Keith Yamashita vividly remembers one smoggy school day from when he was eight years old. He and fellow classmates at the local elementary school in Santa Ana, California, spent their recess corralled in the indoor gymnasium to watch a movie.“That film stuck with me for the rest of my life” Yamashita later recalled while sharing a tale of personal transformation onstage at the Collaborative Innovation Summit, a storytelling event hosted annually by the nonprofit Business Innovation Factory (BIF) in Providence, RI.Keith Yamashita vividly remembers one smoggy school day from when he was eight years old. He and fellow classmates at the local elementary school in Santa Ana, California, spent their recess corralled in the indoor gymnasium to watch a movie.

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Have you ever received an amazing email, one that you’d like to print out and pin to your wall, one that made you grin from ear to ear or slow-clap in appreciation and reverence?

When I come across these gems, I drop them into a “Snippets” folder. I study them, I swoon over them, and I borrow bits and pieces of them to send better email.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Amid a boom in life science venture funding, ARCH Venture Partners has closed its eighth fund with more than $400 million in commitments, the firm announced Wednesday, and at least half of it is earmarked for one of the trickiest areas of innovation: emerging biomedical technology and therapeutics.

The fund matches ARCH’s previous vehicle of $400 million and could end up at $425 million, well beyond the firm’s earlier goal. It filed regulatory paperwork in April that indicated a goal of $250 million.

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Fifteen Applied Research applications chosen from a field of 39 were awarded $3,546,670 August 19 by the governing board of the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST).

Rankings were determined by independent peer review and 28 of the 39 proposals were approved for funding consideration representing a total request from applicants for $9.5 million. Due to funding limitations, only the first 15 were accepted for contract by OCAST.

The Chairless Chair attaches to the user like a pair of pants to create a wearable chair that can be worn all the time.

An "ergonomic leg device" developed for use in industrial settings, The Chairless Chair promises to increase the users' health, comfort and productivity by allowing workers to take the weight off their legs and back at any time. Made of carbon fiber and aluminum, the device weighs less than five pounds and is unobtrusive enough to be worn while walking or running. It can be set into a variety of positions and then secured with a battery-operated lock, which enables the user to rest their weight without the device ever touching the floor.

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The campaign involves people dumping buckets of ice water on themselves (or being doused by others), sharing a video of the experience and nominating others to give it a try as a way to build awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS.) Otherwise known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” ALS is a progressive disease that causes nerve cells to deteriorate and eventually leads to total paralysis and death.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Silicon Valley startups like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Lending Club and others that empower people to get what they need from each other command extensive market attention and sky-high valuations. This Collaborative Economy prospers on the rise of local neighborhoods in home-sharing, friendly human connections with fist bumps in peer-ride sharing, and the ability to share money with each other at better rates than banks.

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Join us as we bring together the Transaction Network of Fortune/Global 1000 Corporates and Portfolio Holders from the VC, Angel, University, Accelerator, State and National Government in the US and around the globe.

Researchers from UCL (University College London) have demonstrated how an interplay between nutrition, metabolism and immunity is involved in the process of ageing.

The two new studies, supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), could help to enhance our immunity to disease through dietary intervention and help make existing immune system therapies more effective.

Emails. Phone calls. Deliverables. There’s always work to do. And somewhere, buried beneath all that logistical rubble, sit our careers, and beneath those, our grander dreams. But you know what? Dreams don’t show up in GCal.

Enter the Goal Board, a scheduler for your ambition. Designed by Pivit Labs, the creators of the charming Linear Calendar, the Goal Board simplifies your life into a three-layer hierarchy: At the bottom, what you want to complete this month; above that, what you want to accomplish this quarter; and on top, what you want to achieve this year.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com 

When you’re hiring, how do you know when someone is right for the job? Is it an intuitive decision, or based solely on the facts of their experience?

It’s not so cut and dry, these leaders say.

“The one piece of advice that I would tell young people getting into the tech industry today is to surround yourself with smart people you can learn from,” says Jess Lee, CEO of Polyvore. When having inspiring comrades around means handpicking them from a crowd of applicants, the process of assembling your all-stars can be overwhelming.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

I  rew up watching Star Trek and believing that by the time I became an adult we would all be using communicators, replicators, tricorders, and transporters. I was optimistic that the world would be a much better place: that we would have solved humanity’s problems and be exploring new worlds.

Image: Our youth are being raised in an time of unprecedented potential and opportunity. (Jim Michaud/AP) 

The year 1777 was not a particularly good time for America’s newly formed revolutionary army. Under General George Washington’s command, some 11,000 soldiers made their way to Valley Forge. Following the latest defeat in a string of battles that left Philadelphia in the hands of British forces, these tired, demoralized, and poorly equipped early American heroes knew they now faced another devastating winter.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

God oh God do I hate conference calls. It’s like 20 people wearing blindfolds trying to hold a conversation in a windstorm.

The interruptions, false starts, loud break-ins, three people talking at once, the dog barking in the background, the one guy standing in downtown Manhattan who won’t hit the mute button.

And above all, boredom. It’s no wonder people always multitask during conference calls.

How many people end business meetings with an “I love you” and a hug? Venture capitalist and former AT&T Labs scientist Deb Mills-Scofield does.

To Mills-Scofield, to do business is to negotiate diverse personalities to get things done — and she has the gift for it. “The broader, deeper, and more diverse your network, the bigger the impact you can make on the world,” she says.How many people end business meetings with an “I love you” and a hug? Venture capitalist and former AT&T Labs scientist Deb Mills-Scofield does.

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“The death by a thousand cuts applies to aging. So I am working to kill aging with a thousand cuts.”

During the dotcom boom, Dave Asprey made $6 million in one swoop. At the age of 26, in the rush of power and possibility that came with that sudden windfall of cash, he felt like nothing was beyond his reach, not even death. “I decided that I was just not going to die,” he tells me, with a smile. “That would be my next challenge.”

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

We're all familiar with the term "muscle memory." Once you've learned to do something--serve a tennis ball, play a difficult piece of piano music, or draw a lifelike human hand--your body seems to intuitively "know" how to reproduce that action. But researchers at Johns Hopkins university have recently discovered that our ability to perform a physical athletic or creative task isn't entirely about what the body has learned to do right. Instead, we owe our success to the hundred times we've tried to master a skill and failed.

Image: Flickr user Miguel Angel Garrido 

When Arielle Jackson started to develop the marketing and communications plan around Cover (the Android app quickly snapped up by Twitter), she brought a lot of firepower to the job. During her nearly nine years at Google, she managed product marketing for Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Voice. She then moved on to Square, where she led go-to-market plans for new hardware products like the Square Stand. At Cover, she put everything she learned to work to help make the product uniquely valuable. Today, she does the same as an advisor to multiple startups.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

How cool would it be if you had a house you could control from wherever you are? If you never had to remember to turn the lights off again, or worry about losing your house keys, or wonder if the dog is sleeping on the couch?

That's the promise of the smart home of the future: a connected home where heating, security and entertainment are fully automated and all of the latest gadgets enable creature comforts with the press of a button or a spoken command.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

In the pursuit of scientific discoveries and entrepreneurial opportunities, the power of knowledge (first and foremost if absolute and coupled with precise measurement) pushes path finders to look for paths that are not trodden yet. Others are driven by the power of ignorance, the equivalent of open-mindedness that is coupled with absolute uncertainty. That power gives them the strength to take a stance different from the traditional one and set out into unknown paths. They are path creators.