Nicola Farronato, co-founder & CEO of B-sm@rk Ltd (www.b-smark.com) has been listed among the speakers of the prestigious annual Amadeus Loyalty Customer Conference which will take place in a resort of Guadeloupe on September 28th - 30th 2015 and will see on stage top Amadeus marketing executives, key airline customers and new partners.

This is a great news for B-sm@rk, an italian-irish young company based at the Guinness Enterprise Center in Dublin which is launching its customer experience platform MySmark (www.mysmark.com) for the travel & hospitality sector at the end of this month.

MySmark is an online service for customer experience management providing easy-to-use tools for customer feedback profiling, monitoring and analysis. It allows to capture emotional and rational data with simple interactions and can exploit personality to segment and predict customer behaviour.

In 1965, computer scientist and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore calculated the year to year progress that had been made during the brief history of computer chips, and he realized that as a result of scientific and technological innovation, the capacity of chips to perform computing functions was doubling roughly every year. This progress was instigated on the scientific side largely by academic and industry researchers, who had continually found new ways to put more switches onto a single chip, and on the commercial side as a result of the market environment in which the chip makers were competing, where they had strong incentive to improve their products to sustain or improve their market position.

Image: http://www.innovationlabs.com

I knew I was in trouble. “Definitely. Get rid of it. Focus on what you do best, and strip away the distractions.” “Don’t. It’s a value-add feature that your customers want, and it’ll keep your ARPU high enough to actually make money.” Two pieces of advice from two entrepreneurs far more experienced and successful than me. Two completely contradictory viewpoints that, by definition, can’t both be right.

For the last century, one enduring cliché has been that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. But now the big power with the sniffles is China.

China’s rise has been the most profound development of the past half century, turning a moribund, rural country into a highly urbanized economic superpower. Hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty, and markets around the world reshaped. China alone accounted for a whopping 24.1% of global economic growth from 2003 to 2013. according to the IMF.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit, US Vice President Joe Biden today said that one of the goals of the Obama administration "is to become India's best friend". "America can be India's best friend... It's not anymore about what can we do for India but what we can do with India," Mr Biden said at the first India-US Strategic Dialogue, attended by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in Washington DC.

International Innovation is excited to be media partner to the inaugural IoT Slam 2015 Virtual Internet of Things Conference taking place on 9 December 2015. The collaboration supports the world’s first and largest virtual conference and exhibition in promoting the latest developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) and discussing the challenges faced.

Created and organised by experts in the IoT industry, this first of its kind online conference and exhibition will bring together members of the Internet of Things Community – a global community of over 7000 corporate executives to highlight key research, important developments and significant activities in the IoT world.

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Matt Erskine was in Nebraska today to announce that the Economic Development Administration (EDA) is awarding $750,000 grant to the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to create a biotechnology connector program that links the University of Nebraska, Nebraska Department of Economic Development, and Invest Nebraska with the private sector’s Bio Nebraska. According to grantee estimates, the program is expected to serve eight startup biotechnology companies each year over the next nine years.

Image: courtesy of foodsci.unl.edu

Anti-immigrant sentiment and phrases like “we have to build a wall” have at this point ecome synonymous with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Indeed, the idea of building a massive wall along the border between the U.S. and Mexico was just about the only policy idea he mentioned at his Dallas rally last week.

Image: Donald Trump speaks on immigration at a rally in Dallas. (Mike Stone / REUTERS)

Picture this: A global business magazine features a close-up head-shot of a 30-year-old male on its cover.

He’s of Indian descent, with an American upbringing and education, and he’s just concocted a multi-million dollar business out of thin air.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

Nova Scotia start-ups have a chance to compete for up to $225,000 through Innovacorp's provincial I-3 Technology Start-Up Competition.

The I-3 competition, launched today, Sept. 3, finds and supports high potential, early stage knowledge-based companies, and encourages entrepreneurial activity across the province.

