A small digital microscope that costs just a few dollars can plug into a cell phone and perform basic medical diagnostics that would ordinarily require expensive lab equipment. The microscope, which uses no lenses, saves on cost and weight by using algorithms to get more information from images. The device can generate blood counts and identify disease cells and bacteria from simple images sent through a USB cord to a cell phone that uses software to processes the data. The latest version of the microscope integrates an interference-based contrast method to provide better images in addition to diagnostic information.

The researchers developing the device hope it will bring better medical diagnostics to parts of the world where cell phones are prevalent but access to expensive clinical diagnostic equipment is not. Even basic cell phones now have significant processing power that can be used to analyze images of blood smears and other samples on the spot, enabling a patient to get on the right tuberculosis drug faster and enabling health-care providers to identify drug-resistant strains faster. What sets the new microscope apart from other efforts at integrating optical diagnostics with cell phones is the effort to make it as simple and cheap as possible. That means eliminating expensive lenses, and using software to get medical information from blurry images.

Here’s a simple question for you…which metro areas did prospered the most during the past business cycle? (2000-2008) Were the winners the highly-educated communities that make up the Creative Economy? Or did someone else zoom ahead?

I asked myself these questions when I was preparing for a talk that I was giving at the Rochester Institute of Technology on innovation and economic development. Being a man of numbers, I calculated the gains in real-per capita income for all metro areas. Who do you think was #1, and who do you think was #366 (out of 366)

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New Orleans native Kenneth Purcell and his wife have called 911 about 20 times in the past year to report break-ins and other crimes near their home and his business, located just three blocks apart in the city's Warehouse District. But that hasn't driven him from the inner city. His 25-employee software firm, iSeatz, is thriving, with sales last year of $38 million, up from $28 million in 2008. That success has been helped by what Purcell calls the "social capital" gained by creating local jobs when he moved back from Manhattan two years after Katrina. "In the midst of hearing about all these big businesses that were abandoning the state in which they were founded, I said, to hell with that," the 35-year-old founder and chief executive says. "I wanted to go home and do the opposite of everyone else."

His company landed second place in this year's Inner City 100 ranking of the fastest-growing inner-city businesses in the U.S. The list—based on five-year compound annual growth rate—is a Who's Who of high-potential private ventures in downtrodden urban areas.(Bloomberg Businessweek is the media partner.) Think multimillion-dollar manufacturers and construction companies (these industries make up 31 percent of the 2010 ranking), not mom-and-pop bodegas.The annual roundup is compiled by the Boston-based not-for-profit Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School competitiveness guru Michael Porter. The ICIC's goal is to show that not only can companies thrive in the inner city, but there are also competitive advantages to locating there. Over the past 12 years, winners have created 71,000 new jobs and employed 40,000 inner-city residents.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: an academic novel, set at a fictional (but prestigious) American research university, portrays tenured faculty who are indolent but querulous; students whose main activities include protesting, avoiding classes, and popping pills; and an administration that’s disorganized, secretive, and ineffectual. Money and status are the primary concerns of professors and administrators alike; the community as a whole is characterized by lassitude and petty squabbling, while education is of minimal importance to anyone.

So what’s different about Tech Transfer, the new book by Daniel S. Greenberg?

For one thing, Greenberg himself. While Tech Transfer is his first novel, Greenberg's journalism career has spanned well over four decades and has primarily focused on science – specifically how it is justified, funded, and conducted in the United States. All three of his nonfiction books address these themes, and the title of the most recent – Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism – might also function as a brief synopsis of Tech Transfer.

To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone.

In a paper titled, "Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea (PDF)," Wharton operations and information management professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive marketing strategies.

Terwiesch, Ulrich and co-author Karan Girotra, a professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD, found that a hybrid process -- in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers -- resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process. More importantly for companies striving for innovation, however, the trio says the absolute best idea in a hybrid process topped the Number One suggestion in a traditional model.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signs SB1254 into law; modifies current R&D tax credit to allow small technology companies to receive a refund of 75% of their eligible tax credit

The National Venture Capital Association, trade group for an industry dominated by men, has a female leader – Kate Mitchell, co-founder and managing director of Scale Venture Partners. Surprisingly, she’s not the first woman to hold the one-year chairman’s post – the others were Kathy Behrens, who took office in 1998, and Patricia Cloherty, who assumed the post in 1994 – amounting to three women on a list that goes back to 1973.

