Here it is: We followed the rumors, the leaks, the speculation and the comings and goings of various peers and future competitors, but Apple's finally gone and revealed the updated iPad. Who presented the event? None other than CEO Steve Jobs himself.

The iPad 2 is powered by an Apple A5 chip, a dual-core CPU that somehow consumes the same amount of power as the iPad 1's A4 unit, but delivers "up to 2X" the speed. This also leads to faster graphics, which Jobs quoted as being "nine times" better than the iPad 1. The A5 is the "first dual-core tablet to ship in volume."

A vision of the city as a glistening, well-oiled machine underlies IBM's new website, City Forward, which is officially inaugurated today. The City Forward initiative, which has been revving up for a few months now, collates the massive amount of data relating to cities in one clearinghouse, making it easier to use for those who make or influence city policy.

Put another way: "City Forward substitutes data for intuition," said IBM's Stanley S. Litow in a release.

While Americans are focused on a possible government shutdown and heated budget standoffs in the states, the U.S. Senate is considering legislation that isn’t getting much attention, but is even more important because it threatens to destroy one of the greatest aspects of American exceptionalism – innovation.

Did you know that Americans are responsible for roughly 90% of new inventions?

While overregulation and taxation harm America’s ability to compete with other countries to attract and keep businesses that create jobs, our greatest stock in trade is the American spirit that fosters innovation, and the world’s strongest patent system to protect inventors’ rights.

A new high-speed lane will be built along the region’s Animal Health Corridor thanks to a $1 million investment by the Kansas Bioscience Authority (KBA). At its board meeting in Washington, DC today, the KBA approved seed money to establish a public-private consortium called the National Center of Animal Health Innovation. The “center of innovation” will bring nine area animal health companies, plus regional universities and government agencies together to accelerate job creation, research, development and commercialization of the next generation of animal health and nutrition products.

“This proposal is part of an overall strategy to position Kansas as the nation’s innovation hub for animal health and animal disease research and product development,” said Tom Thornton, President and CEO of the KBA. “The center will be led by and responsive to industry. Already, these leading companies have identified opportunities to work together to support new product development to advance the competitive position of their companies and the regional economy. Bottom line, we are talking about the potential to create new products, new companies, new jobs and whole new industries for Kansas.”

AUGUSTA, Maine — The state should market its “innovation-based” industries more aggressively and do more to help companies export products to help grow the economy, legislators were told Tuesday.

Members of the Legislator’s Labor, Commerce, Research and Economic Development Committee received the annual update on the impact state money had over the last year in stimulating the state’s high-tech sectors, which range from aquaculture to advanced materials and even includes traditional sectors like forestry and agriculture.

LINCOLN — How sweet is too sweet when it comes to state economic development incentives?

State legislators again are wrestling with that question as they decide how aggressive Nebraska should be in encouraging “angel” investments in promising, but not-yet-marketable, inventions or high-tech innovations.

“Angels” — typically successful entrepreneurs or groups of investors — have been credited with helping finance some of this generation's most successful startup companies, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Nebraska consistently ranks at the bottom for encouraging potentially high-growth, high-risk ventures. But as part of his economic development proposals this year, Gov. Dave Heineman has offered an ambitious program to put the state near the top of the list.

Escape the City is a very niche job website. It was specifically designed for people that want to get off the rat race treadmill and don’t want jobs in normal places.

Escape the City advertises a spectrum of refuges, from marketing and management posts to one-off charity events. Log on now and you could apply to run a post office in Antarctica, help out at a wine company in Portugal or travel India as a Rickshaw Run manager.

With March Madness just around the corner, we thought we'd get in on the action.

We're launching our own "bracket style" tournament to find the next big thing. We'll be picking 64 startups to face off in Startup Madness. In order to quality for the bracket, your startup must meet the following requirements:

* Haven't raised funding of $250,000 or more and haven't generated revenue of more than $250,000 in a single year.
* Have a live, usable public site or an accessible demo on their home page
* Have not already been in the TechStars program - this is not for TechStars companies or alumni companies
* Must be an internet, software, or hi-tech company

Fund:it, an Irish crowdfunding effort supported by The Department of Arts Sports and Tourism is calling for people in the business, arts and media sectors in Ireland to submit their latest business ideas.

The organisation is designed to fund these new companies without the dependence on hard-to-get bank loans but through the power of social media.

For many companies, particularly technology companies, intellectual property (IP) is their most valuable asset.

However, many companies, especially start-ups, fail to adequately identify or protect their IP from the outset. This can often require more costly and cumbersome steps being taken at a later stage to adequately protect the company’s IP.

As we’ll see, identifying and protecting your IP is a straightforward process — provided you know what you’re getting into. Let’s explore seven common mistakes that new companies (and individuals) should avoid.

The nerve-racking wait for cancer-screening results can go on for several days, as clinicians analyze images and biopsies. A new handheld device could significantly shorten that stressful period. Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School have engineered a portable device that plugs into a smart phone and reduces the time it takes to detect cancer to just an hour. The device takes a small tissue sample and quickly analyzes it for telltale cancer proteins. When the latest prototype was tested on 50 patients with gastric-related cancer, it detected malignancies with 96 percent accuracy—better than existing laboratory-based tissue-sampling tests. The results of the study were published last week in Science Translational Medicine.

