Those of us of a certain age can recall a time, roughly a decade ago, when knowledge management metastasized from a promising, positive concept to something bizarre and sinister, before receding from our collective consciousness.

In the early days of knowledge management, the idea that animated the field held great promise. What if organizations could gain fuller access to the gifts—the experience and insights—that people brought to the table? Many delighted in asking rhetorically, “What if our organization knew what our organization knew?”

The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2030, nearly 23.6 million people will die from heart disease. However, lifestyle and diet are key factors in preventing heart disease, says the paper presented today by Dr Oscar Franco at the ESC Congress 2011.

A number of recent studies have shown that eating chocolate has a positive influence on human health due to its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. This includes reducing blood pressure and improving insulin sensitivity (a stage in the development of diabetes).

Preserving just 4 percent of the ocean could protect crucial habitat for the vast majority of marine mammal species, from sea otters to blue whales, according to researchers at Stanford University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Their findings were published in the Aug. 16 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Of the 129 species of marine mammals on Earth, including seals, dolphins and polar bears, approximately one-quarter are facing extinction, the study said.

The offices of the new Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. are surprisingly anonymous.

The public-private hybrid agency officially opened July 1, but there still are no outward signs of its existence: no logos on the walls, no department nameplates. Even the lobby of the building still lists the now-defunct Department of Commerce as residing on the fifth and sixth floors.

So while Wisconsin is open for business, as Gov. Scott Walker likes to say, it seems its chief economic recruiter still is very much under construction.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 29, 2011) – Gov. Steve Beshear today announced a major small business initiative that will provide Kentucky’s small businesses with access to nearly $155 million in new loans to help with job creation across the state.

The Kentucky Small Business Credit Initiative involves three new small business programs implemented by the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development to facilitate increased private lending to Kentucky’s small businesses. The programs include: the Kentucky Capital Access Program; the Kentucky Collateral Support Program; and the Kentucky Loan Participation Program.

Gov. Beshear announced the initiative at the Coldstream Center, part of the University of Kentucky’s Coldstream Research Campus, in Lexington with lawmakers, business leaders and United States Treasurer Rosie Rios. The Coldstream Center houses 25 small businesses with more than 300 employees. Several of these businesses are recipients of federal small business grants.

When David Cohen and I first talked about TechStars in 2006, the concept of a “mentor” was front and center. Early on, we defined TechStars as a “mentorship-driven seed stage investment program” and have held deeply to that concept from the beginning. Today, the vast majority of accelerators use a mentorship model, which is something we are really proud of and thinks serves entrepreneurs everywhere extremely well.

When I was in Cambridge, England at the end of July for the Springboard Demo Day, Jon Bradford (the Springboard Managing Director) talked elloquently about how mentorship was a key part of the program. Springboard is a member of the TechStars Network and subsequently uses the same mentorship model that TechStars uses. During the day I got to meet a bunch of Springboard mentors – they were superb and also incredibly enthusiastic about the Springboard program that Jon had created. Jon then took me for a meeting at 10 Downing Street and on the way suggested that David and I write up a “Mentor Manifesto.” I thought it was a great idea, suggested it to David, who published his Mentor Manifesto yesterday. It follows:

Google Education provided an undisclosed amount of seed funding for the opening of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Mobile Learning, according to the Cambridge school.

The center, located at the MIT Media Lab, will focus on new mobile technologies, apps, and their uses in education, including location applications, mobile sensing, data collection, and reality gaming.

The first project will study and extend, for educational technology use, App Inventor for Android, a tool developed by Google Labs designed to allow anyone--from novices to programmers--to create apps by using a graphical interface of buttons and menus in a web browser called the Open Blocks Java library. Google, which is in the process of open-sourcing the App Inventor code, released the beta version in 2009.

A reader wrote:

Do you have any advice about working from home with kids?

Here’s something I wrote about the subject from 2006. Since then, we’ve added another child to the mix, started homeschooling and I work from home entirely.

During a typical week, I work from home for twenty to thirty hours. Although this allows me greater opportunity to see my wife and two small children, it can also be a little tricky at times. I’ve developed the following rules and routines for making the best of the situation.

Create an office separate from the main living areas of the house and declare it off limits during working hours. Help your child make a child readable sign for the office door so that he will know when it is and isn’t acceptable to burst into the office.

Back in 2004, the city of San Jose, Calif., invested $6 million in an incubator that has since helped hundreds of startups get off the ground.

Today, the San Jose BioCenter is a state-of-the-art life sciences incubator, recognized in 2009 by the National Business Incubation Association as the best incubator in the world. The center provides "wet" laboratories, research equipment, and commercialization support to life sciences and other emerging-tech companies.

There has been tremendous agonizing over Steve Jobs resigning from Apple and speculation of about what will happen as the company loses the great leader who has shaped the Apple brand so dramatically for so many years. In contrast to Steve Jobs, great leaders can also turn into bad leaders. A leader you’d have followed anywhere because of their confidence, strong communication skills, and self-confidence CAN lose the handle on leadership…in a major way.

Having witnessed leaders undergo this unfortunate unraveling up close, it’s worth sharing twelve ways a great leader turns into a bad leader:

This past weekend, while trying out snorkeling equipment for my exciting new hobby of underwater hockey (more on that later), I ran across a product that was a fantastic example of a simple solution to an unmet need.

If you've ever been birdwatching, you've probably taken along a little book so you can identify the birds you see and learn about them. That's a big part of the fun.

But, unsurprisingly, that's not so easy to do that when you're snorkeling! Aside from having no pockets to stash your book, there's also a slight risk that your book might get wet.

