Almost everywhere you look today, people talk about innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s true that in a world where governments are focused on minimizing public expenditure, that economic growth depends on more innovation and more entrepreneurs. And for over 20 years, Silicon Valley in California has been held up as role model of a successful innovation ecosystem.

Image: http://www.thenextsiliconvalley.com

The standard ‘glass half-full or half-empty’ saying is commonly used to emphasize the difference between positive and negative thinking, or optimism and pessimism, respectively.  Positive thinking is generally associated with the glass being half-full, and negative thinking with it being half-empty.  The expression has even come to define personality types which are often referred to as ‘glass half-full’ or ‘glass half-empty’.

The cybersecurity market is growing fast, with great opportunities for growth and innovation. This bodes well for individuals looking to invest in an up and coming tech market. For indeed, savvy investors don’t just want to follow trends, they want to help create them.

Retiring to go play golf in Florida isn’t the draw it used to be. In a 2014 Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey, 72% of employees over age 50 reported that they’d like to continue working in retirement. Partly that’s a response to the Great Recession and a need to compensate for diminished savings; a Conference Board study showed that in the past eight years, nearly two-thirds of 45-60 year-olds experienced a 20% or greater decline in their assets.

Imagine that you were a major investor in a leading company, and its board of directors had no members with independent, world-class financial expertise. Who would look after your interests? You could probably coach the directors to ask good questions, but they would lack the competence to judge the answers. The board would not be able to engage management in robust conversations about the complexities of capital structure, mergers and acquisitions, financial accounting, reporting, regulatory compliance, or risk management. Most investors and regulators would deem such a board unfit to carry out its fiduciary guidance and governance responsibilities.

The Internet may put nearly every imaginable piece of information at our fingertips. But when you’re waiting for a Web page or mobile app to load, it can feel more annoying than convenient. Help is now at hand. An upgrade to the protocol that underpins the Web could help wrest back many of those precious wasted seconds

Last February, Internet wonks signed off on the first upgrade in more than 15 years to the HTTP standard on which Web pages and mobile apps are built. Today one of its most powerful features has been made available at large scale for the first time by CloudFlare, a company that serves up Web content on behalf of over two million websites, including roughly 7 percent of the most popular million sites. Its customers include Reddit and OkCupid.

There are many times when you buy a particular stock and then question why you own that particular stock. In fact, it happens all of the time, when you get your weekly, monthly or annual statements, it is after all supposed to be part of the process, making sure that the thesis is still firmly intact. Making sure that the specific investments that you own still fit the profile, still match all the criteria that you are looking for as an investor. It is Warren Buffett’s friend and right hand man who always says that it isn’t supposed to be easy. What he (Charlie Munger) means by that is stock investing of course is harder than most people think, it is only the longer you do it that you realise that. Unlike large amounts of push ups and bunker shots for South Africa’s most decorated golfer. True story, say what you want about Gary Player (80 years old), at 9 majors, he is more than double that of the next South African.

As the 2015-2016 academic year comes to a close, universities and their industry partners have announced several new university-industry partnerships to leverage university research capabilities to address industry needs. Fortune 500 companies including IBM, Rolls-Royce, and several pharma companies have agreed to commit millions of dollars to support these partnerships targeted at increasing the pace of scientific discovery as well as training the next generation of STEM professionals. Partnerships have been announced in Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and internationally in Canada and Switzerland.

Some people think that being an entrepreneur is easy because you get to be your own boss and make your own schedule. Sometimes it is, especially when you have a passion for your work and business.

If you fancy yourself an entrepreneur, tell me if this sounds familiar. You used to lie in bed at night, wondering why you seemed so different from everyone else in your life. Your friends and family all like to do odd things like sleep, eat, and play. Meanwhile you enjoyed working and designing new products, setting up lemonade stands, and taking things apart to figure out how you could make a better one. People would look at you funny when you would show them your new fashion line, invention, or offer them a sip of your freshly bottled organic beet juice.

If I ever worried that I’d run out of weird and wonderful new life to blog about, that fear has long been laid to rest. Take, for instance, this stunning jellyfish, discovered just four days ago by NOAA’s ship Okeanos Explorer and its ROV Deep Discoverer on the Enigma Seamount near the Mariana Trench 2.3 miles beneath the surface (3,700 meters). I recommend enlarging.

Image: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com

Stanford Professor Bob Sutton suggests two strategies for dealing with team disagreements. Never knock down ideas during the brainstorming stage. And if a team decides to go with a decision you disagree with, be the hardest worker during the idea's implementation. By committing yourself to helping make the idea a success, if it does indeed fail in the end, you will know that it was indeed a poor idea.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/

Astro Teller says the momentum within X, Alphabet's moonshot factory, depends on teams discovering as fast as possible if something is a bad idea, so they can move on to the next one. That requires a work environment where both creativity and critical thinking are rewarded. "Every place is a legitimate place for ideas to come from," Teller says. "You can't destroy the positivity that comes from saying crazy ideas."

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

For many would-be entrepreneurs, the perks of owning a small business outweigh the risks of starting a company. Although giants like Coca-Cola KO +0.22% and IBM IBM -0.97% get a lot of attention, on the ground, fully 99.7% of employment in the US comes from small firms. While starting a company can be scary and hard, keeping it alive is the real challenge; unfortunately, 55% of US startups fail in the first 5 years. Looking at what these companies did or didn’t do can provide valuable lessons for those trying to make a go of a new business.

Over the year’s I’ve tried to offer some tangible, practical advice to help people communicate more effectively. I’ve weighed in on: Email 1 — How to Get Busy People to Take Action Email 2 — Etiquette to Email Introductions

When Oakland startup MegaBots needed cash to give its 15-foot-tall, 12,000-pound combat robot more firepower, the company put out a call for help online.

The founders set up a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.com last summer, explaining that their giant robot needed modifications to prepare for a duel with another robot built by a team in Japan. A month later, MegaBots had raised more than $550,000 from almost 8,000 supporters.

Image: MegaBots Chief Executive Officer Gui Cavalcanti, left, and Chief Operating Officer Matt Oehrlein pose with a giant robot at American Steel Studios in West Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, March 15, 2016. The Oakland startup, previously located in Somerville, Massachusetts, launched a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, raising more than $550,000. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

Coworking spaces are on the rise, from Google’s “Campus” in London to NextSpace in California. Much has been made of these shared workspaces as a brand-new idea, one that barely existed 10 years ago. But the way they function reminds me of a very old idea: the Renaissance “bottega” (workshop) of 15th-century Florence, in which master artists were committed to teaching new artists, talents were nurtured, new techniques were at work, and new artistic forms came to light with artists competing among themselves but also working together.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_da_vinci,_Study_of_a_central_church.jpg

The American people and our economy have come a long way from the recession President Obama inherited seven years ago. We went from hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs a month, to an unprecedented 73 consecutive months of private sector job growth.  More than 14 million jobs have been created. Unemployment has been cut in half. The stock market has recovered. The auto industry was rescued. And we’ve invested in exploding American industries like advanced manufacturing and solar.

Menlo Ventures has raised $250 million in its first special purpose fund in its 40-year history, targeted at helping early stage startups that are being stranded by a sudden slowdown in funding over the past two quarters. "We believe there is a venture valley in the investment landscape that looks like a barbell," Menlo Managing Director Venky Ganesan told me. "There is a lot of interest in early stage — seed and Series A — and a lot of interest in late stage."

Michelle Calloway is standing in front of a group of potential investors holding a microphone. The rules of the pitch are strict: no videos, no samples, nothing in fact that could make it simple to describe the product she plans to launch onto the market. Instead, she has the simple power of words.

So Calloway takes a deep breath and launches into a description of the augmented-reality greeting card company Revealio that she and her husband, Jerry Bowden, hope will disrupt the greeting card industry. People are craving connection, she tells the group, and a personalized, emailed video card could shorten the emotional distance between a soldier overseas and his sweetheart, for example, or a grandmother and grandchild.

Image: http://www.berkeleyside.com