The market has been flooded with positive news about crowdfunding and how it is displacing the traditional venture capital market with great rapidity. This is a trend that is likely to continue, although it does represent only a small fragment of the market. The fact is that crowdfunding still has a long way to go in terms of displacing the venture funding market. A big mistake that one can make is going straight to crowdfunding and believing that is will give you the same coverage that a traditional fundraising campaign will have. This article is designed to provide you with the primary points to consider for your crowdfunding campaign.

In a year of turmoil − marked by campus protests, free-speech controversies, scandals involving academic research, questions about the value of a degree, and more − higher education continues to be on the defensive. Public scrutiny and the social-media environment mean college leaders must be prepared to respond to critics on and off campus, at any time. To help you stay ahead of the curve, we identify 10 national trends, along with case studies, expert commentary, and resources that will enable you to lead effectively in 2016.

Image: http://chronicle.com

Silicon Valley startups and tech companies are famous for their luxurious employee perks. 

Twitter offers its employees acupuncture, for example. Facebook gives $4,000 cash bonuses to new parents. And Adobe forces employees to take time off by literally shutting down for two weeks each year.

Wearable devices are changing the way people think about their lives and lifestyles. Smart watches are changing how we interact with each other, activity trackers are changing how we exercise, and wearable cameras are changing the nature of memory.

So what can we expect from the next generation of wearable electronic devices?

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

Electric vehicles will become a more economical option than internal-combustion cars in most countries by sometime next decade, claims a new report by energy data analytics firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

The reality, though, is that it’s highly uncertain if or when EVs will start gaining significant market share. That’s in part because it may not be so predictable how the costs of energy technologies will fall, and it’s hard to forecast what will happen to oil prices either.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

Inspired by the way palm trees move in high winds, a group of researchers at the University of Virginia and Sandia National Laboratory are developing an extremely long wind turbine blade that could make it possible to construct 50-megawatt turbines—far beyond the power of today’s, which tend to produce just two megawatts. The blades, designed under a program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, would be 200 meters long, 2.5 times the length of the longest blades commercially available today.

Image: Even on the wide-open Great Plains, transporting enormous turbine blades by road is a dicey endeavor.- https://www.technologyreview.com

Whether it’s a keynote speech for thousands or a sales meeting for a dozen, we’ve all seen speakers who keep the audience hanging on every word—and those who have their audiences counting the minutes until they can leave the room. Some folks at the front of the room are charismatic and engaging while others leave us dreading the next time we have to listen to anyone speak.

Nearly two-thirds of professionals write to-do lists, but 41% percent of all to-do list items never actually get done, according to research from the project-tracking software provider iDoneThis. In fact, more than half of people write things on their to-do list on the same day they do them.

While to-do lists are popular, they can derail your success, says Kevin Kruse, author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management. "Do you really think Richard Branson and Bill Gates write long to-do lists and prioritize items as A1, A2, B1, B2, and so on?" he asks. "To-do lists are where important tasks go to die."

If I say a random string of numbers out loud, say 1593657292759381380473, how many of these numbers do you think you will be able to immediately remember

The magical number

Some scientists say that you should be able to remember about seven of them. More precisely, since a paper from the 1950s, called ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two’, some have suggested that the capacity of our working memory is typically somewhere between five and nine things, although some scientists argue that this capacity is actually closer to four.

A secret projectat Google has been dedicated to building the perfect team fornearly five years.

Detailed in an extensive New York Times article by Charles Duhigg, ‘Project Aristotle’ studied hundreds of the tech giant’s teams and aimed to figure out “why some stumbled while others soared”.

Through years of research and studies the team found that one thing was more important than anything else in determining how well a team worked together: Psychological safety.

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

So more open, social digital innovation is coming our way. So why do I say that? There are four aspects where technology will trend towards open to exploit our connected world that might offer up more opportunities to participate and explore. (see more on that here: http://digitalsocial.eu/)

We will be looking to extract ever-diminishing competitive advantage as the world just keeps speeding up, pushing us as technology continues to run ahead of our capacities to assimilate it. Collaborative platforms are clearly the way to go to open-up innovation that allows more radical and complex solutions to be provided. We need to find ways to participate and learn from these as we face greater competition for these diminishing natural resources, open collaboration is certainly one of these.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com 

The week of April 3-9 Paul Singh, a successful entrepreneur and seed-stage investor, will visit Los Alamos, Taos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque to deliver a week-long series of events for aspiring entrepreneurs and community members.

