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Although each of us is born with proactive brain, it's possible to enhance its performance. Here are some tips: Give your brain a rich bank of life experiences. Expose it to diverse environments and situations. Increasing the breadth of your experiences provides richer information for your brain to draw on as it helps you anticipate new situations. Let it borrow from the experiences of others by communicating, reading, or interacting with or about others. Think about what you want from the future. Take time to reflect on individual and team values and goals, both immediate and down the road. These will help guide your brain as it envisions future scenarios that may best help you achieve your objectives. Actively ponder future rewards or accomplishments. Emphasize rich, detailed thinking about long-term outcomes. This reduces the lure (and the danger) of instant gratification. Give yourself periods of relatively uninterrupted thought during which you let your mind wander. Doing this gives the brain's memory system extra time to recombine your prior experiences in ways that can help you envision future possibilities.

On June 7, Cupertino (Calif.)-based Apple said it had $60 million in iAd commitments from marketers, including food and personal-care product maker Unilever (UN), electronics retailer Best Buy (BBY), and satellite-television service provider DirecTV (DTV). Unilever, whose first iAd made its debut in July, is "extremely happy" with the results of its ad campaigns, Rob Master, the company's North American media director, says in an interview. More than 20 percent of people who click on Unilever iAds—which feature video and an interactive game—check out the ad a second time, he says.

Qualcomm is giving up on the direct-to-consumer portion of its Flo TV mobile television subsidiary, according to a report from paidcontent.org.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless offer mobile television services through Flo TV, Flo itself sells a stand-alone personal television and Audiovox offers in-car entertainment systems equipped with Flo TV. 

Analyst Jeff Kagan believes Qualcomm decided to cancel Flo TV's consumer-facing service because it wasn't profitable.

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.

The Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, has made an impressive showing so far. NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an estimated accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into semantic categories — cities, companies, sports teams, actors, universities, plants and 274 others. The category facts are things like “San Francisco is a city” and “sunflower is a plant.”

As game developers and publishers look more and more to digital distribution as a way to bypass current brick-and-mortar game sellers -- in part to cut down on game reselling, a major loss to their bottom line -- we could be witnessing the beginning of a new model of game development. In the future, when you drop $60-$70 on a new game, you might just be buying the game engine and the background art, with the knowledge that the developers will be releasing content packs that provide entirely new, self-contained game experiences that build off the original title.

OnStar-powered mobile apps that can provide diagnostic information about the car, combined with a number of location-based services.

allows owners to perform standard key fob functions like remote starts or locking and unlocking the car from wherever they are. The apps also give users the ability to check their fuel tank level, remaining oil live, tire pressure and information about historical and current fuel economy. The car uploads this information to GM's servers with every start.

tag your parking spot with GPS coordinates

Examville (www.examville.com), an online education marketplace, launches its e-commerce personalized teacher/tutor storefront pages.  Designed to connected educators and students online, the personalized profile pages are likened to those on sites like eBay and Amazon, which smaller sellers to establish their business.  On Examville, teachers can now set up their own online education store with a unique URL at no charge. From that page, they can connect with students/parents worldwide and offer virtual classes, online tutoring and instruction materials (for a fee).  As an open platform, Examville profile pages can also be leveraged by third-party service providers, including test prep and tutoring companies, publishers, corporations among others.