DirecTV has just released their newest Sunday Ticket commercial, and it features the Manning brothers as you’ve never seen them… singing. We hesitate to call this rap, but we guess that is what they were going for. Whatever you call it, it’s an epic commercial, and just the latest in genius from DirecTV and Peyton Manning.

You may have a great idea for a new diagnostic, drug, or technology but developing, testing, and commercializing it takes money. One very viable source for a biotech start-ups in the US are SBIR and STTR Small Business Technology Development grants.

These federal grant programs provide essential funds for hundreds of entrepreneurs to get their technology out of the lab into the market. In fact, with awards totaling about $700 million per year, the SBIR/STTR program is one of the leading sources of seed funds for start-ups and small businesses developing new disease and health related technologies.

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Some skills may be awesome but not in demand: While a sonnet might take your breath away, iambic pentameter doesn't have a high market demand. But some skills by any industry are wanted just as sweetly--and as founders of Pandora, Quora, and White Rabbit suggest, we can start developing them today. Here's where to start:

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It’s not a coincidence that billionaires keep buying newspapers. Warren Buffett has been buying them up for the last year, and last week, Red Sox owner John Henry bought the Boston Globe.

Jeff Bezos didn’t buy the Washington Post yesterday to “re-invest in the infrastructure of our public intelligence,” as James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic, and he didn’t buy it for a propaganda machine.

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Wateroo-region’s Communitech recently announced its plans to fine tune its startup accelerator HYPERDRIVE in an effort to provide greater support for early-stage technology companies.

While already one of the most successful seed-accelerators in Canada, Communitech continues to innovate and iterate to ensure that it remains globally competitive. Since its creation just over a year ago, HYPERDRIVE has admitted 18 companies to its first two cohorts. These companies have successfully raised $3.7M, made significant revenue and created over 70 jobs.

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The hip way to start a tech company is definitely via an accelerator. But for how long?

The number of accelerators has grown from just a handful a few years ago to more than 200 globally today. They help startups with small amounts of funding and liberal doses of training, coaching, and connections, but each is constantly seeking talent, requiring investment, and spitting out a newly-minted set of startups two or three times a year.

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A business incubator focused on developing local biotechnology companies has its first four tenants at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

The BioTech Initiative, a partnership between Pennington and the LSU Louisiana Business and Technology Center, will help grow companies that harness technological advances to improve patient health and care and control health care costs, the two organizations said Tuesday.

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Shark Week sends television-watching humans into a frenzy.

You might think spending twelve hours a day watching faux Megalodon documentaries makes you the ultimate fin-atic. But unless you traded your legs for a tail and forced your dog to dress like a hammerhead, you're just a gr-uppy.

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Feeling a bit Series A crunched? Try going to your friendly corporate venture capitalist.

A study this morning shows that at the same time cash from traditional venture capitalists has been tighter, corporate VCs are opening their wallets wider. CB Insights, a New York firm which tracks venture capital, found that funding from corporate venture capital climbed 7 percent in the second quarter over the same period a year ago, investing $1.7 billion in 126 deals.

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The San Francisco-Silicon Valley tech startup rivalry has gotten a new Richard Florida treatment. This week, the urban policy guru (famous for identifying the urban "creative class") broke down "Why San Francisco May Be the New Silicon Valley." He used venture capital investment data provided by Dow Jones and analyzed by the Martin Prosperity Institute.

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Colorado is currently considering proposals to outlaw Uber and other services that enable passengers to book a car service from their smartphones. Uber and its competitors face similar challenges from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Washington, DC.

In May, the North Carolina State Senate voted unanimously to prohibit Tesla Motors, the innovative electric car company, from selling cars directly to consumers, including via the Internet. The Texas legislature recently retained similar prohibitions until at least 2015.

If you’re like most small-business owners, time is your most valuable resource. Figuring out how and where to spend your time to yield the biggest payoff can be one of the most difficult and stressful things you do. But as with money, time well spent will return to you tenfold – and squandered time will leave you deeper in the hole.

Below is a guide to five ways to spend your precious minutes and hours to yield major returns and get the best ROI (Return On Investment) for your time.

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Every startup founder knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Yet we always dream that we are the exception to the rule. So once in a while it’s good to look at some facts to temper our imagination.

I was reading an old article written by marketing guru Seth Godin a while back where he mentions that “it takes about six years of hard work to become an overnight success”. Based on a small sample of household names from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, he is an optimist. Here is some data from Wikipedia:

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Is the role of the manager to make decisions, or to make sure that decisions get made? The answer, of course, is both — but many managers focus so much on the first role that they neglect the second. The reality, however, is that decision-making often is not a solo activity, but rather an orchestrated process by which the manager engages other people in reaching a conclusion. Doing this effectively not only improves the quality of the decision, but also ensures that everyone is more committed to its implementation.

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In any given month, my venture capital firm receives more than 100 pitches from hopeful entrepreneurs looking for our funding. This is a pretty typical volume for a VC firm.

What might surprise you: The percentage of start-ups that actually land a venture firm's check is in the low single digits. It's obviously not for lack of trying, but the vast majority of entrepreneurs miss the boat.

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Being an academic researcher at an entrepreneurship event is sometimes like being a witch doctor at a medical convention. Some people are curious, but many dismiss you as having nothing valuable to offer.

In the past several years I've attended dozens of entrepreneurship events, sometimes wearing my academic researcher hat and other times my product developer hat. Over the years I've detected what seems to be a growing sentiment that academics - whether through research or teaching - have little value to offer someone hoping to launch a new venture. Consider a keynote speaker's first bit of advice at one event: "If you're enrolled in a university, get out while you still can."

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There is no shortage of lists that attempt to rank the world’s universities and research-focused institutions. However, it’s well known that some places are much stronger in one area of science than others but it is not always possible to interrogate these rankings by discipline.

Today, Lutz Bornmann at the Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society in Germany and a few pals release new online ranking tool that does this and more. Their website site lists the top institutes by discipline and also displays them on a map of the world allowing different regions to be compared as well.

To read the original article: The World's Best (And Worst) Scientific Institutions Ranked By Discipline | MIT Technology Review

To design the ideal innovation portfolio you begin with the strategic perspective, looking at the driving forces of change that are most relevant to your own organization, defining your future goals, vision and strategic intent, as we see that the purpose of the portfolio is to pursue them systematically despite the uncertain world, and to find the right balance between investment risk and innovation output.

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Throughout this study, risk assessment has been considered “a systemic approach (Cooper and Edgett, 2008) in dynamically organizing and analyzing innovation project’s management knowledge and information for potentially hazardous activities that might pose risks under specified circumstances”. Following this definition, the driver to risk assessment is revealed to be deep knowledge. This transposed into innovation culture within the sector, firm, business unit or individual project manager. Gangadhar Yasam (PMP, PgMP, Ford Technology Services India) has evidenced how innovation culture has supported in risk assessment procedures. In his experience, in one of Ford’s last innovation projects (consolidating applications from acquired companies into the company’s system, incremental innovation project), has led the innovation team to spend additional time during the project analysis phase delivering the project on time and shortly under budget (Gale, 2010).

The driver to risk assessment is revealed to be deep knowledge…

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Forbes released the 2013 Midas List for Venture Capital today, revealing the top tech investors in 2013. The Midas List shows that to be successful in VC, all you need is one big hit. Five of the top ten names on the list invested in Facebook, the largest tech IPO of 2012. This year the Midas List’s methodology was tweaked to include 6 month and one year performance post IPO. Seed investors continued to climb on the list this year, a proof of their increasing role in financing tech innovation, due to the falling costs of running tech startups.