In many ways, 2014 turned out to be the year of the smartphone. Headlined by the release of Samsung’s water-resistant, feature-filled Galaxy S5 and Apple’s new “phablet,” the iPhone 6 Plus, the past year produced a slate of big winners in the mobile industry. It also produced several huge flops.

Image: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Jim Merithew/WIRED

Social networking has captured the imagination of users and businesses alike. More and more businesses today are using the social web for marketing. According to the CMO Survey, spending on social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, currently at 9% of marketing budgets, is projected to rise to more than 21% over the next five years.

Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable.

If you walk through the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, you may feel like you’ve stumbled upon a grown-up version of a high school science fair meeting the popular television show, “Shark Tank.”

At least that’s how Andy Robinson, chairman of the ACT-IAC Institute for Innovation Advisory Board, describes his organization’s second annual “Igniting Innovation” awards showcase.

NIH to Decentralize Tech Transfer Responsibilities. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Intramural Research has proposed decentralizing some technology transfer responsibilities;namely, the authority and responsibility for the implementation and execution of patenting and licensing from its Office of Technology Transfer to NIH institutes and centers. There will be webinars to discuss the proposal on February 13, and public comments are due February 17.

Experience shows that the companies that stay innovative are the most likely to succeed and thrive. They must constantly look for the latest emerging trends and incorporate the most relevant ones into their business strategy. Not surprisingly, these companies are usually the ones that have the highest engagement of their most important creative resource – their employees.

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When gauging a region’s long-term prospects for economic growth, not all jobs are created equal.

It’s likely that those characterized by commercial innovation will be crucial to the economy in the coming years. A Brookings Institution report released today identifies these select sectors -- known as advanced industries -- that it says will help sustain regions’ future economic well-being.

Image: Medical and diagnostic laboratories are one of the 50 advanced industries studied. AP/Mike Groll

Before graduating college, I won over $20,000 from business competitions, pitched my idea to Mark Cuban, traveled for free, and rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. I often reminisce and wonder…how the heck did I do that?! Those accomplishments were the result of amazing opportunities I took advantage of, and you can too.

The common denominator was my participation in business competitions. Aside from the monetary aspect, competitions have afforded me surprisingly awesome opportunities, such as the ones mentioned above. Competitions are not for the faint of heart. Your ideas are often rejected and you’re left questioning their validity. The thought of entering can be scary.

Before we start, let’s agree on a working definition of persuasion.

“Persuasion is how we can make people change the way they think, feel or behave.”

It covers a wide variety of techniques that you can use to influence the mind of others…

And don’t consider persuasion as something that you have to put up with, consider it as something you should use.

There are a number of good reasons why a startup should consider venture capital (VC) support.

1. Guidance and support: This is frequently cited as a major selling point by entrepreneurs. VC investors understand the sectors they invest in intimately – they are experienced in the field and know where things are headed. For instance, a VC that specializes in technology will meet frequently with senior executives at blue chip technology companies in Canada and Silicon Valley, and have insight into research and development and strategic road maps that can help steer the product/service toward something the established category leader would highly value. VCs also have people on their teams that have built similar companies in the past. In short, they have the experience, know-how and incentive to help grow your business.

Let’s say you want to build a hotel on the moon. Would you buy the land? Claim it? With private companies racing to make space access cheaper, this question is becoming far less of a joke and far more of a real concern. And it’s led the US Federal Aviation Administration to start laying plans to license US businesses to operate on the moon, Reuters reports.

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A new study shows that Silicon Alley's claim to being the strongest tech sector outside Northern California is being challenged not only by familiar rivals like Seattle and Boston, but also surging new ones like Detroit. The Brookings Institution released a study on Tuesday that ranked the relative strength of "advanced industries"—sectors that employ STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) workers in jobs like engineering, technology or applied research—to the overall local economy of the largest 100 metro areas in the U.S. According to the data, advanced industries in the metropolitan area making up New York, Newark and Jersey City have seen impressive growth, supporting 630,840 jobs in 2013 (the most among the top 100 metro areas included in the study) with a total annual output to $152.6 billion (the second highest).

After growing up on Cleveland’s east side, Bill Fuller headed for North Carolina in 1990. He returned briefly in the 2000s, but he didn’t think he’d ever come back. But when BioEnterprise asked him in 2013 to become its newest CEO-in-Residence, he couldn’t resist the opportunity.

Through the program, Fuller was given a team of advisors, access to investors, a salary – albeit significantly less than what he was making with his 15 years as an executive in the medical device industry -- and 18 months to find a biomed company worth starting and nurturing.

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Do a quick Google search of “work-life balance” and over 260 million results will flood your screen. But the current conversation often treats “work” and “life” as separate and, all too often, in tension. We make annual resolutions, detailed daily plans, and to-do lists, but we do so as individuals — generally not sharing those plans or planning jointly with those closest to us. And we often think of our personal and professional goals as occupying distinct and separate spheres. But what if the work and home “spheres” could merge and actually improve the odds that we’ll achieve our goals?

On a scale of one to five, how important is having a good network to your ability to accomplish your goals? When I ask my executive students this question, most of them answer in the fours and fives. Even the most naive of them agree that, like it or not, relationships hold the key to both their current capac ity and future success.

How do you measure love? Beyond the supermarket magazine or social media “quiz” that we’ve probably all taken, you really can’t. It’s a feeling. You just know.

But when thinking about a brand’s relationship with consumers, the marketer in me needs something more concrete. I need to know how many of my consumers are in love with my brand and the degree of their passion. To try and measure that emotion, I use a “Brand Passion Score” that ultimately shows how in love a consumer is with the brand, and more importantly, why.

We live in the age of narcissism and social media’s only making it worse. That’s a fairly common sentiment among media pundits and one which, on the face of it, has plenty of evidence to back it up. After all, they’ll argue, there’s a reason “selfie” the Oxford Dictionaries Online word of the year in 2013. And think about how we tailor the content we put out on social media. It’s meant to portray the best possible version of ourselves rather than anything accurate. Thing is, that may all be about to change.

When approaching economic development in Memphis, it’s important to consider the impact that high-growth entrepreneurial companies have made locally and nationwide.

In fact, the Kauffman Foundation found that most net new jobs in the last 30 years have come from high-growth entrepreneurial companies.

Mark Zuckerberg and Elizabeth Holmes could be facing some competition in the near future, as more Americans dive into entrepreneurship. About 14% of the U.S. population was involved in starting or running businesses in 2014, up from a post-recession low of 7.6 in 2010, according to a sweeping new study scheduled for release today.

Millennials are a key driver of the trend, with 18% of 25 to 34 year-olds in the U.S. starting or running new businesses in 2014, up from 15% in 2013, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a study of more than 200,000 individuals in 73 countries.

Deadlines are looming for the over 400 accelerator programs revving up their spring and summer programs, so now’s the time to send in those applications.

Budding entrepreneurs should be on the lookout for new programs from accelerators focused on transportation, robotics, eye care, and medical devices.

Over 400 accelerator programs are listed in CrunchBase, and right now some of our favorites are revving up for their Spring and Summer batches. With deadlines quickly approaching, it’s time to send in those applications.