The State Investment Council is considering creating a $20 million "fund of funds" to channel seed and early-stage capital to New Mexico startup companies. A report in the Albuquerque Journal says the fund would be created with $10 million from the state’s Severance Tax Permanent Fund, $5 million from the U.S. Treasury Department and $5 million from private institutional investors in New Mexico.

One of the most common startup myths in Silicon Valley is that you need a product-focused founder to succeed.

Facebook has Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter has Jack Dorsey, and Dropbox has Drew Houston.

But Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, who has an engineering background, doesn't believe in the idea. He thinks it's more important to find your strengths, whether its sales or people skills, and double down on it.

Image: YouTube/Stanford Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang

EPA officials have made it known that they intend to review patent applications to determine whether the makers of pesticides, and perhaps other chemical-containing products, have violated the Agency's requirement that information concerning potential adverse effects of certain chemicals and products be immediately submitted to EPA for review. The failure to timely provide such data to EPA violates the federal pesticides law, and might violate similar regulations that implement the nation's chemical control law which applies to those chemical-containing products that are not pesticides.

Are we on the verge of creating artificial intelligence capable of finding answers to the world’s most pressing challenges? After steady progress in basic AI tasks in recent years, this is the vision that some leading technologists have for AI. And yet, how we will make this grand leap is anyone’s guess.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet (formerly Google), says AI could be harnessed to help solve major challenges, including climate change and food security. Speaking at an event convened in New York this week to discuss the opportunities and risks in AI, Schmidt offered no details on how the technology might be adapted for such complex and abstract problems.

There's plenty of advice out there for young entrepreneurs looking for mentors to help guide their new ventures. But there's comparatively little on how—or even whether—to sign on as someone's mentor. After all, it can be a taxing experience if you aren't prepared for it. So if you’re considering lending your expertise to help steer a new company, here are a few things you might want to think about first.

Until recently, when people talked about “emerging markets,” they were referring to the BRIC economies: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Undeniably, these countries have changed the face of global business over the past twenty years. Yet lately, the BRICs have been crumbling a bit, sparking many reports about their lackluster performance.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

If there is one thing that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his policy-making team excel at it is setting ambitious goals. Abe took office in late 2012 vowing to “bring Japan back” with a raft of reforms, strong government spending and a barrage of monetary stimulus. Those “three arrows,” as he called them, were meant to banish a long spell of deflation and put the country on track for a sustained recovery.

Sixteen leaders from key federal, academic and industry organizations have been appointed by Governor Larry Hogan to the Maryland Life Sciences Advisory Board (LSAB).

The new appointees include a patient advocate, executives from global life sciences companies with U.S. headquarters in Maryland, small biotechnology companies, and leaders from the University of Maryland, University of Maryland Baltimore, Johns Hopkin University, Montgomery College, NIH, FDA and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command.

Daniel J. Abdun-Nabi, president and CEO of Baltimore-based Emergent BioSolutions will serve as the chairman of the LSAB. Newly appointed Board members will serve until 2017.

There is a new ‘buzz’ going around in the investment game—crowdfunding investment. Though crowdfunding is a relatively new investment practice, existing businesses, individual, and startups are increasingly looking to raise funds through this method. Let’s examine some facts and figures to understand the crowdfunding sector has progressed over the years: Juniper suggests that the crowdfunding industry has seen an “accelerated growth”, especially in the equity crowdfunding sector. According to Massolution crowdfunding report 2015, the global crowdfunding industry grew immensely in 2014—expanded by 167% to reach $16.2 billion, up from $6.1 billion in 2013. The industry has raised more than double once again and reached to $34.4 billion, in 2015.

Image: http://dazeinfo.com 

PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading global start up accelerator Dreamit today announced that it has renewed its partnerships with industry leaders Independence Blue Cross (Independence) and Penn Medicine to advance entrepreneurship and innovation in health care. The continued support follows significant upgrades to the Dreamit Health program announced earlier this year. The new model includes key changes designed to appeal to a broader range of entrepreneurs, including a no-cash/no-equity offer to draw later-stage companies and serial entrepreneurs who would not typically consider an accelerator program.

According to PitchBook’s annual report, venture capital funding has peaked and is now headed lower. After concerns over rising valuations and constant streams of unicorn births began to arise in 2014, PitchBook notes that investors finally started to become cautious in the space in the second half of 2015.

