Another company that I met last year, Forus Health, just started shipping its pre-screening tool for the early detection of cataract, glaucoma, diabetic retina, refraction and cornea problems that are common in the developing world. Their device, which can be operated by minimally trained technicians in rural India, is portable and sells for a small fraction of the cost of Western alternatives. It promises to save the sight of tens of millions of people.

Several Indian companies have also reached the mainstream. Zoho offers an alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs. Its enterprise products boast 15,000 global customers and its Web products have 5 million users, according to the company. It generates more than $100 million in revenue every year. Three-year old Tringme provides a VoIP telephony platform that is used by 11 million users worldwide and the Web sites of corporations like IBM and AOL. One of the most popular charting tools on the Web is Fusion Charts. It has 375,000 developers in 110 countries using its tools to build their graphics.

People start businesses for all kinds of reasons. Some expect to get rich, some want to be their own boss, some want to follow their passion and some want to control their own destiny (or at least try). Many have one thing in common; they fail. More than half, depending on whose number you use and how much time you give it.

When I started my business in 1978, there was very little information out there on how to start, expand and operate a small business. As a matter of fact, even the word entrepreneur was barely used, and if it was, it was often used disparagingly — as to describe the guy on the corner who was selling watches under his sleeve.

In a segment featured Tuesday night on the PBS NewsHour, correspondent Hari Sreenivasan brings an outsider’s curiosity to the strange, wonderful world of startup accelerators. The eight-minute report features Sreenivasan’s interviews with entrepreneurs and mentors at TechStars, AngelPad, and Y Combinator—archetypes of the venture incubator wave (or is it a bubble?) that we’ve been chronicling here at Xconomy for the last four and a half years.

This is a must-watch piece, for at least four reasons:

1) It’s the best short summary of the startup accelerator concept you’re likely to find—and a great example of mainstream media interest in what’s long been a fringe phenomenon, unknown to middle America.

Happy Thanksgiving from Rich Bendis, CEO of Innovation America and the Delmarva Group team!

This post initially appeared here on the Harvard Business Review site.

Do you remember being stuck at the kids’ table for Thanksgiving dinner growing up? I do. There were always too many of us to all sit around one dinner table, so we had a secondary table off to the side, sometimes even in a separate room, to which the younger generation was relegated. I remember asking every year if I would be able to sit with the grownups. The conversation at their table ranged from sports to politics to family gossip, and whatever the topic it was always more animated and intense. I know why now: it’s because adults love to talk about the state of their world and how it should get better. But what an irony: those of us with the biggest stake in the future-the kids-were not even hearing the conversation. Back then, all I understood was that the main table was where the action seemed to be, and I wanted in.

You just wrote an awesome blog post. It's well researched, it will help your audience, and the tone is spot on. The excitement to get it on your site is so overwhelming, you scurry over to the 'publish' button and hover over it, about ready to push.

STOP!

Don't make another move. No matter how remarkable the content of that blog article is, there are still countless things that could be wrong with your post. Before you ever hit the publish button on a blog post, make sure you've checked these 11 items off your content publishing to-do list to prevent internet humiliation.

Someone at or around SV Angel, the investment firm headed by Silicon Valley living legend Ron Conway, has leaked the firm’s entire list of investments to date.

Altogether, according to the SV Angel spreadsheet, the firm placed 75 bets on various startups during the first 10 months of 2011 and counts 290 startups in its portfolio.

The leaked documents also include a list of liquidity events, numbering 71 to date. For you non-math nerds out there, that means Conway & Co. have so far had a success rate of around 24.5 percent.

While it seems as though everything we buy these days is Made in China, it is surprising that less than 2% of U.S. consumption actually comes from goods and services from China (see Federal Reserve study attached below). At the same time, Chinese manufacturing enables U.S. companies to compete more effectively in non-U.S. markets, enabling those companies, from Apple and Intel to Nike and Walmart, to thrive around the world. Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturing gives U.S. consumers more purchasing power -- clothes and computers are cheaper. Almost certainly, America is better off because of the success of China. But the gains from trading with China are not evenly distributed. Still, China alone certainly does not account for high U.S. unemployment. What is the right policy going forward?

A new report from Nielsen indicates that what kids want for Christmas is an Apple iPad. But, it’s not just the kids. The Apple iPad is the most desired Christmas gift for children aged 6-12 and children and adults 13 and up.

Two charts of the other top desired products are below.

More than half of American adults say they experience a sleep problem every night or almost every night, according to a poll by the National Sleep Foundation. The National Institute of Health estimates that 50 to 70 million Americans are affected by chronic sleep disorders and intermittent sleep problems.

From the Wall Street trader to the regional sales manager, application programmer or small business owner, ambitious professionals often survive on five or six hours of sleep a night. And high-powered corporate cultures often confuse sleeplessness and caffeine haze with drive and success.

There are two economies at work in the United States right now. One is traditional, entrenched, powerful, and often highly profitable. Big oil companies, large manufacturers, and defense contractors fall into this group. So do the targets of Occupy Wall Street. These businesses account for a lot of revenue, and a lot of jobs, but they're not changing much--at least not for the better. They don't tell us much about what the future will be like.

