Before introducing PopSlate, a case that turns the back of a smartphone into a second screen, Yashar Behzadi needed to test the market for the high-tech product and get feedback from first-generation users. Crowdfunding, he suspected, would achieve both goals.

Behzadi launched a 30-day campaign on Indiegogo in December 2012 seeking $150,000 and ended up raising more than $219,000 in funding from 1,532 backers.

In my research on innovators, I like to draw the distinction between “path finders” and “path creators.” Rarely does the metaphor seem so apt as in the case of Federico Bastiani. He is the originator of the “social streets” movement now spreading across Italy, so the innovation he created literally involves a path: the street in which he and his family live in Bologna.

The New Orleans BioFund has fully disbursed its initial pool of funding for small businesses, providing growth capital to 15 emerging companies in Greater New Orleans. The BioFund has now allocated $3 million to emerging businesses since late 2012 that have grown to more than 85 FTE employees in Southeast Louisiana. The fund is now transitioning to a micro-venture capital model in which startups can receive either equity or debt funding to support business growth. These new capital offerings will include equity investments, convertible debt instruments, and short-term loans.

The company that yesterday was known as Google is now a collection of separate companies, owned by a new holding company called Alphabet. The “Google” brand is the largest of those companies, and it includes search, advertising, maps, apps, YouTube, and Android. The company’s less related endeavors – the biotech research project Calico, the Nest thermostat, the fiber internet service, the “moonshot” X lab, Google Ventures, and Google Capital — are all now separate companies housed under Alphabet.

It used to be that businesses could see their competition coming and anticipate the threats. Clayton Christensen, with his theory of “disruptive innovation”, taught that a new entrant attacked a market leader by launching low-end, low-priced products and then relentlessly improving them.

The most comprehensive assessment of the energy output in the nearby universe reveals that today's produced energy is only about half of what it was 2 billion years ago. A team of international scientists used several of the world's most powerful telescopes to study the energy of the universe and concluded that the universe is slowly dying.

The option to work from home can make employees feel like they are trusted and respected and can be a big boost to quality of life, especially in cities with long commutes. But what about when it seems like flex time is available to everyone in the office but you?

Psychologist Art Markman helps this reader examine whether she's being unfairly singled out.

Do you know what your customers’ path to purchase looks like? If your marketing department is like most others, you may have it set up like a city street where your customers move from Point A to Point B in an orderly procession.

It’s not that simple in the real world, especially for complex or high-consideration purchases like appliances, luxury travel, or sports gear. The path is more like a cross-country road trip instead of a bus ride across town, fraught with rest stops, potholes, missed exits — and maybe even a breakdown along the way.

Deliberate change management is hard, very hard. The familiar saying, “Change is easy -- you go first,” reflects the ambiguous feeling most of us have toward leaving behind our tried and true behaviors.

It's also the sentiment that explains why over 75 percent of culture-change efforts fail, despite the good intentions that typically accompany those efforts.  

Reading is a great tool to change the way you think and open your mind up to new solutions. When you read you realize that people in this world have already faced the majority of the same problems that you face now. You can then adapt their experiences to yours. Reading will give you the perspective you want and the education you need.

Do you have what it takes to successfully start a business, and grow it into a large and profitable company? Many of us have dreamed of setting up our own business, of becoming our own boss, and earning our own way in the world. Yet for every successful entrepreneur there are far more failures. Take our two-minute biz quiz to discover our estimate of your chances.

In a windowless office on a tiny San Francisco side street, Noah Kraft is making me hear things in a way I’ve never heard them before.

I’m wearing a wireless earbud in each ear. The devices, which are white and look kind of like big Altoids mints, are the latest prototype built by Doppler Labs, a wearable-technology startup of which Kraft is cofounder and CEO. Kraft is sitting diagonally across from me, chatting, and using an iPhone app to manipulate the sound of his voice and the relatively quiet background noise of the office in ways that only I can hear.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com 

Mashable's latest #BizChats Twitter chat discussed how to incorporate paying back student loans into your everyday life.

Over the course of an hour, @MashBusiness covered an array of questions, ranging from the best circumstances to consider refinancing student loans, to the biggest mistakes to avoid when trying to pay student loans off.

Several influencers shared insightful tips, including: Greg McBride, SVP and chief financial analyst at bankrate.com; Louis Beryl, founder and CEO of meetearnest.com; Mark Kantrowitz, SVP and publisher of edvisors.com; and Theresa Smith; social media consultant & moderator of #CollegeChat.

Comic books have been around since before Superman first appeared in 1938’s Action Comics #1. Throughout history, both characters and villains have taken on a variety of jobs, but seeing that tech startups are so trendy these days, we’ve decided to round up the ones who’d make the most interesting entrepreneurs.

Image: http://ventureburn.com 

Crowdfunding is big business these days. How big? According to an industry report by Massolution, crowdfunding numbers are expected to reach $34 billion this year. It’s a trendy and often fascinating way to gain financial support for a new entrepreneurial effort.

Let’s look at the two types of crowdfunding.

My lifelong dream is to create more millionaire students than any other stock trading teacher out there. I’m lucky enough to have reached the seven-figure mark myself, and now, I’m dedicated to sharing everything I’ve learned - including the stock trading patterns that work in any market - with the students in my Millionaire Challenge.

But one thing I realized pretty early on was that, if I wanted to teach people to be millionaires, I had to study people who had already reached this level of wealth. I had to learn what they did differently so that I could help my students to not just hit this magic number, but to retain the money they earn and build generational wealth.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt may be at the helm of one of Silicon Valley’s greatest corporate rivalries, but when it comes to showering habits, the two men have more in common than one might think.

Cook and Schmidt are both early backers of Nebia, an eco-friendly shower system that atomizes water into a kind of mist in order to drastically reduce waste. After five years in the making, the product -- which comprises a shower head and a removable hand-wand -- is now debuting on Kickstarter, where it surged past its $100,000 goal in just eight hours. (As of now, it has raised more than $380,000.)

Image: nebia

Modern organizations need leaders who understand disruption, embody agility, and are naturals with new digital tools. Join us at GrowthBeat to learn from leaders who do all this.

Samir Patel, the founder of Growth Machines, will moderate a breakout session featuring the following speakers:

Matt Epstein, VP of marketing at Zenefits Chris Brull, VP of marketing at Kawasaki Motors Corp. Disruption will be the focus, as the speakers discuss how to be responsive and move fast to succeed.

A recent study by the University of Southern California seriously questioned San Diego’s future potential for growth. Among the reasons given were “economic and racial disparity.”

Additional reports have also questioned San Diego’s educational progress and cite the city’s low math, science and graduation statistics.

To avoid a “Tale of Two Cities” scenario, we need a plan to develop better-paying high-tech jobs accessible to those currently shut out of our innovation economy.

A number of reports in recent weeks have stressed that employment effects of the so-called gig economy—contract workers on software platforms such as Uber and AirBnB—have been overstated. At minimum, these reports indicate, any increase in gig economy employment hasn’t shown up in the aggregate statistics—at least not yet anyway.

But my analysis tells a different story, showing that the impacts can in fact be seen if you look more deeply at the data and in the right places.