The same can be said of critical decisions in a board meeting or frankly any other meeting where major decisions are ratified. If you’re turning up to important meetings hoping to persuade the critical people who attend of a decision you’re trying to make and having already “counted your votes” you are sub-optimizing results. This is a classic mistake many entrepreneurs make so I’d like to offer some constructive advice on how the savvy hand would be played.

Image: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com 

This may sound a little dramatic, but the humble automobile is evolving at a far greater speed than ever before.

Huge handfuls of gadgets are being crammed into increasingly advanced vehicles as consumers demand more and more from their cars. What once was a mere transportation box — designed to do little more than move you from your front gate to the shops – has morphed into something resembling a radical smartphone on wheels.

Image: http://motorburn.com 

This week I’ll be writing a 4 part series on the similarities of running a startup and a sports team.

I started playing tennis when I was 12 years old and from that point until I was 21, tennis was my full time passion. I played in tournaments across Georgia and the Southeast as a teenager and then played for a Division I college on a tennis scholarship (UNC-Charlotte). More and more I realize how much that experience helped me with entrepreneurship and running a startup.

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In startups especially, job interviews are just as much for the interviewee as they are for the interviewer. Because there is often a lot at stake for a new company, it's wise to ask where you will fit in among founders and first hires — and how you can make a direct impact on the company's success.

That's why I asked 10 entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) what questions they would pose for an interviewer at a startup. Here's what they had to say:

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

By now, the glaring lack of diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics--or STEM fields--is a familiar, if disappointing, refrain. It is very difficult to ignore the evidence: Silicon Valley's most powerful boardrooms do little to rebuff the caricature of an institutionalized white male patriarchy. And science isn't faring much better, either; a recent study published in Nature found that women accounted for less than 30% of the shared authorships on all published scientific papers.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

Larta (www.larta.org) was founded in 1993 amidst California's economic turmoil with the mission of growing technology-based entrepreneurial ventures in Los Angeles. They assisted 30 entrepreneurs after opening their doors that year. Fast-forward 20 years: they have now assisted over 3,500 entrepreneurs across the world transform their brightest ideas into commercially successful enterprises that positively impact humankind. Larta's impact is global, with industry connections & knowledge assets in 47 countries and 27 international partnerships inked since 1997. Over the past 20 years, they have transformed ideas, small and large, into solutions that feed, fuel and heal the world. Their new tagline, "Ideas, energized." succinctly captures that mission.

Investor activity in the Internet of Things — a term for a connected network of objects, devices and computers — grew steadily larger in each quarter of 2013, a new report shows.

Start-ups focusing on the Internet of Things attracted $1.1 billion in investments across 53 deals last year, according to data from CBInsights, a New York-based venture capital research firm. This represents an 11 percent increase from the previous year.

Image: http://www.washingtonpost.com 

The World Wide Web is 25 years old. Looking back, it's tough to imagine a world without phrases like "vlog," "GIF" or "Klout score." I mean, how did people even meet rural singles from across the country before the web? Did they, like, talk — face to face? With their mouths?

To celebrate the big 2-5, Esri created an interactive map that highlights how the web spread across the world over the past quarter-century. Click through the years to advance from 1993 up to 2012. The blue dots are based on number of users per 100 people — click on them for more information. All data is taken from the World Bank.

Image: http://mashable.com 

BERKELEY — Backed by a vibrant startup culture that serves as the engine of economic growth for much of the Bay Area, UC Berkeley has established several new programs that support the translation of university research into real-world solutions.

For the past decade the campus’s Office of Intellectual Property and Research Alliances, or IPIRA, has helped streamline the spread of cutting-edge ideas from the campus to the rest of society.

Image: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu 

Governments have long encouraged university–industry collaboration, hoping to spur innovations that bring jobs, investment and life-enhancing products1. At the same time, shrinking government budgets for science have forced universities to look to other sources of funding. According to the US National Science Foundation, in 2012, industry supplied just over 5% (some US$3.2 billion) of US research universities' annual expenditure2.

Image: by David Parkins 

Accel Partners has raised two new venture funds in a matter of weeks—an early-stage fund, Accel 12, at $475 million, and a later-stage fund, Accel Growth 3, at $1 billion.

Accel General Partner Rich Wong Accel Partners The new funds come less than three years after Accel raised their predecessor funds in June 2011, indicating the eagerness of limited partners to get into the top venture firms.

Image: Accel General Partner Rich Wong Accel Partners 

Ambient Clinical Analytics is a new startup, founded by Mayo Clinic researchers with help from Silicon Valley investors, that aims to bring data assimilation, communication and analytics to the bedside.

Backed by Rock Health and the Social+Capital Partnership, the venture develops decision support tools for intensive care units, operating rooms and emergency departments. Its technologies, which were developed at the Mayo Clinic, enable real-time access to process-of-care information and analytics.

Grand Rapids has always had a creative bent, from furniture making to brewing.

Creativity, however, isn’t always seen in the same category as making money.

But a recent survey by ArtServe Michigan shows the creative sector brings in billions of dollars to the Michigan economy. The survey, Creative State Michigan, is focused on the 2011 fiscal year, and was completed in partnership with Detroit Creative Corridor Center.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

7 years ago on February 7, 2007, I launched my business and became an entrepreneur for  the second time. I am quite in awe that I am still here given the tumultuous years and change we have all been through. I consider myself a “spiritual entrepreneur,” as I deeply care about the what, why and how of giving back to the community, people and world that supports me. Professional fundamentals and personal values are the keystone of long term success. I am so intrigued with this that I made this timeless ideal the focus of my new book #trusthewhy coming soon:

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The growing power of decision models has captured plenty of C-suite attention in recent years. Combining vast amounts of data and increasingly sophisticated algorithms, modeling has opened up new pathways for improving corporate performance.1 Models can be immensely useful, often making very accurate predictions or guiding knotty optimization choices and, in the process, can help companies to avoid some of the common biases that at times undermine leaders’ judgments.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

You can't celebrate your success without admiring your failure. Similarly, we as a civilization cannot recognize our monumental achievements in technology without remembering our more questionable ideas.

Below we've collected some of the wackier designs to cross the U.S. Patent Office in the 19th century. Ranging from an animatronic creeping baby to a diving dress that transforms you into a deep-sea bullet, these patents will make you wonder what their creators were thinking.

Image: FLICKR, THE U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES 

Most innovations in business incubation are incremental, the fine-tuning of a broad general concept. Rarely does a program discover and capitalize on a whole new era of business development and education. It is this fact that makes the Center for Advanced Professional Studies stand out. The Overland Park, Kan., program has gained national attention in recent years for its program of comprehensive entrepreneurship training and student business building in a range of technical fields. The program has been endorsed by leading universities and businesses. Scores of educators from around the world have traveled to the CAPS facility in hope of cloning or emulating the program, and a dozen schools have begun CAPS programs of their own.

Startups pitch ideas to Exelon during two-day "Dancing with Startups" event in Baltimore

BALTIMORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 18, 2014-- More than 21 startups presented their technology offerings to Exelon executives and IT employees at "Dancing with Startups," a two-day event hosted by Exelon and the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the Cyber Point Technology & Innovation Center last week.

Almost every startup company starts off “scrappy” and there’s a well established culture in the tech startup scene to embrace the “be cheap at all costs” mentality.

So we have the proverbial garage startup or the small team working on desks that are handmade out of scrap wood or former doors from a construction site. But at what point do you need to flip from scrappy to “scale-y”? Um, well, that word choice doesn’t exactly work.

Image: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ 

Undeniably, being a young CEO has its pros and cons.  From a practical standpoint, the earlier one can snag a rung on the corporate ladder, the faster he or she can begin to make money to invest in the future.  However, from a observational standpoint, being younger than other CEOs can make a person feel like an outcast at meetings, events, conferences and sales calls.  Certainly, the key is to project confidence in whatever you do if you’re a CEO under 40 – or even 30 – but there’s a little more to consider, especially in the era of social medi

Image: http://under30ceo.com