Three and a half billion years ago, a mega asteroid slammed into Earth, triggering massive tsunamis and leaving craters bigger than many U.S. states. It was the second oldest and one of the largest impacts known to have hit the planet.

Now, for the first time, remnants of that impact have been uncovered in ancient sediments in Australia, and they're revealing more intriguing details about the Earth at that time.

Image: Evidence of a monster asteroid impact were found in ancient sediments at Marble Bar in northwestern Australia. Credit: A. Glikson  

Companies born before the internet took hold have an enormous challenge: improving their online products and services at the warp speed of their online competitors. The ability to make thousands of changes a day to its online retail service has been a key reason Amazon is expanding its online lead over Walmart and other historically “bricks and mortar” retailers. Amazon e-commerce revenue growth was 10 times Walmart’s last year in dollar terms, and 1.5 times faster in percentage terms.

Tech jobs are some of the most in-demand so far this year, so it’s not a big surprise that the top ranked U.S. city for jobs in 2016 is San Jose, according to the latest analysis by Glassdoor.

"Situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, San Jose is home to high-profile companies such as Facebook, Google, and PayPal," Glassdoor community expert Allison Berry tells Fast Company. "San Jose has the highest score for three of our factors: hiring opportunity, job satisfaction, and work-life balance," she says, even though it comes with a high cost of living.

Improving your memory is a hot topic, but what if you want to influence someone else’s memory—especially when it comes to how (or if) they will remember you? It's an important thing to consider since being forgettable can be toxic when it comes to success, says cognitive scientist Carmen Simon, author of Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions.

"(People) will likely forget up to 90% of what you communicate, and that means your brand, your message, your call to action, everything you want your listeners to act on, will be disregarded," she says. "To be on people’s minds, you must become part of their reflexes, habits and/or goals they consider valuable."

 Image: Flickr user Matthew Trudeau Photography

Equity crowdfunding is a totally different ballgame than traditional crowdfunding.

In our third episode of Crowdfund with Cat, we explore what kind of entrepreneurs would be best suited to raise money with equity crowdfunding and who should be considering investing in startups through equity crowdfunding.

One of the most valuable aspects of a Startupbootcamp FinTech programme is access to a pool of over 500 mentors. No matter what stage you are at with your startup you need a mentor. At Startupbootcamp FinTech, we focus on connecting our cohort to an expanding community of advisors whose expertise can help you with all aspects of your business. The challenge, however, is how to find the right mentor for your startup and therefore maximize the value of a mentor in an accelerator programme?

The TMCx accelerator program couples the resources of Texas Medical Center with the innovative horsepower of entrepreneurs working in the areas of medical technology and digital health. Throughout the program, startups engage with TMC physicians and other hospital stakeholders to refine their value proposition and determine their product/market fit.

John Lindfors, managing partner at DST Global, discusses the growing concern of a bubble in China's Venture Capital market, his investment strategy and the outlook for the tech sector. He speaks to Bloomberg's David Ingles on "First Up" from the Goldman Sachs TechNet Conference in Hong Kong. (Source: Bloomberg)

Take a look at all of the radically successful entrepreneurs you read about in the news or see raking in billions of dollars. Do you think they were born to be entrepreneurs? Do you think they created themselves?

That’s a debate that isn’t singularly answerable. Yes, there are some people who are born with genetic predispositions toward leadership, but at the same time, most successful entrepreneurs started their careers as very different people than they ended up, going through a transformative process that helped them carve their place.

While Mark Cuban once praised Donald Trump for his brash, unrehearsed rhetoric, the Dallas Mavericks owner seems to have changed his tune. "I like the guy, but that doesn't mean I agree with his position," Cuban said on MSNBC's "MTP Daily" on Monday. Cuban isn't convinced that Trump has the entrepreneurial chops.

CEDAR FALLS, Iowa, May 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 18th, the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center (JPEC) received the inaugural Student Entrepreneurship Program of the Year award by the International Business Innovation Association (InBIA) for its unparalleled work in student entrepreneurship. The UNI JPEC team traveled to Orlando, Fla., to attend the 30th International Conference on Business Incubation where they were recognized at the member recognition and awards dinner at the Kennedy Space Center.

