So you called a cab, but no one’s showing. The only thing the cranky dispatcher will say is “He’ll be there in 15.” You call back in 15, and he now says, “Driver’s on the way. Any minute now.” Click. It’s cold, it's getting dark, and you’re already late. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an app that let you tap into an unused supply of empty cabs and cars to get you where you want to go, perhaps with a little style? So goes the legendary inspiration behind Uber, a story now encapsulated in a single tagline: “Everyone’s private driver.”

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From President George W. Bush's embrace of healthcare IT to the opening of HealthCare.gov, hard work, government incentives, political battles and more have made for broad and rapid changes in healthcare in the past 10 years. Click images to enlarge.

On Jan. 20, 2004, President George W. Bush was the first president to mention healthcare information technology in his State of the Union Address. His remarks had the industry abuzz.

Image: http://www.healthcareitnews.com 

2013 was an exceptional year for MaRS Innovation, the commercialization agent for 16 of Toronto’s leading academic institutions. Here are the top 10 news stories from our commercialization portfolio.

1. MaRS Innovation secures a $15 million CECR funding extension

In January, MaRS Innovation was one of four Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research to be successfully extended by the Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada. This achievement reflects and recognizes the quality of the startups and licensable technologies within the MaRS Innovation portfolio, as well as the rigour of its business model and the achievements of its team and academic founders. The extension also ensures that MaRS Innovation will have the resources required to achieve financial sustainability by 2017.

What is the most culturally significant word of the year in the English language? Make your bet. “Drone”? Fat chance. “Rape”? Nope. “Wiretapping?” Nah. “Pope”? Shouldda, especially after Time made him Da Man from this planet. But this time the legislators are the folks of Merriam-Webster Inc., and they have just announced the winner: “science.”

Image: Image courtesy of Kingsway School 

In many ways, our generation is more relational than any that’s come before us. I have more than a thousand friends on Facebook, hundreds of followers on Twitter, and Instagram buddies in 43 different states.

But as I was recently reminded, interaction through social media hardly prepares us for real-life relationships. The other day I interviewed someone fresh out of college for a position at my startup. She had all the ideal qualifications on paper: Great schooling, great grades and great social media presence. But I knew five minutes into the interview that I couldn’t hire her, and here’s why: she couldn’t talk to me. She failed to make small talk, she pulled out her phone five minutes into the interview to text someone, and she never made eye contact.

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New data collected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) have resulted in an upward revision in the previously published 2011 U.S. research and development (R&D) performance total, and further expansion of U.S. R&D performance is indicated for 2012.

These new data put U.S. R&D expenditures at $428.2 billion in 2011, an increase of $20.5 billion over 2010. The preliminary estimate of the 2012 U.S. total for R&D is $452.6 billion.

Strategic mentors are incredibly valuable in growing your career and developing your personal prospects in multiple areas of life. If you are fortunate, you will have multiple strategic mentors at various points in your career who are best suited to your current career stage.

That shouldn’t mean, however, that you ever lose touch with someone who has been a high-impact strategic mentor for you.

Image: http://brainzooming.com 

Chances are, you have days where you get to work early, put your head down at the start of the day, answering emails, going to meetings, and writing reports until it is time to go home. And when you look up, you realize that you did many things, but did not get a lot done.

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We live in an age of Big: Big Computers, Big Data, and Big Lies.

Faced with an unprecedented torrent of information, data scientists have turned to the visual arts to make sense of big data. The result of this unlikely marriage--often called “data visualizations” or “infographics”--has repeatedly provided us with new and insightful perspectives on the world around us.

