Non-fungible tokens or NFTs — products that operate as digital assets — have grown to encompass a $250 million market, according to a 2020 report from tech-tracking company L'Atelier BNP Paribas and nonfungible.com.

Investments in NFTs rose 299% in 2020, gaining popularity as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin continued to boom, according to the report. 

NFT creators and resellers have made millions. In February, an art collector sold a 10-second video artwork for $6.6 million after buying the Beeple project for $67,000 in October — nearly a 1,000% profit.

Image: Looking Glass Factory allows people to sell their holograms as NFTs Looking Glass Factory - https://www.businessinsider.com

March 9, 2021 – Despite a resurgence of infections, confidence is rising about an end to the pandemic. Here is how to grow your way out of the crisis.

In March 2020, companies across the US abruptly shuttered their offices and instructed employees to work from home indefinitely as a result of the pandemic.

At first, many thought the shutdowns would last a couple months. But one year later, millions of workers are still working remotely. The pandemic has forced a large segment of the global workforce to go through a remote-work experiment on a scale never seen before -- and a lot has changed in the last 12 months.

Image: https://www.cnn.com - From Video

Few industries were as hard-hit by the pandemic as travel. The companies on this list, however, found ways to deliver the joy and wonder of experiencing new places while prioritizing travelers’ safety. Hipcamp, Getaway, and Arrive Outdoors brought people outside and off the beaten path, while Delta and Hopper used the crisis to respond to travelers’ changing needs, offering fliers unprecedented transparency and flexibility.

PLASTIC-EATING YACHT CLEANS OCEANS! 🛥🌊

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: Following the tenfold growth of Tesla’s stock between March 2020 and January 2021, the company’s founder, Elon Musk, has emerged as the avatar of green innovation.

The Tesla phenomenon has spilled over into the rest of the nascent electric-vehicle (EV) industry, sprinkling stardust on a host of green startups with unproven technologies and minimal revenues.

WASHINGTON — U.S. health officials are warning health professionals about the risk of false positive results with a widely used laboratory test for COVID-19 and flu.

The Food and Drug Administration issued the alert to Friday for health facilities using Roche’s cobas test for coronavirus and seasonal flu. The agency warned that problems with the test’s processing tubes could result in false diagnosis in people who are not actually infected.

Once you are able to achieve some real “traction” with your business (paying customers, revenue stream), it may seem the time to relax a bit, but in fact this is the point where many founders start to flounder. All the skills and instincts you needed to get to this level can actually start working against you, and you can fail to scale.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Huge Ma first came up with the idea for his much-needed vaccination appointment-finding bot after discovering how complicated it was to book one for his mother.

“You had to basically open three tabs, one for each major government vaccine portal, and then refresh all day until you got an appointment,” said the 31-year-old software engineer from New York.

Image: Huge Ma, a 31-year-old software engineer from New York created TurboVax. ‘There is a huge need for tools like this.’ Photograph: Ali Smith/The Guardian

The stock market, as we have recently seen with the GameStop furore, can be a bit of a rollercoaster. Investors are at work trying to use both better information and ever faster trading algorithms to profit from the market.

Speed and information are an interesting pair. Remember, an important reason why people trade is that they want to realise their information into to make a profit. That information could be a tweet or something far more fundamental, like a careful analysis of a company stock.

Living paycheck to paycheck is an unfortunately common hallmark of American life. And that's more evident than ever now, amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Many are reconsidering their living situations as the US faces a recession : Earlier last year, over 51 million people filed for unemployment in just a 17-week period. For context, the Great Recession eliminated 37 million jobs over 18 months.

Two tech-oriented groups were quick to endorse Gov. Tony Evers’ plan for a $100 million state-backed venture capital fund when he first pitched the proposal in February.

One was the Wisconsin Technology Council, which has been the state’s leading voice on startup policy for more than 20 years. 

The other was the Wisconsin Startup Coalition, a group formed last year that is focused on advocating for entrepreneurs and the state’s early-stage ecosystem. 

Image: https://biztimes.com

Americans are starting new businesses at the fastest rate since 2007. Entrepreneurs have jumped on new demands and untapped opportunities as the economy and social norms continue to evolve. And with this surge in new business activity has also come a boom in venture capital investment, with the U.S. hitting an all-time high in 2020. 

Being an entrepreneur seems like fun, right? 

It’s about being whisked away on private jets, making millions just months after launching your business and posting memes about how you ”Love to hustle and are #killingit!” 

...Negative. 

Choosing the path of entrepreneurship is choosing a dark, bumpy, twisted road, where at the end a train is silently speeding right at you with its lights off. 

Charles Dickens’ opening line of A Tale of Two Cities—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—was evoked recently by the head of the nation’s largest life sciences real estate owner to describe the past year for the industry served by his real estate investment trust.

Image: Sanofi recently sold its 310,000-square-foot Allston plant built by its Genzyme subsidiary to Resilience, a San Diego-based provider of biopharma manufacturing services, which has offered jobs to all 250 staffers and is planning to expand headcount. Boston and neighboring Cambridge, MA, anchor a regional biopharma cluster that remains the nation’s retains its top ranking in GEN’s top-10 list despite signs of growing strength from its closest competing regions. (National Resilience Inc. via Business Wire)

Fast Company released its 2021 list of "The Most Innovative Health Companies," with 10 healthcare tech companies featured in the ranking. 

For the list, Fast Company mined its list of top companies in the healthcare industry that embody creative problem solving in the face of crises. Those chosen for most innovative are pushing forward trends in virtual care, chronic illness management and remote care. 

Concentration in the U.S. health care sector has been on the rise over the past two decades. Starting with horizontal consolidation, it has spread to vertical mergers and acquisitions and megamergers of national players at multiple levels of the supply chain. Given the financial difficulty that many providers have suffered during the pandemic, this trend is likely to continue, reducing competition and increasing prices. In light of this danger, Congress and regulators should take steps now to more fully assess the impact and curb those combinations that adversely impact payers and patients.

The U.S. central bank likely won’t raise its policy rate until 2023, said Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker on Wednesday.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Harker was asked about the bond market starting to price in the first Fed rate hike next year.

“I can only speak for myself… I’m not looking at a hike anytime in 2022,” Harker said. “I mean we’ve got a long ways to go.”

This report presents national trends in early-stage entrepreneurship in the United States, as well as trends for specific demographic groups as available.

The rate of new entrepreneurs was substantially higher in 2020 than in 2019 or in previous years, reflecting more transitions into entrepreneurial activity, broadly defined, among the population during pandemic conditions.

At the same time, the opportunity share of this activity plummeted to the lowest share in 25 years, indicating that many of these transitions were undertaken by people with few other options for economic engagement.

“When you see the aggregation and consolidation like we’re seeing now, with Spotify buying all these podcasts, that means it’s late days. The business has matured enough that they decided to buy into it,” Cuban said. For context, Spotify struck a deal worth more than $US100 million with Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience, in September.

“If it was early days, if it was still a free-for-all, they’d just bring in as many original podcasts as they could for dirt cheap and turn them all into stars, as opposed to buying (current) stars,” Cuban told me.

While Cuban doesn’t have a podcast of his own (yet), he’s reportedly co-founding an upcoming audio-first platform called Fireside. A recent report says it will allow creators to “broadcast, record, and monetise conversations” alongside helpful analytics, and it will likely compete with the buzzy invite-only conversation app, Clubhouse.

Image: Erica Mandy