A new TD Ameritrade survey reveals sports parents are invested in helping kids achieve athletic aspirations, yet often sideline their own financial goals. Sports parents are often the unsung heroes behind top athletes and their dedication to their children is admirable. The survey results highlight that natural desire to put their children’s needs before their own. In addition to sacrificing family vacations and other extras, parents of elite athletes admit to saving less, delaying retirement and tapping college funds to pay for sports.

An estimated 21% of carbon emissions in the United States are attributable to companies, and yet to date there is scant research on how to make firm operations more efficient in terms of reducing pollution. However, the numbers suggest that getting employees to change their behavior could significantly impact climate change. So we partnered with Virgin Atlantic Airways on a field experiment to understand how the behavior of employees—in this case, airline captains—influences fuel efficiency, and how low-cost company interventions can influence their behavior.

The internet is no longer the wild wild west. It’s been around for over 25 years, and during that time the government has stepped up regulations. Here are some of the most common terms and laws that you should be familiar with as an internet investor.

Crowdfunding And P2P Lending Laws

In Title III of the JOBS Act has passed new regulations that changes how equity crowdfunding works. While the law spans hundreds of pages, it does aim to make it easier for investors and companies to exchange money online. The law covers both “crowdfunding” websites like Kickstarter as well as peer-to-peer lending websites like The Lending Club.

Image: http://www.blogtrepreneur.com

Yes, Hollywood may dramatize the plight of the entrepreneur. But sometimes the best way to capture reality is through fiction. Wherever you are in your business venture, you can glean some insight from these 18 provocative and wildly entertaining films.

Hiring the right people is easily among the three most important things a startup founder needs to get right if he is serious about his business. The other two are having a scalable product or service, and having the right investors.

Matrix Partner’s David Skok says a hiring crisis can cripple a startup’s abilities to get products built on time. It can also starve them of the talent they need to market and sell those products.

Government periodically creates new agencies to address particular issues of national concern. These can take a variety of forms, including entire new departments (such as the Department of Homeland Security), independent oversight organizations (such as the Directorate of National Intelligence), large components of other agencies (such as the Transportation Security Administration), and even entirely new small agencies (such as the Administrative Conference of the United States). The newest new agency, which will commence operations October 1st, is the National Background Investigations Bureau.  While new agencies have unique missions, they share a common experience of how to succeed as a start-up in the public sector. 

By pursuing a more concentrated urbanization path guided by action to boost urban productivity, China's local and national policy leaders would minimize the pressures and maximize the economic benefits of urban expansion.

The scale and pace of China's urbanization continues at an unprecedented rate. If current trends hold, China's urban population will hit the one billion mark by 2030. In 20 years, China's cities will have added 350 million people more than the entire population of the United States today. By 2025, China will have 221 cities with one million–plus inhabitants—compared with 35 cities of this size in Europe today—and 23 cities with more than five million. For companies in China and around the world, the scale of China’s urbanization promises substantial new markets and investment opportunities.

Sometimes nothing works. In fact, “sometimes” often seems “all the time.” The digital revolution has bequeathed a welter of new “systems” to cover nearly all of human activity. Something, alas, always goes wrong — the Internet salesperson doesn’t know that his company doesn’t ship to a post office box, or the delivery courier, even with his Global Position System reader insists an address, where the addressee has lived for 40 years, doesn’t exist. Telephone directories have disappeared, replaced by expensive “information” web sites that often display wrong numbers. The instructions for reading telephone messages appears to have been (badly) translated from modern Japanese or ancient Greek.

Image: http://www.washingtontimes.com

Steve Case will be heading to the mountains on his mission to spread his wealth to up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

The AOL co-founder and Revolution CEO announced the five cities he will be visiting as part of the fifth leg of his “Rise of the Rest” bus tour this year. The cities are: Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Phoenix, Arizona.

Image: Steve Case at Washington Business Journal's Power Breakfast event last June.

We tend to think of housing as fitting into a few generic typologies: Single-family home. Apartment. Condo building. But in reality, the fabric of neighborhoods is made up of plenty of interstitial spaces that are neither here nor there—from the odd backyard shed to an alleyway addition to the hidden carriage house.

