomes imminent. "In the U.S., [testing] is routine. It's expected, it's standard," says Nira Pollock, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and infectious diseases expert at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

On May 26, 2010 the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City convened a roundtable on Anchor Institutions to help shape the agenda for the 2010 Summit of the Inner City Economic Forum. The Summit this year will focus on where and how jobs will be created in the inner city economy during the next decade. The roundtable discussion convened a diverse group researchers and practitioners to discuss emerging trends in the role of critical economic development anchors (universities and hospitals).

Advertising needs to send a clear message that users can easily grab. At the same time, the message must to intrigue and entice the customer to purchase the product.

Most of advertisements that we can see on TV or magazines are still elaborates. Instead, I think that simple and minimal advertisement is easier to understand for users and capture their attention in less time.

Create an advertisement minimalistic, and at the same time, clean to understand isn’t easy to do. This post contains a collection of 30 advertisements where minimalism is the main feature.

The figures for venture-capital funding for the first quarter of this year are in, and it's a mixed bag. Some sectors are seeing funding increase while others are losing ground. Interestingly, the two biggest sectors didn't gain any ground, while traditionally less-funded industries moved ahead.

When we look at the psychology of human behavior we can begin to understand certain motivations which draw adults to social media.

Abraham Maslow published his theory of human motivation in 1943. Its popularity continues unabated. Like his colleague Carl Rogers, Maslow believed that actualization was the driving force of human personality, a concept he captures in his 1954 book, Motivation and Personality Maslow’s great insight was to place actualization into a hierarchy of motivation.

MENTION the name of a big European technology firm in Silicon Valley and chances are the reaction will be a mixture of pity and disparagement. SAP, the German software heavyweight? Past its prime. Finland’s Nokia, the world’s biggest maker of handsets? Missed the boat on smart-phones. Ericsson, of Sweden, the leading vendor of gear for mobile networks? Clobbered by the Chinese.

Turn the conversation to start-ups, though, and ears prick up. When will Spotify, a popular London-based online music service, be available in America? Why did Playfish, whose online games attract tens of millions, sell out to Electronic Arts, an American giant? And what will happen to Skype, whose software handles nearly 10% of international telephone calls, after its divorce from eBay, an online auctioneer?

According to data from the US Census Bureau, San Francisco has more people with bachelors' or graduate degrees per square mile than any other city.

On a recent day at LinkedIn Corp.’s headquarters, Chief Executive Jeff Weiner had just finished an all-important task: installing a “High-Five Zone” in front of his office.

The energetic executive fastened a giant square of red tape on the floor and a sign on the wall that instructs people how and when to give high fives. Anyone who walks through the square, which is nearly impossible to avoid, must give a high five to others nearby, the sign declares.

It’s one small example of how Weiner has sought to invigorate LinkedIn since joining the company from Yahoo Inc. a year ago. On a grander scale, Weiner is infusing his high energy into a Web site aiming to become an everyday destination for people to enhance their careers and improve their skills for their current jobs. The seven-year-old company, which boasts some 70 million users and diverse revenue lines, is focused on adding more practical data-oriented tools that provide practical tools for people to use in their jobs and to improve their careers.

The Green Economy is the Hot Topic of the day, and the discussions most often focus on what steps the government is taking.

This approach IMO downplays the role that the market forces play.

A Green Economy can only be realized through the market. And we do not know if the consumer are willing to pay for environmental protection, low-carbon products and technology. Without markets and prices, it is very difficult to develop a Green Economy.

The World Cup is right around the corner, and you'd assume that it'll be an economic bonanza for the host country, South Africa. But the South African government looks at the event differently: They've essentially used the event to mortgage their future.

As this infographic by Menainfra shows, South Africa is spending a whopping $52 billion on the Cup--even though it's only expected to add about $2.7 billion to the country's GDP.

What gives? Those excess investments have gone toward massive new infrastructure projects, which the country hopes will sustain its growth for decades to come. Included, for example, is $9.1 billion on roads, $2.3 billion on airports, $2 billion on rail systems (including a high-speed link between Johannesburg and Pretoria), and, of course, $2.2 billion on sports stadiums. (The irony is that the stadiums are perhaps the most necessary investments--and the ones least likely to yield dividends in the future. And that's why past Olympics have been often been an economic curse, for the host cities.)

The World Cup finals begin in two days, so there is more football blogging to be had. Today’s topic: Innovation. Does football have too much of it, too little of it, or just the right amount?

This sort of question is often raised in the middle of debates about the relationship between intellectual property law and society at large. IP law seems to rely on the general premise that innovation is always socially valuable (”Progress,” to borrow the term from the US Constitution), so critics are quick to jump on examples of situations where innovation may have done more harm than good, or may have been been wasteful, or may simply have redistributed wealth without creating any new value. The best known recent illustration are the broad variety of innovative financial products developed by the wizards of Wall Street.

IP’s general “innovation is good” premise is subject to all kinds of checks, even within IP law itself, but it is nonetheless interesting (and fun!) to find “innovation is bad” stories in order to explore what, exactly, is going on. Are skeptics nostalgic for an older way? Fuddy-duddies who can’t adapt? Third parties injured by spillovers? Regulators overwhelmed by new complexity? Something else, or some combination?

(CNN) -- Those living in the sunny innovation capital of the world better up their game or they will be left in Chinese tech dust.