“It probably reflects, when you think of the number of years we’ve been in business, pretty close to the ratio of women in the industry,” Mitchell said in an interview last week at the NVCA’s annual meeting in Burlingame, Calif., where she took the baton from prior Chairman Terry McGuire.

LONDON, May 10, 2010 (Reuters) — Efforts to develop a vaccine triggered by human sweat, and to control mosquitoes using carnivorous plants, were among 78 science projects that won backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday.

The foundation, a $34 billion fund that is run by the multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and invests in scientific projects broadly aimed at improving global health, said each project would get a $100,000 grant for further study.

Other winning projects include developing a low-cost cell phone microscope to diagnose malaria, using ultrasound as a reversible male contraceptive, insecticide-treated scarves and using imaging systems to seek and destroy parasites with a targeted laser vaccine.

"We are convinced that some of these ideas will lead to innovations and eventually solutions that will save lives," Tachi Yamada, of the Gates Foundation's global health program, said in a statement.

Barely a week after the mighty St. John River overflowed its banks in Fredericton, the stately New Brunswick capital was invaded by another unstoppable force of nature: entrepreneurs on a mission.

More than 80 business owners from across the province attended the one-day New Brunswick Entrepreneurs Summit to learn each other's success secrets and hone their networking skills. But founder Rivers Corbett, the owner of Fredericton catering firm Chef Group, has his own mission: To turn his province into "the Davos of entrepreneurship."

Can Canada's eighth-largest province (pop. 750,000) become a raging source of entrepreneurs? It has happened before. Consider the success of Max Aitken (the financier who became Lord Beaverbrook, the first "Baron" of Fleet Street), not to mention the Irvings and McCains.

There are many different challenges and difficulties facing a start-up business, ranging from cash flows to marketing to protection. This column, the first in a series, deals with the importance of protecting one’s intellectual property (IP).

Many readers will identify with a story about a certain lecturer at the University of Pretoria who started dreaming of a financial empire.

He went to the trademarks office in Pretoria, and did his own searches there to see if the trademarks he wanted to use were available and could be registered. He then set about registering the trademarks he wanted.

This person was none other than Anton Rupert, founder of Rembrandt.

The days of dial-up modems may be gone, but some websites are still surprisingly sluggish. The issue has gained urgency after Google recently introduced a change to its PageRank algorithm that rewards sites that run faster. The search company says that users spend less time interacting with slower sites; adding to the issue are users visiting sites from mobile devices with spotty connections.

Aptimize, a startup based in Wellington, New Zealand, that launches its service in the United States today, says its software can speed up website load times, bringing increases of 200 to 400 percent in some cases. It says it can achieve these improvements entirely in software.

Ed Robinson, cofounder and CEO, says that companies often improve the speed of a website by throwing hardware at the problem. He contends that the fundamental problem is often the structure of the website itself.

Because the recession has been quite severe, a lot of the recent discussion of employment has focused on the time period since the recession began in December 2007. As you no doubt know, over that time period, the jobs picture hasn’t looked pretty in businesses of any size – small, medium, or large.

But if we look at the jobs situation over a longer period of time – since 2000 – the pattern is different, particularly across businesses of different sizes.

In the figure below, I have plotted the number of people employed in small, medium, and large establishments relative to their level in December 2000, using data collected by Automated Data Processing (ADP). ADP reports monthly numbers on employment in small (1-49 employees), medium (50-499 employees) and large (more than 499 employee) private sector establishments that use its payroll services.

Simon Sinek’s TED Talk from TedxPuget Sound (Sept 2009) has been posted and is just awesome. He starts out with the question “Why is Apple so innovative,“ Why is it that Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement,” and “Why is it that the Wright Brothers were able to figure out controlled power manned flight?”

