Earlier this week, we learned about the “pre-cation,” a new recruiting perk used by successful startups to lasso the best and brightest in their industries. On signing the dotted line, draftees are immediately sent on a weeks-long paid vacation, the better to rest up and hit the ground running on that first day at the office.

As the era of human physical labor winds to a close, some of us (who haven’t already been replaced by algorithms or mechanical arms) can take comfort in the cushy work environments and delightful extras our handlers use to keep us inside the office, away from the frivolous distractions of the outside world.

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PETALING JAYA, Oct 6 (Bernama) -- Malaysia, relatively limited by the size of its small economy, must push innovation to the limits to ensure its economic survival amid fierce competition under the Asean Economic Community (AEC).

Datuk Seri Vijay Eswaran, Executive Chairman of the QI Group of Companies, said this entailed local firms looking outward and forging alliances with Asean partners in exploiting the vast and lucrative markets of China and India.

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Elementary school has always looked a little bit like training for a traditional office job: You show up at 8 or 9, sit at your desk, and fill out paperwork for most of the day. An average third grader might spend as much as six hours sitting in the classroom--only a little less time than the average office worker spends sitting at work. But as more offices realize that sitting all day long is actually pretty terrible for health and productivity, how long will it take schools to catch up?

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The acquisition of Tibco Software by Vista Equity Partners earlier this week, in a $4.3 billion deal, raises an important issue: can innovative companies survive long enough to become large companies? 

I meet very few startups that have the ambition to stay independent and challenge the dominant companies in their sector. (Delphix is the exception.) Is it a lack of ambition or simply a realistic assessment of their future? Tibco was certainly ambitious and innovative but it struggled for years to grow amid huge competitors.

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Cashflow is a basic survival metric for every startup. Investors check your burn rate to assess your efficiency, and project your remaining runway before you run out of money and into a brick wall. Don’t wait until you are almost out of cash before managing every dollar spent, or looking for the next refueling from investors. Desperate entrepreneurs lose their leverage and die young.

Longtime readers (George, mom) will know that I have a giant internet crush on Merlin Mann, who most people outside of Tallahassee first heard about through his productivity-themed website 43folders, then through his Inbox Zero e-mail talk at Google, and most recently as a podcaster on shows such as Back to Work, Roderick on the Line, and You Look Nice Today: A Journal of Emotional Hygiene. (How big a crush? I invited him for a 3-talk visit back in the day.) Merlin usually says that he’s interested in time and attention, and in creative work; for me, he’s most helpful in talking through that anxiety endemic to most “knowledge work”: what is my job? what should I be doing next? will my job be disrupted or unbundled?

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Biotech companies are looking for ways to speed up drug discovery and pharmaceutical companies need an easier way to find accurate drug pricing information to make their businesses more competitive. So two big data analytics companies graduating from Blueprint Health’s accelerator have taken a cue from Maverick and Goose. One offers a way to shrink the amount of time genome analysis takes and another developed a way to make it easier for drug companies to find global drug price data in real time.

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Now that the U.S. has its first diagnosed case of Ebola — a patient in Dallas from Liberia — here are the terms you should know when it comes to understanding who's at risk

MORE See How a Photographer is Covering Ebola’s Deadly Spread Inside the Ebola Crisis: The Images that Moved them Most Incubation period: The time between exposure to a virus and when symptoms start to present, which is two to 21 days in Ebola’s case.

Symptomatic: A patient becomes symptomatic when they present symptoms of Ebola, which include fever, muscle pain, headache, sore throat, vomiting and diarrhea.

When we think about the value of exercise, we tend to focus on the physical benefits. Lower blood pressure, a healthier heart, a more attractive physique. But over the past decade, social scientists have quietly amassed compelling evidence suggesting that there is another, more immediate benefit of regular exercise: its impact on the way we think.

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First, here' a warning: I’m about to brag about my child but I promise it’s for a good reason. My 13-year-old son Zachary earned more this past weekend than most of today’s recent college graduates can hope to make in a week. He’s also his own boss. 

