Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
Ever since a massive crack was discovered in Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier in 2011, NASA researchers and other scientists have kept a close watch on this area. The crack cleaved off an iceberg, now known as "Ice Island B31," which broke off from the glacier in November 2013, and has since been drifting across Pine Island Bay, a basin of the Amundsen Sea, toward the Southern Ocean.
Image: A close-up of the rift that opened up across the Pine Island Glacier in 2011. - NASA
Nothing tops happy hour drinks at the end of a long, hard work week — unless the bar patrons around you don't know how to act like normal humans. This isn't Cabo — please stop screaming body shots.
If you think those barflies get a little wobbly in the legs after a few pints, just be glad there aren't any penguins around because they are the animal kingdom's clumsiest creatures. Penguins can hardly hold themselves up, always sliding and falling all over the place. It's a sight as sad as the bar at a T.G.I. Friday's on a Tuesday night.
Image: http://mashable.com
Iowa is no stranger to innovation.
Our history is filled with those who have innovated in areas of agriculture, manufacturing, biosciences, and medicine and even our nascent tech startup community.
StartupCity Des Moines is home to several young companies, IC Co-Lab and Vault Co-working are growing in the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids corridor, and numerous locations around the state from Sioux City to Dubuque, Davenport to Spencer, have spawned their own homes for startups.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
I got asked today for a picture of the four founders of Techstars together (me, David Cohen, David Brown, and Jared Polis.) I did a search and came up with a few, but also stumbled upon this beauty. This is the original promotion video for the first Techstars program, filmed at the end of 2006 and apparently uploaded to Youtube on January 14, 2007.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Bethany Mota is no Sheryl Sandberg; she is 18 and yet to get a degree in business studies. But Mota, who is better known to millions of teenage girls on YouTube as “Motavator”, has already created a million dollar fashion and media empire just by sitting in her bedroom of her California home and posing videos on YouTube that all those teenage girls out there cannot wait to get hold of.
Image: http://www.dailymirror.lk
F
acebook. Amazon. Whole Foods. All of these startups changed the rules of the game for their industries. They represent what business guru Clayton Christensen calls "disruptive innovation" -- new ventures that turn traditional business models upside-down. But do you have to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or John Mackey to call yourself an entrepreneur? Do you have to change the world to be considered successful?
Image: http://www.huffingtonpost.com
Five new programs launched by the province to foster entrepreneurship and employment opportunities for Ontario’s youth shouldn’t be viewed as tools to help students find a job, said Western President Amit Chakma. “These are tools to help our students realize their creative potential and create wealth for our province and beyond,” Chakma said earlier this week as the province announced five new programs to support youth entrepreneurship under its Youth Jobs Strategy.
Image: http://communications.uwo.ca - Adela Talbot, Western News Reza Moridi, Ontario’s Minister of Research and Innovation, announced five new programs to help young people start companies and create jobs in the province earlier this week at Western.
Nissan unveiled a new prototype on Thursday that could potentially do away with car washes.
The carmaker is experimenting with a special super-hydrophobic paint called Ultra-Ever Dry that it's billing as "self-cleaning" for cars. It has been specially engineered to be extremely water- and oil-resistant by UltraTech International.
Image: Nissan's Note, the company's first car to feature the company's new prototype for self-cleaning paint. - Nissan
A financial investor, two venture capitalists and a corporate venture investor had different perspectives but all agreed on one thing at the MidAmerica Healthcare Venture Forum on Tuesday – the importance of capital efficiency in companies they look at.
Image: http://medcitynews.com
Y Combinator is doing something that technology accelerators, even those planted firmly in the healthcare space, have traditionally avoided. It will invest in biotech startups.
Technology accelertors never expressed interest in backing biotechnology companies because drug development takes many years, is capital intensive and a high-risk proposition. But the reward is saved or improved lives, so there’s that.
Today we learned that olive oil counterfeiting is a real thing, and not the plot of some future Wes Anderson movie. We also learned that olive oil counterfeiters' days might be numbered thanks to some tiny DNA particles that could allow the oil to be verified as authentic. Way to tackle the big issues, science.
Image: FLICKR, THOMAS RICKER
Global flows have been a common thread in economic growth for centuries, since the days of the Silk Road, through the mercantilist and colonial periods and the Industrial Revolution. But today, the movement of goods, services, finance, and people has reached previously unimagined levels. Global flows are creating new degrees of connectedness among economies—and playing an ever-larger role in determining the fate of nations, companies, and individuals; to be unconnected is to fall behind.
Image: http://www.mckinsey.com
Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, took a step toward making spaceflight less expensive by reusing its rocket boosters during a mission on Friday to the International Space Station. The Falcon 9 rocket used for the mission, dubbed Commercial Resupply-3, or CRS-3, was the first to fly with landing legs, and was the first to successfully perform a controlled ocean splashdown.
The launch of the third official cargo delivery mission by SpaceX to the station had been delayed from last month and again from Monday due to technical problems.
Image: Blastoff: http://www.technologyreview.com - The Falcon 9 rocket rises from a launch pad at Cape Canaveral.
An automotive crack team made up of 69 of the world’s most respected motoring journalists — the same cluster of savvy jurors who recently handed out the 2014 World Car Awards at the New York International Auto Show — has revealed what it believes are the top five global trends in the industry.
How much value should we place in these findings?
Well, looking back at the results of years gone by, we get the distinct impression that these experts know exactly what they’re talking about — as they should.
Image: http://motorburn.com
Over the last few months people have been asking a lot of questions about Microsoft. That’s understandable. Steve Ballmer’s retirement was sudden and, even a few weeks before he was named, Satya Nadella was a dark horse in the race to replace him. Now though, things are starting to look up for the Redmond-based tech giant.
Recently I became acquainted with a film producer in Salt Lake City, Jeff Hays (Jeff Hays Films), who develops documentary films. At age 56 he’s a serial entrepreneur. His LinkedIn profile lists no fewer than 13 companies and projects, some highly successful and others he acknowledges as spectacular failures. In all, he has emerged with his learning (and his sense of humor) intact.
Image: http://www.forbes.com - Jeff Hays is a serial entrepreneur who has created 6 consecutive successful donor crowdfund campaigns.
The most important goals you set for yourself will take time to achieve. That’s a fact.
At some point, though, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to feel frustrated things aren’t moving faster. But, the truth is, hurrying won’t help you. It can be hard to stay motivated when times are tough. You may even feel like you want to quit. But if you are patient, your persistence will pay off.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Singapore inches closer to becoming Asia's version of Silicon Valley as the National Research Foundation (NRF) injects $60 million this week into six venture capital funds that finance high tech startups in Singapore. This capital will be matched dollar-for-dollar by selected private investors to amount to $120 million for the sole purpose of stimulating technology-oriented entrepreneurship in Singapore.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
A collective of software and consumer Internet-based accelerator programs has placed Tennessee on the map – strikingly close to the technology holy ground of Silicon Valley.
Tennessee’s nine statewide accelerator programs represent the only such network of tech incubators in the country, and they’re backed by Launch Tennessee, a public-private partnership intended to coordinate and support entrepreneurial activity across the state.
Image: http://www.nashvilleledger.com/
We're doing a lot more work with LPs to help them assess VCs using our Investor Mosaic algorithms. Today, we've turned those algos onto ranking angel investors.
Overall, we're seeing increased interest from LPs in VC. In particular, they're trying to understand emerging funds (aka micro-VCs) and who they should evaluate or invest in as they're trying to find "the next big fund". The challenge they run into is that there are currently a glut of largely undifferentiated micro-VCs.
