A small group of bike advocates gathered at a cafe in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side in November 2014. There’s nothing unusual in a few cyclists meeting over coffee, but this particular group was on a mission. Frustrated with what they saw as the city’s lack of investment in bike infrastructure and bike-share in low-income communities and communities of color, they decided to make a big push for change. Step one for those at the cafe that day — Slow Roll Chicago President Oboi Reed; Red, Bike and Green organizer Eboni Senai Hawkins; Friends of the Major Taylor Trail President Peter Taylor; and Major Taylor Cycling Club of Chicago President Shawn Conley — write an open letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Bicycle Advisory Council.

Image: Oboi Reed started Slow Roll Chicago. (Credit: Slow Roll Chicago)

In many ways, small teams are better than large ones. Because there are fewer people involved, team members are more likely to build relationships. Better still, it's harder to slack off, and the bureaucratic slowdown that affects big teams doesn't take hold.

Of course, this may reduce the margin for inefficiency, but it doesn’t always mean small teams work well. In fact, it's not uncommon to find an employee bending over backward on a small team to do the work of three people.

The most legendary of all communist cars was the East German–made Trabant, almost four million of which were produced between 1957 and 1991. Remaining virtually unchanged for over three decades, its 26 horsepower, two-stroke engine produced a maximum (downhill) speed of only 50 mph yet spewed almost 100 times more pollution into the air than Western cars. The plastic frame cracked and shattered upon impact and often needed to be held together by rope or wires. The car’s interior was cramped and uncomfortable, and the steering wheel–mounted gearbox required exceptional dexterity to operate.

Warren E. Buffett was just 25-years-old in 1956 when his hero, Benjamin Graham, the lauded founder of value investing, decided to retire. While matriculating at Columbia University Business School, Buffett had been Graham’s best student, receiving the only A+ in his investments class. A few years after, Buffett had become the star employee of his professor’s investment firm, Graham-Newman. Before he retired, his mentor offered his portion of the firm to Buffett, who respectfully declined, opting to return home to Omaha, Neb., instead. That moment marked a major turning point in Buffett’s professional trajectory. Dawn was about to break on his own investment partnership—one of the most financially productive endeavors of the great investor’s entire career.

Image: Warren Buffett - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warren_Buffett_KU_Visit.jpg

Human beings love to interact – it’s part of who we are. But as we’ve become increasingly consumed with screens, we’ve started to lose touch with our most basic ability to connect with one another.

Rather than handing out gadgets to each of my sales employees and letting machines do the work, what I’ve found consistently yields better sales results is human interaction. Technology enables us to be more efficient, but it shouldn’t define the entire sales experience. We’re already fully equipped with what we need to acquire a customer – our five senses.

Image: http://ventureburn.com

It’s difficult for employees to remain accountable if they do not feel that they are being monitored.

Image: Alan Hirsh - http://www.bizjournals.com/

A study of the top 100 venture firms has found that just 7pc of partners – or 53 of 764 partners – are women, while 38pc of the top 100 firms have at least one female partner.

The Crunchbase Women in Venture report looked at the top 100 venture firms globally and particularly at the women listed as “partners” in those firms, and screened them to see if they were actually partners that had authority to invest funds.

Image: https://www.siliconrepublic.com

New technology in computing, hardware, and bioscience is giving a fresh impetus to the food and agriculture industries' attempts to devise sustainable ways of feeding the world's growing population.

In the past five years, venture capital investment in such technologies, known otherwise as agtech, has grown exponentially, from $300m in 2011 to $4.6bn in 2015.

JAMMU, Apr 24: Union Minister of State for Skill Development and Entreprene-urship (Independent charge), Rajiv Pratap Rudy, released the India Entrepreneurship Report 2015 by Amway.

The report aims to understand the latent enthusiasm for entrepreneurship in the country as well as factors that motivate and obstruct the creation of new enterprises.

Research partner, Nielsen India surveyed 250 households in each of the 21 States across 50 different cities. One male and one female member in the 21-65 age group were interviewed from each household taking the total number of respondents to 10768 individuals (5402 males and 5366 females).

