When it comes to starting up a new technology business, the first place that comes to mind is Silicon Valley, which is located in San Francisco, Calif., USA. However, the rise of living costs and real estate prices is giving entrepreneurs a hard time because they already have a limited budget. For this reason, entrepreneurs should not forget that there are many alternative locations to found a new business that are much cheaper than Silicon Valley. Below you can find the five best cities, besides San Francisco, to launch a startup.

If you have a new business, or you’re trying to ramp up an existing one, the idea of securing outside capital, whether it be through a private firm, individual, or government agency can seem appealing.

Why wouldn’t it? It could help your business scale faster. It could help you finally get an office, invest in new equipment or services or even help pay for a few much-needed employees.

Following three years of extensive research, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) physicist Dr. Uriel Levy and his team have created technology that will enable our computers -- and all optic communication devices -- to run 100 times faster through terahertz microchips.

Until now, two major challenges stood in the way of creating the terahertz microchip: overheating and scalability.

However, in a paper published this week in Laser and Photonics Review, Dr. Levy, head of HU's Nano-Opto Group and HU emeritus professor Joseph Shappir have shown proof of concept for an optic technology that integrates the speed of optic (light) communications with the reliability -- and manufacturing scalability -- of electronics.

“I am tethered to my smartphone for both work and entertainment, as is my husband. It’s omnipresent and an extension of our bodies. Not wanting to be left out, my 16-month-old son takes the baby monitor, holds it in his hands, and peers at it like it is a smartphone. It is the cutest/most pathetic thing.”

That’s the eerie image a New York mom of two paints of her small child’s burgeoning tech addiction. Like most parents, that mom lives a waking life seeped in almost non-stop screen time (an average American adult spends about 11 hours a day looking at a screen). She, like many modern parents, sees her own tech dependency reflected in her children’s habits. She doesn’t always like what she sees.

We all want to be liked, but if you find yourself spending too much energy thinking about what others think about you, you may be creating an unhealthy pattern that can be debilitating to your success.

While it’s normal to care about what others think, problems can arise when the only way you can measure your success is through the eyes of others. And the truth is, we concern ourselves about what others think about us far more than others actually think about us.

Image: FLICKR USER EDSON CHILUNDO

A few months ago, I visited some rural communities that are struggling. Deep among the rolling hills stood neglected fields, fallen barns, and empty houses. A once thriving farm economy lay fallow, leaving many people out of work. Nearly one in five individuals lives below the poverty line.

This wasn’t the highlands of Guatemala or the patchworked hillsides of Rwanda, where my work usually takes me. This was rural Kentucky—and not even Appalachia, its eastern pocket of poverty, but rather Henry County, just a 45-minute drive from Louisville. Like Appalachia, this area had long relied on an industry that drastically declined in recent decades.

The world of marketing is changing faster than technology these days. Winning entrepreneurs have long since supplemented conventional print and video “push” marketing with digital online interactive “pull” marketing, and more recently added social-local-mobile (SoLoMo) to the mix. Mobile and global are driving all of these in innovative new ways to grow your business.

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The factor that affects team productivity and creativity is the ability to conduct constructive conflict. In turn, three other factors that affect that ability, which are strong in children, and disappears when they reach adulthood and the work environment.

Natural selection For a team to be creative, members must get along. This cannot be forced by management, and if it is–it doesn’t work. Instead, they have to share values, act in fairness, and believe that others on the team are competent.

Re: "Enough with the snark" (March 9 editorial)

We appreciated your editorial about the role of tech in Appalachia. We agree: technology and innovation can do a whole lot to create jobs and opportunity across Virginia. But publicity stunts like the “Comeback Cities Tour” are rarely the answer.

Outside investment is important, but places like Roanoke and Hampton Roads already have thriving innovation economies. We learned this when our firm, Village Capital, ran the Virginia Velocity Tour with then-Governor Terry McAuliffe and two dozen Virginia partners in 2016.

Eighteen companies ranging in maturity and focus, from software building to bag making, will be housed in the newly renovated HQ by the end of the month.

Whether you are an entrepreneur managing a startup, or a corporate executive with thousands of employees, it’s hard to ignore the evidence of big value from happy employees. According to a recent study from Deloitte, happy employees have been shown to be up to 20 percent more effective in the workplace than unhappy employees, as well as far more loyal and productive.

Sleep is the foundation of life. Without sleep, we’re going to feel like zombies shuffling around on autopilot all day. Research shows that not getting enough sleep can cause us to be less alert and affect our ability to think. It can also make us moody, which is another hindrance to being a fully functional human being. For too many of us, sleep is one of the first things to go when we’re stressed out. We stay up late and worry over due dates at work or relationship stress rather than just relaxing and letting our body do what it needs to do. We deserve rest, and we have to step up and take measures to ensure that we get enough of it.

1. "There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread." - Mother Theresa

2. "If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice." Meister Eckhart

3. "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated." - William James

4. "Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it." -- William Arthur Ward

One could say today’s American woman is a working woman. In 2016, 57% of women participated in the workforce, up from 43.3% in 1970. Additionally, 42% of mothers were the primary breadwinners for their families, meaning they brought in at least half of their family’s earnings, according to a 2015 report from the Center for American Progress.

Although more women are in the workforce and supporting their families, women’s earnings have historically lagged against that of men. In 1987, the average working woman earned about 70% of a man’s income.

To compete at the speed of digital, you need to unleash your strategy, your structure, and your people.

Congratulations! Your organization is performing at or near the top of its game, or it has been in the recent past. Perhaps even better, you have a strategy to improve in the near future. Now for the bad news: the good news won’t last.

The University of California, Davis, announced today a strategic collaboration agreement with Bayer Crop Science to foster innovation and economic development in the Sacramento region by providing dedicated facility support for university-affiliated startups — particularly those in the areas of agriculture and food-related technologies. 

Located within Bayer’s West Sacramento Innovation Hub for Crop Science, the 3,000 square-foot CoLaborator is designed to house and foster innovative new ventures to transform modern agriculture. It consists of a flexible floor plan that has the capacity for eight to 10 researchers and provides basic equipment for ag-tech startups to quickly begin putting their ideas to the test.

Image: https://www.ucdavis.edu

Frank Shankwitz, the founder of Make-A-Wish, was in a massive motorcycle accident on the highway that left him dead for several minutes. When he was revived, he battled with the question: Why have I been spared?

Then, Shankwitz met a 7-year-old boy with leukemia who only had a couple of weeks to live, on the set of Chips, where the boy's favorite TV characters worked. Shankwitz witnessed firsthand the joy the experience brought the boy -- the joy of having a wish come true. And he started wondering why he couldn't make more wishes come true for other children. 

Image: https://www.entrepreneur.com - From Video

How is the innovation economy in Massachusetts doing in 2018? In the world of biotech, there’s fretting about whether we’re in the midst of a bubble for private and public company valuations. In tech, e-commerce, and other emerging sectors, there’s the ever-present worry about being outpaced by what’s happening in Silicon Valley and even (gasp) New York.

Let’s look at some recent data points and see whether they leave you feeling “coffee mug half full and still hot” or “coffee mug half empty and tepid.”

Image: CHRISTOPHER GOODNEY/BLOOMBERG John Flannery, chief executive of General Electric, which ranks 18th on Boston Consulting Group’s list of 50 “Most Innovative Companies 2018.”

The American workforce seethes with a continuous change. Apart from relatively brief recessions, it expands and becomes ever more complex. It has done so continuously for 400 years. Although the labor market often seems basically stable, with most people working while the poor and unemployed struggle at the margins, in fact the markets constantly churn as millions change their job status every month. 

As a result, monthly unemployment reports never represent the same group of people twice, although the rates may remain the same. Even during a recession millions of people get jobs, and during a recovery millions of people lose their jobs. In recent years, BLS has found that half of the unemployed remain so for less than three months; only about one in ten remain unemployed for more than a year.

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Of all the ramifications that artificial intelligence is beginning to have on our world, the most important by far -- for obvious reasons -- will be its impact on human health.

AI has become a new tool that healthcare workers, biotech researchers, pharma professionals and now even consumers are utilizing. A TechEmergence study of healthcare industry executives "found that over 50 percent anticipate broad scale AI adoption by 2025". Women, although only about 13.5% of the entire machine learning field, are making great strides in the field of artificial intelligence in pharma and healthcare. From CEOs of biotech companies to machine learning engineers, I profile seven women who are solving some of healthcare's biggest problems ranging from global physician shortages to the misdiagnosis of disease to making sense of big data.

Image: http://www.techx365.com