innovation DAILY

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.

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.

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 

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.

President Obama’s visit earlier this month to 1776, the startup hub in downtown Washington, D.C., shined a spotlight on entrepreneurship and innovative thinking nationwide. It was a good location because the contemporary, well-lit loft that incubates and supports area startups has grown from zero to 215 members in only a year-and-a-half.

Image: Students in the first two cohorts of the MA in Media Entrepreneurship mingle at a networking reception at 1776. Photo courtesy of American University.   

There’s a panoply of alternative funding streams for healthcare startups out there – fledgling companies are seeking out avenues like prepaid revenue models, grant funding in lieu of venture capital, and the ever-popular crowdfunding approach.

The outcomes can be a mixed bag, however, said a panel of speakers at MedCity News’ CONVERGE conference in Philadelphia today.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

There are plenty of crowdfunding platforms besides Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and they offer a variety of processes, fees, and uses. The list of platforms has become seemingly endless, ranging from ones designed for personal giving campaigns and non-profit fundraising, to renewable energy and academic research.

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 

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?

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

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.”

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."

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

Balancing your career and personal life is no easy task.

But if you're a data scientist, tour guide or social media manager, it may be easier to maintain a healthy work-life balance, according to Glassdoor.

The jobs site, which compiles data about workplaces, released a list of the top highly rated jobs for work-life balance. The results are entirely based on employee feedback over the past year.

Image: ISAR CHANG  

Every inventor seems to think their invention is worth a million dollars, but I haven’t seen anyone pay that much for one yet. In fact, I often have to tell aspiring entrepreneurs that their inventions have zero value, at least not until they are put in the context of a business plan, with qualified people committed to executing the plan. Early-stage ideas fall in the same category.

Investors mostly agree that choosing top-performing entrepreneurs is probably the most important factor in their success. But how you identify a great entrepreneur is not so clear cut.

What do we look for? When we (an early stage venture fund) decide to back an entrepreneur, want to see a track record of success, ideally as a CEO, or C-level executive in a successful start-up, deep knowledge of the industry the venture wants to disrupt (to fix it you need to understand it), and high-level contacts with potential customers and partners. Investor  contacts are good too.

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 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 

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.

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 

The breakaway success crowdfunding project of the summer is here:  Coolest Cooler is now the 4th  3rd most funded campaign EVER on Kickstarter.  The dark horse campaign has blasted past mega-crowdfunding hits like Veronica Mars and the campaign has not even broken a sweat.  The only campaigns that stand in its path to become number one are; Neil Young’s Pono, game counsel OUYA and PebbleWatch that trailblazed wearable tech.  In the ten days since Coolest Cooler launched the “portable party disguised as a cooler” has raised over $6 million from over 30,000 backers – averaging $600,000 in funding a day!  There are still 42 days left in this campaign so if

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com 

Sergio Ermotti, the chief executive of UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank has been banking since the age of 15. He started out as an apprentice at Cornèr Bank, where he learned to sell stocks and trade. He went on to get a certificate in Swiss banking and it was up the career ladder from there. Ermotti is one of thousands of Swiss apprentices who have grown from a talent pipeline that starts even before university. This is one of the reasons why Switzerland is the top country in the Global Innovation Index (GII) for the fourth year in a row.

If you've ever taken a business 101 course, you probably heard this common piece of advice: the customer is always right. It's a customer service approach to business that relies on service staff placing a high priority on buyer satisfaction. The concept dates back to the 19th century when retail pioneers like Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field insisted on customer complaints being treated seriously in order to retain their business.

The lynchpin of the new IBM-Apple alliance will be this simple phrase in the first sentence of their joint press release: “an exclusive partnership.” It sounds so innocent—a sentiment reflected at every human marriage. The two will become one.

But business combinations are not human marriages. About ten years ago, when New Jersey Superior Court judge Margaret McVeigh settled a partnership dispute between Amazon.com and Toys-R-Us, she wrote: “Long term commitment in a world where the technology is advancing almost on a daily basis is difficult to maintain. . .

