MassChallenge, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit startup accelerator, has chosen 52 startups out of 500 applicants for its 2019 Israel program. The 52 finalists hail from Israel, India, Colombia, South Africa and the United Kingdom, the organization said in a statement.

Image: Members of the MassChallenge 2014 Israel Judges Panel at an event held by the organization, June 11 2015 (Courtesy)

Coastal towns in Britain should build art galleries and champion creative industries if they want to overcome years of economic decay, according to a House of Lords report.

Towns including Margate, Folkestone and St Ives have benefited from arts-led regeneration and similar investment in areas such as Blackpool and Scarborough could stimulate the local economies, it said.

WASHINGTON, April 3, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) today announced it will launch a 16-stop road tour connecting entrepreneurs working on advanced technology to the country's largest source of early stage funding – the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. Also known as America's Seed Fund, the SBIR/STTR programs focus on next generation research & development (R&D) and is led by the SBA with 11 participating federal agencies.

April 03, 2019 - Healthcare investment by corporate venture capital (CVC) firms increased a robust 51 percent year-over-year in 2018, reaching $10.9 billion, according to the latest stats from CB Insights.

CVC deals in healthcare companies increased 23 percent year-over-year last year, totaling 298, CB Insights found.

Large CVC funding rounds for Massachusetts-based biotech firms Moderna Therapeutics and Relay Therapeutics and California-based Samumed drove the healthcare investment surge.

Effort Foundry has been a supplier of high-integrity steel castings to a wide spectrum of industries for more than 40 years. From the outset we have worked hard to maintain quality standards that have helped make Effort a respected leader in our industry.

We would, however, not be where we are today without the help of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Pennsylvania’s powerful job creation and high-tech economic development engine.

Image: The state capitol building in Harrisburg. - https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/opinion/2019/04/ben-franklin-funding-essential-to-economic-growth-in-pa-opinion.html

When a group of engineers launched Fairchild Semiconductors—the first chip startup in Silicon Valley—in 1957, investors offered the founders a relatively new type of compensation: stock options.

More than 90% of CEOs believe their companies will change more in the next five years than they did in the last five. Having a workforce that’s ready and able to harness that change will make the difference between success and failure.

Economic incentives are becoming more creative as state and local jurisdictions are trying to differentiate themselves in the battle for site selection projects while simultaneously improving their communities and helping their workforce. This article examines how state and local jurisdictions are using creative, nontraditional economic incentives to attract companies while also helping their community and workforce along the way.

Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon can't stop attracting job hunters.

The three tech conglomerates topped LinkedIn's list of the hottest companies where Americans want to work for the third year in a row.

On Wednesday, LinkedIn released its annual "Top Companies" ranking, which calculates the most popular corporations among job seekers by analyzing interest in companies, engagement with current employees, job demand, and employee retention. The list also included skills that companies are looking for in new employees, and the divisions with the most new hires.

Bill Gates, the second-richest man in the world, is already backing an effort to build better ways to diagnose and track Alzheimer’s disease. Now, he's helped sign on the world's richest man to back the effort as well.

With new support from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other donors, the Diagnostic Accelerator "venture philanthropy" project at the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) is poised to name its first grantees in the near future and has begun taking applications for a second round of grants focused on fast-tracking digital tools for the disease and its related dementias. 

Image: Bill Gates pointed to research into voice recordings gathered through the 70-year Framingham Heart Study that could one day lead to smartphone-based diagnostics for monitoring cognitive decline. (CC BY 2.0/Ben Fisher/GAVI Alliance)

Held in advance of the BIO International Convention, at AURP’s BIO Health Caucus, we will explore trends in life science research, funding resources, the marriage of life science and engineering in global partnership opportunities. Discover the unique roles that biomedical innovation districts and research parks play in innovation ecosystems in the U.S. and around the globe. Translating discoveries from the laboratory to the market has never been more important.

