For a business owner, it's complicated enough to stay on top of employment laws when your staff is in one place. However, legal regulations from the federal, state and municipal levels can often differ from one another, causing issues for multi-state employers. Discrepancies include wages, benefits, discrimination, background checks, medical leave, paid sick leave –- the list goes on. If your headquarters are in one state with satellite offices in another — or if you have employees that work remotely in other states — how can you address compliance for these contradictory laws?

Welcome to the era of business model proliferation.

Our obsession with scalability is getting in the way of unleashing the potential of the 21st century. We are so fixated with scalability we have taken our eye off of delivering value at every scale including the most important scale of one. The Industrial Era did that to us. Reaching the mass market takes precedence over delivering value to each customer. New customer acquisition trumps delivering value to existing customers. It’s not only business that is obsessed with scale

It can be hard to recover from a less-than-stellar performance review, especially one that you didn’t see coming. You might feel angry, embarrassed, and confused. How do you regain your professional confidence? And how do you make the best use of the critical feedback?

China needs to develop a "comprehensive innovation ecosystem", said a venture capitalist speaking at a gathering of Chinese business executives and VCs in San Francisco on Tuesday. "Silicon Valley creates a great ecosystem and comprehensive support for high-tech companies to grow,"said Benjamin Sun of AngelVest, a firm with offices in California and China that invests in several Chinese companies."That is what we need to learn from Silicon Valley."

Image: Jim Wunderman, CEO of the Bay Area Council, introduces the basic information about California to the Chinese delegation of 15 senior executives of Chinese companies and venture capitalists during a roundtable event at the office of Nixon Peabody LLP in San Francisco on Tuesday. LianZi / China Daily

In today’s fast moving world of business startups, learning trumps knowing every time. What established businesses know through experience keeps them from looking for the new and innovative ways to do what they do better, cheaper, and faster. I’m convinced that’s why most mature companies are slowing down or buying their innovation through acquisition, rather than building it.

As Penn prepares for the ceremonial groundbreaking of the Pennovation Center on Friday, Drexel University’s Innovation Neighborhood is still searching for a master developer.

Both universities are pushing to become incubators of commercial enterprise and educational advancement. Since purchasing a 23-acre site on Grays Ferry Avenue in 2010, Penn has been working to develop the Pennovation Center — a three-story, 52,000-square-foot complex that will serve as a hub for research and business ventures. In addition to the ceremonial groundbreaking on Friday, Penn President Amy Gutmann will host a series of “Pennovation Talks” at the South Bank campus.

Image: http://www.thedp.com

Desperate times call for desperate measures. The Rust Belt, a region familiar to the air of anxiety, knows this all too well, particularly the “desperate measures” part.

A case in point: During the 1990’s, Pittsburgh, like many of its Rust Belt peers, was in the midst of a fit of brain drain hysteria. Strategic policy was needed. So the powers that be thought of a marketing campaign meant to saturate the minds of the educated “young and the restless” who were thinking about exiting the Steel City.

The evidence is in: Customer-driven companies are far more successful than those that neglect their customers. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the ROI of customer management is that your business will still be around in five years to talk about it. But what is it that makes one company stronger than its rivals? Is there a checklist of factors that can be used to benchmark your startup?

Image: Free Digital Photos

The renewal of manufacturing is not an abstract economic issue: It is very much an urban issue. American manufacturing, for instance, rose in cities, and those cities grew around industries from automakers to steelmakers to textiles. Today, with innovation-based manufacturers helping to spur a revival in the sector, the geography of manufacturing is again at stake: Can new manufacturing fit in with the ongoing evolution of cities, and if so, how?

Image: Free Digital Photos

HEALTH INJUSTICE The southeastern U.S. is sometimes criticized as a place with striking patterns of racial and environmental injustice. Those trends combined with other factors also seem to make it a region for health injustice, according to Robert Bullard, dean of public affairs at Texas Southern University, who has spent a lifetime investigating these issues. At a recent SXSW Eco conference in Austin, Tex., Bullard presented a series of maps produced by various sources that reveal how unhealthy the area is. His slides are shown here.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com

The future of the connected home is continuing to evolve, and with more startups pitching products, the ship date of older crowdfunding campaigns hitting customer homes and big name companies warming to the space, I’m starting to see a few trends come together for 2015. I’m sure we’ll see more at CES in January, but based on conversations I’ve had and products I saw at our Structure Connect show last week, here are a few things you can expect on the connected home front.

