A group of businesses is trying to standardize the definition of “data scientist” across various industries, including government.

General Assembly, a coding boot camp, is working with companies including Booz Allen Hamilton, Spotify and Nielsen to create assessments for data science skills that employers could use to benchmark their potential hires.

As Amazon's Hunger Games-esque trial to choose the site of its second North American headquarters drags on, a few cities have emerged as clear favorites.

A new report from Sperling's Best Places compiles speculation from media outlets, research firms, and brokerages into a definitive ranking of the metropolitan areas most likely to be graced with Amazon's presence.

Do you know what the most important skill is as a consultant? We spoke to Deloitte’s Ita Langton to find out.

In professional services firms, consultancy will be a major part of the organisation. Naturally, consulting partners play a very important role in that.

But what exactly does a consulting partner do? What kind of skills do they need? It can be difficult to know what a particular job is really like unless you’re in it. However, talking to someone else in the role can offer a pretty good insight.

Image: Ita Langton, consulting partner, Deloitte. Image: Connor McKenna

EBAN, the European Trade Association for Business Angels, Seed Funds and Early Stage Market Players, is delighted to announce 2 important research publications focused on business angels: the EBAN 2016 Annual Statistics Compendium; and the newly released European Commission study: "Understanding the Nature and Impact of the business angels in Funding Research and Innovation", that EBAN contributed to!

The EBAN 2016 Statistics Compendium is Europe’s most extensive annual research on the activity of business angels and business angel networks. It provides information on the overall early stage market, on how business angel networks operate and insights into their investment attitudes and demography.

Image: EBAN

A 50-degree fall day sends you running for a down jacket, while a 50-degree day in spring feels almost balmy. What’s up with that? Your body has an innate ability to “acclimatize” to colder temps—a skill scientists have recognized since a groundbreaking 1961 study.

For that month-long study, a U.S. Army researcher exposed 10 nude men to temperatures in the low 50s for eight hours a day. Not surprisingly, the poor study subjects did a lot of shivering—which is the body’s quick-fix way to generate heat. But by day 14, the men had mostly stopped shivering, and their bodies seemed to be making heat some other way.

Nearly every successful tech startup I’ve observed over the past 20 years has gone through a similar growth pattern: Innovate, systematize then scale operations. An alternate outcome that I also unfortunately observe in some cases are companies who had extreme early success with an initial product adoption but failed in key areas that limited the growth and therefore the ultimate financial outcomes.

For most people, the end of the year is a time for celebrating the holidays with family. But many entrepreneurs are already thinking ahead to 2018, focused more on setting goals than getting gifts. Here are a few tasks that will help you gain clarity on the past year and to inform your business resolutions for the new year.

Muncie, IN—Ball State University offers one of the best undergraduate entrepreneurship programs for students aspiring to launch their own businesses, according to an analysis by The Princeton Review.

The education services company ranks Ball State at No. 20 on its list of “Top 25 Schools for Entrepreneurship of 2018,” which is posted at http://www.princetonreview.com/best-business-schools. The ranking will be featured in the December issue of “Entrepreneur” magazine.

Image: Aerial image of the Ball State University campus. Photo by: Michael Wolfe - http://www.munciejournal.com

Studies are all over the place about how many jobs, if any, AI and technology in general will claim in the future. Deutsche Bank says automation will claim thousands of jobs from its workforce. CB Insights says AI will come for some jobs, but not all at once. Cornerstone predicts that automation will take over 3.5 million retail jobs. Employers will likely need to sort out job gains and losses based on industry and job categories. 

It's one thing to have a nightmare about a demogorgon—that's at least not real. This creature on the other hand, is very much of this Earth—and there's at least one out there that is very much alive. 

While working on a project, European Union researchers unexpectedly came across (and managed to catch) the elusive frilled shark. According to recent reports from BBC, the shark, whose species has existed unchanged since around 80 million years ago, was found off the coast of Portugal. 

Bill Gates' charitable foundation is putting up $10 million to fund ideas aimed at improving education and eradicating poverty, among other causes.

On Tuesday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a partnership with the MiSK Foundation, a non-profit philanthropic organization established by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

The MiSK Grand Challenges initiative will fund 100 "innovators" with $100,000 each. Ideas must be submitted around two themes: education and global citizenship.

Venture Capital firms don’t invest in industries to disrupt — they invest in industry disruptors, and many now support them operationally. Foundations should consider following suit.

I was recently interviewed by a collaborating team from three high profile foundations/LLCs. Their primary question: “How do we find and cultivate more breakthrough ideas in education?”

