Some have already taken to calling the events in the Middle East "the Arab 1848." Future generations, perhaps, will talk about the "spirit of 2011" when the ground begins to crumble beneath their own autocracies.

But are the same factors at work today as they were in past revolutionary surges? Some are undoubtedly similar -- throngs of disgruntled people have taken to the streets, questing for freedom and economic opportunity. Others, like the use of social media from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter, are undoubtedly new and different. Do the unfolding events of 2011 fit with our existing understanding of revolution or might they warrant updating?

About 400,000 people work at IBM, scattered in offices all over the world. To help them work together, the company has been conducting large-scale internal experiments with social software. What started as ad hoc experimentation has become a focused effort driven by the company's senior management, reaching almost all the company's employees.

As far back as 1997, IBM built an Intranet directory in an effort to help employees find others with the skills and experience they were looking for. For several years after that, employees informally built applications on top of that infrastructure. While many of those tools were helpful, they often didn't have the technical support they needed to really improve work at the company, says John Rooney, who heads the Technology Innovation Team in IBM's office of the CIO. "Projects might be running on a server under someone's desk," he says.

If you think curling is weird, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Though none of these sports is featured in the Olympics like Canada's favorite broom-sport, most of them do stage international competitions that are taken very seriously by their competitors.

So prepare to see the way broomsticks, pets, trampolines, irons, and cheese are used underwater, in the air, and on mountains in the wide and wacky world of sports.

“What’s the hardest part of your job?”

“Tough conversations,” he answers with a sigh.

There it is again. Over the last six years, I’ve been conducting an informal survey in Fortune 500 companies. I keep expecting managers to say their biggest challenge is something like, “Keeping control of the budget.”

But tough conversations continue to be a serious issue. No matter your industry, or your position in an organization, engaging in important or difficult conversations is an uncomfortable aspect of our jobs.

HEC Paris, ranked #1 business school in Europe by the Financial Times, is starting a seed fund for startups launched by students and alumni.

The school is renowned in France for its entrepreneurship programs and many alums went on to become successful entrepreneurs. Its incubator regularly churns out tens of new startups each year. In a regulatory filing (French), the school says the fund will be at least 6 million euros and will co-invest with other seed funds and angel investors, and have at least a 10 year lifespan.

A VENTURE capital insider has identified five technology-related areas entrepreneurs should focus on if they wish to attract funding.

While her list isn't exhaustive, MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) board member Gigi Wang tips mobile location-based services, predictive analysis, vision computing, video analytics and unified advertising platforms as fields that will have investors circling like sharks.

It seems the venture capital firms' appetite is back with a vengeance following the global financial crisis and many are looking to offer seed-, early- and late-stage funding to budding talent.

U.S. technology innovation has relied on venture capital dollars for the last 50 years. That relationship resulted in it – and Silicon Valley – becoming the ones to beat.

Yet last year, only $12.3 billion of new money found its way into venture capital funds, less than half of that in 2008. As private equity amounts retreat, many American start-up financiers see a historic contraction ahead for the industry.

Part of that blame falls on U.S. venture capitalists, who now hunt elsewhere for big ideas. Many of them have their eyes on China for clean technology and other new platforms.

On Friday the International Game Developers Association will honor Jerry Lawson for all he's done to move the state of the art forward.

The honor has been a long time coming.

It was back in the mid-1970s that Lawson developed the first video game console system, breaking ground in more ways than one. You see, Lawson, 70, is black. And while we often try to pretend that's neither here nor there, the truth is it is here -- and it was even more-so there, when Lawson arrived in the valley in 1968.

Lawson started at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1970, when there were very few black engineers working in the valley. Within a few years he was launching and running the new gaming division, where he developed the Fairchild Channel F, a console that allowed players to change out cartridges loaded with games like "Video Black Jack," "Maze, Cat and Mouse," "Spitfire" and "Space War."

In every other form of fiction writing, the writer is the only one who starts with nothing. It all begins with the writer, and everyone else involved builds on the foundations of a script, or story, or manuscript, or feature, or whatever kind of bricks the writer laid down.

Not so with games, and that’s a hard pill for writers to swallow. It’s a genre that doesn’t really care for the writer, and does its best to manage without one altogether. You’re not quickly welcomed onto the creative team, and even if you are, the invitation generally doesn’t arrive until the stone of the game has been cut.

The US Chamber of Commerce to the EU is calling for simpler visa procedures to make it easier for scientists and researchers to move between Europe and America, in response to competition from emerging economies such as China and India.

John Vassallo, chair of AmCham EU, said increased cooperation on innovation and education could drive economic recovery on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Despite the economic crisis and the global downturn, the United States and Europe remain each other's most important markets," said Vassallo, who represents American companies active in Europe.

I’m keynoting this year’s Intersystems Global Conference on the topic of “Freeing the Data” from the transactional systems we use today such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Electronic Health Records (EHR), etc. As I’ve prepared my speech, I’ve given a lot of thought to the evolving data needs we have in our enterprises.

In healthcare and in many other industries, it’s increasingly common for users to ask IT for tools and resources to look beyond the data we enter during the course of our daily work. For one patient, I know the diagnosis, but what treatments were given to the last 1000 similar patients. I know the sales today, but how do they vary over the week, the month, and the year? Can I predict future resource needs before they happen?

President Obama this week released his budget proposal to Congress for fiscal year 2012, which begins in October of this year. The president’s budget matches his important State of the Union observation last month that “maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success” with new investment targets for an array of key science and innovation programs. Republicans have mapped out a different strategy, arguing that we need to cut almost all of these science R&D programs in a bid to reduce the federal budget deficit.

The budget debate every fiscal year sparks new questions about how much support the federal government should provide for the critical research and development in science and technology. But in this year of a politically split Congress, the question of “how much” is center stage. Perhaps the better question is not “how much” but “what for?” After all, if policymakers can agree on what has to be done to ensure our future economic competitiveness, then deciding how much to spend should become an easier task.

A few years ago, when he was governor of West Virginia, Bob Wise attended a graduation ceremony at Pickens High School in Randolph County, a tiny school on top of a mountain where the graduating class consisted of only two students. As he was leaving, he asked the principal how the school was able to attract foreign language teachers.

“He laughed and said, ‘We have one of the best Spanish instructors in the country.’ And I said, ‘How could that be possible here on this mountain?’ And he pointed to a satellite dish and he said, ‘she comes in every day at 10 o’clock from San Antonio, Texas.’ ”

As TechCrunch readers know by now, I speak my mind and don’t shy away from controversy. I am even more provocative when I talk to students. My goal is to make them think outside the box. I encourage students not only to challenge authority, but also to challenge me. I tell them that with my research on globalization, entrepreneurship, and U.S. competitiveness, I am learning as I go; no one has all the answers; I could be wrong. In some talks, I present the available data; in others I just discuss what I have learned.

Over the last ten days, I have lectured at four universities: Columbia, Emory, MIT, and UC-Berkeley. The discussions were all lively, and I received very positive feedback from students.

Bottled water has been a big-selling commercial beverage around the world since the late 1980s. According to the Worldwatch Institute, global bottled water consumption has more than quadrupled since 1990. Today Americans consume over 30 billion liters of water out of some 50 billion (mostly plastic) bottles every year. The Beverage Marketing Association reports that in 2008 bottled water comprised over 28 percent of the U.S. liquid refreshment beverage market. The only bottled drinks Americans consume more of are carbonated sodas like Coke and Pepsi.

And frankly, yes, it is a ridiculous waste that we obtain so much of our drinking water this way when it is free flowing and just as good if not better for you right out of the tap. According to the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), some 2.7 million tons of petroleum-derived plastic are used to bottle water around the world every year. “Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year,” says EPI researcher Emily Arnold. And just because we can recycle these bottles does not mean that we do: The Container Recycling Institute reports that 86 percent of plastic water bottles in the U.S. end up as garbage or litter.

AngelList is turning Silicon Valley upside down. It's basically Match.com for startups and business angels, and startups are raising millions from angels on the site almost every day, leaving VCs to scramble for dealflow and paying higher valuations.

Not everyone likes it: last week O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures partner and Foursquare investor Bryce Roberts publicly left the site, saying it encourages a herd mentality. Meanwhile prolific startup investor Dave McClure says it's the most innovative thing to happen to startup funding since Y Combinator in 2005.

Share your knowledge, expertise and experience with innovation leaders from around the world at the Association of University Research Parks 2011 International Conference.

The conference will provide education and innovative ideas for professionals involved with high technology economic development--both those new to the field, and those with more experience.

Is your business tapping into foreign markets? If you haven't broken out of your domestic market, you are missing out on a big business opportunity. The idea of selling overseas is attractive to many small and medium-sized businesses. But many small business owners abandon any thought of selling abroad because they don't think they have the necessary resources. In fact, this isn't the case. The internet can provide a whole host of innovative strategies for businesses of any size to break into foreign markets.

It is truly a great time to be an engineer building new things. Gadgets from sci-fi movies of 10 years ago are creeping up on us in the real world and mobile devices and social networking have made the internet go truly mainstream. We are on the cusp of seeing even more world changing ideas becoming a reality when everyone is walking around with powerful computers connected with over 20MBps of bandwidth to millions of people.

To top it all off, there is another technology boom happening right now. Anyone who has lived in Silicon Valley through a few business cycles can feel it just by watching the traffic on 101, or reading about “bubbles” in the tech press.

I'm often asked by first time entrepreneurs what's involved with setting up a business. Do I need to incorporate? What do I need to know about hiring? Payroll? Do I need a CPA? How do I register my business? Why do I need to bother with any of this at all?

The fact of the matter is that for most entrepreneurs non-core activities like filing DE-1 forms and negotiating insurance rates are at best a necessary distraction to the value added tasks of creating product, finding customers, and building a team. At worst, they can be a confusing labyrinth of rules, regulations, and risks which if ignored or mismanaged can hurt your business. Unfortunately, business does involve some non-core, administrative overhead that cannot be ignored. And what you don’t know can bite you.