At least, that was the theme of a spate of recent tech conferences held in Beijing.

China is becoming "a hotbed of tech innovation of global impact and also a magnet to attract top tier entrepreneurs coming from all over the world in the same fashion as the Silicon Valley," said Franck Nazikian, president of CHINICT, which bills itself as the largest conference on China tech innovation and entrepreneurship.

“In 1998, 3.4 million Chinese attended university. In 2008, the number was 21.5 million. Once a privilege for a select few, college education has defined a generational experience in China.”

These numbers come from an excellent presentation by Frank Yu, who tried to put it up on Slideshare, but in accordance with the mysterious ways of China, it disappeared. I’m sure he will send it to you if you ask.

Frank gave the presentation at Re-think Shanghai, one of the excellent events Geeks on a Plane attended in Asia over the past three weeks. This wonderful eye-opening tour of what’s going on in Asian entrepreneurship unlocked all kinds of feelings in me, and I’m sure they will be spilling out for months. But here’s my summary of Frank’s hypothesis.

Recent reports cite problems with the US innovation system and tech transfer. Now a new report, ‘Sparking Economic Growth’ from The Science Coalition, a nonprofit organisation of 50 public and private US universities based in Washington, DC, studies the origins of 100 successful companies and lauds federally-funded university research for continuing to spawn innovation, new companies, and jobs.

The federal government is the primary source of money for basic research, supplying about 60 per cent of funding in the US. The second-largest source of basic research funding is academic institutions themselves.

The forum is funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), to help technology transfer offices of universities, institutions, research councils and government-funded laboratories find the management they need to commercialise new technologies and create spin-out businesses. At the same time, UKIF will provide business people, who wish to create spin-outs, access to this technology.

The organisation has been set up by Ian Tracey, of STFC’s Innovations team, and Gerald Law who is responsible for several successful spin-out companies. UKIF has two other research councils, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, ten of the UK’s leading universities, and a number of knowledge transfer networks, science parks and funding bodies, as members.

I [Nick Leiber] moderated a panel yesterday at the inaugural We Own It Summit in downtown Manhattan. The daylong event, hatched through many meetings of the minds at 24 organizations including Astia, the Kauffman Foundation, and Springboard Enterprises, was meant to drum up practical ideas on boosting women’s participation in high-growth entrepreneurship.

My panel was about venture capital. To set the scene, I cited data from the Center for Women’s Business Research that show that while about 41 percent of private companies in the U.S. are owned by women, only 3 percent to 5 percent of them get venture capital. Then the panelists, experienced entrepreneurs and equity investors Heidi Messer (World Evolved), Diane Mulcahy (Babson College), Divya Gugnani (Behind the Burner), and Anu Shukla (KM), candidly described their experiences on both sides of the funding table to an audience of about 45 women and a handful of men. One of the big (if obvious) takeaways: venture money is available but there are still plenty of gender-related obstacles. After that, the discussion began, with panelists and folks in the audience kicking around prescriptions for improving the odds.

WASHINGTON, June 10 /PRNewswire/ -- A group of America's top business executives today released a plan to make America a global leader in energy technology innovation, and in meetings at the White House and with Congressional leaders called for urgent action to begin the national transition to clean, affordable, and secure supplies of energy.

The American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) -- whose members include Bill Gates, chairman and former chief executive of Microsoft; Norm Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin; Ursula Burns, chairman and chief executive of Xerox; John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins; Chad Holliday, chairman of Bank of America and former CEO of DuPont; Jeff Immelt, chief executive of GE; and Tim Solso, chairman and chief executive of Cummins -- said in its report, "A Business Plan for America's Energy Future," that reforming and strengthening U.S. investment in energy innovation is the most critical element to securing America's future.

Angel investor Bill Warner is launching a three-month incubator for startups, located inside the Cambridge Innovation Center. Unlike existing incubators, such as Techstars and Y-Combinator, Warner’s project, called the Anything Goes Accelerator Lab, will not take equity in the startups it admits, and it will not evaluate candidates based on business plans, he said.

Warner said starting this fall, the program’s 80-or-so so slots will be filled by founder teams that show potential. Each will pay $350 a month for three months to get office space in the CIC’s coworking environment, access to tools developed by Warner and colleagues, and a network of informal mentors.

Warner and collaborator Nick Tommarello, a co-founder at Cambridge startup Sparkcloud, in which Warner is an investor, plan to base the three-month program on agile development concepts typically used in the software industry. Tommarello will work part-time on the project, as he remains on the founding team at Sparkcloud.

After at least 40 states made mid-year budget cuts in FY 2010 totaling $22 billion, the prospect for rosier times is after 2012, according to the latest biannual Fiscal Survey of the States conducted jointly by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers. The midterm cuts meant states' spending was reduced from $687.3 billion in FY 2008 to $612.9 billion in FY 2010 - at the same time mandatory spending continued to increase. The report indicates FY2011 will be challenging for many states, in spite of modest revenue growth.

"Because states lag behind national recovery, they expect 2011 to be as bad as 2010, and states will not begin the path to recovery until 2012," said NGA Executive Director Raymond C. Scheppach. NGA and NASBO expect states not to see 2008 revenue levels until 2013 at the soonest.

The Survey is available here: http://www.nga.org/Files/pdf/FSS1006.PDF.