In November 2009, the West family embarked on an unusual family project. Parents John and Judy and teenagers Anne and Paul each had their genomes sequenced, and enlisted a team of scientists at Stanford University to interpret the meaning of the combined 24 billion letters of DNA in those genomes.

The findings, published today in the journal PLoS Genetics, are the first attempt to analyze the genome of a healthy family, a feat that gives family members clues to their future risk of disease, points to lifestyle changes that may help mitigate those risks, and highlights the drugs that are most likely to help or harm them. One of the major benefits of sequencing a family is that it generates much more accurate data, by allowing scientists to filter out sequencing errors. More broadly, the project hints at the future of personal genomics, capturing both the potential for preventative medicine and the challenges in interpreting the meaning of the genome for people who are largely healthy.

There aren't too many doctors in the village of Hari Ke Kalan, in the Punjab region of northern India. But for $1, residents who bicycle to a new health clinic can get an appointment with a physician appearing on a large-screen television and beamed in over broadband Internet.

The clinic, built by a startup called Healthpoint Services, is one of a network of eight "e-health points" that the for-profit company has built in India as part of a growing effort by entrepreneurs to capitalize on the rapid expansion of cellular and broadband access in the poorest parts of the world. With successes such as text-message-based mobile payments taking off in some countries, many experts see medicine as the next major application of technology in poor nations.

It’s that time of year again. Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, the QS Top University Ranking, and U.S. News & World Report’s annual list have just been published, and will shortly be followed by the Times Higher Education world rankings. Despite pages of critique, rankings still have the capacity to create fear and loathing in the higher-education and policy worlds – even before the ink is dry. Surely no one really believes that universities can move up or down the rankings scale in any meaningful way, on an annual basis – so why such hysteria?

It seems to me that the common denominator is status and wealth. Rankings bring vital visibility to nations and universities in an increasingly competitive world. The more globalization drives a single market in education, as it does in most goods and services, the more higher education is a beacon for investment and talent – the more this kind of barometer is inevitable. The publication of the Shanghai ranking in 2003 set the cat among the pigeons. Governments and universities around the world sat up and took notice – because rankings challenged, in a very public way, self-perceptions of excellence. It called attention to what I call the gap between self-declaration and external-verification.

Within the past week I have learned about two new programs to help entrepreneurs raise funding from individual or angel investors.

Will entrepreneurs successfully raise money with them? Yes.

Will they work for you? Probably not.

Let me explain.

It is every entrepreneur's dream to submit a business plan online and have investors magically appear and write them big funding checks.

But unfortunately, this is just a dream. It is NOT how investing work. Sure, it works sometimes, and perhaps one out of every thousand entrepreneurs who tries is able to find investors this way. But I'm not willing to bet on 0.1% odds.

DES MOINES - In the final action of its existence, the Iowa Economic Development Board approved state financial awards Thursday for projects in five Iowa communities that will impact up to 481 jobs.

Thursday marked the end of the line for the 13 board members, unless they need a final conference call to mop up some administrative loose ends. Next month, the state Department of Economic Development will launch a new public-private entity, the Iowa Partnership for Economic Progress. It will be made up of the Economic Development Authority - a state-funded agency with a new oversight board - and the Economic Development Corp., a not-for-profit organization that will be financed by the private sector and possibly federal grants.

HAVANA, Cuba, Thursday, September 15, 2011 – Licenses for self-employment have doubled with the number of licenses granted increasing from about 150,000 last year to 333,000 at present.

This according to Minister of Labour and Social Security, Margarita Gonzalez, who stated that since the implementation of the guidelines passed during the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), last year, employment alternative have been increased to 181 specialties.

Can two startups help make peace between Israelis and Palestinians?

Theodore Grossman hopes so.

The Babson College professor, specializing in technology and information systems, is helping to drive commerce between Israelis and Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, by teaching Palestinians and Israeli's entrepreneurship at Babson College.

"How can we use new methods to bring the people together?", Professor Grossman said.

As we start our convertible debt series, we’ll focus on the discount. Remember that a convertible debt deal doesn’t purchase equity in your company. Instead, it’s simply a loan that has the ability to convert to equity based on some future financing event (we’ll tackle the conversion mechanics in a later post.)

Until recently, we had never seen a convertible debt deal that didn’t convert at a discount to the next financing round. Given some of the excited market conditions at the seed stage, we’ve heard of convertible deals with no discount, but view this as irregular and not sustainable over the long term.

Startups are usually so focused on selling more of their branded product or service to their own customer base (organic growth) that they don’t consider the more indirect methods (non-organic growth) of increasing revenue and market share. Non-organic growth would include OEM relationships, finding strategic partners, “coopetition,” as well as acquisitions.

This initial focus is usually driven by limited financial and people resources, as well as the bandwidth of the executive team. Yet a creative and skilled team will often find that non-organic growth techniques can better leverage these limited resources.

An example of a startup which used non-organic growth early and effectively was Microsoft. Bill Gates started producing software solutions, like his Basic Interpreter and MS DOS, but quickly focused on adding thousands of small partners for applications, and major partners like IBM and other hardware manufacturers. Even mergers and acquisitions (M&A) came early.

Oh that Jesse Brown. He’s at it again. Regular readers probably remember our spirited back and forth recently about Apple’s relative level of importance to technology over the past decade. Now, with his latest post on Maclean's, Jesse has me frothing over another topic: video games.

In his post, he takes issue with the big tax breaks and other financial incentives that video game companies have received in many countries to set up shop there, especially Canada. As Jesse puts it, it’s a highly profitable industry that’s also one of the most subsidized:

"The health of the industry is inarguable—sales of video games reached $15 billion in the U.S. alone last year, eclipsing the music industry, if that still means anything—and it would likely do just fine without the charity. So why the corporate welfare?"

