Last week about 60 people applied to work for our company (thank you TMBA readers, we’re feeling the love). We’ve added a great new team member and in the process have met a lot of intelligent entrepreneurially minded marketers.

The biggest follow-up question from those who didn’t get the job was: “How could I have made my application better?”

Are you worried about retaining your key employees as the economy heats up? Or do you need to attract new workers to help with growing demand for your product or service, or to expand your business? In either case, employee benefits are an important factor in whether employees choose to join your company, stay with your business for the long haul or jump ship.

How do you know if your employee benefits measure up?

Your body is a battleground in the tech industry right now. If it’s not your eyes (Google Glass, digital contact lenses) it’s your wrist (Jawbone UP, Nike+ FuelBand and smartwatches). A recent piece on qz.com points out, every major manufacturer out there is currently making a wearable smartwatch device and will release it around the end of the year, if not before.

Image Courtesy of Gualberto107 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

President Obama announced on Wednesday his nomination of France A. Córdova, a former president of Purdue University, to serve as the new director of the National Science Foundation.

Ms. Córdova, an astrophysicist, is now chair of the Smithsonian Regents, the governing board of the Smithsonian Institution. She was appointed to that post in January, six months after ending a five-year term as Purdue's president as she neared the mandatory retirement age of 65. Ms. Córdova turns 66 on Monday.

Some lucky authors get their books turned into movies.  Others get television series.  Or maybe amusement rides.

Me?  My book is being turned into an entire building.  That’s right, 304 pages of text transformed into 103,000 gleaming square feet of awesomeness.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty cool.

Working from home isn’t always the great gig it’s made out to be. If you’re one of the growing numbers of people who do work from home, you’ll be only too familiar with the potential problems of staying on top of your game from the comfort of your home office. Here are a few ways to keep motivated, stay productive and hit your deadlines.

Image Courtesy of marin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If the Exorcise Pool has its way, you’ll be taking a dip in cleaned water from Newtown Creek, one of the city’s dirtiest waterways. 

As you approach the edge of the trendy, industrial Brooklyn neighborhood of East Williamsburg, you can smell what divides it from Queens: sewage. That plus oil and other industrial contaminants make the three and a half miles of the Newtown Creek one of the most polluted watersheds in New York.

RUNNING STOP SIGNS. TAKING CANDY FROM CHILDREN. CHEATING AT GAMES. IF YOU’RE WEALTHY, CHANCES ARE, YOU’RE MORE LIKELY TO DO ALL THREE.

UC Berkeley social psychologist Paul Piff has run 30 studies on thousands of people around the United States. And time and time again, he finds that the wealthiest participants tend to act the most deplorably.

Image Courtesy of ntwowe / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I’ve been doing a tour of the summer accelerator programs and a question I get a lot is about the feedback the teams get from the investors and mentors they meet with. They ask me how much they should react to the feedback they are getting advising them to do things differently, pivot, change the product, change the strategy, etc.

I call this constant advising/mentoring of early stage startups “mentor/investor whiplash” and I think it is a big problem. Not just with the accelerator programs but across the early stage/seed startup landscape.

Image Courtesy of nokhoog_buchachon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In working with organizations over the years, we've observed a leadership pattern that sabotages change. It occurs when senior leaders, who have been thinking, exploring, and debating about a particular change for a while, finally announce plans for a new initiative. Forgetting that others in the organization haven’t been a part of the discussions and are not as familiar with all of the reasons for the change, leaders are surprised by the amount of resistance the new change generates.

Image Courtesy of jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Let's say your startup isn’t sexy. In fact, it’s boring. Really boring.

So what do you do about it?

If you’re Avalara, which finds its home in the nap-inducing world of sales tax, you make your office culture and identity do the sprucing for you.

I THINK CULTURE IS AVALARA'S COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE. Since the Washington state-based company's founding in 2004, CEO Scott McFarlane has been on a mission to make the Avalara experience more exciting, and "sales tax less taxing." We spoke with him to learn how to make a less-than-thrilling industry, well, more thrilling.

America has always been a nation of tinkerers. Our Founding Fathers, notes author Alec Foege, were innovators in areas ranging from agriculture (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson) and electricity (Benjamin Franklin) to the swivel chair (Jefferson).

Engineering advances drove America’s quest for industrial supremacy in the 19th century, many of them borrowed (sometimes illegally) from the then very resourceful British Isles. By the early 19th century, the U.S. was producing its own major inventions, including the steamboat and cotton gin. By the end of that century, the U.S. was clearly on the way to industrial preeminence. The growth of engineering schools — MIT, the Case Institute, Stevens Institute of Technology, as well as departments at the great land grant universities — generated a steady supply of engineers. For much of the last 70 years, America, has been the world’s leading center of engineering excellence, dominating markets from steel and cars to energy and aerospace.

Image: Flickr

Students of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are not your typical college kids. These are older people, many with advanced degrees. They participate in online courses because they are curious about the subject matter, and they are motivated, in part, by the courses’ being free of charge.

Matt Rourke/Associated Press University of Pennsylvania professor Peter Struck, with teaching assistant Cat Gillespie, teaches a mythology class during a live recording of a massive open online class, or MOOC, in Philadelphia. Those findings, part of a new study, one of the first to take stock of the demographics and motivations of online course participants and conducted by education technology company Instructure Inc. and research firm Qualtrics, might calm the nerves of higher-education administrators who worry about online education replacing standard degrees. For now, these courses appear to compete for student attention more with television shows, rather than with brick-and-mortar classrooms.

Image Courtesy of sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Is American manufacturing experiencing a renaissance, or is it not? That’s the billion-dollar question economists, policy makers and business leaders are pondering these days.

If you ask Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, he’ll say you are asking the wrong question. The real question, he’ll tell you, should be: “Is a manufacturing renaissance possible if we implement the right policies?”

Entrepreneur-focused c-leveled came into being in 2009 during the economic downturn, a time when businesses were looking to resolve issues to survive, says Denise DeSimone, founder and CEO.

A seasoned entrepreneur, DeSimone had had successes. She had helped to build Unicorp., a speech recognition tech company, from the ground up as CEO; within two years it reached a global market with revenues exceeding $74 million.  She was also the CEO of Advanticom. 

I’m interested in metrics mainly as a means to an end: to predict the future. Leading indicators, YES! Lagging indicators, who cares? That’s why I created a technology that produces teaming metrics, and predicts how people will interact in teams. It’s my mission in life now, but I never stop thinking about where new leading indicators might be lurking.

I’ve been writing several blog posts recently that describe EMC’s use of analytics to accelerate the innovation that is coming from global university research partners world-wide. The geographic locations of many (but not all) of our university research partners are depicted on this map.

In addition, in my last post I described how EMC tries to keep track of “what” research activities our global partners are working on through the use of Stanford’s Topic Modeling Toolbox:

The difficulty of parallel parking will be a thing of the past, if the designers of a revolutionary new electric car have their way.

Image Courtesy of artur84 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Lawmakers continued to provide support for life sciences at a reduced level in the recently enacted budget; however, other technology areas did not fare as well. In some cases, funding was eliminated for tech-based initiatives, and lawmakers allowed a tax credit for early stage investors to expire. Meanwhile, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center plans to consolidate activities and redouble efforts to keep things moving in the wake of a 27 percent reduction to their budget.

Yahoo acquired app maker Lexity on Wednesday, the company's 20th since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo a little more than a year ago.

Twenty startups is no small number, especially when you consider that in just 13 months, the 18-year-old company has boosted its acquisition count by nearly a quarter.