Just how much is Samsung willing to pay? The contest will see 10 winners, who will receive a combined $800,000 in prize money.

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Hulu’s owners, including Walt Disney Co., News Corp., and Comcast Corp., are considering various strategic options for the site including a sale. Other firms that have bid or expressed interest in Hulu include cable operator Time Warner Cable Inc., Guggenheim Partners, Yahoo Inc. and former News Corp. president Peter Chernin’s investment group.

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After it pays off a $452.4 million federal loan, Tesla says in a filing today, it will have $678.8 million in cash and cash equivalents, and long term debt of $600 million.

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On May 9, a day after the company posted its first-ever quarterly profit, the stock exploded higher in heavy trading. Ms. Baiynd, a full-time short-term trader since 2006, pounced. From her home office in Charlotte, N.C., the 48-year-old says she scooped up shares at $67.15 and sold them on Monday for a 31 percent gain.

The very next day, Ms. Baiynd changed tack, she says, successfully betting Tesla would head lower on a day when the shares finished down 14 percent from their intraday high.

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Look out Facebook! Hours spent participating per member dropping seriously. First really bad sign as seen by crappy MySpace years ago.

– Rupert Murdoch, still steamed about that whole MySpace thing, tweets a warning to Facebook

Only in the past few years has the Central Intelligence Agency issued standardized guidelines on how to use social media, according to one former intelligence official. The line these guidelines draw appears to be thin: Revealing too much on Facebook and Twitter risks tipping too much to the other side. But given that social media use is becoming ubiquitous, revealing too little could also arouse suspicion.

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Ms. Powell Jobs has ramped up her years-long crusade for the Dream Act, which would give citizenship to young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally. She says she also wants Congress to pass “common-sense immigration reform” for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. She has commissioned polling, lobbied Congress, urged President Barack Obama to take action and funded a documentary about undocumented youth.

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I came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation. It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce.

– Andrew Mason, in a personal blog post about what he’s been up to

Following a slowdown in technology IPOs after Facebook’s offering last May, companies including microblogging service Twitter Inc., peer-to-peer lending site Lending Club Corp. and software-tools startup Atlassian are among those preparing to go public, said executives and people familiar with the matter.

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On the eve of Facebook’s IPO anniversary Saturday, how the Menlo Park, Calif., company tackles revenue is one of the biggest challenges in its short life as a public company. After eight years of focusing on user growth, Facebook has pushed revenue up its priority list and restructured its business so that many of its best minds are now thinking about driving sales.

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Brian Krzanich, who was recently named chief executive, said that although Intel has been slow to respond to the rapid rise of tablets and smartphones, the company is well-positioned to participate going forward.

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In a tense two-hour hearing, parliament’s Public Affairs Committee grilled Matt Brittin, Google’s head of sales and operations in northern and central Europe, about whether the firm completes sales of its products and services in the U.K., making it liable to pay more tax in Britain.

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An unusual supercooled machine built by D-Wave Systems Inc., of Vancouver, British Columbia, will be installed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center, near Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. It will be operated by the nonprofit Universities Space Research Association.

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On Sunday, the Kepler telescope, which hovers in space about 40 million miles from Earth, suspended its operations and automatically put itself into a pre-programmed safe mode. By Tuesday, space-agency mission workers had determined that one of the three reaction wheels required to orient the spacecraft had jammed, NASA officials said. So far, engineers have been unable to get it moving properly.

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Google is a hyper-competitive company, and they repeatedly enter markets that already exist and crush competitors. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work, and Google’s successes are admirable. But there’s nothing stupid about seeing Google being pitted “versus” other companies. They want everything; their ambition is boundless.

– John Gruber, in Larry Page’s remarks onstage at Google I/O about competition — that talk about Google “versus some other company” is stupid or not interesting

It isn’t clear how much Time Warner Cable is willing to pay and whether it is considering purchasing a minority stake in the site or an all-out acquisition. Hulu’s current owners don’t see the cable operator as the most likely buyer at the valuation it has signaled it would do the deal, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

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Tesla said it plans to sell up to 3.1 million new common shares, and offer $450 million worth of notes in public offerings. The company said one use for the new capital will be to pay off, with interest, the balance of a $465 million federal loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Some of the leading innovators were on display this past month at the first-ever Social Enterprise Week in Dubai, organized by Consult and Coach for a Cause, Community Cinema, Hult Prize and Brand Syrup. Over 300 startups and their backers gathered to share experiences, pitch their efforts and network. The breadth of challenges they have embraced are striking, as are the clear market opportunities and returns they seek.

Following are just a few glimpses into the experience:

KarmSolar

Who would have thought that the largest untapped source of fresh water on earth lies beneath Egypt’s deserts? The ability for farmers to grow more food has been limited by the unreliability of diesel fuel delivery to farms wishing to expand their arable land. Enter former oil and gas analyst Ahmed Zahran and his startup KarmSolar, which has partnered with a leading water engineering firm in Princeton, New Jersey, to create solar-powered pumping and storage processes accessible in the desert. He believes that empowering smaller farmers with simple, solar-powered pumping capabilities could be explosive for agriculture throughout the Middle East and Africa. He is up and running in both Egypt and Sudan.

