Josh Kopelman wrote a great post recently highlighting the current state of the early-stage funding market.

One of his main points was that the Series Seed round is becoming so easy to raise that founders aren’t being tested and thus often surprised when it becomes difficult to raise their Series A.

Image: http://techcrunch.com

Nearly 320 investors gathered Wednesday for the Ames Seed Capital LLC annual meeting to highlight the fund’s 2014 accomplishments.

“Our goal is to sort through the many emerging technologies and companies in central Iowa and invest in those where we deem our investment will help provide and grow and create value in the economic fabric of central Iowa and the state,” said Roger Underwood, outgoing president of Ames Seed Capital.

Virgin Media Business is to host an event in Edinburgh as part of a nationwide search to identify the best business minds across the UK with a £1m business accelerator prize fund on offer.

The VOOM: 'Pitch to Rich’ 2015 will comprise six events to take place across the UK in April, with the Edinburgh the event to be held at Dynamic Earth on April 29.

Image: Eventbrite

With the recent unveiling of the new Apple Watch, it quickly became apparent that wearables are just as functional as they are fun. Beyond activity reminders and new ways to connect with loved ones, wearables offer countless opportunities for businesses to track employee efficiency, get information quickly, and offer new services in areas ranging from banking to travel to medical scheduling.

Better pay, more joy in the job, or prerequisite to promotion? Whatever your reasons for deciding to build expertise in a new field, the question is how to get there.

Your goal, of course, is to become a swift and wise decision-maker in this new arena, able to diagnose problems and assess opportunities in multiple contexts. You want what I call “deep smarts” — business-critical, experience-based knowledge. Typically, these smarts take years to develop; they’re hard-earned. But that doesn’t mean that it’s too late for you to move into a different field. The following steps can accelerate your acquisition of such expertise.

Entrepreneurs the world over spend a lot of time thinking of ways to vault hurdles and break down barriers. One set of obstacles that could get a little easier to surmount are the immigration rules that keep foreign entrepreneurs out of the United States and away from its talent and capital.

Back when I wrote ISO A Scientific Revolution in Cancer Research in April of 2013, I truly did not expect to be able to greet the revolution by year’s end. By December 2013, though, Science magazine anointed cancer immunotherapy as the “breakthrough of the year”, and pharmaceutical R&D for oncology immunotherapy has been surging ever since. This is really good news for cancer patients and their families.

What's the future of architecture? Ask any architect and you'll probably get a different answer. But the future proposed by architect Marc Kushner, also the founder of Architizer.com, is an attractive one. Breathing buildings, treehouse-like structures—they're all there.

Kushner spoke about his vision, laid out in a new book called The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings, at a lunch during this year's TED conference in Vancouver. During the lunch, he echoed many of the themes from his TED talk in 2014—namely, that we, the general public, will shape that future.

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com

Washington – The U.S. Commerce Department’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will commemorate the 225th anniversary of the Patent Act by hosting a series of panel discussions at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia on Friday, April 10, 2015. Enacted on April 10, 1790, the Patent Act expanded upon the progress clause in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution which promoted “the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” by further defining the subject matter of a patent as “any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement thereon not before known or used.”

Internet of Things (IoT) systems usually consist of a set of sensors that collect information, which is then transmitted between different devices without human intervention.

At the same time, today’s mobile infrastructure — the devices, the apps — is typically all about human interaction.

At first glance, these two environments seem to be separate. But what if they talked to each other? I’d argue that this integration is actually key to making IoT work, especially under circumstances in which human interaction, judgment, and action can enhance data collection, analysis, and system behavior. In short, input from actual people will make the IoT smarter.

Image: Free Digital Photos

The road to self-assembling houses and shape-shifting robots could begin with something as simple as plumbing. Today when we want to build infrastructure for moving water around a city, we take rigid pipes with fixed capacities and then bury them. And the system works well enough—until we need to increase the flow of water to an area or until a pipe breaks. Then we have to dig the whole thing up and replace it.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com

Cybersecurity people like to say that there are two types of organizations—those that have been hit and those that do not know it yet. Recent headlines should prove that this joke is largely true. Cybercriminals stole the credit-card information and personal data of millions of people from companies that included Target, Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase. Security researchers discovered fundamental flaws in Internet building blocks, such as the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. A massive data-destruction attack sent Sony Pictures Entertainment back to using pen and paper. Criminals accessed the data of more than 80 million customers of health insurance giant Anthem. And these are just the incidents we know about.

One day in 1999 former NASA astronaut Duane Graveline, then 68 years old, returned home from his morning walk in Merritt Island, Fla., and could not remember where he was. His wife stepped outside, and he greeted her as a stranger. When Graveline's memory returned some six hours later in the hospital, he racked his brain to figure out what might have caused this terrifying bout of amnesia. Only one thing came readily to mind: he had recently started taking the statin drug Lipitor.

Image: Some people may have a genetic predisposition to suffer cognitive side effects, such as fuzzy thinking, when they are taking cholesterol-lowering drugs. CORBIS (man); CHRIS GALLAGHER Photo Researchers, Inc. (Lipitor pills)

(Reuters Health) - A small Australian study finds that grandmothers who take care of their grandchildren one day a week do better on cognitive tests than peers who mind grandkids more often, or not at all.

Researchers say the brain benefits from this form of "grandparenting" may come not just from having social engagement, but "active" engagement in those relationships.

"The key point here is they found that the socialization part was important primarily when it was associated with some kind of useful function," said Dr. William J. Hall, a geriatrician who was not involved in the study.

Do introverts, especially those who are shy, have what it takes to be entrepreneurs?

Tick off the personality traits you imagine a successful business owner should have, and you're likely focused on the traditionally extroverted traits. This imagined leader might be charismatic, be a people person (crucial for networking), and already have an impressive list of contacts.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

Government processes. They’re complicated, tedious and drawn out.

But what if there are millions of dollars on the other side of that process? Better yet, what if there was someone willing to sit down and walk you through it? Someone who has trudged through that muck themselves.

If you’re a Delaware business or research organization, you’re in luck.

On April 20, University of Delaware’s Small Business Development Center will open up its Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) sessions. The sessions encourage small businesses to apply for federal grants and contracts through SBIR and STTR to develop high risk/reward technologies. Plus, they’re free to attend for Delaware businesses and researchers.

Image: Get grant writing guidance. (Photo by Flickr user David Wall, used under a Creative Commons license)

1. The first armed drones were created to get Osama bin Laden.

In 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration shut down an operation to kill the al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan with cruise missiles, given collateral damage estimates of 300 casualties and only 50 percent confidence in the intelligence. As the 9/11 Commission noted, “After this episode Pentagon planners intensified efforts to find a more precise alternative.” In 2000 and 2001, the U.S. Air Force struggled to reconfigure a Hellfire anti-tank missile to fit onto a Predator surveillance drone. Meeting one week before the 9/11 attacks, the National Security Council agreed that the armed Predator was not ready to be operationally deployed. The first known killing by armed drones occurred in November 2001, when a Predator targeted Mohammed Atef, a top al Qaeda military commander, in Afghanistan.

M&A may seem hot in the life sciences, but that and IPO activity is starting to cool across all sectors, according to a new report from the National Venture Capital Association. The first quarter of 2015 saw less than 20 venture-backed IPOs since the first quarter of 2013. Independent of sector, when it comes to deal size, this quarter was the slowest in M&A since the first quarter of 2013.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Three years after its unveiling, the $35 million venture-capital fund being pooled by Ohio State University and Ohio University is taking concrete steps toward launching. The OSU-OU Innovation Fund has selected a managing partner and expects to announce the pick this month, pending final contract negotiations, said Stephen Golding, Ohio University’s vice president for finance and administration.

Provo, Utah; Raleigh, N.C.; and San Jose, Calif.; are miles apart geographically and culturally, but they share at least one thing: a high sense of well-being among their residents, according to an index that ranks metro areas on factors that contribute to peoples’ productivity and health costs.

The 2014 Community Well-Being Rankings are the latest from the polling company Gallup and the consulting firm Healthways, both of which started surveying across the U.S. and abroad in 2008. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index surveyed residents to get a sense of their social, physical and financial health, as well as their sense of purpose and connections to their community -- all factors that contribute greatly to worker productivity, societal health costs and the economic competitiveness of a place, Gallup and Healthways argued.

Image: Honolulu ranked in the top five. (Wikimedia Commons/Steve Bozak)