Startup is the new sexy! You say and they clap! It’s a populist word now (add bigdata, analytics and you have a winner!).

Right from central to state governments, there are several announcements pertaining to promoting entrepreneurship in the country.

Before Harvard and MIT released data last month on their first 16 edX MOOCs, we already knew a few things: Millions of people register for massive open online courses, though far fewer receive certificates of completion. Most MOOC participants already have a college degree, even those outside the United States. But there was a lot we didn’t know, especially about who took different types of MOOCs and how much of the course content they viewed. This information may be valuable to those looking to design and lead successful MOOCs. Here’s what we’ve learned from this first data release covering more than half a million students.

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Summer interns can be an invaluable resource for a small business. But although these bright young college kids are ready to tackle challenges, they’re likely inexperienced in the business world and won’t automatically integrate with your team. So to find out how other entrepreneurs were successfully training their interns for the summer, we asked 12 founders from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

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Maryland has retained top rankings in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s annual Enterprising States study released Wednesday.

For the third consecutive year, the State ranked No. 1 in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For the second year in a row, Maryland ranked third in the nation for its Talent Pipeline.

“Maryland is proud to once again be named the No. 1 state in the country for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We thank the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for its continued focus on startups, small business and job creation,” Secretary Dominick Murray of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED) said.

Image: U.S Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Enterprising States 2014 

Email is the most frequently used communication tool in business today. It’s easy, fast and you can communicate with others while on the go. Less intrusive than a phone call or a text message, it allows for convenient communication and quick turnaround.

Most of us receive hundreds of emails a day and so do our clients and customers. That’s the main reason why messages can get lost or ignored in the email shuffle.

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Starbucks is planning to add another bit of ambiance to its stores: wireless charging for smartphones.

The company has announced it's in the early stages of a national deployment of Powermat chargers — little circular pads embedded in counters and tabletops that juice up compatible devices.

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The 2014 ISPIM Americas Innovation Forum  will be held in Montreal, Canada on 5-8 October 2014. Organised by ISPIM, in collaboration with Université de Montréal, Polytechnique Montréal, HEC Montréal and Univalor, this event will bring together around 200 innovation experts from 25 countries. The event programme will tackle the region’s key innovation issues by attracting top-level speakers from Canada and North America from academia, industry and government. The three-day event will include:

We are our choices.   — Jean-Paul Sartre

One very important characteristic of leaders in innovative cultures and organizations is a deep self-awareness of the allure of false choices.  With that in mind, here’s a working hypothesis:  Innovation leadership  is not about making choices.  Innovation leadership is the art of  knowing when choices are arbitrarily false, and then choosing not to choose.

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Summer's almost here, and so are microbes and other environmental woes that can bring your sun and surf fun into a halt.

Among the infections that tend to come when the temperatures rise, some are mild while others can be deadly.  From poisonous plants to "brain-eating" amoebas, here are ten health hazards you should be aware of this summer:

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Susan Cain is not depressed. She’s deep in thought, with her elbow on her desk, head resting on her hands. Yet colleagues would regularly come up to her and ask if she was okay. She was fine, she’d explain, just very focused. “For people to work best, they need choice,” says Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

“Do you want us to charge your phone?” George Holmes asks. Normally, that would be an odd question. But Holmes is the vice president of sales and marketing for Energous, a company that is developing technology called WattUp that will allow you to charge smartphones, tablets, and other small gadgets from across a room without wires.

Energous hopes other companies will license this technology and build it into all kinds of products and places, so you can easily power your iPad while sitting on the couch browsing Instagram, or top off your phone while buying a coffee or playing Candy Crush in an airport. It will face competition, however, from a startup called Witricity that uses a different method, and already has the backing of some major electronics companies.

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Analysts estimate that over the next six years 90 percent of new spending on Internet and communications technologies will be on cloud-based technology. 

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As I make my way through my morning routine, innovation bombards me. The word “innovation” is in every radio commercial, touted by advertisers of universities and car repair shops alike. Everyone wants to be “innovative”. But what is “Innovation”?

To understand why innovation is so appealing, we need to get past the buzz word. The allure of innovation is that it is the opposite of “stale” or “known”. Innovation represents change that brings a significant and positive impact.

Image: Denys Resnick, executive vice-president, of NineSigma 

The conventional view of the U.S. economy, and of state economies, is as static entities which change principally in size (growing in normal times and contracting during recessions). But in fact, state economies are constantly evolving complex ecosystems. Indeed, U.S. state economies of 2014 are not just larger but different than the state economies of 2013. On any given day this year each state will on average be home to businesses that receive 12 patents, release nine new products and introduce nine new production processes, while about 32 firms will go out of business and another 32 will be launched. Firms in some industries will get bigger (the average number of workers in non-store retailers—e.g., the Amazon.coms of the world—grew 0.03 percent every day in 2013) while some will get smaller (the average size of data processing, hosting, and related services shrank 0.07 percent every day in 2013, despite the emergence of cloud computing). Understanding that we are dealing with evolving rather than static state economies has significant implications for state economic policy.

The major metropolitan areas of the United States experienced virtually all of their overall growth in suburban and exurban areas between 2000 and 2010. This is the conclusion of an analysis of the functional Pre-Auto Urban Cores and functional suburban and exurban areas using the Demographia City Sector Model.

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A lot of collaborative economy companies describe themselves as “the eBay of X.” Airbnb is the eBay of hotels. Lyft is the eBay of taxis. Prosper is the eBay of loans. The examples go on and on. It makes sense, because eBay was the first large company to wrestle with the unique challenges brought on by a collaborative marketplace. In fact, eBay alums are quite sought after in the sharing economy, because they have experience scaling a sharing model higher than any company has ever scaled it before.

Image: Oran Viriyincy/Flickr 

Possible is a nonprofit that operates in one of the most challenging environments on the planet. In rural Nepal, it is a health care provider for a community of over 260,000 people who live largely without access to electricity, clean water, and basic infrastructure — including roads. The population is still recovering from a civil war that ended almost 10 years ago, the average income is US$150, and the average patient walks 2.5 hours one way to receive care. With all these odds stacked against them, the Possible team has been told their work is impossible hundreds of times, but they’ve still managed to succeed where others haven’t.

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Most people (including me, I have to admit) think of computer science as a profession where you are locked in a cubicle eight hours a day for most of the time. Yes, I believe it's gotta be exciting to build cool stuff for people to use, but as a whole, is a career in computer science really worth it? And I mean it in all ways: is it well paid? is it a satisfying job? can you expect to get hired at, let's say, 40 or 50 years old?

THERE'S TONS OF ADVICE ON HOW TO MANAGE THAT COVETED MILLENNIAL DEMOGRAPHIC. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE TWENTYSOMETHINGS WHO ARE ALREADY MANAGERS?

For a generation that's making a name for itself via hashtags, clicks, and iPhone sales, we're shaping the information landscape--and entering change-making leadership positions with new skills and experiences that challenge our "selfie" centered stereotypes.

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What did we learn out west the past seven days? Orexigen will have to wait at least three more months to learn if it can market its obesity drug. Four companies in our coverage cities inched closer to the public markets. Dendreon CEO John Johnson decided to step down, and Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs decided to step up with more life sciences funding. Onward to the roundup.

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