Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
This is it. You’ve aligned calendars and will have all the right decision-makers in the room. It’s the moment when they either decide to give you resources to begin to turn your innovative idea into reality, or send you back to the drawing board. How will you make your most persuasive case?
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AT&T plans to expand its high-speed fiber-optic Internet service to as many as 21 new US metro areas. It's claiming speeds of up to one gigabit per second with its U-Verse with GigaPower system, which is only available in Austin, Texas, today.
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To quote Dr. Phil:
“Are you living a life that is more in tune with your “authentic” self (who you were created to be) or your “fictional” self (who the world has told you to be)?”
Gee, I never thought I would write a post where I would quote Dr. Phil!
SAN DIEGO — A trip to almost any bookstore or a cruise around the Internet might leave the impression that avoiding cancer is mostly a matter of watching what you eat. One source after another promotes the protective powers of “superfoods,” rich in antioxidants and other phytochemicals, or advises readers to emulate the diets of Chinese peasants or Paleolithic cave dwellers.
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Every business leader has blind spots which limit their effectiveness and success, but due to ego, over-confidence, or deferential subordinates, many live totally in the dark. Some are smart and humble enough to assume that they don’t know what they don’t know, but lack an effective process for shining a light on their blind spots. Both are equally surprised by their every setback.
From jeans-and-sneakers offices in Silicon Valley to the White House there is anxious talk these days about income inequality and how the venture wealth pie is shared.
Amidst jaw-dropping reports of heady private valuations of Uber, Square, and Dropbox--not to mention the Twitter-Facebook-LinkedIn market capitalizations and shareholder exits--Google’s Eric Schmidt says that he is “very worried” about inequality in the Bay Area.
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By Marc Parry
Many professors and students gravitate to Google as a gateway to research. Libraries want to offer them a comparably simple and broad experience for searching academic content. As a result, a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style.
Image: A.J. Mast for The Chronicle - Andrew Asher, assessment librarian at Indiana U. at Bloomington, studied how students use new library search tools. “It’s a logical impossibility to create a querying tool that doesn’t have any form of bias,” he says.
Whether they're battle-tested veterans or fresh-faced newbies, entrepreneurs undergo an intense learning process when establishing and launching a business. Even those who've been through it before typically face a certain amount of uncertainty. That's why it's critical that they learn as much as possible about their specific area of business as well as entrepreneurship as a whole.
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A new treatment for macular degeneration is close to the next stage of human testing—a noteworthy event not just for the millions of patients it could help, but for its potential to become the first therapy based on embryonic stem cells.
This year, the Boston-area company Advanced Cell Technology plans to move its stem-cell treatment for two forms of vision loss into advanced human trials. The company has already reported that the treatment is safe (see “Eye Study Is a Small but Crucial Advance for Stem-Cell Therapy”), although a full report of the results from the early, safety-focused testing has yet to be published. The planned trials will test whether it is effective. The treatment will be tested both on patients with Stargardt’s disease (an inherited form of progressive vision loss that can affect children) and on those with age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss among people 65 and older.
Image: Vision support: The cells used in Advanced Cell Technology’s clinical trials produce dark pigments and cobblestone-like patterns that can be readily recognized in cultures.
From next month you’re going to start seeing a whole range of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) popping up online. Alongside longstanding ones like .com and .net, you’ll see geographic, special interest and brand name ones like .africa and .joburg, .sport and .radio, and potentially, .cocacola or .microsoft. Should you rush out and secure every possible permutation that vaguely relates to your existing site or business? Probably not.
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SEATTLE, Washington, April 21, 2014 — Five for-profit and non-profit organizations in Washington will receive a total of $1.25 million in Proof of Concept grants to accelerate maturation of promising health-related technologies from ideas into commercial products, the Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) announced today. Also announced was a $300,000 Entrepreneur Mentoring Program grant to the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association (WBBA) to launch a statewide advisory network to train the next generation of entrepreneurs and help early-stage companies achieve commercialization success. (See Backgrounder Information.)
James Patterson's books account for one out of every 17 hardcover novels purchased in the United States. The wildly prolific author talks to Co.Create about how to tell a story that will hook people in.
They call it beach reading--the kind of ultra-accessible mass market paperback that nestles inside canvas bags all summer long. (And on airplanes year-round). Considering how addictive James Patterson's books are known to be, and their inescapable popularity, the wildly prolific author is probably directly responsible for more sunburns than incidents of non-water proof sunscreen.
Image: http://www.fastcocreate.com/
CONQUERING FEAR IS ABOUT SELF-AWARENESS, WISDOM, AND UNDERSTANDING YOUR STRENGTHS--OFTEN IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY. LUCKILY THESE ARE PERSONALITY TRAITS THAT YOU CAN PRACTICE.
BY FAISAL HOQUE
Fear has a place in our emotional life, and it shows up daily. Everything causes it: finding new work, dealing with financial uncertainty, creating something new, contemplating failure. By necessity, our minds are designed to let fear in--without it, we'd never survive.
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There is a line in the movie “The Big Chill” that has stuck with me: “Sometimes, you just have to let art . . . flow . . . over you.”
That’s a great strategic thinking for art – and life.
Letting life flow over you, however, is easier said than done for most analytical people.
But it is wonderful advice you CAN extend to other situations in life.
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Half of the world’s population is now under the age of 25, and 1.8 billion people are between the ages of 10 and 25. This is the largest youth generation ever to exist. Yet few well-being measures and metrics focus specifically on how this age group--the one that has fueled societal and governmental change around the globe in recent years--is faring and feeling about their lives.
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The world is mobile, and so are presentations. Today we’re excited to introduce three new SlideShare products designed to give you an awesome mobile experience: our first mobile app, a completely redesigned mobile web experience and a mobile preview feature for uploads on desktop. Combined, these products make it easier to access, view and share your presentations on-the-go, but they also help you with what SlideShare does best: discover content through people and people through content.
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Big things are coming to Saudi Arabia.
The Middle Eastern country is set to begin visible construction next week on what is expected to be the world's tallest building at 3,280 feet, according to Construction Weekly.
Kingdom Tower will be 568 feet taller than Khalifa Tower, the current Guinness World Record holder in neighboring Dubai, once it is completed. The tower is the first phase of Jeddah Economic Company's approximately $20 billion, 17 million-square-foot Kingdom City project, of which it will be the focal point. Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a nephew of Saudi King Abdullah, is chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company, a partner in JEC.
Image: Kingdom Tower, which will stand at more than 3,000 feet when it is completed, is shown here in a rendering. IMAGE: JEDDAH ECONOMIC COMPANY/ADRIAN SMITH + GORDON GILL ARCHITECTUREÂ
Despite the insistence of many that startups can thrive outside Silicon Valley, it clearly pays to be there, or in New York or New England if you want venture capital.
Nationally, VCs invested at a rate not seen since mid-2001, putting $9.5 billion to work in 951 deals in the last quarter, according to a report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. That was a 12 percent increase in total investment, with much of it flowing into large deals for later stage companies like Dropbox, which raised $325 million in February.
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Previous research has revealed a moderate and positive correlation between procrastination and impulsivity. However, little is known about why these two constructs are related. In the present study, we used behavior-genetics methodology to test three predictions derived from an evolutionary account that postulates that procrastination arose as a by-product of impulsivity: (a) Procrastination is heritable, (b) the two traits share considerable genetic variation, and (c) goal-management ability is an important component of this shared variation. These predictions were confirmed. First, both procrastination and impulsivity were moderately heritable (46% and 49%, respectively). Second, although the two traits were separable at the phenotypic level (r = .65), they were not separable at the genetic level (rgenetic = 1.0). Finally, variation in goal-management ability accounted for much of this shared genetic variation. These results suggest that procrastination and impulsivity are linked primarily through genetic influences on the ability to use high-priority goals to effectively regulate actions.
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C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart’s seminal book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid gained a wide audience when it was published in 2004 and has continued to be widely read ever since. Its iconic phrase, “bottom of the pyramid,” entered the English lexicon. The book was a call to action to the world’s largest companies to develop new products for the four billion people living on $4 a day or less—a market representing what was in effect the new frontier for corporate expansion.
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