Starting in the fall, undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will each receive $100 in Bitcoin—seed money meant to jump-start a campus digital-currency economy that can be engaged with and studied by students and faculty members alike.

The project is being spearheaded by Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore studying computer science and electrical engineering, and Dan Elitzer, an M.B.A. student and the founder of the MIT Bitcoin Club. Together they have raised $500,000 from MIT alumni and members of the Bitcoin community.

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It has long been the case that venture funds (classified as partnerships for tax purposes) have insisted that limited liability companies (LLCs) taxed as partnerships convert to C corporations prior to the consummation of a venture financing. Most commonly, there are three rationales given for this requirement: (1) certain venture fund limited partners are tax exempt institutions or foreign investors and prohibit the venture fund from allocating Unrelated Business Taxable Income or Effectively Connected Income to such types of limited partners that likely would result from an investment directly into an LLC, (2) venture funds are focused on the potential of a future initial public offering (IPO) and the most common vehicle to an IPO is a C corporation and (3) executive talent expects to be issued stock options and are not familiar with the more complex equity issued by an LLC.

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Economically speaking, the news concerning Michigan typically focuses on the purported death of Detroit. To counter that negative trend, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) is hoping to spearhead some new growth among high-tech startups. The Michigan Pre-Seed Fund 2.0 is actually a continuation of a previous effort. It will provide $6.8 million. That’s $5.8 million to high-tech startups in the state and another $1 million to help universities transfer technology to the marketplace.

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Executives, like all human beings, behave the way they do because of a combination of genetic and experiential factors: To start with, each of us has been designed to function more effectively and efficiently in some ways. Then our experiences – especially our pre-adult experiences – have contributed to reinforce some of these predispositions and override others. The net result is a series of neural connections that allow us to function quickly and, for the most part, effectively enough.

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Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro, you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."

1. Scientists are feeling a funding crunch. A Chronicle of Higher Education survey of 11,000 researchers with National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation grants found that 75 percent reduced their recruiting of grad students and research fellows because of economic pressures. Almost half said they had abandoned an area of research they felt was central to their mission.

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The brains of cetaceans—dolphins and whales—differ from those of other mammals in a number of ways, but one of the most striking differences is the size of the hippocampus.  As a general rule, the larger the size of a mammal’s brain, the smaller the fraction of it that the hippocampus occupies, so dolphins and whales would be expected to have a small hippocampus in any case. But the cetacean hippocampus isn’t just small; it is so tiny that it barely exists.

When scientists test drugs on cancer cells, they do so in the two-dimensional confines of the Petri dish. If the drug being tested works well, the next stage is to shift to the 3-D environment and see how the drug tackles 3-D tumors in animals. If that goes well, then, finally, researchers start clinical trials on humans.

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Five or so years after the financial crisis, the pressure on boards and directors to raise their game remains acute. A recent survey of more than 770 directors from public and private companies across industries around the world and from nonprofit organizations suggests that some are responding more energetically than others.1 The survey revealed dramatic differences in how directors allocated their time among boardroom activities and, most tellingly, in the respondents’ view of the effectiveness of their boards. More than one in four of the directors assessed their impact as moderate or lower, while others reported having a high impact across board functions. So what marks the agenda of a high-performing board?

Neuroscientists have made remarkable progress in recent years toward understanding how the brain works. And in coming years, Europe’s Human Brain Project will attempt to create a computational simulation of the human brain, while the U.S. BRAIN Initiative will try to create a wide-ranging picture of brain activity. These ambitious projects will greatly benefit from a new resource: detailed and comprehensive maps of the brain’s structure and its different regions.

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Market Size

The angel investor market in 2013 continued the upward trend started in 2010 in investment dollars and in the number of investments. Total investments in 2013 were $24.8 billion, an increase of 8.3% over 2012, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. A total of 70,730 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in 2013, an increase of 5.5% over 2012 investments. The number of active investors in 2013 was 298,800 individuals, an increase of 11.4% from 2012. The increase in both total dollars and the number of investments resulted in a deal size for 2013 that was slightly higher than in 2012 (an increase in deal size of 2.6% from 2012). These data indicate that angels were active investors in 2013 but those that did invest decreased their individual investments from $85,435 in 2012 to $83,050 in 2013, a decrease of 2.8%. The $24.8 billion in total investments is close to the market high of $26.0 billion that occurred in 2007.

