In the video below, Arianna Huffington makes an astute point about how society defines success: 

"We have been living under a collective delusion for a long while now that burnout is necessary for success, that if you really are serious about succeeding, building a company, climbing the career ladder, then you just have to accept that’s going to require burning the candle at both ends."

Image: http://bigthink.com

It's been nearly 4.5 years since Apple cofounder Steve Jobs passed away. But he remains a role model for many today – the gold standard of a tech visionary.

One of the few men who could call himself Steve Jobs' boss, former Apple CEO John Sculley, talks about why in his new book, "Moonshot."

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#mediaviewer/File:Steve_Jobs_Headshot_2010-CROP.jpg

Thinking about starting a business this year? Most likely you already know that you need to build out your product, service, website, but what about everything else?

A booming business isn’t born overnight. It takes patience and hard work to lay the right groundwork. Whether you plan to build a mobile app or digital media consulting group, here are eight things to consider as you get ready to launch:

Every week it seems like there's a new story with the headline "Cycling Is The New Golf."

While golf "still commands the highest portion of participants with household incomes above $100,000 among popular sports," according to Reuters, its popularity is waning, and the number of courses has been on the decline in the US the past eight years.

Organizations such as edX, Coursera, Udacity, Saylor, OLI and a range of others like the United Kingdom’s long-established Open University will continue to create and refine an ever-larger catalogue of college courses that anyone in the world with an Internet connection can take, for free. Over time, those courses will be organized into sequences that approximate the scope of learning we associate with college majors.

Image: (Illustration by Doug Chayka)

Watch out Silicon Valley! Some of America’s most unsuspecting cities are luring in a new generation of entrepreneurs. Small business owners nationwide are more confident in the economy now than at any other time since 2008, and they're channeling that optimism into new business ventures. This begs the question: where are the best places in America to launch these new businesses?

(Reuters) - Nancy Kessler spent much of her career as a museum curator, but she also has had a lifelong love of working with older people. During one stint working with Alzheimer's patients, she noticed a gap in one type of caregiving: "There is a lot of wellness and physical therapy but not much intellectual stimulation."

Last year, she decided to do something about that. Following a layoff at age 58, she launched Memoirs Plus, which specializes in writing memoirs for seniors. The idea of her business is to provide her clients with intellectual stimulation and a creative activity that helps them tell their life stories.

Can you really teach entrepreneurship? That question gets asked a lot, both in business and academia. Some claim you can learn the skills necessary to be a successful entrepreneur. Others say you either have “it” or you don’t, whatever the heck "it" is.

But I think we're asking the wrong question. It's not about whether you can teach skills to be a successful entrepreneur, but rather what skills need to be taught or learned. For instance, when it comes to the hard skills, anyone can learn them, either in a classroom or on the job. These include things like finance and accounting or branding and marketing or legal. They are the skills that lead to specific action… the “doing” of running your business.

Are you an investor looking for the next best socially minded business or an entrepreneur looking for hot industries where you can have a big impact? Then education should be near the top of your list.

The education-technology sector is ripe for disruption, investment and rapid growth, while offering the coveted opportunity to dramatically alter people’s lives and the global economy.

RamRock Building Systems is all about waste: industrial solid waste, to be specific, and making it into something that serves a purpose.

Using hydraulic compression, the Chattanooga company's technology aims to take discarded demolition and construction material and turn it into interlocking building blocks.

"They stack up like Legos," said David White, RamRock's co-founder and CEO.

Image: RamRock Building Systems, LLC, makes masonry products from non-toxic industrial waste, such as roofing shingles. This demonstration shows how the blocks fit together to make a wall that can be covered behind traditional building materials. This photograph was taken Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn.

46 states and Washington D.C. had at least one tech exit in 2014. California retained the number one spot with more than 520 private company tech exits, which was more than the next 5 states combined. New York came in at a distant second with over 150 exits including OnDeck Capital and Varonis Systems. Massachussets was the only other state with more than 100 tech exits, beating out Texas which fell to rank 4 and below the 100 tech exit threshhold.

