It takes a certain type of person to grow and develop several successful online platforms from the age of 12. For Ted Nash, finder of mobile advertising exchange Tapdaq and the controversial social platform Little Gossip, he thinks this is down to three things: passion, purpose and persistence.

Speaking to the audience at WIRED Next Generation, Nash said every successful entrepreneur must start with passion.

Entrepreneurs, startups, founders. All of these words ultimately relate to the same thing: the desire to get started on a project, to work for yourself on something you believe in.

At this year's WIRED Next Generation in London, co-founder of Entrepreneur First, Alice Bentinck – a woman who defines each of these terms – discussed exactly what it means to become an entrepreneur and how to become one in four steps.

Being an entrepreneur may seem glamorous and exciting.  But the reality can be much different. Hey, I talk to many entrepreneurs – and I often hear words like “tough,” “challenge,” “difficulties,” and so on. And these are often from those people who have had tremendous success!

So before making the decision of becoming an entrepreneur, you really need to do a gut-chuck. Are you willing to make big-time sacrifices? Ready for lots of unpredictability?

It is "only a matter of time" before man-made artificial intelligence becomes smart enough to learn how to take down the internet, claims Elon Musk.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has raised concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) before, despite Tesla cars using the technology to partially drive themselves on public roads and learn how to improve their skills every day.

Later this month, the future of the Irish economy will be on display at the Helix Theatre in Dublin. Researchers and investors will come together to see what innovative Irish companies are achieving and to look to the next wave of innovators ready to bring their offerings to market. SHARE In recent years, dramatic changes have taken place in the composition of Irish exports with high-technology products and services now accounting for over 40pc of overseas sales.

Tech innovators in the self-driving car and AI industries talk a lot about how many human jobs will be innovated out of existence, but they rarely explain what will happen to all those newly jobless humans. As usual, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk responds to an obvious question with an answer that may surprise some. 

The Indonesian government and its universities want to learn how Ideon Science Park was built and has grown since 1983, in cooperation with Lund. This knowledge will be used in creating one hundred new Science Parks in Indonesia.

A certification ceremony took place at “Gula Villan” (Yellow Villa) in Lund on Friday 21 October. The event was followed up by a visit from the Indonesian Ambassador Bagas Hapsoro S.H., M.A, with the title Ambassador Extra Ordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Indonesia to Kingdom of Sweden and Republic of Latvia, which took place on 28 October.

Study after study has shown how human activity, from driving a gasoline-powered vehicle to running air conditioners, has contributed to man-made climate change. But understanding exactly how much damage your personal lifestyle is doing can be difficult.

Many consider innovation to be the holy grail of entrepreneurial success. Investors and entrepreneurs alike dedicate resources and dollars only to come up short and frustrated. Consistently capitalizing on ingenuity and disruption can be almost impossibly challenging.

Kevin Fallon, CEO of Pivotal Innovation, believes that many executives are simply approaching innovation the wrong way. Fallon, a member of YPO, has been at the center of innovation as a COO with two publicly traded corporations and a successful entrepreneur.

I spent most of my adult life working in some of the world’s most challenging business environments. For 15 years, I managed and consulted for media businesses in places like Warsaw, Kyiv and Moscow. It was a difficult, but incredibly rewarding experience, both personally and professionally.

In time, I became adept at parachuting into a new market, learning the culture, learning the language and figuring out how to build a business. I was able to do so because I developed systems and processes for just about everything — marketing, sales, operations, even crisis management.

There are a few things you don't want to see when you're diving in the ocean, and a great white shark tops the list.

A scuba diver named Julian was scuba diving off the coast of Mexico when he found himself just inches away from a great white shark. 

Julian credits his smooth camera work in keeping the shark away.

Not everything belongs on the Internet, and the American electoral process is a textbook example. But 31 states don’t see it that way.

The recent cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee has raised the specter of an Internet-based assault on the democratic process in the U.S., leading computer security experts to call on the federal government to do more to protect the voting process from hackers.

Delivery by drone may be legal within two years. Just don’t expect many pizzas or packages to wing their way through your neighborhood by then. Despite huge interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and considerable hype around the idea of using them to deliver goods, experts say significant challenges still need to be solved for drone delivery to get off the ground.

“F--k-you money” may not be as much as you think. Try our calculator.

The American Dream is traditionally defined by a climb up the socioeconomic ladder to a comfortable middle-class life: a small business built from scratch, a house in the suburbs, a two-car garage, and the first generation of college-educated kids.

But another type of American Dream has now developed: The freedom to upturn your desk, give your boss the finger, and retire on the spot—without making a lifestyle sacrifice, of course.

The term “big data” is ubiquitous. With exabytes of information flowing across broadband pipes, companies compete to claim the biggest, most audacious data sets. And businesses of all varieties — old and new, industrial and digital, big and small — are getting into the game.

Masses of social, weather, and government data are being leveraged to predict supply chain outages. Enormous amounts of user data are being harnessed at scale to identify individuals among a sea of website clicks. And companies are even starting to leverage huge quantities of text exchanges to build algorithms capable of having conversations with customers.

By the end of 2016 the overall crowdfunding industry is on track to account for more total funding than the average annual investment from the venture capital industry (according to the most crowdfunding figures published by the most recent report by Massolution).

Just five years ago there was a relatively small market of early adopters crowdfunding online to the tune of a reported $880 million in 2010.

Image: https://medium.com

In 2008, Chris Anderson (then the editor of Wired magazine) wrote a provocative article called “The End of Theory.” Anderson insisted that the era of Big Data had rendered the scientific method — developing a hypothetical model first, and then testing it with data — increasingly obsolete. Google and other companies were generating a “data deluge” that could no longer be contained or explained by models, by theory. “With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves,” Anderson wrote. “We can stop looking for models.”

Knowledge@Wharton: Given the current landscape, with all it entails and all the connection ability we have, realistically should we be surprised that we’re talking about a term like megachange?

Darrell West: We shouldn’t be surprised, because there is large-scale change taking place all around us. But it’s something people have not quite gotten used to. During a lot of our history, we existed in periods of small-scale and incremental change, so I argue in the book people need to adjust their expectations, because large-scale change is here and is likely to stay in the near future.

1. Focus  “It’s been said that leadership is making important but unpopular decisions. That’s certainly a partial truth, but I think it underscores the importance of focus. To be a good leader, you cannot major in minor things, and you must be less distracted than your competition. To get the few critical things done, you must develop incredible selective ignorance. Otherwise, the trivial will drown you.”

Will big data cure cancer?

While there's a lot of breathless talk about the potential of big data to do just that, Greg Simon, the Executive Director of the White House's Cancer Moonshot Taskforce, is a skeptic--at least for now.

"What big data?" asked Simon speaking at Fortune's Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego Wednesday. "We have in the health system, what is basically insider trading. I know something you don't know. You know something I don't know. When I need to know what you know, I call you, I email you. You fax me stuff."