MENLO PARK, Calif., Feb. 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Global venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) today announced that Jeff Immelt has joined the firm as Venture Partner. Immelt, who recently retired from his role as Chairman and CEO of GE after 16 years at the helm of the 125-year-old company, is widely regarded as one of the world's most innovative and capable business leaders. His extensive domain and company-building expertise are closely aligned with NEA's core sectors of focus, and he will work closely with technology and healthcare companies across the firm's portfolio in this new role.

New players and blurring sector borders are starting to influence the competitive outlook in a wide range of industries. Here’s a close-in look at changes afoot in automobiles and banking.

Four emerging technology clusters will define how automotive manufacturers, suppliers, and digital attackers compete and cooperate for growth. In banking, enlarged platform spaces will offer customers access to a wide range of products and services through a single gateway. In both industries, established players will need to rethink strategy, either by joining existing ecosystems or forging their own.

The richest people in America have a surprising amount in common.

For starters, they’re all men who mostly work in tech. And almost all of them made their fortunes by starting their own companies and maintaining ownership as they soared to success, including Microsoft and Facebook. In fact, seven of the 10 richest men in America are also among the 10 richest people in the world.

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You’ve seen the headlines: “Robots Will Destroy Our Jobs—and We’re Not Ready for It.” “You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot—and Sooner Than You Think.” “Robots May Steal as Many as 800 Million Jobs in the Next 13 Years.”

Such stories are tempting to take at face value. Who wouldn’t want to know if their livelihood, or that of their children, will soon be in jeopardy?

Here’s the problem: the findings cited emanate from a wide array of studies released by companies, think tanks, and research institutions. And their prognostications are all over the map.

Some people’s careers take off, while others’ take longer — or even stall out.

Common wisdom says that the former attend elite MBA programs, land high-powered jobs right out of school at prestigious firms, and climb the ladder straight to the top, carefully avoiding risky moves. But our data shows a completely different picture.

We conducted a 10-year study, which we call the CEO Genome Project, in which we assembled a data set of more than 17,000 C-suite executive assessments and studied 2,600 in-depth to analyze who gets to the top and how. We then took a closer look at “CEO sprinters” — those who reached the CEO role faster than the average of 24 years from their first job.

Raising capital is not for the faint-hearted. The process is rife with obstacles. Fundraising as a female founder can be especially challenging.  As a female founder, here are five tips that I’ve relied on in navigating the rough waters.  

Be confident.

Research has shown that females are less confident and less likely to self-promote than males.  A study spearheaded by Wiebke Bleidorn of the University of California found that there’s a universal gender gap in terms of confidence levels. Regardless of culture or country, men exhibit higher levels of self-esteem than women.

(MENAFN - Asia Times) The dragon is on fire when it comes to high-tech industries but a trade war with the US looms By January 31, 2018 6:22 PM (UTC+8) China's digital economy is racing ahead. Illustration: iStock The unsung star of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week was not a head of state, but the Chinese Politburo member Liu He. The 66-year-old is a trusted confidant of President Xi Jinping and will soon be vice-premier to oversee the Chinese economy.

Betamore, Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures and the University of Maryland, Baltimore are looking for five local digital health, bio-health or life sciences companies to participate in a new collaborative accelerator program.

The application period for Trajectory Next is now open. The new 12-week training program will run from April 1 through June 15. The new program has been branded as a kind of post-accelerator that will offer startups support and assistance as they work to build up their teams, acquire new customers and develop revenue streams. It is designed to serve startups that are navigating the tricky period after graduating from an accelerator or incubator.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the bank of the world's most innovative companies and their investors, released its ninth annual Startup Outlook report today. The survey found that many startups globally believe that business conditions will be better this year compared to 2017, with 30 percent globally noting that 2018 conditions will be much better.

The series of reports offers international perspectives from more than 1,000 startup founders and executives, primarily in the US, UK and China. The reports examine startup leaders' insights on business conditions, fundraising, hiring, workforce diversity and public policy issues, including the impact of regulations, taxes and immigration policies.

Imagine a world in which the human resources function as we know it vanishes and is replaced by automation, outsourcing, and self-organizing teams. Or a world in which top talent is fought over so fiercely that the most adept tech workers hire agents to negotiate and manage their careers.

It may sound like science fiction. But the world of work is changing so fast that either scenario could become reality. Megatrends such as digitization, the rise of automation, and shifting demographics are disrupting the way we work, and the way companies relate to workers.

Nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs, which are increasingly common in employment contracts, suppress employee speech and chill creativity. The current revelations surfacing years of harassment in major organizations are merely the tip of the iceberg.

New data shows that over one-third of the U.S. workforce is bound by an NDA. These contracts have grown not only in number but also in breadth. They not only appear in settlements after a victim of sexual harassment has raised her voice but also are now routinely included in standard employment contracts upon hiring. At the outset, NDAs attempt to impose several obligations upon a new employee.

A new study from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, suggests that replacing time spent sitting with light-intensity physical activity may benefit health more than previously thought.

New research shows that just a little exercise each day can bring significant benefits. In the journal Clinical Epidemiology, the authors report how replacing just half an hour of sitting each day with housework, walking, standing, or similar low-intensity activity is linked to a 24 percent reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

In 2017, Roomi launched an equity crowdfunding campaign through Republic.

My team and I elected to run this campaign even though we’d raised over $17 million as of 2017. And for our Republic campaign, we confidently set our goal at yet another $1 million.

At this point, you may be asking why we’d go to the trouble of creating, marketing, and managing an equity crowdfunding campaign in spite of already having so much capital.

Managing your money, for both your business and in your personal life, can be a daunting prospect. With the new year, many of us are thinking about how we can best allocate our resources and set budgets that will help reap the biggest rewards. But how should you be thinking about the best way to take care of your funds? Take a page out of the playbook of some of the worlds biggest billionaires.

“When women want change, we get it.” That’s what Shelly Bell, founder and CEO of Washington, DC-based Black Girl Ventures, told PitchBook when we asked her if she thinks the tech industry is poised for a massive cultural shift.

Over the course of several months, PitchBook set out to better contextualize our dataset on VC deals for US-based female-founded companies. We engaged in conversations with several women founders and VCs across the US to learn more about their experiences, both good and bad, and to hear what ideas they had for increasing the amount of capital going to women-founded companies. These conversations occurred against a backdrop of daily #MeToo stories and allegations of sexual harassment against executives in numerous industries, making for a lot of interesting conversations that we plan to publish more of over the next several weeks.

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ROCKVILLE, Md., Jan. 26, 2018 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- 20/20 GeneSystems, Inc. finalized its first equity crowdfunding campaign this week with gross proceeds of $1.07 million, the maximum amount permitted under current SEC rules pursuant to Regulation CF. In so doing, the company became only the second medical technology firm to reach this maximum. 20/20 is now listed as one of the "Top 20 Regulation Crowdfunding Campaigns of All Time" by Crowdfund Capital Advisors. The campaign was posted on First Democracy VC, a joint venture between Indiegogo and MicroVentures and was assisted by marketing firm Enventys Partners.

Feeling unprepared for technical disruption? A well-structured role for a chief technology officer is a first line of defense.

The dizzily increasing speed of technological change makes it critical for companies to stay ahead of technology trends and be able to anticipate disruptions. For technology and technological change—which, as Exhibit 1 shows, can involve either pure information technology or technology in the sense of materials and processes—are changing the ground rules for everything from products and services to business models and processes.

Much of the world looked up to the skies Wednesday in search of the “super blue blood moon,” a rare celestial phenomenon that hasn’t occurred since 1982.

The spectacle was particularly captivating because it was the convergence of three rare events: a supermoon, blue moon, and total lunar eclipse — which turns the moon orangish-red, hence the “blood” description. There won’t be another so-called “super blue blood moon” until 2037.

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Time Out's City Life Index, a survey of 15,000 people in 32 global cities, has been released, and it shows which ones promise the most fun and excitement in 2018.

The survey, conducted by Tapestry Research, questioned residents on a variety of aspects of city life.

It ranked cities in categories across food, drink, culture, friendliness, affordability, happiness, and liveability.

Any assumption that an entrepreneur makes about their customers and markets is nothing but a guess, says serial entrepreneur Steve Blank. But how can one prove a working hypothesis? It goes beyond soliciting friends for feedback in the dorm room. Successful ventures locate real customers in the field, solicit their feedback, and deeply analyze the customers whose problems they hope to solve.