Blockchain startup Akiri has received $10 million in Series A funding to develop a distributed ledger platform for health data.

Announced on Jan. 3, the fund was granted by Health2047, a technology incubator company launched by the American Medical Association (AMA). The platform, called Akiri Switch, will be a “network-as-a-service” tool meant to securely transfer private healthcare data including patient records across the U.S. healthcare system.

Alexandria Real Estate recently completed a large building on the west side of Lake Union and now it's starting to plan one on Eastlake.

The venture capital industry in India has taken off only in the last six to seven years, but the year 2017 in particular started with a lot of expectation and hope. This hope was built on the fact that a drop in the sentiment of investors in the year 2016 would have led to correction in valuations that the entrepreneurs were expecting. However, the year 2017 proved that it was not just about valuations, it was much more than that. Let me try and enumerate the main issues that determined the key outcomes in the year 2017.

Image: The year 2018 is expected to continue the momentum of venture capital investing in India. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

Apple says its iPhones are made to operate in temperatures above 32 degrees. Much of the country won’t even creep above that mark until the second week of January – and tens of millions of Americans are enduring lows in the negative double digits.

In conditions like these, many smartphones will be start experiencing problems like shutting off, shortened battery life, display problems or even the glass shattering.

Last June, not long after a catastrophic thunderstorm swept through southern Ontario, bringing a month’s worth of rain in just a few hours, a group of seventy-five architects, engineers, and policymakers from sixteen countries gathered in the city of Waterloo to discuss how humanity will cope with its waterlogged future. The timing of the conference was a fitting meteorological coincidence; in a world increasingly transformed by climate change, heavy rains and major floods are becoming more common, at least in some areas. In the summer of 2017 alone, Hurricane Harvey dumped more than fifty inches of rain over Texas, a monster monsoon season damaged more than eight hundred thousand homes in India, and flash floods and mudslides claimed at least five hundred lives in Sierra Leone.

Image: https://www.newyorker.com - As major storms become more common, could amphibious architecture keep at-risk neighborhoods intact?Illustration by Seb Agresti

As we looked through what we published in 2017 to highlight the very best knowledge shared, two things stood out to us. First, we were thrilled to feature a star-studded cast of extraordinary operators — including but not limited to Instagram CTO Mike Krieger, Facebook VP Product Fidji Simo, Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, and Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson. But second, and more importantly: We ended the year featuring nearly 50-50 women and men leaders (46% women to be exact). In an industry where visibility and role models can make an enormous difference, we were happy to do our part — and motivated to do even better next year.

Working with an amazing leader is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – not everyone can work with Nelson Mandela or Gandhi or even a rock star boss like Bruce Springsteen. Leaders in the knowledge economy, those who have moved up the ranks from team member to team leader, aren’t always charismatic. It’s far more commonplace to find team leaders who were promoted to a leadership role without developing their leadership skills.

Most work, especially the type that MBA graduates go on to do, is team-based. Yet working in a team can be complicated. MBA students often complain about so-called “free riding”, that is, when some team members don’t put in the work but reap the benefits of working in a group.

The new era of highly connected and interactive technology is changing not only how business employees interact with customers, but also how they interact with each other, and with their company. I am happy to see reports that young companies are leading the way in these trends, on both the customer and the employee side. Both are required to stay competitive.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

“Bureaucracy” has become a catchall term for the many ways in which organizations squander workers’ potential. From needless paperwork to delusional project timelines, administrative overhead can prevent workers from doing the meaningful tasks that contribute to the organization’s bottom line. Employees perceive bureaucracy to be an immovable beast, blocking their path toward efficient, satisfying work lives.

And yet excising these bureaucratic elements from organizations would be nearly impossible. Projects that involve complex technical work must be tracked and coordinated across departments; budgets must be accounted for; and costs must be kept in line. While some organizations do a better job than others of protecting their expert workers from the detrimental effects of documentation, schedules, expense accounting, and budget statements (the list could go on), managers can only do so much.

Eric Hippeau, a managing partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures, is well-known in the venture community for his firm’s blockbuster investments including Birchbox, BuzzFeed, Casper, and Warby Parker. Two thirds of Lerer Hippeau portfolio companies are based in New York. Why?

“New York is a center of innovation and technology, but it doesn’t have the VC support that you find on the West Coast,” he said. “There are few early-stage funds such as ours that dedicate the majority of their investment to New York, so we felt that was a very good way to build a portfolio.”

Image: Eric Hippeau Courtesy of Lerer Hippeau Ventures

The market forces that drove the evolution of the private secondary markets, such as democratization, globalization, transparency and liquidity, are now driving the adoption of initial coin offerings by private tech companies.

