For the last three years, we’ve been watching as the hexapods created by Antoine Cully and Jean-Baptiste Mouret have been getting increasingly difficult to put out of action. Using an exceptionally clever algorithm, the robots have demonstrated that they can shrug off absurd amounts of damage, adapting within minutes to recover their mobility even if you chop a third of their legs off. 

Today, this research has made the cover of Nature, which is a Very Big Deal (at least if you’re a scholar), and it brings along with it some updates and even more potential for the future.

“What do startups look for when hiring?” That’s a question that I get asked all the time, and unfortunately, there’s no simple, all-encompassing answer. It’s of course difficult to generalize across startups in different sectors and sub-sectors, and every team has their own preferences as to how they want to build their organization and culture. However, I think a very important thing to understand is how the hiring needs of a startup vary tremendously according to what lifecycle stage the company is in.

Image: http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

As a medical device startup, there are many things you are juggling and balancing all day, every day to advance your product closer and closer to that next critical milestone.

And one of those things you should be doing early on is implementing a bit of infrastructure based on FDA / ISO regulations and requirements.

Doing so ensures that your efforts result in the necessary documentation and records to support regulatory submissions and eventual commercialization of your medical device.

One thing that bugs me about the world of entrepreneurship is how often people who ought to know better propagate these three very common and potentially dangerous myths. They come up constantly as I talk to entrepreneurs at meet-ups, business plan competitions, and in classrooms. And I see them every day in blogs and other online content. I sometimes worry that there are people who claim to be startup experts whose experience seems to be mainly reading what other people say and repeating.

The tech world only stops to gawk for a few choice events: Apple product launches, Marc Andreessen tweetstorms and Mary Meeker's slide presentations. Meeker, a partner at the influential venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and arguably the center of the Silicon Valley hype machine, released her 20th annual Internet Trends report on Wednesday.

The Kauffman Index: Startup Activity calculates a broad composite measure of business startup activity from 1997 to 2015 for the United States. It consolidates three components into one national picture, benchmarking entrepreneurship in the United States in any year to historical averages.

For more detailed information, hover over the data visualization.

(KANSAS CITY, Mo.), May 28, 2015 – Reversing a downward cycle that began in 2010, U.S. startup activity ascended last year, according to the 2015 Kauffman Index: Startup Activity. National business creation findings were released today, and state and metropolitan data will be released June 4.

Over the past two decades, the Startup Activity Index generally has risen or fallen in tandem with the business cycle – up in the 1990s expansionary period and plummeting as the Great Recession took hold. The entrepreneurial activity increase in the 2015 Index represents the largest year-over-year increase in the last two decades, giving rise to hope for a revival of entrepreneurship; however, the return remains tepid and well below historical trends.

With the right set of tools and techniques, people can gain the necessary skills to achieve entrepreneurial success, says a Stanford innovation expert.

"Immersion and curiosity reveal insights and opportunities that are hidden in plain view," said Tina Seelig, executive director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and a professor of the practice in Stanford's Department of Management Science and Engineering. She teaches at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) and has a doctorate in neuroscience from the Stanford School of Medicine.

Image: Stanford Professor Tina Seelig explores the concept of the Invention Cycle in her teaching and in her book, "Insight Out." (Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service)

Long known as one of the greatest interpreters of consumers’ and businesses’ activities on the Internet, Mary Meeker is at it again.

Today, Meeker, a partner at the A-list Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, gave her annual talk on Internet Trends.

Speaking to the Code Conference, Meeker laid out her vision of today’s Internet, and how it compares to what went online in years past, in a 197-slide presentation (see it here).

Once the realm of stodgy bankers, the financial services industry is changing rapidly as young software engineers breathe new life into the sector. That’s good news for customers and even better news for job seekers. The emerging financial tech industry, known as fintech, is the perfect place for tech-savvy creative thinkers who want to disrupt a market ripe for change. Disruption has upended many industries, but financial services has remained stuck in traditions that date back to the aftermath of the Great Depression. Customers have to jump through hoops to get loans and put up with crappy web and mobile platforms. And their patience is wearing thin.

Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously approved the 21st Century Cures Act, which seeks to advance the discovery, development, and delivery of cures and includes language seeking to boost the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget. The committee also sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting further review of safety concerns at certain federal labs. It emphasized that a Food and Drug Administration lab in which smallpox was discovered on the National Institutes of Health campus last year had been inspected several times in the previous three years, and questioned why the potentially dangerous pathogen was not unearthed during those inspections.

