Empathy establishes intimate customer-brand relationships. It understands your users’ situations, engaging them in a manner that approaches customer issues with a heartfelt and optimistic angle. But, contrary to popular belief, empathy is not sympathy.

Startups and entrepreneurs have said a robust ecosystem would attract more venture capital and talent to the Albany, New York area. The Capital Region's economic development group took notice and wants to build off the success or organizations like the Tech Valley Center of Gravity and Startup Tech Valley. The group has bid for $40 million to $65 million in state money toward entrepreneurship. It's part of the region's pitch for $500 million in the Upstate Revitalization Initiative. Read more about that here.

So, who am I? I’m Daniel Kador. You can call me Dan. Right now I’m a co-founder over at Keen. Before that, I was lead engineer/architect at Salesforce for about five and a half years. Then before that I was in school where I studied computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Okay. So, why am I up here? We’ve done a few rounds of fundraising so far.  We started the company by doing Techstars. So we did Techstars at the beginning of 2012. At the end of that, we raised our Angel round. After that we raised our Seed round in 2013, and then we did our A round in 2014. I participated in writing and delivering most of these pitches. So that’s why I’m here.

Whether it's for an emergency fund, a college education, or a comfortable retirement, it's important to have savings. It's a crucial step in taking control of your financial life and can even have positive effects to other areas such as your emotional and physical wellbeing. 

A unicorn appeared at a Silicon Valley event Wednesday night — in a screen print by the British artist Mark Wallinger.

Unicorns of the tech type – startups with a valuation over $1 billion – also were discussed at a cocktail party on the top floor of the Epiphany Hotel in Palo Alto. There, William O’Reilly, of the art-auction house Bonhams, and Jon Callaghan, a founding partner of venture-capital firm True Ventures, drew parallels between venture capital and art investing. Both markets, for example, drew about $50 billion in investments last year, they said.

Image: Mark Wallinger (British, b. 1959), Ghost, 2001, screen print. Bonhams

As a founding partner at the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and a board member at SpaceX and Tesla Motors, Steve Jurvetson spends a lot of time thinking about the future, often the distant future. One of Elon Musk’s biggest backers—Jurvetson boasts that he owns the first Tesla production Model S—he was also a founding investor in Hotmail and sits on the board of Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics, the constructor of the first synthetic cell.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com 

Researchers have found a new species of dinosaur that lived 69 million years ago above the Arctic Circle, the farthest north dinosaurs have ever been found.

The animal, a plant eater about 30 feet long, has been named Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis — ancient grazer of the Colville River, in the Inupiaq language of the Inuit natives of Alaska.

“It had crests along its back like Godzilla,” said one of its discoverers, Gregory M. Erickson, a professor of biological sciences at Florida State University. The dinosaur’s jaw was lined with at least 1,000 teeth with coarse surfaces perfect for pulverizing plants.

Image: A handful of juvenile neckbones of U. kuukpikensis, which were found in northern Alaska. Credit Pat Druckenmiller/Museum of the North 

Mashable's latest #BizChats Twitter chat, sponsored by Wells Fargo Works for Small Business discussed how professionals can get their business off the ground with a well-crafted business plan.

Over the course of an hour, @MashBusiness covered an array of questions, ranging from what the most important components of a business plan are to what financial details are a must for entrepreneurs that are looking to launch their own business.

As the U.S. wireless sector prepares for next year’s historic broadcast incentive auction, one overriding question looms: What’s next?  The appetite of consumers and our innovation economy for mobile capacity is unquenchable, and our nation is in a constant race to stay ahead. One welcome development:  hearings this week in both the House and Senate focusing on streamlining wireless broadband deployment and shaking loose underutilized spectrum controlled by the U.S. government. 

Steve Case, co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer at Revolution, discusses public sentiment against Wall Street and the lack of job creation supported by the banking industry. He speaks on "Bloomberg ‹GO›" (Source: Bloomberg)

The importance of universities as anchor institutions for supporting technology entrepreneurship will continue to grow, said higher education officials during a roundtable discussion Wednesday evening at the University of Pennsylvania.