The EU's 20-year-old single market is at a critical juncture and needs to be fully completed to further boost Europe's crisis-battered European productivity and competitiveness, reveals a report presented yesterday (10 May) by former Italian Commissioner Mario Monti, who was tasked with coming up with a comprehensive new strategy.

On the basis of an extensive consultation process, Monti has drawn a map of new legislative proposals to improve the EU's single market that the Commission should present by July.

Presenting his report to European Commission President José Manuel Barroso before the European Parliament's internal market committee yesterday, Monti urged the EU to remove the remaining bottlenecks that are hampering innovation and dampening Europe's growth potential.

"There is now a window of opportunity to bring back the political focus of the single market," he argued.

Debra Gelinas's students want college credit for their internships. Actually, they need it. Companies often insist on credit so that interns might legally qualify as unpaid trainees. So eager students turn to Ms. Gelinas, director of experiential learning at Berklee College of Music, in Boston.

Berklee values practical experience and offers an internship-based course, but students, who intern for record companies and film scorers, balk at the tuition, especially over the summer. So Ms. Gelinas developed a certificate program, a sort of course-lite: fewer assignments, no credit, no fee.

"It was a way to create more opportunity for students," she says. Berklee started the program this semester, employers seemed satisfied, and 36 students enrolled. More than 50 have signed up for the summer already.

Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a member of the Senate Banking Committee, on Monday filed an amendment to the financial reform currently in the Senate that would require all hedge funds, private equity shops and venture capital firms to register with either a state regulator or the Securities and Exchange Commission, Politico reported.

The amendment would mean that funds under $100 million, previously exempt from the proposed regulation, would now also be required to register.

Politico had this:

“Hedge funds, private equity and venture capital funds have played an important role in providing liquidity to our financial system and improving the efficiency of capital markets. But as their role has grown so have the risks they pose. This amendment will shut down loopholes and provide the SEC with long-overdue authority to examine and collect data from this key industry,” Mr. Reed said in a statement to POLITICO.

SHANGHAI -- Books these days regularly cheer innovation. You rarely go to a conference without hearing how important it is. Copying others has a bit of a stigma.

Yet despite all of that talk, successful imitation rather than innovation may be a better way to make money. Even better, borrowing from others and combining that with your own creativity, can build strong competitive advantages.

So says Oded Shenkar, a business professor at Ohio State University, in a new provocative book called Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation To Gain a Strategic Edge, published by Harvard Business Press. Shenkar previously wrote The Chinese Century, which looked at China's changing role in the world.

Everyday objects with their own IP addresses may soon be the norm. This communication of objects with the Web is the latest version of a still-idyllic new vision of technology that claims it will improve our lives. Yet we're at such an early stage of development of the Internet of Things that finding the best blogs to follow is a moving target.

Many of the 10 offerings below have only come into being in recent months. Not making our list is a ReadWriteWeb favorite - Pachube - which has been remiss in updating their blog. So stay tuned for updates in future posts. For now, here are what we believe to be the 10 most active blog feeds available on the Internet of Things.

Internet of Things Council

The Internet of Things Council is a European think tank of the best minds in the burgeoning Internet of Things sector. From forecasting to developing prototypes, the council members' commonality is the "range of emotions and conceptual breakdown that comes with grasping the territory, the full logistical, business, social and philosophical implications of the Internet of Things." You can access their blog feed here.

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini predicted today that the company will be shipping a billion chips a year within the next five years. On top of that, revenues and profits are expected to grow at low double-digit rates, or more than double the rate of the past five years.

Otellini made the prediction at the company’s analyst meeting in Santa Clara. He said that he expects the computing market to have a 15 percent to 16 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years.

Otellini said that the growth will happen on a variety of fronts. Desktops computers will grow a mere 2.4 percent CAGR through 2014. But laptops will grow 22 percent, netbooks will grow 15 percent, and tablet computers will grow 73 percent to 88 percent.

The venture capital world is evolving quickly — so quickly, in fact, that it can be hard to keep up with the changes.

Conventional VC networks and outlier identification produce poor returns. (This is due, in part, to financiers’ Pavlovian reaction to entrepreneurs with a diploma from a top-tier school.) As we move forward, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding will be used to augment or replace traditional methods and create the high-return VC of the future.