Over the past few years, San Francisco has gradually started to view itself as part of Silicon Valley.

It’s not.

Yes, tech plays a much bigger role in San Francisco than it has in the past. The number of tech workers in the city has sharply increased, from 3 percent of the workforce in 2000 to 6 percent today, according to The New York Times‘ Nick Bilton, a relative newcomer to this city. (Yet those tech workers apparently represent 100 percent of the restaurant and coffee shop clientele, Bilton writes.) Major tech companies now have their headquarters here, including Salesforce.com and Twitter. The business climate is very startup-friendly, and a host of incubators and co-working spaces make it easy for entrepreneurs to set up shop.

Image: Tesla Motors: Located in Silicon Valley, and still working on "hard" problems. Image Credit: Windell Oskay 

Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff founded Honest Tea in 1998. In the recently released Mission in a Bottle, the co-founders tell -- in comic book form -- the story of building a successful mission-driven business. Goldman, now president and "TeaEO" of Honest Tea, joins Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner to discuss sustainability, entrepreneurship, and what it means for a socially responsible, health-oriented business to be bought by Coca-Cola  (NYSE: KO  )  .

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Technological change is not a tide that lifts all boats in our economy. The truth is that it’s more like a tsunami. It threatens to overturn all the boats and drown their occupants, sparing only the lucky few who have already reached safety in the hills.

That’s the kind of admission you won’t often see here in the pages of Xconomy. The X in our name, after all, stands for exponential, a reference to the stunning pace of technological progress and economic growth over the past 75 years—growth attributable largely to advances in computer hardware and software and the organizational changes companies have made to exploit them.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com 

Columbia University's entrepreneurship program is close to picking the alumni-founded startups to join its new downtown coworking space when it opens in June. The new 5,100-square-feet space is in the bottom two floors of the WeWork coworking building at 175 Varick Street in SoHo, and will include space for 71 seats. Rent will be heavily subsidized by the participating schools.

Image: Daniel Acker, Bloomberg - Columbia has finalized plans for its April 11 event #StartupColumbia, an all-day festival. Speakers will include FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley. 

FOR Daniel Ryan, turning 40 and 50 came and went. But sometime around his 61st birthday last July, he said he had an “old man crisis.”

He did some simple math, and quickly concluded that living another 20 years would be considered a “full life.” Even if he remained healthy for another 15 years, he figured he might only be able to maintain his active lifestyle of skiing, hiking and mountain biking for another decade. “Looking at the rest of my life this way hit me like a ton of bricks,” Mr. Ryan said.

Image: James Best Jr./The New York Times 

Kansas Citians may not realize the good fortune they've incurred with the arrival of the area's latest accelerator firm, Techstars. Sure, the Boulder-based group's presence has added exposure to the Kansas City tech scene through the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator leader. But what's more is Techstars' propensity to bolster communities in which it spreads roots.

Image: Bobby Burch | KCBJ Attendees chat during the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator’s open house. 

My friends over at Rad Campaign gave me a heads up on an interesting infographic over at craigconnects, that says it “cracks the crowdfunding code.” While it does not draw on primary research, it does pull from reliable sources and positions the information well.

Over and above that, crowdfunding is integral to the #HopeProject campaign SBC is working on for Milaap (disclosure: client), not to mention building and motivating communities to do good is a particular passion of ours, so I figured I’d share it with you.

Image: http://www.waxingunlyrical.com 

Physicists have found a long-predicted twist in light from the big bang that represents the first image of ripples in the universe called gravitational waves, researchers announced today. The finding is direct proof of the theory of inflation, the idea that the universe expanded extremely quickly in the first fraction of a nanosecond after it was born. What’s more, the signal is coming through much more strongly than expected, ruling out a large class of inflation models and potentially pointing the way toward new theories of physics, experts say.

Image: Proof of gravitational waves created by cosmic inflation is shown here in this image of the cosmic microwave background radiation collected by the BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole. The proof comes in the form of a signature called B-mode polarization, a curling of the orientation, or polarization, of the light, denoted by the black lines on the image. The color indicates small temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background that correspond to density fluctuations in the early universe. BICEP2 Collaboration 

Dark chocolate might pack a double positive punch for our health—thanks to the microbes that live in our gut. New research suggests that beneficial bacteria that reside toward the end of our digestive tract ferment both the antioxidants and the fiber in cocoa.

In their deep-gut alchemy these microbes create anti-inflammatory compounds that have been linked to the cardiovascular and other benefits from dark chocolate consumption. The findings were presented March 18 at the American Chemical Society meeting in Dallas. Other new research helps explain how some of cocoa's widespread health benefits—from improving vascular function to increasing insulin sensitivity—may be linked—and good for even the young and the healthy.

Not everyone chooses a career – some, if they are honest enough, will confess that they got into a career by chance. And once the course of time runs and the biological clock runs, most would choose to stay within the comfort zones of known routines, predictable outcomes and familiar territory, instead of venturing out into newer, better opportunities.

Yet, there are others who are driven by a passion to exceed their own expectations. Those who know that the experience and the expertise they have achieved in the corporate world is only the stepping stone to what they eventually want to become – a successful entrepreneur who always sees an unfulfilled need that could be met.

This is not your average nun.

The Catholic church is no stranger to music, but when 25-year-old Sister Cristina Scuccia appeared on The Voice of Italy, she floored the audience and judges with her performance.

The nun performed a stellar rendition of "No One" by Alicia Keys in full traditional attire while three of her fellow nuns watched backstage. But nothing about her performance was conventional.

I am sitting in the back seat of a taxicab in New York City. The traffic is Midtown, stuck bumper to bumper.

“Everything is turned upside down!” the cabbie shouts, pumping his arm up and down in the air. “Five years ago it was not like this!” he cries.

The taxi driver is not talking about Midtown Manhattan traffic. He is from Alexandria. Not the Alexandria we know on the Washington Beltway, but the Alexandria in Egypt, named after Alexander the Great.

iChuangye, a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding service in China previously known as 5ichuang, today held its first-ever demo day to debut projects that are raising funds on the platform.

We got a chance to talk with CEO Gu Bing, who preferred to name himself as chief service officer of the site, since he consider his works as offering services to entrepreneurs and venture capitalist in an effort to bridge their demands.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

We’ve all heard the success story: Startup struggles to bring investors on board, startup continues to rely on seed funding while gaining traction, then startup launches a Kickstarter campaign, and--BOOM--startup raises an impressive pot of funds from an even more impressive number of backers.

We saw it with Pebble, a watch that displays messages from your smartphone, which raised $3.8 million on Kickstarter. We saw it with Adapteva’s Parallella, a mega-computer chip startup that walked away from Kickstarter with nearly $900,000.

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Talk to any independent business owner, and he or she will tell you that one of the best parts of the job is “being their own boss.” But while the self-employed enjoy certain freedoms -- from operations, marketing to working hours -- unavailable to those who draw a salary, every successful employee should be the “boss” of their own future and career advancement. Whether there are two or two dozen names ahead of yours on the company letterhead, it’s important to remember that no matter who you work for, you also need to be working for yourself.

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A short-term study found that oral glucosamine supplementation is not associated with a lessening of knee cartilage deterioration among individuals with chronic knee pain.

Findings published in Arthritis & Rheumatology, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) journal, indicate that glucosamine does not decrease pain or improve knee bone marrow lesions—more commonly known as bone bruises and thought to be a source of pain in those with osteoarthritis (OA).

I recently came across four articles, none of which make explicit reference to each other but each of which seems to have been written with at least some ambiguous notion of what at least one of the others is focusing on. I am going to treat the four articles in an order that allows me to bring some coherence to the discussion, but I want to emphasize that I am imposing that coherence on the discussion. The fact that it didn’t exist otherwise is really the main point of this post. It seems illustrative of the way in which many of the discussions of the more central issues in higher education frequently dissolve into passionate assertions of opinion that are worse than useless—that are more damaging than silence—because they are not actually about the same things, because no one is stipulating a starting point, what is actually at issue.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

The big job interview you've been prepping for and stressing over for days or weeks is over, and you can finally breathe a sigh of relief — except now comes the hard part: Waiting to hear back.

You’re excited about the opportunity, and you want to do everything in your power to present yourself as the perfect candidate for the job; one way to increase your odds of landing the gig is to follow up in a professional manner.

Image: FLICKR, FREDDIE PEÑA 

Think of your most common habits and the regular culprits come to mind--biting your nails, snacking late at night, cracking your knuckles. Do something enough times and it becomes a behavioral pattern you do almost involuntarily.

But what about creativity? Dictionary definitions can be misleading, offering the impression that creativity is something you either possess or don't. Here's one: Creativity, "the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations." The ability to transcend. Sounds almost mystical.

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