You know the advice: If you want to get more done, try going to bed earlier and getting up earlier. You turn wasted evening TV time into productive morning hours. You can accomplish big things before most people eat breakfast.

I’ve written about many productive people who use this strategy. I’ve also found it hard to implement in my own life. I am not a morning person. I also have three small children who, until about six months ago, woke me up so early that the thought of getting up any earlier just made me want to hide under the covers. However, as I started looking ahead to the deadline for a book I’m writing, and realized that I would need to be more productive and focused, I decided to try waking up early for a week to work, in the hopes that I would get more done.

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First, let's employ the Rosslyn rule about parking your car: "All may park, all must pay." And what you pay varies from city to city. You think it's bad in D.C.? It is — but it's far worse in other U.S. cities. So we leave it to the financial website NerdWallet.com to come up with the numbers. They did, pulling together data on parking costs and motor vehicle theft. Then they poured that stuff into their little pocket calculators to tell us  the Top 10 worst U.S. cities for parking your car.

Image: Ken James 

Having an experienced mentor can be life changing and extremely valuable to your career. That’s why the LinkedIn San Francisco office hosted our annual “Mentor(In)” session with ten senior leaders to learn from their successes and failures. From the importance of having a mentor to managing a mentoring relationship, these were some of the most valuable takeaways from the day:

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KANSAS CITY, Mo., SANTA CLARA, Calif. and NEW YORK, March 27, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The Angel Resource Institute (ARI), Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and CB Insights released the 2013 Halo Report today, which finds angel activity on the rise with more high-valuation deals closed in 2013 than the previous year. While median round sizes held steady at $600K per deal, they were at a three year high when angels co-invested with non-angels. The share of angel investment in Internet, healthcare and mobile startups continued to increase. Golden Seeds, Tech Coast Angels, and Houston Angel Network, which is new to the list, were the three most active angel groups in 2013.

Only 3% of U.S. venture-capital investment was for hardware start-ups last year, but that represents a big increase from 1992–2011, when the figure was less than 1%, says the Wall Street Journal. Investors have long shied away from start-ups making gadgets such as wearable electronics, because of the challenges posed by manufacturing, distribution, inventory, and technical support. But help has arrived: Today’s contract manufacturers, such as PCH International, will not only make your product for you, they’ll also provide engineers and project managers in China; as a consequence, U.S. venture capitalists are taking a rosier view of hardware start-ups.

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As you take the next steps in your career, do you have the right mentor? You may think a mentor is a person within your organization who has more experience than you do, who coaches you and looks out for you as you move up the ranks. You can rely on these mentors for advice because of their more senior perspective. While this definition is technically accurate, it only takes into account one type of mentor. This type of mentor is great support to have, but can an in-company mentor provide the same level of support when you want to look beyond your current organization? They may be able to start you off with advice or leads, but their area of influence is usually within a single organization.

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Global investment in financial-technology ventures has more than tripled from $928 million in 2008 to $2.97 billion (£1.78 billion) in 2013, with the UK winning a rapidly growing slice, according to Accenture research.

The consulting firm said that over the past three years, such investment increased at more than four times the rate of overall venture-capital investment.

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Venture capital firms, already reveling in the most vibrant initial public offering market in more than half a decade, are being further propelled by a spate of billion-dollar acquisitions.

Facebook Inc.’s agreement to buy Oculus VR Inc. this week for as much as $2.3 billion marked the fourth 10-digit deal this year of a venture-backed company. Just nine months ago, two-year-old Oculus raised money from Matrix Partners and Spark Capital at a $70 million valuation.

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BioSTL announced today a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the Monsanto Company that will support the nonprofit’s work to promote regional economic growth and advance St. Louis’ standing as a leader in bioscience. Funding from Monsanto will allow BioSTL to step up its collaborative efforts to build a strong bioscience ecosystem that capitalizes on St. Louis’ world-class plant and medical science strengths. The announcement came during InvestMidwest 2014, a venture capital conference that showcases 40-45 companies from throughout the Midwest in the three industry tracks of life sciences, technology, and food/ag/bioenergy.

Molly Wood decides whether curved screens on new smartphones and TVs are worth the hype — and the money.

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Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) has given a major thrust to promote innovation in the country with the launch of $1 million prize money under two categories — to innovate on a driverless car and do it yourself (DIY) rooftop solar kit.

The initiative called Rise Prize is an attempt to build an innovation culture and create a robust innovation ecosystem that will produce world-class work in the country.

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Patrick Gill is excited to show me a small, fuzzy-looking picture of the Mona Lisa, printed in black and white on a piece of paper. It’s not much to look at, literally, but it’s unmistakably her, with long dark hair and that mysterious smile.

More intriguing than the low-resolution image of da Vinci’s masterpiece, though, is how the picture was created: with a lens-free camera that, at 200 micrometers across, is smaller than a pencil point.

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New methods of genome editing that make precise changes in the DNA of living organisms could have a significant impact on agricultural biotechnology. Earlier this month, Boston-area plant biotechnology company Agrivida said it will use genome editing to create varieties of crops that are easier for farm animals to digest, potentially increasing the productivity of farms raising such animals for food.

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Can entrepreneurship really be taught?

This is just one of the questions that we’ll be exploring in Wisconsin on April 17 in two separate roundtable discussions featuring Boston-area entrepreneurship guru Bill Aulet.

Xconomy is hosting the events in Madison and Milwaukee in partnership with gener8tor and Startup Milwaukee. The roundtables will be our first events in Wisconsin since launching in the Badger State in December.

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A stone’s throw away from Times Square in New York City, Stirling Cox stepped into his United States offices. The entrepreneur had just launched a new North American branch of AlphaSights, the leading information services company he entered after graduating from Harvard Business School three years ago.

His venture paints the picture of a start-up maverick, but his background is rather more mundane. He is an ex-JPMorgan analyst and Bain & Co consultant who changed tracks during an MBA program.

Do you remember why you started or wanted to start your own business? At MomBiz, we call it freedom, flexibility and fulfillment. Have the freedom to work when and where you want, have the flexibility to work around your family’s schedules and have the fulfillment of getting paid to do work you love. It’s a well-known fact you will need to invest 3 things as an entrepreneur: your time, your energy and…your money.

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Innovation often comes from having an eclectic approach. It’s less about expertise and more about minds that can think through details while focusing on the bigger picture. It’s about having an aptitude for both the qualitative and the quantitative. It’s also about the ability to mesh a wild idea with reality, and the fortitude to bring it to market.

Image: http://www.strategy-business.com - Lisa Bodell

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has issued a request for information about the funding mechanisms used to support interagency research, namely awards for research provided by a federal agency to a researcher at a federal laboratory that is managed, owned, or operated by another federal agency. The request notes that such awards may take many forms and are modulated by legislation, regulation, interagency agreements, agency policy, program policy, and practices, and the inquiry covers federal laboratories including government-owned, government-operated, and federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs). Public comments are being solicited to identify challenges and to improve policy and practice. Comments are due April 14; OSTP has provided a form to facilitate responses.

The Global Entrepreneurship Congress is an inter-disciplinary gathering of international start-up champions. Held in Moscow from the 17th-20th March, this year’s event saw entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, thought leaders and policy makers collaborate in order to generate ideas which will drive economic growth and accelerate the progression of an already thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. Over the past five years, the Congress has contributed to the expansion of a global entrepreneurial landscape, enabling experts and entrepreneurs to network across borders and various industries, unleash their ideas and transform innovation into reality.  

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The EU is to go ahead with offering €20 million in prize money to scientists who deliver solutions to pressing and seemingly intractable problems, after making the first such award under a pilot project launched in 2012.   

Future prizes, to be announced and issued in 2015, are expected to cover health, transport, energy and materials, and renewable biological resources, with the money coming from the Horizon 2020 R&D budget. 

Image: http://www.sciencebusiness.net - Ingmar Hoerr, inaugural EU prize winner