Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup. He had just turned 40. His father was ill, his back was sore, and he found himself overwhelmed by life. “Don’t laugh at me,” he said, “but I was counting on the singularity.”

My friend worked in technology; he’d seen the changes that faster microprocessors and networks had wrought. It wasn’t that much of a step for him to believe that before he was beset by middle age, the intelligence of machines would exceed that of humans—a moment that futurists call the singularity. A benevolent superintelligence might analyze the human genetic code at great speed and unlock the secret to eternal youth. At the very least, it might know how to fix your back.

The University of Central Florida has some cool, innovative tech projects in the works and because of the National Science Foundation's Innovative Corps program, or I-Corps, some of those projects stand a good chance of being funded by local investors. The I-Corps program, which started in late January, is a tech accelerator that is only available at 15 universities in the U.S., with UCF being the only Florida university to receive the grant for the program.

Coming hot on the heels of Techstars‘ launch of Techstars Berlin, the crew today they announced that they’ll be opening a hospitality-focused accelerator based in Berlin. The city has a fast-growing ecosystem for entrepreneurs, and the Techstars METRO Accelerator will help play a role in establishing the historic city as a burgeoning tech hub.

Techstars METRO will run in unison with their partners METRO AG and its sales line METRO Cash & Carry, an international player in wholesale trade focusing on the restaurant, hotel, and catering industries. Thechstars’ second partner is the digital agency R/AG with whom they’ve already run two accelerator programs.

David Arnold left New York City looking for answers. 

The managing director for Straight Shot, a startup accelerator headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, had just spent a few days with leaders of similar organizations. They were asking the same questions Arnold was: How do we get more good prospective companies to apply to our organization? How can we stand out among our growing field of competitors? 

Image: Straight Shot's David Arnold addresses a group at the accelerator's office in Omaha's Wareham Building - http://coaching.gallup.com

Most people think Valentine's Day was invented by Hallmark Cards. It wasn't. Valentine's Day is actually a well-documented, historical phenomenon -- its tangled roots winding their way through centuries worth of Christian liturgy, pagan tradition, myth, and an occasional beheading.

Born from 1981 to 1997, Millennials represent approximately 85 million Americans today.

By 2025, they could represent up to 75 percent of the American workforce.

The oldest Millennials turn 34 this year, entering primer age, historically, for entrepreneurship.

Q: What qualities do I need to possess in order to be an entrepreneur? -- Igbor Ubana Nigeria A: There’s one common thread among every successful entrepreneur: An unwavering need to build that cannot be deterred by quantity or severity of challenges.

Being an entrepreneur is not in the slightest tethered to business ownership. Sure, the CEO of a nascent tech firm is, by definition, an entrepreneur, but that same company’s engineer or salesperson has exactly the same opportunity to operate as an entrepreneur.

Boomers are aging out of the "entrepreneurship sweet spot." But their impact on the industry will stay strong.

Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of the economy and the boom in boomer startups has been a major pumping force. But the State of Entrepreneurship 2015 report released today by the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in studying and promoting entrepreneurship, suggests that the boomer binge just may be winding down.

The last decade’s IT-driven productivity gains have largely fallen off, according to a new paper that the San Francisco Fed put up Monday (Feb. 9).

Researchers John Fernald and Bing Wang focused on industries that intensively used or created information technology, and they found that the great digital revolution of the late 1990s’ and early 2000s’ “New Economy” era dissipated in the years just before the recession:

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- In April 2014 the Penn State Research Foundation created The Fund for Innovation to promote commercialization of promising new ideas and discoveries generated by Penn State's $800 million research enterprise. The primary goal is to create new companies and new jobs, and by doing so to increase the already sizable positive impact that Penn State has on the economy of Pennsylvania.

Image: http://news.psu.edu

A while back, I met with a great founder who’s really hustling. We spent some time discussing his idea and I shared some of my experiences with Buffer.

When we’d almost finished our 30-minute meeting, he had one last question:

"Plan vs build. Where do you stand?" I thought it was a fantastic question. Clearly it’s not a binary choice, yet I think it’s also good to ponder which of the two you should focus on.

On its 100th birthday in 2011, IBM ran a four-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times. It said: “Nearly all the companies our grandparents admired have disappeared. Of the top 25 companies on the Fortune 500 in 1961, only six remain today.” The ad may have been designed to hail IBM's resilience, but it also highlighted a telling observation for the new companies emerging today in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. 

Institutional America has knocked the start out of us. We need to get back to being great at starting things in our country. Calling all entrepreneurs. This means you. Yes, you. In talking with some of the most entrepreneurial people on the planet I am surprised by how many don’t think of themselves as entrepreneurs. When did that happen? Our economic history is all about starting stuff but we have gotten away from our entrepreneurial heritage. We need a national entrepreneurship movement. Maybe if we started by enabling more people to be entrepreneurial we would have more entrepreneurs.

Lowe’s Services India Private Limited, a subsidiary of Lowe’s Companies, Inc., the world’s second largest home improvement retailer, has recently announced the inauguration of its Global Innovation Center (GIC) in Bangalore, India to focus on the next-generation customer experience, by laying emphasis on technology and analytics to provide customers with a more personalized shopping experience. This center will work towards building a strong team to support Lowe’s efforts to become an omni-channel home improvement company.

A quick read around in contemporary business writing might show that we are on the verge of elevating innovation and innovators to some kind of mythical status.  It is becoming commonplace to equate those who consciously seek the new, the different, and the disruptive with an exceptional class of leadership and extraordinary business value.   This may very well be true.  But at the end of the day, after all, even innovators are simply people engaged in the world, doing their best.  We elevate innovators to high organizational status at the risk of trivializing what they attempt.

There are periods in history when opportunity is so close, it feels tangible.

Such was America’s Gilded Age from 1870-1900, when the number of U.S. millionaires jumped from 20 to 40,000 as entrepreneurs seized opportunities in railroads, mining, retail and finance.

Such has been China of the last three decades, where the rate of growth averaged over 10 percent per year.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

How much time do you spend enhancing your organizational culture, leadership pipeline, and employer brand? How well are those efforts reported to your investors? If you’re typical, then your culture, leadership, and employment brand are described vaguely or not at all. That may be changing as “enhanced” or “integrated” reporting gains momentum across the globe. It augers great benefits to leaders that have a strong human capital story to tell with numbers, and poses dilemmas for those not prepared to measure their human capital and organizational capability more precisely.

More and more companies are adopting software and product development frameworks like Agile, Scrum, and Kanban — which promote quick, iterative, lean production — to deliver higher quality products, faster. These methods help teams produce rapid, continuous improvements, via daily face-to-face communication and visual workflows.

Join TIA and our member companies at Brocade's headquarters in San Jose on February 18, 2015 for an unvarnished take on Net Neutrality and Title II, as we seek to present a united front against the re-classification of broadband Internet service as a utility no different from water or sewage.

On February 26 the FCC will vote on reclassification of Broadband to be regulated as a Title II utility service. If passed, Title II will have profound implications for the future growth and investment of the Internet in the United States and its global competitiveness.

NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The trailblazing young winners of the World Series of Innovation (WSI), the annual, global innovation challenge presented by Microsoft YouthSpark, were announced today.  The competition invited teams of students worldwide to devise innovative products and services that address everyday opportunities in seven categories. With nearly 800 international entries, two team winners were chosen in each category.