If you are at a point of transition in your life—whether you’re moving from high school to college, college to career, or making a mid-life shift—now is the perfect time to close the gap between what you do and what matters to you. It's time to have more than just a job—do something you truly care about, make a difference in the world, and earn a living in the process.

I work with many angel investors and know that most hope and believe that their support helps the companies they invest in. Now they have proof. Two studies show real evidence that startups backed by strong angels really do better than their counterparts that fail to get such funding. The studies by Harvard Business School professors William Kerr and Josh Lerner and MIT Sloan School of Management professor Antoinette Schoar (along with Stanislav Sokolinsky and Karen Wilson) offer great insight into the power that angel groups have in supporting startup companies. Lerner presented findings of angel groups in the United States and previewed findings of angel groups abroad during a recent Angel Capital Association (ACA)webinar. He will formally present the findings of the global study June 2 at the London Business School. Although there’s been significant growth over the last decade in startup investing by angels, angel groups, and super angel funds, there are very few studies to assess the impact of these investments on startups.

Valuations have been a hot topic in recent equity crowdfunding investment opportunities. The valuations of some recent high profile crowdfunding campaigns have beaten new records. Professional investors are bypassed and left scratching their heads wondering what all of this means for them. Is the crowd enjoying a great party ignoring the hangover yet to come or is the crowd better than the professionals at valuing businesses and the professionals are history?

Nowadays, everything is about the power of the crowd - whether that's booking holiday accommodation through Airbnb or finding out the latest news on Twitter. It's tipped over into investment too, and now anyone can invest in a start-up venture through crowdfunding. Crowdfunding - also called democratic finance - works by pooling small amounts of money from multiple investors to invest in small businesses or projects on an online platform, usually in return for equity in the company or a perk. Given cash returns are languishing, it’s hugely popular: last year more than £1,700 was raised every hour, according to the UK Crowdfunding Association.

Aspiring entrepreneurs who rely only on traditional learning vehicles (teachers, classrooms, and risk-free practice) are doomed to failure in founding a startup today. Either they are never really ready to start, study an opportunity until it has passed, or fail with tools and techniques from a bygone business era. The Internet and the current information wave have changed everything.

While Oculus has created immersive virtual 3D worlds inside the Rift headset, there isn’t much it can do with the actual world around the headset. However, that might change soon, as the Facebook-owned company announced the acquisition of computer vision startup Surreal Vision on Tuesday. 

The deal could be the beginnings of Oculus' bid to extend its virtual reality (VR) promise to actual reality, including technology that can map out users' physical environment and replicate it digitally, to augmented reality (AR), which layers information over their view of the real world. Here's what Surreal Vision may bring to Oculus' table.  

People who earn a college degree before getting married are much less likely to become obese than those who graduate from college after getting married, according to a new study.

“People who get married before they earn a degree from a four-year college are about 65 percent more likely to later become obese than people who get married after college,” said Richard Allen Miech, a research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the study. “While a college degree has long been shown to be associated with lower levels of obesity, the results of this study indicate that the health benefits of college do not accrue to people who get married before graduating.”

Image: http://scienceblog.com

Whoosh and it’s gone! Trust can evaporate in an instant and organisations are notoriously poor at recovering it. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Greg (not his real name), the Project Director for a major international utility project, experienced a breakdown in trust.  After bumping into technical difficulties, his project was in free-fall.  Results were not happening.  The client was unhappy and the “integrated team” that had been rigorously hand-picked was descending into chaos.  Greg was rapidly losing the trust of his stakeholders.

Recovering trust is a daunting task.  It is often associated with an overhaul of governance structures and processes, with a detailed review of work practices and with the occasional product recall.  Moreover, reputation needs to be rebuilt with customers, investors and key stakeholders.  Even with all these efforts, progress is expected to be slow. 

THERE’S A NATURAL process by which some old factories within blocks of the Charles River in Newton, Watertown, and Waltham could have emerged as a hip new innovation hotbed.

The brick buildings, which already boast some tech-forward tenants, look like the kind of spaces where 3-D-printing artisans might set up shop or new hemp-based B2B e-commerce synergies might reveal themselves. Newton, Watertown, and Waltham, though suburban by the standards of Kendall Square, are denser than Austin or much of Silicon Valley. And there are at least a few watering holes nearby where local entrepreneurs could develop a shared identity — as denizens of, say, a “Charles River Mill District” — after sharing their aspirations over craft ales over the course of years.

Image: CLOUDLOCK Employees at CloudLock, a cloud security company based in the Watch Factory building in Waltham, enjoy dedicated deck space on the river. Suburban towns are branding the area “Charles River Mill District.”