Was cryptocurrency a flash in the pan? Less than two years ago, Bitcoin’s skyrocketing price was making people crypto-millionaires overnight. Then coin prices crashed and never recovered. Projects have shuttered, jobs have been lost, and most of 2017’s feverish enthusiasm has worn off. Perhaps the technology isn’t all it was cracked up to be?

Nonsense, say venture capitalists. For them, the decade-old technology has always been a long-term bet on the future of finance; short-term fluctuations in cryptocurrency markets don’t matter. It’s a mistake to conflate the market for digital currencies with the market for investment in digital currency projects, says Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer for CoinShares, a provider of crypto research and investment products. And the latter is still a “large and very active market,” she says.

Image: MS. TECH | PHOTOS: PIXABAY - https://www.technologyreview.com

Ask venture capitalists why they do what they do, and you’ll hear some different takes.

For Ken Johnson, who founded seven different companies before launching Kegonsa Capital Partners in 2004, venture capital — the business of making high-risk investments in startups poised for long-term growth — scratches an entrepreneurial itch. A company where you can work with multiple business plans at once, he said, is like the ultimate startup.

“The trouble with regular entrepreneurism is you can only be the entrepreneur of a company at one time,” he said.

Only a small portion of patents are actually exploited for commercial gain. If more of them could be put to use in Australia there would be great potential for a lift in the country's economy. 

It's a rainy day in Oxford, traditional weather, and an Aussie knocks on my door. Samuel Conway has just landed in the UK after a long-haul flight from Adelaide. He is moving the whole family to the city of spires in order to fulfill his entrepreneurial dream - to establish an Oxford start-up and run it as CEO.

Image: https://www.businessnewsaus.com

Innovate. Innovate. Innovate. That’s the common theme in today’s economy. Innovation stimulates entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurship creates net new jobs.

Driving innovation through collaboration to create jobs is the entire reason for being of the public-private consortium of the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST), the Oklahoma Manufacturing Alliance (OMA), the Oklahoma State University New Product Development Center (NPDC) and i2E.

It’s official: Influencer marketing needs no further proof of concept. Influencer marketing has evolved from a very simple process of working with social personalities (influencers) to promote brands among their audiences to that of highly strategic marketing efforts that have many moving pieces. Over the past few years, influencer marketing momentum has been undeniable . With that, it is important we evolve with the trends that will come to fruition in the upcoming year and understand how to utilize technology to stay ahead of the curve.

Californians need to give up on their dream of a “ranch-house lifestyle” and an “ample backyard” and the state should become “more like New York City,” writes LA Times columnist George Skelton (reprinted in the Mercury-News and East Bay Times in case you run into the LA Times paywall). After reading his article, the Antiplanner has just one question: Why?

Skelton argues that California’s population has grown in the last 70 years and is still growing. But he doesn’t seem to realize that the vast majority of the state is still rural. The 2010 census found that urban areas covering just 5.3 percent of the state is urban and houses 95 percent of the state’s population.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Over the past several years, CMOs have felt seismic pressures to continually innovate in order to compete for new consumers across emerging channels and mediums. However, the question remains, what does innovation truly mean for you and the CMO? Here is the answer by Matthew Mobley, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Merkle.

It’s no secret that the startup ecosystem in India has evolved exponentially in recent years. According to a recent NASSCOM report, India is the third largest startup ecosystem in the world and is expanding to become more global.

In fact, factors such as improving investor sentiment, higher success by local players and government impetus under the “Startup India Stand-Up India” initiative, there has arguably been no better time to be a startup in India.

Andreessen Horowitz will soon cease to be a venture capital firm, veering away from the majority of its Sand Hill Road neighbors in Silicon Valley to instead become a registered investment advisor, or RIA.

The 10-year-old firm, founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, filed in March to become an RIA, as it seeks greater flexibility in its investments, particularly when it comes to cryptocurrencies, said Margit Wennmachers, an operating partner at the firm. Forbes first reported on the change.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#/media/File:Marc_Andreessen.jpg