Though many of the skills entrepreneurs need to succeed aren’t usually taught in a classroom—taking risks, sales experience, and just basic fearlessness—more colleges are developing curriculums to help breed startup founders. After all, starting a company a few years after college is the new law or medical degree. And women are really driving this movement—they’re graduating from some of the top schools in the nation.

Why Able

I first got acquainted with Able Lending when I participated in the Penn Design Challenge, a competition where multiple teams work on a product design challenge posed by a company. This year, that partner company was Able.

I was keen to work with a fintech startup over the summer in a product role. My goals for the summer were to gain experience in product thinking, prototyping and testing process.

Image: Every Friday, the entire Able team spends 30 minutes sharing their weekly learnings. 

BANGALORE: Startup fever is on the rise in India and Modi government is supporting the growth in every possible way. By 2020, the nation would a hub 11,500 startups as per industry trackers. The startup space is also expected to see an investment of a whopping 15,600 Cr or $ 2.25 bn, reports ET. 

"India needs several folds increase in mechanism such as incubation & acceleration that can assimilate entrepreneurs to make them globally successful,”said Executive Director, Indian Steps & Business Incubators Association, Raghunandan Rajamani.

Few companies need to be sold on the benefits of digitization. McKinsey research shows that companies have lofty ambitions: they expect digital initiatives to deliver annual growth and cost efficiencies of 5 to 10 percent or more in the next three to five years.1 Yet despite the often-substantial investments companies have made in digital initiatives, few see that kind of growth.

Is Google about to take a huge dive into the health industry?

The search engine giant has just filed a patent for a “needle-free blood draw” system that could be worn on your wrist and help people who need regular draws to get blood quickly and painlessly, according to a The Verge report.

The patent was just published this week and is therefore still pending. It lays out how the blood draw system would work: it would send gas into a barrel with a micro-particle that would pierce the skin, releasing blood that is quickly sucked up in the barrel that has negative pressure.

The fascination with technology “unicorns” seems about to go the way of Bigfoot sightings, Area 51 aliens and Furbies.

And tech startups will be better off for it. Really.

At the moment, a lot of Silicon Valley is in a panic. There’s been a party going on for the past year, and it apparently just ran out of beer.

Business development companies, aka BDCs, are the stock market’s answer to venture capitalism for individual investors. By buying shares of BDCs, shareholders indirectly invest in start-ups, which are typically only accessible to accredited, very high-net-worth investors through venture capital and private equity firms. BDCs finance and invest in private, small- to mid-sized firms, with annual sales of $10 million to $300 million, in an array of industries.

TinyCo Inc. was in big trouble last year. The mobile-game startup owed $10 million to Silicon Valley Bank but didn’t have the money to pay it off. Company co-founder Suleman Ali was so stressed that he broke out in hives.

Then, Marc Andreessen, the prominent technology investor and one of TinyCo’s directors, made a call to Silicon Valley Bank. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz LLC, borrows from the bank, and SVB invests in startups through the giant venture-capital firm.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have created the thinnest plates that can be picked up and manipulated by hand, using corrugated plates of aluminum oxide. They are thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper and hundreds of times thinner than household cling wrap, but they spring back to their original shape after being bent and twisted.

Like cling wrap, comparably thin materials immediately curl up on themselves and get stuck in deformed shapes if they are not stretched on a frame or backed by another material. Graphene is even thinner, but it also curls up.

Image: Even though they are less than 100 nanometers thick, the researchers’ plates are strong enough to be picked up by hand and retain their shape after being bent and squeezed. (credit: University of Pennsylvania)

It’s not unusual for executives to enter a new job with deep-seated feelings of being an impostor. Our research studying thousands of leaders rising into bigger jobs revealed 69% feel underprepared for roles they assume. Forty-five percent had minimal understanding of the challenges they would face, and 76% said their organizations were not helpful in getting them ready. Fearing exposure as a fraud, many leaders overcompensate with extreme attempts at flawlessness. There are three common, but mistaken, beliefs they share:

When you’re running a meeting with people from different cultures, you need to consider your colleagues’ different needs and approaches. How do you brainstorm ideas, make decisions, and address conflict in a way that is comfortable for everyone? Which culture’s preferences should be the default? And how can you be sure that people who aren’t from the dominant culture participate and are heard?

