Researchers, led by University of Washington (UW) physicist Jens Gundlach, have developed a nanopore sequencing technology that is capable of reading the sequence of a single DNA molecule. In this system, the DNA is pulled through a nanopore while an ion current through the pore electronically reads the DNA's sequence. The nanopore is an engineered protein developed specifically for DNA sequencing by Gundlach's team in collaboration with Michael Niederweis, a microbiologist at the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB). This technology has led to a patent-licensing deal between UW and Illumina, Inc.

The licensing deal gives San Diego-based Illumina, Inc., developer of integrated systems for genetic variation analysis, exclusive worldwide rights to develop and market the nanopore DNA sequencing technology that is based on the engineered pore.

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From the late Steve  Jobs to Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, certain entrepreneurs seem to spring from the  womb predisposed to success. Not only are they exceptionally smart, but they  also have a dogged belief in their own abilities and a similar unrelenting  passion for achieving their vision.

Put simply, they don’t do things like “regular” people. Case in point: Los  Altos, Calif.-based Aaron Levie, the 28-year-old co-founder of online  data-storage company Box, now  valued at more than $1 billion. As a student at the University of Southern  California, Levie shunned the typical college social scene. “If people were  going out on Saturday night, I preferred to be on my computer and working on the  next internet idea,” he says. “I just recognized that I was a bit different than  everyone else.”

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Every man and woman here on earth possesses one thing or another that is unique; “this thing” could be something that has been done before or maybe something that hasn’t been done yet.

That “thing” could be something you like doing or maybe you don’t even enjoy doing it, but you know you have that unique ability. That “thing” is your talent!

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When we talk about productivity, we're really talking about working with our workday in a such a way that we can continually be awesome. There are many roads to the awesome workday: the boulevard of the insanely early morning, the alley of the ultra-productive night, the rest stop of the 3 p.m. nap.

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What started off as the usual demo day for the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator in New York quickly showed how the JOBS Act’s new rules on fundraising have clamped down the way startups pitch—or have they?

Over and over, the audience at last month’s ERA demo day was told the companies on stage were not seeking funding, which was taken by many as a response to JOBS Act provisos that went into effect on Sept. 23 regarding general solicitation.

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I’m sick and tired of hearing about “lean startups.”

No offense to Eric Reis, who’s coined some very corporate Bingo-worthy phrases now enmeshed in Silicon Valley culture (such as pivot, minimally viable product, and continuous innovation), but there are a whole lot of things I think are wrong — dead wrong — with the entire concept. Here are a few of the problems:

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Flash news: my mother language is Hebrew. In the past few years, however, I’ve needed to speak English almost daily with investors, board members, customers, and other entrepreneurs.

I admit, I have tried to avoid it as much as possible. I was afraid of sounding silly or of not being understood by the other side. In every situation, I thought, “Thank God my business partner is an American; he can handle all the English conversations.”

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Is “Orange Is the New Black” or “House of Cards” a TV show?  We can watch them on our smartphone, tablet, computer or TV.  And, unlike traditional TV shows, which are released an episode per week, we can watch the whole season at once, totally disrupting the sense of time the television channels have taught us to expect. And yet, as Kevin Spacey recently pointed out at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, we still talk about that form of media in terms of its traditional viewing source.  It’s still a TV show, even if it’s more like an episodically-punctuated-video-feed.

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CEOs face countless decisions.  The best executives understand which ones they need to focus on and which ones they can delegate.  While the obvious decisions that CEOs need to get right involve strategy and competitive advantage, too many executives delegate away three critical decisions that they need to own:  decisions about goals, resource allocation, and people.

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One of the most critical challenges facing growth-seeking executives in large companies is deciding what constraints they should be placing on their organizations’ innovation efforts. Unconstrained efforts of the “let 1,000 flowers bloom” variety feel good, but often lead to diffused progress. On the other hand, incorrectly constrained innovation efforts carry well-documented risks. Companies that set the wrong boundaries leave themselves vulnerable to disruptive, game-changing start-ups. What kinds of constraints spur innovation and which ones kill it? Generally, we suggest that companies impose two key constraints.