South Africa’s startup landscape is an industry wrapped in mysteries and enigmas. It’s a world of near facts and almost could be truths, especially when it comes to funding. The average entrepreneur is not a 21-year-old University dropout. Also not all of them are men, yes women start companies too.

In a survey conducted by Knife Capital, around 337 entrepreneurs shed some light on this cloak and dagger industry and provided some interesting insights about venture seeking entrepreneurs and what they think their business is worth, how the founders met as well their risk assessment.

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WELLESLEY, Mass., Feb. 6, 2014 -- /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Seventy-seven Babson College startups are competing to win more than $30,000 in Startup Rounds, a new kind of business competition launched by The Babson Entrepreneurship Club (BEC).

Startup Rounds is open to any company founded by Babson undergraduates, graduate students or alumni with less than $1 million in earned revenues.   Visit http://www.startuprounds.com/

As the reach of the Internet has grown, so has the medium’s favored business model: targeted advertising. Signals recording our activity are harvested as we browse the Web and, increasingly, as we use our smartphones. That information is used to build profiles that help advertisers target ads, and opting out is rarely easy.

Some small companies are now redesigning smartphones and Web browsers to give people more control over that kind of data collection. The founders of these startups claim that many people want an alternative to the data-slurping status quo, and that services such as search engines can be run profitably without harvesting much data.

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European scientists from both academia and industry have begun the new research project COMPOSE3, which is focused on an alternative approach to extend Moore’s Law. The goal is to reduce costs and improve the energy efficiency of electronic devices ranging from mobile phones to supercomputers. The project is based on the use of new materials to replace incumbent silicon, and on taking an innovative design approach where transistors are stacked vertically (3D stacking).

Coordinated by IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, COMPOSE3 is a scientific collaboration between industry, research organizations and small- and medium-size enterprises from six European countries: STMicroelectronics, CEA-Leti and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; University of Glasgow in the UK; Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork in Ireland; DTF Technology GmbH in Germany; and Fundación IMDEA Materiales in Spain.

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Offering space in exchange for payment has become the tried and tested technique of monetising online properties. And rightly so; the number of eyeballs glued to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the wider internet on a daily basis make the world’s largest platforms the world’s most valuable. This model has created a wide range of paid media products to choose from – leading to media plans that are awash with Facebook Like ads, YouTube InView ads and promoted Tweets.

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There is no shortage of stories and anecdotes to illustrate how the best strategies can nearly always be reduced down to a brief but powerful statement and even more ink has been spilled describing the dangers of strategy statements that read like detailed action plans.

But how do you go about actually crafting — and using — a 15-word strategy statement?

My approach is based on narrative techniques. I begin by working with clients to write a story based on this template:

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AURP BioParks Meeting on June 23 in San Diego, to be held in conjunction with 2014 BIO International Convention, will examine role of BioParks in today's rapidly evolving drug development environment -- Featured speakers from Merck, UVA, QB3, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, Forest City Science & Technology Group will address how bioparks facilitate relationships among universities, biotechs and big pharmas in U.S. and abroad -

Scaling operations, hiring the right talent and access to equity capital are the top three challenges for technology start-ups, according to a global survey conducted by Silicon Valley Bank. The bank undertook its fifth annual Innovation Economy Outlook study, based on an annual survey of more than 1,200 executives from software, hardware, cleantech and healthcare companies in start-up and growth stages of business in the US, UK and other "global innovation hubs".

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Why do so many venture capitalists ignore the single best predictor of the future: demographics?

One of my particular interests is looking for women & minority entrepreneurs in which to invest. It’s not because of personal ties; I’m yet another white male in the overwhelmingly white male VC industry. According to the National Venture Capital Association/Dow Jones VentureSource, the VC industry is dominated by men (89% of VC Partners), specifically white men (76% of the total). Of all VC Partners studied, just 10% identified as Asian, 1% as African-American, and less than 1% as Latino.