In his play "As You Like It," William Shakespeare reduced the life of man to seven ages.

Now analysts at investment bank RBC Capital Markets have got it down to six.

In a report on global demographic trends, Jay Govender shows how big life events such as getting married and retiring affect how much we borrow and spend.

Image: Reuters DJ Wika Szmyt, 76, plays music at a club in Warsaw, Poland. 

"Would you like a virtual hug?" said Xyla Foxlin, a sophomore from Case Western Reserve University, to a woman passing by her booth at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show.

"What’s a virtual hug?" replied the passer-by, Tiphaine Bichot.

Ms. Foxlin handed Ms. Bichot a fuzzy, brown teddy bear that happened to be tethered electronically to an identical stuffed animal.

"The idea is that, as I give one bear a hug, it sends a Wi-Fi message to that one, and that bear gently vibrates," the student said. As the visitor nestled the toy to her chest and began to feel the simulated embrace, she laughed delightedly, with a wide-eyed smile.

Image: Chronicle photo by Jeffrey R. Young Digital teddy bears that enable people to share hugs from afar were among the products on display at last week’s CES consumer electronics show. The bears’ inventors are Harshita Gupta, a high-school senior in California, and Xyla Foxlin, a sophomore at Case Western Reserve U. 

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich made an interesting prediction during his keynote speech at this year's CES: drones will replace fireworks.

"I see a future where fireworks and all of their risks of smoke, dirt are a thing of the past, and they’re replaced by shows that have unlimited creativity and potential — and powered by drones," Krzanich said.

If you thought his statement was just publicity-seeking nonsense, think again. Intel has a video to back up his claim, where 100 flashing drones synced to a live orchestra dance to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the sky — all powered by Intel chips.

People who drink sugary beverages, such as soda or fruit juice, daily tend to gain a type of body fat associated with diabetes and heart disease, a new study finds.

Researchers looked at about 1,000 middle-age people over a six-year period and found that those who drank sugar-sweetened beverages tended to have more "deep," or visceral, fat. This type of fat wraps around the internal organs, including the liver, pancreas and intestines; affects hormone function; and may play a role in insulin resistance, the researchers said.

Last month the federal government issued its National Innovation and Science Agenda detailing plans to put innovation at the centre of public policy, confident that economic growth, more jobs and enhanced global competitiveness will follow. (Australia has lagged many countries in articulating such an agenda.)

In the 21st century, being an innovative economy and society is obviously a good thing, but what is our mental image of an innovative society? Often California comes to mind with its Silicon Valley, awash with venture capital keen to finance hot new ideas, globally dominant hi-tech companies in bucolic campus settings, famous universities pumping out PhDs in electronics, software engineering and biotechnology, and young, fabulously successful and high profile entrepreneurs. But how do we objectively measure innovation at an aggregate country level, determine its composition and scalability, and identify relevant trends over time so we can adjust our policies and vary our invest ment priorities presumably so as to outperform our peer group?

Innovation. It’s a topic often talked about in the high-tech world – and with good reason. Innovation is crucial to distinguishing the industry leaders from the followers. As a company always looking to bring better solutions to our customers, fostering innovation is key to creating better technologies.

With events like Rails Rumble and Tech Crunch Disrupt, the hackathon has become a very popular way for eager entrepreneurs and software developers to gather and create the “next big thing.” Yet, hackathons aren’t just for the startup crowd. In fact, many companies are using hackathons as a way to break through organizational inertia and instill a more innovation-driven culture.

As EU Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas ponders the design of his proposed European Innovation Council, he will find a large number of templates around the world.

It’s a trending institute, with a growing number of countries establishing national councils for innovation, or for an amalgamation of science, technology and innovation.

And it comes with a regional twist, with a geographic split between advisory councils found primarily in countries in Europe and North America, and councils with a strong planning and coordination mandate, and control over budgets, prevalent in Asia.

NEW YORK, NY – U.S. venture capital firms raised $5.0 billion for 46 funds during the fourth quarter of 2015, a nine percent increase by dollar commitments from the third quarter and a 25 percent decrease in number of funds raised, according to the Fundraising Report by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).  Venture capital dollar commitments during full year 2015 totaled $28.2 billion, down nine percent compared to full year 2014 but much higher than the $17.7 billion and $19.9 billion raised in 2013 and 2012 respectively and higher than the yearly average of $20.32 billion since 2006.

Challenge.gov, which celebrated its fifth anniversary this fall, is a federal website that showcases requests by government agencies for the public to tackle hard problems in exchange for cash prizes and other incentives. Since its inception in 2010, agencies have run more than 450 challenges to help ameliorate problems such as decreasing the "word gap" between children from high- and low-income families or increasing the speed at which salt water can be turned into fresh water for farming in developing economies.

