One of the most important sources of funding for startups with limited operating history that do not have access to capital markets is Venture Capital (“VC”). Venture capitalists own an equity stake in the start-up and have a say in the functioning of the company. Investments are generally made in early stages of a company with long term high growth potential. Most venture capital comes from groups of wealthy investors, investment banks and other financial institutions that pool such investments or partnerships.

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Healthcare is arguably the only major industry in the world that hasn’t embraced automation — and it shows.

According to CMS, the annual U.S. spend on healthcare is nearly three trillion dollars (more than 17 percent of GDP), and yet the World Health Organization ranks our healthcare system below almost every other industrialized nation in the world. Despite all the money being spent, there is still pervasive inefficiency and frustration, with minimal relative value to the patient.

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My prediction is that in fewer than 15 years, we will be debating whether human beings should be allowed to drive on highways.

After all, we are prone to road rage; rush headlong into traffic jams; break rules; get distracted; and crash into each other. That is why our automobiles need tank-like bumper bars and military-grade crumple zones. And it is why we need speed limits and traffic police.

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The first murder through the internet of things will likely take place in 2014, police service Europol warned this month. The crime could be carried out by a pacemaker, an insulin dosage device, a hacked brake pedal or myriad others objects that control life-and-death functions and are now connected to the internet. In control of a malicious hacker, any of these devices could give “killer app” a whole new meaning.

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iOS rules the roost and beats Android, Bay Area coders get paid the most, and Node.js developers are up and coming: This sums up three findings from an analysis I performed on salary survey data collected from thousands of techies around the country by Payscale.com.

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In the Boston-versus-New York rivalry, the Red Sox and the Yankees were also-rans this baseball season. Now, Massachusetts and New York are in another battle for the No. 2 spot: U.S. venture capital investment.

New York is leading Massachusetts in total venture capital invested so far this year, which if it held up would be the first time the Empire State edged out its East Coast rival and took second place behind industry leader California since at least 1992.

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In 1963, nearly 75% of America’s top 50 companies owned and extracted natural resources1. By 2013, only 20% of top firms were natural resource-based. Today, knowledge-focused industries such as IBM comprise over 50% of America’s top 50 firms. Translation: talent is the new oil. But not every region has reservoirs of human capital. Historically, knowledge economies have gathered in select top-tier metros, termed “Islands of Innovation”2. Think Boston and San Francisco. There are numerous reasons for this, including access to select research institutions, as well as the productivity effects that arise when a cluster economy is formed3.

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Many experts will tell you that you can’t succeed as a part-time entrepreneur, as any good startup will require a 100 percent commitment of your time and energy. But not many of us have enough savings to live for a year or more without a salary, fund the startup, and still feed the family. Thus I often recommend that entrepreneurs keep their day job until the startup is producing revenue.

Of course, if you have investors anxious to give you money, or a rich uncle to keep you afloat, there is nothing wrong with a dedicated and full commitment to the startup, with commensurate more aggressive milestones and growth expectations. We all understand the risk of competitors quickly closing in, and market factors changing before we can roll out our solution.

The good news: Venture capital dollars invested in Wisconsin through the first three quarters of 2014 is already double all venture investments last year, and the number of deals is approaching an all-time annual high for the state....

Movies are a great source of inspiration, and while there is no dearth of good fictional movies, what really inspires me are biographies. Fiction requires a powerful imagination and have strengths of their own, but true stories are the ones that make the real kill.

It is an awe-inspiring feeling to know what I am seeing did ‘actually’ happen, with real people, in the real world. So, with enormous difficulty, I am listing down a few among the many great bio-pics that I would recommend every entrepreneur to watch and learn from:

As female entrepreneurs and business leaders, we are often regarded as fearless. We’ve successfully batted away the outdated stereotypes and overcome obstacles that would derail many a man without even breaking a sweat.

Yet under that fearlessness, we face a myriad of challenges and difficult decisions just like any other entrepreneur or CEO. Sometimes those challenges are the same as our male peers and sometimes they aren’t.

The chatter over crowdfunding continues to get louder.

And it's becoming a promising fundraising channel for channel startups and others alike.

Lawyers, bankers and corporate executives gathered last month in Santa Monica, Calif., for the International Bar Association's Silicon Valley From Start-Up To IPO/Exit Conference to discuss crowdfunding among other topics.

In this world of constant change, new technologies, and a thousand cultures, it’s evident and somehow comforting to me that the basic rules for business prosperity really haven’t changed in the last hundred years. Business success is still more about the people than the technology or idea involved. As an Angel investor and a mentor to entrepreneurs I still see this every day.

In their witty book Film in Five Seconds , now out in paperback, Italian ad men Matteo Civaschi and Gianmarco Milesi get brutally efficient with the plot lines of 139 classic movies. Dispensing with such niceties as dialogue, setting and subplots, the duo cut Titanic down to four crisply silhouetted icons. They render The Departed as five rats leading to five tombstones. Brokeback Mountain translates into a spare sequence of cowboy-hatted couples resembling refugees from a "Pedestrians Only" traffic sign.

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Years ago, chef James Corwell was asked to create a line of vegetarian sushi for a party. Today's vegetarian sushi options are decent at best (sweet potato rolls) and insulting at worst (cucumber rolls, really?). So he started thinking about tomatoes. Like raw fish, seaweed, and soy sauce, they're high in savory components. It's not too much of a stretch, he thought, to lump tomatoes into the same category.

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China’s high tech industry is increasingly recognized as a very dynamic industry. More and more Chinese high tech companies are gaining ground on the international stage. “China has changed its strategy and is now ready to offer high value technological products. Today, Chinese do not only copy foreign high tech brands’ features. They innovate and assert their innovation.” explains Fil Control, a French industrial group, leader in the textile machinery industry and owner of a subsidiary in China. What are the most innovative Chinese high tech companies in 2014? Here are 5 leading Chinese companies which show considerable dynamism in terms of innovation this year.

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Prorata rights are one of the most important rights of private market technology investors and yet are seldom fully understood. They often create the biggest tensions between investors who are investing at different stages in the business.

These tensions seep out in some angels or seed funds publicly or semi-privately deriding later-stage VCs for their “bad” behavior. I have seen bad behavior from later-stage VCs, believe me. But I have seen equally bad behavior from super early stage investors.

Evidence shows that people feel mild positive moods when no strong emotional events are occurring, a phenomenon known as positive mood offset. We offer an evolutionary explanation of this characteristic, showing that it improves fertility, fecundity, and health, and abets other characteristics that were critical to reproductive success. We review research showing that positive mood offset is virtually universal in the nations of the world, even among people who live in extremely difficult circumstances. Positive moods increase the likelihood of the types of adaptive behaviors that likely characterized our Paleolithic ancestors, such as creativity, planning, mating, and sociality. Because of the ubiquity and apparent advantages of positive moods, it is a reasonable hypothesis that humans were selected for positivity offset in our evolutionary past. We outline additional evidence that is needed to help confirm that positive mood offset is an evolutionary adaptation in humans and we explore the research questions that the hypothesis generates.

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A number of recent headline-grabbing announcements of divestments and split-ups by companies such as HP (spinning off its PC and printer businesses), GE (the sale of its appliances business to Electrolux), Bayer (the flotation of its MaterialScience chemicals business), and Royal Philips (its separation into two autonomous companies, Lighting and HealthTech) are putting the spotlight again on the phenomenon of “core shifting”: how a company, through a sustained process of acquiring and divesting assets, changes the mix of its business portfolio and thus purposefully shifts the core of its activities.