IPO World , announced today that its strategy of combining international finance with the American investor has now been able to expand in accordance with the Jumpstart our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act. The company is currently defining its business strategy to utilize crowdfunding along with its current strategy to create different investment opportunities.

IPO World's new strategy will utilize: Direct Public Offerings, S-1 Registrations and spin-outs to create an opportunity for their current shareholders to gain equity in companies that will be going public through registration statements and/or be public through a publically registered spin-off. Management strongly believes that current shareholders will be given other equity opportunities through spin-offs and registrations.

A little more than one year after its debut, the digital-textbook program OpenStax College is set to expand by adding a sixth title to its slate of free online textbooks.

OpenStax, a nonprofit group based at Rice University, will add an introductory-statistics text in October. Five additional titles will be available for download by 2015, according to officials.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the “Big Idea Innovation Tournament”, a pre-term exercise for the incoming 2015 MBA class at the Wharton School. The incoming students were asked to come up with a “big idea” on the topic of climate change and then present those ideas first to fellow students and then to a panel of alumnae/i and faculty judges. Students were given a very limited amount of time to come up with their ideas and formulate a presentation. For the final presentations, the student teams were given 2 minutes and 5 powerpoint slides to discuss their concept and convince the judges as to both the impact and the feasibility of their idea. The judging panel, on which I had the privilege to sit, then had the very difficult task of picking the winner from ideas ranging from managing energy usage, conserving water and our other scarce resources as well as measuring the carbon footprint of the foods we consume.

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NIH announces the availability of a Niche Assessment Program for its SBIR/STTR Phase I awardees funded in fiscal years (FY) 2013 and 2014. All active NIH SBIR/STTR Phase I awardees (by grant or contract) as well as those small businesses selected to receive a Phase I award in the first three months of the upcoming fiscal year will be eligible to participate. This program can help “jump-start” a company’s commercialization efforts by providing the market insight and data that can be used to strategically position its technology in the marketplace, by assisting companies with their development of commercialization plans for Phase II applications, and by introducing small businesses to potential partners.

A third party, unbiased assessment of appropriate market niches for products/services that are being developed by NIH’s SBIR/STTR Phase I awardees will be performed by Foresight Science & Technology. Using its Technology Niche Analysis® (TNA®), Foresight will perform the due diligence on markets appropriate for each SBIR technology and develop an in-depth report for each SBIR/STTR awardee that addresses:

While a wave of stock market enthusiasm in the United States for biotech company flotations has yet to cross the Atlantic, venture capital appetite for promising European companies is returning.

Biotech is hot on Wall Street, with the Nasdaq sector index up 43 percent this year, listed U.S. stocks scaling all-time highs and roughly 23 biotech companies going public.

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Enabling technology plays an important role in the life sciences sector in drug discovery. These are the research tools that make the process more efficient and easier for new drugs to reach the market. The Ontario/Québec corridor, second only to Boston and Southern California in terms of research strength in life sciences, is key to Ontario’s ability to compete globally on this front. 

Now, two Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE)-backed projects are the first to be approved under an Ontario-Québec life sciences research partnership aimed at developing enabling technologies for the drug discovery process.

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Startups in the early stages that are trying to get their name and product or service out there with very little budget always seem to turn to social media. This isn’t bad, in fact it’s quite good but most of the time it isn’t always great.

When startups think about social media, to them it seems to be just a place to sell their product or a way to get people talking about the company. All that is great but social media isn’t just something you do without purpose. Just being on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram isn’t a strategy. Before you try to use a platform to drum up publicity for your soon to be instant success, think about what you want to achieve. What is the holistic vision of your social media strategy, what do you want to get out of it and is it sustainable?

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THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE ARE IMMERSED MINUTE-TO-MINUTE IN THE WAY THEY BECOME SUCCESSFUL. WITH SMALL SCHEDULING TWEAKS, COULD WE ALL DO THE SAME?

Author-entrepreneur David Kidder gave Inc. a definition of success that we can all act upon:

(Success is) when you have discovered your innate gift or proprietary contribution to the world and you are spending all your time in that strength and almost none of your time in your area of weakness.

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Electronic medical records. DNA sequencing. Big data. These technology trends are changing the way medicine is practiced today — but what’s coming next?

I scoured the web, reached out to futurists and drew from past conversations with industry leaders to compile a list of the next generation of disruptive technologies that are on the brink of breaking through in healthcare. What’s missing from this list?

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Walter Landor was a branding legend who helped companies from Coca Cola to Levi's define their brand for the public. "Put simply," he said famously, "a brand is a promise." The more important the promise and the better you fulfill it, the better your brand.

