While the average internet speed across the country has grown exponentially in the last few years, coming in at around 18.7 megabits per second according to “Akamai’s State of the Internet: Q1 2017 Report,” there are still large disparities between what many states have come to expect from their connectivity.

With speeds coming in at 28.1 megabits per second on average, Washington, D.C., has the fastest internet in the U.S., according to Akamai’s quarterly report, with Delaware coming in second with average speeds of 25.2Mbps.

The Creating Wealth through Business Improvements report from BMO Wealth Management reveals 60 percent of small business owners never apply for funding to support innovation.

With the development of digital technology and advances in smartphones, apps, artificial intelligence, and social media to name a few, small businesses have to support and implement the latest innovation as quickly as possible. According to the report, innovation drives financial success for businesses of any size.

Image: https://smallbiztrends.com

Every entrepreneur I know has their favorite excuse for a previous failure – an investor backed out, the economy took a downturn, or a supplier delivered bad quality. These things outside your control do happen, but based on my years of experience as a startup advisor and angel investor, I still see too many strategies leading to failure that are inside the entrepreneur decision realm.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

During one of the stops on the Amazon HQ2 roadshow, a team of officials visited Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina seeking to learn more about whether the area was a good fit for the sought-after $5 billion project. According to the Washington Post, one of the items on the agenda was House Bill 2, the 2016 “bathroom bill” decried by many tech companies.

No matter how you define a beach or how high your waterfront standards may be, MONEY has found a perfect destination for you.

The following 14 beaches, both in the U.S. and overseas, range widely. They include quiet sandy retreats, breaks surfers will love, lush foliage-hidden escapes, and kid-friendly options with boardwalk games. The one thing they share: All offer that ideal mix of waterfront amenities and affordability.

StartEngine posts a weekly blog update regarding the state of Reg CF (or Regulation Crowdfunding).  This is the smallest of the three crowdfunding exemptions and allows companies to raise up to $1.07 million. While the industry is still maturing, and expectations are for Congress to increase the cap from its rather anaemic ceiling, crowdfunding platforms have continued to adapts and find ways to work within the rules.

Image: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com

Entrepreneurship can be one of the loveliest careers. You enjoy a work-life balance, run your own show at will, work for passion and, hopefully, live the rest of your life as a self-reliant individual.

Everything is just cool. But if you’re eyeing entrepreneurship ultimately to become your own boss, then you may have to think again.

What makes someone an entrepreneur? Some think entrepreneurs are born, others believe successful entrepreneurship comes from years of education or being lucky enough to have an influential mentor.

The truth is that entrepreneurs come in all different personality types, and come from all walks of life. There isn’t one simple way to determine what makes an entrepreneur. But, many entrepreneurs do share particular characteristics, regardless of their personal style or their business type. How many of these four important traits of entrepreneurs do you share?

INTERNATIONAL - A decade ago, Devin Jameson might have chosen to drop out of college and work on Eversound, a wireless headset start-up for senior communities. Instead, Jameson was able to combine his co-founded company with his academic course work through Cornell University’s eLab programme, an accelerator curriculum he completed in 2015.

The eLab programme runs for a full academic year.

Image: FILE - This Monday, Aug. 24, 2015, file photo shows the New York Stock Exchange. Stocks are off to a solid start on Wall Street, building on the market's gains from a day earlier. Technology and health care stocks rose more than the rest of the market in early trading Thursday, May 10, 2018. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

A decade ago, Devin Jameson might have chosen to drop out of college and work on Eversound, a wireless headset start-up for senior communities.

Instead, Jameson was able to combine his co-founded company with his academic coursework through Cornell University's eLab program, an accelerator curriculum he completed in 2015.

The eLab program runs for a full academic year. Students build out their businesses while participating in lectures, class work, mentorship and receiving a $5,000 investment. At the end of the program, students demo their businesses in front of a crowd of hundreds, including potential investors.

The world’s most influential synthetic biologist is behind a new company that plans to rejuvenate dogs using gene therapy. If it works, he plans to try the same approach in people, and he might be one of the first volunteers.

