If you are reading this article, chances are you have taken an Uber, are familiar with Upwork and maybe even sold something on Etsy. Business models that fall under the “gig economy” umbrella have been proven for business-to-consumer and peer-to-peer markets because they make it possible to crowdsource products and services from huge communities of people.

Large online networks can also be some of the greatest sources of innovation. Led by the enterprise and government research and development verticals, this trend is growing rapidly because of a shift in focus from single-point services to the co-creation (collaborative innovation) model.

Image: http://techcrunch.com

With just two sentences, Jon Stein can make you question everything you thought you knew about the startup world in 2016.

"It was a good market to be raising," Stein told Mashable on Tuesday morning, shortly after his financial services company Betterment announced raising a blockbuster $100 million round of venture capital funding. "I've never before seen so much interest."

Hear that noise? It's the sound of hundreds of startup founders weeping as they ride their hoverboards into the sunset.

The US Department of Treasury, via the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), has published a proposed rule change that impacts the definition of a funding portal under Title III of the JOBS Act. This new rule-making would amend some definitions to include funding portals. Specifically, crowdfunding portals will be required to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act that is intended to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes or terrorist financing. One wonders if all crowdfunding platforms will not inevitably become Broker Dealers.

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com

Many experts are certain that successful entrepreneurs are the ones with the most inspiration (passion and dream), while others will assert that it’s about more perspiration (working harder). In my experience, both are always required in heavy doses. There are no “can’t fail” shortcuts or “get rich quick” scenarios.

That’s why all those so-called million dollar ideas I hear about as an investor don’t get me excited, and entrepreneurs find that working twenty hours a day often generates nothing more than sweat, instead of the desired sweat equity. Moving a dream into reality requires balancing on a tight-rope of passion supported by unending efforts to move heaven and earth to make it happen.

Sacramento, Calif., recently hopped on the innovation bandwagon, but it’s doing things a little differently.

As the city’s first interim chief innovation officer, former Code For America co-executive director Abhi Nemani has spent the past six weeks studying the Sacramento technology scene and planning a new communications and funding framework among government, community and local business. Meanwhile, the city hunts for a permanent full-time replacement for when Nemani moves on, because he has bigger plans. Sacramento gets to be Nemani’s guinea pig as he outlines what cities across the nation will soon have access to through a new venture called EthosLabs.

I thought my ears were deceiving me when a commentator (I believe it was David Brooks) gushed with admiration on NPR a few years ago that it was great that Jeff Bezos of Amazon was injecting Silicon Valley thinking into the Washington Post.  What?!?!?! Unless my Google got jammed, Amazon is in Seattle. But Silicon Valley got the tagline. "Jeff Bezos is bringing the Seattle Rainforest to the Washington Post" just doesn't sound cool.

A Mormon businessman is planning to build a futuristic multi-million dollar city in the middle of rural Vermont based on 180-year-old plans drawn up by his religion's founder.

David Hall, 69, plans to construct a  20,000-home city around a monument to Joseph Smith, founder of the Church Of Jesus Christ Of The Latter Day Saints, near the town of Lebanon, central Vermont.

The layout of his proposed 5,000-acre metropolis would be based on plans Smith drew up in 1833 for the city of Zion, which he originally planned to construct in Missouri.

Everything that has a beginning also has an ending, sadly we concluded our review of the Lean Startup book by Eric Ries last week, but I must say it was an interesting read and review altogether.

However there’s more to adopting the lean thought methodology in growing your startup as an entrepreneur than what the short review gave away. As an entrepreneur you do not want your business to be known only for its smart ideas, you also want to start taking the right decisions that’d in real time validate those ideas. So I’d be leaving you with 5 pointers from the book to help with this.

Don’t call it a comeback, Detroit’s been here for years!

That was the theme (song) when we brought together Detroit’s entrepreneurial O.G.s for the event series that we at Technical.ly are producing with Comcast NBCUniversal. It’s called the Tomorrow Tour, and LL Cool J would be proud.

The main objective of the tour is to make it easier to join any local entrepreneurship community. And based on what we heard from the passionate attendees in Detroit, they’re more than happy to welcome you (and the spotlight) with open arms.

Image: This message was heard loud and clear. (Illustration by Mike Jackson)

Open innovation, or collaborative innovation, is certainly a hot topic, and something that I’ve touched on numerous times over the past few years.

