General Electric recently introduced the Vscan, a portable ultrasound device that looks like a cross between a cell phone and an iPod.

The inspiration for this product did not come from the U.S.; it came from India.

India’s rural physicians, who at most use a thermometer and stethoscope, were put off by the bulky, expensive and hard-to-use ultrasound devices that GE traditionally sells in Western markets. But Indian physicians are not technophobic. After all, they all use cell phones. Observing this, GE’s engineers had a eureka moment: What if they designed an ultrasound device that was as simple to use as a cell phone?

The result was the Vscan, which is now being rolled out in emerging and developed markets alike.

While children count down the days until summer, one question looms large for their parents: "What are they going to do?" Summer should be a time for roaming, discovering and running outside -- but unfortunately, for all too many kids, more free time means more screen time and more structured activities.

It's up to you to ensure that your kids get a healthy daily dose of unstructured outdoor play. Here are six ways to get your children moving, nurture their creativity and provide them with all the rich learning opportunities that outdoor play presents. In the process, you'll meet new neighbors and contribute to a nationwide movement to save play.

If universities want to play as participants, not gate-keepers, in our nation’s innovation ecosystem, university administrators need to learn to create a work environment that attracts, motivates and retains high-performing employees. When people talk about issues involved in transforming federally funded university research into products, medicines and companies, little attention is paid to the people who manage the day-to-day operational details. I don’t mean faculty – they’ve got it good: tenure, freedom to set their own agenda, and advancement opportunities galore. No, I mean the administrative staff, the 9-ti-5’ers, the unknown soldiers who spend their days hunkered down on the frontlines of the great divide between the university and the rest of the world.

University staff employees don’t get much recognition. Professional advancement opportunities inside the university’s patent office are limited. If universities want to play effectively in an era of open innovation, they’re going to need to learn to attract, keep and inspire the people most allergic to slow-moving, rule bound, dead-end university staff jobs. The staff members that dream of bigger things and bigger paychecks typically use their tour of duty inside the university to springboard into more lucrative and interesting work somewhere outside the university. Tax attorneys and financial analysts do the same thing, when they spend a year or two working for the IRS or the SEC and then enter private practice. In fact, high staff turn-over has been identified as an organizational barrier to improving the current university technology transfer process (Siegel, Waldman and Link, 2003).

Last year, the battery startup A123 Systems spun out another company, called 24M, to develop a new kind of battery meant to make electric vehicles go farther and cost less. Now a research paper published in Advanced Energy Materials reveals the first details about how that battery would work. It also addresses the challenges in bringing the battery to market.

A big problem with the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids is that only about 25 percent of the battery's volume is taken up by materials that store energy. The rest is made up of inactive materials, such as packaging, conductive foils, and glues, which make the batteries bulky and account for a significant part of the cost.

If you are like most people walking through the world today you have likely fantasized about making millions of dollars at some point in your life. Perhaps some of you have even had some great ideas some where along the way.

Even though many of us have probably had the urge at times to chase these million dollar ideas, few of us ever actually go ahead and attempt to turn these dreams into a reality.

So why do so few people actually go ahead and attempt to start a successful business venture?

Most people convince themselves that attempting to accomplish this is unrealistic, irresponsible, and too much work for the average person walking through life.

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Quick background:  Bounce rate is a metric that measures the number of visitors who leave your site after having looked at only one page or only staying for a few seconds.  Think of bounce rate as the, “Oops, not what I wanted — next!” metric.

Many business owners focus on “improving” the pages with high bounce rates by revamping the design, changing the navigation structure, rewriting copy… all in an attempt to decrease the bounce rate.  But often that doesn’t work.

Why?  In many cases the page itself is not the issue.  The problem stems from the visitor’s purpose for visiting the page.  Purpose is everything:

There’s a new threat to personal privacy online. In the name of corporate compliance, tools are emerging that let companies monitor and manage social networking posts, including user account profiles. Including LinkedIn.

Last week, Distributed Marketing published a report that might worry anyone who uses LinkedIn as a way to network and job search within their industry. Specifically, they reported on a press release from compliance vendor Actiance, which announced social media monitoring software. Specifically, Actiance had this to say:

“Actiance today announced new capabilities within its Socialite solution to proactively allow organizations to approve content and changes made to employee LinkedIn profiles.”

It may seem slightly ridiculous to consider the prospects for a future solar-hydrogen economy at an institute for theoretical physics in Waterloo, Canada. After all, Canada is the capital of unconventional oil, also known as oil sands, also known as tar sands, which supply more than a million barrels of oil per day to the U.S. And the primary use of today's existing hydrogen economy—a $200 billion a year proposition—is adding the energetic molecule to such unconventional oils to make them more palatable to the global energy infrastructure.

But rebranded as "artificial photosynthesis," an alternative hydrogen future did get consideration at the Equinox Summit of the Waterloo Global Science Initiative last week. The summit's effort paired "future leaders" with old-school scientists to imagine an a new energy scenario for 2030, one that would cut greenhouse gas emissions, restrain a global society that relies on burning fossil fuels, and provide modern energy to the billions of people who do not enjoy it today.

