A local firm has developed a new type of scanner that can see through concrete and steel and save companies millions in lost operational days, and the company is getting set to commercialize its product.

“ We are going through an exciting time right now because we are trying to scale up to do a more commercialization effort , ” said John Bowles, vice-president of Inversa Systems Ltd.

Based at the University of New Brunswick campus, Inversa uses “deep backscatter tomography” technology to peer into the insides of all kinds of dense materials and create images of what it sees inside.

Bowles said the technology is a spinoff from one originally developed for medical use.

I [Author] am not convinced that blind innovation is categorically bad—if it’s a meaningful concept at all. Starting from scratch and trying to make a game that is unique is a great way for game designers to get out of their comfort zone and produce something that aggressively explores and opens up the space of possible game rule combinations.

The Naive View

Let’s assume that innovation and fun can be objectively defined and universally acknowledged. In this case, I see innovation through the improvement of existing systems as moving a particular genre of game forward towards “perfection.” A perfect game is one where the mechanics, if changed incrementally, cannot be made more fun. If you don’t fundamentally alter the rules of a perfect game, you cannot make it more fun. It has reached the end of its evolutionary development. Innovation for innovation’s sake is not moving forward, it is moving laterally. Different paths towards the perfect game are found by discarding what mechanics have come before and coming up with something entirely new. Discarding mechanics can happen at any level: you can discard really basic mechanics like the character being in one world; you can discard mechanics like character death upon reaching 0 HP; you can discard relatively superficial mechanics like instanced raids. Through discarding the old in favor of building the new from scratch, new passageways to perfect games can be opened and these new perfect games have the potential to be more fun than past perfect games.

Running your startup, don't waste time on tasks that apps can help you do -- especially if those apps are free or cheap.

Thankfully, there's a post on the Flexvite blog that put together a list of 12 cheap or free web tools that help you with that.

More investment in public-private partnerships and prioritizing key technologies are crucial if America is to avoid losing its competitive edge in manufacturing, industry and policy leaders warned Congress in recent testimony.

With a heavy focus on manufacturing innovation and government’s role in stimulating new technologies, experts from private, public and academic backgrounds said rival economies have already mobilized their resources in more efficient, targeted areas.

“In order to be relevant, we need to ensure that government R&D programs are focused on ways to provide high-quality assembly, non-destructive evaluation, and high rates of repeatability at large volumes,” said Susan Smyth, director of General Motors’ manufacturing systems research lab, in testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology on March 17.

What is it that entrepreneurs most need? When I ask that question at business schools, the answer is always “money.” But when I ask it of entrepreneurs themselves, the answer is something else — and it’s always the same: “stamina.”

I’ve interviewed successful business owners around the world, and that’s always the answer I get. When you think about it, the reason is obvious. If you quit, the game’s over and you know the outcome. But if you can keep going, you still have a chance. The question is, How do you keep yourself going? The answer may surprise you.

Liz Elting, who runs Transperfect, one of the world’s largest translation companies, vividly remembers an all-nighter she and her co-founder Phil Shawe pulled for a prestigious new client: “I remember one Christmas Eve that Phil and I were doing a job for Goldman Sachs, and we were in there working through the night. When it was done, we were late (and exhausted!) for our own personal family celebrations… In the first few years, there was a lot we gave up.”

Aspiring entrepreneurs usually believe one or more of the following:

• Their idea will get them rich

• Their idea will get them rich quickly

• They can escape the corporate grind

• They can be their own boss and have the freedom to do what they want, when they want

• They can work shorter hours and have more free time for their hobbies, families and other passions

• They can be in control of their career path or their own destiny

• They can leave their mark on the world

• They can do more of what they love to do; and/or

• They should open their own business because they will “do it better”

However, most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t understand what it means to be an entrepreneur. What’s worse is that they don’t understand that being talented at making goods or performing services does not mean you will be talented at running a business.

While the rules of poker are simple and the game itself is quite accessible, success typically requires more skill than luck. There’s a wisdom there that we can take from the game and apply to the startup life.

So if you’re looking to win a big pot, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Calculate the odds – Good poker players calculate two kinds of odds before playing: the Pot Odds (or the ratio of money to put divided by the money to gain – the Pot itself) and Card Odds (the probability to have a winning hand). Anytime the Pot Odds are higher than the Card Odds, the hand is worth playing.

Likewise, you must try to evaluate the odds of your startup’s success: How likely is it to succeed? And how big would the ‘pot’ you’d win be?

Former Microsoft VP Dick Brass published an opinion article in the New York Times, arguing that the Redmond giant has become "a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator," with "a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams." The company, though hugely profitable, "is failing," he says. Here are some of Brass's key points.

 

It’s hard. You know how important a blog can be to your social media efforts so you’ve dedicated real time to building it out and making it the focal point of your social marketing strategy. You slave over it trying to make your blog a place that houses both useful content and great community discussions. But even so, your closest competitor has 2,000 more blog subscribers than you do and you feel like you’ll never catch up. How is he/she doing it and what can you do to not only match, but beat the numbers?

Here are ten reasons why your competition has double your blog subscribers and what you can do to help turn it around.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM) is in trouble.

Not because of yesterday's earnings problems -- missing revenue and unit shipment expectations because of a one-time inventory adjustment at one of its carrier partners. But, rather, because RIM is simply not positioned well for the future.

Specifically, RIM is at risk of becoming a mid- to low-end player in a smartphone market that is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, with Apple's iPhone and Google's Android leading the way.

And unless RIM can make big changes to its hardware, software, and platform products, it risks losing its high-end status, getting pushed down carriers' priority lists, and facing shrinking margins. It risks becoming another Palm, which was once a smartphone leader, and is now struggling to make a comeback.

Social games company Playdom announced the acquisition of Buenos Aires-based developer Three Melons today.

