Everyone wants to work smarter, but sometimes it’s the little things that weigh us down. Like email.

Most of us spend more than a quarter of our workday sending and receiving messages. Instead of struggling to keep up, Matthew Bellows, CEO of email tracking software company Yesware says we should be using it more efficiently.

"When we started Yesware in 2010, people were telling us that email was dead; clearly that’s not true," says Bellows. "Email is a great piece of technology that is very functional and ubiquitous. It’s powerful and sticky in a professional way."

The Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority board Thursday agreed to commit up to $3.9 million to boost small-business development in the Erie area.

The initiative, which the authority calls Ignite Erie, centers on three programs:

- Inner-city small business development.

ECGRA will commit a total of $150,000 over three years to fund one nonprofit, authority or other community development group, headquartered in Erie County, with the ability to tap into what the authority calls the unrealized potential of inner-city markets and entrepreneurs.

Between now and the new year, it’s easy for work to slip through the cracks. Holiday planning and festivities can quickly become distractions and important tasks can be forgotten. But Kris Duggan, CEO of the enterprise goal platform BetterWorks, says setting the right kinds of goals can keep you focused—today as well as in the immediate future.

"Setting goals used to be an annual task that was put in a drawer and dusted off at the end of the year," he says. "Instead of using goals as an operational tool, employees would work on what they thought was best in the moment. What they wrote down didn’t really matter."

1. Just as a dog is not wagged by its tail, your future is not dictated by your past.

Don’t: Let your past dictate your future. Whether you’ve experienced a failed business, had a rough family life, or some other glaring moment that you feel inhibits your success. It’s important to remember that those are only moments in time and remain in their place. You don’t need to carry them with you.

Image: http://under30ceo.com

In a knowledge-based economy, regions win when they cultivate vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems, because these are the settings that attract intellectual and financial capital. Technology transfer, defined here as the translation of research discoveries into commercializable products, is an important component of any region’s innovation economy, a marker not only of a region’s productivity as a knowledge center but also of its capacity for and receptivity to innovation.

Due to the importance of technology transfer to a region’s vitality, the CEO Council for Growth, an initiative of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, commissioned a study in 2007 on the Greater Philadelphia region’s performance in technology transfer and commercialization. The report described a region rich in potential, but one suffering a gap between its robust science and technology research assets and its lagging private sector development track record.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is about to re-launch the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC, with a diameter of 17 miles, is scheduled to be re-launched in March 2015.

To prepare the device for the launch, its temperature has been brought down to only a few degrees Fahrenheit over absolute zero.

Image: CERN Particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is seen placed in a tunnel 175 meters beneath the ground.  - http://www.presstv.ir/

Everywhere I look I see a unicorn.

Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee wrote a brilliant, data-rich story here on TechCrunch one year ago called “Welcome to the Unicorn Club.” She introduced us all to the venture-backed unicorn – “U.S.-based software companies valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors.”

So provocative was her analysis that today, all we seem to discuss or analyze in the venture world is the unicorn.

Image: http://techcrunch.com

Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup Founders dilemmas in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. People may jump into the lifestyle to be their own boss, achieve great wealth, start a new trend, or all the above. The dilemma is that these goals are usually mutually exclusive.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

With fewer than a dozen days left in the holiday shopping season this year, it's as good a time as any to take a look at some pricing trends. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting Christmas Sales tracker comparing prices at different retailers over time for bigger-ticket Christmas gifts like a KitchenAid Mixer, Keurig coffee machine or 55-inch Vizio television. But let's glance at some less common gifts: the items in "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

Researchers are working on a more convenient way to track your breathing while you sleep: by putting a microphone-equipped pair of earphones and a smartphone on your bedside table. The technology could make tracking sleep disorders easier than visiting a sleep lab.

A team at Stevens Institute of Technology and Florida State University conducted a six-month study in which earbuds that included an in-line microphone were plugged into an iPhone that recorded sounds as six people slept. The researchers say that even with the earphones placed on a table next to the bed, they were able to use the microphone to monitor participants’ breathing to within half a breath per minute of what could be recorded with a chest-worn respiration monitor and a microphone clipped to participants’ collars.