Since the dawn of managerial capitalism, collaboration and work have almost always been synonymous. People need other people to realize their greatest impact, and innovation, perhaps the most valuable activity in business, depends critically on the kind of cross-pollination of ideas that collaboration enables.

But technology has changed how we collaborate, especially since the communications revolution began 150 years ago with the telegraph and the telephone. This wave of change continued with the commercialization of the fax machine in the 1970s and of e-mail in the 1980s. The last 20 years have brought a convergence of communications and computing technologies that has expanded the possibilities for technology-enabled collaboration, whether synchronous or asynchronous, proximal or distant. With voice mail, videoconferencing, instant messaging, chat forums, blogs, wikis, social networking, microblogging (through services such as Twitter and Foursquare), voice-over-IP, telepresence, and, of course, mobile communications and computing, never have we had so many ways to collaborate without having to be in the same place at the same time.

The New England Venture Capital Association and five of its member firms will sponsor free Kendall Square desks for early-stage entrepreneurs, starting March 31st. The 2,500 square foot space will be part of a new co-working facility — where numerous start-up teams share open space instead of hermetically-sealed offices — called CriticalMass that will be part of the Cambridge Innovation Center.

Nancy Saucier, a spokesperson for NEVCA, says that the five firms sponsoring the space will choose the entrepreneurs who get "golden tickets." (Others can pay $250 a month to have access to the same space.) The current sponsors will cover the costs for about 48 entrepreneurs a year to get three months of free rent, but Saucier says other NEVCA members have expressed interest in getting involved with the program, and she expects that as many as 100 tickets could be handed out annually. Sponsoring VC firms will also have conference rooms with their names on the door, which they'll use periodically to meet with entrepreneurs (but which will otherwise be open to CriticalMass denizens.) CriticalMass will also host Q&A sessions with angel investors, as well as "how to" workshops geared to entrepreneurs.

The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.

On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

DURHAM, N.C. — Why is it that the same teams seem to dominate the annual men’s collegiate basketball tournament? For that matter, why does the same small group of institutions seem to top annual best-college rankings?

According to a theory developed by a Duke University engineer, these hierarchies are not only natural, but predictable. Just as continually growing streams flow into a larger river, or smaller and smaller branches grow out from a single tree trunk, examples of these hierarchies abound in the natural world.

Emory University experts predict that rates of depressive disorders among men will increase as the 21st century progresses.

In an editorial published in the March, 2011 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry http://bjp.rcpsych.org/, author Boadie Dunlop, MD, writes “Compared to women, many men attach a great importance to their roles as providers and protectors of their families. Failure to fulfill the role of breadwinner is associated with greater depression and marital conflict.”

Research shows that since the beginning of the recession in 2007, roughly 75 percent of the jobs lost in the United States were held by men. On the other hand, women are increasingly becoming the primary household earners with 22 percent of wives earning more than their husbands in 2007, versus only four percent in 1970. Unfortunately, there is little reason for anyone to believe that traditional male jobs will return in significant numbers with economic recovery.

Welcome to disruption. 26-year old Amanda Hocking is the best-selling "indie" writer on the Kindle store, meaning she doesn't have a publishing deal, Novelr says.

And she shouldn't. She gets to keep 70% of her book sales -- and she sells around 100,000 copies per month. By comparison, it's usually thought that it takes a few tens of thousands of copies sold in the first week to be a New York Times bestselling writer.

The comparison isn't entirely fair, because Hocking sells her books for $3, and some $.99. But that's the point: by lowering the prices, she can make more on volume, especially impulse buys. Meanwhile e-books cost nothing to print, you don't have to worry about print volumes, shelf space, inventory, etc. And did we mention the writer keeps 70%?

YouTube partners are making over $1 million off of their videos, according to the NYPost.

We all knew that a bunch of YouTube stars were pulling in six-figures a year, but who knew that some of these guys (and gals?) have become millionaires? Then again, it shouldn't be that big of a surprise to hear about YouTube millionaires when you look at the whole picture of potential revenue streams in banner, pre-roll and overlay ads in addition to sponsored videos and merchandise sales.

"Sponsorships are where money is right now," YouTube star Cory Williams of SMPFilms told us in an interview from last September.

Last year we did a series about the trend in micromultinational businesses. These are businesses that are small — some very small with a mere handful of employees — but already operating as multinationals. It used to be that your business had to wait to grow up before going international. Not today. Today you can leapfrog from a startup serving a 50-mile radius, to selling to customers in dozens of countries.

Today that I’d highlight some articles from our archives on the special challenges and opportunities of going international even while a small business.

Public speaking is a great marketing tool and exposure medium when used appropriately. On the other hand, it can do damage to your business when done badly.

You’ve probably heard the following tips: practice, practice, practice; come prepared; show up early and get a sense of the room. We can add to the list: don’t fidget, move with purpose or not at all, pause for effect, don’t ‘um’ and ‘ah.’ These are all good points. Debbie Fay of bespeak presentations shares some great ideas in her article Be a Presentation Powerhouse.

There is another aspect to public speaking that I’d like to address here. Many speakers get so caught up in their heads that they don’t stop to think about the impact their words or actions are having on the audience. While public speaking is good for the speaker, it only works well when the speaker frames the speech around what’s best for the audience. Instead of thinking about what you hope to gain from your presentation, remember that you get what’s best for you by concentrating on what your audience members need and want.