Staying connected has never been so important to so many of us. We have developed a love affair with our smartphones — to the exclusion of other, more important thing in life. Ever since all the major brands, such as Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung raised their game and started releasing high end mobile phones at competitive prices, there have been upward trends in owning cell phones across the globe and with 967.78m units sold across the world, almost everyone in civilized countries owns a cellphone.

The kind of opportunity that technology and energy markets once offered is beckoning investors to property near biotech clusters. Emerging from the recession, technology and energy markets commanded the attention of commercial real-estate investors that wanted to tap into improving occupancy and rental rates largely absent elsewhere.

Image: Wareham Development designed this 110,000-square-foot building for biotech tenants in Berkeley, Calif. - http://news.investors.com 

One small bull shark thought it would be a good idea to corner a pod of hippos at the iSimangaliso Wetland Park in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The hippos, however, were definitely not cool with an intruder on their turf — particularly if that intruder was looking for a bite to eat.

Tour guide Stacey Farrell managed to capture the face-off between the shark and the hippos on video.

Suffice it to say, the shark swam away with its tail between its legs (so to speak). Because let's be real — if you're gonna pick on somebody in the animal kingdom, it definitely shouldn't be hippos.

Image: http://mashable.com

We all know how important a good night's sleep is to being your most productive self at work the next day. Yet demanding work schedules, family obligations, or even just binge-watching TV often get in the way of getting a full 7.76 hours of sleep a night.

 Here's how the always well-rested manage to pull it off:

THEY SET A BEDTIME

Gretchen Rubin, author of Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, sets an alarm to go off about 15 minutes before her actual bedtime. "Often I stayed up too late because I was so tired I couldn’t face getting ready for bed. Now I try to get ready for bed well before when I plan to actually go to bed, so when I do, it’s easy," she says.

Antarctica is one of the coldest, snowiest parts of the globe, but there may actually be less snow across the surface of the planet's southernmost continent than scientists originally thought.

Researchers studying areas of eastern Antarctica where snow is often stripped off the surface by wind, recently found that the powerful gusts are actually vaporizing massive amounts of snow, rather than blowing and redistributing it elsewhere. The findings have implications for future measurements of snow accumulation in Antarctica and how the continent may contribute to rising global sea levels.  

Image: A view of East Antarctica's Recovery Ice Stream. Credit: Ted Scambos/NSIDC

You’re working hard, doing all you can to build your leadership skills and retain your best employees while simultaneously pouring your all into acquiring customers and building up your company. So it’s no surprise you feel spread thin with little left to offer at the end of the day. 

Studies show that people who engage in hobbies, especially creative ones, perform better at work. Many people even report a sudden burst of insight about how to solve work problems while focusing on a totally unrelated activity.

Although money is needed to expand and advance a business, an entrepreneur can significantly contribute to the growth of his or her company by simply investing intangible resources such as time, energy and creativity. In fact, some of the most rewarding investments that I have made in my own business and career required very little, if any, use of monetary resources. 

February 14-17

Manchester Grand Hyatt

San Diego San Diego, CA USA

Join the largest gathering of academic technology transfer professionals!

Register today! 

Networking

At the AUTM Annual Meeting, you're not just visiting with old friends — although that happens, too! — you're making important business connections and working deals. AUTM makes this easy through our partnering too, AUTM Connect™.

• 70% of attends return to Annual Meeting primarily for the networking. 
• 80% of attendees use AUTM Connect to schedule meetings. 
• 1 in 4 attendees have attended 7 or more Annual Meetings.

You’re running around with a to-do list a mile long, crossing off item after item. You’re feeling super productive. But are you really being productive, or are you just being busy?

Read more >> Barbara Hemphill, founder of the Productive Environment Institute and an expert on time management, says checking things off a long list may simply be a way of relieving the pain of procrastination. Being productive, she says, means accomplishing those tasks that will get you closer to meeting your goals. Any other tasks that don’t help you to do so are just clutter.