One of the fun parts about being a veteran entrepreneur is passing on my hard-won wisdom to the next generation. Today I work with many young business minded people who have questions about entrepreneurship. I encourage them to take an entrepreneurship self-quiz composed of the following six questions:

Why are you starting this business in the first place?

Do you want to be your own boss? Are you convinced you could do a job better than someone else? Do you see a need for a product or service that does not exist or is underrepresented in your area (or the world)?

If you were thinking about setting up shop in the tech capital of the world — for your first office or your fourteenth — it'd be wise to take a moment and ask one crucial question: Is it really worth it?

Sure, you'd be at the epicenter of innovation, surrounded by brilliant minds, mega-corporations and venture capital heavyweights begging to get involved, but you'd also be facing some of the highest living and operating costs in America. And nothing bogs-down a business like lots of overhead.

Piet Dircke is standing on the sidewalk at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport pointing up to the building’s second floor. Or, as he puts it, sea level. The tarmac, where planes taxi nearby, should be about four meters under water, he explains. It isn’t submerged because of more than a century of work by Dutch engineers, like Dircke, on a complex network of dikes, sea barriers, and pumping stations.  

Image: Piet Dircke (left) looks across the Nieuwe Waterweg from beneath one of the giant arms of the Maeslantkering storm surge barrier. - https://www.technologyreview.com

Well before self-driving cars hit the road, fleets of robotic long-haul rigs may be shipping goods across the country.

A startup called Otto is the latest company working on automated truck driving. And Otto’s team includes some engineers from the self-driving team at Google, as well as from Tesla, Apple, and Cruise Automation, who have joined the company to develop technology that turns a conventional truck into a partially automated vehicle.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

In 1790, approximately one out of every twenty Americans lived in cities. By 1960, two-thirds of the US population lived in urban areas. And for the first time in our world’s history, more people now live in cities than in rural areas. According to the latest census, over 80 percent of our population has moved to cities.

This has massive implications for society. City infrastructure needs to grow and flex to accommodate this population influx. Transportation, schools, office spaces, food, housing, water, trash, electricity, and the very ways we co-exist and connect as people are being disrupted. And in turn, this has led to some thrilling advancements in urban innovation.

Astro Teller, director of the moonshot factory at Alphabet known simply as X, explains how he is a "culture engineer" and how he systematizes innovation by creating a work environment where employees are encouraged to be audacious. He says they are given the freedom to work on projects that inspire them and that they want to own – whether they fail or succeed.

A new mode of innovation is emerging that blurs the lines between universities, industry, governments and communities. It exploits disruptive technologies — such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things and big data — to solve societal challenges sustainably and profitably, and more quickly and ably than before. It is called open innovation 2.0 (ref. 1).

The promise is sustainable, intelligent living: innovations drive economic growth and improve quality of life while reducing environmental impact and resource use. For example, a dynamic congestion-charging system can adjust traffic flow and offer incentives to use park-and-ride schemes, guided by real-time traffic levels and air quality. Car-to-car communication could manage traffic to minimize transit times and emissions and eliminate road deaths from collisions. Smart electricity grids lower costs, integrate renewable energies and balance loads. Health-care monitoring enables early interventions, improving life quality and reducing care costs.

Image: EasyMile/Alain Herzog Driverless buses are being tested by an innovation consortium in Kista, Sweden.

A decade ago, Norwegian media group Schibsted made a courageous decision: to offer classifieds—the main revenue source of its newspaper businesses—online for free. The company had already made significant Internet investments but realized that to establish a pan-European digital stronghold it had to raise the stakes. During a presentation to a prospective French partner, Schibsted executives pointed out that existing European classifieds sites had limited traffic. “The market is up for grabs,” they said, “and we intend to get it.”1 Today, more than 80 percent of their earnings come from online classifieds.2 Flash Flash