BlackBerry surprised Wall Street on Friday by beating the already admittedly low-end estimates for its fourth quarter. BlackBerry's numbers were dismal — but not that dismal. In fact, the company's stock has risen about 24% over the last three months, as some investors have been sold on a comeback story.

So does BlackBerry have a shot?

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Whitewater rafting is pretty intense on its own. Add a 60-foot drop and you've got an act that is both death-defying and just a tad bit crazy.

Kayaker Dane Jackson spiced up the already dangerous activity with a plunge down a waterfall in Veracruz, Mexico. And his GoPro captured the entire wild ride down.

Image: http://mashable.com 

Suppose your company has 8 million shares outstanding and you’re fortunate enough to be able to raise $4 million at an $8 million pre-money valuation in your Series A. That’s a $12 million post-money valuation and each share is valued at $1.00. You continue to own 8 million shares after the financing, but you issue 4 million new shares to the investors, thus you now own 8M/12M or 67 percent of your company and you have $4 million in the bank.

Image: http://tech.co 

Save The Date: April 1, 2014 We are excited to announce the launch of ChemCeption… the nation’s only incubator focused solely on commercializing chemistry-based technologies and helping entrepreneurs, start-ups, and small companies launch their businesses. We hope you share our excitement and can hold the afternoon of April 1, 2014 for the ChemCeption launch event at the West Virginia Regional Technology Park in South Charleston. The event program features Keith Burdette, WV Secretary of Commerce; Jeffrey V. Kessler, WV Senate President; Tim Miley, WV House of Delegates Speaker; ChemCeption clients; and Greg Babe, President and CEO, Liquid X Printed Metal, Inc., and former President and CEO of Bayer Corporation. ChemCeption is a one-of-a-kind technology incubator that brings the people, facilities, and know-how together to boost the commercialization of chemistry-based technologies. We look forward to celebrating with you! Click Here to RSVP.

Tech stocks are looking like 1999-style bubble again, according to a story by Jeff Sommer in the New York Times.

Rental middleman Airbnb is valued at $10 billion, or more than the Hyatt hotel chain. King Digital Entertainment went public on a $7 billion valuation on the strength of a single game, Candy Crush Saga. That’s almost as much as Electronic Arts, which has been making video games since 1982. Facebook’s valuation has exceeded $150 billion, making it easy for the company to spend $2 billion on virtual reality firm Oculus VR. The New York Times concluded that this is all a bunch of hot air.

Image: http://venturebeat.com 

It’s been almost 30 years since the computer scientist Jaron Lanier formed VPL Research, the first company to sell the high-tech goggles and gloves that once defined humanity’s concept of where technology might soon take our species. In the late 1980s, a person could pull on a $100,000 head-mounted display and electronic gauntlet and fool their brain into thinking he’d stepped inside the simulated space rendered on the screen.

Image: Future gazing: VPL Research demonstrated its EyePhone virtual reality system at the Texpo Telecommunications Show, in San Francisco, in 1989. 

In the three years since the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan has tried to replace nuclear energy with fossil fuels. But the costs have proved prohibitive, and now the government is convinced it must turn its reactors back on.

Image: Three years later: An aerial photo taken on March 11, 2014, shows what remains of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station on the third anniversary of an earthquake and tsunami that led to a major crisis at the plant. 

Fleur Pellerin, la ministre en charge de l'Innovation, a présenté le 14 février le nouveau cadre juridique du financement participatif, dont la France veut être l'un des "pionniers."

Donner au financement participatif les moyens de se développer, tout en protégeant les particuliers-investisseurs ou prêteurs. C'est là tout l'enjeu de la réglementation du "crowdfunding", présentée le 14 février par Fleur Pellerin, la ministre en charge des PME, de l'Innovation et de l'Economie numérique, et destinée à faire de "la France un pionnier du financement participatif".

Image: Le financement participatif a permis de collecter plus de 3 milliards de dollars dans le monde, en 2013, selon Fleur Pellerin. 

On March 12, 1989, British inventor Tim Berners-Lee filed the proposal for an "information management system" that would later become known as the World Wide Web. Now, on the Web's 25th birthday, Berners-Lee is calling for something to be done about protecting users’ privacy rights on the Internet. 

In a statement released Wednesday, Berners-Lee posed the question, “How do we build a universal Web accessible to all regardless of physical or cognitive capabilities?”

Wisconsin needs a few “wins” to kickstart its entrepreneurial scene, according to the California venture capitalist heading up Madison-based 4490 Ventures. Greg Robinson started this month as general partner at 4490, the new $30 million venture capital fund targeting early-stage information technology firms, provided by the State of Wisconsin Investment Board and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. 

Image: Jeff Goldbert, ESTO The new 4490 Ventures is temporarily housed in the University of Wisconsin's Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery building. 

WAUKESHA – Sixteen major companies will take part in about 200 “speed dating” meetings with 54 emerging companies during the inaugural Wisconsin Tech Summit, to be held April 7 at the GE Healthcare Institute in Waukesha.

Produced by the Wisconsin Technology Council and partners that include the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the Tech Summit will provide an organized way for young companies and corporations with a national and global footprint to meet and explore likely business relationships around technology needs and innovation.

Those relationships might include research and development partnerships, direct investments, strategic partnerships as vendors or sales outlets, even merger and acquisition.

The Director, Division of Corporation Finance at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Keith Higgins, gave the keynote address at the Angel Capital Association Summit in Washington, DC today.

Higgins, who has been in the thick of rulemaking with the JOBS Act and correspondingly all types of crowdfunding, comments on the legislation and specifically addresses, general solicitation and  Regulation A or Title IV of the JOBS Act.

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com 

How can you screw your startup? Let us—and Jason Mendelson—count the ways.

Mendelson is a managing director of the Foundry Group, a venture capital firm based in Boulder, CO, and he knows startups. As a VC or mentor, he’s worked with hundreds, so he’s seen up close what works and what doesn’t.

Mendelson focused on the latter during a presentation Monday at the Boulder office of Techstars. He ran through a list of “18 Things That Can Blow Up Your Startup.”

Image: http://www.xconomy.com 

We're inching toward spring, so our thoughts naturally turn to all the things we haven't been able to do for the past few months. Like: biking! Oh man, biking is so great. And so is this little animated history of the bicycle's design, created by Danish firm Visual Artwork.

Silicon Valley’s “youth problem”—its culture of bar crawls and technical interviews that disadvantage older engineers—caused some hand-wringing in the New York Times recently. And the New Republic called Silicon Valley “one of the most ageist places in America,” interviewing a plastic surgeon who says he does a brisk business in Botox injections for tech employees terrified of wrinkles.

Image: Adult supervision required. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz 

If anyone tries to tell you that government grants play no role in technology innovation, point them to the field of software-defined networking.

And soon, you might be able to point them to open social networking.

Image: MobiSocial co-founders T. J. Purtell, Ian Vo, Monica Lam, and and Ben Dodson. Image Credit: MobiSocial 

The Internet is chalk-full of lists of characteristics that entrepreneurs must either possess or gain in order to be successful. However, not many of those lists will outline some characteristics that won’t get entrepreneurs far in their businesses. Here are four characteristics that successful entrepreneurs cannot let get the better of them.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Aside from instant nerd street cred and the bragging rights that come along with it, one of the core benefits of getting into Y Combinator for a startup founder was a guaranteed investment from marquee names in the venture capital world like Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. But soon they might be guaranteed the cash without the name.

Image: Y Combinator co-founders Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham. 

Perhaps sparked by the recent recession, I’m seeing a new era of the entrepreneur, with startups springing up all around. Based on my own mentoring and investing experience, the best entrepreneurs are pragmatic problem solvers. They have an uncanny ability to find elegant, easy, and fast solutions to pain points in the marketplace, as well as their own challenges.

The real question is whether problem solving is a skill you have to be born with, or is there any hope for the rest of us to become successful entrepreneurs. After some review of available resources, I’m convinced that problem solving is a learnable trait, rather than just a birthright.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com