The word “typical,” when expressed about a person or population, often comes out as a nasty stereotype — which is why we won’t offer examples.

The environmentally minded folks at National Geographic, however, stuck to hard numbers for this video. It describes a typical person, built with hard demographics.

The video says the world’s most typical person is right-handed, makes less than $12,000 a year (ouch!) and has a cell phone, but not a bank account. Go figure. As for typical-ness based on sex and ethnicity, that person is a 28-year-old male Han Chinese.

Salesforce.com jumped into cloud computing before the term even existed. The company was founded in 1999 to offer businesses a customer-relationship management (CRM) service that ran online and didn't require software to be installed on employees' computers. But last year, Salesforce entered a decidedly more crowded market: the one for collaboration tools. Like other such services, Chatter takes elements from Facebook and Twitter and puts them into an application that helps employees assist each other much more efficiently than they can by endlessly e-mailing documents to each other. The company's chief scientist, JP Rangaswami, explained to Technology Review's deputy editor, Brian Bergstein, why Salesforce thinks Chatter is unique, and how collaborating in the office might become much more like a game—in a good way.

A new search tool developed by researchers at Microsoft indexes medical images of the human body, rather than the Web. On CT scans, it automatically finds organs and other structures, to help doctors navigate in and work with 3-D medical imagery.

CT scans use X-rays to capture many slices through the body that can be combined to create a 3-D representation. This is a powerful tool for diagnosis, but it's far from easy to navigate, says Antonio Criminisi, who leads a group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, U.K., that is attempting to change that. "It is very difficult even for someone very trained to get to the place they need to be to examine the source of a problem," he says.

For all the clever things smartphones can do these days — like stream movies and play 3-D games — the latest mobile craze centers on revamping one of the earliest phone applications, the text message.

Apps from a wave of new start-ups allow multiple people to participate in the same conversation on a mobile phone, like a group chat room or conference call held by way of text message. The new applications, most of which are free, include GroupMe, FastSociety, Beluga, Kik, TextPlus, PingChat, HurricaneParty and Yobongo.

Ministers from 25 member states have decided to go ahead with plans to introduce a common system for registering patents that would save European businesses millions of euros each year. Meanwhile, Italy and Spain are still refusing to join in, and difficult legal issues remain unresolved.

The decision to proceed with a Europe-wide patent system was taken by EU ministers in Brussels yesterday (10 March), with the agreement of all the countries except Italy and Spain.

These two countries have chosen to exclude themselves from the process, because they refuse to accept the proposed rules regarding the choice of official languages.

In my previous post I advised small businesses about the upcoming March 15 deadline for S Corp election. I wanted to follow up with a more detailed look at the two most popular business entities for small businesses: the S Corporation and LLC (Limited Liability Company).

These two entities share several key similarities. Perhaps most importantly, both will protect your personal assets from any potential liabilities of the company (whether from an unhappy customer, unpaid supplier, or anyone else who might pursue legal action). With both the S Corporation and LLC, your personal finances, home vehicles and other assets are all safe. In addition, both structures allow a business to borrow money and sell equity in order to raise capital. Both stay in existence until they are dissolved, without need for periodic renewal. And both offer pass-through tax treatment when it comes to federal income tax.

People who can’t manage their own lives don’t make good entrepreneurs. Small businesses require multi-tasking, work prioritization, and decision-making, with no entourage of assistants and specialists. That’s why Fortune 500 executives usually don’t survive as startup CEOs.

First you have to learn to accept total responsibility for things that happen to your business, just like you are responsible for everything in your personal life. Maybe you are comfortable with having a spouse in control of your personal life, but couples running a business are high risk.

We humans do many stupid things. But sometimes it's not our fault, it's just how our brains naturally function.

Psychology Today and PsyBlog write about four things humans are inclined to do that cause us to make poor decisions.

1. We treat inferences as facts

Inferences are conclusions we draw from observations. The problem is that observations aren't always spot on.

The billionaires of the tech scene on the Forbes Billionaire List are a mix of the old timers, and newcomers.

People like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Michael Dell top the list every year. But their younger counterparts are slowly catching up.

Take Mark Zuckerberg. The king of social networking added $9.5 billion to his fortune and jumped 60 spots from #212 in 2010 to #52 this year.

