In Austin, Texas, a battle is brewing over residential zoning and affordable housing.

As people flocked to the Texas metropolis over the last 10 years, decades-old zoning laws pit older homeowners against millennial movers. Though the city is in the process of rewriting its laws, that process is meeting with resistance from the older, largely boomer crowd of city politicians that have zoned most of the city to be single-family-only. Their continued resistance could threaten the affordability of Austin housing — and it's already turning the city into the south's San Francisco. 

Image: Austin is so popular it's becoming unaffordable. Reuters

The recent world-wide health pandemic has highlighted again how fast things can and do change in the environment today, and it’s up to you to make sure your business can survive and thrive in this new world. As the current supply chain problems illustrate, we are all interconnected, and can no longer run our businesses without consideration for all the other businesses and society.

In my role as a business advisor, I still find a pervasive dog-eat-dog and ‘me’ mentality, rather than a more collaborative shared responsibility to work together, and improve all our futures, including business as well as health, environmental, and cultural. I was happy to see some good guidance on this business transformation in a new book, “Lead With We,” by Simon Mainwaring.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

In a mysterious message over Thanksgiving weekend, the Bored Ape Yacht Club tweeted out an image of a 3D-rendered shadowy Ape, wearing pink sunglasses and a green tracksuit. It was an Adidas track suit to be specific, with a BAYC logo on the left breast.

Another popular collection, PunksComic, whose derivative comic series that comes with fractional ownership rights to 16 CryptoPunks and whose initial non-fungible token (NFT) issue sells for over $27,000 at the time of this writing shared a similar image with one of their characters.

November 30, 2021 - UC Davis Health and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced the launch of a health IT innovation center which aims to enhance digital health equity.

The global Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) Program, powered by AWS, fosters collaboration between clinicians, patients, and developers to help inform the creation of open-source solutions to advance digital health equity worldwide.

Among the 13 AWS CICs globally, this will be the first CIC based at an academic medical center.

Amy Jordan left her career in entertainment to pursue her passion for pilates. With zero collateral to her name, she paid for the reformers on a credit card and by the time she opened her second studio in 2009, she had only $217 left in her bank account. Those two studios grew to thousands of clients and dozens of employees within a year. However, Jordan realized that a traditional reformer was missing essential elements such as the Wunda Chair, jump board and ballet bar and the studios lacked the floor space for all of those apparatuses. Jordan knew she had to find her own solution for a reformer that did it all. 

Image: Founder and CEO of WundaBar. COURTESY OF AMY JORDAN

Whether you’re already on your entrepreneurial journey or just starting, you need to know how to network. Learning to use networking to your advantage is the best thing you can do for yourself and your business. There are many reasons to do this, but the most important of them all, perhaps, is to keep your business from failing.

Why is networking so important? Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found approximately 20% of all small businesses fail within their very first year. To avoid becoming another statistic, it’s essential to do as much as you can to keep your business flourishing and relevant even before you set it up. An excellent way to do this is to network. 

For many years, healthcare delivery entailed the physical interaction between a patient and physician as a means to receive a diagnosis, medical treatment, or operative care. This changed slightly with the advent of telehealth, which delivered the patient-physician relationship through digital means and the internet.

But these paradigms are now at the cusp of an even larger, more monumental form of unprecedented disruption, as augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) are quickly bringing forth possibilities that were never previously imagined.

Airports, highways, and hospitals. Subways and railway systems. Water utilities, power and telecommunications grids. The delivery, operation, and management of infrastructure is the lifeblood of any economy. It is critical to keeping goods, services and energy flowing, to boosting productivity, and to safeguarding equitable economic development and jobs. But the challenges currently facing these multi-billion-dollar systems are enormous.

Venture capital investment in global healthtech companies is projected to reach $42 billion by the end of the year, according to Silicon Valley Bank's latest report, "The Future of HealthTech."

The first three quarters of 2021 closed with what SVB called an astounding $34 billion invested globally across 1,040 deals.

Almost every startup has flirted with the idea of joining an accelerator program. When done right, they can be an invaluable opportunity to learn from experts, get feedback on your product, business, or strategy, and get access to lucrative funding opportunities. But just how beneficial are they?

