LAS VEGAS — If the skateboard and Segway had a strange, high-tech love child, it would be the IO Hawk. It's as weird and wonderful as it sounds.

The IO Hawk, by the company with the same name, is a self-balancing motorized personal transporter. It's one of the many tech products on display at the 2015 International CES this week.

Feel like a big fish in a small pond? Sales numbers healthy but not growing anymore? There are a lot of moving factors to weigh before you start seriously scaling your business. When should you pull the trigger and take things to the next level?

I asked 15 entrepreneurs from the YEC how they knew it was the right time to scale their businesses and why. See what they had to say, below.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/83346641@N00/3760104591 

PORTSMOUTH — New Hampshire startup incubator Alpha Loft announced the launch of Accelerate NH, a startup accelerator program for NH.

The three month intensive program will aid startup founders in accelerating the development of their innovative companies.

Program director Joshua Cyr explains, “building a scalable innovation-based business on your own is very difficult. Our goal with the program is to provide significant focus and aid to founders and their companies and also create a more vibrant startup ecosystem and business economy for New Hampshire.”

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Startup accelerators have been around for years, but 2015 marks the 10-year anniversary of when business incubation truly became popular.

Accelerators like Y Combinator and Techstars figured out in 2005 and 2006 that providing seed money, advice, and connections over a condensed period of time can help businesses grow. They helped pave the way for all the startup accelerators we see today.

The super star creative professionals who make well-executed designs, possess rare abilities, work hard and seem to be so lucky inspire us all. So, what "secret sauce" might aid the next tier of top designers? They might be well advised to try sleeping their way to the top.

Failure is a part of life, especially for entrepreneurs. Most new businesses fail within the first few years, and even if your business is one that survives that harsh initial trial, you’ll experience plenty of smaller failures along the way.

Seasoned entrepreneurs know that no single failure could ever be enough to compromise the success of a dedicated mind. Instead, failures are merely temporary obstacles in a long journey. They are experiences to be learned from, and mistakes that improve our abilities.

PARIS — Fifteen young entrepreneurs have 90 seconds to pitch their products, from belts that automatically adjust to digitally-connected insoles to recycling bins that do the separating for you.

The typical setting for such a competition would be Berlin or London, long considered at the heart of Europe's young start-up culture. But this is playing out in a drab basement in middle-class Paris – testing assumptions about the friendliest tech countries in the region.

Image: Steve Marcus/Reuters 

Recently, I have seen a lot of pitches by entrepreneurs looking for money. As I have read through their emails, listened to their elevator pitches, and stared at their power point decks, I have become convinced of the following: Most entrepreneurs do a lousy job of pitching investors. Five mistakes occur so often that I feel compelled to offer suggestions on how to avoid them. So here are my five recommendations to entrepreneurs pitching for money:

Campus Technology is looking for innovative colleges and universities that have deployed unique technology solutions to campus challenges.

Nominations are now open for our tenth annual Campus Technology Innovators Awards, recognizing institutions, technology project leaders and vendor partners that have used technology in new ways to support teaching, learning, administration and operations. The deadline for entries is Feb. 17.

The FLC is pleased to offer its latest, on-demand e-learning course, “The CRADA Process”! This FREE, introductory-level training course isperfect for anyone new to this important technology transfer (T2) mechanism. A followup to “Introduction to CRADAs,” this course provides a broad understanding of how Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) work.

Before CES 2015 (the world's largest Consumer Electronics Show) gets officially underway in Las Vegas, there's CES Unveiled, billed as preview for the entire show. In fact, Unveiled is more like a frantic group press conference, as scores of companies debut their products to any reporter who pauses long enough at a given booth. After scouring the ballroom at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, we found 10 newly announced products worth keeping an eye on. From ambitious blue sky ideas in search of crowdfunding to smart little gadgets you can pick up later this month, here are some of the most innovative products we've seen so far.

Image: http://www.mensjournal.com

Christopher Skroupa: You’ve worked inside high-tech security companies, the Central Intelligence Agency, and in the world’s security research and testing company. Based on your experience, how effective do you believe technology is at preventing costly cyber disruptions?

John Pirc: Cyber security technology is able to prevent what it is designed to combat. The challenge is in the ability to catch the unknown threats. Unfortunately, security vendors are still using legacy detection methods and/or creating feature bloat within their product offering that just ends up reducing the security efficacy. If I were to provide a percentage of security product effectiveness I would give it around 70% and this would apply to the very large legacy security vendors.

Economic destiny is often shaped by luck. For example, the region of Halifax has benefited from great luck over the centuries. It sits at a fortunate position near the far eastern edge of North America, where it has served as a valuable shipping link between Europe and the Americas. But luck cannot be a long-term strategy. This is especially true today, when value is increasingly exchanged across data lines instead of shipping lanes. So how does a place like Halifax adapt in the modern economy?

LAS VEGAS — It's common to loosen your belt buckle a little after a big meal. But a new product called the Belty takes that task out of your hands.

This smart belt automatically adjusts itself throughout the day, depending on how much you've eaten and how much exercise you've done to compensate.

Particle smasher

The long wait is over: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will reboot in March after a two-year shutdown. The machine at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will restart with collisions at 13 trillion electronvolts—almost double the current record. Scientists hope that the extra firepower will help the collider to unearth phenomena that fill in gaps in the standard model of particle physics. The popular theory of supersymmetry, already in doubt, could lose further favor if the upgraded LHC cannot find evidence of the many heavy particles that the theory predicts.

Image: Worker at the Large Hadron Collider, July 2013 Credit: CERN

Citizens and businesses now expect government information to be readily available online, easy to find and understand, and at low or no cost. Governments have many reasons to meet these expectations by investing in a comprehensive public-sector digital transformation. Our analysis suggests that capturing the full potential of govern ment digitization could free up to $1 trillion annually in economic value worldwide, through improved cost and operational performance. Shared services, greater collaboration and inte gra tion, improved fraud management, and productivity enhancements enable system-wide efficiencies. At a time of increasing budgetary pressures, governments at national, regional, and local levels cannot afford to miss out on those savings.

Just as the CEO is the investor’s interface to a business, the application process and form is your interface into top accelerators like Techstars and Y Combinator. The best programs are super-selective--less than 1% of applicants get in, making them pickier than Harvard, Stanford and MIT. So as our New Year’s present to you, here is the scoop on how to improve your odds of getting in. We can’t speak directly for any programs other than TechStars Boston, which the two of us have known and been involved in for years, but these hints should improve your chances significantly just about anywhere.

Around this time every year, global innovation and design firm Frog predicts what the biggest trends in tech will be in the coming year. In 2014, Frog predicted that drones, augmented reality, and self-driving cars would all be big trends (and they were mostly right). For 2015, Frog sees 3-D printers and hydroponic gardens in every kitchen, and smart T-shirts and wearable fitness AIs as some of the major tech trends of the year. Here's how four of Frog's designers see 2015 in tech playing out.

If you're determined to be more organized this year, don't make the all-too-common mistake of expecting it to happen all at once.

"People decide they are going to overhaul their lives in January and they are going to do it all at one time," says Regina Leeds, who has written nine books on organization, including One Year to An Organized Life. "That is setting yourself up for failure."

In the age of the quantified self you can track just about any personal metric.

Track too much, though, and you’ll be too overwhelmed with data to use it. So what’s worth measuring? When I asked people drawn to the well-measured life, they listed these metrics as the ones with the best payoff: