With markets on edge over the huge debt mountains that built up in Europe and the United States during the global financial crisis, 17 economics Nobel Prize winners gathered this week on the picturesque island of Lindau on Lake Constance in southern Germany to discuss the discipline.

Among them are Joseph Stiglitz, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for work on how markets cope with asymmetric information, Myron Scholes, who won in 1997 for his work on derivatives, and Robert Mundell, a winner in 1999 for his analysis of optimum currency areas.

The Lost 1984 Video: young Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh - Steve Jobs always "had it"

The Original 1984 Macintosh Introduction: the magic moment, when Steve Jobs unveils the Macintosh and releases it from its bag.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans view the computer industry the most positively and the federal government the least positively when asked to rate 25 business and industry sectors. All five of the top-rated sectors this year are related to either computers or food.

Gallup has asked Americans each August since 2001 to indicate whether they have positive or negative views of a list of business and industry sectors. The 2011 update is from Gallup's Aug. 11-14 survey.

The results range from a +62 net positive rating for the computer industry to a -46 net positive rating for the federal government.

Create or die.

That’s how “digital content architect” Michelle Ferrier dubs her program that brings together journalists, business owners, educators, programmers and the like to conjure up new vehicles for consumers of media. Moreover, it’s a fitting message for entrepreneurs in today’s unmerciful business climate.

While in Philadelphia attending the recent National Association of Black Journalists conference, I had the opportunity to meet Ferrier and a score of dynamic entrepreneurs, financiers and journalists during a special lunch meeting at a local Italian eatery. As you would expect, informal chats and introductory conversations eventually turned to our most pressing issue: The devastating impact of an alarmingly high Black unemployment rate of 16%. Instead of sharing a series of doomsday scenarios though, each attendee focused on targeted, long-term solutions.

A reader asks:  We’re a startup based in Palo Alto, and we just received a Series A term sheet for a $725,000 investment.  The investor is basically insisting we use his lawyer at a big Valley firm to represent us.  He said he doesn’t need a lawyer, and this will save us a lot of money.  We’re first time entrepreneurs, and we don’t know if this is standard practice and what we should do.  Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer:  Welcome to the world of the Silicon Valley!  This is not uncommon, but I still cringe when I hear it (probably because I was trained at two big law firms in New York City and this kind of stuff typically doesn’t happen there).

A recent report about the "future Internet" by the UK's national innovation agency, Technology Strategy Board, has some illuminating information about the emerging Internet of Things. It suggests that converged services and a brokerage model, amongst other things, will define the future Web. The report is available as a free PDF download, but as it's 59 pages long we'll summarize some key points in this post.

The report defines the future Internet as "an evolving convergent Internet of things and services that is available anywhere, anytime as part of an all-pervasive omnipresent socio-economic fabric, made up of converged services, shared data and an advanced wireless and fixed infrastructure linking people and machines to provide advanced services to business and citizens."

Like many great political alliances, symbiotic relationships in biology may have started with antagonism, before the two parties reached mutual understanding—at least according to some evolutionary biologists. The often cited example is the mitochondrion, the eukaryotic cell’s energy-supplying organelle, which may have first existed as a prokaryote. As the story goes, this prokaryote was engulfed by a second cell, and the two eventually formed such a close symbiotic alliance that one could not live without the other. This mutual dependence, however, formed over many millennia.

Our own symbionts, the microbes that reside throughout our bodies, primarily in our guts, have a more independent—some might say downright rocky—relationship with us, their hosts.

The Internet has bred a new generation of entrepreneurs. Instead of starting a local shop and hoping your idea will work, many entrepreneurs are able to start on the Internet. They can test their idea with a small investment, and build their way to a bigger business when they succeed.

The Globe and Mail has covered some lessons that webpreneurs need to consider when running their business.

Brace for some spectacular screw-ups

Many of the startups that end up on the front pages of business sections after being acquired by the likes of Google and Microsoft don’t always get off to the best starts.

At this point, no one’s going to confuse Ohio’s Mahoning Valley with California’s Silicon Valley.

Check back in a few years, though.

Economic-development leaders in Youngstown know they can’t do much about Northeast Ohio’s climate — like it or not, the average temperature for January is 23.6 — but they’re working hard to improve the region’s business climate.

There’s no doubt that Youngstown needs a boost. When the U.S. steel industry foundered in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Rust Belt poster child lost than 50,000 jobs. Most never have come back.

As the baby boomers grow older, America is getting older, too. According to the 2010 census, the nation’s median age has increased to 37.2, up from 35.3 in 2000. The aging trend held up in every state — only the District of Columbia has a younger median age now than a decade ago. For states, changing demographic patterns, visualized below as “population pyramids,” have major implications for policy and politics. Older states, such as Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and New Hampshire, may have less time than others to prepare for challenges such as providing long-term care for a growing elderly population. At the same time, younger states such as Utah and Texas must wrestle with educating relatively large school-age populations — Christopher Swope

Medical apps attracting big venture financing. In the world of healthcare startups, last week was a big week for digital healthcare companies developing medical mobile apps. Four digital health companies closed venture financing deals, including Awarepoint and Tandem Diabetes Care in San Diego and AliveCor in Oklahoma, which is developing a device that turns smartphones into low-cost heart monitors.