Joao Bocas, better known as 'The Wearable Expert', sees a future where smart garments are key to improving people's health through technology.

Smart clothes and accessories are becoming more common and we embrace them as part of our lives. Watches, bracelets, rings or shoes have become devices capable of tracking our activities. But this information is not just a curious fact, it can also be a means to monitor and improve people's health . Therefore, Joao Bocas , founder and CEO of Digital Salutem , better known as 'The Wearables Expert' , explained to us how to apply these technologies for well-being .

The European Commission named Dortmund in Germany as this year’s European Capital of Innovation, netting the city €1 million (US$1.13 million) in prize money.

Runners-up were Dublin in Ireland and Malaga in Spain, which will receive €100,000 each, followed by Vilnius in Lithuania in third place. Vantaa in Finland won the European Rising Innovative City award worth €500,000.

Healthcare innovation has been rapid and is predicted to accelerate dramatically in the coming years.

As the industry moves from analogue to digital, “big data” in healthcare is set to explode. Advanced diagnostics will power the shift from treatment to prevention. Personalised medicine will lead to targeted therapies that are right for the individual.

Image: Steven Rees, head of Investments for the Middle East and North Africa at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.

Cryptocurrency adoption has grown increased six-fold in the past couple of years since its inception. Crypto has become a lucrative option for investment, and several companies across the world are distributing pay checks in digital currencies. But digital currencies are not equally welcomed everywhere. Over the years, some cities in the world have turned out to be cryptocurrency hotspots. Governments of different countries react to digital currencies differently as they cannot surely be regulated and controlled.

The venture industry has continued to prove its resiliency in 2021—a year marked by outsized funds, numerous mega-deals and the soaring interest of multistage investors looking to back younger startups.

As a result, valuations of VC-backed companies are on the rise across most stages in the third quarter. Our latest US VC Valuations report takes a deep dive into startup valuations across the venture lifecycle through Q3 2021, including spotlights on sectors such as biotech, climate tech and enterprise tech.

Image: https://pitchbook.com

Because digital transformations change every process — from strategy to execution — and alter every function, they’re often challenging to pull off. CEOs have to be digitally literate and get personally involved if they wish to succeed. Yet, it seems that many companies don’t have the kind of CEOs, top management teams, and boards of directors they need to tackle digital transformations. Not only do CEOs have to be digitally literate, but they also need to play the pivotal role of the change agent. Digital transformation is about so much more than adopting new technologies and processes. At its core, it’s about overcoming inertia and resistance to changing the way people think and work. The CEO needs to lead from the front, inspire confidence in her vision, and rally the company to believe in what might appear to be a distant destination.

Getting a meeting with a venture capitalist is notoriously difficult, but there is such a thing as being too fast to get connected. If you aren’t properly prepared, you can burn your one shot to make a great first impression.

From the moment you make it public that you are seeking investment, you turn over an hourglass of about six months. You should be able to get all the funding you want in that time, or investors will begin to worry about why you’ve taken so long. 

The recent announcement by South African scientists of a new COVID-19 variant has sparked fears across the globe, leading to a market sell-off and heightened anxiety about a pandemic entering its second winter.

The variant, currently referred to as B.1.1.529, was discovered in Botswana and has already been reported in South Africa, Belgium, Hong Kong, and Israel.

These days, if your startup does not have an Internet home base up and running, you are not ready for business or potential investors. Customers go there to check on the details of your offerings and verify that you are not a scam, investors look there to check out your management and sales approach, and suppliers expect to find contact information.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is launching The Time is Now: Advancing Equity in Science and Technology Ideation Challenge.

OSTP Director Eric Lander is asking the American public to share their insights on a central question, “How can we guarantee all Americans can fully participate in, and contribute to, science and technology?” The #OSTPTimeIsNow #SciEquityChallenge gives all people, from students and skilled technical workers, scientists, and industry innovators, to equity advocates, creatives, education leaders, and the people who value and use science and technology in their everyday lives, the opportunity to help answer this question by directly submitting their own thoughts, ideas, or examples of existing or promising actions that expand equity and inclusion.