Getting things done effectively in a startup requires total individual and team accountability. You can’t afford excuses and multiple people doing the same job. In my view, “taking responsibility” is the core element behind accountability. Many people hear responsibility as an obligation, but I hear it as “the ability to respond.”

Unfortunately many people don’t have the ability to respond, because they lack confidence in themselves, or simply don’t have the skills required. Therefore an entrepreneur’s first requirement is to hire or team only with people who are accountable (already have the confidence and skills you need) – training them on the job is prohibitively expensive when you have minimal income.

Here's what political marketers learn from people who don't vote:

Nothing.

If you don't vote because you're disappointed with your choices, disgusted by tactics like lying and spin, or merely turned off by the process, you've opted out of the marketplace.

The goal of political marketers isn't to get you to vote. Their goal is to get more votes than the other guy. So they obsess about pleasing those that vote. Everyone else is invisible.

U.K.-based accelerator programme Springboard announced the launch of what it claims to be the world's first three-month accelerator bootcamp targeting the Internet of Things (IoT). The programme has already garnered partnership support from some big names, including ARM, Unilever, Neul and the Rs.1,902.17 ($35) computing platform Raspberry Pi.

Each partner is expected to play an active role in selecting and mentoring 10 teams of entrepreneurs chosen to be part of the programme, guiding them through from idea generation to Series A funding.

If natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy are becoming more frequent, and their aftermaths more expensive, then the federal response needs to become more dynamic. Especially in fostering economic recovery, there’s more the U.S. government can do. Some steps are small and obvious, yet still valuable. Barack Obama’s administration, to its credit, has made progress in cutting disaster-relief red tape, for example. Still, the patchwork of application requirements and eligibility criteria businesses must sort through to receive aid can be further streamlined and made more consistent across agencies.

Ketan Banjara’s living room isn’t cluttered with remote controls. To shush the music, he simply holds a finger up to his lips. And when he gets up from the couch and leaves the room, his TV screen pauses automatically.

Banjara is a cofounder of PredictGaze, a startup that combines gaze detection, gesture recognition, and facial-feature recognition to create more natural ways to control everything from your TV to your car.

If you think working overtime, skipping your lunch hour and staying chained to your desk will make you more productive, you need to cut yourself some slack and take a break.

Working non-stop without taking a break can increase your chances of weight gain, heart disease and worse. Staring at a computer screen for more than 2 hours per day can cause Computer Vision Syndrome, a real affliction, which causes blurry vision, headaches, dry eyes and can lead to long-term nearsightedness. However, getting up and away from your desk for just 5 minutes can alleviate eye strain and reduce fatigue in addition to making you feel better. The mere act of standing at your desk instead of sitting at it can help you burn up to 2500 calories per week. Not bad for just standing around.

A decade and a half into the Web revolution, we do much of our banking and shopping online.   So why can’t we vote over the Internet? The answer is that voting presents specific kinds of very hard problems.

Even though some countries do it and there have been trial runs in some precincts in the United States, computer security experts at a Princeton symposium last week made clear that online voting cannot be verifiably secure, and invites disaster in a close, contentious race.

I recently wrote about the 12 tips to building successful startup communities. After a recent discussion I had with Steve Blank it made me remember that I had left off one of the most critical factors – a culture of failure.

I remember this lesson well. I lived in London from 1997-2005 and for 6 of those years ran my startup based out of London. At this time I can tell you that the Brits definitely didn’t have a culture of failure. If your startup went belly-up (the Brits have a much more crude slang term for it) there wasn’t likely somebody lined up to fund your next attempt at a startup.

Remember doctors walking down halls, talking into tape recorders like Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks? Now they're holding conversations with their mobile devices, taking a page from David Bowman and Frank Poole's interactions with HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Ubiquitous mobile devices such as iPhones and Androids offer both opportunities and challenges for physicians. Critical EHR data is accessible almost anywhere and near instantly, and patient notes can be recalled with a few taps on a screen. But minimized screen real estate is at a premium: What data should be shown? And that's to say nothing of the challenges of entering the data: Typing full notes on a mobile phone can be a carpal-tunnel inducing strain.

The Utah Science Technology and Research initiative aims to strengthen Utah’s “knowledge

economy,” generate high-paying jobs and expand the tax base for the state. In its first six years of operation, the initiative has bolstered the innovation infrastructure of Utah, increased the human capital devoted to research, and demonstrated success in technology commercialization. By encouraging

collaboration, USTAR has enabled Utah-based researchers to tackle bigger and more complex projects

and funding opportunities. Brookings Institution has called USTAR “a national best practice.”

The initiative focuses on:

Recruiting industry leading researchers to our two research universities, the University of Utah (U of U) and Utah State University (USU).

A clean-tech start-up that thinks it has solved a problem that has vexed engineers for decades–how to effectively store energy generated by wind and sunshine–has gained some heavyweight financial backers.

