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As the old joke goes, two people meet at a party. Guest 1 asks Guest 2 what he does for a living. "I'm an actor," he answers.

1. Rumors have often swirled that Skype was up for acquisition, and now the latest batch suggest that Google and Facebook are involved in a rival courtship dance around the VoIP firm.

AT&T expands its forays into the daily deals space, this time through yellowpages.com. Why a telecommunications company may have a natural advantage in daily deals.

There are many things you can say about leggings, but most women who wear them will reduce it to one word: comfortable. Yet the super-comfy wardrobe staple recently caused a stir in the blogosphere when the U.K.'s Daily Mail reported on why the popular stretchy pants can make you fat.

How can companies transform to fit the new business landscape? How can companies even realize they need to change?

"Oh, great! Another cupcake shop!" I hear these words as soon as I step onto M Street, the posh, townhouse-lined retail thoroughfare in Washington, D.C., and most lately the raging epicenter of the great American cupcake pandemic. I'm standing in front of an outpost of Sprinkles, a California cupcake chain that joined the fray just the week before.

Machine readable congressional transcripts will bring the power to find political gaffes to everyone. Forget leaked cables: there's enough juicy political nonsense lurking in the public record to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle until 2012

We learned all kinds of things from our parents--manners, safety, housekeeping, how to make a cake, how to pump our legs to make ourselves go high on a swing and where to find crayfish in a creek. As they showed us how to reach these small successes in our daily life, they also taught us science knowledge--even though they may not have known a lot about psychology, physiology, chemistry, physics or animal adaptation. In learning by doing, young children get support for their later formal education: they build a set of experiences that they can recall and relate to new information in middle school science classes and beyond.

... And Living Social and anyone in the deals business, which has, until now been focused on scoring the deepest discounts for individuals. Here's why Facebook Deals inaugurates a new era.

"The cloud" is the biggest and most overused buzzword in the tech industry. You can't turn on the TV today without seeing ads from Microsoft , IBM, or Cisco touting the cloud in some form. Take the following IBM commercial, which attempts to define the lofty concept for consumers: the cloud does email, predicts traffic patterns, lowers energy bills, develops software, understands risk

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs.

People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore led by Sven Pettersson recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior. We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate.

Imagine a world where no one ever gets stuck in traffic--where cars have built-in sensors that can predict where and when future accidents will occur, keeping commuters out of harm's way. That's never going to happen

By using the host of position-relating sensors in modern smartphones, scientists at MIT think they could make the phones and network perform better so your calls don't drop when you're on the move. When you're strolling or rolling through a crowded city chatting on your cellphone, there are a number of things that can get in the way of your call working properly. A primary culprit is handoff between different cell towers.

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