When was the last time you sat staring off into space daydreaming? Now, when you have a moment of down time, you probably check your e-mails, text, go online or play Angry Birds.

There’s plenty of technology on that smartphone to keep your mind occupied. But here's the rub: Your brain needs to be bored to be creative. It also needs down time to re-group.

Just think back to the days when your mom kicked you out of the house and told you to come home when it’s dark. Think of how creative you were at filling that unstructured time.

While President Obama urged Congress to pass his $447 billion jobs bill combining tax cuts and new government spending, skepticism remains as to whether the package could kick-start the stalled economy and if it would indeed pay for itself as the President promised.

President Obama’s “American Jobs Act” proposals include a 50 percent cut in payroll taxes, incentives for businesses to hire returning veterans and people who have been unemployed for more than six months, and new spending on America’s infrastructure. The President said that the proposals would not increase the growing federal deficit, and that he has ambitions for long-term deficit reduction through spending cuts.

Hong Kong is not famous for providing the best environment to entrepreneurs. But if you look around, help is there. Established in 2001 by Hong Kong government, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks offers incubation program for technology startups in the territory.

The program, called Incu-Tech, has been operating since 1992. At first, it was located in a downtown building in Kowloon Tong. Then, it moved to Science Park, a water-front county-side area in the north-eastern part of Hong Kong, in 2001. The place offers a rare campus-like environment in the crowded city.

A recent report, “Oklahoma Higher Education: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom” published by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs and written by Matthew Denhart and Christopher Matgouranis of The Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, D.C., asserts that state investment in universities bears little fruit with respect to economic development. However, recent data assembled by the Association of University Technology Managers says just the opposite: There is a positive correlation between money spent on research and economic development.

The metrics that go to the bottom line: royalties generated on inventions and the formation of startup companies — those that come about as a result of research activities. An analysis of the AUTM data shows that the top 25 universities in the nation have average research expenditures of $709 million per year. On average, this produces 261 inventions and generates $28 million in royalties for each of those universities. These royalties stem directly from an estimated $560 million per year in revenues to companies based on university research.

Building owners and managers are often reluctant to adopt new energy efficiency technology because they doubt it will be worth the cost in the long run.

Nolan Browne, managing director of the Cambridge, MA-based (for now) Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, is on the same page.

“I fundamentally agree with them,” he says. “If we don’t prove it, why would they want to buy it? We need to prove that it will work or last 20 to 30 years and that the occupant in that building is going to be happy and productive. If not, then it’s a problem.”

His organization is in the process of retrofitting an old building in the South Boston waterfront section known as the Innovation District. The facility will serve as the center’s offices and a “living lab” for demonstrating and validating energy efficient building technologies.

Microfinance is a term for lending money to low-income individuals. These individuals typically don’t have access to the same banking opportunities available to middle- and upper-income households.

Microfinance is often seen as a tool to help people climb out of poverty. Loan recipients can apply the money to building or sustaining a family-owned business. The loan amounts issued, however, are typically small — much smaller than those provided by banks.

While modern microfinance has gained traction thanks to the web, the practice has actually been viable for some time. Here’s a look at how it evolved and how the Internet is bringing it to more and more people.

How do you capture the present state of design in one single chart, with only 50 names? You don't. But, inspired by the effort of those 50, we gave it a shot in Fast Company's 2011 design issue.

In Fast Company's 2011 design issue, we focused on American design: What it means, where it stands, and where it's going. And so naturally, we thought it necessary to create a list of the country's most influential designers. We could have left it as a list, and that would be fine. It would have enraged a few people, enlightened a few more, and that's it. But instead, we wanted to gave readers a bit more insight into what "design" actually means today. Say it with me now: Infographics, to the rescue!

Looking to raise some money, but not sure where to go? Trying to make sense of the venture capital space? This chart from LUMA Partners should help. It lays out all the venture money investing in the digital industry.

Advanced energy as an economic development opportunity is a relatively new paradigm.  Until recently, the industry was focused on regulatory and environmental issues and was not thought of as a job creator.  Within the last 5 -7 years it has become a huge economic opportunity that regions, states and the nation as a whole are trying to capture. But, how do we make sure that we are harnessing the entire system of regional, state and federal efforts to create that economic impact?  By creating  an organization from the bottom up!  It may sound a little glib but the effort is turning into a great opportunity to collaborate nationally and accelerate competitiveness in advanced energy.

Today, NorTech and seven of Ohio’s energy focused business organizations announced that we have formed a new statewide partnership. This new organization, Advanced Energy Economy Ohio (AEE Ohio), will seek to drive the development of advanced energy to boost Ohio’s economy and competitiveness. The purpose of this collaboration is to increase our capacity statewide to accelerate the energy economy, to have good reliable data and to advocate for effective policies.  AEE Ohio is one of the first regional advanced energy organizations in the country that will feed into an emerging national coalition focused on growing America’s energy economy.

Are you an entrepreneur? Are you consumed with a great desire to create a company, create value or change the world? If so, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve created today’s roundup with you in mind. Read up on tips, resources and news important to you as we explore the journey into the world of entrepreneurship.

Basics

Is entrepreneurship all it’s cracked up to be? It all depends on how you approach it. To many people who decide to start their own business, disillusionment and disenchantment can easily and quickly set in. They find their new endeavor causes them more stress and less satisfaction than they expected. They work longer hours, make less money, and are more isolated than in their previous work. This article emphasizes why they do what they do, recognizing the sacrifices they must make. Huff Post Small Business