Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
Where did this sense of entitlement in our business culture come from? I’ve written about this before, but I was reminded again a while back at a conference for startups when an entrepreneur started berating investors for not funding early-stage startups. It sounded to investors like me that they felt a funding entitlement for their startup idea. Of course, I’m sure entrepreneurs sense that many investors feel entitled to deals with no risk. It’s bad news either way.
Bubble chatter probably isn’t going away anytime soon it seems. After Q1’14 saw venture capital investment hit its highest quarterly mark since Q2’01, investors deployed 39% more capital across 11% more deals. In aggregate, H1’14 saw U.S. VC funding leap to $23.87B, a 71% increase versus H1’13. The number of U.S. tech companies that raised their first financing at a $1B+ valuation has jumped as well – and represents a 133% increase from the total number of companies that raised at a $1B+ valuation in all of 2013.
Image: https://www.cbinsights.com
1. "I want to put a ding in the universe." - Steve Jobs
2. "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them." - Alfred North Whitehead
3. "Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk
4. "If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong." - Charles Kettering
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
No, my spell checker is not out of order. In fact, I had to fight to get it to stop correcting me.
Mehdiocrity: A state of being wherein the only acceptable alternatives are to be non-reactive, to be unengaged, or to raise indifference to an art form.
There’s a lot of it going around.
Mehdiocrity is not as simple as mediocrity.
Many founders consider successfully selling their company to be the hallmark of success. However, once you’ve spent the past few years building a business you’re passionate about, how do you decide if you’re really ready to sell? Is it ever a better choice to stay on board and keep building?
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Getting a new job offer or making a new business deal is exciting — but negotiating? Not so much. The process of negotiation can be nerve-wracking, and it's easy to make mistakes, especially if you haven't had much experience negotiating. Before your next negotiation attempt, make sure you watch out for these seven common negotiating mistakes.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
For most people, myself included, both money and technology sit in the mental category of “functional magic.”
The details of how these things work are a little hazy, although we’re damn glad they do, despite the inkling that they’ve snared us in some nefarious spell. We’re vociferous about their failings, but we hesitate to dabble in the dark arts ourselves. We might have to sell our soul to the devil. We might have to do maths.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
It’s been a good year for patent trolls, and now the biggest troll of them all wants to keep the party going: a report reveals that Intellectual Ventures has acquired more than 200 new patents, which will help IV extend its legal tentacles in fields like wireless infrastructure and cloud computing.
In case you’re unfamiliar, IV’s peculiar brand of innovation involves acquiring old patents and using them to arm thousands of shell companies, whose sole business is to extract licensing fees from productive businesses.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Since 1790, 273 cities have made an appearance on the list of the nation’s 100 largest places.
Cities of all shapes and sizes have made the list at one time or another - ranging from New York, which has held the top spot in every single census from the very beginning; to little Chillicothe, Ohio, which appeared once in 1830, at #87, and never made the list again.
Image: http://www.newgeography.com
The Middle East and North African entrepreneurship scene has been abuzz of late with a rising number of start-ups, especially in the tech industry.
High smartphone penetration rates and a growing e-commerce sector have made MENA a hotbed for tech start-ups, bringing a surge of investors in their wake eager to tap into the promising new business potential.
Image: REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
We saw how choosing the mission-driven life is the basis of social entrepreneurship. We choose it out of a sense of responsibility to the world and to the value of our own lives.
But that sense of responsibility and the yearning for a more purposeful life often come to us before we know what our mission is.
How do we find our mission?
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I have two jobs, one as a tenured professor of computing and information technology at the University of Washington Information School, in Seattle, and the other as a venture-backed co-founder and CEO of a tech startup called AnswerDash. When I tell people that, many react with, “Oh, those jobs seem very different.”
Today’s customers are much more in control of their buying decision, as they have more choices and more information than ever before. Almost instantly, via the Internet or on their smartphone in the store, they can find the lowest price alternative or their favorite features, without waiting for push marketing or listening to your best sales person.
Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, who assumed his post on May 28, said in a recent speech that since the financial crisis the United States has done much to strengthen the financial system and reduce the likelihood of future crises. At the same time, he warned that it is impossible to completely prevent another crisis.
Consequences of crisis still reverberate "Fortunately, policymakers succeeded in dealing with the situation better than many had feared they would," Fischer said in the Martin Feldstein Lecture at the National Bureau of Economic Research. "Unfortunately, we are still dealing with the consequences of the collapse and the steps necessary to deal with it."
A lot of budding entrepreneurs have asked us how they can raise capital for their new businesses. The answer is it's extremely hard . Even if you are a tech startup with a hot idea and amazing growth potential, it's still really hard to raise funds from investors who don't know you when you don't have much to show for your company. After all, eight out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months. Investors/lenders rarely fund companies at this stage -- however, there are other options.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
If you ever wanted to get more serious about photography, but weren't quite sure where to start, MIT's free online course in photojournalism just might be the right entry point.
It's not a full-blown photography class--there's no instructor or peer feedback, and the course assumes you already know a little something and don't need to learn all the technical aspects of camerawork. Instead, it centers around the type of photography most of us partake in: shooting our environment on the fly. A curated reading list and weekly assignments are designed to guide you in thinking about how to approach subjects and environments. They're also intended to help you translate the five senses you experience in the living world into a single, dynamic photo.
Everyone knows that the “Obamacare website,” or HealthCare.gov, performed so badly at launch that it became a political Achilles Heal for POTUS.
Well, the White House has just put up the posting to search for the next keeper of the online face of the government’s health insurance plan exchange.
Image: http://venturebeat.com
Beacons have the potential to completely automate our lives. These tiny transmitters will seamlessly give companies information about us that help them provide better service; puppeteer real-time opportunities for us to save or enjoy; and simplify the exchange of funds. They will remove many of the arduous steps we go through to get something done today. Steps which are so engrained into our psyches that we don’t yet even realize how much they are interrupting our lives. Traveling in particular is full of millions of annoyances that beacons, sensors, and other advances in mobile tech will soon help to squash. Just imagine a 36-hour business trip:
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Georgia is known for its peaches, sweet tea and hot weather. However, it has some lesser-known advantages. You might not have guessed it, but the state is quickly becoming a haven for female entrepreneurs.
From 1997 to 2014, Georgia has experienced more growth in women-owned business than any other state, with the percentage of businesses owned by women skyrocketing 118 percent, according to new information from Expert Market. The company recently put together an infographic that breaks down the ratio of female-to-male entrepreneurship state by state.
8 About $13.8 bil was invested in startup companies in Q2, up 34% from Q1 and the most since Q1 2001. Software startups raised a near-record amount, suggesting that the IPO market will stay hot. This year, 37 tech firms have had IPOs vs. 45 for all of '13. In one of the largest rounds ever, ride-sharing service provider Uber raised $1.2 bil. Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/071814-709516-big-jump-in-venture-capital.htm#ixzz3846SFIYL Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook
