The power and influence of paid media advertising, including print ads, TV commercials, radio, and even online digital campaigns is waning, in favor of unpaid earned and owned messaging from your website, social media, key market influencers, and existing customer word-of-mouth. But startups need to remember that even zero paid media doesn’t mean that marketing is free.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg first started to get the website off the ground in 2004, he moved from Boston to — where else? — Silicon Valley.

Tale as old as time. Startup founders have been moving to the San Francisco Bay area since at least the 1970s.

Today, it’s a huge hub for technology. But ironically, the same technology that’s made the area boom means you don’t actually have to move your business to succeed.

A small town can offer all sorts of advantages for an entrepreneur. In many cases, it’s even better than the big city.

A new accelerator program will soon start in Richmond that, unlike other incubators or accelerators that focus mostly on helping for-profit business startups, will help budding nonprofit ventures grow and succeed.

The accelerator program, NPO Launchpad, was founded by Richmond-area entrepreneurs Pat Hull and Jeff Palumbo, both of whom have backgrounds in for-profit and nonprofit ventures. It is funded by the Hull Foundation, a charitable fund created by Hull that also has supported other local programs to assist prospective entrepreneurs such as UnBoundRVA.

Sweden has returned to the top spot as the best country in the world to live in for women, according to a 2019 ranking from US News & World Report. In 2018, the spot was taken by Denmark — the country is now back down to No. 2.

The media organization surveyed more than 9,000 women as part of its wider Best Countries ranking in order to determine which of 80 countries around the globe are the best for women to live in.

In a converted parking garage turned business incubator and accelerator in downtown Syracuse, N.Y., entrepreneurs and inventors from as far away as Italy and Switzerland are hard at work developing software applications, power systems, and imaging technology for the emerging unmanned systems industry.

Entrepreneurial resources are often the crux of a successful new startup amid a competitive business climate.

In Winston-Salem, there are many entrepreneurial opportunities for growth in the form of business accelerators, business incubators and other programs.

Image: Jason Thiel is the president of the Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership. Andrew Dye/Journal

A thriving, connected community of passionate users is on nearly every early-stage founder’s wishlist. It can serve as a shorthand that their startup has signs of product/market fit, generate a word-of-mouth viral growth loop, and help carve out a brand that’s known for deep ties and offline connections.

Crunchbase, the world’s leading database for venture-backed startups, has published a report detailing the gender split of venture investments made in the first two quarters of 2019. The report shows that female-started companies received only 3% of the combined invested capital.

Companies with male founders secured 89% of the invested capital, while female-founded companies received 3%. The remaining 8% was received by companies with both male and female cofounders.

IT WAS THE spring of 2010 and Erik Johnson had just graduated from the University of Vermont with a bachelor’s in economics. Two years prior, Johnson had moved to Burlington from Boston to finish his degree, attracted by the Green Mountain State’s natural beauty and laid-back culture. Vermont had a lot of perks for an avid trail runner like Johnson, but he quickly learned that job opportunities were not among them. After a nearly year-long search, Johnson was grateful to land a gig as a webmaster at a local company. It didn’t pay much, but it was better than nothing. Still, he concluded that Vermont’s largest city (population 42,000) didn’t offer much in the way of career advancement. So when Johnson was offered a job at a research university in Boston the following year, he jumped at the opportunity.

If Philadelphia ever wants to compete with the likes of Silicon Valley and New York City, it needs to fund the innovative ideas and rapid growth of start-ups.

And we’re well on our way: Venture capital investments to Philly-based companies set a record in 2018, injecting about $1.4 billion and propelling the City of Brotherly (and Sisterly) Love into the top 10 regions for venture activity.

Image: TOM GRALISH / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

(CNN)Twelve of the nation's largest telecommunications companies and attorneys general from all 50 states plus DC announced a voluntary agreement Thursday to prevent and punish illegal robocallers.

It's the latest move by regulators and law enforcement to push back against the growing tide of unwanted and even illegal calls from telemarketers and scammers.

Image: https://www.cnn.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana will launch a new 5G hub to drive the testing and development of 5G-enabled technologies and assist businesses and innovators by propelling research and development with faster speeds, lower data latency and increased reliability.

As one of only two metro areas in the U.S. selected for the launch of both AT&T and Verizon 5G broadband networks, Indiana’s capital city is uniquely positioned to be at the center of global advancements and growth in 5G.

After decades of promises that they “may work” to reduce cardiovascular the lack of demonstrated benefit leads me to conclude that consumers are wasting their money

Every 38 seconds, someone in the U.S. dies from cardiovascular disease. Even more worrisome: deaths from cardiovascular disease have been rising dramatically since 2011 following years of decline. Strokes, heart attacks and other cardiovascular events cause great suffering and are an enormous health care burden.

Kolaleh Eskandanian, PhD, is the vice president and chief innovation officer of Children's National Health System in Washington, D.C.

Here, Dr. Eskandanian outlines the big cybersecurity challenges and how she expects her role as the chief innovation officer at Children's National to evolve over the next few years.

Question: What emerging trend or technology in cybersecurity are you most interested in today and why?

KCRise Fund closed out its first fund and launched a second fund, which is focused on making venture capital investments in high-growth, early-stage technology companies in Kansas and the western half of Missouri.

The KCRise Fund II is targeting a size of about $30 million. Like the first fund, it's a sidecar fund, investing alongside other venture capital funds. However, it invested only in Kansas City-area companies seeking at least $1 million in Series A financing.

Image: Darcy Howe is managing director of the KCRise Fund, which was founded to encourage more venture capital investment in the Kansas City area. - ANDREW GRUMKE | KCBJ

I recently looked at a few of the largest US banks’ private equity solutions for HNW.  Even with the perspective of having worked with alternative investments for some time, I was surprised by the extra level of fees charged HNW clients.

Start with the alternative investment itself.  Certainly the private equity firms have pricing power in this current seller’s market—in my recent Forbes column “Not Enough Private Equity To Go Around”, I shared that Preqin estimated that there was a record $2 trillion in “dry powder”, or unspent money, in private funds globally, with over $1.2 trillion of that total $2 trillion being earmarked for private equity.  

Teachers have the incredibly important job of educating the next generation of Americans, but how much they're paid varies widely across the country.

Nationwide, the average public school teacher salary for the 2017-2018 school year was $60,483, according to data from the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. While the nominal teacher salary has increased over the last couple decades, when adjusted for inflation, average salary has dropped over time — about 1.3% lower than the $61,275 (in 2017-18 dollars) average in the 1999-2000 school year.

The United Nations agency that guards intellectual property rights has ranked countries according to how innovative they are.

Switzerland is the most innovative country in the world, according to the latest Global Innovation Index published in July by the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). But for the first time, Israel has also joined the ranks of the top 10 most innovative countries, while Vietnam and Rwanda are leading their respective income groups

Image: https://www.undispatch.com

For a few, delegating comes easily, maybe too easy. For others who are perfectionists, letting go of even the most trivial task is almost impossible. If you are in this second category, you probably don’t like the references behind your back that you are a “control freak” or a “micro-manager.”

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about Millennials, but what about Generation Z? Gen Zers were born between 1995 and 2010, which means they’re either fairly new to the workforce (the oldest of the group being 24) or will be entering it in the near future. According to a joint study by management-consultants McKinsey and consumer-trend researchers Box 1824, Generation Z are digital natives, identity nomads, realistic, radically inclusive and want more dialogue and less confrontation. To prepare your company for this newest wave of workers, you’ve got to adapt, and here's how to best attract and retain top Gen Z talent.