We haven’t heard much about the Hyperloop since Elon Musk first confirmed he was working on the concept back in August 2013. That’s hardly surprising, the maverick innovator always said he only wanted to show the world that it was theoretically possible and would leave its actual construction to someone else.

Image: http://memeburn.com/

Technological innovation is the wellspring of human progress. Despite this, a growing array of interests – some economic, some ideological – now stand resolutely in opposition to innovation.  Inspired by Englishman Ned Ludd, who led a social movement in the early 19th Century to destroy mechanized looms out of fear that the Industrial Revolution was going to ruin his way of life, today’s “neo-Luddites” likewise want to “smash” current technology. However, while for the most part these advocates no longer wield sledgehammers, they do wield something much more powerful: bad ideas. Neo-Luddites have worked to convince the public and policy makers alike that technological innovation is something to be thwarted. Indeed, the their target is broad, including genetically modified organisms, new Internet apps, smart electric meters, health IT, big data, and increasingly productivity itself. In short, they want a world in which risk is close to zero, losers from innovation are few, and change is glacial and managed.

Riccardo Ocleppo, the online entrepreneur behind student-sharing platform Docsity.com, shares five of the key startup lessons and essential entrepreneurial skills he’s learned along the way.

1.  Don’t give up Keep in mind that founding a startup is a long road; there will be lots more startup lessons to learn, and you will need strength and courage. It’s natural to get discouraged, just don’t give up!

As an entrepreneur, I’ve made it a point to use all resources available to me to make sure I’m running my company to the best of my ability and considering all perspectives. Of course, this includes talking with my mentors and teammates, as well as getting consistent feedback from my customers. What I’ve also found extremely valuable is taking the time (which I know is hard to find) to sit down and read.

Image: Moritz Plassnig

Jan 15 (Reuters) - China will set up a government venture capital fund worth 40 billion yuan ($6.5 billion) to support start-ups in emerging industries, in its latest move to support the private sector and foster innovation.

"The establishment of the state venture capital investment guidance fund, with the focus to support fledging start-ups in emerging industries, is a significant step for the combination of technology and the market, innovations and manufacturing," China's State Council, the cabinet, said in a statement.

(YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif.) — A pair of Americans on Wednesday completed what had long been considered the world’s most difficult rock climb, using only their hands and feet to conquer a 3,000-foot vertical wall on El Capitan, the forbidding granite pedestal in Yosemite National Park that has beckoned adventurers for more than half a century.

Image: http://time.com

SAN JOSE -- The Silicon Valley economy, fueled by fast-growing innovation industries like nowhere else in the country, has rebounded strongly from the Great Recession and is poised for more stellar growth. But the region has stumbled in its quest to create a skilled talent pool that can meet the hiring appetite of the high-tech sector, according to a report released Wednesday.

Technology businesses now account for 33 percent of the economic output of Silicon Valley, defined as Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco counties, the report from the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Community Foundation has found.

Image: A view of downtown San Jose, Calif., on Monday, Jan. 12, 2015. (Gary Reyes/Bay Area News Group)

Samsung has supposedly approached BlackBerry in a $7.5 billion takeover bid, reports Reuters. Its sources say that executives from both companies were in talks as recently as last week—presumably during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. 

Image: The BlackBerry Classic announcement 

We live in a globalized world. Working globally often means working with teams in different locations. Unfortunately, those locations may not always be in the same time zones. Can people work well together when very few of their business hours overlap?

Hillan Klein, chief operating officer of domain registration and web hosting company Namecheap, thinks so. "We want to build a business with the best talent we can find," he says. So as they’ve scaled up, "we looked at talent without geographic boundaries. This gives us a global source pool."

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

Over the years I have observed that organisational high flyers display many contradictory behaviour patterns, and it’s this paradoxical nature which makes them so successful. Spotting nascent stars can be a challenge, not least because we can’t always be sure what we’re looking for. Some may first impress us as ‘‘golden larvae’’, but never complete metamorphosis, while others grow into true butterflies.

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PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A student and young entrepreneur at Penn’s Wharton School has won a major award. “I was so humbled, to be honest,” says Wharton junior Aaron Goldstein after being named Entrepreneur magazine’s “College Entrepreneur of the Year.” He won for developing a smart thermometer called “Fever Smart.” The wearable device has a computer chip in an adhesive bandage which, Goldstein says, can help parents keep tabs on a sick child’s fever.

To be an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to jump into the deep end. And that takes courage. 

But courage is just the beginning. At a fundamental level, most entrepreneurs need to repeatedly overcome adversity and pursue opportunities with very limited resources. 

Last week, Bruce Croxon, a Canadian entrepreneur and former dragon on CBC-TV program “Dragons’ Den,” stopped by MaRS to deliver a down-to-earth, informative and fun lecture to an enthusiastic Entrepreneurship 101 crowd. He offered a ton of advice on everything from how to tell if entrepreneurship is right for you to how to hire the right people to why pitching dog products on “Dragons’ Den” is a bad idea.

Once upon a time, a teen with an entrepreneurial streak had few options: babysitting, mowing yards, or maybe a paper route.

These days, young people are designing clothing lines, designing apps and creating other businesses before they finish – or even start high school.

You’ve heard it before: Don’t mix business with pleasure. This could certainly be the case if you dabble with the idea of going into business with a friend. If you’re not careful, the relationship can turn sour very quickly and hurt your business in the process. On the other hand, a close, trustworthy dynamic could result in tremendous benefits for a business.

The Office of Management and Budget says members of a new team of tech innovators working to straighten out digital projects in government have had their noses to the grindstone over the past few months.

Presumably, members of the U.S. Digital Service have even been too busy to set up a website of their own.

But all that’s about to change.

Image: http://www.nextgov.com

For Scotland’s universities, the four-year undergraduate degree is the “gold standard” intended to offer a broader and more flexible education compared with three-year courses on offer elsewhere in the UK. This may be so, but there has of late been something of a rush to launch three-year programs north of the border, joined most recently by the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Did you know that in 2014 the world hit 52% of its entrepreneurial capacity? That’s according to the Global Entrepreneurship Index, which hosted last year’s 2014 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Morocco. As this ecosystem of small businesses continues to grow and thrive, standing out from the crowd is going to become an increasingly difficult challenge. So, how can you do it?

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Successful startups seem to follow similar paths to greatness, and unfortunately all too often that path leads them back down the hill much faster than they went up. Big company powerhouses, like IBM and Xerox, took fifty years to make the cycle, but new companies today, in the age of the Internet, often make the cycle in five to ten years, or even less. Consider MySpace and Webvan.

Late last year Communitech's HYPERDRIVE welcomed applications for their fifth cohort with a new investment thesis, one that gave priority to companies with female co-founders.

This morning the Waterloo-based accelerator announced that they're once again tweaking their model. HYPERDRIVE is being replaced with a new late-stage sales accelerator called Communitech Rev.