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If you ever thought India is merely a software sweatshop for the west, it’s high time you rethink! India is today poised to play a more significant role in the global R&D spectrum. Since 2012, emerging markets like India, China, Brazil, and Mexico have stepped up their innovation efforts and entered the list of top 10 innovative markets in the world. Overall, these markets contribute 31% of the world’s new product innovation, while innovation in developed markets has dropped to 69%.

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A mocked-up set of busy streets in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will provide the sternest test yet for self-driving cars. Complex intersections, confusing lane markings, and busy construction crews will be used to gauge the aptitude of the latest automotive sensors and driving algorithms; mechanical pedestrians will even leap into the road from between parked cars so researchers can see if they trip up onboard safety systems.

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For investors in technology start-ups, it’s all about disruption. Discover a new business on its way to bursting apart an industry and putting it back together — Spotify for music, Facebook for mobile advertising — and all that high-risk speculation is well worth it. Tech investors are balancing the risk inherent in hunting for the next great disruptor by allocating to something very different: real assets that hold their value amid technological change. This strategy may turn out be a smart move in a frothy market.

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Missouri has more startup accelerators than all but three states in the U.S., according to data from Seed DB, a database chronicling seed accelerators. A majority of those are in St. Louis. St. Louis’ four accelerator programs — Capital Innovators, Prosper, Yield Lab and SixThirty — combined with Kansas City’s three accelerators give Missouri seven accelerators, which trails only California (26), New York (16) and Texas (eight).

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Up in Wisconsin, they're doing something creative with craft beer besides brewing it. They're turning microbreweries — and other small businesses — into investment opportunities for individuals.

It's an idea worth importing to Illinois, if the legislature would pursue it.

Wisconsin is among a dozen or so states allowing local companies to raise money by selling stock via specialized websites. In the beer example, MobCraft Beer of Madison wants to raise $250,000 to $500,000 by selling small ownership stakes to residents through a portal called Craftfund.com.

Cambridge House held its Canadian Investor Conference event in Toronto, Ontario on 26 September 2014. The event was geared toward investors by bringing top thought leaders and companies who are interested in accessing investors.  BoardSuite Founder, CEO Oscar A Jofre was invited to participate in a panel along with John McCoach President TSX-V, Richard W. Carleton CEO, CSE, Cromwell Coulson CEO of OTC Market Groups, David Franklin Managing Director of WoodsWater Capital LP to discuss where is the money.  Full disclosure, I work with Oscar but this is a message and topic that are important for a wider audience to hear.

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As kids we dream of being professional video gamer testers and Lego builders. But usually by the time it comes time to choose a career path, reality sets in and we choose something more realistic like sales.

But there are some out there that have carved out careers for themselves that only our inner kids could dream up, and they're proving that you can actually have fun making your living.

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Health officials are now monitoring 50 people in Texas for signs of Ebola, via twice-daily temperature checks, and in recent days, there have been reports that people in other areas of the country — most recently, Washington, D.C. — may be infected with the virus.

But why can't all these people just be tested for Ebola as soon as possible?

Ebola is difficult to diagnose when a person is first infected because the early symptoms, such as fever, are also symptoms of other diseases, such as malaria and typhoid fever.

Image: Scientists working with Ebola must work in Biosafety Level 4 conditions, like those this CDC scientist is working under. Credit: CDC/ Dr. Scott Smith

Business partnerships have traditionally been agreements to drive more transactions than either company could do alone. The new paradigm, driven by disruptive technologies, cloud-served supercomputing, and the new generation of young adults with global empathy, is partnering and giving something now for a competitive advantage in the future.

Over the past couple of years, big data — the all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data processing applications — has received so much attention that it’s become difficult to separate the hype from the genuinely useful information. It’s also become difficult to know exactly how best to use that data. In the best instances, it can help solve massive problems (and win World Cups) and in the worst, it can blind companies to the real, human needs of their customers.

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