People who manage to get a lot accomplished each day aren't super human, they've just mastered a few simple habits. Some may be easy to guess: Keep your desk organized and aim for around eight hours of sleep a night. But others, like taking a mid-day nap or complaining, might surprise you.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

They're ready to work with you. Are you ready to work with them?

Think Pixar's robotic lamp, as it turns to face you before the movie starts. Cute, right? Sinister? Never. At least not to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which this week released 2015 World Robot Statistics report.

By 2018, says the report, global sales of industrial robots will on average grow by 15 percent year on year, and the number of units sold will double to around 400,000 units.

Image: "Greetings. Are you ready to collaborate?" The UR5 robotic arm from Denmark's Universal Robots has proved useful to a variety of companies' production processes. Photo courtesy of Universal Robots

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Last year, many tech IPOs enjoyed soaring valuations in their Wall Street debut, raining cash on the companies and their investors and boosting concerns about another Silicon Valley bubble.

Now, the party is winding down, according to data analyzed by Reuters: Five of the 12 U.S.-based tech companies that went public this year, or 42 percent, priced their shares at a valuation below or nearly the same as their private market value, compared to 24 percent of the 29 that went public in 2014.

How is it that no matter how hard they try some people are always at least 15 minutes late while others are always on time? Here's what those pathologically punctual know that you don't.

They’re meticulous calendar keepers.

Never rely on your memory. "My calendar is the tool I’ve put in place to remind me when to do things," says Kara DeFrias, deputy director of 18F Consulting, a civic consultancy for the federal government. "If a notification doesn’t pop up for a meeting, I’ll miss the meeting."

Touch screens are versatile and easy to use, but the slick surface isn’t great for some tasks—typing more than a quick e-mail, for instance—and becomes pretty useless when your eyes are occupied with other tasks.

With all this in mind, researchers hailing mainly from the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany built a prototype of a touch screen with a layer of gel atop it that can change from soft to stiff when heat is applied—making it possible to create temporary buttons in all kinds of shapes that needn’t be defined in advance, which users can feel and use to interact with the display.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Hiring the right people is extremely hard. Not only is the market tightly constrained — especially for tech companies, but the unwritten rules for how to hire are often plain wrong. With more candidates who “look good on paper” going on to flounder at startups, it’s time to rethink what qualities actually make someone a great employee.

While Kauffman research shows that both women and people of color are underrepresented in entrepreneurship, the U.S. Census Bureau’s recent Survey of Business Owners highlights the growth of women of color in business. 

Ownership by Race Thirty-six percent of all non-farm and non-publicly held businesses are owned by women. When broken down by race, the SBO finds that women of color are more likely to own businesses than women overall.

PORTLAND, OR (September 22, 2015) – The Angel Resource Institute at Willamette University (ARI) released the 2015 Q2 ARI HALO Report: Geography Edition today, a national survey of angel group investment activity sponsored by PitchBook. ARI’s Vice Chairman of Research Rob Wiltbank said, “For the first time ever, we are able to report on the geographic differences over the last several years for the key metrics we’ve been reporting in the HALO Report™.”

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.  Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

There is a deep irony lurking about in any conversation concerning innovation.  It’s always there, and it’s always influencing what you will do — or not do — with respect to improving innovative thinking and practice.  Without recognizing and understanding that irony, it is next to impossible to ever develop a working model of how innovation works.  It is a problem that is pretty easy to recognize, but much, much more difficult to understand.

Is there more to being organized than just knowing your way around a spreadsheet and to do lists? Are their mysterious ways to those of us not so organized any better?

According to a study, people who said they were organized, also said it actually improved their work performance. Being organized can cause people to feel more in control and have more mental energy. If you would like to benefit from this, the good news is that anyone can learn to be organized according to the National Association of Professional Organizers.

Business partnerships have traditionally been agreements to drive more transactions than either company could do alone. The new paradigm, driven by disruptive technologies, cloud-served supercomputing, and the new generation of young adults with global empathy, is partnering and giving something now for a competitive advantage in the future.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com