If you have room in your head for only one nugget of leadership wisdom, make it this one: the most powerfully motivating condition people experience at work is making progress at something that is personally meaningful. If your job involves leading others, the implications are clear: the most important thing you can do each day is to help your team members experience progress at meaningful work.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Congressman Randy Hultgren (R–IL) and seven original cosponsors introduced the Department of Energy Laboratory Modernization and Technology Transfer Act of 2014 on July 17. The bill would create a seamless pathway for private innovators to transition the basic research at America’s national labs to commercial success stories.

The City of Vancouver wants to inject itself into the venture capital market, using the power and connections of its economic commission to help raise funds for small and medium businesses.

Unhappy with what it says is the inability of local start-ups and medium-sized businesses to get financing for innovative projects, the city plans to create a Vancouver Entrepreneur Fund that would act as a matchmaker between those companies and local and foreign investors.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Red wine. Cheese. Innovation. Yes, these are all things that get better with age. Don’t believe it? Science offers some pretty compelling evidence that wunderkinds are the exception, rather than the rule.

One researcher found that Nobel Prize winners’ age around a significant breakthrough is about 38 (and not recognized until they're 60) and another posits that a lifetime of learning leads to greater breakthroughs between ages 55-65. Data from the Kauffmann Foundation bears this out as findings indicate people over 55 are almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

So many cities and regions continue to struggle economically. Even within nominally well-performing places there are pockets that have been left behind. Most of the have-nots in the current economy have been struggling for an extended period of time, often in spite of enormous efforts to bring positive change.

Why is this? Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that these places are getting exactly the results they want: Maybe they actually don’t want economic development.

Economist David Friedman once told this joke: “Two economists walk past a Porsche showroom. One of them points at a shiny car in the window and says, ‘I want that.’ ‘Obviously not,’ the other replies.”

Did you know that every minute another 293,000 statuses are updated on Facebook? Or that 433,000 Tweets are also sent out in that short timespan? If you think those numbers are big, there are also 4.7 million new posts each minute on Tumblr alone (including reblogs).

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com 

Dan Huttenlocher doesn’t like walls. This isn’t so much an aesthetic preference as it is a practical concern. Walls divide people and define spaces. They restrict movement. They discourage exchange. And they’re a pain to move if your needs change, especially when they’re stuffed with cables, ducts, and other infrastructural accessories.

Image: Handel Architects - Cornell Tech is planning a campus “unlike any ever created in higher education,” shown here in an architect’s rendering. 

When the Michigan Venture Capital Association (MVCA) released its annual report about the state of venture capital earlier this summer, there was plenty to be optimistic about. In 2013, Michigan bucked national trends by increasing the number of VC professionals statewide by 84 percent, compared with a 13 percent decline nationally. VC-backed companies in Michigan increased by 66 percent over the past five years, and according to the MVCA data, Michigan also vastly outpaced Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin when it came to the number of venture-backed deals brokered in 2013.

 image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Being a Director in a Company is a responsible position. Many Entrepreneurs are clueless about the role and responsibilities of the Director from Company Law’s viewpoint. This leads to greater non compliance and can also lead to litigations and penalties.

In this episode of eLagaan Whiteboard Friday, the eLagaan team talks about various activities that a Director is expected to perform while they hold office. It also looks at major and most common of instances of non compliance that could arise and tentative penalties associated with them.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans who report exercising for 30 minutes every day in the past week feel best about their physical appearance, while those who exercise no more than one day in a given week feel the worst. Seventy percent of Americans who exercised for at least 30 minutes every day the prior week express agreement that they "always feel good" about their appearance, compared with half of those who say they exercised for at least 30 minutes one day (50%) or no days (49%). For the most part, each additional day per week that Americans exercise for 30 minutes or more is associated with at least a small increase in feeling good about their appearance.

Image: http://www.gallup.com 

Is money everything in the workplace? Not according to this recent survey, which found that the biggest deal breakers at work are issues related to advancement and work-life balance.

A survey of 1,000 employees by human resources software company BambooHR revealed that while younger people are annoyed by low salaries, salary actually becomes less important to employees as they age. The real deal breakers: issues with bosses and co-workers and skewed work-life balance.

You may think that only big, established companies need to worry about patent trolls but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Startups also run the risk of being a target of these trolls, or more politely known as non-practicing entities (NPEs).

For instance, if your company has a transactional website, conducts ecommerce, has a customer-facing smartphone app or provides in-store customers with Wi-Fi access you have patent risk and are a prime target, too.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net