Every entrepreneur I know is short on resources, including time, money, and skills. The last thing they can afford is to waste any of these, but in my mentoring and coaching activities, I see it happening all too often. Waste in a startup is any activity that absorbs resources, but creates no value or competitive advantage in the eyes of customers.

Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection. Every day, he tracks his mood and mental state, what he ate, and how much time he spent outdoors. Twice a week, he gets his brain scanned in an MRI machine. And once a week, he has his blood drawn so that it can be analyzed for hormones and gene activity levels. Poldrack plans to gather a year’s worth of brain and body data to answer an unexplored question in the neuroscience community: how do brain networks behave and change over a year?

While different investigators have examined a particular person’s brain activity at different times, no study has examined the patterns of a brain at a twice weekly frequency for a year. Poldrack’s self-tracking study could help fill a gap in the neuroscience community’s understanding of how brain networks act. “We know absolutely nothing about how a healthy brain changes its function and fluctuates over the course of days and weeks and months, and that’s important to know because there are a lot of disorders, including depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia that show really big fluctuations over the course of weeks and months,” says Poldrack. “This kind of data set—I image myself two to three times a week over a year, that’s 100 to 150 imaging sets of one person—just doesn’t exist,” he says.

As chief scientist for President Obama’s reëlection effort, Rayid Ghani helped revolutionize the use of data in politics. During the final 18 months of the campaign, he joined a sprawling team of data and software experts who sifted, collated, and combined dozens of pieces of information on each registered U.S. voter to discover patterns that let them target fund-raising appeals and ads.

Now, with Obama again ensconced in the Oval Office, some veterans of the campaign’s data squad are applying lessons from the campaign to tackle social issues such as education and environmental stewardship. Edgeflip, a startup Ghani founded in January with two other campaign members, plans to turn the ad hoc data analysis tools developed for Obama for America into software that can make nonprofits more effective at raising money and recruiting volunteers.

500 Startups appears to be on a mission to take over the world. With about 20 percent of its capital going to international companies, the seed fund and accelerator has expanded its scope to include India, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Brazil and last year it snatched up LatAm startup accelerator, Mexican.VC, to aid with its efforts south of the border.

Looking to plant roots in the region, Dave McClure and company brought on Mexican.VC partners Cesar Salazar and Santiago Zavala, hiring them as its new Mexican venture partners. In February, 500 Startups Mexico City showed off its first batch of companies, and, now that it’s begun to hit its stride in Mexico, the accelerator is expanding its scope.

To the Editor:

In his May 26 column, “Obamacare’s Other Surprise,” Thomas L. Friedman discusses how data that support medical decision-making and collaboration, dovetailing with new tools in the Affordable Care Act, are spurring the innovation necessary to deliver improved health care for more people at affordable prices.

This is just another example of how public policy is driving a smarter health care system focused on the quality of care, not the quantity of care delivered. That means increasing transparency and accountability, avoiding costly mistakes and readmissions, keeping patients healthy, and enabling new payment and care delivery models, like accountable care organizations, to work.

On April 5, 2009, three words changed my life -- and the lives of my wife and four children - forever: "You have cancer." Here is what I wrote in my blog: "It was a moment frozen in time as I gazed over the edge of my earthly life."

Those words resonate within me to this day.

Diagnosed with stage IV diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, my life was turned upside down as I was abruptly catapulted into "cancer world" -- a world of doctor and hospital visits, medical tests and chemotherapy; a world of waiting and watching, worrying and praying.

Almost one in five alumni from the University of Michigan, Michigan State University or Wayne State University has started a business, and as a group the alumni are about 1.5 times as successful as the average business owner with those companies after five years, according to a new study by East Lansing-based Anderson Economic Group.

The “Embracing Entrepreneurship” report, prepared by Anderson for the University Research Corridor using data collected by Survey Sciences Group LLC from more than 40,000 alumni of the three schools, found about 19 percent have started a company, and some have created more than one.

An early-stage investor who has backed over half a dozen companies including mobile services venture ZipDial and business software maker Hotelogix, Sunil K Goyal now helms, Your-Nest Angel Fund, which invests in early stage companies. In conversation with ET, Goyal, who earlier led the direct-tohome services at Bharti AirtelBSE -2.03 %, lists out six things the government must do to boost entrepreneurship.

Single window to startup: In an index that measures the ease of starting a business in a country, India ranks 173rd. It can inch up the index by ensuring that a single application covers all aspects required to first register a company. With a similar process followed subsequently to obtain mandatory certification for employee benefits including provident fund, gratuity and professional tax.

As I've noted many times before, entrepreneurship is a key driver of innovation and economic growth. But we also know that entrepreneurship is spiky — not everyone becomes an entrepreneur, and not all places foster this kind of growth.

Economists, mayors, and economic development officials as well as venture capitalists, technologists, and business leaders have long sought to track the key characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, who are at the core of game-changing companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. These same groups of people have also been working to identify the factors that drive the success of certain entrepreneurial regions, such as Silicon Valley.

The 3rd Quebec Seeks Solutions Conference will be held in Québec, Canada on 5-6 November 2013. Organised by Quebec International, this conference is a place where concrete problems of small, medium, and large companies will be discussed to deepen the understanding of the issue and to seek potential solutions. The results and impacts of the two first editions have demonstrated the value of this new approach and several companies have already demonstrated their interest to participate.