His “2016 Tech Tour” is a great opportunity for anyone starting a business, getting some practice at pitching, or getting that idea off the back burner. It also is an opportunity for entrepreneurs all over the state to get together for networking.

Physically, the Corzo Center for the Creative Economy at University of the Arts is little more than a tiny lounge, seeming far too small to contain the force in perpetual motion that is Neil Kleinman.

Not that it matters. Kleinman's mission as the center's director encompasses the whole city, and he seems to be exploring every pocket of Philadelphia for partners willing to support it.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing business models, increasing output, and automating processes across a number of industries. But no other sector has been more impacted by this technological revolution than manufacturing.  

Manufacturers across all areas —automotive, chemical, durable goods, electronics, etc. — have invested heavily in IoT devices, and they're already reaping the benefits. Manufacturers utilizing IoT solutions in 2014 saw an average 28.5% increase in revenues between 2013 and 2014, according to a TATA Consultancy Survey.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com 

Can Procter & Gamble innovate its way out of a five year sales slump?

P&G’s slashing of costs, jobs and brands have dominated attention in the past few years, steps that executives say will allow them to focus on their core businesses. But a critical part of P&G’s turnaround strategy is to reinvest savings back into the Cincinnati-based consumer products giant.

Freed-up resources will help P&G create and improve new products from better laundry detergent to razors, the executives say.

Before Nathalie Miller decided to walk away from Instacart, the grocery delivery start-up now worth more than $2 billion, she made a spreadsheet to analyze how much money she was leaving on the table.

She had been Instacart’s 20th employee, managing operations during a period of extremely rapid growth, and the sum could have been huge. She quit anyway. Like many strivers in Silicon Valley, she had a bigger plan: to start her own company that could not only make millions, but also fulfill a mission she believed in.

Image: Nathalie Miller in November at a co-working space in San Francisco. She was eight months pregnant and seeking investors. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times   

See correction at end of article.

AUSTIN—Two missives penned by Austin entrepreneurs pondering the state of the city's venture capital have gone viral in business circles.

In a Medium story posted on Feb. 15, Richard Bagdonas, founder of the Operation Turkey nonprofit, wrote about the disparity between San Francisco and Austin investors: "Recently an Austin-based venture capital firm offered my company $400k for 40 percent of its equity. This was one week before their counterpart in the Bay Area offered $2MM for 20 percent of the same company. Nothing had changed in that week and both received the same pitch and deck in the weeks prior."

Image: Joah Spearman, CEO of Localeur LLC, said his company was considering leaving Austin because of the difficulties it faced raising capital. Submitted 

Just as Rodeo Drive symbolizes movie-star glamour and Wall Street represents corporate money, Sand Hill Road has long been synonymous with the bundles of cash backing the tech industry.

But the Menlo Park street that houses some of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital firms and has funneled money into the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram, is no longer the VC mecca it once was.

Image: Natalie Bartlett works alone at a conference table at the Redpoint Ventures office in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco Monday morning. A life-size cutout of company partner, Tomasz Tunguz, keeps her company. Karl Mondon — Bay Area News Group 

HERE’S an apparent paradox: Most Americans have taken high school mathematics, including geometry and algebra, yet a national survey found that 82 percent of adults could not compute the cost of a carpet when told its dimensions and square-yard price. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently tested adults in 24 countries on basic “numeracy” skills. Typical questions involved odometer readings and produce sell-by tags. The United States ended an embarrassing 22nd, behind Estonia and Cyprus. We should be doing better. Is more mathematics the answer?

Image: http://www.nytimes.com  - Laurie Rollitt

China will develop traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) into a pillar industry, according to a blueprint released by the State Council, China's Cabinet, on Friday.

The plan proposes universal access to TCM care by 2020. By 2030, TCM should make a notably greater contribution to social and economic development.