Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
More often than not, I meet with a hopeful entrepreneur about a potential venture capital investment and leave the meeting with a simple response: the person’s company just isn’t ready. Your company may have traction, could have customers, or might even have revenue – but that doesn’t mean you’re ready for venture funding. Check out this list and then give my office a call.
Image: http://www.forbes.com
Everyone is saying “curated.” And that can mean only one thing: “curated” is played out. At Potomac Tech Wire's 2014 Venture Capital Outlook Thursday, five D.C. area venture capitalists were asked to name the most tired phrases of 2013, those eye-roll-inducing terms entrepreneurs drop over and over when describing their startup.
Image: Joanne S. Lawton
As a lawyer dedicated to helping early stage entrepreneurs develop and polish their value propositions I have been struck by the confluence between entrepreneur rap sessions with potential investors and jazz jam sessions (given my parallel career as a professional jazz pianist for over half a decade). My thesis for this piece is that the optimum creative and integrational modalities of a quality jazz jam session may be instructive to prospective and practiced entrepreneurs.
Image Courtesy of nuttakit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
This has been the year of the image—whether selfies, memes, pins or what-have-you. Social sites that emphasize pictures over text—Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr being the chief examples—hit it big this year, both in user growth and in the billion-dollar valuations investors lined up to assign them.
Prior to 2013, many folks considered the Visual Web a fleeting trend that wouldn’t stick around. Here are some of the newsworthy moments that convinced the tech world otherwise.
TALLINN - The Estonian state plans to enter the risk capital market via the state-owned Kredex foundation and invest 60 million euros in start-up companies, reports Postimees. Postimees claims that the state intends to create a fund of funds with an amount of 60 million euros and channel that money into sub-funds for which the state picks fund managers. In all sub-funds, private investors will add funds in addition to state funds. In addition to state money, private investors should add ...
Image Courtesy of sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
It's almost 2014, which means it's time to reflect on the past year, with its ups, downs, inspiring moments and tragic events.
For the second year, filmmaker Jean-Louis Nguyen has created a video montage that remembers the year's most headline-making moments — or as, he writes in video's YouTube description, "the stories that brought us together this year."
Image: http://mashable.com
“So you pay yourself last?” That was the summary of an entrepreneur friend gave upon learning the economics of VC. Thought it was an interesting way of phrasing it, and applies more generally to one’s approach in creating value: do you pay yourself first or last?
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
On Dec. 7th, a team of Jake Gittlen Cancer Research Foundation scientists led by Dr. Khai C. Ang presented at the Midtown Scholar on an up-and-coming new way to fundraise for the scientific community: crowdfunding. Their talk, entitled, “Bridging the gap: engaging the public in scientific research,” highlighted the current publicly-disengaged structure of academic research. Conventionally, research is solely funded through government agencies such as NIH and NSF; the public is not privy to the progress of research except through subscribing to academic journals, which are written for a purely scientific audience and difficult to understand for non-scientists.
Image: http://www.harrisburgmagazine.com
Phone booths offer some office privacy for those working for or running the start-ups that have set up shop at business incubator 1776’s space in Northwest Washington.From left are Josh Hurd of Nonprofit Metrics, Kim Bryden of Kitchensurfing and Jeb Ory of Phone2Action. Michel du Cille / The Washington Post
Image: http://www.washingtonpost.com
The original idea for an “idea lab” was only supposed to last one year.
“I wasn’t thinking long term. I didn’t think I’d be doing this 17 years later,” said Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, Los Angeles’ first startup incubator, which was formed in 1996.
Everyone in the business world has heard of the old bestseller by Geoffrey A. Moore titled “Crossing the Chasm,” but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers.
"Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for." - Viktor E. Frankl
The first job I ever had was working second shift in an injection plastics molding factory in Binghamton, New York during the summer between my first and second years of college. I started on the simplest machine making tiny, yellow, dynamite caps and worked my way up to operating injection molds that made plastic liners for sewer pipes, contraceptive foam applicators, and plastic cogs for sewing machines. Each mold was operated by one person so there was no one to talk to, except on break, but the novelty of moving from machine to machine every night was enough to keep me motivated for the first couple of weeks.
Image Courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Batteries made from pigments found in cuttlefish ink may lead to edible, dissolvable power sources for new kinds of medical devices. Researchers led by Carnegie Mellon University materials scientist Christopher Bettinger demonstrated the new battery. “Instead of lithium and toxic electrolytes that work really well but aren’t biocompatible, we chose simple materials of biological origin,” Bettinger says.
Image Courtesy of sscreations / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
We all spend more time on email than we should. But does when you do that first check matter?
When I started writing about what the most successful people do before breakfast a few years ago, many people asked me where email fits in a productive morning routine.
We know there’s a school of thought--best summarized by Julie Morgenstern’s wise book Never Check E-Mail in the Morning--saying you shouldn’t check it early on. But many of us do, in fact, a recent survey done by the Huffington Post and Real Simple found that 47% of the 3,583 women polled kept their smartphones on their night stands so they could check email right when they woke up.
Image: http://www.fastcompany.com
There are lots of times when I’m stuck on a title for a post, or the perfect word for something I’m writing.
Fortunately, we’re pretty keen on experimenting and testing here at Buffer, so I can try lots of different ideas and see what works best.
Even better, though, is having some data to give me a rough guide on where to start. I found some really useful data about crafting the perfect blog post or copy, and hopefully you’ll find it useful too.
Image: http://www.fastcompany.com
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just got a physician, big university administrator, and one of the world’s most respected drug developers rolled into one as its new CEO.
Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the chancellor of UC San Francisco since 2009 and the former president of product development at Genentech, has been hired as the new CEO of the Gates Foundation, according to a statement from the foundation. She will start on May 1. UCSF said Sam Hawgood, the dean of the school of medicine, will replace Desmond-Hellmann as interim chancellor.
Image: http://www.xconomy.com
Area 52 Games, in conjunction with Disney Interactive and LucasArts, announce a brand new free-to-play Star Wars game coming to the PC.
Star Wars: Attack Squadrons will allow up to 16 players to bring customized “popular Star Wars ships” into massive space battles. As seen in the game’s trailer and first screens, staple Star Wars ships like X-Wings and TIE Fighters will make an appearance, as will new ships and environments that are being announced in the coming weeks, according to IGN.
Image: http://mp1st.com
A major part of the human experience is learning about new tools and how to use them — a process the Internet makes much easier and quicker. Thanks to the massive amount of online information and tutorials, it's simple to find the best ways to complete tasks and actions of all difficulties.
According to data from Google, Internet users were preoccupied with classic dilemmas in 2013, searching for answers to questions such as how to tie a tie and how to flirt, as well as some more modern issues, including how to unjailbreak their smartphones.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
While English is the most popular language on Twitter, it may surprise you that the majority of published tweets are not in the mother tongue of the company's founders.
Just over one-third (34%) of all tweets were in English in September. With 16%, Japanese is the second-most popular language on the microblogging network, while Spanish clocks in at third place.
Image: http://mashable.com
Thanks to the Internet, we no longer have to be too embarrassed to ask "obvious" questions. Instead, we type them into a search engine and hope no one is peering at our screen. We can find answers to the most basic inquiries with very little digging, whether it's the goings-on of the world, medical worries or whatever is trending on Twitter.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