Eshraq

Mental health is one of the most vexing — and least openly discussed — medical challenges around the globe. The stigma often associated with it is particularly sensitive to many of the cultures and societies in the Middle East. An Egyptian business analyst living in Dubai, Ragy Khairy, has started Eshraq as one of the first online counseling and coaching portals in the region. Eshraq facilitates private sessions for a fee and offers public health webinars funded by corporate sponsorship and online advertising. Partnering with a leading Egyptian VC, Innoventures, he plans to scale Eshraq throughout Egypt and the UAE. “I wanted to combine my passion for innovation with giving back,” he told us. “I see our Middle Eastern communities suffering from mental, social and medical problems, yet conservatism, traditionalism and lack of awareness stands between them and seeking professional help. We can help.”

Liquid of Life

Bottled water is extremely popular in the Middle East — over 800 million liters are consumed per year in the UAE alone — which has created a large-scale challenge of how to sustainably dispose of plastic bottles. Not waiting for the nascent recycling industry to take hold in the region, UAE-based entrepreneurs Rukhsana Kausar and Neil Hegarty are seeking to stop the problem at the source. Their company, Liquid of Life, offers a filtration system that replaces plastic water coolers with bottle-free water dispensers. Thirty companies in the Emirates, including Microsoft and Fraser Suites Hotel, have signed on; the company recently turned its first profit and is planning to expand next across the Middle East. Rukhsana notes, “Social entrepreneurs too often miss that to succeed they have to focus on the business as much as the ‘social.’ Change costs, but if you have a great service people want, they’ll pay for it.”

Barzh

Emiratis Abdulaziz Al Jaziri, Fatma Al Khoori, Mohammad Al Hawi and Noora Al Qassim not only wanted to become ambassadors for their national cuisine, but also thought there was an opportunity for local women with home-based micro businesses to sell their products to a broader market online that they could never before reach. They launched Barzh, combining an online Emirati food ordering service, a cafe and an Emirati food recipe portal. Barzh is an Emirati word used for a parlor, or a formal living room, to receive and entertain guests where people can meet for a discussion or to share a meal. Barzh hopes to link anyone in the region with Emirati cooks and therefore provide additional household income to Emirati home-based business owners, most of whom are women. When asked why they chose to set up the company as a social business, Mohammad noted, “NGOs are great, but they have sustainability issues. Even with short-term support, you never know about funding in the medium-term. We want the business income to continue to help our cause and our culture.”

Shared Workspaces

A strong entrepreneurial ecosystem is developing to help hundreds of similar enterprises. Shared workspaces like Shelter in Dubai and AltCity in Beirut are creating affordable homes and access to technology and infrastructure in the early days of these social entrepreneurs creating their ideas. The Hub will open in Dubai, providing needed acceleration space to social enterprises as it has in over thirty cities around the world.

Competitions

Business plan competitions specifically tailored to social enterprise startups are bringing them region-wide exposure and much-needed seed capital. Most notable is the Hult Prize, self-branded as an accelerator of social entrepreneurship, and providing one million dollars to more established winning teams. The Business for Acument Pitch Competition, held for the first time last year in Dubai, awards startup prizes of $4,000 to each of two winners. Consult and Coach for a Cause, started by the passionate Medea Nocentini and Baraka Ventures, founded by dynamic partners Rama Chakaki and Mahmoud Abu Wardeh, provides mentoring and coaching to social entrepreneurs.

Can problem-solving at scale really happen through profitable startups? “While there are many challenges faced by social enterprises, we believe that it is possible to run a profitable business while addressing economic and social issues. These businesses can scale and grow to have a major impact in the world,” said Nadine Kettaneh, partner of Willow Impact, a social impact investor based in Dubai.

One thing is certain, none of these social entrepreneurs are waiting for the public sector to figure it out. “I hate the word ‘stability,’” one entrepreneur told us. “It’s not that we don’t value ‘stableness’ in order to build businesses, but our parents’ generation used that word as an excuse for business as usual.” He paused. “We are not going to wait. We can do better.”

Heather Henyon is the founder and managing partner of Balthazar Capital, a Dubai-based microfinance investment advisory firm serving the Arab region. Since starting the region’s first social business, Grameen-Jameel, in 2007, she has been an active mentor and supporter of social enterprises. She can be followed on Twitter @BalCap.
Christopher M. Schroeder is a leading U.S. Internet entrepreneur and venture investor. He is the author of “Startup Rising — The Entrepreneurial Revolution That’s Remaking the Middle East,” to be published August 2013 by Palgrave/MacMillan. He can be followed on Twitter @cmschroed.

The researchers stopped well short of creating a human clone. But they showed, for the first time, that it is possible to create cloned embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to the person from whom they are derived.

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The move comes on the same day of the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, in which Google is set to launch a paid subscription music-streaming service akin to that of Spotify AB. In the past, the company has used this conference to preview music-related initiatives.

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That has started to change. Boards worried about their scant digital expertise are scrambling to recruit newcomers who can advise management on strategies for mobile devices, social media and data analytics.

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The DICE unit, purchased by EA in the middle of the last decade, will be a key cog in the creation of a new series of “Star Wars” videogames. Walt Disney Co. announced last week that it enlisted EA to make “Star Wars” games weeks after closing its LucasArts games division.

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Virgin America flight attendant on landing: “If your mobile device is within reach, you can stop pretending it’s turned off now.”

– Andy Baio (@waxpancake) via Twitter

After a miserable past few years, marked by the rise of Samsung Electronics Co. and the dominance of Apple Inc., Japan’s once-powerful electronics manufacturers are grappling with outside investors and fed-up creditors looking to break the cozy and insular bonds that were once a hallmark of the country’s corporate sector.

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