Business networking is one of the most interactive and successful approaches to market yourself and building relationships. By attending events, meeting like open-minded individuals and interacting with different people you can share, discover and learn new things. Successful business networking is the linking collectively of persons who, through faith and relationship building, become walking, talking advertisements for one another. These people can be your potential clients, consultants, workers or even business partners.

Apart from this, business networking activities also brings the opportunity to meet potential customers and clients, as well as prospective business suppliers. Business networking events can create symbiotic relationships among colleagues and associates that can foster new ideas or resolve current issues in your industry.

Angel groups have grown significantly in the last decade, as more and more organizations have been established and more individual angels have joined the groups. Angel groups now exist in nearly every American state and Canadian province, and they offer accredited angel investors the opportunity to invest in and help build successful companies - while also having a good time. Every group is different in terms of investment strategy and culture, but ACA member groups offer interested investors a variety of benefits. Most angel groups are looking for new investors to join their group. [1]

Other than "having a high net worth," no one-size-fits-all description of an angel investor exists. The levels of experience and particular interests of angel investors vary widely. But certain overall classifications can be useful if you're hoping to match your capital needs with the right kind of investor.

The media landscape is changing right in front of our eyes – we have moved from a world where large organizations controlled the media we consumed to a more democratic time where everybody has a voice. Because of the huge shifts in technology, anybody can start their own media empire with a small amount of money, lots of drive and a creative mind.

Two of the biggest examples are Techcrunch and Mashable which were both started by individuals in their own homes and in less than five years have each become worth close to $50 million. So how would you go about creating your own little media empire and what are the barriers to entry?

Administration Seeks Comment to Help Formulate
Federal Funding Opportunity- Strong Cities, Strong Communities

The Obama Administration recently launched Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2), a new interagency pilot initiative to strengthen local capacity and spark economic growth in local communities while ensuring taxpayer dollars are used wisely and efficiently. ‪

In addition to the six pilot locations, SC2 includes an Economic Visioning Challenge designed to help additional cities develop economic blueprints, which will be administered by EDA. Six cities will be competitively selected to receive a grant of approximately $1 million that they will use to administer an “X-prize style” competition, whereby they will challenge multi-disciplinary teams of experts to develop comprehensive economic and land use proposals for their city. 

The Administration is seeking comments on the structure of the Challenge to help formulate the Federal Funding Opportunity. Due to significant interest in this initiative and to ensure stakeholders have ample time to comment, EDA is extending the deadline for the submission of comments from August 9, 2011, to September 7, 2011. Interested parties should submit comments in writing by e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.or facsimile to (202) 482-2838 by September 7, 2011. Click here to read the original notice for the Challenge.

Click here to view Federal Register Notice.

How does Australia unleash a new generation of entrepreneurs who create and commercialise ideas, experiment and take risks, fail and succeed, and build wealth for themselves and the community? A generation of young entrepreneurs who, over time, will help this country stimulate higher innovation, lift productivity and wean itself off the mining boom.

The Venture will address these issues in a series of blogs on start-up entrepreneurship over coming weeks. The series aims to stimulate debate on how this country can encourage and help a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs pursue their dreams and succeed in business ventures. The goal is to give more voice to smaller enterprises in a business debate that is always dominated by big companies.

At the turn of the 20th century, the board of directors of the Cleveland Trust Co. met weekly to go over the bank’s loans. The minutes show the directors carefully scrutinizing loan applications, especially from local entrepreneurs. Yet toward the end of the 1920s, the minutes start reflecting a board less interested in local business lending and more absorbed with sending money to New York to play the stock market. “There was none of the careful oversight of before,” says Margaret Levenstein, executive director of the Michigan Census Research Data Center at the University of Michigan, who examined the minutes as part of an ongoing research project. “They wanted to speculate.”

The bank’s finances took a hit when the stock market boom went bust in 1929. Cleveland Trust survived the Great Depression, including a 1933 bank run that ended after its president, Harris Creech, clambered on a desk and calmed down nervous customers. But its speculative splurge evokes the banking industry’s race to a fast buck 75 years later. And the rise and fall of Cleveland’s economy from the 1870s into the 1930s may help explain why entrepreneurship—a key engine of new job creation—is falling short in America today.

In 1922, Baltimore society woman and magazine correspondent Emily Post wrote the book on etiquette. An encyclopedic guide to the manners of its time, Etiquette became a best-seller and launched a family business.

Her descendants are carrying on the task through the Emily Post Institute, and her great-great-grandson, Daniel Post Senning, is working on a book about etiquette in an age of digital communications, mobile devices, and social networking.

I accepted an invitation to speak to Berkeley College's new Business Club last week, and while I dreaded the drive from Long Island to Brooklyn, knowing it would be snarled with traffic (it didn't disappoint -- 2-1/2 hours to go 50 miles -- one way), I also had a hunch it would be interesting and worth the trip. I was right.

Anthony Gay, the head of the college's new Business Club, produced a crowded roomful of students interested in hearing me and other entrepreneurs talk about our experiences starting businesses. I found myself taking lots of notes from the speakers and the students asking questions.

The world needs new energy resources—not only to offset the decline of our existing reserves but to support the rapid growth of emerging economies like those of China, India, Brazil, and Russia. The International Energy Agency estimates that resources yet to be developed or discovered could be needed to account for 50 percent of conventional oil production by 2035.

Discovering and unlocking those new resources will require a new generation of technology to be deployed at a global scale, and this technology must use existing infrastructure. That's not only a tough technical challenge but one accompanied by often overlooked challenges of industry culture.