As expected, LinkedIn launched a personalized news site this morning, and while it's not going to replace Twitter, it could give LinkedIn users reason to visit the site a lot more often.

That could help LinkedIn earn more money from advertising as it prepares for its IPO this year.

The site is called LinkedIn Today, and it looks a lot like any other news aggregator -- think Google News. The difference is that news stories are selected and given prominence based on your industry interests, stories that are popular among members of your LinkedIn network, and stories that are popular across the entire LinkedIn network.

College isn't cheap; but if you choose wisely, the pay-off at the end is worth it.

Businessweek released their ranking of the best undergraduate business schools for 2011. We sorted through to see which of these colleges helps students land the highest starting salaries.

Surprisingly, some of the best salaries don't come from the best programs.

In a first for an important region of the Middle East, the Middle East Venture Capital Fund announced today it has raised a $28.7 million fund to invest in Palestinian technology companies according to Venturebeat.com.

The fund will be based in Ramallah and it has money from a bunch of international companies, foundations and other investors. The investors include Cisco, Google, the Soros Economic Development Fund, Skoll Foundation, Jean and Steve Case, and the European investment bank.

Hailing Karnataka’s Semiconductor Policy 2010 as landmark one, Asia Semiconductor Trading Support Association (ASTSA) President & Fukuoka University Kyushu Economic Research Centre Professor Hajime Tomokage, speaking to Deccan Herald on the sidelines of ISA Vission Summit 2011, said the aim of Kyushu cluster was to enhance technology of companies in the cluster and help bring their products to market, besides creation of new businesses and new markets for them.

I am proud of my bona fides on supporting the advancement of women. It angers me to think how slow executive suites and boardrooms are to welcome more qualified females. Stubborn gender wage gaps for comparable work are unacceptable and must be closed.

However, with all of the attention and focus on supporting equal opportunities for women, we have taken our eyes off an alarming trend. Young men in the US are in trouble by any measure of educational attainment. It’s a big deal and, for reasons of political correctness, we aren’t talking enough about this growing national problem.

IBM today announced 24 winners of its Smarter Cities Challenge, the first of 100 cities worldwide that will receive $50 million in technology and services from the consulting giant.

Philadelphia is one of eight U.S. cities in this round of the program, which is planned as a three-year initiative. Mayor Nutter is holding a press conference this afternoon to share more details.

“IBM will send talent to help the city identify and streamline programs and services, worforce training, education training, digital literacy training,” city press aide Aviva Kievsky tells Technically Philly.

I’m an entrepreneur. The last time I was an employee was in 1983. So what did I get from my MBA studies?

It wasn’t about earning power. I quit the fancy high-paying MBA job I’d recruited into just a few weeks after graduation. I went back to the consulting firm I’d worked with while I was at business school, before I graduated. And I was self employed less than two years later, and I’ve never worked for anybody else since then. I was an employee of the company I founded and owned.

The Forbes Billionaire List is coming out this evening.

The top 10 have already been released.

Meet them here.

Life in Europe is fantastic -- great food, low stress, less driving, more biking, and so forth.

It's not just in leisure, but in the workplace too.

There are multiple companies in Europe with amazing offices. Some of them are American, but plenty of great European brands have workplaces that reflect their unique status.

The line between an appropriately probing interview question and the kind that could slap your company with a discrimination lawsuit has grown increasingly difficult to navigate.

Misfire, and the consequences might be more expensive than you think.

When UCLA researchers studied California employment discrimination cases in 2007 and 2008, they found plaintiffs won about half those that went to trial in civil court.

While Einstein was not a neuroscientist, he sure knew what he was talking about in regards to the human capacity to achieve. He knew intuitively what we can now show with data—what it takes to function at your cognitive best. In essence: What doesn’t kill you makes you smarter.

Not so many years ago, I was told by a professor of mine that you didn't have much control over your intelligence. It was genetic—determined at birth. He explained that efforts made to raise the intelligence of children (through programs like Head Start, for example) had limited success while they were in practice, and furthermore, once the "training" stopped, they went right back to their previously low cognitive levels. Indeed, the data did show that (pdf), and he (along with many other intelligence researchers) concluded that intelligence could not be improved—at least not to create a lasting change.