One of the key rules in business is to develop performance measures to understand your progress and learn from successes and failures.  Most angel investors insist that the entrepreneurs they invest in have a vibrant set of metrics from the get-go.  Isn’t it funny that most of us angels don’t demand the same standards of ourselves? Why don’t more angels create metrics on their own investing?

Ben Popper: This was the year the tide went out in tech, and we learned who was swimming naked. After five years of ever larger funding rounds, the market threw some cold water on the party. From Dropbox to Square to Snapchat, a lot of "unicorns" failed to live up to their sky-high valuations.

The poster child for this was Theranos, a company which claimed to have invented a revolutionary new technology that could identify diseases with just a pinprick of blood. It achieved a nearly $9 billion valuation and its iconoclastic founder graced numerous magazine covers. The only problem was, its technology and business didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

There's a lot of space junk orbiting the Earth these days.

Right now, NASA is tracking about 20,000 pieces of spent rocket parts, defunct satellites and bits of debris larger than a softball that are hurtling around the planet at more than 17,000 mph. There are also about 500,000 objects the size of a marble or larger being tracked as they orbit Earth and millions more that are too small to track, according to NASA.

Image: http://mashable.com

From improving their parental leave policies to diversifying their workforces, these are the companies whose good deeds in 2015 were enough to not only keep them off the Naughty List but win them special props:

NETFLIX The U.S. remains the only developed country in the world where employers aren’t required to offer some kind of paid leave for new mothers. In August, Netflix set an example for the rest of the nation when it announced a generous upgrade in its parental leave: New parents—moms or dads—would now get unlimited paid time off during the first year after their child’s birth or adoption.

Bozeman, Mont. — PERHAPS, like me, you were among the tens of millions who visited one of our national parks this year. If you did, you most likely shared my appreciation for the foresight of previous generations to set aside treasures like Yellowstone. This legacy of conservation has long served as a point of pride for our country, and rightly so.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com

Twenty fifteen can be described as the year when the Indian startup ecosystem grew out of infancy and started teething—which, of course, led to some pain. From soaring valuations and huge funding rounds to mass layoffs and rebellious entrepreneurs, this year was packed with action for the world’s third largest startup ecosystem.

Image: http://qz.com

Goldman Sachs' annual compendium of its 100 best charts from the year is a treasure trove of information on pretty much everything.

One chart that jumped out at me while I was browsing was the one below that shows the top 15 websites in 11 big countries from around the world. Google is the clear winner, and probably a bit surprising as a search engine, taking the top spot in 7 out of the 11 lists.

The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning held a meeting on Dec. 23 to review the outcome of the Korean government’s creative economy policy. At the conference, the ministry mentioned the establishment of 17 Centers for Creative Economy & Innovation as the most significant achievement of this year. The number of companies housed in these centers soared from 45 to 509 in 2015 alone.

Image: http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/

SOCIAL innovations are new strategies, ideas and approaches to solving problems, and the number of people actively changing things for the better has been increasing in Slovakia, even when the impacts remain limited.

“Searching for solutions that may bring real and deep changes is difficult and requires cooperation of several stakeholders,” Monika Brošková, a programme manager within the Pontis Foundation, told The Slovak Spectator. “It requires a critical mass of people who are able to offer, in a creative way, better alternatives, or to change the system, that has caused problems that bother us.”

Biologists often emphasize how little anyone really knows about the brain, the genome, and the mechanisms behind effective drugs. But this year their tune changed as diverse technologies–gene editing, stem cells, cloning, and DNA databases–coalesced into an immensely powerful toolkit for manipulating life. The message in 2015 seemed to be: “We can do anything.”

Electric cars are becoming quite cool, thanks to the likes of Tesla. Turns out, however, Elon Musk and his cohort don't have a monopoly on cool EVs. Sure, he might have the only one with Falcon Wing doors, but there are plenty of wild eco-friendly machines out there.

Image: RENOVO MOTORS 

Since it launched in 2013, Product Hunt has become the go-to place to find the next big app, gadget, or service.

Here's how it works.

A new tech product gets added, and then people vote on whether they like it or not. In this way, the site functions a bit like Reddit, though there is a heavy element of curation by Product Hunt's team, which decides what gets featured on various pages.

Image: Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover.

No matter what is going on in your career, chances are someone else before you had a similar situation.

I've been a journalist for the better part of two decades and during that time I've interviewed and written about thousands of people in various stages of success, from CEOs of multibillion companies to entrepreneurs launching startups (including one founder who launched a startup while fighting brain cancer.)

Each year MIT Technology Review selects 10 emerging technologies that we believe will remake the world. Here’s how this year’s picks got closer to reality over the past 10 months.

Magic Leap

When Rachel Metz of MIT Technology Review saw the four-armed blue monster, she knew Magic Leap’s technology was something special. The company is working on a headset that can make you see virtual 3-D objects blended seamlessly into the real world. Magic Leap doesn’t talk much about its technology or strategy. But we have learned that the company is working on silicon chips that process light and is inviting developers to create content for the headset, which does not yet have a public release date. Microsoft is working on a similar headset scheduled for a limited release early next year. Comparing demonstrations of the competing technologies suggested that both projects have amazing potential.

It’s near impossible to predict which stories will draw the most eyes, and this year was no different. The top 10 stories published in 2015—ranked by the number of overall page views—both confirmed our intuitions and surprised us, too.

The weather outside is frightful, because it is not beginning to look a lot like Christmas. In fact, only a smattering of Americans has a shot at waking up to a fresh dusting on Friday. Temperatures leading up to and forecast for December 25 run about 10 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in the U.S. Northeast, Southeast and parts of the Midwest. In fact, this Christmas Eve is expected to register as the warmest on record in many cities along the Eastern Seaboard. That balmy air eliminates the possibility for new snow in those regions. And out West, snowfall so far is absent to low unless you're in the mountains. Blame global warming? Blame El Niño? Actually, the primary factor is likely a climatic phenomenon centered over the North Atlantic Ocean that is keeping cold Arctic air in check.

New York, which saw a total of $7.65 billion invested across 775 deals in 2015, had some of the largest funding rounds in the U.S. The amount of capital exceeded 2014— a breakout year in its own right— when investors put about $4.5 billion into NYC startups. In both scenarios, the deals were mostly internet and mobile plays. By comparison, N.Y.C. is still second to the San Francisco Bay Area, which — according to PitchBook — has a whopping $34 billion invested across 1,900 California companies. New York Business Journal perused the largest funding rounds of 2015.

Don’t even try to manage Millennials, the largest generation in the workforce. Lead them. Yes Virginia, those born just before the turn of this last century are different. They cannot be managed the way other generations have been managed. They must be inspired and enabled through BRAVE leadership.

The BRAVE leadership framework is comprised of Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values and the Environment, building those from the outside in through context, purpose, strategy, message, and implementation. Applying those to Millennials:

Google Life Sciences got a rebrand today: It’s now called Verily. A new site is up as well to illustrate the company’s emphasis on wielding technology “to create a true picture of human health” – and “effecting prevention.”

Just as Google formed parent company “Alphabet” earlier this year, it’s clearly sticking to a literary theme with “verily,” which is a florid, Shakespearean way to say “truth, truly, confidently.”

Image: http://medcitynews.com 

On Monday, broadband services company Sandvine released data showing how video streaming utterly dominates the internet. During peak hours in North America, 70% of all bandwidth going from providers to consumers (that's "downstream" bandwidth) was taken up by video.