A third of U.K. adults check their mobile devices in the middle of the night, according to a study from Deloitte that also suggested the pace of consumer adoption of smartphones will fall in the next 12 months. The study of 4,000 people, published Monday, showed 10 percent of people look at their device immediately after waking, and 52 percent check within 15 minutes. The numbers are similar at the end of the day with 10 percent looking at their phone immediately before they go to sleep.

For nearly a decade, venture capital has been glaringly absent from Australia's financial market structure – and the missing link in the nation's fledgling tech ecosystem.

Now, it's safe to say the drought is broken, and the local VC sector is suddenly awash with capital.

OK, it's not quite a downpour of biblical proportions but domestic VC funds are on track for their second straight year of record fundraising. As reported by The Australian Financial Review this morning, AirTree Ventures closed a $250 million fund, the biggest yet, with support from two major superannuation funds.

 Image: http://www.afr.com

The huge fund comes from two large Australian super funds and a range of wealthy family groups.

The AirTree fund will be split into two, with half of it acting as an early-stage fund to provide seed, Series A and Series B funding, and the rest forming an “opportunity” fund to write larger cheques for later stage funding in order to help companies expand and scale.

Image: http://www.startupsmart.com.au 

Recently there have been numerous articles and editorials understandably scrutinizing the increases in pricing of EpiPen produced by Mylan, a generic drug company. The strong reaction to the behavior of Mylan and a few other companies is threatening to impede the ability of R&D-focused innovator companies to provide innovative, life-changing new therapies to patients.

The drug industry comprises thousands of companies broadly separated into two business segments: generics companies and about 4,000 large and small innovator pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The generics industry exists to provide a competitive marketplace for older drugs (whose patents and/or other exclusivity have expired) at reduced prices; the biopharmaceutical industry invests in inventing new medicines.

Tech star and billionaire Steve Case has been hammering home one idea for the last few years — that the future of tech and startups rests outside of the traditional Silicon Valley ecosystem and in the fertile plains of America’s heartland.

Now, with less than a month until his fifth “Rise of the Rest” tour, he sees that idea gaining traction.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com 

The Board of Directors for Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern PA recently approved investments totaling $515,000 in five companies located in the Center’s 32-county footprint . While each of the companies serves decidedly different markets and are in various stages of their business development, they took the first important step in turning a good idea in to a business reality by applying to Ben Franklin for funding. If you need startup funding and are located in central or northern Pennsylvania, you could be eligible to receive our investment capital and business support services.  

Yesterday was the opening of the African American Museum in Washington DC, dedicated to the role that African Americans have played in building our country and our culture. It was signed into law 13 years ago by then president George W. Bush after being sponsored by the bipartisan support of Rep John Lewis (D) and Sen Sam Brownback (R).

Image: https://bothsidesofthetable.com 

In 1929, just before the stock market crash, Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld, sold their department store in Newark to
 R.H. Macy and Company for $25 million ( $343 million in 2015 dollars). Grateful to the people of Newark for their support, they planned to endow a medical college in that city.

Yet when they approached Abraham Flexner, the foremost authority on higher education at the time, he told them that there was little point in building a medical school just across the river from Manhattan, where there was no shortage of medical talent.  Instead, he asked the Bambergers to be more ambitious.

Google is widely considered, by both the general public and business experts, to be one of the most innovative companies in the world. So how does Google promote a culture of innovation and ensure that innovative ideas are properly implemented, creating profitable new products that position the company for long-term success? Google’s “recipe” for driving innovation is no carefully guarded secret sauce. Rather, Google has openly shared this information with the public. In 2013, Google codified a new set of “Nine Principles of Innovation,” which updated the version first unveiled by former Google executive Marissa Mayer in 2008.

Connecticut hasn't become the Silicon Valley of bioscience quite yet, but five years after lawmakers made a massive investment to support the development of that industry, there is a thriving hub in Farmington.

Eighteen technology or bio-medical startups recently set up shop inside new laboratories at the Cell and Genome Science Building on the University of Connecticut Health campus.

The labs are being leased to the companies as part of the university's Technology Incubation Program, which is designed to help bioscience and tech companies start and grow in Connecticut.

Two words resonate throughout the Bay Area Community Council’s new report on economic development: alignment and collaboration.

The two go in hand in hand. For example, to better align education with the needs of employers, we need collaboration.

Getting there can be daunting, but not unrealistic. The BACC’s report, “Journey to a Greater Green Bay” will be released Monday and it offers 15 calls to action for the entire community — local government, business, education and community leaders — in order to achieve its vision statement of “one community, one journey to a greater Green Bay.”

Ohio Innovation Fund, a $35 million joint venture fund of Ohio State University and Ohio University, has invested in its fourth company since January – and its managing director sees high-quality technology startups statewide.

Image: Bill Baumel, Ohio Innovation Fund 

Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley prefer to fund the young, the next Mark Zuckerberg. Why? The common mantra is that if you are over 35, you are too old to innovate. In fact, there is an evolving profile of the “perfect” entrepreneur—smart enough to get into Harvard or Stanford and savvy enough to drop out. Some prominent figures are even urging talented young people to skip college, presumably so they do not waste their “youngness” on studying.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com 

One reason why it’s hard to predict the fate of a new technology is that it’s too tempting to focus on bugs in an early version. We forget to look for the bigger underlying idea that will become apparent as the problems get solved.

Take something as ordinary as a digital watch. As absurd as it may seem now, when the first ones emerged in the early 1970s, people wondered whether consumers would be able to make the mental leap to telling time by digital numbers. Besides that, the contraptions had problems that made them seem as if they might become a passing fad.

WASHINGTON, DC – The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) issued the following statement today after the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 5719, the Empowering Employees Through Stock Ownership Act.

“Most cash strapped startups dedicate their financial capital to developing and building new products and services, making stock options a critical tool to building strong teams,” said Bobby Franklin, President and CEO of NVCA.  “Talented startup recruits are happy to accept less in salary in exchange for stock options because they know that if the startup succeeds, everyone shares in the gains.  This is the secret sauce that underpins the innovation economy, aligning the interests of the startup founders, their investors and team members to drive value creation for the country.”

The university has been top for four years in succession, albeit jointly with its main rival Oxford in 2014. The 2017 guide is published this weekend.

Cambridge is dominant in four of the nine measures on which universities are rated. It came top in the most recent research ratings, has the highest entry standards, the best degree completion rate and the highest spend on services and facilities of any university.

For Martine Rothblatt, nothing is off limits. Not even death.

The founder of Sirius XM Satellite Radio and United Therapeutics Corp. (NASDAQ: UTHR) is the quintessential innovator who lives life asking the question: “Why can’t we?”

She’s the kind of dreamer that believes she can reach immortality and has even created digital consciousness that would allow humans to essentially live forever as robotic doppelgangers.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com 

Many of the great research-and- development laboratories of the 20th century have been downsized or broken up. Despite nostalgia for powerhouses like Bell Labs, they are unlikely to return.

Those industrial labs were often supported by de facto monopolies that have since been swept away. With knowledge concentrated in those few large companies, society had to rely on centralized internal research to generate innovation. But useful knowledge is much more widely distributed today, making it infeasible and unwise to hoard vital knowledge in such silos.

ON CREATIVITY

How do people get new ideas?

Presumably, the process of creativity, whatever it is, is essentially the same in all its branches and varieties, so that the evolution of a new art form, a new gadget, a new scientific principle, all involve common factors. We are most interested in the “creation” of a new scientific principle or a new application of an old one, but we can be general here.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com 

In 2012 I decided to pursue an idea I had to develop a surfing journal app called Surfr.

At that time, I already had one app on the App Store called Promtr that was self-funded and generating some revenue. However, I knew that Surfr was going to cost considerably more to develop and it was pretty unclear how I was going to afford to fund the project. After reading about a project on a website called Kickstarter, I decided to dive into the world of crowdfunding and successfully navigated my way through tutorials, best practices and the application process.