Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit are all companies that emerged out of tech accelerators. These incubators of talent have been a crucial component in turning tech start-ups into businesses that can stand on their own two feet. As well as giving needy new companies financial support and office space, they play an important role in helping them develop through mentoring.

When Bill Gates confesses to regretting never having learned a foreign language, you can’t help but wonder what exactly makes mastering a foreign tongue so vexingly difficult.

For those of us who are not retired billionaires, the expense and time that traditional education models demand is a huge contributing factor. For those who are, perhaps the tedium of it all is to blame.

When you're at a loss for words, emoji can fill the silence. Now, you have 184 more to choose from.

Apple released iOS 9.1 for iPhone and iPad on Wednesday, and the update includes new wallpapers and support for Live Photos. But the most exciting update, of course, is the new emoji. Scrolling through your emoji keyboard can be overwhelming, so we've rounded them up here for you.

While I was attending the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's Innovation unConference Friday morning, I was able to pick the brains of a few of the entrepreneurs who attended, namely three who are all at different points in their careers.

Image: http://bostinno.streetwise.co

During the five years that billionaire Mark Cuban has appeared on the hit investment show "Shark Tank," he's made more than 70 investments, in companies like fancy sock makers or a pretzel business. 

If Canada isn’t generally thought of as a “creative” country, it might have something to do with our long-standing identity as commodity economy, or “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” as we have sometimes been called.

Not to mention, we keep losing many of our most creative people to a certain neighbour to the south, to jobs in Silicon Valley or Hollywood.

I often ask entrepreneurs I’m meeting for the first time to imagine that our meeting just ended and it was a great success from their point of view. Then I ask, “What made this such a great meeting for you?”

It is a dependable way to guide a conversation to a meaningful outcome and lead entrepreneurs away from the Tyranny of the Pitch Deck. But strangely enough, no entrepreneur has ever asked me that same question back. Were someone to do so, I would tell them that the meeting went great because the entrepreneur had already completed five tasks that made them stand out from the scores of deals we see weekly. Here are those five tasks.

When I’m looking for the next great marketing mind or business development genius, I’m not looking for just an employee. I’m looking for a partner. Being smart and having a great college pedigree is carrying less and less weight these days. Bottom line: Your education is not going to make my clients ecstatic about the work we do or put my company on the front end of innovation. What companies need in today’s world is talent with the ability to think, do, and execute in any circumstance – without anyone holding their hand.

Oakley Latch sunglasses have an ingeniously simple special feature: a clip in the temple so you can attach them securely to your shirt when not wearing them. They were designed by skateboarders Eric Boston, Sean Malto, and Curren Caples and skate photographer Atiba Jefferson.

Image: http://boingboing.net/ 

Bruce Rauner didn’t seem Wednesday like a man much concerned with getting his way: The Illinois governor visited Rend Lake College in Ina, Illinois, the Elks Lodge in Mt. Vernon, the Marion Chamber of Commerce, the Marion Junior High School and 17th St. BBQ in Murphysboro, a popular downstate destination that served a whole hog at his inauguration earlier this year. At nearly every stop, his topic was the same: Illinois needs big changes.

Image: http://www.politico.com

In early January 2005, Josh Kopelman W’93, Founder of half.com and First Round, was spending the day as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Wharton Entrepreneurship, meeting one-on-one with Penn student entrepreneurs for 30 minutes each.

Image: Josh Kopelman W’93 with his Wharton Entrepreneurship Alumni Achievement Award.

This morning Clutter.io announced they raised $9 million from Sequoia, arguably the best venture capital firm that exists. Congratulations. Sincerely. Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t tell you this because I invested in their main competitor, MakeSpace. I know my MakeSpace friends will forgive me because I just don’t believe the conventional wisdom is right. And it’s part of what can go wrong in startup land.

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is a challenge, even when you have a job you love and an understanding boss.

According to its most recent survey of employee feedback from about 60,000 company reviews, Glassdoor found that work-life balance has actually been creeping downward in recent years, as employees reported an average work-life balance satisfaction rating of 3.5 in 2009, 3.4 in 2012, and holding at 3.2 since 2013, based on a five-point scale with 1.0=very dissatisfied, 3.0=okay, 5.0=very satisfied.

MARK MURO: Regional tech leaders and city economic-development people keep asking: How can we keep more of the beneficial growth of homegrown innovation gains local?

Too often, technology insights fly out of local research centers and university labs and into the global production system with no stop for job creation anywhere near to home. The result is a missed opportunity—both for nations and local places but also tech companies, which may be losing out on the powerful synergies of co-located innovation and growth.

If you want to play in the quantum sandbox, you have to accept some bizarre rules. You have to accept that a single thing can exist in two states at once—alive and dead, black and white—until it’s observed or measured in some way, at which point it instantly takes on one quality or the other. You have to accept that two particles at opposite ends of the universe can be entangled in such a way that anything you do to one instantly affects the other. And you have to accept that the strictest, no-exceptions rule in all of physics—that nothing can move faster than the speed of light—may have some exceptions after all.

If there’s one thing that has enabled Man Crates CEO and founder Jonathan Beekman to be successful as an entrepreneur, it’s hustle.

In a recent interview with Stanford‘s Graduate School of Business, the founder of the gift company explained how he’s “been wired for entrepreneurship” since he was a kid.

LOS ANGELES—Like Disney and the Dodgers before it, Cedars-Sinai is partnering on an industry-specific technology accelerator in Los Angeles. The nonprofit hospital in the Beverly Grove neighborhood has teamed on the first-ever Techstars Healthcare Accelerator.

The program will offer 10 entrepreneurs and startups in the global healthcare industry $120,000 in funding plus mentorship and guidance from senior leadership at Cedars-Sinai and access to Techstars’ network of more than 7,000 founders, mentors, investors and corporate partners. At the end of three months, the participating companies will participate in a demo day, presenting their work to investors, mentors, company executives and the community at large.

Presentations are your chance to make an impression. Whether you’re standing before 100 important company leaders or just a handful of people you know, the content and delivery of your presentation has the power to make or break you. But while your instincts might suggest that the effectiveness of your presentation stems from how you deliver it in the crucial moment, the reality is that it stems from how you prepare it in the days leading up to that moment.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. and BOCA RATON, Fla., Oct. 22, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Institute for Commercialization of Public Research (the Institute) announced today results of a new study conducted by The Washington Economics Group, Inc.® (WEG), a boutique economic consulting firm led by nationally recognized business economist Dr. J. Antonio (Tony) Villamil. The study measured economic impacts of the Institute between 2011 and 2015, and concluded that the organization's impact throughout the state of Florida increased significantly during this past fiscal year, generating an overall return on investment (ROI) of 14 times.