The benefits of taking your business digital are mostly about agility — and newcomers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), need to safeguard that agility carefully.

One aspect of agility is mobility. If your employees aren’t chained to their desks but can access all the systems and information they need, from wherever they are, that can increase productivity dramatically. If you can’t check your stock, place an order and confirm a delivery date before the end of a meeting with a client — be sure that one of your competitors can.

Venture capital execs discuss where they see opportunities in the cloud and container space. They believe investors should take a long-term view, not chase hype.

There is no shortage of hype in the cloud and in container technology today, but is there any money to be made in new startups that are now entering the space? That's the question a group of venture capitalists attempted to answer during a panel discussion on Aug. 27 at the OpenStack Silicon Valley event.

Image: http://www.eweek.com

Market turmoil that sent stocks plunging down and shooting back up has some tech investors and entrepreneurs keeping a watchful eye on Wall Street, as a reminder that the good times won’t last forever.

“It’s a reminder to people that the music can stop at any time, you’ve got to be building it the right way,” said Nick Rellas, chief executive of alcohol delivery startup Drizly. “We operate our business under the assumption that the money we have in the bank is the last money we’ll ever have.”

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Technology. It has been a hobby of mine since 1981 when I fell in love with programming, applications and online games. My brain is wired for logic and for problem solving and computers have always helped me fill this compulsion.

A real estate development research organization is recommending that the University of Washington build a 240-foot tall office tower in Seattle’s University District that would help the school with its goal of creating an innovation hub near campus.

The need for measures is evident across governments and in the field of public policy monitoring and evaluation. To make the case for particular policy strategies and to monitor their peers, decision makers increasingly rely on numbers, charts and rankings. In the field of entrepreneurship, we are seeing new efforts to quantify public policy performance and compare it with the goals of other governments as well as against other countries.

Image: http://www.kauffman.org 

The consequences of global sea level rise could be even scarier than the worst-case scenarios predicted by the dominant climate models, which don't fully account for the fast breakup of ice sheets and glaciers, NASA scientists said today (Aug. 26) at a press briefing.

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for: Your boss calls you into her office, compliments your stunning work as of late, and awards you a fancy new title and some exciting, powerhouse responsibilities to go along with it (hooray!).

There’s just one teeny, tiny catch—the company can’t afford to give you a raise right now. This became an all-too-familiar story during the recession, and it’s still common today as businesses cut costs while trying to maximize their talent, says Dan Schawbel, bestselling author of Promote Yourself and Me 2.0. "A promotion (without a raise) is an easy way to not spend more immediately while still pleasing the employees," Schawbel says.

 

Did you know that the average manager gets interrupted approximately once every eight minutes? That’s about seven interruptions each hour. What’s worse, after every interruption, it takes an average of 25 minutes to fully regain cognitive focus. No wonder at the end of an eight-hour day, you still feel like you haven’t accomplished anything.

When Google acquired the online photo editor Picnik in 2010, CMO Lisa Conquergood and the rest of the Picnik team went, too. They worked on the site until Google narrowed its focus and closed Picnik in 2012. Still believing in the concept, the original Picnik team left Google and founded the photo-editing site PicMonkey.

With the advent of social media and the pervasive move to smartphones, even customers who still prefer to purchase in brick-and-mortar stores have dramatically changed their shopping habits. Many people don’t post about their experiences, but still routinely check first to see what others are saying about the brand and the product online.

I sit on the Governor’s Science and Technology Council, which was reinstated by Gov. Mary Fallin, to help move the state forward in areas of science and technology. Many council members are successful entrepreneurs. We also have scientists, educators, investors and economic development leaders. Together, we pretty much cover every aspect of the innovation economy in Oklahoma.

Being physically active has a lot of health benefits, but the latest research questions whether it can help the brain

Exercise can help the heart, lower the risk of diabetes, keep blood pressure in check and help you maintain a healthy weight. But researchers say you shouldn’t expect it to keep your brain alert.

You are not able to stand still in this fast paced business environment, but most of the time innovation fails. Innovation process-expert Robert Cooper shows that of every seven new product/service projects, about four enter development, 1.5 are launched, and only one succeeds. Innovation is so difficult to master, indeed. I love to share with you five reasons why innovation goes wrong and give you ten ways to reduce your failure rate of innovation.

I recently made a couple of tweets/Facebook posts pointing out that market declines threaten California’s budget surplus. I referenced articles in the WSJ and Bloomberg, and I thought the observation was non-controversial—almost banal.

So I was surprised at the feedback. One person asked why. Another said it doesn’t mean anything until holders of declining assets cash out. Yet another pointed out that the wealthy were back to where they were eight months ago. Finally, one said we wouldn’t know of the impact until after the end of the next budget year.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Athletes today use increasingly complex technologies to enhance performance.

We have seen considerable leaps forward in sporting performance as a direct result of technology either used during competition or in training. The big question is which technology has had the biggest impact on its respective sport?

Casinos know it. So do the retailers where you like to shop. There are hidden behaviors that all people have, but are not aware of. For instance, it is human nature to prefer to have pleasure now, than later. Also, people are overly optimistic and make decisions on feelings versus cognitive calculations. And the big whammy of them all, we would rather not lose something, than gain something better.

Everybody talks about innovation these days, but the word is used so lightly. Every new app, gadget or product feature is now “innovation”. A few decades ago, “innovation” implied a life-changing advance in technology: the transistor, the computer, space flight. Does it mean anything that we speak of innovation more casually today than we did in the past century? Maybe.

A pacemaker that doesn’t run out of battery power, autonomous circuits that can be implanted into the human body to monitor vital signs and supercharged nanobots that can be injected into the bloodstream to target cancer cells – when Dr Lutfi Al Basha, an assistant professor in electrical engineering at the American University of Sharjah, and his research team’s energy-harvesting circuitry come to fruition, medical technology and wireless sensors will be self-powered and independent of a battery backup.