This is the latest in a series of acquisitions in social gaming over the past few months.

With industry leader Zynga raising $180 million in December, and gaming giant Electronic Arts making a huge play in social games by acquiring Playfish, there is a lot of cash lying around and plenty of pressure to scale up to stay competitive.

Some of the deals that have been announced thus far:

• Zynga acquired Serious Business in early February.
• Playdom acquired Offbeat Creations in early March.
• Ex-MySpace boss Chris DeWolfe raised over $20 million, acquired MindJolt, and made clear his intentions to keep on buying up game developers.
• Several weeks ago, Playdom acquired Metro Games, another Argentine company.

Regular Anthill readers will know by now that we are big fans of the TED talks series. This talk by marketing maverick Seth Godin — delivered at the TED 2009 conference in Long Beach, California — ranks in the top 10 most popular TED talks of all time. And rightly so.

Over 18-minutes, Godin outlines his theory that the internet has banished the era of mass marketing, and that the ancient social unit of the tribe has returned, empowering ordinary people to lead extraordinary movements.

Sometimes it seems like we are all puppets being manipulated by the puppeteers. Think about what influences our behavior. It is media that permeates our lives everywhere we turn.

Behavior is the result of actions created by beliefs. Beliefs are created from experiences that influences the four components of the human DNA. Our DNA is like capital waiting to be used to “produce” something with or for others. The four capital component we each possess are intellectual, social, creative and spiritual capital. (see The Emergence of the Know Profile)

These four elements represent the human DNA that determines our individual and collective productivity. Our individual and collective productivity represents an economy. An economy is fueled by rates of production and consumption. Consumption is influenced by media used to propagate the value of things  produced.

In the past I’ve written on the topic of “Raising Venture Capital” but today I’m starting a new series called “Understanding VC’s.”  My goal is writing this series of to make it easier for you as a startup needing to raise money to understand how venture capital firms work so you can be more efficient and more effective in your process.

In today’s post I want to talk about the concept of a VC flightpath. This is my description of a VC process, not one I’ve heard from other VCs so don’t expect it to be accepted nomenclature. But I use this all of the time as a metaphor when talking with entrepreneurs in person and I’ve found it to be a useful way of explaining to entrepreneurs what is going in in the VC’s life.

When you visit a VC to tell them about your wonderful idea it’s easy to imagine that this person is not evaluating any other deals at the moment. I have no idea why, but that’s always how it always felt to me when I was an entrepreneur raising money. Of course I knew that they sat on other boards that kept them busy but somehow it seemed like I had all of their attention to myself during the fund raising process – especially the ones who seemed to like me and spend time with me. Even when you’re getting the VC love this reality I imagined couldn’t be further from the truth.

Investors write checks because they hope to get a decent return on their money. The way venture capitalists reap those returns is by taking their companies public, or perhaps selling them to other companies. That's a tough game when demand for IPOs is anemic, as it was in 2009.

Demand hasn't been robust in 2010, but things are thawing. As of this writing, eight companies had done IPOs thus far this year--the same amount for all of last year, according to CB Insights, a Manhattan firm that tracks private-company funding trends (including venture capital, private equity and government-backed deals).

"The venture funding and M&A activity we've observed so far in 2010 suggests that this year's venture funding levels will be higher than last year, but still below those highs of a few years ago," says Anand Sanwal, a CB Insights founding partner.

Jose Ferreira, Founder and CEO of Knewton, reveals the secrets to snagging venture capital in a recent post for HuffPo

.

Ferreira says a startup that has all five of these characteristics is a surefire investment for any VC firm.

And a startup that comes up short in any of these areas has a fundamental problem in their strategy.

Google (GOOG) has a reputation for playing April Fool’s pranks. (This year’s renaming the site Topeka as a twist on Topeka, Kansas calling itself Google is pretty amusing.) And it had an impressive retro one on YouTube, recasting some videos into a “text” mode, similar to how programmers once used ASCII text to simulate images in the days before laser and ink-jet printers. However, this cute twist backfired as users complained heavily about the new video page interface that YouTube had separately introduced.

Here’s one example of the videos in normal video mode.  Unfortunately, embedding a link to the text mode doesn’t seem to work, so click here for that version:

There are signs of hope for venture-backed companies ready to cash out through an initial public offering (IPO) or an acquisition, according to the latest report from Dow Jones VentureSource.

The overall liquidity numbers for the last three months are up from the same period last year — there were a total of 85 deals adding up to $4.7 billion. That’s not quite on-par with the end of 2008, but it’s up 27 percent from the $3.4 billion earned in the first quarter of 2009.

We don’t work in the same way as we did 150 years ago—and, as the way we work as changed, so too has office design. The last twenty years in particular have brought about a sea change: Rather than simply typing at a computer all day, the workaday ideal involves meetings and brainstorming sessions. A lounge might be every bit as productive as a cubicle, and that lesson has been embraced by dotcoms and ad agencies.

“What are the new developments in water? Are there new technologies that developing countries could use to bypass expensive and cumbersome systems? What’s the next big thing that could solve the water crisis?” Politicians and the media often ask experts for new ideas to make water “interesting”. Yet, on the whole, water systems constructed today use much of the same technology they did 100 years ago.

Certainly, it’s not all about technology – appropriate demand, social structures and institutions have to be in place to make technology effective and sustainable. In the chapter on innovation in the WDR2010, we compare the share of revenues that private companies invest in research and development in the energy sector (0.5%) with that of electronics ( 8% ) and pharmaceuticals (15%), to show that the energy industry hasn’t exactly pushed the envelope in terms of innovation. We didn’t even think to find out how much private water companies invest in research. Yet I’d be surprised if it were as high as 1.5%. The water sector has not historically been a hothouse of new technology.