Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
With the uptick in the economy, as an active startup mentor, I’m seeing a new surge of entrepreneurs and startups, with the commensurate scramble for funding. There just aren’t enough Angel investors and VCs to go around. Thus I’m getting more questions on new mechanisms, like crowd funding, and an old one long out of favor, the so-called “reverse merger.”
As anyone who is paying attention knows: “innovation” is important to every single brand on the planet. How do we know? Because nearly every CEO talks about “innovation” as a differentiator. Every start-up, it seems, refers to their value proposition as “innovative”. And don’t even get me started on all the “innovative” ninjas, gurus and self-anointed experts that sell based on the importance of being… you guessed it… “innovative.”
Image: http://switchandshift.com
As the Indian political upheaval shows, Indians are fed up with government inaction and corruption . They want accountability, better education and healthcare , and prosperity. And they want them now.
Technology-led solutions may be the only way for India's new government to rapidly uplift its population. Large-scale government programmes and social welfare will take too long. Take education as an example. Tens of millions of children receive substandard education or none at all. It will take years to train new teachers and build schools, and an entire generation will be left out. The only practical solution is to roll out digital tutors with the help of NGOs so that communities can uplift themselves.
We know that spending all day hunched over laptops is shortening our lifespan and expanding our waistlines. Still, the threat of never growing up to be an Anderson Cooper-caliber silver fox may not be enough to motivate young tech workers to switch to a treadmill desk and sign up for some daily Jazzercise.
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Carl Ruedebusch is a veteran businessman who understands how high-speed Internet connections can make or break economic opportunity – depending on where you live in Wisconsin.
Ruedebusch owns a Madison development company that has built millions of square feet of commercial space , including parts of the Fitchburg Technology Campus and the TEC Center on the city’s North Side near Madison Area Technical College.
You may not know much about the groundwater in your area or the alarming drop of its levels in certain parts of the country. But you should care, because ground water abundance significantly affects things like food production, so it actually has a sizable impact on you and people you know.
Image: http://gigaom.com
Following landmark meeting with Paris Region Lab – a vivid initiative headed by Jean-François Gallouin to develop Parisian incubators, and support start-ups in accessing city RFPs, and handle innovative experiments over the Greater Paris territory- I had the chance to listen to Cécile Tevet, and discover another side illustrating how Paris has become truely digital.
In the 12 years that New York was led by a tech businessman, it reawakened as a global tech capital. A digital city has been born, catalyzing an innovation economy to the tune of $125 billion a year. But Mayor Bill de Blasio must make a deeper commitment to tech and leading-edge initiatives to ensure that growth continues. As he introduces his tech agenda this month at Internet Week New York, he can turn to his predecessor and to other cities for replicable strategies.
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DURHAM — The angel investor market in 2013 continued its upward trend started in 2010 in investment dollars and in the number of investments, according to the 2013 Angel Market Analysis released by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire.
Angels increased their investments in the seed and start-up stage, with 45 percent of 2013 angel investments in the seed and start-up stage, up from 35 percent in 2012. Angels also exhibited an increased interest in early stage investing with 41 percent of investments in the early stage, up from 33 percent in 2012.
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At cocktail parties and in the hallways at conferences, people who toil in the trenches of the startup world will speak much more honestly about their experiences than they will in a blog post — or in print — with their name attached to it.
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A hamburger that’s 90 per cent fat-free sounds a lot better than one with 10 per cent fat. And even when the choices are the same, humans are hard-wired to prefer the more positive option.
This is because of what’s known as the “framing effect,” a principle that new research from Concordia has proved applies to mate selection, too.
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Urban sprawl is the type of thing you tend to forget about if you’re living in it, except maybe when you’re stuck in traffic inching home after work. But it does a lot more than cause road rage: Sprawl also makes us fatter, sicker, and poorer, and it’s the source of half of the country’s household carbon footprint. In a series of photos taken over seven years, now published in a new book called Ciphers, photographer Christoph Gielen shows a different perspective on sprawl, intended to get more people to question typical patterns of development.
Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com
GOOGLE RESEARCHERS LISTENED TO 119 HOURS OF USER COMPLAINTS ABOUT MOBILE WEBSITES. HERE’S WHAT THEY LEARNED.
Some mobile websites are borderline unusable, forcing you to squint and peck around in hopes of finding whatever piece of information you need. But others seem to fit your phone like a glove. What’s the secret to their success?
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From employment to leisure and transportation to education, tech is changing the world at a faster pace than ever before. Already, people wear computers on their faces, robots scurry through factories and battlefields and driverless cars dot the highway that cuts through Silicon Valley. Almost two-thirds of Americans think technological change will lead to a better future, while about one-third think people’s lives will be worse as a result, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. Regardless, expect more change. In a series of interviews, which have been condensed and edited, seven people who are driving this transformation provided a glimpse into the not-too-distant future.
Image: http://www.nytimes.com
I hit the streets of San Francisco on an all-too-warm afternoon with camera and notebook in tow, scouting for people wearing what I thought of as the “tech uniform”—the studiedly casual California look associated with startup culture.
You know the look—company T-shirt, jeans, and the omnipresent hoodie. You’ve seen this fresh-from-the-dorm look in films like The Social Network and now in HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” the series that cunningly stereotypes the Bay Area's tech scene. Does reality reflect the Hollywood stereotype?
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“The cure for Apple AAPL +0.16% is not cost-cutting; the cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” Steve Jobs made that bold statement when he returned to Apple after a 12-year absence. Apple was close to bankruptcy. We all know what happened next. Steve Jobs launched one innovation after another after another, revolutionizing computers, entertainment, music, retail, mobile, and telecommunications. It’s no wonder that CNBC named Steve Jobs the #1 most innovative and transformative business leader of the past 25 years.
When people think of entrepreneurs, they think about Silicon Valley. They picture the guy (or gal) in flip-flops and a hoodie, with shaggy, untended hair, cranking on their Macbook at all hours of the day. You know the type: the one who never bought into the traditional 9-to-5 desk job, or who did and quickly figured out that corporate life was no fit for their distaste of bureaucracy, let alone their wardrobe. So off they went, raised a couple thousand dollars of VC money and created an app that sold for billions two years later.
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Crowdfunding is a term that has hit the mainstream, with sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo becoming well-known for offering rewards, such as free merchandise, for providing financial backing. Adding to the mix are sites like AngelList that allow investors to connect with startups and take equity stakes.
In a Spreecast about the landscape of early-stage venture capital fundraising, early-stage investors Jeff Clavier, of SoftTechVC, and Manu Kumar, of K9 Ventures, weighed in on how crowdfunding fits into the larger venture-capital landscape.
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A Chrono-Sensory Mid-Air Display system may sound insanely high tech, but it's just a complicated way of saying "bubble machine." A very special bubble machine, called "SensaBubble," designed by computer scientists at the University of Bristol. "We wanted to create an ambient floating display that provides information in a more subtle way," says Dr. Sue Ann Seah, a post doc in the department and lead author the SensaBubble study.
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In the past couple of years, SEO has turned from a compliment to a curse word. From being associated with technology, to being associated with Spam. Thus, new buzzwords have woken up to cover for SEO’s reputation flaws and bring new and positive connotations into the puzzling world of online marketing.
Image: Vasco Solutions
