There are few more credible authorities on artificial intelligence (AI) than Hilary Mason the New York-based founder and chief executive of the data science and machine learning consultancy Fast Forward Labs.

So, I asked Mason, who is also the Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners and the former Chief Scientist at Bitly, whether today’s AI revolution is for real? Or is it, I wondered, just another catch-all phrase used by entrepreneurs and investors to describe the latest Silicon Valley mania?

It’s clear that the Japanese startup scene has come a long way in the last decade. The country’s market, often considered “closed” by outsiders, is nonetheless a huge breeding ground for innovative, competitive companies. Japan’s corporations are taking notice, with a growing number of corporate VC’s jumping into the ecosystem. Some of the hottest sectors of the market, like fintech, are projected to grow at astronomical rates in the coming years.

Image: https://www.techinasia.com

Amsterdam, Guangzhou, Norfolk, New York, Seattle, Singapore - and there are more - all have something in common: they are world port cities.

World port cities have an advantage in the effort to reinvent their community for the new economy—an economy vitally dependent on creativity and innovation—that other cities are only now coming to understand.

Peter Bellerby is one of the last artisan globemakers on earth. But now, he's teaching an entirely new generation of artists the secrets of crafting entire worlds by hand. 

10 years ago, he started working on his first globe out of his living room. Today, Bellerby's studio employs 20 people, including cartographers, painters, globemakers, and woodworkers. Currently, they're working on remaking a 17th century celestial globe, commissioned by The Louvre.

Image: http://mashable.com

1947 was a year of political ambition, says a panelist for the book launch of The Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development in posing the question, "Do we have that same level of ambition in the current crop of international leaders?"

Image: http://therealnews.com

Apple increased its R&D investment to $2.94 billion in the third quarter of 2017, around 6.5 percent of the company’s total sales in the quarter. It is a large advancement on the past years, and shows Apple has a few things big planned in the coming years.

The most talked about, at least by Apple executives, is augmented reality. At WWDC 2017, it announced ARkit, a new SDK for developers to build mixed reality apps on iPhone and iPad. IKEA is one of the launch partners on iOS 11, turning its entire catalogue to highly realistic 3D images.

Image: https://readwrite.com

Ottawa – The competition to become one of up to five government-designated technology “superclusters” and draw from a federal funding purse of $950 million has attracted more than 50 proposals.

The contest, a cornerstone of Ottawa’s so-called innovation agenda, is designed to encourage academia and businesses to work together on strategies to boost fast-growing sectors – everything from advanced manufacturing to clean technology.

A recent piece by the IPA’s David Caygill and Matt Rebeiro on corporate venturing caught our attention recently. Whenever valuable industry insight emerges, we can’t help getting stuck into a debate with colleagues over intricate details.

The piece explored some valuable points of view around corporate venturing – from investment being (part of) the incentives for startups to 'culture eating strategy for breakfast.' But having spent over a decade working in corporate venturing, we felt the piece could’ve gone further.

Image: http://www.thedrum.com

A new report from PitchBook Data shows seed and late-stage valuations are down in the Bay Area this year, but up for Series A and B rounds. Here is a look at that and where the most deals and dollars flowed in the region in Q2.

Image: https://www.bizjournals.com

Being an entrepreneur can be challenging, exhilarating, and fulfilling. Running your own business requires unwavering commit, focus and determination. It’s not an easy path, but for some people being an entrepreneur is a passion that can’t be ignored.

There is no straight line to becoming an entrepreneur, but there are things you can do to set yourself up for success. Studying hard and getting good grades is a start, but nothing replaces hands-on experience. According to an annual survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 91 percent of employers said candidate experience is a factor in hiring decisions. Nearly half of surveyed employers wanted new-grad experience to come from internships or co-op programs.

When I was a young girl, I was a consummate entrepreneur. I sold food (scary, if I you tasted my cooking), lemonade, clothing -- heck, I even sold my sister’s stuffed animals back to her (that’s another story). All that said, I would have loved a book to develop my growing business mind.

Clearly, I am not the only one. My good friend JJ Ramberg is the host of the entrepreneurship show Your Business on MSNBC, notably the second longest-running program on the network. She's also an entrepreneur in her own right as founder of the twelve-year-old coupon site Goodshop.

In a striking advance that helps open the door to organ transplants from animals, researchers have created gene-edited piglets cleansed of viruses that might cause disease in humans.

The experiments, reported on Thursday in the journal Science, may make it possible one day to transplant livers, hearts and other organs from pigs into humans, a hope that experts had all but given up.

Every port-a-potty in the state of Oregon was reserved months ago. In a small town in Kentucky, workers are planning to disable the automated street lights that turn on in the dark. Officials in Wyoming–and 13 other states–are readying for the worst-imaginable traffic jams.

All of this for the sake of two minutes on a summer Monday, when the moon will block out the sun and the sky will darken.

Image: “Because the eclipse is ‘monetized,’ the inane comments about viewing safety and only watching on TV have gone by the board.” (Image: NASA)

Whether people in the United States believe they can thrive economically in a digitally disrupted world depends strongly on the amount of education they’ve attained, according to a new survey.

Imagine for a moment the way the world will look in the near future when technological advancements finally make possible many of the artificial-intelligence and advanced manufacturing capabilities that we keep hearing are just around the corner.

Last year, there was the temperature spiral. This year, it’s the temperature circle that’s making the trend of global warming crystal clear.

A new video shows the rhythm of global warming for countries around the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Bars representing each country’s annual average temperature anomaly pulse up and down. It's like watching a heartbeat on a monitor.

Until recently, recruiters and hiring managers have had to rely on gut instinct to determine whether or not a candidate will make a good fit on a prospective employer’s team. Now a company called SquarePeg is throwing them a lifeline.

Launching out of beta this month, SquarePeg is putting some data behind the hard-to-articulate notion of “fit.” The company’s goal is to replace interviewers’ intuition with assessments that size up candidates’ personality attributes as well as their skill sets.

The young men came from similar backgrounds – all three of them had parents from Nigeria, and they grew up hearing about the sad state of the Nigerian economy.

They came together with a goal to help solve the problems they heard about so often in their youths. And now, from across three U.S. universities, the three student entrepreneurs have launched a company called Releaf to try to tackle some of Nigeria’s biggest economic problems.

Image: https://today.duke.edu

For frequent flyers, anything that speeds their way through the nightmare of a crowded airport is a good thing, no? The latest effort toward that end is the expanding use of biometrics: The passenger’s face, essentially, becomes their boarding pass. Goodbye paper. Goodbye apps.

The Good News

To most founders a startup is not a job, but a calling.

But startups require money upfront for product development and later to scale. Traditional lenders (banks) think that startups are too risky for a traditional bank loan. Luckily in the last quarter of the 20th century a new source of money called risk capital emerged. Risk capital takes equity (stock ownership) in your company instead of debt (loans) in exchange for cash.

A politely ferocious debate is being waged in America right now about the best place to launch a start-up. This isn’t surprising post Great Recession—especially with millions of mobile Millennials graduating into the workforce willing to cart their STEM and MBA degrees anywhere, some of them with the next Uber in their heads. There are major bragging rights in play. Billions in tax revenue, investment returns, and political capital are also at stake.