Few countries rely on their brand promise as much as the United States. Beyond its power in binding Americans together, the US brand promise has a powerful influence abroad. Ronald Reagan is famous for articulating a vision of the U.S. as "a city on a hill." That precise image was also evoked by John F. Kennedy when he was President-elect, and long before him by Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop. "We shall be as a city upon a hill," Winthrop wrote in 1630, "the eyes of all people are upon us." From its earliest origins, America has been conscious of the message she projects abroad.

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A patch designed to make people 'invisible' to disease-transmitting mosquitoes may soon undergo field trials in Uganda.

The Kite Patch is a small sticker for clothes that works by disrupting mosquitoes' ability to sense exhaled carbon dioxide (CO2) and human odour — the key known ways by which the insect finds people to bite.

A single patch is designed to provide protection for two days and to be effective against all mosquito species.

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How long does it take to learn a new skill? Not as long as you probably think.

Most people have heard of the “10,000 hour rule” – popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in the book Outliers – the idea that it takes at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill. Based on research by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, the “rule” is valid, as far as it goes. If you want to step on a golf course and seriously compete with Tiger Woods, that’s what you’re in for.

Here’s the problem with the “10,000 hour rule”: it doesn’t apply to the types of skill acquisition most people undertake. Aside from competitors in very narrow, ultra-competitive performance fields like sports, chess, and music, it’s way more common for people to decide to learn something for certain benefits: business success, personal interest, or enjoyment. You and I are playing a different game, so we can play by different rules.

At the very least, photographer Craig Gibson's portraits and composite images of boys and their fathers confirm that none of these kids secretly belongs to the milkman.

The old line goes, "If you want to know what your girlfriend will look like in 25 years, look at her mom." That's clearly true for guys and their fathers, too, as U.K. photographer Craig Gibson elegantly demonstrates in his series "Boys and their Fathers."

In recent decades Canadian universities, including Concordia, have gained intellectual property rights over their researchers’ work and are attempting to capitalize from it. But returns are slim and costs are high, and the practice has raised ethical concerns. What really makes Concordia want to commercialize?

“My job here is to invent new ideas,” Concordia engineering professor Muthukumaran Packirisamy told The Link in July, sitting in his office in the EV building. Packirisamy is known in the academic world for developing microsensors used in medical diagnosis and telecommunications.

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We all know helicopter parents, who are always hovering overhead to make sure that their children are thriving. In one survey of 725 employers hiring recent college graduates, more than a quarter had been contacted directly by applicants’ parents or received applicants’ resumes from parents; some even had parents show up at interviews with their children, negotiate the terms of their job offers, and ask for a raise or promotion.

In the workplace, many people become helicopter managers, hovering over their employees in a well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to provide support. These are givers gone awry—people so desperate to help others that they develop a white knight complex, and end up causing harm instead. Studies by the psychologist Sandy Lim suggest that helicopter managers prevent recipients from becoming independent and competent, disrupting their learning and confidence for future tasks. In focusing on the short-term benefits of helping, helicopter managers overlook the long-term costs.

I’m looking forward to sharing posts from time to time about things I’ve learned in my career at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. (I also post frequently on my blog.)

Last month, I went to Omaha for the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. It’s always a lot of fun, and not just because of the ping-pong matches and the newspaper-throwing contest I have with Warren Buffett. It’s also fun because I get to learn from Warren and gain insight into how he thinks.

Being likeable will help you in your job, business, relationships, and life. I interviewed dozens of successful business leaders for my last book, to determine what made them so likeable and their companies so successful. All of the concepts are simple, and yet, perhaps in the name of revenues or the bottom line, we often lose sight of the simple things - things that not only make us human, but can actually help us become more successful. Below are the eleven most important principles to integrate to become a better leader:

With the increasing adoption of cloud computing, mobile devices and web-based applications, hackers have more opportunities than ever to infiltrate and crash network systems, especially in healthcare, which is increasingly becoming more vulnerable. The two greatest areas of opportunity for investment capital and the start-up community is in healthcare and cyber security. The nexus of these two sectors provides an even greater and more focused set of opportunities for investment. The Angel Venture Forum brings together all star roundtables of experts to opine and discuss the topics and the opportunities herein.

Many brothas and sistas think they are entrepreneurs and like to talk like they are entrepreneurs and hang out at the club like they entrepreneurs but they are simply not entrepreneurs. Cats can feel mad and offended and defensive all they want but at the end of their day, they are not entrepreneurs. The majority of these brothas and sistas claiming to be entrepreneurs are really doing nothing but working self-managed jobs. This article is going to show you the difference between an entrepreneur and someone working a self-managed job.

Every entrepreneur wants to know how they can improve their odds on the road to success, and why some entrepreneurs seem to be able to squeeze success out of even a marginal business case. Most experts agree that is has lot to do with your level of passion, determination, and innovation, modulated by a strong focus on reality, common sense, and street smarts.