Funding your startup or growth company through equity crowdfunding platforms has the potential to raise money faster and more efficiently than other venues. The beauty of going down this route is that it makes the fundraising process seamless from the initial contact through closing the deal.

Here are five strategies that will increase your likelihood of success.

If you're in job search mode or even keeping your eye on job openings *just in case*, then you're probably wondering what you can do to really get the attention of someone who can give you a job.

LinkedIn looked into that very question and analyzed over 330 million member profiles to see which skills are the most important in the job market. The result was that the vast majority of the 25 "hottest" ones were tech-related. Those top skills included things like mobile development, digital marketing, Ruby, and user interface design.

The industry might be called non-profit, but organizations in that field still require money to stay operational, spread awareness and get the job done. That’s where crowdfunding has helped.

In 2013, crowdfunding platforms raised billions of dollars -- $5.1 billion, to be exact -- a third of which went to social causes. Crowdfunding has also helped nonprofits reach new audiences and find committed donors: 28 percent of those who donate to a non-profit cause are likely to donate again, according to an infographic compiled by cloud-based fundraising platform MobileCause.

Now, you can unlock your door or your laptop using just the blink of an eye. Surat-based Biomatiques Identification Solutions, which is the only Indian company to have received the standardisation testing and quality certification (STQC) for their iris scanners from the department of electronics and information technology (DEITY), government of India, has already sold around 18,000 iris scanners on e-commerce platforms in just about 45 days.

"I know, I really should ask for some more help and delegate," lamented a recent client. "But . . ." Ah. There it is. The big "But" was about to get in the way again.

How often have you resisted the idea of delegating some of your work? You may understand—at least intellectually—that delegating is a powerful skill that can boost productivity and build cohesive teams, yet many of us continue to resist.

One positive that came out of the recent debates in the Senate and House Judiciary Committees as they marked up their patent reform bills was general agreement that the inter partes review (IPR) process established by the America Invents Act is having serious unintended consequences. Rather than fulfilling its original intent of weeding out weak patents, IPR’s and the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) have become “patent death squads” as they strike down 77% of the patent claims under review. The IPR process is being used to undermine confidence in the patent system. A recent article estimates the resulting cost to the U.S. economy as over $1 trillion.

While providing charity eye care in Haiti, Marc Albanese noticed that a single step in the process slowed everything else down. A complex eye-testing machine was essential, unwieldy and too costly to buy in multiples — and it became a bottleneck in giving people necessary care. Happily, the Boston University-trained clinician offered an innovation he’d created at his company, Smart Vision Labs: a version of the same machine at one-fiftieth the weight and one-hundredth of the cost.

Image: Smart Vision Labs

The debate about whether or not urban downtowns are definitively back or not feels interminable. Some statistics tell the story that millennials are undoubtedly swearing off adulthood in suburbia for urban lifestyles. Others point to downtowns in many Rust Belt cities that have yet to rebound.

Felipe Gomez is busy. Twenty-one years old and a rising senior at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, he’s balancing his studies with a job, a social life and yes, a startup. But Gomez is no Soylent-chugging code jockey aspiring to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Brian Chesky. Gomez’s startup, FTC Plasma Solutions, uses plasma technology to reduce emissions and improve fuel efficiency in jet engines. Different than venture capitalists betting on the next Facebook or Airbnb, his backers are Boeing Corporation, the Department of Energy and NASA.

Working with Melltoo Marketplace, a Dubai-based mobile app for buying and selling used items in the UAE, I’ve started to learn a lot about entrepreneurship and the startup scene. Over the past couple of months, I’ve met a lot of young entrepreneurs with all kinds of startups and I’ve come to one very simple conclusion: true success cannot be achieved in isolation. Nowadays, more and more young Arab entrepreneurs are getting mentorship and financial support from the private and public sector.

Christmas-tree-farm proprietor. Personal-finance guru. Adirondack-furniture builder.  Those were just a few of the entrepreneurial activities that Morningstar.com readers said they were pursuing--or considering pursuing--in their retirement years. (To read the complete Discuss forum thread, click here.) 

