Time was when many vehicles offered a manual option, either because customers wanted performance, or because they wanted better fuel-economy — or because they just wanted a cheap option.

While one can still find manual transmissions on vehicles in Europe and South America, automatics are the rule in the US.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com

Singapore is well recognized for its technological advancements, especially the way it protects its people and organizations from rising cyberthreats. The government adopted necessary data protection measures and established a data security review committee in order to enhance the data security practices in the country. A recent survey, “Deloitte Cyber Smart Index”, commissioned by VMware, elevated Singapore’s cybersecurity readiness  and revealed that Singapore faced the highest cybersecurity risks in the Asia-Pacific.

If you have a software development background like mine, I’m sure you often get questions about when to outsource, versus building the solution in-house. The same applies to manufacturing and almost any process these days. Outsourcing is defined as contracting the work to another company, usually located in a developing country, like India, China, or Eastern Europe.

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“Venture capital” brings to mind Silicon Valley and the Scrooge McDuck piles of money created by the lucky few who made early bets on Uber or Facebook. That traditional approach, in which VCs make a number of equity bets in one portfolio in hopes of finding a unicorn, is great for high-risk, high-reward ventures with huge potential markets. But it’s not a good fit for funding many of the emerging solutions to the myriad elements of the coronavirus pandemic. The lived experience of the coronavirus varies even from county to country, meaning that needed solutions will also vary — and require more than one type of investment.

What do GE, IBM, Disney and Microsoft have in common? All these industry behemoths were started in recessions, which bucks the conventional wisdom that one should never start a business in a time of economic uncertainty. If anything, navigating market contraction requires discipline, agile decision-making and ruthless prioritization to succeed, even more so than during boom times of unlimited capital from investors.

Remember the infamous, illogical notion of women and politics not mixing together? Well, it's time to throw that notion out of the window.

Because apparently, across the globe, all the six countries that have had a commendable response to Covid-19 had one thing in common - female leadership.

Throughout human history, crises have been pivotal in developing our societies. Pandemics have helped advance health-care systems, wars have fuelled technological innovations and the global financial crisis he … like Uber and Airbnb. The present coronavirus pandemic will arguably not be an exception; entrepreneurs can be expected to rise to the challenge.

The coronavirus outbreak is first and foremost a human tragedy, affecting hundreds of thousands of people. It is also having a growing impact on the global economy. This article is intended to provide business leaders with a perspective on the evolving situation and implications for their companies. The outbreak is moving quickly, and some of the perspectives in this article may fall rapidly out of date. This article reflects our perspective as of April 13, 2020. We will update it regularly as the outbreak evolves.

Image: https://www.mckinsey.com

It will be years before we fully understand the economic impact of the coronavirus, but one thing is painfully clear right now: Small businesses across the country are facing an existential threat. Businesses with fewer than 500 employees account for 48% of American jobs and 43.5% of GDP. Yet while these smaller firms are an essential part of the U.S. economy, they’re often financially fragile, with little cash on hand or resources to buffer even a minor financial shock. In the throes of the sweeping disruptions caused by the coronavirus, businesses around the country have closed temporarily. Many have ongoing expenses and little or no revenue and face the prospect that they may never reopen.

By now, researchers and health experts have gained a better understanding of the range of symptoms caused by COVID-19, which include fever, a dry cough, and of course, the dangerous inflammation of the respiratory system. Most of us know that COVID-19 can be much more severe than a typical flu, but lesser known are the mechanics behind how the virus causes pneumonia in its victims.

Today’s informative illustration, by scientific designer and animator Avesta Rastan, details the effects COVID-19 has on our lungs, from moderate to severe cases.

Image: https://www.visualcapitalist.com

The world of marketing is changing faster than technology these days. Winning entrepreneurs have long since supplemented conventional print and video “push” marketing with digital online interactive “pull” marketing, and a while back added social-local-mobile (SoLoMo) to the mix. Mobile and global are driving all of these in innovative new ways to grow your business.

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How to convert socks into hashtag#masks hashtag#jugaad

We hope you and your families are well. This is a reminder that due to COVID19 the BioHealth Capital Region Forum, originally scheduled to take place this week, April 14th and 15th at AstraZeneca, has been postponed. 

We are looking into combining the BioHealth Capital Region Forum with the BioHealth Capital Region Investment Conference which tentatively will be held between October 19th and 21st, 2020. We will advise you of our future direction on these events as soon as we develop our path forward. Please save these dates until we finalize the details as we hope to have an in-person event at that time. Thank you for your patience and understanding during these challenging times.

- BioHealth Capital Region Forum Planning Committee

Leading a startup has always been challenging, even under the best conditions. Founders need to quickly master a tremendous range of skills, from building a fantastic product and nailing go-to-market efforts to raising money and managing a board, all while figuring out hiring, culture and compensation. Starting a company is also a lonely endeavor, one that forces founders to make difficult decisions every day with imperfect information. While triaging these challenges, eventually every founder runs headfirst into a problem they haven’t seen before, the kind that leaves them unsure of where to start.

The AIM-HI Accelerator Fund’s Women’s Venture Competition is a high-profile initiative among women-led oncology start-up companies or venture teams aspiring to soon establish such firms, in which all participants are offered access to intensive accelerator boot-camp programming by one of the world’s most renowned women entrepreneur accelerator and business training service providers, Springboard Enterprises, and—subject to due diligence and negotiation—the winning business will receive up to $300,000 in AIM-HI investment.

Women’s Venture Competition review committees are comprised of a combination of world-class life sciences industry professionals, investors and entrepreneurs from within the extensive network of the National Foundation for Cancer Research, the non-profit affiliate of the AIM-HI Accelerator Fund.

There are three basic steps to stamping out the spread of a highly contagious disease such as COVID-19. First, you detect who has the disease. Then, you trace who they may have passed it to. And finally, you isolate everyone who is at risk.

Step two—also known as contact tracing—can be a time-consuming, manual process where public health officials ask those who’ve fallen ill to create lists of people they’ve been in contact with so those people can be told to self-quarantine. In South Korea, the government has turned to technology to scale up this process, using cellphone location data, CCTV cameras, credit card purchase data, and other kinds of surveillance to tell people if they’ve come into contact with individuals who have tested positive for the virus.

Image: Ryoji Iwata/Unsplash

Investment activity in Ireland could reduce by up to 50pc depending on how long the Covid-19 pandemic lasts, according to a survey carried out by the Irish Venture Capital Association (IVCA).

The survey was carried out among IVCA members to gauge the anticipated impact of the virus on future investment strategy. Members include SOSV, which has over $700m (€640m) worth of assets under management, and Delta Partners, which has €250m under management.

Image: IVCA director general Sarah-Jane Larkin. Photo: Fennell Photography

Many passionate entrepreneurs fight to add more features into their new products and services, assuming that more function will make the solution more appealing to more customers. In reality, more features will more likely make the product confusing and less usable to all. Focus is the art of limiting your scope to the key function that really matters for the majority of customers.

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One of the most common questions that people search about hashtag#coronavirus is how long it lives on surface. Part of the hashtag#healthcommunication and hashtag#healthliteracy is presenting complicated information in different ways. Kudos to my WebMD colleagues for this inforgraphic

Medical device maker Medtronic has won Food and Drug Administration approval to immediately market a lower-cost ventilator to meet increased demand because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The ventilator, the Puritan Bennett 560, is currently sold in 35 countries at an average price of under $10,000, the company said late Wednesday. It plans to launch the ventilator in May.

Image: https://m.startribune.com/