Reports have revealed that approximately 80% of organizations are engaged in some form of open innovation, with Johnson & Johnson one of the latest to try it with their JLINX platform.

JLINX is an incubator based in Belgium that offers startups a way to develop from within the companies life science ecosystem.

Mumbai: Big companies across sectors are stepping up open-innovation collaborations with small high-tech ones across the world. The number of fintech partnerships forged by big banks, for instance, multiplied threefold globally during 2009-2015. And large automotive companies across the Atlantic have more than doubled their investments in start-ups and boutique technology firms in the last five years.

Aspiring entrepreneurs often approach me as an angel investor, touting their innovative idea for yet another online dating site. I agree the need is out there, with over 91 million interested singles between the age of 19 and 45 around the world. Yet almost no one in this business makes any money, since it comes with a larger list of challenges than most other opportunities I see.

The Latest on reaction to a new North Carolina law that limits LGBT protections in the state and prevents transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity (all times local):

6 p.m.

The venture capital arm of Google's parent corporation won't invest in North Carolina startup businesses with a law in place halting local governments from approving anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people.

SEO is a wild world. It’s confusing. It’s fast. It’s complicated.

And even though SEO has made huge advances, many entrepreneurs are still left with questions about what it is, how it works, what’s changed, and, most importantly, how to make their businesses viable and profitable in 2016.

I’ve structured this article in the form of six questions that entrepreneurs frequently ask about SEO.

This is your SEO survival guide.

Many of the jobs humans would like robots to perform, such as packing items in warehouses, assisting bedridden patients, or aiding soldiers on the front lines, aren’t yet possible because robots still don’t recognize and easily handle common objects. People generally have no trouble folding socks or picking up water glasses, because we’ve gone through “a big data collection process” called childhood, says Stefanie Tellex, a computer science professor at Brown University. For robots to do the same types of routine tasks, they also need access to reams of data on how to grasp and manipulate objects. Where does that data come from? Typically it has come from painstaking programming. But ideally, robots could get some information from each other.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

The United States is expected to be the most competitive manufacturing nation, moving China into the number two position by 2020, according to the 2016 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index report from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (Deloitte Global) and the Council on Competitiveness (Council). The rankings also reveal a shift among the world’s traditional manufacturing powerhouses due to the Asia Pacific region’s rising influence and declining strength in European and BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

As a leader, communicating can sometimes feel like Groundhog Day. No matter how hard you try to get your message across, it is all too easy to find the next day that you face the same blank stares, predictable objections, and questions that indicate that you failed to make it stick — that people just aren’t getting it. One reason leaders find themselves in this cycle is that their approach to communication is based on an outdated mental model. It’s a model best described as a “post office.” They view themselves as the sender of a message and others as the receivers. If problems arise, leaders look for disruption somewhere along the route.

At a preview of the new American Museum of Natural History exhibition “Dinosaurs Among Us,” scientists gave a tip of the hat to Thomas Henry Huxley, the man who proposed in the 1860s that dinosaurs never really vanished from Earth. Most did go extinct, but their evolutionary legacy lives all around us. They are birds, all 18,000 species of them.

Image: Archaeopteryx was described in the 1860s by Thomas Henry Huxley from its fossil specimen as having feathers but many reptilian features. Credit Zhao Chuang/Peking Natural Science Organization, via American Museum of Natural History

Anyone who imagines that running a federal agency would be fun should consider the plight of HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell and NIH Director Francis Collins. How would you like to have prominent Members of Congress, “public interest” groups, and the media claiming that you have the power to lower drug costs to help desperately needy people, but you refuse to use it?

Secretary Burwell and Director Collins are facing formidable pressure to reinterpret the Bayh-Dole Act for the compulsory licensing of costly drugs arising from federally supported research. They may get some comfort knowing such actions aren’t sanctioned by the law, or that caving in would devastate the U.S. drug development system. The stakes in their decision whether or not to “march-in” to control the price of Xtandi, a prostate cancer drug, are enormous.

Over the last decade innovation along with unprecedented creativity has allowed all industries opportunities like never before. As I look back in time there are so many examples; of what was then, to what is now. The mind can easily get overloaded when you think back at all the missed opportunities. We all say, ‘remember when…’ more and more often it seems.