When companies like Pinterest and Instagram become successes overnight, our expectations for what brands can or can’t do become unhinged from reality. Case in point: JC Penney.

When John Cleese received an honor from the University of St. Andrews some years back, rather than follow in the footsteps of John Stuart Mill and other notables who had preceded him and who had talked about courage, magnanimity and other great virtues, he made a speech about cowardice. He made the case that if cowardice didn’t have such a bad name the world might be a better, more socially cohesive, place. After all, he pointed out, ritual submission works really well in the rest of the animal kingdom. He implored students to help society by going out into the world and acting more cowardly.

With only a few days left being a teenager, just thinking about what happened this past year gives me chills.

Before I continue, I have to warn you: this post is not for everyone. And this isn’t a tech-focused post, either. I’m writing this for that person out there who needs that extra reminder that anything is possible. If you want to know how my world flipped this year, and what surprising lessons I’ve learned along the way, keep reading.

A special truck transports the largest wind turbine blade in the world from: it stretches 75 meters long. The turbine is seen here en route from Esbjerg to Østerild in Denmark, where it will be installed. Larger turbines generate more power than small ones, and do so more efficiently.

Gauging audience attitude toward your business is can sometimes be challenging. If you’re a small neighbourhood business it’s easy because you can just ask them. The bigger you become however, the more difficult that becomes.

That’s where the field of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) comes into play. Using technology to ask the right the right questions you can find, attract, and win new clients as well as nurture and retain those you already have.

There was a time when we believed that hard skills determined your success. And for some positions it still does. But hard skills are not the only components impacting your ability to excel within a company or an industry (and they never have been).

It’s a lesson you usually learn right after you come out of college and take that first job.  Or you loose it after you loose a position because of a few painful personality traits (of course they would never say it like that).

One of the most interesting trends in startup land is the rise of the "acqui-hire," which is when a big company buys a smaller company just to get its employees. For instance, Facebook acquired New York-startups Hot Potato and Drop.io just for the companies' founders. It pretty much killed the product they developed. Or, more recently, Google bought Milk, the app development company from Kevin Rose. It killed all of Milk's projects and put the team to work on Google+.

The number of conversations about doctoral education and the chancy academic job market has reached saturation. Everyone agrees we need more transparency, more realism: Getting a Ph.D. is no guarantee of permanent full-time employment in higher education.

In certain fields the odds of finding yourself on the tenure track, without debt, are low. You could end up adjuncting on food stamps or, most humiliatingly, erasing the doctoral degree from your résumé (no longer a "curriculum vitae") to avoid appearing unqualified for a sales job.

The article is an attempt to draw attention to some important policies that need to be put in place to stimulate an entrepreneurial economy. These are simply some suggestions that could further enhance what the government is currently doing to stimulate the economic growth of the nation by a focused policy on entrepreneurship.

For the culture of  entrepreneurship to thrive, to provide the environment where budding entrepreneurs can develop into expanding and innovative enterprises,  and to assist those in the informal economy, the polices in place must be focused. It is also a means of highlighting some broad guidance to employers in advocating for policy change.

There is plenty of early stage funding available for Irish start-ups but securing it isn’t easy

IT’S A PECULIAR irony of the current credit environment. On the one hand, established businesses looking to access funds to develop and grow – or just stay in business – are struggling to do so. On the other, start-ups – companies as yet unproven and untested – are finding that seed capital funding may never have been more plentiful than it is now.

This mini MINI is so cute, we want to just put it in our pockets. The remote-controlled miniature car has been making itself useful at the London Olympics, by doing all sorts of odd jobs, like picking up stray javelins, hammers and discuses strewn about after track and field events.

BMW is of course, one of the sponsors of the games, and is behind the car, which is about the quarter of the size of a real MINI. There are three cars doing chores in London presently, part of a larger fleet provided for Olympic use by BMW. It's a smart branding move by the brand, marrying aesthetics and functionality quite well to make it stand out among the plethora of Olympic sponsors.

The typical recruiting process is inefficient. This is the best explanation for why so many recruiters are turning to platforms like Facebook to Pinterest and beyond to source candidates. In 2011 the average cost per hire was $5,054, and the traditional recruiting process takes an average of 45 days to fill a position. This is a lot of time and money disappearing. Is it any wonder why more recruiters are looking at the popularity and usefulness of online video?

How long before the number of developers necessary to build what we can dream about stops growing, starts shrinking, and goes to zero? Will coding as we know it always be around?

If anything has held true about the progress of technology over the last 150 years, it is that one generation's bread and butter tasks become automated and the skill level requirement for participating successfully in the workforce is forced up. We've seen disruption by machines among all sorts of human labor, particularly in the area of "making stuff".

Can a 75-year old health insurer spark some radical innovation on the local startup scene? That's the goal of a new partnership between Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Healthbox, which runs a three-month "accelerator" program for entrepreneurs working on new products and services for the healthcare industry. The new program starts today, with 10 teams taking up residence in Kendall Square — in the same office building where DogPatch Labs and TechStars Boston are based — and wraps up with an "Innovation Day" in November, when they'll show off their progress.

Returning to work after an extended absence is tough. Your network's stale. Your expertise is rusty. People wonder whether you're committed.

Shannon (name has been changed) encountered this challenge. At 32, she had advanced professionally from health care consulting to investment management, with an MBA in the middle. That's when she had children, moved overseas with her husband, stopped working, and then returned to a different city in the US. At 50, Shannon was a divorced mother without a job for the past 12 years. She needed to restart her career.

Sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far greater rate than previously expected, according to data from the first purpose-built satellite launched to study the thickness of the Earth's polar caps. Preliminary results from the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 probe indicate that 900 cubic kilometres of summer sea ice has disappeared from the Arctic ocean over the past year.

Imagine an apple that never goes brown. A company has found a way to turn off the gene that makes apples go bad, so that they can be shipped, stored, and used more easily in cooking. But what’s the cost? 

The kind of fruit you might see in a television ad, glistening and unblemished, is a rarity. A large percentage of all produce (40%) never even makes it to the grocery store or farmer’s market because of damage. This problem, compounded by the fact that apple consumption has been on the decline for decades, led Neal Carter, the founder and president of Okanagan Specialty Fruits, to search for solutions. He came up with the Arctic Apple, a genetically-engineered apple that doesn’t turn brown, even when bruised or cut open. It’s the closest science has come to creating the perfect apple specimen. But not everyone is happy about it.

There are now over 13,000 health, fitness, and medical apps available. In a previous post I discussed ’Five creative and necessary ways of getting medical apps adopted.’ Specifically they were incorporating medical apps in informatics, utilization in schools for health education, government initiatives regarding digital technologies, medical apps in EHR clinical decision support tools, and patient portals. These however do not necessarily lead to adoption of these apps. Some of these are years away. But the industry is rapidly maturing and here are some ways in which it has or heading towards.

The average American on the street has a Facebook account, an opinion about Facebook, heard about the Facebook initial public offering, and knows it collapsed. That same person doesn’t see how their life connects with biotech, probably can’t name a single biotech company, and certainly hasn’t heard of any members of the biotech IPO class of 2012.

But here’s something that might surprise both biotech insiders and the average guy or gal on the street. The biotech IPO class of 2012 has made money for investors, while tech’s most glamorous up-and-comers have been stumbling.

San Francisco red-hot startup activity is not only inflating the commercial real estate market, but it is also having an impact on the residential rental market, data shows. Since January 2011, annual rents are up by $5000 but things are even worse down in the Peninsula. Some are blaming it on the IPO market, but I personally think it is more and more people moving to SF Bay Area, working for tech startups and thus putting pressure on the local real estate market.

Gone are the days of blockbuster drugs and miraculous cures for intractable diseases. For years, the pharmaceutical industry has been struggling to develop new compounds to battle the diseases that plague humankind. But Big Pharma’s “innovation crisis” is a myth, and the real problem with the industry lies in incentives to spend millions of dollars on making drugs that are only slightly better than existing products, according to a new analysis published in BMJ.

Donald Light, a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and Joel Lexchin, who teaches and studies public health policy at Canada’s York University, write that the oft-touted phenomenon of slowed innovation and stagnant drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry is an untruth sown by pharma execs among members of the media and lawmakers in a bid to attract more R&D funding.