In an age where Kickstarter and Indiegogo are virtually household names, it’s hard to remember that just a few years ago "crowdfunding" hadn’t even been codified.

Danae Ringelmann and two of her classmates from the University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business – Slava Rubin and Eric Schell – came up with the idea to use technology to democratize finance and launched Indiegogo in 2008. The idea was simple: allow people to put their money behind the ideas that they believe in.

Image: http://www.entrepreneur.com 

One way pharma giant Johnson and Johnson stays ahead of the competition is via its network of Innovation Centers where researchers are working on new approaches to cardiovascular issues, infectious diseases, neuroscience, and more.

The centers are located in San Francisco, Boston, London, and Shanghai – and this week the company announced that Israel was joining the family, in the form of an incubator J&J will be opening in Rehovot, near the Weizmann Institute. Working together with several other partners, the company said, the new incubator “is the latest in a series of recently announced collaborations to fuel entrepreneurship in the world’s scientific hot spots.”

Image: Researchers work at the Weizmann Institute (Photo credit: Doron Horowitz/Flash90)  

The world's tallest, fastest and probably scariest water slide will be unveiled this summer at Schlitterbahn Waterpark in Kansas City, Kan.

The slide, named Verrückt (German for "insane"), will beat the current world record slide in Brazil, which stands at 164 feet. However, the details of the slide at Schlitterbahn will not be revealed until its opening day.

Today, Sanofi US launched its second Partners in Patient Health (PiPH) Innovation Challenge: Collaborate | Innovate, which will award $100,000 to the winning team. This year's theme is "Co-Creating for Breakthroughs: Moving toward a collaborative research and development ecosystem." The Challenge calls on non-profit patient, provider and professional associations to partner with other associations and/or academic institutions to propose new approaches which translate patient insights into improvements in the drug development process.

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The view from the roof of the seven-story, mesh- and LED-covered Hypercube building is one of modern-day Russia, where just 110 billionaires control 35 percent of the household wealth. Immediately to the south is a golf course built by President Vladimir Putin's “favorite oligarch,” Roman Abramovich (net worth $10.2 billion), who reportedly owns a residence in the neighboring village along with Suleiman Kerimov (net worth $7.1 billion) and Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov (net worth $13 billion).

Image: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters 

“Oh, you’re an entrepreneur? So…have you ever thought about getting a job?”

The chances are high that you’re responding by shaking your head to the point of whiplash right now. Join the club because you’re not alone. With terms in mind, such as J.O.B. meaning Just Over Broke, it’s no wonder that you may have an awful taste in your mouth about working for anyone other than yourself.

Have you ever had a big eureka moment where you believed you might have a great idea? After having that moment did you ever consider how you could take that idea and actually make it into a viable business? There are a few things to consider before you truly know if your business is worth jumping into or not.

Solve a Problem:

While the Facebooks and Twitters of the world are amazing products and companies, they are also outliers. It’s much harder to create something that has such massive effect. Can I solve this problem better than anything out there?

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We spend plenty of time thinking about what we say in business, but not necessarily how we say it.

When it comes to professional settings, though, the way we speak — including tone, pitch, and volume — is every bit as important, and dramatically affects how our bosses and colleagues perceive us.

Since it's hard to recognize your own verbal slip ups, we consulted several experts to identify the most problematic speaking mistakes, and how to avoid them.

Image: picstopin.com 

Watch never-before-seen videos of an MIT-developed lubricant called LiquiGlide that makes anything--syrup, ketchup, paint--slide right out of the bottle so you don't waste a drop. The applications start in the kitchen, but they extend into almost every industry.

Consumers expend a remarkable amount of energy (and muscle) interacting with household goods. We're constantly shaking bottles of mustard or salad dressing, praying the condiments will eventually spill onto our food. We're violently rattling pens and Coca-Cola cans trying to will out any last dribbles of ink or soda. And everyone has experienced the pain of running out of toothpaste, when we have to squeeze and mush and roll up that tube of Crest until it looks like the end of an elf's slipper, to force those final sticky gobs onto our Sonicare brush. But a new solution from MIT called LiquiGlide could finally end such first-world woes once and for all--while dealing a serious blow to the world's waste.

