Dan Gilbert -- the Cleveland Cavaliers owner and founder of Quicken Loans -- and Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington will be among the judges at Thursday’s Cupid's Cup entrepreneurship competition.

The competition is held every year by Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank. Plank and Wes Moore, founder & CEO of BridgeEdU, will also be judges.

The competition, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on the University of Maryland campus, is now in its 11th year. The winners will receive more than $100,000 in total cash prizes. Information is at cupidscup.com.

Steve Case is the co-founder of America Online, the company that democratized online access. Steve is currently the chairman of the Revolution investment firm and also the Case Foundation. President Obama named him Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Additionally, Steve has chaired Startup America and Startup Weekend, initiatives to promote entrepreneurship.

In short, he’s a billionaire. But let me tell you a story that will give you a better insight into the man. I had dinner with Steve and his crew immediately after Apple blew up the contract for Steve’s company to create an online service for consumers called AppleLink Personal Edition.

Image: http://guykawasaki.com

A few weeks ago I attended the latest pitch event by Entrepreneur First (EF) whereby their latest cohort of super bright academics spoke about the ventures they were hoping to build.

EF are unique in the sense that they don’t look to back businesses as much as to back bright academics. They take these talented people, put them into complimentary teams and give them support to get an idea off the ground.

All 10 University of California campuses and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory would split $66 million over three years, according to an Assembly bill introduced last week, to spin out academic innovations into partnerships and startups.

Image: UC President Janet Napolitano at the 10-campus system's headquarters in downtown Oakland. PAOLO VESCIA

Finding success as a producer of content is often a hit-or-miss endeavor. With such a flood of content being produced by so many people on a constant basis, getting your name out there as an effective author can be incredibly challenging. Whether you’re writing for a personal or professional blog, strategically producing content for specific campaigns, or practicing engagement with pre-existing content, it’s important to contribute to the Web in ways that will ultimately drive other users back to your own content.  Publishing on LinkedIn is one way to do it.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com

WARSAW - The chief executive officer of the state's orthopedics initiative says a new accelerator will support the "lifeblood" of the industry. Sheryl Conley says the AcceLinx Medical Device Business Accelerator from Warsaw-based OrthoWorx will provide entrepreneurs with in-house and industry partner expertise, assist with access to capital and offer working space. Conley says concepts in the orthopedics industry can take more than six years to hit the market.

Nearly 11,000 Hoosiers work in the orthopedics industry.

Image: http://www.insideindianabusiness.com

Jessica Livingston, cofounder of the venerated startup incubator Y Combinator, gave an interesting interview this week on some of the problems female founders continue to face in the tech world and how this is changing.

Speaking with Fortune, Livingston said that the biggest issue female founders are encountering is fund-raising, as most venture-capital investors continue to be men (in another recent piece, Fortune reported that women make up less than 6 percent of people making investment decisions at venture firms in the U.S.).

Ted Leonsis is teaming up with Georgetown University to start the Leonsis Family Entrepreneurship Prize, seeded with a $1 million cash gift. Who can compete? Georgetown students and recent alumni with great business ideas.

When Modisar Net decided to develop livestock management app Modisar to provide farmers with a new way to accurately record and monitor farm inventory, employees, animals and finances, it turned to the Microsoft Innovation Center (MIC) in Botswana for help. Not only was the Gaborone, Botswana-based company able to build its precision livestock farming software on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, but it also received technical mentoring and help to grow its network while incubated at the centre. Thanks to the help of MIC Botswana and Microsoft’s technology, the Modisar app beat 449 competitors to win the 2014 Orange African Social Venture prize and came top at the Seedstars Gabrone 2015 competition in December 2015. 

ri-City Herald LINKEDIN GOOGLE+ PINTEREST REDDIT PRINT ORDER REPRINT OF THIS STORY The governor has signed a bill to create economic gardening program in the state following the launch a year ago of a pilot Tri-City program.

Economic gardening is an approach to economic growth that emphasizes nurturing and cultivating local, second-stage companies, or companies that have outgrown the start-up stage but have not grown to their full potential.

Saab has been my car of choice for a long time. They’re fun to drive, great in the snow, and last a long time with proper care. A few years ago, I was sorry to see the company drive off to the big parking lot in the sky.

