A report from Ernst & Young on Forbes said the venture capital community in the US still leads worldwide in giving entrepreneurial businesses access to funding and fostering a culture of entrepreneurship. According to the report, the US ranks very well in three of the five pillars of the EY Global Entrepreneurship Barometer. The categories which countries can use to gauge their progress in entrepreneurship include access to funding, entrepreneurship culture, tax and regulation, education and training and coordinated support, EY's report said.

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In the midst of all the indulgence and decadence this time of year, it's comforting to know there are some very real health benefits to some of the most common flavors of the season.

Between candy canes and Christmas bark, peppermint is giving cinnamon a run for its money as stand-out spice of the holiday season. And we're thankful for that, considering the following:

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Many entrepreneurs are not prepared for conflict, or actively avoid it. Their vision, passion, and focus are so strong that they can’t imagine someone disagreeing, much less fighting them to the death. But the reality is that startups are composed of smart people, with emotions as well as intellects, working in close proximity under much pressure, so conflicts will occur.

Reading the news may give you the feeling U.S. politics is in a pretty despairing place — there’s high national and student debt, frequent bipartisan gridlock, and steady unemployment. But there’s also hope for increasing civic engagement — and it’s being fueled by tech entrepreneurship.

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A recent visit by President Obama to an Ohio steel mill underscored his promise to create 1 million manufacturing jobs. On the same day, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced her department’s commitment to exports, saying “Trade must become a bigger part of the DNA of our economy.”

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Juniper released its top 10 tech trends for 2014 today. And if the research firm is right, our cities are going to get smarter, our money is going digital, and we’ll be printing a lot more products at home.

Here’s a quick overview:

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It’s easy to get overwhelmed as an entrepreneur, but there are seven things that you have to pencil in every single week.

Monitor your key metrics. At my company, CakeStyle, we’ve created a dashboard (lovingly dubbed “Real Talk”) so we can quickly get a snapshot of the metrics that matter most to our business and how they are trending: daily sales, margins, site traffic, orders from new clients, repeat rates of existing clients, average transaction amounts and inventory levels, for example. Watching closely allows you to detect negative trends early and intervene before they create a major issue.

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In my fifteen years of helping small businesses, the most common question I hear from budding business owners is, “What kind of legal agreements do I need?” As a good lawyer, I used to answer with the response entrepreneurs hate most: “It depends!” When pressed for a list of the most common, or most important, there are three main agreement categories almost all businesses can benefit from.

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INNOVATION ACT PASSES: NOW WHAT? — The big picture, from Erin: “Supporters of a bill to crack down on so-called patent trolls cheered its passage by the House on Thursday and immediately began to push for Senate action on the measure. The House passed the Innovation Act by an overwhelming vote of 325-91, just six weeks after it was introduced by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). The swift action marked a stark contrast to the years of negotiation that led up to the last congressional patent overhaul, the America Invents Act, in 2011...Supporters say Thursday’s lopsided vote in the House sends a signal to the Senate as it starts to shape its own bill...But opponents caution that...the substitute amendment offered by leading House Judiciary Democrats John Conyers (Mich.) and Mel Watt (N.C.) received significant support, even though it ultimately failed.” MORE, for Pros: http://politico.pro/19kP0iX

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Scientists have known for more than 150 years that sharks get cancer. And yet the belief persists that the animals don't suffer from the disease.

That misconception is promoted in part by those who sell shark cartilage, who claim that the substance will help cure cancer, said David Shiffman, a shark researcher and doctoral student at the University of Miami. But no studies have shown that shark cartilage is an effective treatment, and the demand for the material has helped decimate shark populations, researchers say: Humans kill about 100 million sharks per year, according to a March 2013 study (although many factors contribute to the killing of sharks, including demand for shark-fin soup).

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Ryan Seacrest is notorious for having his hands in just about everything these days, so it's no surprise he's now eying the tech industry.

The American Idol host and serial reality TV producer, who is known for using both an iPhone and BlackBerry device, invested $1 million in the Typo Keyboard, an iPhone accessory that aims to make typing a lot easier. The case snaps on to the top of an iPhone and turns the touchscreen keypad into one that resembles the BlackBerry's qwerty keyboard.

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Are we approaching the point where Boston will have more venture capitalists living in dorm rooms than in Wellesley? Maybe not yet. But another student-run investing group is about to start putting money into campus startups, this time at Tufts University. The Tufts Venture Fund, formed last year by students including Eric Peckham and Alexandra Halbeck, has been out raising money from Tufts alumni with an aim of reaching $300,000. Faculty advisor James Barlow tells me that "they've been successful in securing $150,000 for certain, and they may actually be in the range of $250,000."

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Entrepreneurial businesses are where it’s at for job creation, accounting for more than half of all employment in most G20 economies. Despite success achieved to date from that perspective, however, huge opportunities remain to improve access to funding for rapid-growth companies.

While securing traditional bank lending remains challenging, venture capital (VC) has played a vital role, providing larger injections of equity-based capital than are typically available from angel investors. The US VC community continues to lead globally in both providing access to funding and maintaining an entrepreneurial culture.

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In the last five years, there has been a distinct globalization of entrepreneurship. There is a lot more romanticism about startups now, a lot more startup related events, organizations, incubators, so forth and so on.

However, the seed capital eco-system around the world is inadequate. How do we change that?

New York has made the greatest progress in becoming a major seed capital eco-system, most likely because of its natural concentration of wealth, and general comfort with the idea of speculation. Elsewhere, entrepreneurs are still struggling to find capital.

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You’ve heard all the stories by now, about the intern fired for a tweet; the college admissions officers who check out social media sites before sending offer letters; the HR folks who track data about potential job candidates. But a tidy, G-rated Facebook profile isn’t enough to guarantee a job offer anymore. Data is becoming a bigger part of corporate and academic decision-making, and America’s youth need to know that the trail they leave online — the sites they visit, the photos they share, the purchases they make – promises to follow them for a long time to come.

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University Research Funding: Still Lagging and Showing No Signs of Improvement | The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation itif.org It will come as a surprise to many that America is no longer, and nowhere near, the lead nation in terms of funding university research. In fact, of 39 nations, the U.S. ranks just 24th in government funding and 27th in business funding as a share of...

Richard Bendis Nominated Again!

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In 2013, big companies in the cloud space faced downtime challenges, companies in the social media space were valued at costs seemingly much higher than they’re worth, and a superpower’s secrets were revealed to the world. Four big events or trends in the IT space this year have had great significance for the industry. In each case, the trends bear thinking about, because how we respond to them now will shape the future of the way we interact, work and play online and in the cloud.

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The best panoramic images need to be taken from relatively high vantage points. In recent years, that’s become easier thanks to remote control aircraft and helicopters that can hoist cameras aloft.

These machines have plummeted in price while their performance has sky-rocketed. Today, it’s possible to buy a decent quadcopter weighing 100 grams for just a few dollars and to fit it with a cheap camera that weighs less than 10 grams.

It's not surprising that many people don't like cubicle life.

But recently we've noticed a particular amount of disgust directed toward the once-revolutionary open-office layout. What was supposed to be the ultimate space for collaboration and office culture was having the opposite effect.

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