Ah. Another January, another J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference — where this year’s biggest biopharma deals are just a cocktail and a handshake away. As swaths of C-suite execs descend upon San Francisco, here’s an overview of some of the ideas we expect to see in motion at the conference (cattle yard) this week:

Image: http://medcitynews.com

It is impossible to be or become an innovative organization unless and until the issue of culture is your first priority.

There.  That’s said.   It should be pretty clear and unambiguous.   If innovation is the topic, culture should be your first concern.  If innovative practices, innovative execution, innovative output and innovation as a means to long-term excellence are a desired outcome, your attention should go first to culture.  If innovation is a “strategic imperative” or some such other phrase or vision or story line, then culture change should be the path you pursue.  Start anywhere else other than culture and at best you will achieve only  incremental tactical and structural improvements; at worst, you will create a cynical and disengaged team, one that hears the word “innovation” as . . . just another organizational whim.

Building an innovation nation will require an “all hands on deck approach,” calling all levels of government, private sector companies, philanthropists, non-profits and the larger tech community, to make it happen. That’s according to U.S. CTO Megan Smith and Office of Science and Technology Policy Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation Tom Kalil, who spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Kalil and Smith discussed five key initiatives that are driving innovation in cities across America: the Maker Movement, smart cities, TechHire, workforce diversity and the “tour of duty” hiring model that’s helping bring top tech talent to government.

Image: https://gcn.com

Sculptor and installation artist Jason deCaires Taylor has attracted quite a lot of attention for his underwater sculpture gardens. Works like Reclamation, The Lost Correspondent, and Inertia are celebrated as much for their conceptual flair as for the surreal transformations they undergo once they are colonized by marine life.

Taylor’s work with underwater sculptures grew out of childhood days spent exploring the coral reefs of Malaysia (he was raised in Europe and Asia). Trained in sculpture, Taylor also became a fully qualified diving instructor and naturalist, as well as an award-winning underwater photographer.

Image: https://magazine.good.is

In 2013, Michigan enacted the Michigan Invests Locally Exemption, which allows non-accredited investors to buy crowdfunded securities.

MILE allows Michigan businesses to raise up to $1 million every 12 months. If the issuer is willing to supply audited financial statements, it can raise up to $2 million.

Non-accredited investors can invest up to $10,000 a year. There is no limit to how much an accredited investor can invest.

Confidence and hope is high among the Australian startup community, and according to many of the major players, 2016 will be a flagship year for the sector.   On the back of the government’s $1 billion innovation statement, four new $200 million VC funds and the innovation ecosystem placed in the national spotlight, the community has a lot of momentum that will be consolidated and built on this year, startup speaker and advisor Anne-Marie Elias says.

After the end of 2015, we stopped for a second to look back and try to understand what really happened this year in the Israeli startup and venture capital scene and imagine how the next year will look.

To get a true reflection of tech companies’ life cycles, it’s not enough to look at the entry and exit moments, such as funding rounds, M&As, and IPOs, but also at what happened for startups operating on a day-to-day basis.

Image: http://www.geektime.com

In the six years since Fitbit began selling its first fitness tracker, a $100 clip-on device that used a growing flower on its tiny display to indicate how active you’d been, the market for wearable gadgets has changed tremendously.

Companies large and small have flooded the market with all kinds of fitness trackers, smart watches, and other wearable devices. According to technology market researcher IDC, between July and September of 2015, 21 million wearables were shipped out, about triple the number from a year earlier.

Image: James Park, Fitbit CEO - http://www.technologyreview.com

When we think of great leaders, we often think about individuals who give speeches that motivate action, but in addition to being great speakers, great leaders are also great listeners. Taylor Barens Crouch, graduate student in clinical behavioral medicine at the University of Maryland, says being a good listener is crucial to being a great leader.

"If we’re trying to lead people in a direction that they want, it’s absolutely necessary that we understand people’s desires and perspectives and thoughts, and listening is necessary to get that information," says Crouch.

Life was going well for Chris Bailey. A longtime student of productivity techniques, he’d launched a blog to chronicle his experiments with different strategies. The blog became popular enough that he got a contract to write a book called The Productivity Project. He was about halfway through writing when he decided to go to Ireland last February "to brainstorm a little bit, to celebrate that I was ahead of schedule, to give myself a rest, to be kind to myself," he says.

Workers in many of the world’s labor markets have reason to celebrate in 2016—and they’ll have a little extra cash to do so. According to Korn Ferry Hay Group’s 2016 Salary Forecast, workers in most regions will, on average, see their biggest pay increase in three years. Real wages, which are average increases adjusted for inflation, will hit roughly 2.5%, with some regions experiencing markedly higher increases.