Since Saab is now parked permanently, I’ve been working hard to keep my current 2004 model alive for as long as possible. Luckily I have a fantastic Saab mechanic, Cliff Story of Story’s Garage. Cliff and his team are experts at keeping your car running without diving deeply into your wallet. His shop is a 3 bay place that sits down a long gravel driveway, surrounded by trees and dead Saabs…old cars that finally decided to retire.

“Please move slowly and don’t break anything,” says my Jewish mother

In a tech ecosystem that idolizes Facebook (“move fast and break things”) and Y Combinator, the Business Plan Competition feels particularly anachronistic and maybe even damaging to innovation. I couldn’t disagree more.

Virtually all the finalists have working prototypes and traction

To be a contender in the WBPC, real work has to be put into your business to demonstrate traction. My company, VeryApt, a personalized apartment recommendation platform and review community, failed to advance past the initial round in 2013, driving us to create the MVP and execution plan that ultimately led to our third-place finish in the 2014 competition.

Image: https://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

What if you could browse the web in virtual reality? Just imagine the potential. Hyperlinks could take you not to Wikipedia pages about history, but right to the landscapes of ancient cultures, immersing you in plagues and art and war. Recipe sites could give you smell-o-vision cooking simulations. Message boards could become face-to-face chats. The web as we know it could become tangible, interactive, and more immersive than ever.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

In the startup world, failure is a given. Fail fast is the founder’s mantra. Make a mistake, learn from it, move on, say the experts. When startups are well funded—and have a growing number of staff members and stakeholders, it’s not quite so simple.

We know that the road to success is paved with bumps. It’s possible to rise from the ashes of a startup’s crash and burn. We’ve reported how one CEO picked herself up and bootstrapped another startup that’s now a smash hit with over $100 million in revenue. Others pulled a hard pivot when their first idea didn’t measure up.

As the freelance economy continues to grow, a number of industries have emerged as top employers, and they may not be the ones you typically associate with freelancing.

The freelance economy is a diverse ecosystem filled with skilled employees of a wide variety of backgrounds. Nearly 54 million Americans are now part of this growing ecosystem, according to a study by the Freelancers Union, and a study by Intuit predicts that 40% of the American workforce will be comprised of freelancers, contractors, and temporary employees by 2020.

Image: Plaintronics via Wikimedia Commons

In a boost to entrepreneurship in the country, the south Indian state of Telangana on Monday announced in its new IT policy that the government will develop 1 million square feet of infrastructure space in tandem with the private sector, which will be dedicated to startups and entrepreneurship-related activities, over five years.

If you're still drinking skim, read this

For years you’ve been told to go for skim over full-fat dairy. Even the latest dietary guidelines for Americans urge people to avoid the full fat, and following this lead, school lunch programs provide only low-fat milk and no whole milk at all, even though they do allow chocolate skim milk with its added sugars. But large population studies that look at possible links between full-fat dairy consumption, weight and disease risk are starting to call that advice into question. And some research suggests people who consume full-fat dairy weigh less and are less likely to develop diabetes, too.

America has long been recognized as a world leader in innovation.  Not only does the unending flow of new inventions make life better for consumers, it also helps create new jobs and opportunities for millions of American families.  The “intellectual property” associated with American innovation is protected by a network of laws, including patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets.  These legal protections are essential to reward innovation and encourage continued investment in American research and development. Unfortunately, trade secrets are the only form of intellectual property that do not receive robust federal protection. This needs to change.

Image: Alcoa HQ in Pittsburgh. Two years ago Alcoa and three other major manufacturing firms were hacked by five Chinese army officials who allegedly stole trade secrets. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar) 

Russia has always been seen as a challenging place to do business, especially among Western multinationals. But despite perceptions of entrenched corruption, economic turbulence, and political risk, many big firms have invested and maintained a presence in the country. And while two years of shrinking GDP growth, sanctions, and a volatile ruble have led some companies like GM to leave the market, there has not been a large-scale exodus of MNCs from Russia.

There are more than 5000 financial technology (fintech) startups in the world now. Many unicorns are emerging among them. There are now about 50 fintech-unicorns (tech firms valued at more than $1 billion) on the loose. Along with many established players becoming larger, new startups are launched monthly, if not weekly. This staggering growth is a reflection of the hype around fintech, where a plethora of start-ups are using technology to compete against or collaborate with established financial players. The result is a dramatic increase in company valuations as investors look to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.