After seeing the strength of the six finalist projects and evaluating each of the teams' proposals, TEDCO board members decided to up their $300,000 offer, and fund every one of them.

Millennials are changing the way people work and run their businesses. And as they also become entrepreneurs and small business owners, their approach will again change the status quo. The third annual First Citizens Bank Small Business Forecast reports 48 percent of millennials want to be part of the startup trend. This might be driven by the fact 60 percent don’t accept current corporate culture and find working for an employer impersonal.

The Halloween spirit is typically goblins, ghouls and ghosts. But why not bring your entrepreneurial spirit to the forefront on Oct. 31?

From Snapchat’s dancing hot dog to Steve Jobs’ turtleneck and New Balances, here’s your guide to 15 tech-inspired Halloween costumes.

The race for artificial intelligence dominance has meant that specialists in the field are being paid huge salaries by tech companies for their knowledge and expertise, reports The New York Times. At the heart of the issue is a major labor shortage of those with the ability to do deep research on artificial intelligence.

As an advisor to startups, and a mentor to many aspiring entrepreneurs, I’m still surprised at the number who are determined to go it alone. Even worse, when they figure out that they really need help, the first place they look is for an intern or untrained helpers. They don’t realize that these only increase their workload, due to training and management, rather than offloading real work.

Helpers do what you say, while people smarter than you in their domain do what you need, without any attention from you. In fact, if you are paying attention, you can actually learn from what they do. For example, inventors need to stick with their creative skills, and find a partner who knows how to build a business around it. That’s a win-win for both partners.

The accelerator model of helping young start-ups to grow has been around for a little over a decade now. Within this time frame accelerators have evolved in terms of business models, monetization strategy, organizational models and adaption to different industries – especially accelerators working in healthcare.

The beginning of modern tech accelerators started in 2005 with Y-Combinator as the first of its kind. After the big success of Y-Combinator other accelerators like Techstars, Seedcamp, Startupbootcamp or PlugAndPlay have followed this path. The trend of more and more accelerators entering the market came to a peak and turning point in 2013. The number of accelerators is in a steady decline since 2013. Running an accelerator successfully for a longer period of time isn’t so easy.

One hundred years ago, Lieutenant-General Arthur Currie took on Vimy Ridge, a challenge that had befuddled the Allies for many months during the First World War. His analysis, planning and rehearsals led to a great Canadian victory. A century later, the battle for Canada is to capture the high ground of innovation performance. It will take the same kind of diligent and focused effort.

Saudi Arabia, Opec’s biggest oil producer and the Arab world’s largest economy, launched on Tuesday a specialised investment zone in the north-western region of the country called Neom, which will be backed by more than US$500 billion in capital as the kingdom continues to diversify its economy away from hydrocarbons.

Image: The investment park initiative NEOM, focused on nine specialised investment sectors, was unveiled by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. REUTERS - https://www.thenational.ae

Global banking-industry performance has been lackluster. Now comes the hard part: the rise of nonbanking platform companies targeting the most profitable parts of the banking value chain.

The global banking industry shows many signs of renewed health. The recovery from the financial crisis is—at long last—complete, capital stocks have been replenished, and banks have taken an ax to costs. Yet profits remain elusive. For the seventh consecutive year, the industry’s return on equity (ROE) is stuck in a narrow range, between 8 percent and the 10 percent figure that most consider the industry’s cost of equity.

I was at a dinner with eight highly successful professional women recently, ranging in age from 35 to 74. Their stories were typical of research I have been conducting on dual-career couples. One had just been given a huge promotion opportunity in another country, but had struggled for several months to get her spouse to agree to join her. Another had decided that to save her marriage, she would take a yearlong sabbatical and go back to school, giving the family some balance and a breather from two high-powered jobs. A third had tried to work part-time for her law firm but quickly realized she was being professionally sidelined. She opted for a doctorate instead. Her husband continued his career.

Sisun Lee loved his job as an engineer at Tesla. He had absolutely no intention of quitting and starting his own company.

But what started out as a fun side project to find a cure for hangovers has grown so big, he felt he had to quit his job this week and launch a company.

On July 5, his startup Morning Recovery, will be open for business, where it will sell an FDA-compliant hangover cure.

