SparkLabKC founder and managing director Kevin Fryer said the program is seeking three years of stable funding as part of a new business model for the business accelerator in Kansas City. SparkLabKC

Business accelerator SparkLabKC is reworking its own business model, skipping this year’s program for startups to concentrate on finding funding for the next three years.

Kevin Fryer, founder and managing director of the program that has helped boost area startups for three years, said it needs $425,000 each year to operate. It has raised more than $1.2 million by seeking individual grants since its launch.

WASHINGTON • Venture capital companies in the United States are raising money at the highest rate in more than 15 years, even as the values of some once-hot start- ups have begun to cool.

In the first quarter this year, US venture funds collected about US$13 billion (S$17.5 billion), according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), using data from Dow Jones VentureSource. It added that this is the largest total since the dot-com boom in 2000.

At the same time, hedge funds which helped push valuations of technology start-ups to dot-com- era heights are getting picky, Bloomberg has reported.

The hope for mainstream of adoption of wearables in healthcare are a lost cause for some, but continues to be a long-term goal for the likes of Fitbit and others. But a post on Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers’ blog this week pushes for technology companies to address a boring, cumbersome, yet practical reality: the need for better battery life.

“Our wearable devices should last weeks and months, not hours and days. Power consumption of key components like processors, radios, memories, and sensors are the primary culprit,” the report read.

Image: http://medcitynews.com 

Believe it or not, the gimmick diet has legs—for everything from weight loss to longevity

Benedict Cumberbatch is doing it. So is Jimmy Kimmel. But unlike most celebrity-sanctioned diets, there’s actually some compelling science to support its purported benefits. It’s sometimes called the 5-2 diet—meaning five days of normal eating followed by two days of severe calorie restriction—though it’s more commonly referred to as intermittent fasting. No matter what you call it, avoiding food for hours or even days at a time appears to be more popular than ever.

Intuitively, many entrepreneurs and businesses believe that the key to faster growth and success is more products, features, and markets. Since we all have limited resources, and can’t add more hours to the day, the result is usually more things done poorly, rather than a few key things done better than anyone else. The message here is focus, reiterated by every advisor and investor.

Good examples of startup focus before success include Google with their search engine, Facebook with friends networking, and Apple with personal computers. Later, after that initial success builds resources, and your penetration of the target market approaches 30 percent, it’s time to expand your horizons and make anticipatory changes to your focus. Don’t wait for a crisis.

Xconomy New York —  The Alexandria Center for Life Science currently houses some of the most ambitious biotech startups in New York, not to mention some outposts for pharma companies like Roche and Pfizer. Not bad for something that, as Alexandria Real Estate Equities CEO Joel Marcus said, “was a contaminated laundry site” just a short time ago.

The change Marcus described as he kicked things off last night at our latest annual New York biotech event, “New York’s Life Science Disruptors,” was symbolic of what’s happened in New York over the past few years.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com 

Confucius, the great Chinese thinker and philosopher, put emphasis on choosing a job we love, so we will never have to work a day in our lives. In the same vein, Oprah popularized “Do what you love and the money will follow.”

But how many of us really follow this advice? We’d say few and far between. Given the choice between a corporate life with prosperous lifestyle, passions are often side-lined.

Image: http://mashable.com 

Low gas prices won’t stop the electric car market from its march toward the mainstream.

by Bradley Berman March 30, 2016 It’s been five years since the first mainstream electric cars went on sale, yet the market remains tiny, with just 115,000 sales in the U.S. in 2015. The top seller was the high-end carmaker Tesla, which will unveil a new $35,000 car this week with the hopes of reaching a more mainstream market (see “Tesla’s Cheaper Model 3 Could Strain Charging Infrastructure”).

With the price of gasoline hovering below $2 a gallon, it might seem that Tesla CEO Elon Musk will struggle to reach the masses. But there are signs the mainstream buyer could soon become more open to plugging in, even if oil prices remain depressed.

Salman Khan is not afraid to make mistakes in his popular teaching videos. In fact, he considers them a feature.

"I’ll giggle every now and then because I make a mistake, which I think students say, "OK, it’s OK to make mistakes and it’s OK to giggle while doing mathematics," he says. "And it seems like a small thing. But when was the last time you giggled, you know, while doing a math problem?"

You don’t have to start out as an expert in order to run a successful business.  Of course, many entrepreneurs have started their businesses without money or financial backing.  And similarly over the years, plenty of entrepreneurs have found success in fields where they had no previous experience. So whether you’re young and considering starting your very first business, or just getting started in a different field, these successful entrepreneurs with no experience should provide a dose of inspiration for your new venture.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com 

Failure is harsh, unforgiving and brutal. Failure doesn’t see skin color, ethnicity or socio-economic background. It’s an equal-opportunity offender and is always lurking just around the corner. As an entrepreneur, the likelihood that your company will be worth US$1-billion one day is less than 1 in 10 000, or 0.0001%. Even for those that just do “okay”, the attrition rate of startups in the US is roughly 50%.

Image: http://ventureburn.com

When you think of an entrepreneur, who do you picture? Do you imagine a stereotypical successful entrepreneur with a firm handshake, a bold personality, ample social charm and a larger-than-life attitude?

Most of us have this picture, at least partially, because many entrepreneurs do exhibit these qualities. It’s no secret that successful entrepreneurs share many qualities, including a degree of charisma and high levels of energy. You’ve probably identified people in your own life who might make good entrepreneurs, and you might have even used or agreed with the idea that someone could be “born to be an entrepreneur.”

It’s easy to lose focus. As entrepreneurs, we are constantly making huge decisions and thinking about the welfare of our business in both the short- and long-term. That is why recharging is crucial.

Related: How Successful People Manage Stress

I’m not simply referring to long stretches of time off. I’m talking about small simple moments in the day-to-day hustle. Allowing our minds to stretch, loosen up and move in new directions is an important part of this recharging process.

No company wants perfect competition. It’s tough. There’s no money in it. Perfect competition drives profits down to close to zero. Instead, what companies strive for is market dominance. They want to stand apart, be the best and, ideally, the most profitable. But how to achieve this? In a world of non-exclusive goods and services, hasn’t head-on competition become the norm? Or is there another way? In other words: is there a formula for market dominance after all?  

Image: http://knowledge.insead.edu

The Linux Foundation has released a new course for developers looking at licensing compliance. The course is called Open Source Compliance Basics for Developers (LFC191), is free and is self-paced. Importantly this is not just a course for developers and is something that IT managers, project managers and even legal teams should consider taking.

The goal of the course is to ensure that developers understand how open source licensing works. Many people believe that open source means free to use however they want. That is not the case and there are numerous issues ranging from licenses around copyright, patents, requirements to file changes and the right to use and distribute code that need to be understood. The problem is that few really understand these issues and often inadvertently break the conditions attached to open source code.

Every year the Grower-Shipper Association polls its members to identify the issues and challenges that they feel are most important to them. Over the years, I’ve written about many of them extensively – labor, water, food safety, crop protection, land use, farmworker housing, transportation and logistics.

Here’s a new one to ponder: How do farmers produce twice as much food over the next 20 to 30 years with half the resources? That’s right, by 2050, there will be over 9 billion people to feed. The middle class will increase from 1.5 billion people to 4.5 billion and they will demand better food choices – fruits and vegetables being chief among them. Global production must increase by 70 percent to meet this demand. How do we do this in an era of less land, less water, less inputs, less labor?

Image: http://www.thecalifornian.com

The simultaneous and often synonymous use of the two terms ‘research’ and ‘innovation’ is a source of confusion and misunderstanding, marring the dialogue between innovators, scientists and policy makers.

Nowhere has this confusion been more evident of late than in the discussions about the creation of a European Innovation Council (EIC), and its raison d’être vis-a-vis the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).

Image: http://www.sciencebusiness.net

As I shared with you in my last blog, Spaces In Between, last week I took a Clarity Break in Arizona. By a wonderful coincidence, the desert was blooming. A rainbow of bright colors sitting atop an unending vista of various kinds of drab cactus was a fitting landscape in which to let my mind roam freely.

By an unfortunate coincidence, however, my trip coincided with the Arizona presidential primary. There I was, contemplating the vastness of the spaces in between while a barrage of last minute candidate marketing was going on around me non-stop.

SAN FRANCISCO — Robert Reed, who is enjoying a surprising career turn as a busy tour guide at the latest hot spot here, stood smiling one recent sunny morning before 10 foreign dignitaries and journalists. They included the mayor of Genoa, Italy, and the general consuls from Italy, Canada and Switzerland.

Each visitor wore a sport coat and tie, and a yellow safety vest to ensure they wouldn’t be run down by garbage trucks.

Image: Workers inspecting a bale of refuse at the Recology recycling plant in San Francisco. Foreign officials and others often visit the facility for ideas on how to handle their own mushrooming piles of garbage. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times

I owned and ran my own company not too long ago. I had managed to escape the shackles of everyday corporate slavery and venture out on my own. After a few years, the dream came crashing down harder than a 50 mega tonne nuclear warhead. The dream had ended, but, as I found out, it wasn’t truly over.

During the process of closing down my business, paying back those that still required money, and trying to make people happy, I learned a few important things.

Here are the five key points I learned from my experience.

Image: http://ventureburn.com