Urban transport in India is notorious, and the continuous and rapid growth of the country’s urban population does not help matters one bit.

From autorickshaws to buses, metros to taxi services, the Indian public is heavily dependent on public modes of transport for their daily commute. However, mobility in the metros can often be unpredictable and unorganised - traffic jams and crowds making it more difficult.

Everyone loves the idea of a startup: One person or a small team of people starting a business by bootstrapping it and leveraging funding to become a million-dollar company or even a unicorn. That love for startups is deeply entrenched in the popular psyche. However, when most people think about startups, they don’t often imagine female-founded or led companies.

One of the world’s largest car manufacturers, Ford, is embracing the citizen development movement through the use of Pegasystems’ low code/no code platform. Citizen development aims to provide business users with tools that allow them to build out applications themselves, using a light touch framework that doesn’t require hard coding, with the aim of allowing a business to move at speed and with more agility.

Image: (Image sourced via Ford website)

Strategic technology talent is more important than operational technology talent. Competitiveness depends on strategic technology, not if the trains on time. Cloud delivery — and other trends — has fully commoditized operational technology. Today it’s all about strategic technology. But companies have very few strategic technologists, especially those who understand the innovative intersection of business and technology. This is Part I of a 3-part series on strategic technology talent.

In recent days, prominent venture capital funds have come out with survival tips for their portfolio companies. While asking startup founders to tighten their belt is sound advice, it’s worth wondering when venture capital titans might be urged by their investors to scale back their own pay, too.

Their compensation has been rising fast. Last year, median cash pay for a partner at a venture capital firm, including base salaries and bonuses, rose 10% to $928,000, reported The Information, citing a survey conducted by Holt Private Equity Consultants.

Building a culture of innovation requires organizations to provide autonomy to their employees while simultaneously embracing and encouraging their ideas.

CIOs seeking to establish an innovation ecosystem should look beyond methodologies. Since innovation today is taking place at a platform level, it is crucial that CIOs think more about vendors and partners and how they fit into their ecosystem.

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. That’s where I see too much entrepreneur burnout, growth plateaus, and founders being replaced, to their chagrin.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Customers expect more these days from those they do business with — more than simply providing a product or service. In fact, research indicates that 71% of millennial consumers in the United States are actually willing to pay more for a product or service when they know that some of the company’s profits go to charity. 64% of consumers actively avoid brands with societal views that they disapprove of.

Have I lost you already?

If you’re a business leader, probably. Entrepreneurs and business leaders are renowned for being tough as nails, highly rational and skeptical of airy fairy concepts. On the surface, intuition might sound like the latter.

But what if I told you that intuitive business requires less effort, and delivers better results? Your ears would probably perk up.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can soon make roads safer to drive in India, reveals a new study.

A unique AI approach that uses the predictive power of AI to identify risks on the road, and a collision alert system to communicate timely alerts to drivers, is being implemented here with an objective of resulting in a significant reduction of accidents.

The United States has regained a coveted speed crown in computing with a powerful new supercomputer in Tennessee, a milestone for the technology that plays a major role in science, medicine and other fields.

Frontier, the name of the massive machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was declared on Monday to be the first to demonstrate performance of one quintillion operations per second — a billion billion calculations — in a set of standard tests used by researchers to rank supercomputers. The U.S. Department of Energy several years ago pledged $1.8 billion to build three systems with that “exascale” performance, as scientists call it.

Image: Inside the Frontier supercomputer, a network of tubes carries water to cool thousands of computer chips in the system.Credit...Oak Ridge National Laboratory/Hewlett Packard Enterprise

In recent years, SoftBank has been something of a totem for venture capital largesse. The Japanese investment juggernaut headed by Masayoshi Son has been, by some margin, VC's most prolific investor, backing iconic startup success stories—and some of the biggest failures.

Now, things are turning sour indeed. On Thursday, we learned that SoftBank's Vision Fund posted a record investment loss of 3.5 trillion yen (about $27 billion) for its latest fiscal year. The overall loss for the company totaled 2.1 trillion yen. Its stock price, meanwhile, has plummeted, losing around half of its value since March.

In the old days, every entrepreneur planned on taking their startup public, and making it big. Today the rate of startups going public (IPO – Initial Public Offering) is finally up from the dead zone of the last two decades, and is now double the rate back in 1999. Smart entrepreneurs are now starting to look at this option again, as well as the challenges of running a public company.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com 

Once your business is running and sustainable, everyone these days expects it to grow, as an indication of long-term health and competitiveness. Thus continued growth becomes the biggest challenge for many of you business owners I meet in my consulting practice. Everyone is looking for that magic strategy that will keep them growing, even during market and company changes.

In my experience as a business advisor, most organizations, large and small, struggle to keep up with the pace of change and competitive forces today. You may have a brilliant product strategy, but your operational teams seem to fight change, as well as each other, resulting in turf battles and confusion, leading to the internal drama and problems that occupy too much of your time.

In 2016, I was meeting with Gail Miller, one of the wealthiest women in the United States. Gail was nearing completion of the transfer of her sole ownership in the Utah Jazz to a trust she had carefully designed to keep the team in Utah well into the future. During the course of reviewing various documents with her I asked, “Gail, does it bother you at all to give away your ownership in the Jazz?”

The National Advisory Council on Innovation & Entrepreneurship (NACIE) is charged with developing a National Entrepreneurship Strategy that strengthens America’s ability to compete and win as the world’s leading startup nation and as the world’s leading innovator in critical emerging technologies. The council will help with identifying and recommending solutions to drive the innovation economy, including growing a skilled STEM workforce and removing barriers for entrepreneurs ushering innovative technologies into the market. The council also facilitates federal dialogue with the innovation, entrepreneurship, and workforce development communities.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra today announced the formal establishment of the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as an independent entity within the National Institutes of Health and the appointment of Adam H. Russell, D.Phil., as acting deputy director. Currently, Dr. Russell is the Chief Scientist at University of Maryland's Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS). He spent more than a decade as a Program Manager, first at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and then at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dr. Russell will begin his new role in June.

Image: https://www.hhs.gov/

Descartes-08, Cartesian Therapeutics’ investigational CAR T-cell therapy, appears generally safe and markedly lessened symptom severity in the first five patients with generalized myasthenia gravis (gMG) enrolled in a Phase 1b/2a clinical trial.

“I am very encouraged by the interim analysis findings,” as the therapy “appears safe and well tolerated, and the extent of clinical improvement seen in our early participants is remarkable,” Volkan Granit, MD, the trial’s principal investigator at the University of Miami, said in a press release.

Image: https://myastheniagravisnews.com

The age of social media has disrupted conventional ways of advertising and transformed the way that businesses reach consumers. In recent years, social media itself has undergone radical changes. Mike Mandell is a leading lawyer on social media thanks to the popularity of his legal tips and entertaining posts. Here he shares his advice for startups and their founders.

Image:  Social media guru Mike Mandell KYLE BERMAN