Entrepreneurs around the world are driving a new agricultural revolution to address the world’s dual food security and environmental challenges through sustainable agriculture technology, or “AgTech”. We need many more of them.

As I celebrate the July 4th week at a family home nestled in a valley surrounded by farmland, I am realizing how little attention I have dedicated on this blog to agriculture. Global demographics indicate that food demand is expected to increase 70 percent by 2050, with a parallel increase of as much as 100 percent in food prices. Environmental challenges and urban trends all indicate that farmland is not the key part of the equation to tweak. Clearly, the global agriculture system is under pressure. Enter AgTech. It is a fast-growing industry, but it needs more entrepreneurial innovators to step in.

TORONTO – The National Angel Capital Organization (“NACO”) releases data on Angel investing that shows $89 million was invested in 199 deals by 29 Canadian Angel groups last year alone. This data was captured in NACO’s 2013 Report on Angel Investing Activity in Canada.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

It’s not hard to find people willing to write the narrative that “venture capital is not an asset class” or “venture capital has performed terribly.” The most recent was 18 months ago or so called The Kauffman Report. It had an influence on the people who fund our industry in a negative way as many asset managers who fund our industry read this flawed report. That’s a shame because many of these people missed out on what will be a few great VC vintages.

Famed tech startup accelerator Y Combinator aims one day to fund 1,000 companies a year its quest to spin out $1 billion “unicorns,” and for now it wants all portfolio companies to move to Silicon Valley for its three-month program, new President Sam Altman told a venture capital confab Friday in San Francisco. “I do think the Valley is still the best place in the world by a huge margin to build a start-up,” Altman said at the PreMoney Conference, which was sponsored by fellow early stage accelerator and investor 500 Startups, also based in Mountain View.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com/ - Patrick Hoge - Y Combinator President Sam Altman. 

Encapsulating a business in a single word or phrase can be a daunting task. For startups, the name of the business becomes the first word of every investor pitch and the first message that’s spread to potential users. Although it’s often dramatized, a solid name can be a startup’s first step toward gaining legitimacy and recognition.

You can have your interview materials rehearsed and ready to blow them away, but it's the sound of your voice that could be holding you back.

Try recording yourself speaking, and check for these common habits of speech that are proven to undermine your words.

For much of its history, the U.S. has been a place of innovation, where new ideas and products could flourish. But that era may be coming to an abrupt end, warns Clayton Christensen, who coined the term “disruptive innovation” and teaches at Harvard Business School.

Christensen, author of “The Capitalist’s Dilemma,” believes that American business practices are killing any potential for real growth. Rather than focus on the long term, businesses are obsessed with efficiency metrics and short-term returns. Continuing to do so, Christensen predicts, will put America in the same position as Japan, with an abundance of capital but nowhere to invest.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com/ 

Faced with cracked nest eggs and a lackluster job market, older Americans are becoming entrepreneurs. If you're a baby boomer with a business plan, you should know about a growing number of free and low-cost resources, some specifically geared for your generation.

According to the nonprofit Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, individuals between the ages of 55 and 64 represented 23.4% of the entrepreneurs who launched businesses in 2013—up from 14.3% in 1996. In recent years, the foundation says, this age group has created new businesses at a higher rate than any other. The data, writes Kauffman research director Dane Stangler, indicate "the United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom—not in spite of an aging population but because of it."

Image: http://online.wsj.com/ 

Akron is the latest city to launch a Silicon Valley-style business accelerator.

The Akron Global Business Accelerator just started recruiting high-tech startup companies for the new Bit Factory accelerator program.

Image: http://www.crainscleveland.com/ - Bit Factory executive director Anthony Margida 

Annie Lowrey writes in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky., which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.

The Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com/ 

Americans have a split vision of education. Conventional wisdom has long held that our K-12 schools are mediocre or worse, while our colleges and universities are world class. While policy wonks hotly debate K-12 reform ideas like vouchers and the Common Core state standards, higher education is largely left to its own devices. Many families are worried about how to get into and pay for increasingly expensive colleges. But the stellar quality of those institutions is assumed.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com/ - Eiko Ojala 

From being careful about how your words and actions can affect your brand to a focus on the customer and about ongoing changes in technology and in the market, there’s a lot for an entrepreneur to keep in mind. In this week’s Community News and Information Roundup, we look at what the best blogs and communities have to say and come up with some killer lessons for all entrepreneurs. Enjoy!

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Bio-innovators and entrepreneurs are often frustrated that investors don’t see the scope of biological opportunity. The industry’s funding models remain in flux. With appetite for risk unpredictable and a landscape that’s often unexplored, what’s a startup to do? How are big companies responding? In this video, Paul Gurney of McKinsey & Company moderates a discussion with Beth Seidenberg of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lindy Fishburne of Breakout Labs and the Thiel Foundation, and Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Synthetic Genomics, Inc.

We are living in a technology-infused world — hence the rising demand for top tech talent. Companies are fighting with one another while attempting to attract the best candidates, and young tech wizards are getting lost in the process. With so many jobs opening daily, how can your company stand out?

Image: FLICKR, TECHCRUNCH 

Every entrepreneur believes that their product or service is different, and that every customer will quickly see the advantage over competitors. Yet true product differentiation in the eye of the customer is rarely achieved. According to a survey by Bain & Company a while back, 80% of businesses believe they have differentiated offerings, but only 8% of customers agree.

It's standard to size a market by the number of widgets sold, but in the Internet of Things, which numbers sensors and devices in the billions, widget counts don't really matter. In part this is because the real money in IoT is not in the "things," but rather in the Internet-enabled services that stitch them together. 

More to the point, it's because the size of the IoT market fundamentally depends on the number of developers creating value in it. While today there are just 300,000 developers contributing to the IoT, a new report from VisionMobile projects a whopping 4.5 million developers by 2020, reflecting a 57% compound annual growth rate and a massive market opportunity.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

What role has angel capital played at Phunware? Phunware was established in February 2009 and over the first five years we raised approximately $17.5M in angel money. In fact, this was the only type of external capital that we raised during our formative years as we purposefully chose not to take funding from any corporate, venture or institutional investors.

Image: http://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/ 

When we think about American finance, the default image is of a pinstriped banker on Wall Street. But increasingly financial services is shifting away from the traditional bastions of money.

In an analysis of recent and longer-term employment trends, we have identified the large cities –those with over 450,000 jobs – that are gaining jobs in financial services, a sector that employs 7.9 million people nationwide.  Overwhelmingly, the fastest growth has been in cities not associated with high finance, but largely low-cost Sun Belt cities, which account for seven of the top 10 large metro areas on our list.

Crowdfunding has become the go-to resource for entrepreneurs looking to launch new products and businesses. It’s an incredible tool to gather support and test ideas on a smaller scale, before moving ahead full-force on a business. That said, it also requires entrepreneurs to put in plenty of work in order to be successful.

Image: http://www.forbes.com/ 

Canada is gaining a stronger foothold in the Big Apple.

Sheng Li Digital was among the latest intake accepted into the Canadian Technology Accelerator Program. Established by the Consulate General in New York, the program helps Canadian digital media companies access resources to accelerate their growth.

Image: http://www.techvibes.com/