Former Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is starting a technology business incubator, Lumi Labs, with longtime colleague Enrique Muñoz Torres.

The venture will focus on consumer media and artificial intelligence, according to the company’s website, which is set against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks. Lumi means snow in Finnish, Mayer told the New York Times, which reported the news earlier Wednesday.

Image: http://fortune.com

Is Britain’s love affair with entrepreneurship coming to an end? In each and every year from 2007 to 2016 the number of new businesses registered with Companies House increased; now, however, that trend has come to an end – last year saw a 10 per cent fall-off in start-ups, the latest data shows.

Some 589,009 new companies incorporated during 2017 according to Companies House, down from the record set in 2016 of 657,790. The numbers only provide a proxy for entrepreneurship, since sole traders setting up in business without launching a company aren’t included.

These are the most influential people of the year

During the past 25 years, I've asked more than 10,000 people where and when they get their best ideas. I get all kinds of answers, but the one that has always fascinated me is "the shower" -- maybe because I also get so many of my good ideas there. And so, at the risk of overstating my case, I hereby offer you 20 reasons WHY the shower is so conducive to idea generation.

We get stronger, not weaker, by engaging with ideas and people we disagree with, says Zachary R. Wood. In an important talk about finding common ground, Wood makes the case that we can build empathy and gain understanding by engaging tactfully and thoughtfully with controversial ideas and unfamiliar perspectives. "Tuning out opposing viewpoints doesn't make them go away," Wood says. "To achieve progress in the face of adversity, we need a genuine commitment to gaining a deeper understanding of humanity."

Don’t overlook the insight that two simple metrics can yield about the effectiveness of your R&D spending.

You’ve probably heard the old joke about the two economists who saw $20 on the sidewalk. “Look,” exclaimed the first economist, “a $20 bill!” “It can’t be,” the other economist answered. “If it were a $20 bill, someone would have already picked it up.”

With a plentitude of resources at our fingertips, there has never been a better time to build a business. Sites like F6S, Appsumo and StartupStash list hundreds of low-cost resources available to businesses of all sizes. But, while available resources make it easy to set up the operations, the more challenging task is actually managing the business.

“Patent protections and the reliability of our intellectual property as a property right in the United States was a key part of the strength of the American innovation system,” said Walter Copan, Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology yesterday morning as he opened the Unleashing American Innovation Symposium, in Washington, DC. “This is still true today and today we find ourselves at another turning point.”

Image: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, speaking at ‘Unleashing American Innovation Symposium’, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world when it comes to flooding, storms, and impact from sea level rise.

In 2016, Bangladesh experienced four cyclones— a record number in the country's recent history. And by 2050, sea level rise could inundate 17% of its land and displace up to 18 million people in Bangladesh, according to Atiq Rahman, the nation's leading climate scientist.

Image: Inside a City App classroom. - Waterstudio

On a Wednesday afternoon in a sprawling lot on a former naval air station in Alameda, California, across the bay from San Francisco, workers are welding a massive black tube together. The tube–roughly the length of a football field–is one piece of a larger system that will set sail for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch this summer, where it will begin collecting some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic trash brought there by ocean currents.

Image: Photo: The Ocean Cleanup

To build a startup, entrepreneurs need a laser focus on providing an innovative solution to a real problem. Once they achieve that initial traction, the focus needs to change for quicker growth. Most entrepreneurs dream of achieving the exponential expansion of a Google or Amazon, but few investor pitches I see outline any strategy beyond simple marketing to make this happen.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

This invitation-only event is free for executive level biotech leaders and is presented by BioHealth Innovation, VirginiaBio, Inova, Children’s National Health System, QIAGEN, Maryland Tech Council, University System of Maryland and MedImmune/AstraZeneca. Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC set the bar high for biotech innovation. So please join us for our Annual BioHealth Capital Region Forum that will highlight the accomplishments of today and chart our successes of tomorrow.  

I always imagined tumbleweeds to be harmless and picturesque, but these California residents know otherwise.

In high desert areas of California like Victorville, thousands of tumbleweeds blew in on a particularly windy day yesterday, covering resident's lawns and backyards entirely.

The high winds were associated with a storm system swinging out of the Southwest, bringing hot, dry air and dangerous fire conditions to several states.

The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) is inviting industry professionals and entrepreneurs to attend its annual Industry Day and hear from top innovators in the technology transfer community. On April 26 at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel, attendees will have the opportunity to discover how public-private partnerships can work to their advantage.

Throughout history, humans and their ancestors have perfected the art of killing big animals. Now, a new study finds that as humans spread around the globe, extinction of large mammals soon followed.

Massive mammals such as wooly mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and various saber-toothed cats roamed the Earth between 2.6 million and 12,000 years ago. Now they — and most of the rest of the big ones — are extinct. 

Image: (Photo: Bill Neibergall, the Des Moines Register)

On UN projections between 2015 and 2050, the world population will grow by nearly 2.38 billion people, from 7.35 billion to 9.73 billion. Although this 32% growth is a big increase, it marks a slowdown from the 66% growth rate recorded in the preceding 35 years (1980-2015). Total Fertility Rates (TFRs) have come down all over the world and are expected to continue falling.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

So, what do Qualcomm, Symantec, iRobot, and Sonicare Toothbrush have in common? The answer: these are all businesses were seated by money from the federal government, through the Small Business Innovative Research Program. Here in the region, about 250 million dollars a year goes into startups developing high technology.They get to keep their commercialization rights, and sell to the government as a prime if they develop something meaningful. This program is a fantastic opportunity for startups in the D.C. region, and to talk about it, we were joined by Robert Brooke, director of federal funding programs at the Virginia Center for Innovative Technology.

Imagine this: You’re a general manager for a manufacturing company and orders are up. You know you should be celebrating, but instead, you feel gut punched. Your plants are facing severe capacity and material constraints and you know you can’t fill these orders. Now you have to decide which ones to fill, which to delay, and which to turn away.

Your decision will favor winners and losers: desperate customers, angry sales reps, and frustrated factory employees. And, if you don’t get it right, your reputation with all of these stakeholders will take a serious hit.

Congress created the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs in 1982 and 1992, respectively. These programs require certain government agencies to set aside a percentage of their extramural budgets so domestic small businesses can engage in research and development (R&D) with a strong potential for technology commercialization. Accordingly, 11 agencies support the SBIR program with five of them also having STTR programs. The Small Business Administration serves as the coordinating agency for the programs.

M.G. Siegler, a prominent tech investor with GV, formerly Google Ventures, wrote a blog post this week called "Arrogance Peaks in Silicon Valley," in which he described a disturbing trend he had noticed among people in the tech industry — namely, that they're "losing touch with reality."

"You can see it in the tweets. You can hear it at tech conferences. Hell, you can hear it at most cafes in San Francisco on any given day," Siegler said. "People — really smart people— saying some of the most vacuous things."

Image: Russ Hanneman on HBO's "Silicon Valley" is known for being a billionaire with a flashy car. HBO