When technology students at MIT ask Matt Marx whether they should take a job locally or head to California, he points to the fact that the Bay State allows companies to require employees to sign noncompete agreements – and California has banned them - as an argument to head west. “I say, all things being equal, I would go to California, because if things don’t work out, you’re not stuck (in the company)” said Marx, an assistant professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “I hate to say it, because I live and work here,” he adds.

Today I am opening the APEC Start-Up Accelerator Leadership Summit here in Taipei. The summit is challenging 30 startups along with 200 top executives and officials from the APEC region to re-think past assumptions about how the public and private sectors can collaborate to build sustainable startup ecosystems in the region.

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Want to participate in high-risk, high-reward projects while solving some of health care’s biggest problems? Want to be a catalyst for change and revolutionize the way government works?

Apply to participate in the HHSentrepreneurs Program! The HHSentrepreneurs Program connects innovators and entrepreneurs from outside federal government with internal innovators to work on projects that address some of the biggest challenges in health, health care and human services.

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Being an entrepreneur is a weird profession.

As technology entrepreneurs, we’re often seen as visionaries who can see further than others, a reputation for which there’s at least some truth. This is what puts us ahead of the curve and at the doorstep of opportunity.

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Your smartphone is the best tracking tool a marketer could ask for.

London-based marketing firm Renew has created Presence Orb, a trash can-based tracking system that collects data about the smartphones that pass by. Over the course of a week in London, Renew says, it captured info about over 4,000,000 devices, 530,000 of which were unique.

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Some hospitals are turning to technology entrepreneurs to reduce readmission rates and avoid penalties imposed under the Affordable Care Act, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

Background

Last year, an ACA provision went into effect that allows CMS to penalize hospitals for excess readmissions of Medicare patients.

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America will dominate the 21st century – economically and culturally – thanks to our dominance in technology.

Mobile technologies, supplemented by social connectivity, integrated with real-time data, enhanced by location-aware services and all supported by infinitely scalable yet highly personalized digital platforms will determine our future. These meta-offerings, delivering growth-spurring anytime, anywhere connectivity to all people and things, are each led by uniquely American businesses.

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Last week I asked readers of Business Report to submit terms they thought needed replacing in our vocabulary. The response has been quite interesting as you can see from the letters published today.

There is an emerging consensus, albeit a nascent one, about the need to change our national vocabulary. Words we speak go a long way in determining our attitudes and how we respond to challenges and opportunities at hand. We all know that a vocabulary that seeks to apportion the responsibility for moving South Africa to others is of no value.

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It is unfortunate that many young professionals do not worry about financial affairs. This is especially true for those in their 20s who feel that they are simply too young to dwell on financial decisions and planning. And then, when they are ready to get their finances in order, they often find themselves up to their ears in debt.

However, there are ways to get beyond these problems and live a debt-free life. The key is to recognize the mistakes you may be making and do your best to avoid them in the future. Listed below are some of the biggest finance mistakes young professionals make.

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There’s an unfortunate truth about business websites in general. Actually, two of them: (1) usually the only person who realizes the power of being online is the CEO himself/herself, and (2) it’s actually difficult for them to convey this point of view onto other employees in an effective way.

In other words, you can always force someone to help you with the company’s website, but how can you actually make them truly care about it?

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Of all the efforts devoted to improving economic and social conditions in developing countries, the most prominent has been the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which set targets for reducing poverty and improving education, gender equality, health, and sustainability by 2015. As is true with any type of development, meeting these targets depends on resources, and a large part of the resources devoted to the MDGs come from developed countries’ pledges for what is called Official Development Assistance (ODA). However, since peaking at $128.7 billion in annual net ODA in 2010, the annual total paid in ODA has declined for two years running, standing at $125.6 billion for 2012.1

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Venture capitalists who found the time to pick up a book or two this summer tell Venture Capital Dispatch about what they read at the beach–or at least in the occasional minute when they could put down their work and put their feet up. Here are some of their recommended reading picks, along with their comments:

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This post is for my fellow entrepreneurs. Especially, the one’s who love to code and create stuff, but find themselves clueless about “how to sell?”.

Everyone lives by selling something. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

We have done reasonably well in taking WebEngage to thousands of customers worldwide within 20 months of our launch. There’s a whole lot of ground to cover as the company has a long long way to go. Me and my co-founder, have written code all our lives – a whole lot of it, with one attempt resulting into, arguably, India’s first UGC-driven consumer internet brand (Burrp). When we started building out WebEngage, we did what we were best at – we created and rolled out a version 1 of our product in 5 months time. But then, the harsh reality kicked in – how do we now tell our prospects that there’s something worth their money? I decided to be to guy who would hunt for a few early stage customers.

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Stefan Kühn studies biochemistry at Stellenbosch University in the wine country of South Africa's Western Cape province. He was working on his master's thesis last year and writing in his usual way, which he describes as messy and free-flowing. Then he took a massive open online course (MOOC) from Duke University called Think Again: How to Reason and Argue. It changed the way he approached his thesis. “It taught me what a good argument is, how to construct it, how to avoid general fallacies,” Kühn says. “I started the course because of personal interest (I love a lively debate) and was pleasantly surprised when I realized I was using it for my write-ups as well.”

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Our world is determined by the limits of our five senses. We can't hear pitches that are too high or low, nor can we see ultraviolet or infrared light—even though these phenomena are not fundamentally different from the sounds and sights that our ears and eyes can detect. But what if it were possible to widen our sensory boundaries beyond the physical limitations of our anatomy? In a study published recently in Nature Communications, scientists used brain implants to teach rats to “see” infrared light, which they usually find invisible. The implications are tremendous: if the brain is so flexible it can learn to process novel sensory signals, people could one day feel touch through prosthetic limbs, see heat via infrared light or even develop a sixth sense for magnetic north.

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Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It’s also no surprise that it’s the Nr.1 value for Buffer’s culture, if you see our slidedeck about it. So naturally we are obsessed with it.

I would love to be happier, as I’m sure most people would, so I thought it would be interesting to find some ways to become a happier person that are actually backed up by science. Here are ten of the best ones I found.

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Activity in a key brain area drops with age

The older people get, the more trusting they become—a tendency that can be dangerous because it puts elders at risk for exploitation and abuse. But why does it happen?

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Just how important protégés are to a powerful person was made clear to me by this question, told to me by a Fortune 100 CEO. When choosing his direct reports, he asks: "How many blazing talents have you developed over the years and put in top positions across the company, so that if I asked you to pull off a deal that involved liaising across seven geographies and five functions, you'd have the bench strength — the people who 'owe you one' — to get it done?"

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In September 2003, the Cairo office of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) organised a meeting to discuss establishing a network of professional Arab women in science and technology.

As a result, the creation of the Arab Network of Women in Science and Technology (ANWST) in Bahrain, was announced during a meeting at the country's Arabian Gulf University in 2005.

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A malaria vaccine has become the first to provide 100 per cent protection against the disease, confounding critics and surpassing any other experimental malaria vaccine tested, Nature News reports today.

The vaccine, developed and tested in the United States, will now be tested further in clinical trials in Africa, starting at the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania. If those are successful, the vaccine may be licensed as early as four years from now.

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