Every new business quickly realizes that revenue coming in every period on a committed basis is the Holy Grail to survival and growth. According to many experts, getting new customers is five to ten times harder than getting additional revenue from existing customers. Thus the subscription model (low fixed monthly payments), is rapidly becoming the norm for new products and services.

Culture and creativity stir the soul like nothing else. Whether it is music, film or literature, the dynamic and innovative societies we enjoy today come from the hard work of many people across many industries. This tradition is as true in India as it is in the US. As we approach this year’s World Intellectual Property Day and its theme Digital Creativity: Culture Reimagined, I have been reflecting on my past year in New Delhi as the US ambassador.

When Zinedine Zidane, the then French captain, headbutted Italy’s Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final, the clash quickly became one of the most infamous incidents in football history. What was not clear was what sparked the Frenchman’s ire – Zidane said his mother had been insulted, a charge that Materazzi vigorously denied.

Image: Dr Helen Bear has developed technology at the University of East Anglia to read people’s lips. Photograph: Martin Pope for the Guardian

The Innovation Gateway is once again on the hunt for small companies with big ideas to help drive resource efficiency across major estate properties – and this time we will be working with three new partners – one the of the UK's largest chain of supermarkets Sainsbury's, leading integrated services company Carillion and the UK's leading independent contract catering services provider catering group BaxterStorey, on top of our main sponsor and founding member Royal Bank of Scotland.

The four leading UK companies are looking for projects focused on employee engagement and reducing energy, water and waste across their property estates.

Can General Electric deliver 800 jobs to the greater Boston economy? That is one question that will consume local economic developers in the wake of the Fortune 500 leviathan’s surprising decision to move its corporate headquarters from Connecticut to Massachusetts.

In the course of wooing GE, Boston pledged up to $25 million in city property-tax concessions, and the state and the city together pledged more than $250 million in various other subsidies, to persuade the corporation to relocate. Having the GE HQ in Boston, they hope, will pay bigger dividends down the road.

Image: (Photo: AP/Steven Senne) Protesters hold signs outside a news conference held by General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh on April 4, 2016. The demonstration was protesting the millions of dollars in tax breaks used to lure GE to Boston.

Potential Regional Innovation Strategies Program Applicants:

Ensuring that entrepreneurs across the nation have access to the tools they need to move their ideas and inventions from their laboratories and garages to the market is a top priority for President Obama and his Administration.

To continue advancing this key priority, today, the Economic Development Administration released the Federal Funding Opportunity (FFO) and began accepting applications for the 2016 round of Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) Program funding. 

Uber is the ultimate test of whether the last eight years of venture investment in Silicon Valley was worthwhile.

Uber is valued at $60 billion. It's privately held. Nobody outside its execs and a few investors really know what its books look like.

The Internet of Things (IoT) —  a vast network of connected devices — is set to become the world’s largest device market over the next decade, potentially creating trillions of dollars in economic value. However, without a reliable and secure network connection, these devices will fail to deliver that value. Device owners can choose between a number of established and emerging networking technologies to connect their IoT devices and collect data from them for analysis.

Wisconsin has a business startup problem. Despite the buzz in Madison and a few other communities, there are far too many places in the state where entrepreneurship is still just a fancy word versus economic action.

The reasons are somewhat easily explained: manufacturing and agriculture are capital-intensive and therefore not always startup-friendly; the labor force is slightly older and less educated than the U.S. average; rural Wisconsin is barely recovered from the Great Recession; and a low immigration rate works against Wisconsin because newcomers are more likely to start a business than native-born Americans.

I was recently asked, “What is your definition of cloud?”

I thought for a moment about giving the stock answer: the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition: Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Image: https://developer.ibm.com

With 38 enduring plays, 154 sonnets and 5 narrative poems to his name (though scholars are still trying to figure out if he really was behind them all), William Shakespeare is remembered for both his staggering work ethic and remarkable understanding of human nature -- two qualities that every entrepreneur must have in their pursuit of success. To commemorate the Bard’s life, which ended on April 23, 1616, read on for some of his most memorable quotes about leadership, facing your fears and taking advantage of every opportunity that comes your way.