The government’s flagship $1 billion innovation statement has been revealed, focusing on facilitating more private investment in early-stage startups and collaboration between the public sector and private businesses.   Announced by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at the CSIRO headquarters in Canberra on Monday afternoon, the statement includes 24 policies costing $1.1 billion over four years and covering 11 portfolios.

In the past couple of years there has been a rise in sovereign wealth funds’ investments in healthcare. These cover a wide range of areas from hospital chains to pharmaceutical companies, but it also includes direct investments in digital health startups. China Broadband Capital invested in smartphone diagnostic developer Scanadu and French Groupe Arnault includes Clue, a maker of female health apps, among its investments. Alaska Permanent Fund is one of the founding investors in Denali Therapeutics, a biotech business targeting neurodegenerative disorders.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Today, Microsoft is trying to keep up with other tech giants, but sixteen years ago, the company was regarded as a leader in technology.

In 1999, Microsoft released a video segment about the connected home of the future. While the bulky 90s products, like a cell phone that looks more like a Game Boy, have since rendered themselves obsolete, the tech featured in the video — voice recognition, biometric identification, and more — is pretty spot-on.

The Chronicle's executive-compensation package has been updated with information on private-college presidents for the 2013 calendar year.

The update provides data on 558 chief executives at 497 private nonprofit colleges in the United States. The median salary for leaders in office for the full year was $436,429. Thirty-two of the presidents earned more than $1 million.

The most recent data on public-college presidents, also from 2013, include information on 238 chief executives at 220 public universities and systems in the United States. The median salary for those in office for the full year was $428,250. Two of the presidents earned more than $1 million. Read our latest report.

A NEW entrepreneurs’ visa will be introduced by the federal government to lure the world’s brightest technologists to set up in Australia under a “brain gain” policy.

A move to relax immigration requirements will form part of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s $1 billion innovation policy to be announced today.

With Australia’s digital literacy regressing, permanent residency will also be made easier for overseas students to remain here on finishing science and tech research programs, rather than returning home.

Image: Mr Turnbull has made innovation a key policy area to take to the next election / Picture: Kym Smith

In a rare national address from the Oval Office, Sunday, President Obama reiterated his administration's strategy for confronting the threat of international terrorism. Among the actions the President laid out, he called on "high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice."

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, and recent mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., by two individuals who appear to have been radicalized by jihadi ideology, there has been a renewed focus on the tech industry when it comes to tracking and preventing online communications by would-be terrorists.

Image: President Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office - Screengrab via WH.gov YouTube

Why do established companies struggle to become more agile? No small part of the difficulty comes from a false trade-off: the assumption by executives that they must choose between much-needed speed and flexibility, on the one hand, and the stability and scale inherent in fixed organizational structures and processes, on the other.

Start-ups, for example, are notoriously well known for acting quickly, but once they grow beyond a certain point they struggle to maintain that early momentum. Equally, large and established companies often become bureaucratic because the rules, policies, and management layers developed to capture economies of scale ultimately hamper their ability to move fast.

Image: http://www.mckinsey.com

When I was much younger everyone, myself included, wanted to be a hedge fund manager. And who could blame us. After seeing the kind of houses these folks lived in, any sensible bloke with aspirations of ditching the 30-year old Fiat for a Porsche wanted a hedge fund of their very own. They clearly brought only wonderful things to those who had one… except maybe Raj Rajaratnam.

Developing countries have been raising the issue of technology transfer to address their development challenges for quite a long time. Particularly in the global discussion of climate change, technology issues have always been at the forefront. It's being suggested that just like the way the food crises of 1960 triggered the need for a "green" revolution, climate change agenda should trigger the process of transferring technology to developing nations to upgrade both products and production process and make them cleaner and climate-resilient.