How old do you have to be to buy cigarettes? Increasingly, that depends on where you live.

In most places, you can still buy cigarettes if you're 18. Last month, however, Hawaii became the first state to raise the minimum age for tobacco purchases to 21. The California Senate has passed similar legislation, while a handful of states have raised the age to 19.

Image: Newsies smoking, St. Louis, Missouri. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, 9 May 1910. (Wikimedia// Lewis Hine)

Silicon Valley breeds the kind of people that create computers that fit in the palm of our hands, electric cars that can go hundreds of miles on a single charge and plans to launch tiny satellites across the globe to bring everyone in the world Internet access.

Biotechnology is now taking shape alongside those other big ideas, thanks to reduced costs in robotics, machine learning and some innovative Silicon Valley thinkers. Investors poured more than $3.9 billion into U.S. life sciences in 2014, and there are a growing number of startups in the field.

Long used by musicians and film makers to finance their projects, scientists and environmentalists are increasingly using crowdfunding to realise their goals.

Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular fundraising method where social media is used to seek small donations from a large number of supporters to raise a set amount of money.

Image: A Deakin University research project looking at edible seaweed raised more than $5,000 through crowdfunding. (Supplied: Deakin University) 

One of the University of Virginia's more prominent efforts to promote entrepreneurship is the i.Lab, a startup incubator based out of the Darden School of Business and supported by collaborators around the university. This incubator accepts applications not just from students in the MBA program, but also take joint projects between students and faculty—and even from people in the community who might have no connection to the school. We've picked out seven of the most eye-catching startups to highlight—check them out to get a feel for the latest UVa-born innovations.

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Building businesses has become cheaper by several orders of magnitude. Josh Levy and his team took just over $2 million in angel financing, and has built a profitable business in New York. For those entrepreneurs facing the Series A crunch, this is an important story to follow. You will do fine if you have patient angels, and just use their investment to bootstrap to profitability.

It’s a fascinating time to take stock of startup innovation in the Netherlands, a rare turning point where you can watch the hard work of the past give way to the immense promise of the future.

Behind London and Berlin, the Dutch startup scene is already considered to be one of the most prominent in Europe. (If it feels unfair to weigh an entire country against individual cities, consider that the Netherlands has 17 million people crammed into an area half the size of South Carolina.)

Domestic terrorism, cyberattacks, power outages, white collar crimes and other catastrophic events are just a few of the potential crises companies can face. While many companies have a crisis plan in place, they may not have actually tested their plans, or the plans may be inadequate. A Deloitte online poll of more than 2,000 C-suite executives, managers, analysts and crisis professionals from U.S. and international companies¹ found that a large percentage of respondents did not know what their biggest gap in crisis preparedness would be. Further, half of respondents were not sure whether the crisis response team had been tested.

Starting a new business is a serious undertaking. Yet many aspiring entrepreneurs I know approach it as a fun project, get-rich quick scheme, or perhaps an expensive hobby. Others quit their day jobs and commit everything to their new passion, without regard for their own well-being, or the welfare of others around them. Neither of these approaches bodes well for success.

From hanging a mosquito net above your work desk to spending your lunch break inside the freezer to keep your body from overheating, you know the importance of protecting yourself in the summer. You refuse to go outside from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. when the sun's rays are strongest, even though that meant missing your sister's wedding.

The State Entrepreneurship Index tracks core trends and reflects states’ entrepreneurship envi- ronments, growth in business formation and tech- nological innovation. Each state index is calculated HIghest N. Y. 2.34 by comparing five key economic components and determining how much their performance deviate above or below the “median state,” which is as- signed a value of 1.0.

Sometimes we hear that technology companies have lost their ambition. Too many great minds are pouring their energy into the next app for the affluent, the argument goes. Where is the daring?

Right here. This year, when the editors of MIT Technology Review began our annual search for the smartest companies, we did not have trouble finding big ideas. To make the list, a company must have truly innovative technology and a business model that is both practical and ambitious, with the result that it has set the agenda in its field over the past 12 months.

On May 29th, there were 52,000 nanoparticles per cubic centimeter of air measured at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

This may not seem the most compelling opening to an article, until you realize that the measurement was made in 1889 – over 100 years before nanotechnology and nanoparticles began hitting headlines as one of the most talked about emerging technologies in recent decades.

Small businesses have been at the core of America’s economy since people started calling this place America. If you weren’t making it yourself, there was a shopkeeper in the middle of town peddling the wares you needed. Wagon running a little wobbly? Take it to a wheelwright.

Policymakers adopted messaging and narratives around the importance of enabling “access to financing” long before the more recent policy efforts to support new firm formation.  However, although the world of early stage capital has been transformed of recent by the introduction of crowdfunding and the merging of traditional types of angel and venture investing, we still know very little about the impact of recent policy interventions and whether they have increased access to financing for promising new ventures.  

It’s become a drinking game. Any time a conference keynote speaker says the word “innovation,” you take a sip of beer. And any time he or she declares that a company that isn’t innovative can’t be competitive, you have to down a shot of tequila (lime and salt, optional).

But what’s really required to create an innovation culture? Do digital-first companies like Google—celebrated for its glasses, self-driving cars and other “moonshots” — always have the edge? In my discussions with IT leaders I discovered common qualities that have made innovation thrive at companies like Google, Nordstrom, Johnson & Johnson and Lego.

For a founder, the first few million dollars you raise are likely to be the messiest in the history of your company. For some they come in a single round, meant to last you 12, 18, 24 months – a straight trajectory towards the milestones you’ll use to raise a Series A. But for most it’s a lumpy mixture of bootstrapping, friends and family, hackathon prizes, angels, incubators/accelerators and venture capital which combine over a period of months or years.

The finance guys on Wall Street might throw a lot of money around in New York's restaurants, bars, and housing markets, but the finance sector doesn’t have the level of influence on New York City’s local economic health that you might think. Instead, it’s the growing numbers of striving actors, writers, designers, and artists that give the city its edge.

That’s according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank based in New York. It concludes that not only has New York City overtaken Los Angeles as the city with the most creative workers over the last decade, but also that it has had among the fastest-growing creative economies

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If you’re not reaching, engaging, and monetizing customers on mobile, you’re likely losing them to someone else. Register now for the 8th annual MobileBeat, July 13-14, where the best and brightest will be exploring the latest strategies and tactics in the mobile space.

Independence is one of the main benefits of owning your own business. But as many small business owners have learned, the day to day business grind and tasks involved in running a business can often make you fall back into that uninspiring routine that you thought you were leaving behind at your 9-to-5.

If you think all entrepreneurs are driven mavericks in the mould of Richard Branson or James Dyson, think again. Research by Barclays and the University of Cambridge has revealed a variety of different types of entrepreneur as diverse as the businesses they create.

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