An investment group that includes Bill Gates‘ Cascade Investment and Thiel Capital, a firm run by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook Inc. FB +0.94%, has poured $37.3 million into LightSail Energy, a three-year-old start-up dreamed up by a Princeton graduate school dropout. The investment was led by Thiel Capital and Founders Fund.

Danielle Fong, now 25, said it took LightSail about a year to raise the Series D funding because investors are more wary of clean technology since solar power company Solyndra spectacularly failed in 2011. Solyndra burned through nearly $1 billion from private investors and more than $500 million in Department of Energy loans before declaring bankruptcy.

“It was the worst of times. It was the best of times.” – Un-Dickens

There is a looming sense, a dark narrative that America’s best days are behind it. Why? A clash of civilizations. A sense in many pockets of the country that we are living in a time of anomie, inequity and worry.

Everywhere you look, there is disaster. At ground zero are the remnants of a 100-year flood known as the 2008 financial crisis; it’s a flood that never completely receded.

Put another way, whether you are politically right or left, believe in trickle down or trickle up,  the hard truth is that there are few catalysts for significant job growth in America right now.

The United States is no longer one of the world's ten most "prosperous" countries for the first time according to the Legatum Institute. The Legatum Prosperity Index assessed and ranked the prosperity of 142 countries based on eight sub-categories: economy, entrepreneurship and opportunity, health, governance, education, safety and security, personal freedom, and social capital. America experienced an "unprecedented" fall to twelfth in the rankings, as it experienced "weakening performance across five of the Index’s eight sub-categories."

10:09AM EST November 5. 2012 - MENLO PARK, Calif. — The air was thick with optimism.

More than a dozen women investors huddled around a table recently, listening raptly to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, a seminal figure in the tech world.

They had gathered at Facebook's headquarters here to discuss gender issues in venture capital. Sandberg, a major influence among many of them, unexpectedly dropped by to share some inspiring words. Her new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, is due in March.

What are the most useful, day-saving things you should keep on you if you're constantly shifting climates, time zones, and currencies? Geoff Watts of Intelligentsia Coffee shares his must-pack items.

Geoff Watts, vice president of coffee for Chicago’s renowned Intelligentsia Coffee, is not your typical, desk-bound exec. Intelligentsia roasts coffee from around the world, and that’s where Watts has spent most of the last decade: learning every last detail about the cherries that eventually become caffè macchiatos. That means his travel bag is more about survival and grit than DisplayPort adapters (though those are handy, too).

Salaries hinted at a recovery last year after a noticeable dip in 2010—the first-ever drop in The Scientist’s 10-year history of surveying the life science community. But this year, salaries remained relatively flat overall compared with 2011, and even regressed in some areas. In contrast to the steady growth observed in The Scientist’s Salary Survey since 2001, the past few years stand out as a distinct plateau, with 2012 median total earnings (salaries plus fees, bonuses, and profit sharing) of $87,000 falling just below the $90,000 our readers reported in 2009. However, the overall flatness in the 2012 median earnings disguises big changes across sectors and regions of the country.

This year’s high-scoring disciplines included bioengineering, biophysics, and food/nutrition science. Earnings in traditional research specialties, on the other hand, took a significant hit: median total compensation for researchers in endocrinology dropped by more than $30,000 from 2011, systems biologists’ take-home pay dipped by $38,500, and those in cancer/oncology took home some $15,000 less than median earnings last year.

At my firm, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), we think a lot about the ingredients to creating huge companies – disruption, great entrepreneurs, big markets.  The disruption aspect is interesting as this has evolved over the years – in the 80’s and 90’s, much of the disruption was really technology based (a new molecule, a new piece of code, a new piece of hardware).  Now, disruption comes in a lot of ways – business models, go-to-market, value chain, market evolutions, as well as pure technology.

One disruption that has happened is the new wave of enterprise technology companies that have hit the public markets over the past 18 months.  Each are innovators in their own sectors, but as a group, they are shaking up the public markets in a very positive way.

I knew the “brain drain” problem had reached a crisis point when they started talking about it in Boston. You know the story: Kids move to where they want to live and then look for a job, not the other way around. They’re drawn to a small number of hip metro areas (D.C., San Francisco, Seattle) and smaller cities (Boulder, Colo.; Missoula, Mont.; Palo Alto, Calif.) around the country and hip employers follow them. The result is an upward cycle of talent and jobs and business growth in the fashionable places, and a downward cycle everywhere else.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Venture capital performance declined across several time horizons as of June 30 but remained in positive territory overall, according to the Cambridge Associates LLC U.S. Venture Capital Index – the performance benchmark of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

The Index said the lower returns in the short-term reflected a decline in the asset value of public holdings in the second quarter.

However, there was continued improvement in the 10-year period as the strong down quarters of 2001-2002 continued to roll out of the calculation, the report said.

The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.

Tables, counters and whiteboards will eventually become displays. Meeting rooms will have touch panels, and chalk boards will be replaced by large systems that have digital images and documents on a display that teachers can mark up with a stylus.