For entrepreneurs just starting out on their start-up journey, it can at times be a lonely existence with little support. For this reason, it is important to find mentors who will help you find your direction and encourage you to reach your full potential.

When you’re just starting out you’re full of great ideas. Having a good mentor at this stage can be extremely beneficial as they can help you sort through your ideas, help you develop them and then move forward. Likewise, when you lose your way or become disheartened, a mentor can keep you on the straight and narrow and give you confidence in your business vision.

Entrepreneur Media recently organized the 6th Annual Convention for entrepreneurs and startups on 23rd-24th August at, Hotel Pullman, Aerocity, New Delhi. This two-day conference saw some of the brightest minds of India – veterans and young ones alike, sharing their experience in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, also to draw attention towards some of the best practices that they follow, in order to capture the consumers' interest and get a successful business plan running smoothly. The conference included 5 distinct summits, keynotes and panel discussion, ignite talks, pitch stage, mentoring, and networking sessions aimed to give participants tailored opportunities to gain some valuable experience and build further a professional relationship with other brands that could help their ventures grow.

Specialized robots that clean and provide security, robot-assisted surgery, natural language processing-augmented instruction, and helping people adapt as old jobs are lost and new ones are created: these are some of the profound challenges explored by a panel of academic and industrial thinkers that has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might affect life in a typical North American city.

Titled “Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030,” this open-access year-long investigation is the first product of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100), an ongoing project hosted by Stanford University to inform society and provide guidance on the ethical development of smart software, sensors and machines.

Technological innovation has long been and will continue to be critically important to both income growth and national competitiveness. So it is important that we examine the 2016 presidential candidates’ policy agendas through that lens.

In each of the last two presidential elections, ITIF has released a report examining the two major candidates’ positions on a host of technology and innovation policy issues. While the 2016 election has proven to be unusual in many ways, one manifestation is that third-party candidates appear to have more support than normal, particularly the Libertarian Party nominee, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson. As of this writing, however, both Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein are polling well below the minimum threshold required to participate in the official presidential debates, so ITIF is focusing its analysis on the two major-party candidates, Democratic former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Republican businessman Donald Trump.

As the summer winds down, so do many internships. As a business owner or manager, you may be asking yourself: Should I hire my intern as a full-time employee?

While there may be various business factors to consider — Is your business growing? What will demand be the rest of the year? — you should be seriously contemplating whether or not any of your summer interns have demonstrated their potential to become a rock-star full-time employee.

Canadian universities play an instrumental role in developing a dynamic innovation system to provide for Canada’s social, economic and cultural advancement. Universities above all others are institutions that nurture the key ingredients of innovation: acquiring new knowledge, comparing ideas, seeking solutions, fostering inventiveness. As Canada strives to address the challenges of today and tomorrow, it must be able to rely on its universities. This means adopting a more global view of innovation and, first and foremost, supporting research across all fields of knowledge.

You don’t have to be an expert on digital currencies like bitcoin to be intrigued by the potential of the technology underlying them. Blockchain, as it’s called, is something new in computing. It mashes up cryptography and peer-to-peer networking to create what amounts to a shared database of transactions and other information—which can be open to all, controlled by no one. It’s not just for securely recording payments in crypto-coinage; a blockchain can handle complex transactions, even entire contracts. True believers say blockchain could reduce the need for businesses to organize as companies, which get work done via command and control. Using blockchain, they say, collaborators will be able to work together as free agents instead of under a hierarchy of bosses.

As digital disruptions impose greater demands on IT systems and organizations, companies must consider an end-to-end approach for upgrading and managing business technologies.

Most companies face critical IT modernization issues, whether that means digitizing the customer purchasing experience, managing or moving away from aging software and hardware solutions, or shifting to newer technologies such as cloud-based computing, serverless computing, and microservices for delivering software.

No one knows whether human consciousness will reside on a computer chip by the end of the century or even if self-driving cars will rule the road. But this much is certain: Earth is going to get hotter. The maps displayed here forecast how much warmer our planet will be up through the year 2100 and how precipitation patterns will change. To make the figures, Scientific American worked with Earth scientists at NASA Ames Research Center. The researchers used high-resolution climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to generate climate data for nearly every point on the planet for every month of every year through the end of the century. Our graphic presents a middle of the road emissions scenario—it assumes that the world curbs greenhouse gases by mid-century but that substantial warming continues to take place.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com/

The moment that incited Mark Bertolini's workplace revolution did not happen in the office, at a conference or even when he was thinking about his job—it occurred during a family vacation. But it was not a happy moment; in fact, it nearly killed him.

Geologists say that they have unearthed some of the oldest known evidence for life on Earth. The discovery, yet to be confirmed, suggests that life arose quickly on the young planet. In this week's Nature, Australian and British researchers report finding layered structures called stromatolites in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks from Greenland. Stromatolites, which look a bit like geological cauliflowers, form when microbes trap sediment and build up layer after dome-shaped layer.

Image: Scientists have found evidence of stromatolites much like these in Shark Bay, Australia within 3.7-billion-year-old rocks from Greenland. Credit: PAUL HARRISON Wikimedia Commons

I helped build Apple during its renaissance in the 2000s. Surrounded by incredible people, I learned the value of relentless focus and of a brand powerful enough to drive consumer trends the world over. It was a phenomenal place to start my career. But it was terrible training for a startup founder.

There's no doubt that Apple’s contrarian approach has been part of its wild success. It makes sense, then, that many startups try to emulate it. But when they do, they inevitably find that the common wisdom about culture, which Apple largely flouts, is both common and wise for a reason: it works.

Image: Flickr user Constanza Gajardo León; App Photo: Flickr user m01229

The Innovation Gateway - Round One 2016 brought together Sainsbury's, Carillion, BaxterStorey and Lancaster University, along with founding partner Royal Bank of Scotland, in a first-of-a-kind partnership to crowdsource solutions that solve their most pressing environmental challenges.

From growing gourmet mushrooms to sewage heat recovery, the eleven solutions selected address a range of targeted resource efficiency challenges. 

A European funding programme for businesses and researchers is to invest more than €600 million across 7 new initiatives launched this month.

Businesses can apply for support for projects in a range of fields including smart transport, autonomous transport, factories of the future,digital health, the circular economy and energy efficient buildings.

The funding is part of the EU’s Horizon 2020 fund for researchers and business, which aims to ensure Europe produces world-class science and that barriers to innovation are removed.

Since July 15, 1916, we have been making the impossible possible. From producing a single canvas-and-wood airplane to transforming how we fly over oceans and on to the stars, The Boeing Company has become the world’s largest aerospace company. Over the last 100 years, Boeing has created an inspiring legacy of innovation — one that has defended freedom for millions and propelled people across previously untraversed skies and even beyond into space. Our relationship with Jordan and the Middle East is equally historic and in tune with the region’s vision for an innovative future.

I have judged more than 20 start-up weekend events – if you have not been to one I highly recommend it.

Over the course of 54 hours, participants pitch an idea, build a team, road-test the idea with potential customers by getting out of the building and talking to people, change the idea to reflect the reality of things and then pitch it to judges.

As a judge all I look for is validation – how many people (in public) did they speak to? What did they say? And how did they react to that feedback? 

Image: http://www.afr.com

ALAMEDA, Calif. — Two robotic sailboats trace lawn-mower-style paths across the violent surface of the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska. The boats are counting fish — haddock, to be specific — with a fancy version of the fish finder sonar you’d find on a bass fishing boat.

About 2,500 miles away, Richard Jenkins, a mechanical engineer and part-time daredevil, is tracking the robot sailboats on a large projection screen in an old hangar that used to be part of the Alameda Naval Air Station. Now the hangar is the command center of a little company called Saildrone.

Image: A Saildrone boat being carried back to its hangar in Alameda, Calif. The self-sailing vessel can gather research data much more cheaply than ships with crews. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

When people are judging the quality of leaders’ decisions, they tend to focus much more on outcomes than intentions. For example, they judge hiring decisions not on the basis of whether the decision was made thoughtfully or fairly but on whether the new employee performs well. They judge the quality of a product decision on whether the product was well received in the market, rather than the quality of the process that led to the decision in the first place.

The G20 leaders annual meeting is being held in Hangzhou. The city holds significance for its natural beauty – heaven on earth as the Chinese describe it – and for being the hometown of Alibaba, China's world famous e-commerce company, a symbol for Chinese transformation from the world's factory to a high-tech economy. Indeed, the Global Innovation Index(GII) 2016 released this month, placed China in the top 25 among 128 countries to become the first middle-income economy to join this group.

Image: http://english.cri.cn

The nation will be observing Labor Day on Monday, which allows millions of Americans to enjoy the last waning days of summer with the added benefit of having the day off of work.

But how did this early September holiday get its start?

Though President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, the occasion was first observed on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City, when a parade was organized by the city’s Central Labor Union (CLU)—a secretive labor union founded in 1869 by a group of Philadelphia tailors.

Image: http://enewsbreak.com