Image: The Peep connected camera may use Bluetooth to send images more quickly than Wi-Fi. - http://gigaom.com

Hands Down, Eyes Closed, and Dont Think .... Go and build your team ...

A great team, will build an awesome product. An awesome product will find a lot of money.    

Dr. Janice Presser-  Build your own assets first: products, if you're a development person; a great network, because that's where your initial team and customers will come from; and your bank account, because funding your own early stage dream is much more fun that convincing other people to give it to you.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Do you have a billion dollar idea, but no technical cofounder to build it? I was in the same situation when I met my technical cofounders Jaeho Chung (alumnus), Sanghoon Kwak (WG’14/G’14) and Hovan Yoo through a Wharton connection. Actually, I didn’t even have a billion dollar idea when they asked me to join the team. So how did I get the Kim Kardashian of dev teams—who collectively have created apps that have been downloaded over 500 million times, received 4 science and engineering degrees from Stanford (A bachelors, two master’s, and a PhD) and even won a Bronze Medal in the International Physics Olympiad—to ask me to join their team?

Image: Slidejoy Founders at time of founding.

Here's our list of 10 Boston-area companies that could go public within three years. While not all of these companies have explicitly expressed plans for an IPO, this is a list of the companies we think have venture funding, revenue and potential scalability to go public soon.

Image: Tom Erickson is the CEO of Burlington-based digital services firm Acquia, which made our list of 10 companies that could go public within three years. - http://www.bizjournals.com

It’s all self inflicted.

Trust me I know.

After forcing startup idea, after startup idea, following every trend on Techcrunch, attending every douchey networking event, and living in a city where just trying to cross the street makes you think about how many different ways you could kill someone, I had enough.

It’s really unsettling how many people we call idiots or assholes just because we are behind the wheel of a car, or trying to catch a train.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Job data is important to understanding the nation's economy, but the spreadsheets can be painful to analyze. The economic development consulting firm TIP Strategies, though, has developed a very cool visualization tool to understand how employment surges and contracts over time and geography.

The Greater Houston Partnership recently crowed about adding 600,000 in the first nine months of this year, and that is truly remarkable. But how does this recent boom compare to the last 15 years? When Houston is adding jobs, what is the rest of the country doing?

Image: http://www.houstonchronicle.com

I know I’m getting old. I remember in 2007 when the idea of a super angel appeared, where successful entrepreneurs were suddenly angel investors making 10 or more seed investments a year. This was a “new” innovation that was celebrated with much fanfare. Between 1994 and 1996 I made 40 angel investments with the money I made from the sale of my first company. I was referred to as an “angel investor” – I didn’t get the super angel moniker back in the 1990s, but I was often referred to as promiscuous.

This webinar, hosted by Randy Laxer, co-chair of Morrison & Foerster’s Global Corporate Department and Shu Iwasaki, an associate of Ito & Mitomi, registered associated offices of Morrison & Foerster, will discuss potential strategies for replicating Silicon Valley style venture capital financing terms in a Japanese venture capital financing.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Two new studies in the New England Journal of Medicine rocked the world of celiac research, both proving that scientists have a ways to go in their understanding of celiac disease, which affects about 1% of the population, whether they know it or not. MORE This Free App Knows Exactly What’s in Your Food 8 Salt-Free Flavor Boosters Holy Science! Pope Says Evolution and Big Bang Theory Are Real NBC News Hometown Hero: Fallen Canadian Soldier Laid to Rest NBC News Georgia Banker Who Faked Death Gets 30 Years in Prison NBC News

One Italian study wondered if the age at which gluten is introduced into the diet could affect a person’s likelihood of developing the autoimmune disease—so they kept gluten away from newborns for a year. To the shock of the researchers, delaying exposure to gluten didn’t make a difference in the long run. In some cases it delayed the onset of the disease, but it didn’t stop people from developing the disease, for which there is no cure.

Today, Golden Seeds is one of the largest angel networks in the US, that manages funds of about $40 million and has invested about $60 million in 60 companies via a combination of angels and funds. Like Golden Seeds, a handful of women-only VC funds exist in developed markets in the US and Europe, and are becoming a global movement. The common goal of such funds is to help aspiring women entrepreneurs break the glass ceiling by helping them start and fund * their high growth businesses.