Over the past few years, these alternative housing types—often known as Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs—have become better known, as demographics and socioeconomic forces reshape our communities. Cities including Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin, among others, are all moving to ease restrictions on building ADUs.

Image: The Garden House, an ADU by Waechter Architecture

In November 2014, the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian peninsula, Crimea, became a virtual battlefield on Google maps. Initially Google Maps displayed Crimea as a disputed area with a dotted border. After pressure from the Russian government, Google was forced to changed it, so people in Russia now see it as Russian territory on Google Maps. Outside Russia it is still marked as a disputed area.

The notion that maps provide an objective or scientific depiction of the world is a common myth.

Image: World map with the British Empire highlighted in red, Mercator projection. Author: Colomb, J.C.R. Publisher: MacClure & Co. Date: 1886. Location: Great Britain. (Wiki Commons)

Communities in Connecticut are lining up to take advantage of the state's newest effort to promote business growth.

Looking for ways to kick-start the state's slow-growth economy, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and the General Assembly enacted legislation establishing competitive grant funding to create so-called innovation places, linking institutions such as colleges, universities and hospitals with entrepreneurs, small-business owners and others. The goal is to draw investment, promote new businesses and stoke job growth.

A recent report commissioned by streetlight design and manufacturing company Lucy Zodion has found significant barriers to smart city development in the UK.

The report contains research into the opinions on smart cities of senior contacts from councils across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The in-depth interviews conducted in May and June 2016 gauged the appetite for smart cities among UK councils and opinions on a range of topics, from the biggest obstacles to smart cities to the most pressing priorities for councils.

Image: http://readwrite.com

The economic development bill filed late Sunday and enacted right around midnight Monday does not include an expansion of a tax incentive aimed at helping low-income workers or authorization for the Massachusetts Lottery to expand into online gaming, according to the lead House negotiator on the bill.

Both of those proposals had been included in the Senate's version of the bill.

"The Senate had a number of outside sections that didn't match up with things in the House. Most of those were set aside or held in conference," said Rep. Joe Wagner, the House chairman of the Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies.

Image: State Rep.Joseph Wagner D- Chicopee, is seen during a meeting with The Republican editorial board. (Mark Murray / The Republican file)

N.B. The following article should be taken in jest!

The Modern Workplace is a stressful and difficult environment to be in. Here are 5 top tips for surviving it.

1. Remember to stay active in the office environment Apparently, sedentary office #Work (aka your typical 9 -5) is worse for your health than smoking! However, the good news is that an hour's brisk exercise offsets the health risks. Therefore, you need to spend an hour of your working day, randomly running around the office to stay active: it is necessary for your health!

Non-compete agreements, which limit employees' abilities to leave their current organization to launch a rival business, can stymie entrepreneurship, according to new research.

The study, which will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Management Science, revealed that in states where there is strict enforcement of non-compete agreements, fewer employees leave their employer to start their own businesses in the same industry.

It's little more than a decade since Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard at the age of 19 to launch Facebook. The social network has made him the fourth-richest man in America and a hero to any aspiring college entrepreneur. Of course Zuckerberg was already something of a prodigy when he started his global empire. But for those with more modest abilities, there are now thousands of schools across the country offering courses in entrepreneurship.

Below is a list of KAUST’s latest electrical & electronics technology licensing opportunities. KAUST’s technologies are available for joint development, patent licensing or other mutually beneficial relationships.  To learn more email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Insurgent companies are full of foundational stories and most of them involve heroics. They recall the times when the original team of hard-charging entrepreneurs did the impossible to deliver on the company’s founding mission. They celebrate the all-hands-on-deck moments when the factory shut down or a key order got lost in shipment. This is remembered as a “time of heroes” — a period of incredible energy and growth, when job descriptions mattered less than who had the best idea.

Image: https://hbr.org

You think you’ve found the right candidate to fill your open position and now it’s time to check references. What’s the best way to get the information you need? Should you ask each person the same questions? What do you read—if anything—into the tone of their voice? And how do you overcome the fact that so many companies only allow you to talk to HR and confirm the most basic information?