What’s the difference between being happy and feeling alive? Let me tell you. Being happy involves feelings of joy, contentment and euphoria while often excluding, ignoring or suppressing negative feelings. Feeling alive is knowing that every day brings challenges that you either will or will not overcome. Feeling alive isn’t restricted to joy. It involves pain, fear, anger, confusion, frustration, happiness, euphoria, triumph, accomplishment, failure, success, remorse, resentment and everything in between. That’s how most entrepreneurs I know would probably define what it’s like to start and run your own business.

Image: http://ventureburn.com 

For some, the perks of ping pong tables, free snacks and flexible hours are enough to convince early startup hires to sign on the dotted line. For others, the potential to make an impact on a growing business and have a hand in shaping an industry is the main allure. With new and promising startups popping up in locations everywhere from Silicon Valley and New York City to burgeoning tech hubs like Boston and Miami, it's clear that startup culture has its advantages — and its hardships.

Image: FLICKR, BOLANDROTOR 

Failure to teach students even basic theory behind how computer technology works has several implications -- none of them positive. That’s the motivation behind a new push to boost computer learning in public schools.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

At least two-thirds of American doctors surveyed use mobile-health apps on the job. But about two-thirds also think a truly connected healthcare system in the U.S. is more than five years away—or won’t happen at all.

That’s according to a new report by MedData Group, a healthcare marketing firm based in Topsfield, MA. The report surveyed 532 doctors around the U.S., across specialties and practice sizes, between December and March.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com 

Silicon Valley is the land of big ideas and startups looking to become the next household name. According to a recent Venture Capital report, venture firms nationwide invested $7.8 billion in 1,005 startups in the third quarter of 2013 alone. Nearly half that money went to companies in Silicon Valley.

PitchBook’s 2013 Global Venture Capital data reports there were 107 IPOs in 2013--the highest number since 2007, and according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, more than 1,900 startups made funding efforts public on AngelList since the site opened to public pitches last fall. There are now more sources of funding for early-stage, promising companies than ever before.

Here comes another study saying that extroverts are happier than introverts.

In June 2014, The Journal of Research in Personality will publish “Why Extraverts are Happier: A Day Reconstruction Study” by Wido G.M. Oerlemans and Arnold B. Bakker from Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. In this study, the researchers asked introverts and extroverts to report their recollection of how they felt during various activities. Overall, extroversion equals more happiness, the researchers found.

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Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh endeavors to raise the perfect Zappos "family."

That’s why he ditched his company’s old corporate structure; it’s why he offers new hires $2,000 to leave the company; and it’s why he practices the policy of hiring slowly and firing quickly.

So where did this obsession with fostering this culture come from?

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com/ 

Who do you need to collaborate with who lives the spirit of what Henry Ford was talking about? And when will you contact them?

The U.S. Department of Commerce has announced the inaugural members of the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship initiative. See who they are in the slideshow above. Commerce secretary Penny Pritzker will chair the first meeting Monday.

"I am honored that President Obama asked me o bring together some of America's most dynamic businesspeople to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs in the U.S. and around the world," Pritzker said in a press release.

Image: Rich Barton, co-founder and Executive Chairman, Zillow (Courtesy of Zillow) 

SAN FRANCISCO - Listen to the tales of successful company founders and you will get the impression that they sailed smoothly to success. They’ll lead you to believe that they did everything right and made it big because of their smarts and perhaps a little luck.

Don’t be fooled. Entrepreneurship is never like that. You fail constantly, suffer setbacks at every turn, and live with the fear that you won’t be able to make payroll or that your product won’t work. You have to deal with disgruntled employees, unhappy customers and concerned investors. Even when you achieve success, you wake up the next morning and find that everything is falling apart—that even before you've gotten over the hangover you have another big headache.

There was a time when the world economy was propelled by power-driven machines and natural resources. The industrial age lasted for about two-and-a-half centuries and its hallmark was ‘mass’ everything: production, markets, distribution. Now, a different type of economy is emerging which is commonly referred to as the ‘knowledge economy’. In what way is this economy different and what are its implications for the future well-being of our society?

I bet like any other business owner you want more clients and ideally, you would like them to knock on your door. After all, what’s better than a lead who has found you by themselves and reaches out for a quote? Enter content marketing.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

China is changing more rapidly than ever, but has your China strategy adapted yet?  In the aftermath of the US financial crisis in 2008, companies from North America and Europe rushed into China, seeking to grow both sales and profits.  However, with China’s growth slowing over the past two years, costs shooting up, the government making life difficult for multinational companies, and confusion following the reforms emanating from the Third Plenum in November 2013, some companies are heading in the opposite direction.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

The Drexel University professor Frank Lee and his team hacked into the lighting system of a 29-story skyscraper in Philadelphia to play Tetris on the building’s facade.

Image Courtesy of podpad / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

BIG data is suddenly everywhere. Everyone seems to be collecting it, analyzing it, making money from it and celebrating (or fearing) its powers. Whether we’re talking about analyzing zillions of Google search queries to predict flu outbreaks, or zillions of phone records to detect signs of terrorist activity, or zillions of airline stats to find the best time to buy plane tickets, big data is on the case. By combining the power of modern computing with the plentiful data of the digital era, it promises to solve virtually any problem — crime, public health, the evolution of grammar, the perils of dating — just by crunching the numbers.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com 

New medicines that shrink tumors and have beneficial effects lasting for months to years in some cancer patients are helping breathe new life into an old idea: using a patient’s own immune cells to attack malignant cells.

Several drug makers are trying to prove the safety and efficacy of new medicines that harness the body’s own lines of defense. Merck, for one, is testing an immune-modulating compound in patients with metastatic, or spreading, melanoma. In an early-stage trial, half of the patients receiving the highest-attempted dose of the drug saw their tumors shrink or disappear, and more than a year later, the vast majority of those patients who responded to that dose and lower doses were still alive. On average, the prognosis for survival a patient with late-stage metastatic melanoma is less than a year.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com 

The Atlas humanoid robot, unveiled last year by Boston Dynamics, a company later acquired by Google, is a marvel. It can clamber over rubble and operate power tools. But these abilities don’t come cheap. Atlas has a price tag well above a million dollars, and it consumes around 15 kilowatts of electricity when in operation, meaning hefty power bills for its owner and limiting its practicality. “That’s enough to power a small city block,” says Alexander Kernbaum, research engineer at the nonprofit research agency SRI International. To be truly practical, he says, Atlas “needs to be many times more efficient.”

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com - Helping hand: A new kind of electrostatic clutch from SRI makes this design around 10 times cheaper than previous robotic hands, which could cost $35,000 or more. 

Independently of each other, a small number of people have recently asked about the workflow involved in publishing a group-authored blog like ProfHacker.

Now I don’t pretend that the way we do things is the best way possible, but I’m happy to describe how we go about publishing 2 posts a day, 5 days a week.

If you’re involved in a similar project that uses a different workflow, feel free to share the details in the comments to this post.

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Reference calls. We all have to make them. Whether you’re considering hiring a new employee or as an investor whether you’re looking to do a background check on the founders of a company.

Summary

MyFundingPlace.com announces its alternative crowdfunding solution reserved for nonprofit organizations. Charities finding it hard to crowdfund capital on big platforms are turning to MyFundingPlace to raise money for their projects large and small.

Description

My Funding Place, an upstart platform based in Quincy MA. The MyFundingPlace.com crowdfund portal is different: it is reserved exclusively for nonprofit use, and solves the problems charities have with lack of support for their campaigns. Unlike virtually every other platform on the web, MyFundingPlace support staff are in contact with campaign owners from sign-up to completion, offering guidance and tutorials while promoting raises with everything from custom press releases to large scale social media engagement.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net