A Richmond-based venture capital firm has a new name and is making a new push to fill its coffers with extra cash.

New Richmond Ventures, recently rebranded as NRV, launched a $30 million capital raise, according to SEC documents filed in late May.

NRV is an investment firm founded by Richmond businessmen Ted Chandler, Jim Ukrop and Bob Mooney. The firm provides growth capital for small, local businesses.

Image: http://richmondbizsense.com/

With the growth of the securities crowdfunding industry in Singapore, local private investment platform Fundnel has been making moves to grow and deepen its business operations in the market.

Via a range of partnerships with various investment organisations and communities, coupled with the recent amendments made to crowdfinance regulations in Singapore by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which terms the sector as the securities crowdfunding (SCF) inudstry, the company is preparing itself for further growth.

Image: Kelvin Lee, CEO of Fundnel, with company advisor Jason Best Read more at: http://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/45529-45529/

At 6 p.m. on January 9, 2003, seven Thai garment factory workers, well into a three-month-long struggle for due compensation, ceremoniously started in on yet another peaceful act of defiance. For two hours, as the chaotic capital city of Bangkok whizzed around them, the group sat in near silence outside the Ministry of Labor, the office they were hoping would rally to their side. They waited patiently as over 200 fellow protestors and supporters each took a moment to cut off a lock of hair. The hair cutting carried great cultural significance: In Thailand, hair represents the “the life your parents gave you,” explained one protestor. “If you cut it off, you cut off life itself.”

You need to have more meetings with less talking—and more silence.

Maybe you’ve experienced the awkward moment when nobody has anything to say. Relationships may not be fully established yet, or the room becomes silent because someone said something that was out of the box and nobody knows what to say about that. This isn’t the kind of silence that I’m suggesting you facilitate or encourage.

But you should encourage the kind of meetings where people are thinking together.

The post-Brexit aftershocks keep coming. The latest is that Nigel Farage says he is standing down as leader of the UK Independence Party having achieved his "political ambition" with the UK having voted to leave the EU.

Only a few days ago Boris Johnson, the face of the “leave” campaign and the favorite to replace David Cameron as Prime Minister, ruled himself out of the race for 10 Downing Street.

Image: https://www.linkedin.com

Like me, many in the science and innovation community were fervent Remainers and will have shared my shock at the outcome. Others will be Brexiteers. You may still have been shocked.

Most will be directly affected by EU funding, collaboration or free movement implications of the negotiation which is coming and must be deeply anxious in the face of this personal uncertainty. I understand that and share many of those emotions but rending our garments is not going to protect the world class science & innovation ecosystem we have all worked so hard to build up.

Image: Chancellor George Osborne and Nicola Blackwood MP, chair of the House of Commons science and technology committee, talk with Dr Simon Hughes during a visit to Begbrooke Science Park in Oxfordshire. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA

Google is working on new features to bring the web to VR, according to Google Happiness Evangelist François Beaufort.

To help web developers embed VR content in their web pages, the Google Chromium team has been working towards WebVR support in Chromium (programmers: see Chromium Code Reviews), Beaufort said. That means you can now use Cardboard- or Daydream-ready VR viewers to see pages with compliant VR content while browsing the web with Chrome.

Image: http://www.kurzweilai.net

We are only as good as our networks. Our decisions reflect the diversity of our networks. Complex problems usually do not have simple solutions but require a deep understanding of the context. How do we understand the complexity of social networks? Empathy puts us in other people’s shoes. We try to understand their perspective. Empathy is a requisite perspective for the network era. Empathy means engaging with others. The ability to connect with a diversity of people is the human potential of the Internet.

Image: http://jarche.com

For all entrepreneurs, starting a business is the route to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” no matter how risky. It’s the American dream that has been the goal of people in this country for over 240 years. If you are here in the U.S., I hope you are all able to take some time off this holiday weekend, to contemplate what you do, and why you do it.

According to an old article and poll by Startups.co.uk, having the independence to make your own decisions is considered the key benefit of being an entrepreneur. Nearly 90% of respondents said decision-making independence was very important, closely followed by more flexibility for a better work/life balance. Job creation and innovation are the results, not the drivers.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

It has been said that the purpose of organisation is to eliminate uncertainty. Is this stifling the ability to innovate?

I recently spoke with the innovation leaders at a major biopharmaceutical firm. They were lamenting the challenges of designing an innovation program that seemed overwhelming. No matter what they did, the organisation just kept focusing on execution and narrow thinking rather than innovation and big thinking. I reminded them that big companies are like slowly sinking ships (sinking under the weight of their own execution orientation); efforts to innovate will never be ideal, rather it’s a matter of pumping water out of the hull to keep the ship afloat.

Image: http://knowledge.insead.edu

SAN FRANCISCO — Maria Poblet, who leads an organization that assists Latino families facing eviction in San Francisco, says she appreciates the philanthropy that the city’s technology companies do in far-flung places to address global poverty and the environment. But what she really wants to see them do is pay more taxes to help with homelessness and lower-cost housing in San Francisco.

“You have a C.E.O. who cares about kids in Ghana one week or dolphins the next week. Those are important,” she said. “But the people impacted by displacement in San Francisco are a worthy cause, too.”

In January, GE announced plans to move its headquarters from Fairfield, Conn., to Boston. The move to the Seaport District, the city’s innovation hub, is symbolic of the digital transformation the 123-year-old company has undertaken.

Central to GE’s transformation plan is the decision to integrate its software unit, global IT and commercial software teams, and cybersecurity capabilities into a new digital business unit. GE’s goal is to make its industrial products “smart”: Connected to the company’s ecosystem of apps, these machines will communicate automatically when they need maintenance, thus eliminating downtime and lapses in productivity. With this move — arguably GE’s most ambitious undertaking since its Edison Engineering Development Program — the company is aiming to become the dominant player in the industrial Internet of Things.

Most large organizations today are looking for leaders who can easily and effectively move between countries and cultures, taking on expat assignments, understanding disparate markets, and managing diverse teams. Where can they find such talent?

My advice is to look to a group of people I call “global cosmopolitans”— highly educated, multilingual professionals who have already lived, worked, and studied for extensive periods outside their home regions. Whether their international exposure started in their childhood or later, as a result of relocation for education or work, my experience and research confirms that these people often possess five key characteristics that leave them better equipped to tackle complex challenges than their less-global peers:

From years of working with angels, I can tell you that no two are the same.  But if you could choose three words that would apply across the board to every accredited angel investor, what would they be?

My choice—powerful, difference-maker and elusive. Of course there is no right or wrong answer, but what I do know for sure is this: precious little is known about the estimated 2300,000 angels in our country—except that they use their wealth to wield immense economic influence in the U.S. startup economy.

The questions you've always wanted to ask: what do VCs do? Where do they get their money? How do they decide where to invest? And how do you become one?

In the world of technology startups, we often hear about venture capitalists. However, we rarely hear explanations about who they are, the role they play, how they operate and how they fit into the bigger funding picture. We’re going to help answer some of those questions here, starting with the most obvious...

Glenn Solomon, GGV Capital managing partner, and Bloomberg's Ellen Huet discuss how the Brexit referendum impacts venture capital investing. They speak with Bloomberg's Emily Chang on "Bloomberg West." (Source: Bloomberg)

Imagine a future where “moonshots” are part of our everyday reality. In this future, shipping no longer uses environmentally damaging Styrofoam but instead an organic mushroom-based material. Things like meat and leather can be created in a laboratory, limiting the need for environmentally harmful animal slaughterhouses, or tanning and garment factories that can endanger workers.

In this future, astronauts in orbit 3D-print the materials they need while onboard their spacecraft.  And imagine that funding for these innovations comes not from Silicon Valley venture capital, eccentric billionaires or maverick corporations, but instead from the United States government, which has already invested in these moonshot technologies and is helping to make them a reality. And that’s just the beginning.

The state's 21st Century Jobs Trust Fund has had a strong return on investment since launching in 2005, but Michigan is at a crossroads in its efforts to diversify its economy, according to a study commissioned by the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

The fund's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program has created 26,839 jobs in the decade since legislation in Lansing allowed proceeds from the state's portion of tobacco settlement revenue to fund various diversification programs, according to the 73-page report by Columbus, Ohio-based TEConomy Partners LLC, a consulting firm that focuses on analysis and strategy for innovation-based economic development.

Venture capital investment in European start-ups dropped by more than a third in the second quarter, contributing to anxiety about the continent’s technology sector – which is expected to be buffeted by Britain’s exit from the EU. In Europe, funding from venture capitalists fell from $4.3 billion in the second quarter of 2015 to $2.8 billion in the three months that ended last week, according to preliminary data provided by research firm Pitchbook.

Image: A March for Europe demonstration against Brexit in London on Sunday. The British capital is home to more than four in 10 of Europe’s start-ups valued at over $1 billion. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters 

Wednesday. Hump Day. The part of the week when we're over the hill and begin sliding toward the weekend. If hitting midweek feels even a little bit better than slogging through Monday or Tuesday does, well, you're not alone. According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the worst day of the week goes to Tuesday—but just barely. It turns out that all the weekdays are rated about equally badly compared with the weekend.