Innovation leaders from Penn and four other top U.S. universities described how their schools promote entrepreneurship, including through the establishment of incubators and strategic partnerships with the private sector. The talk was hosted by the Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Penn Center for Innovation.

Image: Yale's Jon Soderstrom, left, and Penn's John Swartley talk about the role of universities in today's innovation economy. (Photo by Adam Bender)

Yesterday, I gave a talk and then did two breakout Q&A sessions at EO Alchemy 2015. It was a lot of fun and many of the questions were thought provoking to me, which I enjoy greatly. One of them caused me to pause and answer extra deliberately. Near the end of the second breakout session, I was asked “What Do You Want Your Legacy To Be?”

Corals are dying across the planet. The culprit? Ever-increasing temperatures are stressing out corals' colorful partners called zooxanthellae. The result? Bleached-white corals. Now, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have found the stressful conditions are expanding from Hawaii into the Caribbean. Because of the breadth and severity of the bleaching, NOAA scientists have declared a "global coral bleaching event," only the third such declaration on record. Here's a look at what's happening beneath the world's seas.

Image: http://www.livescience.com/

Companies have been investing feverishly in digital initiatives as their business models shift beneath them. Global business spending on cloud technologies alone will surpass $174 billion this year.1 Many organizations have hired chief digital officers (CDOs) or set up dedicated business units to drive digital strategy.2 Yet while these investments have generated bursts of innovation, many companies have failed to institutionalize the sort of game-changing disruption that leads to sustainable growth. To become digital to the core, companies must scale their digital experiments—from work flows to the workforce.

Minnesota startup champion Graeme Thickins wrote a great blog today about the seemingly large number of high profile MN startups that raise venture capital money they don’t ‘need’ citing companies like Code42, LeadPages and most recently Field Nation who raised capital after being bootstrapped for many years.

At the end of the blog he posed a few questions about what VCs think when startups they fund don’t spend their cash.  I thought it was great approach as usually the questions are more geared towards the founders (‘why did you take the money if you didn’t need it’) than the VCs (‘how do you feel about your cash not being spent’).

While some people pursue entrepreneurship for the promise of wealth or leadership, others are more interested in the journey of creating and nurturing something. Either way, certain realizations about life, management and business come with the territory.

I was watching the new season of "Shark Tank" the other evening with a friend.

He turned to me when it ended and said, "I need to just think of a good idea and get on 'Shark Tank.' I mean, that’s all it would take."

Yup, it’s that easy (major dose of sarcasm).

There has been a recent surge in the glorification of entrepreneurship.

Image: Flickr/PROSilicon Prairie News

As with so many things, it was only after we left our accelerator experience at co.lab, sponsored by Zynga.org, that we truly started to take stock of its lasting value. As a small, indie, education start-up working out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, having the opportunity to spend time learning out of the offices of an educational games accelerator based in San Francisco, made quite the impression.

A year later, we thought we would share some of the more enduring insights that we gleaned from this experience. After living through the adventure, we actually now have a much better understanding of these cohort-based mentorship programs. Before we get started, we should probably add one, rather strong caveat. Namely, when confronted with the option, we think everyone should choose to join an accelerator.

When working with an outside company, there are only so many factors you can control. But based on their behavior, you should know when it’s time to back out. That’s why we asked 12 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question: “What is one warning sign that a deal with a partner or vendor is not going to pan out?” Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

A great idea is never enough. You need money to turn your idea into a reality.

Your family and friends may give you money for your idea. But you are going to need more people to invest, unless you have very rich friends and family.

Crowdfunding is a popular way to raise money using the Internet.

Businesses can use crowdfunding to start projects or products. Backers, who donate money, support those products. Sometimes they get the earliest model for a discount.

Image: Entrepreneur Marion Moon turned to online crowdfunding to get her organic fertilizer company off the ground earlier in 2015. (Hilary Heuler / VOA News)