When Reno fell, it fell hard. It fell the way you fall after hitting 21 and then going bust on double or nothing. It fell the way you fall when you find out your husband is sleeping with his secretary. It fell like a boxer hit with the knockout blow. All have played into the checkered history of Reno — a city that has, at various times, relied on gambling, quickie divorces and prize fighting to power its economy.

Every entrepreneur can learn from a mentor, no matter how confident or successful they have been to date. Most people don’t know that billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, for example, gives real credit to the inspiring mentorship of Steve Jobs for Mark’s Facebook success. Yet most entrepreneurs simply don’t know how to work with a mentor. It is not as simple as one person giving the other all the right answers.

It would be almost three hours until Tesla’s big announcement, but inside a Northwestern University classroom near Chicago Thursday night, the famed nuclear critic Arnie Gundersen had the inside scoop:

Tesla Motors TSLA +1.99% CEO Elon Musk was about to announce an industrial-scale battery, Gundersen said, that would cost about 2¢ per kilowatt hour to use, putting the final nail in the coffin of nuclear power.

By Jof Enriquez

U.S. legislators recently released a discussion draft of the medical innovation bill known as the 21st Century Cures Initiative. The legislation aims to hasten the discovery, development, and delivery of new medical devices and drugs, particularly for the treatment of thousands of diseases for which there are no cures.

The proposals in the draft include ways to revamp how agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) foster and regulate medical innovation in the U.S.

Vint Cerf, co-creator of the internet and polymath icon is continuing to be a catalyst for global innovation and change as he clearly demonstrates in my engaging chat with the legend. His influence on government, industry, education, society and its ripple effect with executives, technology professionals, enterprises, SMBs and consumers plus history is without measure.

Internet fads constantly come and go, but one that has stubbornly stuck around, despite repeated incorrect predictions of its imminent demise, is the QR (Quick Response) code. So what is a QR code and why is it important? If you’ve never heard the term before, you may be scratching your head right now.  While the more Internet savvy may already know, for those who don’t, here’s what a common QR code looks like:

When trying to get investors for your startup, you need to present a great idea. But potentially even more important is how you present yourself as a leader. Martin Zwilling recently wrote about this investing concept for Forbes, saying: “As an Angel investor in early stage startups, I’ve long noticed my peers’ apparent bias toward the strength and character of the founding entrepreneurs, often overriding a strong solution to a painful problem with a big opportunity. In other words, the entrepreneur quality is more important than the idea.”

Most of the matter in the known universe is stuff that we have no way of seeing. Dark matter--the incredibly dense, invisible material that exists between stars, planets, and all the other objects that we can see--accounts for over 80 percent of the total matter in the cosmos. What can astrophysics teach us about innovation? In an organization, spaces that exist in the gaps between bureaucratic processes, spaces that all too often go undetected, much like dark matter, are the richest areas of growth. Think of the places that straddle more than one department, that live outside of the normally rigid distinctions we follow, or that combine two or more areas of expertise. We call these spots in a business the whitespaces. Working in whitespaces is about making dark matter visible, lighting up the promise that hides in the shadows.

Image: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

If you’re hoping to kill it at work this week, you may want to take a cue from Mark Teixeira and Jeb Bush.

Both the New York Yankees baseball player and the Republican US presidential hopeful have shed pounds and turbocharged their energy in recent months by changing their diets. For Teixeira, that entails eliminating sugar, gluten, and dairy. For Bush, it means much the same, along with limiting himself to lean meats, seafood, eggs and nuts.

There are few things that Deloitte's consulting arm and Box's file sharing business have in common. Yet the CEOs of these respective companies agree on two big problems at their respective companies that keeps that up at night. 

On a Monday panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, Jim Moffatt of Deloitte and Aaron Levie of Box first agreed that recruiting and retaining top Millennial talent is top of mind for their diverse companies. While Moffatt is working to empower young employees to stay at the firm longer by giving them more diverse work, Levie is grappling with the challenges of running a 1,300-person workforce with the average age of 25 or 26. 

Various powerful new tools for exploring and manipulating the brain have been developed over the last few years. Some use electronics, while others use light or chemicals.

At one MIT lab, materials scientist Polina Anikeeva has hit on a way to manufacture what amounts to a brain-science Swiss Army knife. The neural probes she builds carry light while collecting and transmitting electricity, and they also have tiny channels through which to pump drugs.

A perfect storm is an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances aggravate an environment drastically. In the entrepreneur world, I feel we are in such a situation now for new startups, with the confluence of business recovery, the explosion of new digital technologies, and the political turmoil around the world.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 

A General Motors promotional film envisions the future: Drivers enter the highway, put their cars on “autopilot” and sit back as the vehicle takes over and heads for the horizon. The film’s date? 1956.

Sixty years later, automakers are making that dream a reality.

But the technology has sprinted ahead so fast that lawmakers and regulators are scrambling to catch up with features like hands-free driving that are now months away, rather than years.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com 

Rising competition from neighbouring countries is challenging Singapore’s attractiveness as a business destination and an entrepreneurial hub with a  with a world class startup ecosystem.

Its reputation as a centre for multiple business clusters has generated significant benefits and synergies for the city-state. This and the fact that it still is the densest startup ecosystem in the world (with a world-class legal and other infrastructure, governance and reputation) has helped maintain its stature, despite certain deficits.

Image: Constellation of Singapore startup system by Zach Tan of IDA (2014) 

Every savvy entrepreneur knows that having an A-plus team is the difference between successfully raising capital and getting a product launched,  versus looking down the cold, hard barrel of failure. Hiring developers can be one of the most daunting tasks when it comes to choosing team members, especially for the entrepreneur who has little to no coding skills and might be flying blind. I reached out to Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal, a network of engineers created by engineers. Only 3 percent of engineers considered are accepted following a rigorous screening process. Here's 10 tips Du Vall offered for evaluating a developer:

The modern research university was conceived in 19th century Germany by Wilhelm von Humboldt to advance higher education from basic knowledge acquisition toward the higher ideal of knowledge generation. By combining teaching and research by placing students in labs alongside their professors, this new model fostered academic freedom and research innovation. It also provided a steady stream of young, creative, and motivated scientists. Universities worldwide quickly adopted this model and this built the brain trust that launched the industrial revolution.

Illinois' economy is sputtering. And it's not because the state's economic development agency isn't doing its job. In fact, it's partly because the agency exists in the first place.

For years, Illinois' economic development agency, the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, or DCEO, has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the biggest companies in the state, leaving taxpayers with the bill and small-business owners struggling to succeed on an unequal playing field.

My last post was about how Silicon Valley is evolving into an urban form that’s not quite leafy and open enough to be a suburb anymore, but not really vibrant and compact enough to be a proper city either. “Too thin to be jelly. Too thick to be jam.” The story got an unusually large number of visits. I received some well informed comments that touched on the reality that Silicon Valley is a big place and I shouldn’t generalize. Palo Alto is very different from Fremont and so on. It’s not all isolated corporate enclaves. Fair enough. So here’s a quick follow up that explores the jelly in the jam.

Image: Google 

BENGALURU: In a sign of the rising opportunities in India, the country outpaced China in the number of deals struck by venture capital (VC) funds in the first quarter of 2015.

India saw 69 deals happening in the first quarter as against China's 66, according to a report by CB Insights, a New York-based firm that tracks VC funding. India saw the most deal growth among Asian countries, at 60% compared to the first quarter of 2014, when the number of deals stood at 43.

Startups in the Middle East are looking attractive enough to turn a few seasoned professionals into venture investors in the region.

For the MIT Arab Startup Competition this year, Hala Fadel and her colleagues received 5,000 entries from eager entrepreneurs in the Middle East. This youthful embrace of entrepreneurship, says Fadel, who spent a dozen years investing in pre-IPO and public equities in Europe, is one reason why she decided last year to quit her job in Paris and co-found a Middle East venture capital firm called Leap Ventures, with offices in Beirut and Dubai.

Image: Leap Ventures cofounder Hala Fadel  - http://www.forbes.com