As a teenage hobbyist building robots at home in Bristol, Joel Gibbard had a leftfield thought when pondering his next project. How would he continue to make models if he lost a hand?

“The critical thing to me in continuing to play with robotics and tinker with making things was to use my hands. So I thought it would make sense to make a robotic hand so that in the event I ever lost one, I would continue to use that,” he said.

Image: Joel Gibbard with his invention, which he says he can produce for around £2,000, compared with the £20,000 to £50,000 currently charged for similar ‘off the shelf’ products. Photograph: Open Bionics/Open Bionics

In his encyclical on climate change, leaked earlier this week and scheduled to be released on Thursday, Pope Francis remarks that the most severe impacts of climate change will likely fall on those least able to withstand them: the poor. 

“Many poor people live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to heating,” Francis writes, “and their livelihoods strongly depend on natural reserves and so-called ecosystem services, such as agriculture, fisheries, and forestry.” Many of these people also live in the countries near the Equator; it is inhabitants of the tropics who will feel the effects the soonest, and who will suffer the most.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Until recently, I didn’t know a thing about how my roughly 25-minute bike commute across San Francisco—or any other part of my day, really—affects my body, other than that I inevitably arrive at work sweaty and a bit out of breath when I’m in a big rush. How high is my heart rate? Do my sleep habits affect it? How many calories do I burn?

These questions have been on my mind as a number of activity trackers and smart watches have hit store shelves over the past couple of years, promising to track information like steps, sleep, heart rate, sun exposure, and calories. With one of these sensor-filled gadgets on my wrist, surely I could get accurate information about my body.

Do you have some vague plans to go back to school at some point, and get more education? Can't go wrong with another degree, right?

Well, no. In fact, that's actually a pretty dangerous assumption.

Getting an expensive degree without knowing exactly what you'll be getting out of it is a quick way to rack up debt that won't necessarily help you achieve your goals. So, before you (possibly) get yourself in a lot of trouble, here are five questions to consider before applying to school, again.

There has been a steep change in American family life in the last 30 years.

Across the country, most children now grow up in dual-income households where the division of labor at home is, increasingly, split between parents. Forward-thinking companies are waking up to this fact and are adapting to the evolving demands of their male and female employees.

In Washington, where tech buzzwords are dropped more frequently than phone calls in the Metro tunnel, it’s not surprising to hear the Pentagon wants to get better at big data.

What is interesting, though, is the Defense Department’s approach. Rather than ponying up big bucks and buying technologies as was once commonplace, the Pentagon is setting up shop in Silicon Valley to forge partnerships, identify new technologies and maybe even recruit some new talent.

Medical care today is episodic. We’re assessed by our doctors at our annual physical exams, and we’re treated by our doctors when symptoms of ill-health become manifest. In the periods in between, we’re unmoored and untended, perhaps engaging in behaviors that will sabotage our health. And because medical care today is driven by data derived from physician encounters, it becomes an explicitly physician-focused dynamic. If health care data were to be continually collected and assessed independent of physician encounters, medical care might finally be transformed to become a patient-focused dynamic instead, yielding efficiencies, improved outcomes, and lower costs.

Growing up, I believed that very soon we would all have robots like Rosie, from “The Jetsons,” cleaning up after us. For those out there who are too young to remember “The Jetsons,” Rosie is the family’s domestically adroit robot maid. After all, why should anyone waste time doing dishes or folding clothes? I longed for a droid friend like C-3PO, Luke Skywalker’s robot buddy from Star Wars.

Leadership’s engagement with cybersecurity is not only internally driven. Regulators have also begun to raise expectations. In countries like the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission has affirmed the importance of including cyber security processes and events in a public company’s disclosure of risk factors and material events. In the Asia Pacific region, strict laws are emerging in several countries to enable the government and regulators to require companies to take measures to ensure cyber security threats are looked into.

Image: http://enterpriseinnovation.net