The National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) has released its annual report on angel investing activity in Canada for 2017.

The report, which is based on a survey of 43 angel groups across Canada, was developed in partnership with the Government of Canada, BDC Capital, RBC, BDO, Ryerson Incubate, and Innovate Network Canada. The report highlights key trends and statistics of Canada’s angel market, and finds that angel groups are continuing to support entrepreneurs at all stages including those seeking first-time investments and follow-on investments.

Professional and business services have long been identified with the downtowns of cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, where lawyers, accountants and architects are thick on the ground. However, in recent years there's been a clear shift in the geography of this vital sector, with some of the strongest job generation emerging far from the high-rise canyons. This shift is of profound importance given that professional and business services is by far the largest high-wage job sector in the U.S. and one of the main ladders to the middle class, with an annual average salary of $60,446, compared to $48,115 a year for the average nonfarm job.

The future of 3D printing and medicine is coming into focus.

Scientists at Newcastle University in the UK say they've created the first 3D-printed human corneas. Using a combination of their unique "bio-ink" and cornea stem cells, they can print the corneas in under ten minutes. 

Image: A bioengineering proof of concept. IMAGE: NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY

The FINANCIAL -- Open innovation processes promise to enhance creative output, yet we have heard little about successful launches of new technologies, products, or services arising from these approaches. Certainly, crowdsourcing platforms (among other open innovation methods) have yielded striking solutions to hard scientific and technological problems—prominent examples being the Netflix predictive recommendation algorithm and the approach to reducing the weight of GE jet engine brackets. But most R&D organizations are still struggling to reap the very real rewards of open innovation. We believe we’ve hit on an important hidden factor for this failure and that it holds the key to a successful integration and execution of open innovation methods.

Breaking into venture capital is not easy. Starting a brand new VC fund?

Even harder.

Potential limited partners (entities that invest in VC firms) judge a firm on the past performance of the firm’s previous funds. The life of a fund is nominally ten years, which means the verdict on how well a firm’s current fund has performed takes at least a decade to be assessed.

Shape the future of productivity with tools that enable a new dimension of work. Start working in mixed reality.

Mixed reality: Your world is the canvas

Microsoft HoloLens is the first self-contained, holographic computer, enabling you to engage with your digital content and interact with holograms in the world around you.

Since that horrific February day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when 14 students and three faculty members were killed by a former student with an AR-15, classmates Jaclyn Corin, Emma González, Cameron Kasky, David Hogg, and Alex Wind have been working strategically to prevent gun violence from happening anywhere else.

Image: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, from left: David Hogg, Jaclyn Corin, Cameron Kasky, Emma González, and Alex Wind have taken the gun-control debate to Wall Street. (Photo : Jessie English)

I love Amazon’s convenience, but hate its interface. The overload of options and links everywhere, the tiny buttons, the product pages that go on forever, the dumb search–why does it suggest to search for gaming laptops in “All Departments” vs. “Computers”? Does the company sell gaming laptops that grate cheese in “Home & Kitchen”? But I digress. My point is that I just watched this parody of what Amazon might have looked like in the ’80s, and it seems a lot more user-friendly than the real thing.

Work is more demanding and competitive than ever, which is leading to higher rates of stress and burnout for employees and managers alike. But there is a better way. In her latest book, Leah Weiss, a lecturer, researcher and meditation expert at Stanford University, offers a path of enlightenment and understanding that focuses on mindfulness in the workplace. She recently appeared on the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111, to talk about the lessons in her book, How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind. (Listen to the full podcast using the player at the top of this page.)

In case you missed it, Elon Musk called BS on the field of nanotechnology last week. The ensuing Twitter spat was admittedly rather small on the grand scale of things.

But it did throw up an important question: just what is nanotech, and where does the BS end and the science begin?

I have a sneaky suspicion that Musk was trolling with his initial nano-comment. After all, much of the tech in his cars, solar cells and rockets relies on nanoscale science and engineering.

Image: https://2020science.org

GENEVA (Reuters) - Chinese and U.S. envoys sparred at the World Trade Organization on Monday over U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that China steals American ideas, the subject of two lawsuits and a White House plan to slap huge punitive tariffs on Chinese goods.

Image: FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, November 9, 2017. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj/File Photo

Atlanta’s Emory Healthcare is launching an innovation hub to develop, test and implement technology solutions designed to minimize cost burdens for both patients and providers, while improving health outcomes.

Image: https://www.healthdatamanagement.com

Setting up shop and staying in the US as an entrepreneur could soon become a lot harder, as the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has proposed a new rule intended to scrap the International Entrepreneur Rule (IER). Under the IER, immigrants creating new companies (and jobs) in the US could remain in the country for 2.5 to 5 years, as long they met certain milestones for growth and development. However, the current Trump administration wants to rescind the rule under a broader crackdown on immigration to “secure American jobs” and “protect American businesses”.

You may think earning a big salary means climbing the corporate ladder. Not necessarily.

Many U.S. companies offer six-figure salaries even to rank-and-file workers. A few, like California-based cancer-research company Geron Corp. (median pay: $500,250) and New Jersey clean-energy firm NRG Yield (median pay: $964,000), hand out upwards of half a million dollars or more.

Image: http://time.com

(Apply Early. We are only accepting a maximum of 200 IP and startups in total for this round)

Calling all universities, inventors, faculty, students, federal labs, and entrepreneurs to submit IP and startups for the next University Startups Conference and Demo Day on May 1-2, 2018 in Washington, D.C.

There’s a quick litmus-test conversation any early-stage VC will have with the founder and it’s one that you should be as prepared for as your elevator pitch. It goes something like this …

Usually that’s the point in the meeting where a VC realizes that this meeting isn’t going to go very well.

Image: https://bothsidesofthetable.com

Investing? In Uber, in Airbnb, in the big guns and the up-and-coming pistols of tech?

That’s the arena in which those with the deepest pockets play, say some who stay on the sidelines. Venture capital is for the firms and the individuals with the wherewithal to commit hundreds of millions of dollars.

Those investors are the ones who can afford to wait years before they get their money – hopefully with a lot of return on investment. Conversely, there is always risk in those same investments, in terms of loss of capital.

Lewis Pollard, the curator of the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, recently highlighted his favorite object in his museum's collections--this gadget, created circa 1896, used to resuscitate canaries in coal mines.

For about a century--from the 1890s through the 1980s--British coal miners had a tradition of lowering canaries into a coal mine to detect the presence of noxious gases. As the BBC explains, the "canary is particularly sensitive to toxic gases such as carbon monoxide which is colourless, odourless and tasteless.

Image: http://www.openculture.com

Last summer, Paul Maeillo had to clear a vacant lot in North Philadelphia, and he wasn’t happy about it. He’d done it plenty of times before, as part of the Philadelphia Horticultural Society’s LandCare program, which hires local contractors to maintain the neighborhood’s many abandoned parcels. But on this day the lot was full of wildflowers — and wildlife. In fact, it wasn’t vacant at all. He saw snakes and mice and many, many bees, gathering nectar and pollen from the untamed flora. “Just teeming,” Maeillo remembers. “It was kind of wild.”

The 2017 Census Bureau population estimates shows that population growth in the nation’s largest municipalities (incorporated cities and equivalent) has declined substantially relative to the healthier gains posted earlier in the decade. Among the 36 municipalities with more than 500,000 residents (including Honolulu, see below), the total population grew 0.63 percent between 2016 and 2017 (July 1), down more than one-third from the annual rate between the April 1, 2010 census and July 1, 2017. By comparison, the 2017 United States annual growth rate last year was 0.71 percent. The table below summarizes the results.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com