Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
With 1.3 billion people supporting a booming mobile and software development industry, China is the blue whale of emerging tech markets. China will be the No. 1 market for Apple moving forward, but everyone in the mobile sector needs to think about how to develop for China’s market and work with Chinese developers, who have a much better understanding of the culture than we do.
Over the past few years, there has been a surge of home automation products to make our lives easier, more efficient and, in many cases, even more reliant on our smartphones.
With the kitchen being a central hub of activity, it’s no surprise that a lot of these advances in home tech revolve around the things we enjoy most — cooking, eating, and spending time with family and friends.
Image: http://mashable.com
Throughout history, tech innovators have had lots of common traits.
They’re bright, outside-the-box thinkers, creative, and open-minded about the future.
But here’s something you may not know about the tech founders listed below: they all went to Montessori school.
Image: http://www.businessinsider.com.au
Are you headed down to SXSW this week? If you are, there is one must-attend event: the SXSW Interactive Accelerator Competition.
The Accelerator is SXSW’s annual pitch contest that draws thousands of applicants from some of the world’s hottest up-and-coming technology companies. Past winners include companies such as NutShellMail (acquired by Constant Contact), Foodstopping (Opentable) and Siri (duhh…).
Image: http://tech.co
First of all, congratulations! You made The Washington Post and they even spelled your name correctly. Unfortunately, AUTM was specifically called out in an article titled Patent Trolls Have a Surprising Ally: Universities. The name of another article appearing at the same time Patenting University Research Has Been a Dismal Failure, Enabling Patent Trolls: It’s Time to Stop while long winded speaks for itself. And two innocuous sounding reports from the Brookings Institution Building an Innovation Based Economy and University Start-Ups: Critical for Tech Transfer say that Congress should amend the Bayh-Dole Act to give the federal government control over whether you can grant exclusive licenses, that you have been unsuccessful as most technology transfer offices are not self-supporting, that your business orientation conflicts with the mission of a university and your alleged model of “licensing to the highest bidder” has failed. The New York Times accurately summarized the intended message in its headline Patenting Their Discoveries Does Not Pay Off for Most Universities.
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
The scenario appears bright for Ireland’s indigenous tech sector. At the Mobile World Congress conference and exhibition in Barcelona, Spain, this past week, Irish tech firms 3V and Asavie secured multi-million euro deals with mobile operators Orange and Telenor, respectively.
Over in Silicon Valley, California, Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison saw a recent funding round value their start-up Stripe at more than US$1bn.
Image: http://www.siliconrepublic.com - Mark Horgan, partner in Atlantic Bridge and chairman, IVCA
Standing desks aren’t exactly a new topic of conversation here at Profhacker. Ryan did a series titled “Stand (in the Place Where You Work)” (see Part 1 and Part 2) and has reviewed the GeekDesk Max. The Geekdesk is pretty expensive, though, so it isn’t an option for everyone. Konrad explored a less pricey (and far more portable) alternative when he reviewed the Ninja Standing Desk, and Lincoln pointed us to directions for building your own affordable standing desk.
Image: http://chronicle.com
You have no shortage of pizza choices. In your area alone, you probably have several hundred pizza shops. Well, Pizza Hut has a plan to get you in the door and leave those others behind.
Image: http://technabob.com
On the back one of the strongest investment years for angel and venture capital commitments, GrowthBusiness looks at which firms were the busiest.
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
We are women entrepreneurs. As such, we’re part of a small (but growing!) group. We’re members of the Wharton MBA class of 2013, a class with not only the highest percentage of women (45%) in Wharton history, but also the highest number of students pursuing their own startups (7.4%). Clearly, change is happening, and we’re proud to be part of it. Our startup, Of Mercer, makes affordable, stylish workwear for women. We like to think we’re helping other women succeed in business through great style.
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
TORONTO Canadian startups are in a prime position to cash in on the growing popularity of crowdfunding, but regulators need to ensure that incoming rules do not hinder that potential, TD Economics warned Wednesday.
According to the 13-page report, the global crowdfunding market is estimated to be worth $3.25 billion, with the majority of the funds coming from North America and Europe.
Imagine a shareable city. What does it look like? Or are you asking: “What is a shareable city?”
The concept of shareable cities is a compelling interest of Cities for People, a new Canada-wide initiative that launched this month and is designed to make our cities more resilient. This month, Cities for People and Social Innovation Generation (SiG) co-hosted a national speaking tour featuring April Rinne, chief strategy officer of Collaborative Lab, and her approach to building shareable cities.
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
From the invention of the printing press to the telephone, the radio, and the Internet, the ways people collaborate change frequently, and the effects of those changes often reverberate through generations. In this video interview, Clay Shirky, author, New York University professor, and leading thinker on the impact of social media, explains the disruptive impact of technology on how people live and work—and on the economics of what we make and consume. This interview was conducted by McKinsey Global Institute partner Michael Chui, and an edited transcript of Shirky’s remarks follows.
In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust with revenue flatlining at $200 a week. Since then, over 9 million people have used it to find temporary housing. Etsy was founded almost a decade ago, but doubled its valuation with its last two rounds of funding.
Image: http://firstround.com
Hand out Neosporin at your staff meetings and tell employees not to come back without lacerations.
It's not your typical business advice, but that and similar tips are what about 600 San Diego-area business executives heard at an innovation summit hosted by Vistage International at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines last week.
Image: Sekou Andrews used his voice poetry to convey a message of inspiration and innovation at the Vistage International innovation summit in La Jolla this week. — Courtesy photo - Sandy Huffaker Photography
Pursuant to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012 (JOBS Act), on December 18, 2013, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed significant amendments to Regulation A, which we refer to as Regulation A+. The proposed exemption permits nonpublic companies to raise up to $50 million by selling free-trading securities to the general public. This new exemption is intended to provide another avenue for private companies to access the capital markets to raise a significant amount of capital without going through the IPO process.
We all need time off. Like serious time off.
Time when we feel like we're able to truly rejuvenate without the little panicked voice chirping away in the back of our heads fretting about the backlog of things we are going to have to deal with when we come in. Information overload can be a very taxing issue for many people.
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Risky career moves, what-was-I-thinking relationships, and just about every '80s fashion trend--most of us have made bad decisions in our lives. And while we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, living with the outcome of a bad decision doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re immune to repeating it. (See: recent '80s fashion revival.)
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
When Angela Jia Kim arrived at the meeting, she discovered a problem. The cofounder of the women entrepreneur’s network Savor the Success was being hired by a large corporation to consult on a project, but her contract hadn’t been signed.
“They told me they had a little issue that needed to be worked out with my attorney but that it wasn’t a big deal; they promised it would be signed by noon,’” she recalls. The company had flown people in for the meeting and Kim didn’t know what to do. “My intuition told me to walk out--to not enter into the consultation without the contract--but my need to please others kicked in.”
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
I’ve been thinking about making things as a way to “do” scholarship for a while now. There’s an unsurprising obsession among many of those at the border of digital studies and the “digital humanities” with bridging the gap between what we study and what we publish. But there’s always risk involved in making something weird. It’s easy to know what to do with a rejected essay for a journal: there’s always another venue, and revising, while painful, is manageable. Making things is a lot less certain. And once you’ve made something, there’s no guarantee your prospective search or tenure committee will find it valuable. At this year’s MLA Evaluating Digital Scholarship panel, many of the speakers relied on the additive model, or the monograph “plus” the experimental work.
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/73213168@N04/6605406331
