When Marcus Cobb met Steve Case at 36|86 Entrepreneurship Festival in 2017, it’s unlikely either had an inkling that two years later Cobb’s Jammber would join Case’s Rise of the Rest portfolio.

Today the Nashville music-tech startup and the AOL founder’s seed fund are “partnered ... redesigning the biz of music,” as Cobb tweeted. “3 exits, 100s of jobs, millions raised, billions in transactions.”

In an effort to support a healthier and more productive workforce, employers across the country are expected to spend an average of $3.6 million on wellness programs in 2019. Think onsite gyms. Standing desks. Meditation rooms. Nursing hotlines. These are just some of the benefits companies are investing in.

Based on my own experience as a business professional, employees who are not seriously engaged in the business should be totally obvious to everyone, including the manager or CEO. Yet many managers and executives seem to ignore the situation, or have no idea how to fix it. The result is that the performance of whole team is degraded, and the business suffers as well.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com/

When IBM first debuted its Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! in 2011, it was like something out of science fiction. Here was a computer that could not only understand spoken questions, but answer them faster and more accurately than the best human players. Nobody had ever seen anything even remotely like it before.

Six months after graduating from Towson University with a degree in public relations, Bilaal Daghar of Baltimore was bartending and looking for a more professional job. Then a friend told him about an apprenticeship program at a digital media firm that would pay him to learn the skills he needed to become a digital media specialist.

Image: Thanks to an apprentice program, Bilaal Daghar of Baltimore went from bartender to digital media specialist. Photo by Lisa Nevans Locke

University students have for years created businesses in their dorm rooms. Although “college entrepreneur” often evokes images of tech founders, a cadre of students is instead focusing on disrupting the food industry.

These entrepreneurs are using science, in addition to taste, to bring their products to market. Their focus is low-tech, but they face their own set of challenges, including waste and food safety regulations, experts say.

Image: Marco De Leon, left, and Rip Pruisken in the Brooklyn offices of Rip Van Wafels, a snack company they started while students at Brown University.CreditCreditAn Rong Xu for The New York Times

Let me start by saying you can never get blockchain right -- you have to get your business case right to make practical use of the technology.

For many people, blockchain today is what artificial intelligence (AI) was a few years ago: a technology they’ve heard lots about yet struggle to understand the real benefits. Even as the CTO of a company actively developing blockchain technology, I struggle sometimes to wrap my head around the myriad aspects of distributed-ledger systems (DLS) and the enormous jargon that surrounds them.

No one -- particularly entrepreneurs -- enjoys the feeling of being overwhelmed. In this session, you'll learn how to outline and create action plans to organize your life. You’ll also get tips for increasing your personal productivity. By breaking down your daily routine, you’ll be better able to deal with feelings of being overwhelmed; you'll be able to tackle all that you want and get to everything you want to accomplish.

Here’s an industry secret: At its very core, when we strip away all the smoke and mirrors, the buzzwords and superlatives, innovation is really about belief and disbelief. 

For example, if you believe the only way to hail a taxi is by standing on the curb and stretching your hand into the street, you will continue standing there hoping for a taxi to stop. However, the moment you start disbelieving that what everyone around you is doing is the only way to do it—this is the moment true innovation begins.

A vast "raft" of volcanic rocks stretching over 150 sq km (58 sq miles) is drifting through the Pacific Ocean, scientists say.

The sea of pumice - the size of 20,000 football fields - was first reported by Australian sailors earlier this month.

Experts say the mass likely came from an underwater volcano near Tonga which erupted around 7 August according to satellite images.

Image: MICHAEL HOULT Image caption Sailor Michael Hoult was one of the first to report the volcanic rock raft

After a relatively quiet IPO market, 2019 has emerged as the year of the digital health IPO with Health Catalyst, Livongo Health, Phreesia, and Change Healthcare all going public and with one more - Peloton - set to debut soon. Will this last?

The digital health market has seemingly caught fire in 2019, but it remains to be seen whether this blaze will continue or be snuffed out unceremoniously like a lit matchstick in the wind.

Many executives dream about starting an executive coaching or consulting practice, or launching one after they retire. But a touchy subject soon emerges: what should you charge?

It’s unorthodox, but I’m doling out grades at the start of the semester, rather than the end.

■  Creativity: B+.

■  Collaboration: D-.

Over the past few years, schools in Boston have been pretty creative when it comes to adding entrepreneurial offerings. Colleges offer student-run clubs, “office hours” with well-known founders and investors, makerspaces for building a first prototype, and hackathons where students form teams and work together to develop a concept that might eventually grow into a company.

Image: PillPack cofounders TJ Parker (left) and Elliot Cohen. The Somerville company is an example of cross-campus activities fueling innovation. (PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF/FILE 2015)

Between Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States, there's a swirling pool of trash over twice the size of Texas.

It's estimated that this area, dubbed the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, contains over 1.8 trillion bits of floating plastic — that works out to roughly 250 pieces of debris for every person on Earth.

However, a 25-year-old entrepreneur, Boyan Slat, is on a mission to clean up the plastic soup.

Image: Slat's organization, The Ocean Cleanup, has developed a tool to remove the trash. Steven Guerrisi/Flickr

GoldieBlox Founder and CEO Debbie Sterling recounts the difficulty of addressing defects resulting from the rapid ramp-up in production as demand exploded for the toy. She explains how she turned the setback into an opportunity to increase customer loyalty by publicly apologizing for the flaw and sending out a million new blocks along with personalized letters to every child.

Astro Teller, director at X, talks about how failure is not only accepted within Alphabet's moonshot factory, but how teams that kill their ambitious projects early are rewarded generously for the lessons that the failures yield. The seemingly counterintuitive practice establishes workplace norms that incentivize boldness and transparency.

Innovation is not a monopoly of Silicon Valley, says venture capitalist Randy Komisar. But entrepreneurship as a profession, he notes, is practiced best on KPCB's home turf. Here, failure isn't personal, and it is tolerated for approximately 70 percent of the businesses that launch here. The Valley offers a unique understanding that Plan A is often flawed and that failure is a necessity for true innovation, and thus it offers the space for smart and inventive people to reassess and move on to the next venture. This key difference that has evolved over the past 70 years, says Komisar, is what has made Silicon Valley thrive.

On August 18, China unveiled a detailed plan of reforms to be implemented in Shenzhen, supporting it in establishing a model area of socialism with Chinese characteristics. 

This sets a three-phase goal for Shenzhen: becoming a modern international city of innovation by 2025; a hub of innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship by 2035; and a global benchmark city with outstanding competitiveness, innovative capacity and influence by the mid-21st century.

Image: http://www.china.org.cn

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, your calendar is jam-packed. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s been managed effectively. In fact, it may merely be a cluttered mess that’s setting you up for failure. But how can you tell? As the founder of Calendar, an app that helps business owners manage their time better, I've studied over 200 million calendar meetings and formulated these 11 signs you’re not managing yours effectively.