Before 2012, Arkansas startup founders looking to join an accelerator program to fast-track their ventures had to look out of state.

The ARK Challenge gave them a reason to stay home. The state’s first startup accelerator, the ARK was funded into life in 2012 when Innovate Arkansas submitted an application to the $37 million Jobs & Innovation Accelerator Challenge, an effort by the U.S. Department of Commerce to spur job creation within targeted regional industry clusters.

Image: http://www.arkansasbusiness.com

A herbal tea that could combat malaria is due to start its first clinical trial in July, researchers have announced.   The brew, called Saye, will be trialled against the conventional malaria drug artemisinin with funding from the Ministry of Health in Burkina Faso. The Saye tea has been used in the country for more than 30 years.   Saye is a mixture of three plants, including the root of the local N’Dribala plant (Cochlospermum planchonii), and was first licensed as a herbal medicine in Burkina Faso ten years ago. But the compounds it contains that might act against malaria have yet to be identified.

Are you up for the challenge? Here's how to qualify.

We welcome innovative technology startups from all over the world that are building a scalable business and are interested in presenting their products and representing their country at the 2nd Annual World Cup Tech Challenge 2015.

How to apply:

• Fill out all the boxes in the application 
• Upload an Executive Summary of no more than two pages 
• Submit a 2-minute video-pitch (recommended, but not required).

The deadline for submission is May 4! Applications will be screened as they come in, so we strongly encourage you to submit your application before the deadline. The 24 qualified startups will be announced by May 15.

Green Bank, W.Va., is not the sort of place where one would expect to find high-speed Internet. Surrounded by rocky terrain, the hamlet of fewer than 200 people lies on the edge of the Allegheny Mountains. Cellphone service is unavailable for miles and radio transmission is strictly limited to avoid interference with a federal astronomical observatory nearby. It’s a place where residents can, quite literally, live off the grid.

Image: Green Bank, W.Va., resident Alfred Ervine watches a technician hook up his new Internet and TV service. David Kidd

Managing baffles us with its complexity. Leaders looking to improve managing do not know where to start, much less where to finish. So even though the gales of creative destruction continually threaten their enterprises, they do not necessarily see radically revising their managing as the obvious solution. But that’s exactly what their enterprises need.

Image: Free Digital Photos

1. "You gotta manage the time."

"I'm most productive making music on the road, in hotels, or in planes, because that's when I have no distractions. Not that my family is a distraction, but when I'm home I feel selfish if I'm not spending half the time with my son. But if I'm working on a project somewhere else, I can just focus. Next week I have the whole week with my son and then I won't see him for a while—I'll be gone for three weeks. So you gotta manage the time."

Image: Free Digital Photos

More than half of all healthcare practitioners, or 57 percent, said that on “most days” they feel more attached to computers than their patients, according to a recent survey conducted at the Integrative Health and Medicine conference.

In addition, 65 percent of healthcare practitioners have considered leaving medicine because it was no longer rewarding, according to the poll of 754 practitioners, of which 78 percent where physicians.

Image: Free Digital Photos

The traditional mode of starting a company has been to plan a serial process, where you complete once all the steps, leading to the “big bang” launch of the company. I strongly recommend a dramatic departure from this model, called “planned iteration” or Lean Startup methodology, where you assume you won’t get it right the first time, so you launch with a minimum viable product (MVP).

Successful CMOs achieve growth by leveraging technology. Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we'll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited. Request your personal invitation here!

It seems like everywhere you turn these days, companies are appointing “Chief Revenue Officers” (CROs) – especially at hyper-growth startups like AdRoll, Mixpanel, and New Relic. While the title is becoming increasingly common, each company tends to define the role in a slightly different way. As a CRO myself who works with other CROs every day, it’s been fascinating to see how this new breed of executive is evolving and spreading.

A marketer’s job is more complex than ever, thanks to our increasingly digital world. Now, the Canadian government has thrown another challenge into the mix: Canada’s Anti-Spam Law, or CASL, presumed to be the strictest marketing regulation in North America. And they won’t just affect Canadian companies.

CASL fines can be as high as $1 million for an individual violation and $10 million for businesses, and we’re starting to see the fallout. Just last month, CASL’s very first million-dollar fine was handed out to Quebec company Compu-Finder. Two weeks later, well-known companies Plentyoffish Media Inc. and Avis received fines.

by Dr. Ellen Brandt   

The second high-priority Agenda item for the Bring Back the Meritocracy! project in 2015 is persuading top-tier venture capital groups to launch "new-old-style" venture funds, focused on founders and early-stage entrepreneurs over the age of 40, and participating in the administration of such funds once they are launched.

We're calling these funds "new-old-style," because far from being an aberration, they represented the historical norm up to a very few years ago, when venture capitalists seem to have lost their collective sanity - or at least, their collective common sense - and began to focus way too large a part of their efforts on funding extremely young entrepreneurs, some still in their teens.

Perfectionists are often reminded that "done is better than perfect." But it turns out there’s another reason we should all try to create more "done" moments in our workdays.

Saying the word done can help you get more accomplished on your to-do list. "Telling ourselves that we’re done creates not only an emotional reaction but a physiological response as well," says Leslie Sherlin, a psychologist, neuroperformance specialist, and the cofounder of the brain-training company SenseLabs.

If you are one of the many professionals still trapped between jobs by circumstances outside your control, or are about to dump the loser job you have now, you should be actively defining and starting your own business, in parallel with looking for that ideal job. Let me explain why this is a win-win deal, no matter what the outcome.

You have probably secretly always wanted to run your own show, but with an existing job, never took the time to consider a startup. Then there was always the risk of failure, which of course doesn’t apply once your real job is gone. Also, for most of us, not having done it before, we have no idea where or how to start.

By Joe Ferguson 0 A grow-our-own economic-development strategy is taking root in Tucson.

It’s fueled by a larger wave of university-driven tech startups and patents, and by the growth of business incubators and mentoring centers.

Also contributing is a downtown hipster-inventor spirit that’s resulted in collaborative “co-work” spaces and “maker” movements.

But it’s also a stopgap strategy born of necessity.

Malala Khan wants to empower women with technology.

The UND student is using her training as an electrical engineering major to develop a product—perhaps a smartphone app—aimed at "crowd security," although she didn't want to give too much away about her product.

"I'm a tech person," she said. "I have ideas, but I don't know how to turn them into something that could be sellable."

As a facilitator of the creative process, I continue to be astounded by how few organizations have any kind of process is place to PAUSE, reflect, and make sure they are coming up with the right questions. Apparently, I'm not alone.

1. "It's not that they can't see the solution. They can't see the problem." - G.K. Chesterton

Vaccine London, April 25, 2015 (Reuters/NAN) The world’s first malaria vaccine, produced by GlaxoSmithKline, could be approved by international regulators for use in Africa from October.

The final trial data showed that the shoe, called RTS, S offered partial protection for children for up to four years.

It will be the first licensed human vaccine against a parasitic disease, and could help prevent millions of cases of malaria, which currently kills more than 600,000 people a year.

Entrepreneurs and investors often speak of the so-called capital gap.

They’re typically referring to the challenge that exists for a startup between the arrival of seed funding and more substantial institutional investment designed to take a company beyond concept to the customer.

In Austin, there’s also a perception gap.

“I would again draw an analogy to venture capital,” observes Ben Thompson, in a typically incisive Stratechery post eviscerating the new streaming service Tidal. “The importance–and amount–of venture capital has never been greater.1 The truth is that because so many folks can now get started it is that much harder–and more expensive–to cut through the noise.”

Indeed. Music, movies, books, and other arts have always been “tournament” industries, in which most success accrues to a minority of blockbuster hits, as described by a power law. For every billionaire J.K. Rowling, you find ten thousand frustrated unpublished novelists.

Despite the rush in every academic institution to offer more courses on entrepreneurship, I still haven’t found it to be something you can learn in school. Of course, you can pick up the basic principles this way, but the problem is that the practical rules for success are changing so fast that no academic can keep up. The best thing you can learn in school is how to learn.