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug 29, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- It's one thing to take the top spot from MIT in creating startup companies from university research, but it's quite another to maintain a steady commercialization program. Data released today by the University of Utah (the U) shows continued progress in commercializing technologies from July 2010 to July 2011. Highlights of the findings include the creation of 23 companies, 233 invention disclosures, 81 license agreements and engaging over 2,400 students.

The U's Technology Venture Development office, also known as Tech Ventures, collected the data. Tech Ventures facilitates all commercialization activities on campus, from managing patent applications and technology licenses to community outreach and student entrepreneurship programs.

Economic developers will find this publication a valuable tool in building their relationships with their local elected officials. The guidebook outlines the "top 10 list" of things elected officials should know about economic development in order to be effective leaders. The publication is the result of a partnership between the National League of Cities Center for Research and Innovation and the International Economic Development Council.

Download the PDF

Lots of communities waste money trying to lure companies with tax incentives. But nobody wastes money quite like the Greater Kansas City area.

That’s because the Kansas City, Mo., metro area spills over into Kansas, involving state governments in the bidding. It is a game that some prominent businessmen want to halt, saying it does nothing to encourage new economic activity.

Seventeen prominent business leaders, including top officials with Hallmark and Sprint Nextel, recently wrote a letter to the governors of Kansas and Missouri, asking them to put an end to the “economic border war.”

Middle managers are the much-maligned workhorses of corporate America. Squeezed between the demands of the top brass and the realities of front-line employees, middle managers face blame from both camps when things go wrong and win little praise when a policy works out. And when times are tough, middle managers are often the first to go. Still, research shows companies often owe many more of their successes to middle managers than top execs.

Things, we can conclude, have never been easy for the beleaguered middle manager, but are they soon to get a lot worse? That’s the conclusion of a column earlier this year in the HBR written by London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, author of The Shift. In it she predicts that the role of middle manager is actually going extinct. Why? Gratton offers two main reasons.

A recent email from Harvard Business School does a nice job of summing up the efforts of its faculty to discover what companies can do to increase their capacity for innovation. Some of these findings have already been written about in this blog, while others are new. Here’s how the researchers suggest managers can do a better job of creating and managing innovative ideas:

1. Prizes make a difference. Today, the best-known prize for innovation is probably the Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million for the first privately funded manned spacecraft that could break through the earth’s atmosphere within two weeks. There are other X Prizes now being offered for designing fuel-efficient cars, reaching the moon, and sequencing the human genome. But skeptics claim that these prizes don’t spur people to create things they wouldn’t have created anyways-they just reward existing behavior.

If you work for one or live with one, I guarantee you’re not going to like this post. But like it or not, the characteristics that make control freaks insufferable jerks may be the unwanted flipside of what makes them natural leaders.

Now, before you hit the delete key or flame me, note that we’ve spent quite a bit of time on the negative qualities of control freaks, i.e. that they’re typically overly demanding, micromanaging, bullying, untrusting, aggressive, compulsive, paranoid, stress monsters.

Two hundred years ago it was enough to rely on natural advantages to build a great city. Cities were built on the intersections of rivers or along gentle bays that launched commerce and trade on mighty oceans. Those days are long gone. Today our greatest competitive advantages are the qualities that attract the best and brightest from around the world to come here: our freedom, our diversity, our tolerance and our dynamism.

New York became the world’s greatest city because New Yorkers dared to dream it and build it. Today we are looking far into the future once again—and launching one of the most promising economic development initiatives in the city’s long history.

Most policymakers are starting to both heed entrepreneurs for their job and wealth creation efforts during these tough times as well as pick up on one of our nation’s biggest source of high-growth start-ups: immigrant entrepreneurs. But if public reaction to a recent NPR segment and recent Washington Post commentary on the topic are anything to go by, I fear we have a long way to go to convince the average American citizen.

However, policymakers can and should reassure Americans anxious about job loss at the hands of high skilled immigrants. Yes, creating “Entrepreneurs Visas” would indeed permit entrepreneurs from other countries entry into the United States. The Kauffman Foundation has spelled out the rationale behind this proposed tool and how it would function. Initially, entrants would be screened for a temporary visa based on either the outside capital they had attracted or revenues from U.S. sales they already had recorded. However, Green cards would only be granted later if the entrepreneur had hired a minimum number of U.S. workers. This type of visa is already embodied in the revised version of the Kerry-Lugar Startup Visa Act, but that particular proposal unfortunately limits the number of startup visas—mostly, I am guessing, to make it palatable to Americans. Why limit these visas when their holders would create numerous jobs right here in the United States without “taking a job” from any other U.S. workers?

When speaking to hopeful entrepreneurs throughout the years, there was one question that I constantly heard: “Do you think I have the qualities necessary to be a successful entrepreneur?”

To answer that question, I have put together the questionnaire below to help young professionals find out whether they have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Take the survey below of various psychological traits—whether inherent or learned—that could predict your ability to be the next Bill Gates, Meg Whitman or Larry Page. Give yourself one point for each of the characteristics below that describe you.

1. Are you self-confident?

Do you believe in your convictions so strongly that you would argue your view with anybody, anytime to win your case? Entrepreneurs often create new products or even new markets that few will initially believe in. (Think: Chia pets, Beanie Babies, the pet rock and the Internet). Would you have the confidence to see your idea or product through?