If the Super Bowl is the culmination of a year of great football, then Super Bowl commercials are the pinnacle of great marketing. At least they should be. But the ads for this year’s big game, which cost a reported $5 million per 30-second spot, were decidedly lackluster (a word many also used to describe the game, the lowest scoring in the event’s history).

Sure, there was some humor and a sprinkling of celebrities, but critics said the commercials were largely devoid of the creative edginess that has become the signature of great Super Bowl ads. The result was a collective “meh” from consumers who took to social media to make fun of the commercials.

As a leader, you want the people in your organization to trust you. And with good reason. In our coaching with leaders, we often see that trust is a leading indicator of whether others evaluate them positively or negatively. But creating that trust or, perhaps more importantly, reestablishing it when you’ve lost it isn’t always that straightforward.

Anne Curzan, English professor at the University of Michigan, studies the evolution of language. While many of us roll our eyes at bizspeak — from synergy to value-add to operationalize — Curzan defends business jargon. She says the words we say around the office speak volumes about our organizations and our working relationships. She shares how to use jargon more deliberately, explains the origin of some annoying or amusing buzzwords, and discusses how English became the global business language and how that could change.

“While cursory nods were made to the importance of encouraging innovation, the witnesses discussed how patent exclusivity, thickets, and evergreening drove up drug prices while promoting the greater use of Patent Trial and Appeal Board reviews against drug patents.”

The opening salvo in what promises to be one of the hottest debates in the new Congress was fired January 29 during a day-long hearing in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform—how to lower the price of prescription drugs. And it didn’t take long to make it clear that patents are right in the middle of the scrum.

You know those stories of scientific breakthroughs, in which the lone genius scientist struggles for years until his “eureka!” moment?

Yeah, that’s a lie.

With the big data revolution well under way, today scientific discoveries are the result of massive collaborations.

Case in point? Last week, 18 institutions teamed up and devised a method to image entire brains 1,000 times faster than anything before. Dubbed by the team as an “Avengers, unite!” moment, they combined strengths to physically blow up brain tissue to over 20 times its usual size, and scanned their inner circuits and molecular constituents—down to the nano-scale level—using a new type of blazingly fast microscopy.

Interested in working for yourself and building a business as a solopreneur? There are more opportunities than ever for individuals to make a solid living while being self-employed. No matter your skills, interests or experience, there’s sure to be a type of self-employment that is well suited to your needs.

Sarah Taylor is only 17 years old, but she lives with constant pain. She was diagnosed with arthritis at 18 months old, and she also suffers from fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disease.

The teen says she does find some relief through acupuncture.

“I also rely on medication, but this is also a good way to keep it under control as well,” she says.

When Taylor was younger, she realized one of the biggest challenges she had was expressing her level of pain.

There may be a sense of relief among startup founders who received tax notices on angel funding earlier this year. According to a The Times of India report, the government is considering additional sops and, possibly, redefining the term startup.

However, it will not solve the problem the way it didn’t when the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) issued a notification last month, saying that the proposed changes were to “ease availment of angel tax exemption”. Now the Government intends to form a working committee to look into the ‘definition’ of a startup.

While top-rated US colleges are household names, there are plenty of other, sometimes overlooked, schools that offer great educational and career opportunities.

College preparation and admissions consulting firm CollegeVine assembled a ranking of the most underrated colleges and universities in the US. To compile the ranking, it evaluated several career- and outcome-based metrics for each of the schools, including cost of attendance and financial aid, career outcomes, and overall return on investment.

Image: Facebook/hofstrauniversity

In today’s world of constant change and information overload via the Internet, content marketing and branding are often more important to success than product quality or technology. Contrary to a popular myth, word-of-mouth and viral marketing are not a substitute for more basic branding activities. The challenge is that many new business owners still don’t know where to start.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Security researcher Troy Hunt recently discovered one of the largest online troves of leaked personal information in history — a collection of nearly 773 million hacked e-mails and passwords.

Hunt’s discovery stresses a point that’s been evident for some time: Once information is digitized, no one can fully guarantee its safety.

So how do we fix our cybersecurity troubles? In two words: Slow down. Put simply, the time has come to more purposefully control what it is we digitize. 

If you’re an entrepreneur setting up or running a company, it’s important you have the right tools in place to monitor your teams’ attendance while also increasing its productivity.

Here are six reasons every entrepreneur needs to be a Time Clock Wizard:

1. Increasing speed and accuracy In the past, employees would manually log their attendance. Aside from taking up a small chunk of their workday, this method isn’t 100 percent accurate. By implementing an attendance monitoring system, employees won’t have to dedicate any time into clocking in for work.

As Good as it Gets? With all the dire headlines, let’s not forget the epic run that venture has been on. We’re now approaching a full decade of compounding tailwinds, with low rates and abundant capital bringing in risk-incentivized asset managers from around the globe. We’ve only just begun harvesting this decade of innovation investing.

In 2013, starfish — including the morning sun star, the richly hued ochre star and the sunflower star, whose limbs can span four feet across — started dying by the millions along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Alaska.

They were succumbing to a wasting disease. It began with white lesions on their limbs, the dissolution of the surrounding flesh, a loss of limbs and finally death. Understanding, let alone solving, the problem would take research.

Every executive has two types of investment war stories. The first type is underestimating an opportunity, which leads to a “fish that got away” story like how Blockbuster could have bought Netflix. The second type is overestimating an opportunity, like how Eddie Lampert bought Sears for $11 billion only to see it land in bankruptcy over a decade later.

Behind the most successful entrepreneurs is often a motivated morning routine. According to researchers at The University of Nottingham, self control, willpower and task-performance all peak in the morning. This means business owners who can max out this crucial time are off to a great start for the day. In this spirit, here are five essential morning habits collected from case studies and best practices in the sports and entertainment industries.

If I gave you a magic wand, and said you could redesign a college from scratch, what must your students learn?

I argue that you need to help build problem-solvers who are adaptive, creative and entrepreneurial in their thinking.

It turns out you can find programs on today’s campuses that already teach these things: entrepreneurship programs. I believe such programs not only the future of teaching the kind of agency that everyone will need, they may hold some of the keys to the future of higher education itself.

Image: Student participating in a LaunchU entrepreneurship program at Oberlin College 

Although startups based in California, New York, and Massachusetts have traditionally accounted for the majority of VC tech investment in the US, VCs are spurring other hotbeds of innovation across the country.

Using CB Insights data, we analyzed the most active venture capital firm in each state, based on unique tech investments from 2014 to 2019 YTD (1/24/19).

Image: https://www.cbinsights.com

In the final stretch of 2018, Philly-based accelerator Dreamit saw three of its portfolio companies get acquired in deals that totaled an eye-popping $600 million.

First up it was Boston-based LevelUp, a payment tech company that got picked up by GrubHub in September 2018 for $390 million. Then, over the holidays, adtech company Adaptly inked its deal to be acquired by consulting giant Accenture for an undisclosed amount. Ringing in 2019, PR analytics firm Trendkite — an Austin-based PR analytics firm founded by QuotaPath founder AJ Bruno — closed its sale to PR media company Cision for $225 million.

Image: https://technical.ly