Dominic Basulto

At one time, the sharing economy looked unstoppable.

In the aftermath of the 2008 recession, everybody was looking for ways to save and generally be smarter about using the diminishing amount of what they had. By some accounts the total value of everything people are sharing today—from apartments to cars to used clothing to unused parking spaces—is close to $26 billion. Yet, even the icons of the sharing economy—companies such as Airbnb and Uber—continue to face a host of regulatory and legal challenges that could impede, if not completely foil, their plans for future growth faster than they can disrupt the markets of the incumbents.

Here's what we're reading/watching Friday:

1) In case you missed it, Stanford University fellow and Washington Post columnist Vivek Wadhwa was on the "PBS NewsHour" last night. In his column for Innovations, Wadhwa outlined the competition for highly-skilled immigrants — a competition that today, Wadhwa and others find, the United States is losing. Wadhwa spoke with the "Newshour's" Ray Suarez about the nature of the immigration debate as it concerns highly-skilled workers, the nature of the current immigration system for those workers and how it stands to change:

Senators should be aware of a critical fact, as they debate immigration reform: If we don't want foreign-born talent in the United States, other countries are more than happy to take the talent, and the innovation potential that goes with it, off of our hands.

There's a new term in the innovation lexicon.

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor credited with coining the term "disruptive innovation," authored a white paper with colleagues Heather Staker and Michael Horn titled "Is K 12 blended learning disruptive? An introduction of the theory of hybrids." In it, the authors introduce "hybrid innovation", which is described in a release as "a fundamentally new concept [in] the world of disruptive innovation." The paper was announced by the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation (formerly the Innosight Institute) on Thursday.

In 1999, I decided to leave the headaches of entrepreneurship behind and get a regular Silicon Valley job in an attempt to ride the dot-com wave. My timing was terrible, and by 2001 I had started another company. In that time, however, I learned that the corporate world is comprised of two groups. In one group, there are the entrepreneurs, individuals judged by actual results and forced to live by Yoda's famous line, "Do or do not, there is no try." Then there are the corporate stooges, for lack of a better term, who are usually judged by their ability to play corporate politics, making nice to their various bosses.

Here's what we're reading/watching Thursday:

1) Sometimes great innovation needs a little inspiration. And, as Vivek Wadhwa has written, aging Baby Boomers are in a prime position to usher in some of the world's next, great innovations. In that vein, we start this morning with Yuichiro Miura. At age 80, he is the oldest person to have reached the top of Mt. Everest—at least for now. During a news conference, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said of Miura's accomplishment:

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Microsoft Research was in town Tuesday, and there wasn't an XBox One in sight. Instead, the company brought along technology that has yet to — or may never — hit store shelves.

All of the technologies on hand were introduced earlier in the year. But every other year, said a public relations representative on hand at Microsoft's Innovation & Policy Center in D.C., the company brings the technologies to the nation's capital to showcase them for customers, academics, lawmakers and other industry leaders. Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research USA, was on the Hill earlier in the day for an event (no, he did not run into Apple CEO Tim Cook) to talk about the importance of federal funding for university research. All of the work done on the projects featured during the TechFair, said Lee, were done in collaboration with educational institutions.

Here's what we're reading/watching Wednesday:

1) More big names in the tech sector and elsewhere announced Wednesday that they are offering their support for the 'March for Innovation,' started by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other tech leaders earlier this year in support of immigration reform. The bipartisan coalition includes former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, and coalitions Obama for America and Republicans for Immigration Reform.

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield is recovering from his days as commander of the international space station. He fielded questions about his time in space, his social media popularity, the making of his cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and his recovery process back here on Earth.

In 1978, when I started my career as a security guard at IBM, employers viewed their employees as property—static entities that wouldn't dare stray. Back then, businesses professed to know what was best for their hires and looked after them in exchange for loyalty. Top talent was carefully hidden to prevent poaching by competitors and tenure was prioritized over talent, rewarded with tokens—gold watches, pens, and pins—for years of service.

Gesture-control tech company Leap Motion released a video Monday showing off how its technology will work with Windows. The video is a fun romp through the technology pairing's possibilities:

But one feature of computer technology—and a popular one, to boot— is missing: the keyboard. The video shows how a stylus or fingers can be used to draw and write free-form on the screen, but there's no word-processing or virtual keyboard. I asked Leap Motion if that would be part of the out-of-the-box suite of features, and a spokesman said Tuesday that it's not, but that developers would be free to create one for the hardware:

Here's what we're reading/watching Tuesday:

1) A fierce tornado has torn through Moore, Okla., leaving dozens of people dead, and the death toll is expected to climb.

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This year's HealthBeat conference continues through Tuesday in San Francisco, with health technology innovators gathering to offer their take on what's challenging, what's working and what's next in innovation for the health care industry.

Here's what we're reading/watching today:

1) Yahoo confirmed the $1.1 billion deal to acquire micro-blogging site Tumblr in a press release on the company's Web site Monday, promising not to "screw it up":

There's a disconnect in Washington right now. The Obama administration has been breathlessly pitching futuristic, new innovation initiatives—everything from projects to map the human brain to new initiatives around manufacturing involving 3D printers. It's simultaneously having to contend with a number of embarrassing political scandals headaches both at home and abroad.

Watson, IBM's supercomputer named after company founder Thomas Watson, was on Capitol Hill Thursday to show off what it has learned since it dove into health care roughly a year ago.

"I thought I was coming up to play chess with a computer," said Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) as he took the podium in the House Energy and Commerce committee room during an event hosted by IBM and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), vice chair of the committee. But the now-famous servers were nowhere in sight, since Watson's computing power is now accessible to authorized users through the cloud.

Here's what we're reading/watching today:

1) It's Friday, so we're starting on the lighter side, so to speak. A meteoroid crashed into the moon on March 17, producing a flash roughly 10 times as bright as any seen since NASA researchers started monitoring meteoroid impacts on the moon. Meteoroid collisions with the moon are common, but as far as we know they've never been this bright before:

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is back on terra firma, and the way he chose to spend his days in space aboard the international space station have made him a celebrity — particularly his cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," which has been viewed well over 11 million times.

Here's what we're reading/watching today:

1) Google CEO Larry Page conducted a surprise open question-and-answer session during the Google I/O conference Wednesday.

Among other observations (including the fact he "didn't appreciate" this), Page expressed his sadness over the state of innovation online and offline and offered his take (not positive) on the rocky relationship between Google and Microsoft. Page, who recently revealed that he suffers from vocal cord paralysis, also openly mulled the idea of creating a separate country free of the regulations and strictures that, as Page sees it, hold back innovation:

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Kepler, the spacecraft on the hunt for Earth-like planets, may have reached the end of its mission.

If you've seen a certain map about hate speech and Twitter recently, you may have come to the conclusion that pretty much every state east of the Dakotas is vilely racist, homophobic and disability-prejudiced.

The Google I/O developer conference is underway, and the Wednesday keynote is scheduled to begin at 12 p.m. ET.

Google is offering a live feed of the conference via (what else?) YouTube. Meanwhile, The Post's Hayley Tsukayama has a look at what to expect from the show this year the rumor that Google is expected to launch a streaming music service to compete with Spotify. If you're wondering what the I/O stands for -- it's input/output -- and if you're wondering why the conference matters, Tsukayama sums it up: