“We were able to email 10 of our customer advisory board members, give them mockups of the new feature and invite them for an hour of usability testing — we threw in Amazon gift cards as a reward — and the results were amazing,” says Peter Kazanjy, best known for co-founding recruiting startup TalentBin and his proven early-stage sales wisdom. “With a Customer Advisory Board (CAB), you essentially have a captive audience of folks who are fired up for your success, and who you can leverage on an ongoing basis to build the best product possible.”

You have this breakthrough invention. You know it will change the world.

But passion alone isn’t enough. You need moolah to fuel your innovations. And you think you’ve done everything you can to get a particular VC’s attention. You have called and emailed. And emailed and emailed.

In return, there has been zip, zilch nada.

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the best way for angels interested in making pre-seed stage investments to put money into start-up companies. I’ve come to the conclusion that investing in accelerator funds is better than joining an angel group. Angel groups are investor collectives that pool funds and management. Back in 1994, when the first angel group got started, they were an important organizational innovation in early stage finance.

THE ACCELERATION is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration.

Because the collapse of vulnerable parts of the ice sheet could raise the sea level dramatically, the continued existence of the world’s great coastal cities — Miami, New York, Shanghai and many more — is tied to Antarctica’s fate.

Four New York Times journalists joined a Columbia University team in Antarctica late last year to fly across the world’s largest chunk of floating ice in an American military cargo plane loaded with the latest scientific gear.

A new study by the Impact Centre at the University of Toronto suggests that Canada doesn’t have a problem securing patents for its inventions; it has a problem of commercializing them.

The study, Canada’s Patent Puzzle, looked at economic, patenting, and company data from several sources, including Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Gross Domestic Product and Triadic Patent Families data, Forbes’ Global 2000 List, and Research Infosource’s list of the top 100 R&D spenders in Canada.

It’s time for more entrepreneurs to reset their focus, and shift their thinking to completely different ways of doing things. Everyone talks about innovation, but the majority of business plans I see still reflect linear thinking – one more social network with improved usability, one more wind-farm energy generator with a few more blades, or one more dating site with a new dimension of compatibility. Serious changes and great successes don’t come from linear thinking.

Anyone who’s celebrated a significant work anniversary knows just how a company can change over the years—who has a seat at the table, what customers expect, the most coveted skills. But there’s just as much that stays the same: what your brand stands for, the shared lexicon, your unique culture. We use the term organizational DNA as a metaphor for the underlying organizational and cultural design factors that define an organization’s personality and determine whether it is strong or weak in executing strategy. (See Exhibit 1.)

On May 16 of last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally allowed both accredited and non-accredited investors to engage in regulation crowdfunding. Under the new SEC rules, startups and other private companies could offer equity in return for capital to help support business growth. As of May 2017, total contributions under the regulation crowdfunding into startups and small businesses are over the $40 million mark with an average investment of $833 per investor. Using data from the Crowdfund Capital Advisors, Catherine Yushina from Crowdfund Insider highlighted several data points about the first year of regulation crowdfunding:

MAY 10, 2017 —What if I told you that, contrary to the alarming headlines and eye-catching infographics you may have seen ricocheting around social media, new technologies aren’t shaking up the labor market very much by historical standards? You might think I was as loopy as a climate-change denier and suggest that I open my eyes to all the taxi drivers being displaced by Uber, the robots taking over factories, and artificial intelligence doing some of the work lawyers and doctors used to do. Surely, we are in uncharted territory, right?

New York will start approving applications for self-driving car permits this month, making it the latest U.S. state to open its roads to driverless vehicles.

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the year-long pilot program, aimed at exploring the possibilities of self-driving cars in New York and figuring out if they’re safe.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK - The NC PACES Act investment crowdfunding exemption is now in effect. Please see the Secretary of State Crowdfunding website to review the FAQs and rules. Investors will want to start by reviewing the excellent Investor FAQs there.

Investors should also review the investment process, investment types, vetting process, and risk analysis on the localstake.com website. Experienced crowdfunding platforms like Localstake.com that support PACES Act offerings do things that help reduce investor risk such as vetting of the businesses, background checks, checking on compliance with the rules, document management, escrow funds transfer management, and follow up reporting on your investment.

Honeywell on May 17 unveiled a roughly $100 million corporate venture capital (CVC) effort to invest in early stage, high-growth technology companies that match the Tier 1 provider’s portfolio and software ...