Silicon Valley has been taking a lot of heat lately for its power and elitism. That’s only natural for a region that has rapidly gained enormous economic and cultural clout. But it seems especially ironic that this is happening in the San Francisco Bay area, that one-time headquarters of flower power where entrepreneurs have long fashioned themselves as rebels and iconoclasts battling robotic rivals (Microsoft, IBM) and liberating workers from the hierarchical ways of corporate life.

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To learn new motor skills, the brain must be plastic: able to rapidly change the strengths of connections between neurons, forming new patterns that accomplish a particular task. However, if the brain were too plastic, previously learned skills would be lost too easily.

A new computational model developed by MIT neuroscientists explains how the brain maintains the balance between plasticity and stability, and how it can learn very similar tasks without interference between them.

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Compared with other US public-sector research institutions, the US National Institutes of Health has contributed inventions that have had a disproportionately greater impact on the overall number of products produced, drugs granted orphan status and drugs granted priority review.

Marketers have been trying to make print and outdoor ads interactive for years, but despite their efforts, consumers are largely rejecting QR Codes. Can a new technology called Clickable Paper reboot those efforts?

Imaging and electronics company Ricoh introduced Clickable Paper two years ago, but the company just introduced iOS and Android apps in the United States late last year. (A similar app has been available in Japan since 2012.)

Image: http://mashable.com 

Intellectual property featured prominently in 2013’s public discourse. Gene patents, patent trolls, India’s anti-patent actions, and other developments around the world captured headlines. Here are Patently Biotech’s top blog posts written in 2013 by number of views.

1.   Myriad Supreme Court Decision: BIO’s Statement

2.  Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

3.  What a Patent is Not

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I just watched the movie Jobs, and before you Apple fanatics lose your mind, this is not a review, go watch it yourself. What I have are some lessons from Apple’s early days for entrepreneurs, the Steve Jobs way.

If the movie is an accurate representation of the birthing of Apple Inc. (it’s not really), then Steve Jobs robbed Steve Wozniak out of a company and many people more. If the movie is an accurate representation of the early days at Apple, it takes some serious guts and a heck of a lot of moxy to work for the revered innovator.

GSE is centered on innovation, design thinking and entrepreneurship. An immersive, hands-on residential summer experience similar to Kentucky’s other Governor's School programs, the session will be held June 22 through July 12, 2014 at Georgetown College.

The GSE selection process looks for students who thrive in an imaginative and innovative environment and function well on a team. Grades and test scores are not considered. To apply, students must complete an online application, upload a 2-minute video and submit two recommendations. There is no application fee and no cost to attend the program if selected.

Joint ventures (JVs) often seem destined for success at the outset. Two companies come together in what seems to be an ideal match. Demand for the planned product or service is strong. The parent companies have complementary skills and assets. And together they can address a strategic need that neither could fill on its own. But in spite of such advantages, revenues decline, bitter disputes erupt, and irreconcilable differences emerge—and managers call it quits.

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The holiday season is filled with traditions—like the lecture-filled advice you’ll get from medical authorities about how to conduct yourself abstemiously at fat- and sugar-laden party buffets.

I'm not saying they’re wrong, mind you. You should aim for the crudités and skip the cookie platter. And you should keep up your exercise regimen, holidays or not.

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Many of the latest supercomputers are based on accelerators, including the two fastest systems according to the 11/2013 TOP500 list. Accelerators are also becoming widespread in PCs and are even starting to appear in handheld devices, which will further boost the interest in accelerator programming.

This broad adoption is the result of high performance, good energy efficiency, and low price. For example, comparing a Xeon E5-2687W CPU to a GTX 680 GPU, both of which were released in March 2012, we find that the GPU started out four times cheaper, has eight times more single-precision performance and four times more main-memory bandwidth, and provides over thirty times as much performance per dollar and six times as much performance per watt. Based on these numbers, accelerators should be used everywhere and all the time. So why aren’t they?

Image: http://www.hpcwire.com 

This has been a huge week for female innovators. Not only was Janet Yellen named as the first-ever female chairman in the 100-year history of the Federal Reserve, but also SNL announced that Sasheer Zamata would become the first black female cast member on the show since 2007. By helping to break the glass ceiling for women in two widely different fields, both Yellen and Zamata are playing an important role in changing how we think about the gender gap in fields far beyond just economics or entertainment. And that’s good for the future of American innovation.

Image: President Obama applauds Janet Yellen, his nominee for Federal Reserve chairman. (Charles Dharapak/Associated Press)