In addition to the event in itself, QSS is also the place where the notion of local open innovation is born and we invite you to participate to the pre-event: Seeking Solutions Summit: Methods and Policies Creating a Local Ecosystem for Technology Transfer, Collaboration, and Local Innovation. This event will bring together innovation experts and collaboration enabling people. Participating delegates will be able to network with the local open innovation world community. Frank Piller, professor of management and director of the Technology & Innovation Management Group of RWTH Aachen University, Germany, will be one of our Keynote speakers.

Starting a company is tough, but growing it into a mature and stable business can be even trickier. Luckily, business accelerators help entrepreneurs with this often-challenging phase of a company’s life.  But you shouldn’t simply dive into the world of accelerators without first doing research and finding out what’s right for your business. Here’s what industry experts say you should be looking out for:

Make sure the accelerator provides real results.

David Cohen, Founder and CEO, TechStars

“Founders should keep in mind that more than half of accelerators have never gotten a single company funded, nor had any companies exit successfully. There is some diligence to be done by talking to past founders of the program and looking at overall results. Hopefully, you will see more accelerators providing detailed statistics and data on every single company, like we do on our website. I think founders deserve to know this, and it’s easy enough for accelerators to provide.”

What’s the most important trend in innovation that nobody is talking about?

We at Xconomy reached out across our national network of innovation leaders (the Xconomists) to get some answers to this question, and to spur some intercity discussion. What we got back was astounding for its diversity and depth. And while it’s no longer true that no one is talking about these trends, they are clearly issues that warrant more attention than they’re getting.

The Xconomists—who are a mix of entrepreneurs, executives, investors, and researchers—answered our innovation-trend question on several interesting levels:

The newspaper The Irish Times is looking to answer a question near and dear to the hearts of media companies everywhere: What is the future of advertising? It asked entrepreneurs to submit their best ideas for companies that might help media--say, a newspaper--make money in coming decades, now that the sun has set on classified ads. 

More than 100 start-ups applied to be incubated at the Times, applicants has been whittled down to a final 10, which were selected by a panel of Ireland's largest media buyers, including Tyson Pearcey of Mindshare and Paul Farrell of Initiative. The competition, dubbed Fusion, will close on June 14, when a judging panel selects an overall winner right before the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in Dublin.

Massachusetts is first -- again -- in the Milken Institute's State Technology and Science Index 2012. The index tracks and evaluates every state's tech and science capabilities -- and their success at converting those assets into companies and high-paying jobs. Conducted every two years for the past decade, the index has found Massachusetts performing in first place in every edition.

The 2012 State Technology and Science Index looks at 79 unique indicators that are categorized into five major components: research and development inputs, risk capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure, human capital investment, technology and science work force, and technology concentration and dynamism. It is one of the most comprehensive examinations of state technology and science assets ever compiled.

In the 20th Century, meaningful education was all about learning your ABCs. Today, it's centered on Alphas, Betas and C++.

Programming skills are becoming ever more important, quickly turning into the core competency for all kinds of 21st Century workers. That inescapable fact is leading individuals to seek out new ways of learning to code, startups and non-profits to find ways to help them and businesses to search for innovative approaches to finding the coders they so desperately need.

Five top Japanese drug companies are to open their "libraries" of experimental compounds to scrutiny by scientists hunting new treatments for malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases affecting the world's poor.

The initiative, announced on Thursday, is the first project under a new $100 million partnership between the drugmakers, the Japanese government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund research into neglected tropical diseases.

Software pilots are tricky endeavors.  They are a crucial first step in the process of deploying an enterprise software technology solution.  You don’t want to commit full tilt until you’ve tested a technology.  Successful deployments have significant impacts upon companies, people and careers.  You want to get it right.

Whether you call it a pilot or a Proof of Concept (POC for short), Pilots may be “tricky” but there are 6 crucial steps to take to optimize your chances for success  

GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK), the U.K.’s largest drugmaker, will work with the U.S. government to develop antibiotics for resistant infections and bioterrorist threats in an agreement valued at as much as $200 million.

The company will collaborate with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will provide $40 million for the initial 18-month agreement, London-based Glaxo said in a statement today. If the accord is renewed over five years, the department will provide as much as $200 million, the drugmaker said.

America finally has an opportunity to establish a sensible immigration policy in the coming months.

The effects of the policy will have far reaching ramifications in terms of both economic and social implications for the country in years to come.

The debate about the immigration bill is entering a period of elevated rhetoric, where the media and legislators are honing in on specific tradeoffs that could help the imbill get ratified in the Senate.

Purpose

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and participating Institutes invite grant applications for research on the development of safe, real-time, non-invasive (or minimally invasive), in vivo methods to assess the development and function of the human placenta.

Background

The placenta is essential for the maintenance of pregnancy. The prominent function of the placenta is in the transfer of nutrients, gases and waste products between the mother and fetus. It is effectively the lung, gut, and kidney of the fetus. Abnormalities of placental development and function are known to underlie many major pathologies of pregnancy including spontaneous preterm birth, fetal growth restriction, and preeclampsia. Most information on placental biology is obtained studying placental tissue obtained from pathological pregnancies, such as a preterm deliveries occurring predominately in the third trimester, or from term deliveries in which placental development has already crested.  Hence, there is a paucity of information obtained earlier in gestation, a period of time when many of the pregnancy pathologies are believed to have their origins, as well as very limited information gleaned throughout gestation from normal pregnancies. The development of real-time, non-invasive (or minimally invasive) methods to assess the development and functionality of the placenta in vivo throughout gestation would serve as valuable research tools to enhance our understanding of placental biology and rooted pathologies. The development of these tools could lead to the identification of markers and predictors of pregnancy outcome, and provide a future foundation for better pregnancy monitoring in the clinical setting.