At any given meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s business school, it’s become standard to have a few telecommuters dial in through a conference line, and one or two come in as robots.

Essentially, these robots, made by Double Robotics, are iPad stands on wheels that enable remote workers to log in from wherever they are, take control of the robot, and experience the environment through the iPad’s camera. Remote workers controlling the robots can move forward, backward, left, and right to wander around the room and make small talk with colleagues, just as if they were there in person. It's not uncommon that two robots have meetings with one another if both workers are remote that day. Additionally, workers can adjust the height of their iPad to alter their vantage point and, in turn, change their perspective around the room. Much more real than the standard live video chat where you’re just a face in the room, the robots allow remote workers to actually take up physical space through their robot.

Image: Double Telepresence Robot Photo: courtesy of MIT

Meaningful work is driven by intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation.

Extrinsic motivation is a nice way of describing when you do things primarily to receive a reward. You might take a new job because of the higher pay and better benefits package. Then you work 60-hour weeks to reach an arbitrary goal that someone else has set. After all, it will look good on your résumé a few years from now when someone is judging you—based on their own motivations.

Intrinsic motivation—or deep internal motivation—is much richer. For example, consider a teacher who is inspired by the growth of a student or a doctor who is driven by improving health. Intrinsic motivation stems from the meaningfulness of the work you do. You are driven by what you yearn to do even if there is no reward or compensation.

In the last 25 years there has been a huge change in the level of competitiveness of smaller urban areas – by which I mean the small end of the major urban scale, or metro areas of about one to three million people – that has put them in the game for people in residents in way they never were before.

I recently gave the morning keynote at the Mayor’s Development Roundtable in Oklahoma City and talked a bit about this phenomenon, as well as how these generally younger and sprawling areas ought to be thinking about their future.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

I spent some time in the last few weeks with my colleagues Morgan Bender and Scott Kupor going through the state and history of US tech funding. It's pretty easy to point out that the current situation bears little resemblance to 1999 or 2000. This time it's different. But then, it's always different - what's going on now? 

NEW YORK — This morning Fitbit (FIT) began trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $30.40 per share. Yesterday the company set its opening price at $20 a share.

Throughout the day the FIT trading price held around $30 per share, ending the day nearly flat at $29.68 per share. The stable trading price means that the opening price was an accurate reflection of the market demand for FIT stock.

“Fitbit is at a nexus of technology and health, which are interesting growth themes that people want to invest in,” said Doug Chu, head of Silicon Valley listings at NYSE.

Venture capital has been one of the investment world’s most severe asset classes, with sharp and short peaks that stand out against the public stock market’s wider waves. And there is new data suggesting that venture capital has already headed into one of its long lull periods, despite the record number of “unicorn” companies that are still waiting to go public or be acquired.

Image: http://fortune.com

The Dutch Student Investment Fund was launched last week by the University of Twente to back spinouts from Twente and its partner institution Saxion Academy with funding of between €25,000 and €100,000.

The fund will be run by five students, assisted by experienced board members and investors including Erwin Holtland, an investor in the local business park Kennispark Twente, Steve Walsh, a professor of the University of New Mexico, Ray Quintana, associate at the US-based Cottonwood Technology Fund, and Thomas Mensink of Golden Egg Check, a business consultancy.

Image: http://www.sciencebusiness.net

British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline is investing $95 million to create a new U.S. research institute led by a top genomics professor to investigate how a cell's operating system works.

The move reflects a commitment to fundamental research by the British company, even as its shifts emphasis to greater reliance on non-pharmaceutical businesses such as consumer healthcare and vaccines.

The government finalized its plan for the Pangyo Creative Economy Valley, Korea’s version of Silicon Valley, and wants to complete construction by the first half of 2017.

Economy-related ministries held a meeting Wednesday and made the final decision on the valley, which is supposed to attract 600 technology-based companies by 2018: 300 start-ups and 300 more mature companies in their third and fourth year of business.

It wasn't until I heard that a colleague had nuked his personal email account—on purpose, for good—that it hit me: Email is the most reviled personal technology ever. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief at BuzzFeed, was so fed up with email that he did the 21st-century equivalent of unlisting his phone number and ripping the cord out of the wall. (He couldn't do the same at work, but I suspect he wanted to.) This abject fear and loathing of a telecommunications technology, and the radical step Honan took to escape it—not mitigate, not reframe, not "fix," but escape—got me curious about how we got to this point. What are the actual, fundamental design flaws—if any—with email? What makes it such a huge target for "fixing," yet so resistant to it?

If the last year in the economic development arena has shown anything, it’s how serious the competition for new projects has become. States and localities understandably have raised their general expectations with the U.S. economy generating stronger growth prospects, confidence in American manufacturing on the rise, and a number of high-profile siting, expansion, and relocation decisions fueling economic development pursuits. But many companies at home and abroad have remained reluctant to part with capital to invest in new and augmented facilities while the U.S. and global economies remain “iffy.” And a handful of states have indicated they’re getting more serious about chasing new business by cutting tax rates and taxes.

Three-day weekends feel like a treat when holidays fall on a Friday, but employees at several companies regularly say "TGIT" because four-day workweeks are their norm.

According to a study by the Society for Human Resource Management, 43% of companies offer four-day workweeks to some employees, and 10% make it available to all or most employees. The reason? It positively impacts the bottomline.

Recently, my husband had one of those days that, were he a woman, might have inspired an Allison Pearson novel and a Sarah Jessica Parker movie.

He spent the morning in meetings, then came home around noon. He packed up a wide variety of Norwegian foods (he lived there for several years), and took them to our son’s school. He gave a presentation on Norway to a room full of 5-year-olds. After, he did more work from home, then had family dinner and went swimming with our kids. He left the house around 7:30 p.m., got on a train, and went to Newark airport, where he got on a flight for Europe.

They say a rising tide lifts all boats, but it's easier to be happy for a friend's career success when it doesn't directly threaten your own.

Leadership coach Lolly Daskal helps a reader figure out how to repair her friendship after taking her pal's dream job.

The open-source software movement started in the late 1990s. Since then, open-source software has transformed the software industry. Today, many infrastructure software startups employ open-source strategies to market their software and win dominant market share.

Y Combinator is raising money to create a new VC fund according to forms filed with the SEC. 

It's called the Y Combinator Continuity Fund I. The company declined to disclose the amount raised, and the filing indicated that the first sale has yet to occur. 

The innovation economy in America's heartland is booming and on track to keep up its momentum, according to Silicon Valley Bank's Annual Innovation Economy Outlook survey of technology and life science executives.

Looking at the results regionally by Illinois respondents, the survey details how these executives plan to keep fueling growth and strengthening a Chicago-based innovation ecosystem that rivals regions perhaps better known as tech hubs.

Most of the action in venture capital now is in so-called growth rounds, with billions of dollars flowing into established technology superstars like Uber and Pinterest.

But Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s best-known investment firms, is trying a different approach: focusing on early-stage seed rounds — and offering founders unusual terms.

On-call schedules, patient monitors, diverse mobile devices and other healthcare IT systems all contribute to a web of information that is difficult to navigate and manage. This eBrief offers nine tips to bring order to the chaos and improve patient care.

If angel investing is your passion, you’re in it long term; and getting a good rate of return ensures you can continue investing for years. That’s why developing a strong angel portfolio is so important. Finding the right companies, figuring out how many to invest in and which types of deals to focus on is the magic formula angels are after.