“Disruption” is one of the most overhyped concepts of the last ten years. A Google Trend search for “disruptive innovation” shows a steeply rising graph, and you can hardly open a professional news website without reading stories about whole sectors being disrupted. Given that “business as usual” is apparently undergoing a profound transformation, how this will impact the people doing the actual work in our economy? One logical consequence is that the way people work and earn money will also radically change. How this will be different is a direct result of the new dominant organization model that is currently emerging.

Earlier this week, Intel launched a new platform and related software and services to help developers accelerate innovation in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) space. The Intel IoT Platform includes an updated version of the Intel IoT gateway, edge management middleware from Wind River, enhanced McAfee security, and API and traffic management tools. It aims to address IoT devices from industrial machinery to smart headphones to medical equipment, including wearables. The new platform provides a reference model, making it easier for customers to implement their own solutions and deliver innovations to market faster. Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Dell, HCL, NTT DATA, SAP, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Wipro and others are joining together with Intel to develop and deploy solutions using their building blocks on the Intel IoT Platform. (Read Press Release)

Q: What's the best way to drive tech innovation at my company?

A: U.S. businesses spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on R&D in an effort to improve products and processes. Beth Storz is part of that equation: As president of Minneapolis agency Ideas To Go, she helps companies establish successful innovation initiatives. We asked her to tell us how to implement technology upgrades so that everyone feels involved in the process.

The U.S. Senate gave final passage on Saturday to an overdue spending bill for the 2015 fiscal year that provides modest increases for research, while holding education spending mostly flat.

The compromise bill, which averts a government shutdown, finances most of the federal government through September 30. The Department of Homeland Security, which provides some research money to universities, was funded on a shorter-term basis.

Within the EU, Germany’s state of Baden-Württemberg is the region with the strongest innovative capacity, with no other European region investing as much economic output in research and development. EurActiv Germany reports.

For the sixth time in a row, Germany’s state of Baden-Wuerttemberg scored first place in the EU-wide innovation comparison. The result was announced by the State Statistical Office of Baden-Wuerttemberg on Thursday (11 December).

Image: For the sixth time in a row, Germany’s state of Baden-Württemberg scored first place in the EU-wide innovation comparison. (Heribert Pohl/Flickr)

Building a biotechnology startup is a lot like getting a private university education: To make progress, you have to get past the high-cost barrier to entry. First and foremost, biotech requires expensive clinical studies and the use of state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities. In fact, major pharmaceutical companies spend at least US$4-billion to develop a single drug. That’s not pocket change for the typical entrepreneur. But even biotech startups spend between US$20 000 and US$50 000 per patient on direct clinical trials. And with most Phase II trials requiring at least 200 people for each study, the costs quickly add up.

The year saw many developments that will have far-reaching and long-lasting implications, both practically and intellectually. Start the countdown below and go to the end to see some of the other important stories that didn’t quite make the cut.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com

A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these “massive open online courses” stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher education. Their interactive technology promised to deliver top-tier teaching from institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, not just to a few hundred students in a lecture hall on ivy-draped campuses, but free via the Internet to thousands or even millions around the world. At long last, there appeared to be a solution to the problem of “scaling up” higher education: if it were delivered more efficiently, the relentless cost increases might finally be rolled back. Some wondered whether MOOCs would merely transform the existing system or blow it up entirely. Computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of the MOOC provider Udacity, predicted that in 50 years, 10 institutions would be responsible for delivering higher education.

Narrowing down the top 12 tech products of the year is no small task. The breadth and depth of the consumer technology world gets larger every year, now encompassing such novel categories as wearables, 3D printing and, uh, dongles. 

But this year more mature product categories shined the brightest. Smartphones, laptops and e-readers saw some truly exemplary devices join their ranks. And among software, the most recent iterations of well-known franchises captured our attention the most.

As reported in a story earlier this morning, Oregon is preparing to join 15 states that have implemented rules to let businesses raise money through investment crowdfunding....