Guy Kawasaki on Innovation

Guy Kawasaki outlines 10 steps to innovation in this terrific presentation. I’ve never had the opportunity to attend one of Guy’s talks, but judging by the video it would certainly be worth the time. Guy does a great job of telling a coherent story in an entertaining and engaging fashion.

In the news

In line with yesterday’s theme, two articles in the Scientist discuss online opportunities for scientists:
Shouldn’t you be online?
-Editorial addresses restrained adoption of online services by scientists (an issue I raised in my post yesterday.)

Better work through the network
-Using LinkedIn to expand your network.

Take aim…
- This month’s Economist includes a brief overview of the intrinsic difficulties developing cancer therapies.

Nature Releases Scintilla

Nature Publishing Group has created a science aggregator called Scintilla. The goal of Scintilla is to bring personalization to science.

Here’s a description from Nature’s blog Nascent-

Scintilla is an aggregator—of science weblogs, news stories and publication databases—but it works in a slightly different way from the existing online RSS readers that cover the whole internet. For a start, the sources are manually selected, and only related to science, so there shouldn’t be any trouble with spam when searching for stories. Also there’s no ‘unread items’ count, so you don’t have to feel like you have lots of reading to catch up on. Browse the site, add sources to your collection, and visit your ‘Read’ page on Scintilla whenever you’re looking for some juicy science stories to read.

Should US Scientists Take a Protectionist Stance On H1-B Visas?

A recent Science article highlights the impact increasing the number of H1-B visas could have on US scientists. Companies such as Google, Microsoft, and more recently Genentech have advocated for increasing the H1-B visa cap. Bill Gates has proposed that the cap be abolished. Increasing the cap is, of course, in the corporation’s best interests as such action will increase the prospective employment pool, and likely depress wages.

I don’t have a problem with companies lobbying for increases in the H1-B visa cap (that currently stands at 65,000.) Incredibly, the cap was reached on the very first day that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began accepting visa applications for 2007.

Microsoft Surface

If you haven’t heard of Microsoft Surface, I highly recommend you check it out. It’s amazing technology that could change the way we interact with digital media. It’s not difficult to imagine future applications for this technology beyond it’s current platform and into areas such as medicine and biotechnology.