Then there's the innovation economy: defined by the creation of new businesses and new ways of operating, with its emotional and philosophical center in Silicon Valley. Some might argue that this second economy has been in place for decades, fueling new tech-based ventures. There is ample evidence to support this (Apple, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, et al). Yet in the past few years, we've seen an explosion of entrepreneurship, not just in the Bay Area but around the country in places such as Austin, Boston, Detroit, New York, and Portland, Oregon. The influence of these smaller, often fast-growing, companies is pervasive: Almost every big, traditional business has some effort under way to spawn small, "fast" divisions within its operation.

Hugo Campos is a man on a mission. He wants access to the data being collected inside his body by an implanted cardiac defibrillator. He believes that having this information could help him take control of his health—for example, by helping him figure out what triggers his frequent attacks of abnormal heart rhythms. While not life-threatening, they cause dizziness, fainting, and chest pain. But he says device makers are reluctant to make that information available, mostly for commercial reasons.

"I have this complex little computer implanted in my body, but I have no access to it," says Campos. "The best that patients can do is get a printout of the report given to the doctor, and that's designed for doctors, not patients. Patients are left in the dark."

On Monday, on the edge of the MIT campus, representatives of MIT and Pfizer Inc., along with elected officials, participated in a groundbreaking ceremony around what will become a 180,000-square-foot research hub for Pfizer’s Neuroscience Research Unit and its Cardiovascular, Metabolic, and Endocrine Diseases Research Unit. After the ceremony, which included remarks from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Cambridge Mayor David Maher and MIT President Susan Hockfield, participants walked down the block for a reception at the atrium of the MIT’s McGovern and Picower institutes.

You can make it as complex as you like, but what really matters in innovation is the simplicity of management and only a minimum amount of bureaucracy. Innovation management is in many aspects different than regular business operations (less predictable, riskier), but in many aspects it is very much alike (basic management practices).

In my conversations lately with innovation managers, this subject has been a common subject. In a time of speedy changes in markets, high uncertainty and tough competition, innovation has become seen as the silver bullet. And innovation managers are under pressure to make it happen. But innovating in itself is not that simple, as many of you know, especially if one wants to innovate radically to generate real competitive advantage.

Members of a community engaged in the practice of collaborative innovation gain tremendous insights as they pursue that practice through the phases of an enquiry-led campaign. What ideas and insights do we contribute to the question at hand? What have we learned about the practice itself? One commitment that campaign teams make to the community is to create forums and provide the resources to share these insights. In this article Doug Collins suggests an approach by which the campaign team can build a basic communications plan to meet their commitment for sharing relevant information at each phase.

Don’t Change that Channel

I worked in the media industry earlier in my career. The business fascinated me. It enjoyed a rich overabundance of characters and disruptive forces, leavened by a revolving door of thoroughly disruptive characters, who reveled in continually resetting the rules of the game.

The world of mobile has come a long way. Mobile devices are constantly evolving and delivering refined operating systems (OS), better apps, user-friendly features and faster connectivity. What this means is that websites have had to up the ante too; by optimising their sites for mobile (or developing mobile) apps.

In the midst of this, (mobile) email marketing has also had to keep up with the global smartphone explosion. Although it has established its place as the original workhorse of digital marketing, every year email marketing “dies”, only to come back bigger and better the following year. When you think about it though, the potential for email marketing remains massive. After all, how much can you do online these days without having to divulge your email address? That’s right – not much. Which is why email marketing remains one of the top-performing digital marketing strategies.

Everyone enjoys writing and reading good content but in the world of online, it carries extra benefits. After all, every SEO specialist worth their salt insists that copy is king and that every site needs great copy and fresh content. The almighty Google itself has proclaimed that fresh, relevant copy is like catnip for the king of the search jungle. But how long does copy remain fresh?

In scientific circles, there is a concept known as a “half-life”. The half-life of a substance according to Wikipedia is:

The period of time it takes for the amount of a substance undergoing decay to decrease by half. The name was originally used to describe a characteristic of unstable atoms (radioactive decay), but it may apply to any quantity which follows a set-rate decay.

I caught up Friday afternoon with Reid Leonard, the Merck executive who will head up the new $250 million Merck Research Venture Fund. While the New Jersey pharmaceutical company still hasn't made an official announcement about Leonard's new gig, word started leaking out earlier this month on Twitter.

Leonard, who began working at Merck in 1989 and rose to be a top licensing exec at the company, told me a bit about the fund's strategy and origins:

The initiative to get it established was the work of David Nicholson, who is head of worldwide licensing for the company. Several of us had been pushing the notion for a few years that, given the overall reduction in the amount of venture capital available to early-stage life sciences companies, and the increasing role of corporate venturing, it was really a good time for Merck to consider stepping up in this way. Our future pipeline depends on accessing innovation from outside.

The world is even smaller than you thought.

Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.

The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb.

Google is almost as famous for its amazing workplace – (Free valet parking! Amazing retreats!) – as it is for its incredibly painful hiring process.

The problems have been:

• Google preferred Ivy Leaguers.
• It cared about your GPA, even if you're in your 30s.
• Google would hassle applicants with "brain teaser" interview questions.

We know about this painful process because we've experienced it first hand.

About five years ago, I applied for a sales job at Google and was told early on that my college GPA (a 3.0) would probably ruin my chances. (I didn't get the job.)