Remarkable things are defined as unusual, extraordinary, or worthy of notice or attention. Something can be remarkable because it is novel, surprising, extreme, or just plain interesting. But the most important aspect of remarkable things is that they are worthy of remark.

If we tell someone about a secret bar hidden inside a hot dog restaurant, it makes us seem cool. Sharing extraordinary, novel, or entertaining stories or ads makes people seem more extraordinary, novel, and entertaining. Not surprisingly, then, remarkable things get brought up more often. In one study, Wharton professor Raghu Iyengar and I analyzed how much word of mouth different companies, products, and brands get online. We examined a huge list of 6,500 products and brands, everything from Wells Fargo and Facebook to small brands like the Village Squire Restaurants and Jack Link’s. From every industry you can imagine. Banking and bagel shops to dish soaps and department stores. Then we asked people to score the remarkability of each product or brand and analyzed how these perceptions were correlated with how frequently they were discussed.

Silicon Valley topped the list for the top 10 U.S. cities in terms of tech acquisitions in 2012.

PrivCo, a New York company that track private investments, said that Silicon Valley (combining San Francisco and the region around it) led the way in terms of the value of acquisitions of companies. It was followed by New York City(100 deals), Boston(62), Los Angeles (55), and Seattle (43). Rounding out the list were Austin (40); Washington, D.C.(39); Atlanta (36); Dallas(33); and Houston(30).

The top ten was ranked by the total number of U.S. private tech companies acquired last year in the region. But the biggest acquisition of a private tech company acquisition was in New York, as Zayo acquired AboveNet (in nearby White Plains, N.Y.) for $2.2 billion.

In the wake of the 2012 presidential election, some political commentators have written political obituaries of the "red" or conservative-leaning states, envisioning a brave new world dominated by fashionably blue bastions in the Northeast or California. But political fortunes are notoriously fickle, while economic trends tend to be more enduring.

These trends point to a U.S. economic future dominated by four growth corridors that are generally less dense, more affordable, and markedly more conservative and pro-business: the Great Plains, the Intermountain West, the Third Coast (spanning the Gulf states from Texas to Florida), and the Southeastern industrial belt.

Richard Bendis will be a speaker at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference which takes place from March 8-17 in Austin, Texas. SXSW is a set of film, interactive, and music festivals which occur every year in March. Mr. Bendis will be speaking on March 9th at a session titled "Entrepreneurs in Residence: Not Just for VCs." In his presentation, Richard will introduce the BioHealth Innovation, Inc. EIR program and speak about some of the commercialization challenges being addressed creatively by the biohealth community in Maryland.

The heady promise of money and mentoring is proving to be short-lived for scores of fledgling ventures graduating from the growing number of accelerators in the country.

Every six months, there are at least 120 new ventures coming out of nearly 35 accelerators that provide the first helping hand to an entrepreneur starting on a career in business. However, at the next level, when they need venture capital, these companies are finding few takers. This mismatch is leading to a glut of young companies facing an uncertain future across India's entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Go-to people get things done. As an entrepreneur, you need these people, and you need to be one, if you expect your startup to be successful. That may be easier said than done, since resumes do not tell the story, and without real nurturing, the best people won’t stay around long.

To highlight how rare this breed is, Jeffrey Gandz of the Richard Ivey School of Business relates a quote from a new CEO in a large company, "I have more than 1000 people in my head office organization, 900 can tell me something’s gone wrong, 90 can tell me what’s gone wrong, 9 can tell me why it went wrong, and one can actually fix it!"

There's so much hype surrounding crowdfunding and for good reason. Stories like the one of Ouya, a game console developer that raised $950,000 in just 8 hours on Kickstarter capture our imaginations. In 2012 alone, over 2 million people pledged approximately $319 million on Kickstarter while global crowdfunding is predicted to grow to $6 billion in 2013.

So far so good. But existing crowdfunding models are based on donation and reward based models where backers donate money to projects with no prospect of enjoying the upside of a successfully funded crowdfunding project. That's where equity-based crowdfunding comes in. Rather than donate money in a crowdfunded business, backers, or more precisely, investors, invest money in the business and in return receive shares or other similar equity interests in the business with the prospect of sharing in the upside. It sounds simple but raising money from investors in this way requires compliance with the securities laws which until the enactment of the JOBS Act last April were ill-equipped to accommodate this kind of money-raising.

Berlin has changed significantly over the past three decades. When I hitchhiked there from West Germany in the early 1980s, it wasn’t the easiest place to visit.

Marooned in the center of East Germany, it was only possible to visit West Berlin, and visitors by car could only secure a visa that applied for the road from the border to the city’s entrance. If you left the road, you faced arrest.

For those who lived in East Berlin, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 defined their lives. It cast another iron window behind the so-called Iron Curtain that descended across Europe after World War II. More than 5,000 tried to escape over (and under) the wall — and hundreds died doing so.

Some of the biggest tech companies in the world were started on college campuses, but the students behind these startups usually have little choice but to look outside their college community for funding.

First Round Capital, a venture capital firm that often touts itself as thinking outside the box, decided to try changing this by introducing an experimental fund that would give a committee of college students $500,000 to invest in their peers' startups. The Dorm Room Fund, as it's called, launched in Philadelphia in September, just in time for the new school year. Hundreds of students applied to be part of the investment team. First Round Capital eventually selected 11 students from Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania to serve as the board for the new fund.

If you are not running your own business today, do you plan to start one in the next three years?

Whether a person answers “yes” or “no” to this question depends a lot on where she is located. According to the 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a survey of nearly 200,000 adults in 69 nations, only 2 percent of people not currently running their own businesses in Japan and Russia intend to start one within the next three years. But 79 percent of non-entrepreneurs in Uganda intend to be in business for themselves within that time.