Enrique Allen had an epiphany while meditating one morning about how to bring design literacy to Silicon Valley. Instead of spending so much of his energy mentoring and consulting with startups about how to bring iterative creative thinking and a respect for user experience to their company culture, why not do the inverse? "I realized I should be helping designers become more startup-ey," Allen tells Co.Design. "Those are the people, who, if they become leaders in a company, will model design behavior from its inception, right in the company's DNA." So he started The Designer Fund to give entrepreneurial designers an on-ramp into the Silicon Valley world of angel investor networks, demo days, and funding rounds. "It's about helping to give designers a seat at the startup table that engineers and MBAs already have," Allen says. The intended result: Smarter companies, better products, happier users -- and an improved world.

The National Post seems to have liked my column this week on ICANN's next-generation domain names. It's promoted three times this morning on the "NP Entrepreneur" home page (see photo).

The story suggestion came from Naseem Javed, corporate-naming expert and founder of ABC Namebank. He's really excited about the new opportunities that will emerge out of the creation of a whole new set of domain names: instead of dot-com, you can have dot-blog, dot-Kodak, dot-Calgary, dot-anythingyouwant.

There are a few catches. One, the regime has yet to be approved by ICANN, the world's top domain decision-maker. (But the betting is it will be approved next week.) Secondly, simply applying for one of these "generic top-level domains" will set you back $200,000 or more.

Customer development guru Steve Blank recently wrote a couple of good posts (part 1 here and part 2 here) on what is good and bad about board meetings in the twenty first century and how we might change them. As he says, board meetings haven’t changed much…

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

It’s time.

Every investor expects to see some business traction, both before and after a funding event. If you have been working 20 hours a day, and spent your last dollar, but have no results to show, investors will be sympathetic, but will probably tell you that your dream doesn’t have wheels. Traction means forward progress.

I hear a lot of entrepreneurs contemplating their great “idea” for several years with little discernable progress, and looking for money to start. Talk and time are cheap, but they need to understand that investors judge past results as a good indicator of future expectations. Here are some tips which will signal traction and fundability to investors, as well as to your team:

Document your business plan. It’s hard to build a business without a plan, just like it’s hard to build a house without a blueprint. If you have a product description, that’s necessary, but not sufficient. If you have neither, and choose to approach an investor, you will get no attention, and probably never again get a shot at funding with that investor.

Forcing yourself to write down a plan is actually the only way to make sure you actually have a plan. Make sure your plan answers every relevant question that you could possibly imagine from your business partners, spouse, and potential investors. That means skip the jargon and include explanations and examples.

Dave Vogt was born without his left hand. From birth, he began wearing a hook in its place. What was a part of life for Dave soon inspired Mark Stark.

Mark went to work in his home and put together a prosthetic hand his friend could use for the tasks where a hook would fall short. Called the Natural Dexterous Hand, it is not only gentle enough to lift a wine glass, but it is strong enough to pick up a chair, reports Suburban Journals.

Constructed from plastic, each finger and joint on the hand operates individually. The fingertips have attached rubber finger cots, much like postal workers use for rifling paper. The palm of the hand uses the grip from a glove. Other building materials include rivets, fishing line, screws and springs.

The presentation below was given by US VC blogger Mark Suster at the Founder Showcase conference in San Francisco yesterday. It’s a cracker – 70 slices, but quick to flip through.

My favourite bit is his discussion of ‘lean vs fat’ i.e. how aggressively you should ramp your cost based and go for growth (slies 31-34). The answer: stay lean until you REALLY know you’re onto something big. Emphasis mine.

This week, IBM celebrated a major milestone: its 100th year in business.

The centennial is especially impressive for a company involved in technology, an industry that is known to "eat its young" and regularly watches once-lucrative companies upended by startups and innovators offering faster, easier, smaller and cheaper processes.

IBM has reinvented itself many times, evolving from manufacturing machines that process data on punch-cards to making hard drives and floppy disks to inventing the bar code. Its fortunes were at risk in the 1990s, but IBM successfully reengineered itself and remains one of the largest tech companies in business. The AP notes, "With around $100 billion in annual revenue today, IBM is ranked 18th in the Fortune 500. It's three times the size of Google and almost twice as big as Apple. Its market capitalization of around $200 billion beats Google and allowed IBM last month to briefly surpass its old nemesis, Microsoft."

It was an historic last night in Mountain View, CA as the first annual New Me Accelerator program, designed to motivate African-American technological entrepreneurship, launched on the campuses of Google, Inc.

Created by Angela Benton (founder) and Wayne Sutton, NME has been the continuation of Ms. Benton’s commitment to empower and create opportunity for African-Americans in the digital space.

Hosted by Interactive One Chief Technology Officer, Navarrow Wright, the NME kick-off event asked 12 young black digital entrepreneurs to pitch their product and business ideas to an executive panel of venture capitalists including leaders from Syncom and David Krane from Google Ventures. Mr. Krane, the 85th employee of Google, Inc and former head of Global Communications for the search giant, offered constructive feedback and heartfelt counsel to the young entrepreneurs, many of whom had no former experience pitching their ideas.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is calling for a tax break for investors who push money into companies that are based in the state.

Details of the proposal, which Kasich delivered to a conference committee that’s reconciling differences in budgets passed by the House and Senate, were scant, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

Here’s how Kasich described the proposal: “If you are an Ohioan and you invest in an Ohio company … and hold that investment for two years, you will pay no tax on the gain.”

The proposal also includes a tax credit for investors who sell stock and reinvest that gain in an Ohio company, as long as they hold shares in the Ohio company for two years.