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You know the saying: Hindsight is 20/20.

We've all made mistakes over the years. Conventional wisdom says that mistakes in business are bad. Or are they? Some would say that if you fear failure, you've already failed--heck, billionaire inventor James Dyson swears by mistakes.

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Middle-skill jobs are in the same camp as green jobs, STEM jobs, and other groups of occupations that garner lots of attention: They can be defined many ways, by many rubrics. Regardless of the definition, however, it’s clear that middle-skill, or middle-wage, jobs have been in decline for years.

New research from the Federal Reserve indicates the share of middle-skill jobs in the workforce has dropped from 25% in 1985 to just above 15% today, part of the hollowing-out effect that David Autor of MIT has documented. And as our chart above shows, middle-wage jobs — those that pay between $13.84 and $21.13 per hour, as defined by the National Employment Law Project — sustained much deeper cuts during the 2008-2009 recession than high- and low-wage jobs.

The Angel Resource Institute (ARI), Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and CB Insights released the Q2 2013 Halo Report today, a national survey of angel group investment activity, which finds median angel round sizes down to $590K per deal, median pre-money valuations remaining stable at $2.5M and 74% of deals are syndicated. When angels co-invest with other types of investors the median deal size is $1.95M.

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Connecticut College students and a professor of neuroscience have found “America’s favorite cookie” is just as addictive as cocaine – at least for lab rats. And just like most humans, rats go for the middle first.

In a study designed to shed light on the potential addictiveness of high-fat/ high-sugar foods, Professor Joseph Schroeder and his students found rats formed an equally strong association between the pleasurable effects of eating Oreos and a specific environment as they did between cocaine or morphine and a specific environment. They also found that eating cookies activated more neurons in the brain’s “pleasure center” than exposure to drugs of abuse.

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Technology transfer policies are always at the centre of policy debate. As suggested by the European Commission (2007), technology transfer schemes are reputed to be ‘the processes for capturing, collecting and sharing explicit and tacit knowledge, including skills and competence’ and so constitute a fundamental engine for enhancing economic and social welfare.

Microsoft has chosen Tel Aviv-based SkyGiraffe, which helps businesses deploy mobile apps, as the first start-up to receive seed capital from the Microsoft Ventures program.

SkyGiraffe provides a platform that helps businesses deploy applications on mobile devices without needing to write code, according to Microsoft. It is currently in private beta.

It seems obvious that entrepreneurs must be able to talk well to sell their products. After all, you have to be a salesman to convince your customer to choose your technology over others.

But here’s the thing that some entrepreneurs tend to forget: You also need to listen well. Before you pitch your product to customers, let the customers do the talking.

ff Venture Capital, where I am a Partner,has consistently generated a gross IRR on invested capital in excess of 30%. We've done that in a world where the average ten-yearreturnsfor venture capital firms are in the single digits. Historically we couldn't say this in a public setting;now we can.

Software is eating every industry, including the entrepreneurial ecosystem itself. Funding platforms and tools such as AngelList and Indiegogo are clearly changing how entrepreneurs are raising capital. (Indiegogo is a ffVC portfolio company.) But what about venture capital firms?

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“There is no glass ceiling if you start at the top.” I read that line this morning in an article praising the glory of entrepreneurship and I thought, that really describes my life now. I mean, no one ever would have promoted me to CEO. I wouldn’t even have been considered a good ‘diversity candidate’. (A diversity candidate, I’ve been told, is one who makes it slightly easier to tell the rest of the finalists apart.) And in addition to that pesky second X chromosome that I carry around, the typical CEO is in the neighborhood of a foot taller than me.

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When David Cohen and I came up with the idea for the Global Accelerator Network (GAN) in 2010, we counted roughly 100 accelerator programs around the US that were founded following the Techstars model. We labeled Techstars a “mentor driven accelerator” and reached out to others who were using the same approach to create what became GAN. From that initial outreach, 16 high quality accelerator programs joined us to launch the network.