"More and more people now see how empowering it is to be an entrepreneur," said Stephen Duff, president and CEO of Innovacorp. "The province's start-up community has grown and improved significantly in the last decade and we expect the submissions will be top-shelf. Nova Scotia, get ready to bring your A-game."

The Federal Reserve’s decision last Thursday to keep interest rates unchanged caught many by surprise. That was against the backdrop of the hawkish stance of many members of the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC), which makes decisions on interest rates and money supply growth.

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

HELSINKI (AP) — Micha Benoliel grew up in France and launched his first technology startup there, but he never forgot the atmosphere of adventure and optimism in San Francisco, where he studied in the early 1990s.

So when he came up with an idea for a smartphone app that could send messages without Internet or cellular connections, he went back to California in 2011 to pursue his dream.

You probably think you’re pretty smart. Most people believe they’re smarter than the average American, according to a study from YouGov. Yet when it comes to IQ, most of us are indeed average, falling in the 80-119 point range. While this number peaks in our late teens to early 20s and remains relatively stable as we age, that doesn’t mean your potential is fixed.

Fringe ideas are fringe ideas until they aren’t. When reformers started to push for child-labor laws around a century ago, it looked like an outside shot. So did a $15 minimum wage, before Vice President Joe Biden and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo took up the cause a few weeks ago. (It still does—and some say it's a bad idea in the first place—but it’s come a long way in a short time.) Not to be outdone, Berkeley, California, is now pressing to require a $19 hourly wage, and one CEO promised employees a $70,000 minimum salary earlier this year.

In 1977, when he was 22 years old, inventor Alex Lidow had the sort of eureka moment most techies would kill for. While in graduate school at Stanford, Lidow co-invented, along with Thomas Herman, a type of device called the HEXFET power MOSFET that would make his family’s old company, International Rectifier, more than $930 million in royalties. And it turned Lidow's grandfather, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, and his father, who fled Berlin in 1937, into important players in the hardware industry.

Race and ancestry, or countries/peoples of origin, are popular topics, with large amounts of data attempting to help us understand the ethnic nature of the country. In this paper I attempt a summary description of the intersections of race, ancestry, and genome, at the state level, but I hasten to emphasize that the “findings” are tentative, highly uncertain, and based on astoundingly unreliable data. I hope some readers may point the way to better data or safer interpretations.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Autumn may officially begin on September 22 or 23 each year, but it often feels like the weather takes a few weeks to get the memo.

Here at TIME Labs, we were curious when it begins to actually feel like fall around the country. To do so, we looked at 21 years of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, defining autumn as the first five consecutive days in which the high was lower than 70 percent of a region’s yearly range in temperatures. (For example, a place with yearly lows of 10 and yearly highs of 90 would have a “fall line” of 66 degrees, which is 70 percent of the distance between those extremes.) Enter your city or county below to see when you can expect cooler weather in your neighborhood.

Migrants are an invaluable asset to the British economy, however, those with entrepreneurial flair are being held back because of lack of access to funding to start a business in the UK, reveals new findings from social enterprise This Foreigner Can.

Over the summer, a pilot study of 200 migrant entrepreneurs in Stratford was conducted by This Foreigner Can, a London-based organisation designed to help provide start up funding and mentoring for those who have chosen to move to the UK from another country.

Image: http://www.sourcewire.com/

An environment friendly battery made from waste material, that can work continuously for 72 hours with no electricity required for its charging, has been developed by a private educational institute.

The 'Fly Ash Battery' developed by Amity University is a novel ash and activated carbon based battery comprising of aluminum anode and amorphous carbon with graphite.

Image: http://www.moneycontrol.com

As your small business grows, so does your need for staff. This is especially true during your busy season. The good news is that there are a multitude of online platforms such as Upwork (from the merging of Odesk and Elance), Freelancer, Outsource and Fiverr that provide ever-increasing sources to grow your staff without breaking your bank. Whether you seek workers on a per-project basis or for preset periods, outsourcing sites such as these can help you grow your business AND still keeping staff-related expenses low.