Image: Morning Recovery CEO Sisun Lee created a hangover cure drink that's gone crazy in Silicon Valley. Sisun Lee - http://www.businessinsider.com

If by announcing a search for a second headquarters Amazon intended to play one city against another and generate millions of dollars in free publicity, it has worked. Many observers believe Amazon has long known where it wants to be — or at least has never seriously considered more than two or three specific sites — since there are no more than a handful of cities that fit the requisite criteria.

Amazon may be huge, and the bounty for the winning city potentially life-changing. But when casting about for a second North American headquarters, what matters to Amazon are many of the same things that matter to many other companies.

Imagine walking into your doctor appointment and not only receiving a thoroughly researched diagnosis, but a menu of treatment options that match your condition, lifestyle and health goals.

That’s the promise of Precision Medicine – an approach for disease treatment and prevention that uses continuously updated data to assess and treat patients taking into account their unique genetic makeup, environment and lifestyle.

We've been anticipating the release of Tesla's Solar Roof tiles, and the four sleek styles do not disappoint. Elon Musk shared pictures of the installed tiles and you would never guess the roof is made of solar panels.

Image: http://mashable.com/

One of the most controversial psychological studies in recent memory appeared last month as an advance release of a paper that will be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Yilun Wang and Michal Kosinsky, both of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, used a deep neural network (a computer program that mimics complex neural interactions in the human brain) to analyze photographs of faces taken from a dating website and detect the sexual orientation of the people whose images were shown. The algorithm correctly distinguished between straight and gay men 81 percent of the time. When it had five photos of the same person to analyze, the accuracy rate rose to 91 percent. For women, the score was lower: 71 percent and 83 percent, respectively. But the algorithm scored much higher than its human counterparts, who guessed correctly, based on a single image, only 61 percent of the time for men and 54 percent for women.

Out on the water's surface, floating above the site of a coral nursery was the first sign of trouble: a tangled mass of line, buoys, lobster traps, and debris. 

A coral restoration team from Florida's Mote Marine Laboratory was checking on its underwater nursery for the first time since Hurricane Irma brought 140-mph winds to the Keys, and things didn't look promising. The team of scientists grows coral, which is then planted out on reefs decimated by global warming and other human abuses.

Image: The brighter coral in the foreground was exposed during Hurricane Irma.IMAGE: JESSICA LEVY/CORAL RESTORATION FOUNDATION 

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Infinite Suburbia, a collection edited by Alan M. Berger and Joel Kotkin, with Celina Balderas Guzaman:

"Global urbanization is heading toward infinite suburbia. Around the world, the vast majority of people are moving to cities not to inhabit their centers but to suburbanize their peripheries. Thus, when the United Nations projects the number of future "urban" residents, or when researchers quantify the amount of land that will soon be "urbanized," these figures largely reflect the unprecedented suburban expansion of global cities. By 2030, an estimated nearly half a million square miles (1.2 million square kilometers) of land worldwide will become urbanized, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

A year ago the Midwest seemed on the cusp of a renaissance. Small towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Omaha had perfected the YC model of accelerator creation and low-cost/high-impact funding. The ecosystems have cropped up everywhere there is a coffee shop or an artisanal sandwich truck and the idea of “doing a startup” vs. going to work for some corporate behemoth is a well-worn path for many students. Even as the startup era dies in the Valley it is exploding in the heartland.

Image: https://techcrunch.com

Techstars in Boulder has set up a new venture capital fund to expand its presence in Austin, Texas.

The Boulder-based small business accelerator raised a total of $6.7 million, according to SEC filings on Oct. 19.

The funds will be used for a new accelerator geared toward companies solving social or environmental problems through tech. The newest program, called  Techstars Impact Accelerator, is launching in Austin, where the firm has had a presence since 2013.

Image: http://www.businessden.com

Want to boost your brain power? Researchers at Johns Hopkins think they have a solution.

There are countless programs out there claiming to help improve your brain function. To date, none of them have been proven to be effective. But researchers at Johns Hopkins recently compared two exercises thought to improve brain power, specifically your working memory (not your IQ), which can help you handle a number of work and school-related tasks easier.