The stealth startup Rejuvenate Bio, cofounded by George Church of Harvard Medical School, thinks dogs aren’t just man’s best friend but also the best way to bring age-defeating treatments to market.

Image: CHARLES II OF ENGLAND AS PRINCE OF WALES, 1630 - JUSTUS VAN EGMONT

The Ann Arbor-based Renaissance Venture Capital Fund, created in 2008 as an affiliate of Business Leaders for Michigan, has finished raising its third and largest fund of $81 million.

Renaissance is a fund of funds, investing in other venture-capital firms that are willing to invest in Michigan companies, many of them early-stage tech companies. Previously, it raised funds of $45 million and $79 million.

Image: Renaissance Venture Capital Fund “Each time we’ve got more organizations involved. It’s great validation as our reach gets larger." — Chris Rizik, Renaissance Venture Capital Fund CEO and fund manager

Not much bigger than a bottle cap, the device Neda Ghazi holds in her hand could have a significant impact on Canadians’ health. 

It’s an ultraviolet light tracker, called the QSun, that clips to a T-shirt or sports bra and alerts the user when they’re about to get a sunburn – a leading cause of skin cancer. 

Ghazi and her co-founder – and husband – Ali Monam developed the $99 device through their University of Toronto startup Comfable and recently raised nearly $50,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to fund its production.

Image: Neda Ghazi holds the QSun, an ultraviolet light tracker. When paired with an AI-powered smartphone app, it can not only tell users when they're at risk of being burned, but how much sunscreen to apply (photo by Chris Sorensen)

There's a lot of pressure for small-business owners to be masters of every aspect of their business. This is especially true when you're first starting out and are often a one-person shop. A recent survey by The UPS Store found that one of the biggest barriers to starting a small business in 2018 was fear of failure, behind concerns about financial security.

Is there any better time to start a business than as a student? Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and many other successful entrepreneurs would probably argue not. Students with free time and few responsibilities can take risks that parents with mortgages and full-time work can't take. Launching a business is also brilliant real-world experience and could even cover tuition fees.

Even though we all know that success in business means taking risks on new and unproven innovations, we are still creatures of habit, programmed by evolution to favor the safe and familiar. Thus following your natural instincts and intuition in growing your business is often the worst thing you can do. Yet training yourself and your team to practice unsafe thinking is scary.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

It’s official: the gig economy is taking over work as we know it. More than a third of the workforce — 55 million Americans — are currently working as freelancers. This is the highest number of people on record who have chosen freedom over a 401k.

For some, the gig economy is simply a way to pick up extra cash. That’s how my first company, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, got its start: I needed to pay for college. For others, though, it’s a way to escape from the corporate world for good. They want the freedom and control that only working for themselves can provide.

We open today on a familiar scene: After a long day of back-to-back meetings, Bob arrives home to find his wife, Jane, who also has just returned from work, starting to prepare dinner. As Bob rolls up his sleeves to begin chopping carrots, they talk about their day.

Despite the burgeoning interest in three-dimensional (3D) printing for the manufacture of customizable oral dosage formulations, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved tablet notwithstanding, the full potential of 3D printing in pharmaceutical sciences has not been realized. In particular, 3D-printed drug-eluting devices offer the possibility for personalization in terms of shape, size, and architecture, but their clinical applications have remained relatively unexplored. We used 3D printing to manufacture a tailored oral drug delivery device with customizable design and tunable release rates in the form of a mouthguard and, subsequently, evaluated the performance of this system in the native setting in a first-in-human study. Our proof-of-concept work demonstrates the immense potential of 3D printing as a platform for the development and translation of next-generation drug delivery devices for personalized therapy.

Image: http://advances.sciencemag.org - From article.

Trump is opening the skies to robotic aircraft. The White House has launched a new program to expand testing of drones, which means states and local governments will now be able to seek sweeping Federal Aviation Administration approval to allow drone flights over people, at night and out of sight of an operator. Previously, anyone wishing to use drones in those situations had to seek a waiver from the FAA, which was a long, laborious, and rarely successful edeavor.