Keeping both hospital guests and clinicians happy is not easy, especially when it comes to meeting their need for WiFi. And it's not likely to get any easier.

Ali Youssef is senior clinical mobile solutions architect at Detroit, Michigan-based Henry Ford Health System and he says maintaining an adequate wireless network in a hospital setting requires aiming at a constantly moving target.

"You can't predict what’s coming in the future," he said recently. "Mobile is a very disruptive technology. For example, you couldn’t predict the emergence of the iPhone or iPad."

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We all know that everyone wants to build their own startup; everyone wants to create the next billion dollar company. But what about working for one? What about the employees? I think this topic concerns many founders: stock options. With more than a few startups emerging in the past three years, I wonder how many actually set aside an employee stock option pool. Will it only happen when you get funding? Or do most founders just not mention it unless their employees ask?

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Entrepreneurs and startups often ask if they should use social media for marketing, digital media, or traditional media. The answer is yes to all, and the challenge is how to choose how much of each, and how to integrate them for maximum impact and the least cost. None should be considered mutually exclusive to any other.

The place to start today is if your company only uses traditional media for marketing, or no marketing. According to a Harvard Business Review article, only 60% of companies today use social media at all, and only 12% of those feel that they are using it effectively. These have the biggest potential for adding social media integration, and the best base for assessing its value.

Rewards based crowdfunding leader Kickstarter has breached the $900 Million mark for total dollars on their platform as they continue the march towards the $1 Billion mark which should be surpassed some time in 2014.  Kickstarter updates their site statistics on a regular basis and $900 Million was hit sometime earlier today (December 1, 2013).

This amount processed on their platform includes:

• 124,639 Launched Projects 
• $770 Million “Successful Dollars” 
• $103 Million “Unsuccessful Dollars” 
• $27 Million Live Dollars (as of today)

The Evan Burfield of June 2000 was the archetypal startup wunderkind, the kind of overachiever who naturally invites unfavorable comparisons to yourself at the same age.

There was his skinny, almost teenaged face on The Washington Post’s website, accompanying a reader Q&A on how he built a financial software company, netDecide, instead of rowing at Dartmouth.

Image: http://upstart.bizjournals.com 

By Christine B. Whelan

The path to success is linear, as conventional wisdom has it: You get a good education, make a thoughtful choice about a career, and diligently climb the ranks until you are rewarded with money, power, and personal fulfillment. In truth, life is often more like a slinky, full of twists and turns that challenge you to pull back, regroup, and reinvent yourself.

I was giving a speech at my father’s retirement banquet and I can tell you – I was a nervous wreck.  It’s one thing to speak on marketing to an audience of small business owners and something entirely different to speak to 450 people about my father and the difference he has made in our community.

I didn’t know where to begin or what to say.

Back in the day, your website was the only presence you needed to reach new customers. With all the buzz about social media and blogging, a business that wants to stay ahead of the game must engage and interact on a frequent basis on these platforms. Engaging on various social media channels brings a new set of PR and digital marketing responsibilities that must be integrated in your business if you want to protect and expand on the web.

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American Councils for International Education announces the opening of the winter 2014 application season for the US-Russia Innovation Corridor (USRIC). University-based startups and entrepreneurs leading innovative projects interested in exploring collaborations and accessing incubation services and U.S. networks in their target industries are encouraged to apply (http://usric.americancouncilsnetwork.org/).

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Richard Bendis Nominated Again!

Each year, Speakers Platform recognizes five speakers within ten popular topic areas. Excellence in speaking is based on: expertise, professionalism, innovation within the topic area, client testimonials & references, presentation skills, original contribution to the field and votes. The only substantive requirement is that the candidates' keynote presentation fee must be under $30,000USD. 

NOTE: clicking on the VOTE button above will navigate you to the page to vote for Rich.  Instructions on how to vote are found there.  Merely clicking on the VOTE button above will NOT register a vote.  We appreciate your support!

As we have long maintained, clean energy is perhaps the defining industry of the 21st century. Energy that is efficient, clean, reliable, abundant and cheap has the potential transform life for every New Yorker.

Clean energy can encompass biofuels, biomass, building technology, energy storage, fuel cells, photovoltaic (solar), smart grid, transportation, wind and other technology fields that improve energy efficiency and/or leverage renewable energy and low-carbon technologies.

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Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and US-based VC Avalon Ventures have announced the creation of the first of up to ten San Diego-based biotech firms as part of a $495m alliance signed in April.

Sitari Pharmaceuticals, which is using technology licensed from Stanford University, will receive a total of $10m from Avalon and GSK to get the San Diego-based company off the ground. The company will investigate treatments for celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder which targets the small intestine.

Many entrepreneurs looking for funding in order to develop a service or a product or start scaling up their activities after finding the product-market fit. First time entrepreneurs and those who haven’t raised fund yet often struggle to figure out how does the venture capital investment process look like.

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The Canadian government is in talks with Canada's Northleaf Capital Partners and HarbourVest Partners LLC, a U.S.-based investment manager, to oversee a portion of its funds targeted at promoting new venture-capital investment, according to people familiar with the matter.

Canada has made venture-capital financing a key part of its strategy to foster long-term economic growth, betting the move will foster innovation and spur the creation of new companies and high-paying, skilled jobs. It has committed to invest...

China’s economy has entered a critical phase. Since the country opened its doors in 1978, the economy has witnessed tremendous growth. Its gross domestic product has surged from less than $150 billion in 1978 to $8,227 billion in 2012 (see “China’s GDP” chart below). In the process, more than 600 million people have escaped poverty. This is a marvelous achievement for any country, let alone one as geographically large and populous as China.

Think about the common, albeit under-followed, presentation tips for speakers who want to deliver content more effectively:

• Use more and bigger images to engage the audience visually 
• Don’t include everything you’re going to say on the slides 
• Use high-contrast foreground and background colors to improve readability 
• Make ample use of builds to keep the audience from getting ahead of what you are saying 

I preach and try to follow these presentation tips whenever I speak.

Lots of biotech companies today say they want to be great for a long, long time. But which of today’s companies are actually doing it? Which ones are truly visionary, and built to last?

These questions have been on my mind since I re-read “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies” in preparation for an Xconomy event in San Francisco on Dec. 9. The classic book by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras came out in 1994. The authors spent six years identifying and studying the common characteristics of companies that had long runs at the top of their industries.

Economists have shed light on the vexed question of whether economic development can buy happiness – and it seems that life satisfaction actually dips among people living in the wealthiest countries.

Politicians are intensely interested in the link between national wealth and levels of happiness among the population, but it is a subject which is still wide open to debate among economists.

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One of the biggest challenges early-stage companies face is capturing the key initial customers that vet their technology and lend credibility in the market. These usually large organizations, known as anchor customers, may also be key partners that often accelerate commercialization.

The website for the Affordable Care Act was doomed by an inordinately complex setup that tried to link disparate databases in real time.

The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn’t all bureaucratic. Forcing slow and disparate databases run by government and insurance companies to work together in real time—and then launching the service all at once—would have challenged even technology wunderkinds.