After the blizzard of ICO activity in 2017, few would contest that we are on the front end of a paradigm shift in the private capital markets. Accelerating declines in early stage VC activity while ICO volumes ramp are not a coincidence. And if the size of a paradigm shift can be predicted by the speed of its onset, then we should all be preparing for the venture world to change very significantly, very soon.

Image: https://www.pehub.com

Every company needs a home. Even the towering giants of online commerce desire a cozy place to hang their virtual hats (and sometimes more than one cozy place, as attested by the current bidding war for Amazon's HQ2). While many a corporate mythology might dwell nostalgically on the "we started in our garage" trope, no startup wants to linger in the carport for very long. Once your business gets sure footing, you're going to need digs.

Accenture has released the Fjord Trends in 2018 in its recent report, which analysed the pressing forces acting internally and externally on organisations and society.

The Accenture 11th annual report examines seven emergent trends expected to impact business, technology and design in the year ahead.

According to the report, rapid technological advancements are altering the world we live in today, provoking both wonder and fears about the possibilities.

Making predictions can be a tricky business. Nevertheless, Xconomy recently brought together some of San Diego’s most prominent life sciences leaders to offer their vision for what the regional biotech cluster will be like in five years.

They broadly agreed that San Diego has proven itself as a great seedbed for life sciences startups. The list of recent buyouts includes Life Technologies ($13.6 billion), CareFusion ($14.4 billion), Receptos ($7 billion), Seragon Pharmaceuticals ($725 million), Aragon Pharmaceuticals ($1 billion), and Auspex Pharmaceuticals ($3.2 billion). Yet one central question arising from their discussion went largely unanswered: Are there specific steps this region can take to boost the life sciences ecosystem so that more seedling biotechs can become independent global giants and remain in San Diego?

Image: Photo by Teresa LoJacono

Last year Kim Phan, a clothing designer in Manhattan, decided she wanted a miniature version of herself. She wore a print dress from her label, Yumi Kim, and proceeded to a branch of Doob, where she stepped into a walled room — the “Dooblicator” — fitted with 54 cameras. The cameras captured her from every angle, and then Ms. Phan stepped out and reviewed the image on a monitor.

“I wanted it to be a motion shot,” she said. “I told them, ‘I want you to capture my dress flying.’”

Image: What to do with a doob? They aren’t sturdy enough to play with, like a Barbie or Star Wars figure. Credit Peter Garritano for The New York Times

When starting out as a new entrepreneur, you need to be ready for all kinds of challenges and obstacles, from insufficient funding to tough competition, as well as trouble finding enough customers or dealing with incapable employees. But perhaps some of the most frustrating problems you will face will be those you cause yourself, as a consequence of a mis-timed action or off-day decision.

FOR DECADES, no industry has been a more reliable moneymaker than pharmaceuticals. Immune to recession, drug companies regularly score 15 percent profit margins year after year. There is no danger of market saturation and, in the U.S., little prospect of government restraint of prices. Nearly all regulatory submissions win approval, and turnaround times are steadily decreasing. If you are an investor, what’s not to like?

If your idea of multitasking is watching a football game on television while texting your friends on your smartphone and checking email on your tablet, you’re not alone. In today’s technology-driven world, multitasking is an integral and necessary part of life. But are you really getting anything done effectively when you try to do many things at once? New research from Wharton marketing professor Rom Schrift and doctoral student Shalena Srna shows that multitasking is a mere illusion because it is impossible to execute more than one task at a time. Nevertheless, the perception of multitasking seems to be beneficial to performance. Schrift and Srna, who authored the paper, “The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance,” with Yale marketing professor Gal Zauberman, shared their observations with Knowledge@Wharton.

On  uly 11, 2016, Ian Thornton picked up the phone for what he thought was a routine catch-up after a monthlong sabbatical. He had missed a rough couple of weeks in the U.K., including the country’s shock decision in a June 23 referendum to leave the European Union, sending the pound tumbling to a three-decade low against the dollar as investors struggled to comprehend the result. Chris Kennedy, then chief finance officer at computer processor designer Arm Holdings, was about to deliver even less likely news. Arm had a takeover bid.

Image: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com

Bitcoin got a bit of a new year bump thanks in part to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Thiel's VC company Founders Fund spent around $15 to $20 million in the past buying bitcoin. The Journal says the company claims its investment is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

SEE MORE: When Bitcoin Falls, So Does The Rest Of The Cryptocurrency Market

Bitcoin's actual value has skyrocketed in recent months, but it's still pretty unstable. The Journal's report may have prompted Bitcoin prices to jump up about $1,000 — it was hovering at close to $15,000 later in the day.