Having the perfect business partner can help you take your business to another level even faster than you could take it on your own. Not only will you have someone to bounce ideas off of, but you can also have someone whose skill sets complement your own, making you a well-rounded team. But just like any relationship, you need to date first and test the relationship, so that you don’t make an expensive mistake. Breaking up a business partnership is a major distraction, so you must choose well.

The case that Will Zell slides onto his iPhone doesn’t look that unusual, but it’s doing something pretty out of the ordinary: capturing some of the radio waves that the phone transmits when connecting to cell-phone towers and Wi-Fi routers, converting them to electricity, and feeding that power back to the phone’s battery.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com 

I recently wrote an article that outlined a new approach to developing and supporting successful innovation incubators and accelerators within corporate organizations. The article appeared to have touched a nerve as I had a number of people reach out to me to offer their experiences with incubators/accelerators. While I received a range of opinions, I was actually most interested in the stories of failure.

The human body serves as the perfect metaphor for understanding the innovation challenge facing today's organizations. The body is built to adapt and respond to demands that are placed upon it. The greater the demand, the stronger the response. If you and your organization are going to thrive in this world you must build and keep your innovation muscles strong. We know that only the fittest survive.

A member of President Obama’s cabinet met with local entrepreneurs Tuesday to discuss how federal funds have helped accelerate their businesses, and in turn grow Kansas City.

In a stop to Kansas City during the National Council of La Raza, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker met with companies that have participated in business incubator Digital Sandbox KC. Digital Sandbox, which has received two i6 Challenge grants from the Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration, invests up to $25,000 in area businesses for specific projects that help them secure additional funding.

Image: Photo by U.S. Department of Commerce 

Startups are sexy because of their disruptive potential. The successful ones upset status quo, change how things are done, and dethrone the giants of industry. In today’s competitive climate, smart corporations are on the prowl for innovators who can give them an edge. Global retail major Target is doing that through its accelerator program in India.

Combinator is the Stanford of startup incubators. With an acceptance rate of less than 3 percent, it is known for launching superstars, such as Dropbox, AirBNB and Reddit. For a fledgling startup, getting into the exclusive program (which takes in two classes of about 85 companies each year) can feel like a “Hail Mary” opportunity for mentorship and investment. Perks of the three-month program include weekly dinners with tech and business luminaries, hands-on guidance with fundraising and product development, and the opportunity to pitch top investors at a Demo Day at the end.

Pluto finally got a visitor from Earth, 85 years after the dwarf planet’s discovery by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. Completing a nine-year, 3-billion-mile voyage, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reached the former ninth planet of our solar system on Tuesday.

Image: Artist conception of New Horizons Spacecraft. Credits: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute 

Bubble debate aside, 2014 was a remarkable year for the venture capital industry. Fundraising, investing, and valuations all increased significantly across the board, yet the trend of industry consolidation continued. This “flight to quality” has persisted for many years, and in 2014 we saw 4% of the firms that raised funds account for nearly 44% of the total capital raised. As a result, the data continue to support our belief that the venture industry is shrinking. Moreover, in our latest research report on the State of the Venture Capital Industry, we find sound reasons why VCs remain excited about today’s investment opportunities to tap the next generation of truly disruptive and transformative technology companies.

We’re in week three of our Summer accelerator programme, where we’re providing 12 weeks of intensive mentoring and support and investment to 10 startups that are using technology to tackle big social and environmental problems.

With just nine weeks left until demo day, we’ve compiled 21 tips to help any startup get the most out of an accelerator programme.

1. Come into the office. Even when we don’t have sessions on, teams get a huge amount of learning from chats with the rest of the cohort and lucky encounters with mentors.

Image: http://bethnalgreenventures.com 

When MyHeritage, a genealogy site with approximately 80 million members, sent out a call to its users several months ago for photographs of members who strongly resemble their ancestors, responses poured in from around the globe. Approximately 110 users sent photos as part of a competition to win a family photo shoot. Many of the pictures looked as if they were of the same person.

When you’re describing your experience and applying for a job do you let potential employers know that you’re motivated? Nice word—but everyone else uses it, too. "Motivated," in fact, is the most overused buzzword on LinkedIn profiles, followed up by "passionate" and "creative."

Being first to release a new technology can give a company an advantage in the marketplace, but when the product isn’t true to your brand, it can backfire. Red Hat, a world leader in open-source software, learned this lesson in 2008 when it acquired the tech firm Qumranet in an attempt to move into virtualization, a technology that allows computers to simultaneously run multiple operating systems.

Going purely by the numbers, Wisconsin is hardly an ideal place for startups seeking investment.

According to the 2015 National Venture Capital Association Yearbook, companies in the Badger State raised $86.8 million in venture capital investments in 2014. That was good for 26th in the U.S. and accounted for less than 0.2 percent of the $49.3 billion national total.

Thousands of small businesses are extorted every year for payoffs through patent infringement threats or lawsuits, but a bill in Congress aiming to give them some relief may do more harm than good, lawmakers warned on Tuesday.

A House bill entitled the Innovation Act, along with its Senate counterpart, aim to counter "patent trolling," a practice in which an entity uses a patent claim not to protect an invention, but to accuse businesses of infringing upon or stealing a product or technology.

Image: http://www.usnews.com 

LAWRENCE — A new study that is the first to use Social Security Administration’s personal income tax data tracking the same individuals over 20 years to measure individual lifetime earnings has confirmed significant long-term economic benefits of college education.

ChangHwan Kim, a University of Kansas researcher, said the research team was also able to account for shortcomings in previous studies by including factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, place of birth and high school performance that would influence a person's lifetime earnings and the probability of college completion.

The Technopolicy Network is proud to announce its 13th Annual Academic Entrepreneurship Conference in São Leopoldo (RS), Brazil! This year’s theme is “Building an international startup ecosystem”.  In line with this theme the results of the Best Science Based Incubator Awards will be announced. Furthermore, please feel invited to the Science Based Business Exchange where science regions will present themselves and find partners for collaboration.

“Sexual aversion and loss of sexual enjoyment.” “Flatulence and related conditions.” “Mouth breathing.” These are actual recorded causes of death for at least one person in the Centers for Disease Control registry that aggregates mortality information from all 50 states.

I found this out only by accident while researching which diseases are responsible for the most lost years of life. When I reviewed the dataset (download my data and code here), the usual suspects topped the list, including lung cancer and heart disease. But the dataset contained thousands of other listings. Curious, I went straight to the bottom, to the rarest causes of death.

VSP Global, comprised of a collective group of businesses focused on vision care and optics, is working on technology to include a wearable device into eyewear that’s centered at the temple part of the frames. This would remove the need for an additional physical product like your average wrist device.

Project Genesis is the company’s effort to allow people to monitor their health and the correlated statistics other wearables provide using a product many would purchase anyway – eyeglasses.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Here’s the scenario. A company raises $2m of seed money from angels in a convertible note with a $6m cap. Assuming equity is raised at or above that cap, the total dilution, before the new money, is 33% (equivalent to an equity financing of $2m at a $6m post money valuation.

The company spends the $2m building and launching their first product. The first release is underwhelming, but they iterate aggressively, with feedback and support from some of their angel investors. The product gets a lot better. They go out to raise a Series A, but there are no takers. The feedback is “come back when you’ve made more progress with customers.” They are running out of money.