If you thought supersonic passenger travel died with the retirement of the Concorde fleet in 2003, get ready for what one company—and Richard Branson—thinks could be the launch of a new age in which people fly from New York to London in three and a quarter hours for business class prices.

Today, Boom Supersonic, a Denver-based startup and Y Combinator alumni, unveiled the design of the XB1, a one-third-size version of the 45-seat plane it expects to put in the skies by the early 2020s.

Image: Interior of a Boom Supersonic Airline Plane (Photos: Boom Supersonic)

Building a successful startup outside Silicon Valley has its challenges, but people do it all the time. One of the biggest hurdles is raising early-stage VC money. Since so many investors are clustered in and around the Bay Area, companies that aren't can find themselves struggling to draw their attention.

But the good news is that, once you do, you'll get more runway out of those dollars than your Silicon Valley counterparts will. According to one recent study, the Bay Area is home to the two most expensive cities in the country in which to start a new business.

America’s ‘rust belt’ states, which gave Barack Obama their votes in 2008 and 2012, have now sent Donald Trump to the White House. It’s a shocking reversal that testifies to dis affection on many fronts. But it’s also a long-term political consequence of bipartisan trade, economic and innovation policies that have focused on growth and competitiveness while largely neglecting the negative impacts of technological change and globalization on quality of life in the American heartland.

Australian business innovation has added almost $70 billion to the economy but is still falling short of its potential, according to research. A report by Commonwealth Bank suggests the 44 per cent of businesses to have implemented at least one change that, according to international standards, qualifies as an innovation have pumped $69 billion into the economy.

A great leader inspires and motivates people. A great leader leads with a passion and purpose that’s infectious, and that brings everyone together in working towards common goals and achieving a common vision. A great leader brings out the best in people, all people, no matter their background, experience, education, or position. A great leader ensures all opinions are heard, especially those that are critical. These are things I state often in these missives, but they were reinforced recently when I read about William Bowen.

Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We have already begun to see ways in which computing, sensors, artificial intelligence and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives.

As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions that we have relied will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence.

One global trend I don't think the elections will impact: the growing excitement about scale ups. (Sorry this post is longer than usual: I hope you will read it through- Dan)

A Scale Up Movement has taken off around the world which might, and in my view, should, supersede the world’s fascination with startups as economy-drivers. The essence of the Scale Up Movement is that what’s impactful about entrepreneurship is not how many companies start-- it is how many firms actually grow. It is growing companies, not starting them, that gives entrepreneurship its unique contribution to employment, taxes and wealth.

There’s plenty to learn every day. But trying to learn everything can be overwhelming.

If you want to dig deep into a particular topic in a short amount of time, there are some ways you can speed up your process.

From setting an agenda, testing yourself regularly and paying attention to your surroundings, there are a number of methods you can use to become a faster learner. Check out writemypapers.org’s 25 Ways to Learn Faster infographic below.

Entrepreneur Sir James Dyson is launching his own university to deliver the engineering graduates that British businesses are struggling to find, writes Alan Tovey for The Telegraph.

The product that made Sir James Dyson famous, the cyclonic bagless vacuum cleaner, came about because the inventor wasn’t satisfied with what was available on the market back in 1978. Five years and 5,127 prototypes later, he came up with his own design that did exactly what he wanted. Now the entrepreneur is doing the same with education – spending £15 million (US$19 million) in the first year on setting up his own university, the Dyson Institute of Technology, which he insists is “not a business, not even philanthropic, but a really good idea as we need people who are educated”.

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you do for a living? The reason I ask is that if you’re an accountant, estate agent or work in a bank, I’m sorry to say I’ve got some bad news for you.

According to Oxford academics Michael Osborne and Carl Frey, there’s more than an 80 per cent chance that these jobs will start to be replaced by technology in the coming years. 

This is a continuation of a trend we’ve seen in previous decades. In the Eighties and Nineties, advanced robots supplanted human workers in factories. Today, as technological development accelerates, white-collar jobs in fields such as finance and administration are under pressure. 