The large difference across countries in the fraction of the population that plans to start a business in the next few years raises the question: why?

At this week’s ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C., politicians from both sides of the aisle, together with environmentalists and business leaders, will do something unusual—they’ll agree on something. They’ll all sing the praises of ARPA-E, the agency created in 2009 to fund the development of early stage energy technologies. But what could get lost in all the laudatory remarks is the fact that ARPA-E won’t solve our major energy challenges and can’t fulfill its mission alone.

That mission has always been limited. Its authorizing legislation directs it to identify promising advances in labs and give them a boost, enough to demonstrate the potential to private investors. A small company or university lab that has discovered a promising material, for example, might be funded to produce a working prototype battery or solar cell. But ARPA-E was explicitly not supposed to take over for venture capitalists in commercializing technology. The agency invests only in projects that are too risky for private investors.  

I recently went to a great tech event called VatorSplash. It's an event where tech entrepreneurs claw their way to center stage in hopes of getting their demo seen and receiving the coveted Vator award. The real benefit is they get in front of some impressive VCs that might love their idea enough to fund it to the next phase. The night I went I was lucky enough to get to listen to the CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin speak. And as I write this, I'm using his great tool.

Libin walked us through his beliefs on entrepreneurship; specifically who should be an entrepreneur and where they should launch. As he chatted about the "who" part, I pulled four reasons why anyone thinking they want to start a business should NOT DO IT and related it to my day-to-day and boy, was he spot on. So here's my take on his words. Don't start a biz if...

Striving to be the best you can be in the workplace should always top your list of professional goals. Whether you’re just beginning your career or you’ve been working at it for awhile, being a stand-out employee is something you should never lose sight of.

While we all have specific characteristics that have the potential to help make us good employees, continued improvement is beneficial to a long and successful career. Your employer likely has high expectations for you; therefore, you should also have them for yourself.

Strive to hit the next level. Here are 10 traits of amazing employees:

1. They set the standard. All-star employees aren’t average — they set a new standard for employee aptitude. They break molds with ease and their performance likely gives way to a new way of doing things around the workplace.

Thousands of people from 135 countries have already confirmed their participation for next month’s week-long Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) and festival in Rio de Janeiro. As chair of the GEC for the past few years, I have witnessed the emergence of this global platform for collaboration among entrepreneurs, their investors and national leaders held outside the United States. So what happens at the GEC?

What is interesting about this event is its reach and scale and the evidence it provides of the democratization of entrepreneurship - the phenomenon of startups, and the communities that foster them springing up in the most unexpected corners of the globe. Governments from all corners have been racing to make their nations more attractive to entrepreneurs. The list of countries embarrassed into improving “ease of doing business” in the latest World Bank rankings lists nations of all economic classifications. This is why at the GEC in Rio next month, while Brazilian entrepreneurial prowess will be on show, delegates will experience not an all Brazilian or American show, but a global one focused on startup cities, experiential education, startup legislation, new models for where entrepreneurs can get their money, and an array of the most effective practical efforts in the world— from the likes of Kauffman and Endeavor—to help entrepreneurs scale.

The Obama administration is right to direct federal agencies to make public, without charge, all scientific papers reporting on research financed by the government. In a memorandum issued on Friday, John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, directed federal agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures to develop plans for making the published results of almost all the research freely available to everyone within one year of publication.

Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT. The agencies must submit plans to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy within the next six months that will apply to both peer-reviewed scientific papers and digital manuscripts and supporting data.

About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study has found.

Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (907) » The findings, published on The New England Journal of Medicine’s Web site on Monday, were based on the first major clinical trial to measure the diet’s effect on heart risks. The magnitude of the diet’s benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.

Wall Street is an easy place to pick up the habit of overeating. Think about it: It's a place that embraces taking clients out to lavish dinners, working long days and sometimes splurging on meals to make up for those miserable hours. And then there's the time honored tradition of the Wall Street eating contest. Eating contests are the product of bankers — competitive by nature — having down time during their long days at the office. All of the sudden, someone decides to bet someone else that they can't eat the entire contents of a vending machine... or 60 hamburgers... or 500 Starbursts.

I love business the way some people love football. It’s a passion for me: most kids at 18 years old are just entering college, but I was busy starting my first real company. At the time, I just couldn’t imagine taking two more years of required courses before digging into what I really loved, so I skipped college and sought out mentors to show me the way instead.

Here are three of the best pieces of advice I got along the way to help ensure I’d be a successful entrepreneur:

1. Put a dollar figure on your time — and any task you can outsource for less, do it.

When I first started out, I was doing everything in my company, including shipping, data entry, you name it.  One of my first mentors said, “I promise that you can pack boxes better than anyone else at your company, but is that what you want to be doing all day?” I decided my time was worth $20/hour (a whopping figure at the time) — which meant no more shipping boxes for me! Instead, all of that time saved went into things that were going to make money for my companies (like sales calls, marketing, etc.).  That decision changed my life, and within one year of implementing that advice, I went from $150,000 in sales to over $1M.

Do you want to be among the top 1% entrepreneurs who are considered to be champions in their own fields? Go ahead and learn of the nine things that make a champion entrepreneur – you might just be one. 

A lot of people like to think of themselves as entrepreneurs. And while some of them are technically entrepreneurs as they are selling a particular service or a particular product, not all of them can be regarded as a champion entrepreneur. What’s the difference?

An entrepreneur chases after potential clients. A champion entrepreneur is chased by loyal clients.

An entrepreneur is a beginner in his niche. A champion entrepreneur is his niche’s expert.

An entrepreneur has failed ten times. A champion entrepreneur has failed a hundred times or more.