When the founders of Upworthy were planning their site, they considered a question that a few years ago would have sounded suicidal: “Should we have no homepage?” They wondered whether staffers’ time would be better spent meeting readers where they were already hanging out--on social media, largely--than to hope readers would type a URL into their address bar. It was clear that most people simply didn’t find content through homepages as much anymore, and that is was only a matter of time before a media outlet didn’t even bother with one.

Few sites are immune to the abandonment of the homepage, but if there was one survivor, it was reasonable to guess that it would be nytimes.com. News consumers have long made the trusted site a habit, and the Internet Wayback Machine shows that the Times has barely felt the need to tweak its homepage design in the last decade and a half. But last week, an internal New York Times report attained by BuzzFeed showed that even this homepage is quickly becoming less relevant.

`Indiegogo is aiming to be a big player in equity crowdfunding—if the regulations ever get finalized.

"I think there is a massive market to be had if equity crowdfunding ever happens," said Slava Rubin, CEO if Indiegogo. "We are super bullish, but we have to wait and see what the regulations will be."

Sir Richard Branson has said he would have used crowd-funding to start his Virgin empire if it had existed in the 1960s.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who started the brand selling records, last week invested in the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.

He told The Telegraph in an interview that he likes how the business is changing the way people think about finance. “Indiegogo is challenging the way we have always raised money,” he said. “It allows people worldwide to get their big ideas off the ground without having to go through gatekeepers who decide who can and can’t raise money.”

One morning in May 1998, Kevin Tracey converted a room in his lab at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y., into a makeshift operating theater and then prepped his patient — a rat — for surgery. A neurosurgeon, and also Feinstein Institute’s president, Tracey had spent more than a decade searching for a link between nerves and the immune system. His work led him to hypothesize that stimulating the vagus nerve with electricity would alleviate harmful inflammation. “The vagus nerve is behind the artery where you feel your pulse,” he told me recently, pressing his right index finger to his neck.

A downward slide has been slowly shifting the business landscape for years. Beginning sometime in the 1960s or 70s, an economic force silently started to take hold in America, taking with it jobs, traditions, and livelihoods. Mom and pop shops quietly started closing across the country, and small businesses from every sector — retail, dining, manufacturing — all started to close up shop. Several decades ago, something shifted that started to kill entrepreneurial spirit, and it persists to this day.

Signs of economic recovery in Greece are beginning to be evident. And although the pace is slow, it is real.

A little more than a month after Greece issued its first sovereign Eurobond since before the financial crisis, another issuer, National Bank of Greece is reportedly set to come to market with a senior unsecured bond issue of its own–one that could be priced at an even lower yield than the sovereign’s, thereby attesting to the improved sentiment surrounding Greece.

When Nassim Nicholas Taleb developed his popular theory to explore way-out-of-the-norm surprising events, he outlined three characteristics of a black swan event:

1. The event has a huge impact
2. The event is very hard to explain using (commonly used) scientific methods
3. The event appears unforeseen due to people’s psychological biases.

What do Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft all have in common ? Aside from being some of the most successful companies in the world, they are able to lay claim to their dominant positions as a result of sourcing venture capital. But, according to local experts in the field, there seems to be little hope for entrepreneurs here who need venture capital to develop their ideas into the next big billion-dollar company.   

At the Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance’s Third Caribbean Business Executive seminar, Central Bank Governor Jwala Rambarran said, “the industry has collapsed”  and when expressed as a percentage of GDP, VC fundraising in the Caribbean was “negligible” or at “zero”. 

For all the reporting about the unceremonious manner in which Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. replaced executive editor Jill Abramson with Dean Baquet, the strongest evidence that the needle on his tenure as publisher of the New York Times has reached the danger zone is the company’s internal “Innovation Report” that someone at the New York Times Co. leaked last week, perhaps in hopes of offsetting the bad publicity.

Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Wednesday a controversial patent bill backed by major technology companies was being taken off the committee's agenda for now.

The committee had been attempting to reach agreement on changes to a bill aimed at reducing patent litigation brought by patent assertion entities, often called "patent trolls" by their critics. The measure is similar to legislation passed overwhelmingly by the House of Representatives in December.

Image: http://ohoakcliff.com/2013/05/25/happy-memorial-day/ 

New research indicates that climate change has already triggered an unstoppable decay of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The projected decay will lead to at least 4 feet of accelerating global sea level rise within the next two-plus centuries, and at least 10 feet of rise in the end. 

What does the U.S. look like with an ocean that is 10 feet higher? The radically transformed map would lose 28,800 square miles of land, home today to 12.3 million people.

Image: By the metric of most people living on land less than 10 ft above the high tide line, New York City is most threatened in the long run, with a low-lying population count of more than 700,000. Courtesy of Climate Central 

Each year we pick the ideas, companies, applications and inventions that have amazed us with their unique solutions to common problems or marketplace voids, executed in forms both ultra-high-tech and strikingly simple.

We divide these innovators into the 10 categories that we believe best tap into the zeitgeist, and this year there's a lot that's new.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Crowdfunding has become much more prominent after Facebook (FB_) recently bought crowd-funded virtual-reality headset maker Oculus for $2.1 billion. In September of 2012, Oculus was financed by nearly 10,000 individuals for over $2 million through KickStarter, a crowdfunding platform.

The crowdfunding principle -- when individual investors finance a project over the Internet or at live events -- can result in more profitable investing in stocks, too. Let's look at Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett -- two of the best investors in history -- Andy Frankenberger, winner of the World Series of Poker, and Dom Einhorn, founder of crowdfunding site Born2Invest, as they talk about investing principles relevant to the new crowdfunding movement.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Many people in the technology licensing field paid close attention to the experiment conducted by Penn State University when they licensed 59 portfolios of patents through an online auction during a two week period in early April 2014. The results weren’t that financially impressive, but something more important was at stake.

Image: Patent Drawing for a Flying Machine, 10/05/1869 (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives) 

Summer vacation season is almost upon us, which means it’s time for the usual hand-wringing over the modern relationship with leisure.

Things may be looking up--a recent AmEx survey of small business owners found 60% planned to take at least a week off, the highest proportion since 2006.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

With Memorial Day weekend starting in just a few hours, many Americans will be relishing in an extra day off to kick back and relax. The additional time off may have everyone wishing a three-day weekend was the norm. Well, for some companies, it is.

Treehouse, an online service that teaches web design, app design, and coding, has a year-round three-day weekend policy. CEO Ryan Carson began taking Fridays off soon after starting his first company to spend more time with his family and since the company’s inception has made it a policy that employees do the same.

At a recent baby shower, along with the 35 or so assembled guests, I was asked to write down a specific wish for the newborn girl: “I hope you grow up to…” Predictably, most of the advice was along the lines of “become a good person” or “realize your dreams.”

I felt oddly self-conscious as I wrote: “I hope you grow up to become a CEO.”  Even as a female CEO, stating this goal publicly felt like a jarring contrast to all pretty pink ribbons and lacy cupcakes at the party. But I also felt obligated to suggest this possibility because it might not occur to anyone else.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

We all have a lot to learn from the new generation of companies that have come out of the Silicon Valley revolution. Many of these entrepreneurial lessons have been codified in books, the new bibles for innovation — not just for entrepreneurs but also for managers looking to create new and innovative innovation businesses inside existing corporations. Companies that want to shake themselves out of their routines and generate innovation from inside take the Silicon Valley cookbook and start adding recipes from it to their own.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

WASHINGTON -- A growing number of startups want to play the matchmaker role between community colleges and employers. One of them, WorkAmerica, makes an unusual offer as part of their pitch: students get a legally binding job offer before they enroll at one of the company’s partner colleges.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net