Inc.com writes that “

[t]he Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has awarded a research grant to Nobel Prize winner Edmund S. Phelps to fund a three-year study comparing entrepreneurship in the United States and Europe.  ‘Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Capitalist Systems,’ Phelps’s project examining how different economic systems impact entrepreneurs, will study the impact of culture on economic performance, the different financing options and trends in Europe and the United States, and whether Europe needs more angel investors and venture capitalists, among other topics.”  In November 2006, Phelps authored an article in the Wall Street Journal in which he favorably compared the American model of free enterprise with the “stakeholder-driven capitalism” favored by most EU countries.  You can find my blog post on the article here.

According to the Associated Press, “a fundamental change in the design of microprocessors is presenting software developers with a challenge — and a huge financial opportunity.  […]  The problem is that many software applications weren’t written for chips with multiple cores, and the hardware is advancing so fast that the software runs the risk of being left behind.”  Mark Lewin, program manager in External Research & Programs for Microsoft Research, said “the solution will require more than inventing new programming languages as developers need to invent entirely new ways to build software.  ‘It will take a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of rethinking, but the opportunity is huge,’ said Lewin, whose group this week announced a $500,000 grant program for universities with innovative proposals for studying software development for multicore computing.”

The Washington Post points out that there are “two Americas online: one that’s connected to high-speed Internet — socializing, paying bills, uploading debate questions to presidential candidates on YouTube — and one that’s not. This is the digital divide, now more than a decade old, a rarely discussed schism in which the unconnected are second-class citizens.  […]  And in a presidential election that’s being fought as much online as off it — all campaigns employ Web strategies — some say the candidates have generally ignored the issue.”

In some other parts of the world, the problem is even worse.  The New York Times reports that “[a]ttempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the [African] continent. Less than 4 percent of Africa’s population is connected to the Web; most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.  A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, communications networks were destroyed during years of civil conflict, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems.”

MSNBC has an interesting article today on domain name sales.  As MSNBC points out, “[t]hese are boom times in an estimated $2 billion industry that involves the buying and selling of domain names.  […]  ‘This industry is like the wild, wild West right now and people have no idea how fast it’s growing,’ said Jerry Nolte, managing partner of Domainer’s Magazine, a new trade publication devoted to this little-known world.  Some believe the industry’s market value could reach $4 billion by 2010 as people continue to purchase approximately 90,000 names a day and the number of domain registrars swells.”