Tanya Van Court was a career corporate executive. Moving from telecom to television, she rose through the ranks at ESPN and Nickelodeon, eventually becoming senior vice president of marketing and education partnerships at Discovery Communications. But all that climbing on the corporate ladder didn’t completely prepare her for one critical part of making the leap to entrepreneurship: making the pitch to potential customers

There’s nothing worse than arriving home from Ikea, so excited about your new living room furniture, only to spend the rest of your weekend slaving over the assembly instructions and cursing in Swedish.

A new piece of software, recently detailed by a team of researchers spanning Singapore, China, and Israel, promises to design furniture that assembles without screws, wood, or glue. Instead, you can piece this furniture together by hand because every part interlocks.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

TAMPA — The University of South Florida continues to climb the list of the nation’s most prolific patent-holders, now sitting at number 10 among U.S. universities for patents granted last year.

USF was granted 104 patents in 2014, according to a report from the National Academy of Inventors and the Intellectual Property Owners Association. The Tampa school was tops in the state, with the University of Florida Research Foundation ranking 15th with 87 patents, the University of Central Florida 23rd with 66, and Florida State University 52nd with 30.

So you decided that an accelerator is appropriate and helpful to your company. You read 10 Reasons to Join (or not to join) an accelerator post and decided to go for it. Filled out the application, researched different kinds of accelerators, applied, and got in.

Congrats! Now the work begins. Here is how you can maximize what you get out of the program.

Work backwards from your goal.

"Patience is a virtue," the saying goes. But I'm not a patient person, and neither is my husband, yet we've managed to build and sell companies we stuck with even during the bad times.

It may be a matter of semantics, but discussions about entrepreneurship often boil down to the difference between patience and persistence.

They may work with you. But they’re not ready to trust you.

That’s a message entrepreneurs are sending in the MedCity News survey on corporate venture capital commissioned by Lake Whillans. Among the 450 innovators who took the survey, most made it pretty clear: we want to work with anyone who will give us cash and competitive advantage.

As we reported in January 2015, 2014 was a banner year for venture capital on all fronts, from fundraising, to investment and exits – save, however, for the small drop in the number of deals versus the largest aggregate dollar investment since 2000. The momentum and deal-size trends continued through Q1 2015, with the highest VC funding for any quarter since 2000 and the highest median valuations on record. Fewer, larger deals continued through Q1 2015, which saw $13.4 billion in total VC investment. www.pehub.com; MoneyTree Report, PricewaterhouseCoopers and NVCA based on data from Thomson Reuters . A Dow Jones VentureSource study actually estimated a final Q1 2015 total of $15.7 billion investment in U.S. startups and Prequin puts the Q1 2015 number at $16.3 billion. Big VC plays on later-stage companies totaling $4.2 billion (a 62 percent year-over-year increase) included SpaceX’s $1 billion raise and a $530 million round for Lyft. There were no noticeable shifts in industry group allocations, with software, media, consumer internet and biotech continuing to lead the pack. Dow Jones Venture Source.

Robert Herjavec, star of ABC's "Shark Tank" and spokesman for Small Business Revolution, recently sat down with us to talk about small business and entrepreneurs. Here he shares his thoughts on what trait any entrepreneur must have to succeed.  To learn more about Small Business Revolution, visit them online.

Over the past two years, we have had one of the most significant tectonic plate shifts in the evolution of the startup ecosystem in India. We are seeing legions of young people, often right out of college, experiment and innovate across business sectors, to bring in new ideas which enhance efficiencies, open new gates of opportunities, level the playing field and connect various geographic and demographic dots.

Entrepreneurs are well known for being fearless, independent risk takers. However, in reality, many entrepreneurs find themselves facing personal challenges that can be overwhelming. In fact, San Francisco researcher Michael A. Freeman, who is conducting an analysis at The Entrepreneurship Center at the University of California, San Francisco, reports a higher rate of mental health conditions like depression among entrepreneurs compared to the general population.

Crowdfunding for all kinds of projects, businesses and products is all the rage right now. It's making some major inroads into real estate investment as well. Basically, it is a process by which small investors can participate in very large projects with smaller cash outlays. Some real estate crowdfunding is allowing investments as low as $100, though most are at least $1,000 and many have six figure requirements.

This may be one of the best environments for tech companies to receive funding since the extreme financing figures recorded during the tech boom in 2000, according to a new Small Business Administration (SBA) factsheet. In Q1 of 2015, venture capital (VC) investments totaled $13.4 billion making it the fifth straight quarter to see over $10 billion in VC investments. This trend is part of a sizeable post-recessionary rebound in VC evidencing major growth – VC investments have grown by more than 150% over the last five years. However, this increased VC activity is not benefiting many early stage startups because VCs are shifting away from funding startups as they are just developing. Most VCs are making targeted investments in more mature tech companies in order to potentially jump in before companies go public. The result of this trend of late stage investment by VCs has caused a reduction in the availability of risk capital for promising startups.

Young entrepreneurs are rushing to launch their dream business as investors and policy makers enthusiastically encourage a new startup trend, opening doors for people to strike gold and reverse the economic slowdown.

In the first quarter of 2015, Chinese investors staked about US$260 million in angel capital, tripling the amount registered in the same period a year earlier, venture capital and private equity research firm Zero2IPO Group said on Wednesday.

The workplace can be full of conflict. Groups of people, driven by different goals inevitably find themselves at cross purposes and disagreements flare up, regardless of industry or country. Add personality clashes and different personal values into the mix and the firm can become a crucible of professional rivalry. Sometimes it can become destructive to the firm as a whole.

When most cities announce they want to increase the number of people taking transit and biking and walking, they tend to do so with little action or funding to actually accomplish that goal. Dublin, on the other hand, is poised to take a major step to ease congestion and encourage use of alternative transportation: Ban personal cars in sections of the downtown core.

Have you ever walked beneath an overpass and seen a mural or simple gathering of benches and shade plants in the gloom? There’s something thrilling, secretive and even populist about the experience — encountering space reclaimed for people beneath a monument to cars, commerce and GDP.

Image: Chat Travieso/Design Trust for Public Space

The cost of entry for an aspiring entrepreneur has never been lower, and the total wealth of opportunities has never been larger. You can start a new web site business on the Internet for as little as $100, with cheap smart phone apps, new technology innovations, or tapping the multitude of opportunities brought by capitalizing on our concern for dwindling natural resources.

Last month, I focused on the new sharing economy, so this time I wanted to highlight how a shortage of something, like natural resources, should be seen by an aspiring entrepreneur as a wealth of new startup ideas. I was inspired by a recent book, “Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century,” by Stephan Heck and Matt Rogers.

I’ve heard many investors and some executives repeat the mantra, “Never offer exclusive deals,” and since this blanket statement is generally bad advice I thought I’d offer the less conventional but I believe more practical version of why exclusive deals can actually be a huge bonus for a startup and why I actively encourage them.

As Sarah Allred explains, while color perception universally involves the practice of categorizing colors according to basic labels, the influence of categorization on color memory remains largely unknown and understudied.

“So that leaves a lot of questions unanswered,” says Allred, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers University–Camden. “‘Do we remember colors just as we saw them?’, ‘Does time affect how we remember colors?’, ‘Are some colors easier to remember than others?’”

For those healthcare providers still resistant to technology, you've got a problem on your hands: You're going to be left behind. This is where healthcare it going – with or without you.

That's according to a new Accenture report, Healthcare Technology Vision 2015, which lays out five key trends in the industry that show adaptation might be the best business model.