Somewhat surprisingly, Florida beat out the tech hubs of Washington and Illinois with the exits of Prolexic Technologies and BlueKite. Maine, Arkansas, and Kentucky entered the rankings in 2014 after being shut out in 2013.

The United States and Europe continue to dominate the list of strongest metropolitan areas (city) economies in the world, according to the Brookings Institution's recently released Global Metro Monitor 2014. This is measured by gross domestic product per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity (GDP-PPP). Brookings points out that this does not indicate personal income, but "proxies the average standard of living in an area."

Obsessed with mobile growth? Join us February 23-24 when we reveal the best technologies and strategies to help your company grow on mobile. It all takes place at our 5th annual Mobile Summit at the scenic Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, CA. See if you qualify here.

National innovation agencies are becoming a common feature of government support for innovation around the world.  From Tekes in Finland to CORFO in Chile, and Innovate UK closer to home, these organisations help catalyse commercial developments in science and technology and support businesses to innovate. 

While there has been a lot of interest in these institutions in recent years, there has been little systematic analysis of their role in driving innovation and economic growth.  At Nesta, we are starting a new research project that will look under the bonnet of national innovation agencies and better understand how they work.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/70534377@N00/79476476

It’s been another bad week for America’s benighted patent system: a Texas jury ordered Samsung to pay a patent troll $16 million for using Bluetooth — even though the “inventor” admitted Bluetooth had been on the market for years before he patented it. The system is a mockery.

Still, its defenders say, the system is working because it facilitates “tech transfer” and the passing of critical knowledge from inventors to companies. But now even that justification is collapsing in light of a new study that suggests patent licensing often does nothing at all to promote research or new products.

Canada has a diverse and dynamic technology landscape, with new startups emerging from Halifax to Vancouver.

Yuri Navarro, executive director of The National Angel Capital Organization, along with experts from three booming startup communities across Canada—Carl Furtado of Waterloo’s Golden Triangle Angel Network (GTAN), Ross Finlay of Halifax’s First Angel Network (FAN) and Mike Volker of Vancouver’s Angel Technology Network (VANTEC)—have identified these top five fastest growing trends for Angel Investing in 2015.

Image: http://www.techvibes.com

Even though I love technology, I always cringe when an entrepreneur starts his investor pitch to me by touting his new technology. They have forgotten that new technologies are perceived by most customers as causing more pain than the problems they eliminate. I chastise these startups to highlight the solution created by the technology, rather than highlighting the technology.

In a statement yesterday (Thursday, February 19th), the Ontario Securities Commission shared they expect to release crowdfunding rules this coming summer.  The proposed rules entered a comment period last year and the Commission has been in the process of reviewing the feedback;

“The comment period ended on June 18, 2014 and the participating CSA jurisdictions collectively received approximately 916 comment letters regarding the OM exemption and approximately 45 comment letters regarding the crowdfunding regime. We are reviewing the comments and our goal is to publish the OM exemption and the crowdfunding regime either in final form or, if warranted, for a second comment period, in summer 2015.”

Deloitte has launched the 2015 Top Technology Talent Competition for a fifth year seeking innovative ideas from college students on how technology can solve a business problem.

The winner of the 2015 Top Technology Talent Competition will win a trip to one of the Deloitte digital studios in the US, in addition to a six-week summer internship in Deloitte Ireland which will enable them to further develop their idea if they so choose.

Image: Deloitte launches 2015 Top Technology Talent competitionMaria Leacy, analyst, Peter Duffy, analyst, and Harry Goddard, partner, in Deloitte’s Technology Consulting team

In this article, Joshua Steimle shared why he thought great ideas are worthless. He simply writes “An idea combined with successful execution can change the world. An idea by itself is worthless.” Steimle begins by writing about how VCs don’t enjoy signing NDAs since they are oftentimes listening to ideas that don’t include a robust strategy – not something that they consider valuable. They don’t want to just hear an idea since they won’t be executing on it and if it’s not too hard to introduce, then someone else is bound to get to it sooner rather than later. All good ideas need to be paired with a worthwhile execution.