There’s no better time than the present for established enterprise players like IBM, Salesforce, and Oracle to swallow up bleeding-edge business intelligence companies.

From SAP to Microsoft, established players are fighting to be the all-encompassing solution for the enterprise. Yet, they’ve been stagnating. Hewlett-Packard is trying to architect a seemingly endless turnaround. IBM is culminating a 10-year campaign to focus on high-margin services and software, but at the expense of lost market share in its hardware business. Only now is Microsoft focusing on the cloud, a move that almost looks like too little, too late.

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The adoption of IT in healthcare systems has, in general, followed the same pattern as other industries. In the 1950s, when institutions began using new technology to automate highly standardized and repetitive tasks such as accounting and payroll, healthcare payors and other industry stakeholders also began using IT to process vast amounts of statistical data. Twenty years later, the second wave of IT adoption arrived. It did two things: it helped integrate different parts of core processes (manufacturing and HR, for example) within individual organizations, and it supported B2B processes such as supply-chain management for different institutions within and outside individual industries. As for its effects on the healthcare sector, this second wave of IT adoption helped bring about, for example, the electronic health card in Germany. It was also a catalyst for the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act in the United States—an effort to promote the adoption of health-information technology—and the National Programme for IT in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Regardless of their immediate impact, these programs helped create an important and powerful infrastructure that certainly will be useful in the future.

Being called selfish doesn’t feel like a compliment, but the trait can actually make you a better person, psychology experts say.

“When you take care of yourself first, you show up as a healthy, grounded person in life,” says Bob Rosen, author of Grounded: How Leaders Stay Rooted in an Uncertain World (Jossey-Bass, 2013).

Biopharma firms continued to attract US venture capital investment in Q1 according to new analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which says the number of firms that received backing is encouraging.

Though parents still agree that a college degree is extremely important, fewer are planning to shell out their own money to help their kids attain one. About 77% of parents say they plan to help their child pay for college -- down from 81% last year, according to a Discover Student Loans survey of 1,000 adults.

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Social networks that allow you to send only the message "Yo" to your contacts. Food-delivery services valued at $400 million. Startups that deliver rolls of quarters to your home (just $27 for $20 in change!).

It isn't hard, looking at a lineup like this, to conclude that Silicon Valley has jumped the shark. The entire Bay Area appears to have given up on solving anything but its own problems: those afflicting the same 20-somethings who are building these startups.

Why are venture capitalists often reluctant to invest in companies that make apps?

"Because it's a red-ocean market. There's so much competition, it's inevitable that there will be blood in the water," said Tom Kinnear, a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan.

Image: http://www.crainsdetroit.com/ - Tom Kinnear 

Entrepreneurship is all about leading – leading customers to a new product or service, leading a startup team to peak performance, and leading a new business to the market opportunity, while providing maximum return to stakeholders. Most entrepreneurs feel they have innate leadership talents, but struggle with how to nurture these abilities and measure their effectiveness.

I run Romulus Capital, a seed-stage venture firm I founded a few years ago while at MIT. We invest in and build startups at the foundational level. Our firm is really a product of the millennial generation, and like many millennials, is global in its DNA. So when we raised $50 million for our second fund, it was natural that half of it came from investors across ten countries. In the process, we learned much about what it takes to build partnerships with international businessmen and what they think about U.S. technology startups.

Image: Courtesy of Romulus 

MIT researchers develop an improved system for timing of urban lights to minimize commuting times.

Anyone who has ever driven a city street and been frustrated by having to stop again and again for red lights has probably thought that there must be a better way. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a means of computing optimal timings for city stoplights that can significantly reduce drivers’ average travel times.

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

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For a long time women entrepreneurs have been marginalized in traditional forms of finance, excluded from venture capital and business angel investing which is often referred to as old boys clubs. With only 12 percent of all business angels being female, it is not surprising that only 12 percent of business angels funded female entrepreneurs in 2011, according to the Center for Venture Research. People tend to fund people just like them. Men fund men and women fund women according to an article in Forbes.

I had a Fitbit Flex. I don’t any more. To track my progress while walking, I had to constantly sync to my smartphone to monitor my steps in real time. The syncing didn’t work very well, and there was no way to have the display on the phone persistently show my progress. Every few minutes if I wanted to see how many steps I had taken, I had to sync. At least the Fitbit did the syncing wirelessly over Bluetooth, unlike the Jawbone UP which requires you to physically plug the bracelet into your phone. Though Fitbit and Jawbone have their fans, I thought it was a royal pain to use. It was another device to manage and charge…not to mention the $100 expense.

Those of us living in the United States are reminded each Independence Day of the many blessings we enjoy in terms of equality and individual liberty. The level of cultural capital for entrepreneurs is obviously linked to a nation’s cultural norms, stigmas and role models – or lack thereof. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of female entrepreneurship where unaddressed challenges allow women’s creativity, problem-solving capacity and even key science and technology skills to lay idle in our societies.

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What worked for Littleton, Colorado could be the answer for your community, too.

Turns out, Colorado is cultivating more than aspen trees and kick ass snowboarders.

For the past 25 years, the town of Littleton, Colorado has been using the concept of economic gardening to grow its businesses and economy with amazing results.

It is kind of amazing how far entrepreneurship has come and how significant it now is in our national discourse and consciousness. A century ago, it was the strength and importance of the unions and the labor movement that fostered the creation of Labor Day in 1894. Today we are talking about a national Entrepreneurs Day.

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By day they are accountants, lawyers, technologists, salespeople. At work they’re focused, productive, successful, often rising to senior positions within their profession. Yet these unassuming salary men and women harbor a dark secret, a secret that burns within them, consuming their evenings and weekends, pushing their endurance and sometimes their relationships to the limit. Meet the part-time entrepreneur.

In the office of the future, you may not so much walk into a room as log into it automatically. That’s what Sam Dunn, the CEO and co-founder of Boston-based startup Robin, thinks. The company is using wireless sensors to make rooms in office buildings aware of the people in them and let employees know exactly where their co-workers are.

Image: Office mates: A device containing an iBeacon and the Robin smartphone app. 

Angel Investor Groups play an important role in the promotion of Entrepreneurship in the country. In addition to capital, they provide mentoring, access to networking and access to market, and these are inputs that a startup desperately needs.

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500 Startups Founder Dave McClure discusses how venture investment is changing as the costs to build product and acquire customers continue to drop. According to McClure, these changes indicate we are entering the "Henry Ford era" of internet entrepreneurship.

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technology and strategy officer, articulates her company's framework for growing innovation: build, buy, partner and integrate. While elements of the approach may involve occasional challenges of internal alignment, says Warrior, the long-term growth and entrepreneurial spirit inside of Cisco is proof of the framework's viability.