The number of U.S. venture rounds closed plunged 25.8 percent from Q2 to Q4 2015. However, editor Garret Black notes that there was still an incredible amount of activity on the year.

Image: http://www.benzinga.com 

Packing up and shipping out to start fresh in a different country can seem like a pretty crazy daydream, but the U.S. Department of State estimates that 6.8 million Americans have actually done it—that’s more than the population of Tennessee!

WORKING ABROAD, EVEN IN A CONTROLLED MILITARY ENVIRONMENT, HAS TAUGHT ME MANY THINGS, THE MOST IMPORTANT BEING TOLERANCE. Whether through study abroad programs or by their own resolution, many millennials make the move to explore and jumpstart their careers in a new part of the world. If the thought of working abroad piques your interest, you’ll want to check out programs like InterExchange and the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), which provide opportunities to work, volunteer, and travel abroad. You should also read what these millennials have to say about working abroad—and the energy it brought to their careers.

On a hot, swampy November afternoon at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, the private school’s boys’ lacrosse team is huddling around the bench draining water bottles after a round of drills. It’s a scene like any other on high school fields around the country . . . except here there’s a small crew of men sitting off to the side with laptops, running diagnostics on the team’s fluid intake, tracking each player individually through smart chip–enabled refillable water bottles.

The start of a New Year is always a great time to re-evaluate your business plans and operations, and ask yourself if there’s anything you could do better.

Here are a few ideas for getting a good start to 2016:

1. Set your goals for the year ahead

During the first few days of the New Year, take a bit of time to think about your goals for the calendar year ahead. Focus especially on the aspects of your business that you neglect in the busyness of day-to-day survival.

Image: http://ventureburn.com 

Biological researchers should be able to share datasets the same way they share published scientific articles — at least, that’s what the National Institutes of Health is trying to ensure with a new project. 

NIH is building a virtual space called “the Commons,” where researchers can one day do just that: share data, software and any other virtual tools or research processes in a way that’s “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable,” or “FAIR.”

In our kitchen we have a refrigerator. This is a familiar first world luxury. It's 15 years old. Within any reasonable tolerance it does exactly what we bought it for and, barring the need to change the light bulb (IotT not required), it works just fine.

Fast forward to CES; refrigerators that open at the brush of a foot but sensitive enough to know the difference between human and canine paws. Refrigerators with cameras, sensors, tablets and wifi that alert you to freshness and quantity and re-order when stocks are low. 

We all like sweet things, but we should be eating less sugar. Now a study hints that it may be possible to tone down our taste for sugar

MORE Drinking Soda Can Make You Store More Unhealthy Fat Here’s How Americans Are Failing to Meet Dietary Guidelines Experts Say Lobbying Skewed the U.S. Dietary Guidelines A little-discussed factor that can make dieting difficult is the issue of tolerance. Our bodies get used to a certain amount of fat, a certain amount of sugar, or a certain amount of salt. The more we eat, the more that tolerance builds—and that just makes us need more of the stuff in order to “taste” it.

The trend is well underway.  Research indicates that more and more baby boomers are starting a business. Whether it’s consulting, taking the reins of a franchise, or developing a home-based enterprise centered on a personal passion or hobby, starting a business in retirement can offer many benefits.  Done properly, a retirement business can not only help fill a retiree’s time and replace their work identity, it can also help make their retirement savings last longer.

Massachusetts looks to secure its place in the healthcare industry as a digital innovation hub through a public-private partnership that aims to lure tech innovators to the state, according to an announcement from Gov. Charlie Baker.

This plan is being compared to a previous initiative to expand the biotech and life sciences industries in Massachusetts, according to a Boston Globe story, though the state committed $1 billion to that effort. The "big money" for this new effort, Baker said, according to the Globe, will come from the private sector.

The American Medical Association has invested $15 million to become founding partner of Health2047, a high-tech incubator that will explore innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the nation's 1.1 million physicians and their patients.

“Health2047 intends to transform the way that individuals receive—and physicians deliver—care by collaborating to make system-level advances in healthcare,” said Doug Given, MD, PhD, chief executive of Health2047. “Health2047 — an entirely new business model in the healthcare industry — combines strategy, engineering, design and venture disciplines to create new and important linkages between the physician community and the AMA’s content/regulatory experts with leading companies, emerging growth companies and individual entrepreneurs. We will develop, optimize and harvest disruptive ideas that enhance — at the system level — the practice of U.S. healthcare.”