Americans adore entrepreneurs. In every poll that I have seen, entrepreneurs are held in high esteem even as big business is generally viewed with disdain. Why?

Americans’ positive feelings about entrepreneurship are related to their positive feelings about small business, with which entrepreneurship is often conflated.

Small business gets its rosy glow partly from the well-propagated claim that the small business sector creates all the jobs in the economy. That is largely true, actually, but it is also an example of the ubiquitous practice of lying with statistics.

Are you an entrepreneur looking for seed money to get your startup off the ground? Consider approaching angel investors, who often step in to fill the gap between funding from family and friends and Series A funding from a venture capital firm.

Because angels invest their own money, they’re frequently more willing to back a risky, unproven idea than professional investors. Many angels are retired executives or successful business owners who take an active interest in a startup and its founders, and strive to add value based on their professional expertise and business network.

The fintech sector is being shaped by shifting market conditions, new regulations, and changes in consumer demands and behaviors.

For the past decade, fintech companies—technology firms that focus on financial products and services—have moved quickly, forcing incumbents to rethink their core business models and embrace digital innovations. But now, the fintech industry is itself maturing and entering a period of rapid change. Companies wondering how they will fit into this new era must first understand the forces that are pushing the changes.

I’m sad to announce that I’m dropping out of the Thiel Fellowship—the $100,000 grant I was awarded by Peter Thiel’s foundation.

I’m turning down the rest of the grant that I haven’t received yet—which is a lot of money—and donating what I have already received to a charity or project related to climate change, because our planet is about to get wrecked.

Like many others, I expected to go to bed last Tuesday night to jubilant proclamations by the media that their anointed candidate was the newly elected President of the United States of America. But something unexpected happened on the way to the coronation: blue collar men and women from the heartland arose and overthrew the political class. Government by transnational elites was said to be the inevitable wave of the future but it shattered against a wall of voters in the United Kingdom and the United States where commoners standing up to those presuming to determine their futures for them has a long tradition. They said “No thanks” (actually their sentiments would more accurately be captured in a two word phrase inappropriate for printing here).

In an effort to accelerate growth in the cybersecurity and health technology industries in Montgomery County, BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI) has partnered with The MITRE Corporation of McLean, Virginia—a not-for-profit corporation that operates federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), including the National Cybersecurity FFRDC.

BHI will serve as the primary manager for the Rockville Innovation Center (RIC), which is home of BHI's health tech startup accelerator, Relevant Health. MITRE will provide the resident RIC start-up companies technical mentorship and insight into the most pressing cybersecurity challenges facing business and government today. This collaboration is an extension of a strategic initiative recently launched by MITRE to act as an innovation bridge between the private and public sectors.

It is notoriously difficult to predict the technologies of the future: who can forget Tomorrow’s World presenter Raymond Baxter confidently espousing the merits of paper underwear, or ‘Whispering’ Ted Lowe being forced to improvise by an uncooperative snooker-playing robot on the same programme?

These outlandish glimpses into our imagined future may have turned out to be some way off the mark, but they illustrate the importance of producing sufficient ideas that there are guaranteed to be some good ones among them. And that means a sufficient number of creative individuals to support a critical mass of activity, from generating the ideas to ensuring that the best concepts are recognised and developed into new technologies.

You only need to look at Boston's rapidly changing skyline to see concrete evidence of the city's booming innovation economy.

Industrial giant General Electric is just the latest company to make Boston its world headquarters. Firms large and small are hoping to profit from the city's thriving, high-tech, ecosystem.

You’re working in the garden when you notice your tomato plant is stunted and wrinkled. What is your next step?

A team of researchers from Penn State University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) believes you should reach for your phone. They are building a free app called PlantVillage that can recognize plant disease from a mobile phone photo.

Behind the app, expected to be available in early 2017, is a database of 150,000 photographs of diseased plants—a number the team intends to grow to three million.