Why paying interns makes good business sense

No one wants to work for free, yet it seems to be the only option for many young professionals seeking a foothold on the career ladder. Unpaid internships are fast becoming the necessary pre-requisite to full-time employment.

Before setting up my own business, I had a long career in the most vilified industry going. Investment banking. It has a terrible reputation but it pays its interns, and I pay mine.

Public speaking tends to be a love-or-hate pursuit. Some professionals loathe the prospect, wishing it weren’t required of them. Others — and I hear from many – dream of developing a paid speaking career on the side.

Indeed, the economics can be enticing. Top speakers in the corporate world often command $20,000-$35,000 for one-hour keynotes, and I’ve developed a healthy six-figure side business doing so. Business celebrities like Malcolm Gladwell bring in far more (back in 2008, it was widely reported that he received $80,000 for one engagement, and he’s now listed as booking talks in the $100,000 to $1,000,000 range). But even relative beginners can earn $5,000 for an engagement – if, that is, they can get booked.

Qualcomm. iRobot. You might have heard of these companies--one making a huge impact on your wireless technology, the other keeping your home clean. But what you may not know is that they have deep roots in the Department of Defense (DoD), via the Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, program.

And it's these two success stories, among many others, that brought together SBIR and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) leaders from the Departments of the Navy and Defense--along with representatives from across government agencies--for the third annual SBIR/STTR Training Workshop, held recently in Baltimore, Maryland.

Image: (U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY JOHN F. WILLIAMS/RELEASED)

The venture capital world is dominated by men—and for companies led by women, especially companies creating products FOR women, pitching to these male investors can be a demoralizing experience. Women sitting on billion-dollar ideas aren’t taken seriously simply because the people writing the checks don’t understand their experience.

Outstream Video   Gizmodo spoke with three of these women about their products and their experiences pitching to investors. Janica Alvarez is the CEO of Naya Health, a company that makes a smart breast pump. Alvarez said that at a pitch event, investors recoiled when she passed around the breast pump. Alvarez and her husband initially raised $6.5 million, according to Bloomberg, but when the funding stalled, they had to turn to Kickstarter. Meanwhile, investment firms funneled over a hundred million into the now defunct Juicero.

Image: https://gizmodo.com

A new generation of founders looking to build the next Facebook or Uber are shaking up tech. These leading young investors of the 30 Under 30 for Venture Capital in 2018 provide the funding and support to get them there.

This year's group of up-and-coming venture capitalists hail from the nation's biggest and oldest venture capital firms and have started their own. They've created organizations to empower under-represented entrepreneurs and helped others bridge the gap from China to the U.S. They're immigrants and Bay Area lifers, early stage experts and growth stage gurus. And with a 10 women and 15 people of color in this year's class, both record numbers, they represent the faces of a rising new guard of venture capital that's shattering the stereotype of the Silicon Valley power broker.

There are two types of people in this world: puzzle lovers, and people who are wrong. However, if you are an unfortunate member of the latter group, the good news is there's a way for you to redeem yourself once and for all: by giving puzzles another chance.

Check out the 1000 Vibrating Colors Puzzle from Clemens Habicht's Colour Puzzles. The color puzzles come in three variations, including two that don't involve optical illusions, but it's the incredible vibrating colors one you'll want to check out. 

Image: THE JACKY WINTER GROUP 

Entrepreneurialism, by definition, knows no barriers, and adversity can be a precursor to opportunity. Impelled by the expectation of a shortfall in their finances, many of today’s entrepreneurs are smashing through age-old barriers and perceptions of what’s possible.

Adversity agitates for change

New findings show that the desire to become an entrepreneur can be more financially-driven than first realized. Xero’s Ageless Entrepreneur report shows that four out of five Australians over 40 feel pressure to look for additional streams of income as they look towards retirement. This can apply at the other end of the age scale too, with younger generations saying that worries about housing affordability are spurring them to set up their own ventures.

Image: Xero - Xero customer and cheesemaker Margie Parsons left the corporate world to pursue her passion.

With two-thirds of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2050, the question of how to make cities work better for their inhabitants has never been more urgent. If harnessed, the data that permeate cities can answer this question in myriad ways, and serve to inspire solutions for navigating the technological, social and economic changes of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

With this in mind, and as part of a World Economic Forum drive to empower city leadership in employing technology to improve the urban experience and using data to define and measure their preparedness for this transformation, it has published a report “Data-Driven Cities: 20 Stories of Innovation”.

Image: http://www.thenextsiliconvalley.com