Here’s a scenario. You decide to go out on the town with friends after work, but worry that you’ll have so much fun you won’t be able to handle a late commute home.

What to do?

Well, just pull out your smart phone (or as of today, your iPad), download the Hotel Tonight app, and score a great deal with a last-minute booking at one of a half-dozen local hotels, ranging from basic to luxury.

A year ago, as the Arab Spring rebellions were raging, Ramy Adeeb was desperately trying to keep up to date with developments in his native Egypt, and to share the best articles he could find with friends.

“I could share links of Facebook or Twitter, but they quickly got lost in the stream,” he recalls. “There was no permanence and no structure there. There was the need for a better way.”

Entrepreneurs are using technology to change virtually every aspect of how  we do business these days, and that includes inventing new kinds of non-profit organizations (NPO).

One sector desperately overdue for innovation courtesy of technology is K-12 education, which leads us directly to San Mateo-based Edmodo, the free platform that enables teachers to create closed networks with their students in a Facebook-like UI that virtually reproduces and extends the classroom environment in many ways.