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When a cyclist battles it out for road space with a multi-ton truck, chances are, the guy on two wheels is going to lose. So it's no wonder that bike advocates around the world want a way to elevate the status of cyclists with design that prioritizes their needs. In London, architect Norman Foster has unveiled the concept for an urban cyclist's dream: a sparkling, car-free stretch of elevated highway made especially for biking. Futuristic as the rendering (above) makes it seem, Foster's proposal hardly the first of its kind. Hopes for superhighways that let cyclists bypass city traffic safely and quickly have been around for almost as long as the bicycle itself, though few cities have been willing to implement such plans. Here's a brief history, and what Foster--and the rest of the world's bike advocates--could learn from it:

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com 

While some companies, like Ecovative, are tooling around with highly sustainable alternatives to shipping products around the world, two undergrads have just reinvented the humble cardboard container itself to be more efficient.

Learn how to get year-end statistics for VC exits in the PitchBook Platform, as well as how to quickly share the information with colleagues or download it directly into Excel.

Image: https://my.pitchbook.com 

To get a more confident You in the new year — or a more confident company, community, family, or team — first know what gets in the way. The best resolutions will go nowhere without the confidence to stick with them.

Confidence is an expectation of a positive outcome. It is not a personality trait; it is an assessment of a situation that sparks motivation. If you have confidence, you’re motivated to put in the effort, to invest the time and resources, and to persist in reaching the goal. It’s not confidence itself that produces success; it’s the investment and the effort. Without enough confidence, it’s too easy to give up prematurely or not get started at all. Hopelessness and despair prevent positive action.

Image: stockimages 

Who will offer the world more than a dead end?

Consider: Walmart is the biggest employer in America.

The typical Walmart “associate” (sorry—I meant Highly Exploited and Vulnerable Person With No Access to Healthcare, Job Security, Or Other Benefits, All of Which Are Subsidized By the Public Purse, Who’s Sometimes Locked in the Store Overnight) earns the princely sum of about fifteen and a half thousand dollars a year.

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Matthew Beason is a well-respected executive at a non-profit with a multi-billion dollar endowment. On top of continual domestic travel, countless dinners with donors, and constant planning meetings, Matthew is also a married father of four children. While his work schedule sometimes leaves him exhausted, Matthew consistently attends school and athletic events and is, while at home, fully there for his family.

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Every day we get a whole heap of crowdfunding pitches from non-profits and social enterprises, which vary from the very good to the very crap. We’ve seen it all, from the three-line-’people-will-get-it’ pitch to the boring-10-page-grant-application pitch (hint, both miss the point).   To make it easier for you, we’ve broken down crowdfunding pitches (and any non-profit pitch, really) into these 5 steps and given you an example from a real campaign:

Image: http://www.crowdsourcing.org 

Attention social entrepreneurs focused on public safety: You can apply to a new Philadelphia-based accelerator that recently won a $1 million grant.

Called FastFWD, the “super-group” accelerator was formed by the City of Philadelphia, along with  GoodCompany Group, a nonprofit, social enterprise accelerator in the city, and the Social Impact Initiative at the  Wharton School, after winning Bloomberg Philanthropies 2012-2013 Mayors Challenge, along with four other cities. (They included Providence, Chicago, Houston and Santa Monica).

Image: Liberty Bell, Philadelphia (Photo credit: Wikipedia) 

What sparks paradigm-shifting innovation in any business? It’s a special mix of entrepreneur and company, regular in every respect except for having the courage and foresight to make an idea happen that was supposed to be impossible. As an entrepreneur in a startup, how do you know if you have this potential, and what are the steps to get from an innovation to a revolution?

The first step is to meditate on the examples set by others, like Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or Thomas Edison with the electric light. There are many others, like the book I read a while back about Ratan Tata bringing out the Nano car in 2009 in India for less than $2,500. The book is titled “Nanovation,” by Kevin & Jackie Freiberg.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 

Culver City, once the heart of California’s movie industry, was dying just a decade ago.  The downtown was decaying.  It had become a sleepy commuter town.  Today, however, people have proclaimed it an urban renaissance.  Parts of the city that were once “forlorn and forgotten” are now crawling with high-tech companies and creative media professionals.  Wine bars have sprouted throughout.

Image: Photo Credit: Tom Bonner Photography, Eric Owen Moss Architects