A friend or acquaintance approaches you to be ‘on the board’ of his or her new company, to give input or guidance. You happily sign on the small-print free dotted line, pleased to help out and perhaps you’re being paid for your time too, and you may also gain some valuable experience along the way. But remember that accepting appointment as a director or a company should not be done lightly. A web of legal duties exist which by law a director owes to the company, and it is a very good idea to be aware of these and take them into account before saying yes. Your attorney will be able to advise you of your obligations and the most important provisions which you need to consider.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Marriott International Inc. is launching a restaurant incubator competition, hoping to tap the world's growing cadre of food and beverage entrepreneurs to bring a new level of cool to its hotels. The Bethesda hotel giant bills the competition, called Canvas, as a "global concept lab for food and beverage ideas." The winners will get up to $50,000 each and six months to operate and prove their concepts.

Researchers have long looked at the relationship between looks and leadership success.

A 2011 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study found that male CEOs who have wider faces achieve better financial performance in their companies. In the October 2014 issue of The Leadership Quarterly, a paper by University of Munich economics professor Panu Poutvaara found that being attractive can help sway election results your way

Recently I interviewed a sleep expert on the best ways to optimize sleep and was blown away by how much I didn’t know about this topic. As entrepreneurs we tend to take the “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” approach more often than not. Before my interview with this expert I knew better than to think that way about sleep, but I had no idea how powerful effective sleeping was. Nor did I know that there even was a more effective versus a less effective strategy to sleeping.

December 22, 2014 – The Government of Canada has announced that it will grant Permanent Residency to approximately 50 Immigrant Investors as part of its Immigrant Investor Venture Capital Pilot Program. This pilot program replaces the now-defunct Federal Immigrant Investor Program.  That program, widely criticized as a “cash for citizenship” program, was put on hold in 2012 and cancelled in early 2014 over fraud concerns.

Regime's far-reaching policy to affect citizens, business, government

The government says its "digital economy" policy is aimed at utilising digital technology to improve the country's competitiveness, improve people's lives, and improve governance.

The programme led by Deputy Prime Minister MR Pridiyathorn Devakula has so far unveiled five main elements, namely hard infrastructure, soft infrastructure, service infrastructure, digital-economy promotion, and digital society and knowledge resources.

Image: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/

Every Christmas Eve, thousands of kids from around the world use NORAD to track Santa's whereabouts. Since the 1950s, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) has done so using a "radar system." But the story of how it started—with a typo—is even more incredible than the job itself.

You see, back in 1955, a man named Harry Shoup was the head of the defense command in the US. The way his kids tell it, he had two phones on his desk, one of which was red because it was a private military line. Only one other person had the number to it: a general at the Pentagon. Then one day in December, it rang and a boy asked, "Is this Santa Claus?"

Image: http://readwrite.com

LANSING, MI -- Gov. Rick Snyder today took his pen to several bills today, including one that establishes an "Entrepreneur-in-residence" program at the Michigan Strategic Fund, currently under the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC).

SB 4998 was sponsored by Wayne Schmidt. It aims to make state economic development programs and incentives more accessible.

Image: Gov. Rick Snyder today signed bills touching on several policy areas. (AP File Photo)

New technologies can have revolutionary impacts with widespread and unexpected benefits. Technology can also serve as a tool to enable governments to better serve their citizens. The public sector can also develop policies that utilize technologies to empower innovators. These are the 10 technologies from 2014 that innovators and governments are using to make the world a better place.

It's that time of year again, when we look back at the last 12 months and try to give it all some meaning. For entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, innovators and every one else tied into the upstart economy, it was another year when the old guard found itself scrambling to stay relevant while the new breed kept changing the rule book.

We here at Upstart, along with our colleagues around the country at the Business Journal, tried to make sense of it all. Click through to see a month-by-month breakdown of the biggest stories of each month as well as a few oddities that we felt needed to repeated.

Image: http://upstart.bizjournals.com

While hunting, Weddell seals have biological adaptations that allow them to dive deep, as much as of hundreds of meters, but also an uncanny ability to find the breathing holes they need on the surface of the ice. Now, researchers supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) believe they have figured out they do it: by using the Earth's magnetic field as a natural GPS.  

Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who think the most creatively, not only in their initial product or service, but more importantly all through the stages of growth from startup to maturity. But even the best of them can easily slip into some bad decision habits that limit or hurt their business, due to natural human tendencies and the pressures of business challenges.

The nation’s largest restaurant chains have made a big deal in recent years about introducing smaller portion sizes. McDonald’s eliminated the Supersize menu, while T.G.I. Friday’s and others have introduced small-plate items. Yet the restaurants have also been doing something else, with less fanfare: continuing to add dishes so rich that a single meal often contains a full day’s worth of calories.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com

What do you give the geek who has everything? For the Trekkie, Whovian or maker on your holiday gift list, we've got some suggestions that'll knock your Spocks off — without breaking the bank. From a "Star Trek" spatula to a tiny hovercraft, here are some of our favorite picks for the Who-lidays.

Image: http://www.livescience.com

There’s been a lot of growing excitement the past few years about modern and innovative ways to prepare children for careers, technology, and social paradigms of the future. I would just like to pause for a minute and remind everyone (including myself): High school kids have never been too excited about the adult world, and that hasn’t changed.

Mike Rothenberg envisions a world where psychiatrists help people conquer their fear of heights using virtual reality, where students learn new skills in immersive virtual worlds, where paraplegics can roam digital streets without leaving their beds.

That world isn’t here yet, despite recent advances in VR technology, but Rothenberg thinks it’s close. To get there, however, we’re going to need more companies building new hardware and software. And that’s going to take capital. “The innovators have been stepping up for decades,” he says. “It’s time for the financiers to step-up.”

Image: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Amgen Inc. announced an agreement Monday to become a sponsor of LabCentral, a biotech incubator in Cambridge, Mass.

The Thousand Oaks pharmaceutical company can nominate up to two biotech startups a year for residence in LabCentral’s facilities. The lab has 28,000 square feet and can house 28 early stage companies. Other sponsors of the project include Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, MIT and Johnson & Johnson Innovation.

Eastern Foundry, a new startup incubator focusing on government contractors as tenants, launched on Dec. 16. With 70 offices covering 21,000 square feet, it’s already 85 percent full. Eastern Foundry CEO and Founder Geoff Orazem said he expects to be full in his space on the fourth floor of 2011 Crystal Drive by “mid-February at the latest.” Its occupancy rate is just one example of the sweet spot his company has found in its sector.

Image: http://www.arlnow.com

The real North Pole is in China.

About 300 kilometers out of Shanghai is the town of Yiwu, where 60% of the world's Christmas decorations are made by workers in 600 factories and shipped around the globe.

Design studio Unknown Fields Division and photographer Toby Smith took a peek into the Christmas village while tracing the supply chain of the world's consumer products across the South China sea, following cargo routes and heading inland to their production bases.