There was an interesting new report out last week looking at who America’s innovators are — and who they aren’t. The study, conducted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, discovered more than one-third of the innovators they polled were born outside of the U.S. with a median age of 47 when they created their innovations, hardly the young Valley hot-shots lionized on magazine covers.

The health foundation of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates is in talks with Latin American governments and scientists over plans to spread hundreds of millions of mosquitoes that are unable to transmit dengue fever and Zika virus.

The discussions include a proposal by scientists in Medellín, Colombia, to spend $16 million to try to protect the city’s three million people with the new breed of mosquitoes.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been stoking excitement about virtual reality—a technology he has described as “the next major computing and communication platform”—for a few years now. But in a new interview posted at Business Insider, he says the technology remains a long way from reaching the mass market.

“I honestly don’t know how long it will take,” he said. “It could be five years, it could be 10 years, it could be 15 or 20. My guess is that it will be at least 10.” 

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life and I’ve been divorced for seven years now. Going through divorce was excruciatingly painful. Not just because of the divorce itself and splitting up a family, but because of the added loneliness common for most entrepreneurs.

In the past few years I’ve become acutely aware of the plight of the divorced entrepreneur. This seldom-discussed topic almost seems taboo in business circles. So many become isolated in this precarious, solitary, often disastrous, post divorce quandary, which I believe deserves more attention within the entrepreneurial community.

I admit it. I have two motives for writing this blog: one altruistic and one completely selfish. First, the altruism: this blog is another attempt to persuade owners that the light you see at the end of your business-owning career tunnel is not the exit of your dreams. Until you take advantage of the latest thinking and best practices in Exit Planning, that light is a 15,000-ton locomotive that will flatten your business, your financial security and your legacy.

Selfishly, I’ve joined the Forbes roster of bloggers because my blood pressure soars every time I see another owner fail to take full advantage of their “last act” in their business careers simply because they lack information and guidance.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about “landing pads”.

Two weeks ago newly appointed trade minister Steven Ciobo officially launched the Australian government’s first landing pad at RocketSpace in San Francisco and last week Shanghai joined Tel Aviv on the list of places the government expects to open additional hubs in 2016.

Image: http://www.startupsmart.com.au 

When I left home for the airport the temperature read one degree. So after landing in San Diego and heading towards the 80 degree sunshine, I was feeling pretty good. While walking through the terminal a man going the other way looked at me, stopped and said: “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Bernie Sanders?” Actually that’s pretty ironic given the topic I want to discuss today. If you were looking for someone offering you free stuff, you’re in the wrong place.

Image: David and Goliath, by James Tissot. Copyrighted 1904.  

The best colleges prepare students for a career by helping them obtain hands-on experience through internships, externships, and cooperative education (co-op) programs.

The Princeton Review recently published "Colleges That Pay You Back: 2016 Edition," which includes a list of the best schools for internships. The ranking was determined by students’ ratings of accessibility of internship placement at their school.

Image: Facebook/The George Washington University 

For seven years, the U.S. government has been searching for an energy miracle via the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA–E. And yet, over the same time span, the biggest advance has been the quick deployment of various renewable energy technologies everyone knows about, accompanied by a rapid drop in cost. But Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and former founder of Microsoft, says that’s not enough to really revolutionize energy supply and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

Online labor platforms make it easier to find—and harder to retain—talented people. They give companies a real opportunity to transform the way they recruit, develop, and engage their employees.

It’s safe to say that when one out of every two working-age adults in the United States has registered for a certain website—LinkedIn, for example, boasts more than 122 million US members—it has achieved critical mass.

Despite the recent spate of diversity and inclusion initiatives, the gap between genders in tech is just as wide as ever, according to a new report from SmartAsset.

The financial software and data firm just completed its second annual analysis of Census Bureau data and found that overall, women still make up just over a quarter (26.5%) of tech jobs in the U.S. and earn, on average, 85% of what their male counterparts in similar positions earn.

All too often, we see innovation as a single event. A genius like Steve Jobs envisions a thousand songs in our pocket and the iPod is born! Or Alexander Fleming notices a mold growing in a petri dish and suddenly penicillin transforms medical science.

Yet the truth is that the road to any significant innovation is a long and twisted path. First, scientific research uncovers important insights. Then, those discoveries must be engineered into useful solutions and finally, new products and processes must be implemented at scale in order to transform a particular field or industry.

Entrepreneur Brian Pallas has managed to achieve the stuff of founders’ dreams. His startup, Opportunity Network is valued at $150m, and the 28-year old hasn’t taken a penny of venture capital. Just last year, when I first reported about Pallas’ success, ON was valued at $100m.

The site is aimed at CEO’s and family businesses around the globe looking for partnerships, or mergers and acquisitions. ON makes anonymous introductions for members who meet strict financial requirements and are looking for deals of $1m or more.

The next job you apply for could involve a challenge even before you submit your resume. Two companies are gamifying the recruiting process to change the way they search for talented candidates.

It’s not surprising, given the major shift in the way people look for jobs over the last decade. Research from the Boston Consulting Group and Recruit Works Institute reveals that 55% of searches globally happened through Internet job sites and 35% via a smartphone. Applying through social media and submitting a video interview are rapidly becoming more accepted

Last month, President Obama announced a plan to bring computer science into all American classrooms. The initiative, called Computer Science For All, would devote part of the 2017 fiscal budget—about $4 billion in funding for states and $100 million for school districts—to bringing public schools up to standard with their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education programs. Computer science is a "new basic" skill, the president said, and our children can no longer afford to miss out.

Image: Flickr user US Department of Ed

We’ve all heard of introverts and extroverts, but what if you feel like you’re a little of both? You might be a third personality type—an ambivert—and it can give you an edge in business.

"Introversion versus extroversion is all about where you get energy, not how social you are, which is often confused," says Todd Hall, professor of psychology at Biola University. "These are broad categories, and the reality is there is a continuum of introversion to extroversion. So the people who fall in the middle are not easily categorized as an introvert or an extrovert, and we have this ‘special breed’ combination of ambiverts."

Image: Flickr user angeloramosing

Baltimore cybersecurity startup Terbium Labs has raised $6.4 million to scale up its dark web data analysis and recovery technology. The Series A round was led by Boston-based .406 Ventures and brings the company’s total funding to $9.7 million. The money will go toward scaling up its signature software as a service, Matchlight. The service helps companies determine when their data has been stolen and recover it within minutes of it reaching the dark web.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — With so many local startups emerging from the state’s business accelerators and entrepreneurial support programs, investors are stepping up to help more firms find funding.

The New Mexico Angels in particular has spread its wings. The group of about 70 people, who pool their resources to invest in early-stage companies, pumped $1.6 million into 10 deals in 2015. And, unlike past years when the Angels funded a mixture of local and out-of-state firms, all of last year’s investment went to New Mexico businesses.

When Next City began its Health Horizons: Innovations and Informal Economies column last March, I set out to cover a year of global health innovations affecting informal workers in cities in low- and middle-income countries. “I’ll trace a path around the planet,” I wrote about my plans for the year, “talking to healthcare corporations, labor activists, and the average woman selling oranges in places like Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa; Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya; the slums of Karachi, Kolkata and Kathmandu … .”

Image: Pasang Sherpa lives in a displaced persons’ camp under a plastic tent in Chabahil, Nepal. (Photo by M. Sophia Newman)

What are the most promising business figures in the Baltic States? I was curious to find out more about these game changers and discover what kind of impact they are making. After talking to some of my friends and entrepreneurs I identified top 10 promising founders to watch in the Baltics, creating solutions to problems that affect millions of people not only locally but in most cases globally.