For those of us living and breathing angel investing day in and day out, it can be hard to remember just how much angel investing has evolved in the past few decades. At the recent ACA Summit, I recounted some of the key shifts in the environment and described the impact this has had on all of us:

30 Years Ago…was when we really started seeing innovation migrate from large corporate R&D labs (largely due to cost cutting) towards early stage ventures that were more nimble at innovating on their own.

There are two completely different ways of looking at crowdfunding. It is either a) the best thing to happen to start-ups since Red Bull; or b) while sometimes useful, it’s no serious substitute for other sources of money, including family & friends. Even bootstrapping.

 This may not endear me to some of my friends, but increasingly, I lean towards the latter.

As I am about to do an open innovation session for a B2B company, I got to think about this question once again and since it works well for a good discussion, let me start out with a couple of remarks:

• B2B companies are actually just as good as consumer goods companies on open innovation, but the latter are just more visible when it comes to open innovation initiatives. A reason for this could be that the products and brands of consumer goods companies are better known and thus we hear more about these companies.

If you've ever used the Internet — and you know who you are — you've undoubtedly had apps or various services stop working unexpectedly. For ordinary users, this usually just means no access to Twitter or Gmail for a while. But for developers, whose apps and services rely increasingly heavily on hooks into popular Web services, the problem can be far more complicated.

We provide technology, support, resources and community to Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics startups to jumpstart development and accelerate market traction. We currently serve a network of over 250 startups across the globe.

Is your startup a Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics solution that’s beyond ideation and privately held? Want the chance to get in front of 15,000 enterprise customers? Want face time with Dr. Vishal Sikka, Member of the Executive Board SAP AG, Technology & Innovation?

Beware of random collisions with unusual suspects.

Unless, that is, you want to learn something new. In that case, seek out innovators from across every imaginable silo and listen, really listen, to their stories. New ideas, perspectives, and opportunities await in the gray areas between the unusual suspects.

It seems so obvious and yet we spend most of our time with the usual suspects in our respective silos. One of the most important silos we need to break down is the one between generations.

I’m fully convinced that both inspiration and perspiration are always required in a startup. Yet many people seem to be stuck on one end or other of this equation – all perspiration with no dream, or all inspiration with no reality. Success is the right balance of both for fun and profit.

Aspiring entrepreneurs ask me why their great idea hasn’t sold; they talk about it endlessly, and they expect others to do the development, finance, and marketing work for them. Those at the other extreme don’t look up from the grindstone long enough to notice whether all their work is producing sweat equity or just sweat.

Being a risk taker in business is not the same as being reckless. Nevertheless, the word “risk” has a negative connotation to most of us, implying danger and possible loss. For true entrepreneurs, risk is viewed as a positive, with its implied challenge to overcome the unknown and hitting the big return.

In fact, risk is an integral part of life, as well as every business, yet so few people learn to manage it properly, or even want to think about it. One way to learn is to understand better how successful entrepreneurs approach risk, and look at actual strategies they use for success.

It's a common practice for job applicants to use social media to stand out to employers. We've seen the Vine resume, the Kickstarter one and enough infographics to make you cry. But how often do you see a company get creative when making an offer?

Tech marketing firm ePrize posted a picture to Instagram this week asking its former marketing intern Samantha Bankey, who graduated from Ferris State University in Michigan last weekend, to join the company.

In our "Young Innovators" series, we've been featuring young people trying to change the world. This time, we spotlight Jack Andraka, who started googling ways to prevent cancer after losing a friend to the disease. And look where it took him.

Jack Andraka's science project doesn't sound like a high school sophomore's crowning achievement. It sounds more like a Nobel Prize winner's.

Here you can learn about our unique program, the services we provide to Russian start-up companies and university projects, as well as take advantage of free online resources for entrepreneurs and university faculty working in the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Some investors, particularly angel investors, may see equity crowdfunding as a threat to traditional venture capital. But not InCube Ventures.

Over the past few years, the San Jose, Calif.-based life sciences venture capital firm has co-invested with accredited individual investors on a handful of deals.  On Friday, the firm went one big step further with the launch of VentureHealth, an equity crowdfunding site for biomedical technology companies.

Canada is launching a full-court press to try to capitalize on what could be a large, albeit short, window of opportunity to attract the best and brightest foreigners in America’s technology heartland with promises of permanent residency.

As part of this hostile takeover of global entrepreneurs, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney will kick off a four-day trip to Silicon Valley Friday to promote Canada’s new start-up visa among Canadian ex-pats who’ll be encouraged to spread the word, as well as foreign entrepreneurs attending TiEcon 2013, the world’s largest conference for entrepreneurs. He’ll also be meeting with students at Stanford University, some of America’s top immigration experts and local media to promote the new program.

I was pretty slow about getting around to reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. The career-capping book by Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, spent months on all the bestseller lists back in 2011. I finally picked up a paperback copy a couple of weeks ago.

The book is mainly about the limits of intuition and the biases—seemingly built into the way the human mind has evolved—that keep us from acting in accord with logic, rationality, and statistics. For example, the “anchoring effect” means we’re highly suggestible when it comes to numbers and prices. No matter how much soup they really want, grocery-store customers buy more when there’s a sign saying “Limit 12 cans per customer.”

We don't often think about the way we usually operate at work, whether we're performing an informal five-step process for evaluating a new proposal, or setting priorities for managing our time. But our ability to improve the ways we do things depends on defining and shaping our daily habits of mind and practice — our "standard work."

There’s a disconnect in Washington right now. The Obama administration has been breathlessly pitching futuristic, new innovation initiatives—everything from projects to map the human brain to new initiatives around manufacturing involving 3D printers. It’s simultaneously having to contend with a number of embarrassing political scandals headaches both at home and abroad.

In other words, the same team that’s bringing you the Jetsons and inviting Apple CEO Tim Cook to the State of the Union is also the same team that seems to be tripping over old-world style politics.

I was fortunate early in my career to get some valuable, but simple advice. I don’t remember where it came from – probably from some motivational speaker or maybe the Dale Carnegie Course, since I spent my first few years out of college immersed in personal development. The advice is embodied in ten words, 20 letters:

U.S. producers of farm-raised salmon are working hard to help fill today's growing demand for seafood. Now U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutritionist Susan Raatz, physiologist Matthew Picklo, and cooperators have found that farm-raised Atlantic salmon maintains its healthy levels of omega-3 fatty acids when baked.

Two omega-3 fatty acids, EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), are abundant in oily fish such as salmon, tuna, mackerel, and herring. Some data have shown that consuming 250 milligrams daily of EPA and DHA—the amount found in a 3-ounce salmon fillet—is associated with reduced risk of heart-disease.

In July 2012, farmers in the U.S. Midwest and Plains regions watched crops wilt and die after a stretch of unusually low precipitation and high temperatures. Before a lack of rain and record-breaking heat signaled a problem, however, scientists observed another indication of drought in data from NASA and NOAA satellites: plant stress.

Healthy vegetation requires a certain amount of water from the soil every day to stay alive, and when soil moisture falls below adequate levels, plants become stressed. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) have developed a way to use satellite data to map that plant stress. The maps could soon aid in drought forecasts, and prove useful for applications such as crop yield estimates or decisions about crop loss compensation.

ROCKVILLE AND BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, May 20, 2013 – BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a regional private-public partnership focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Central Maryland, today announced its selection of Ram Aiyar, Ph.D., M.B.A., as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) for BHI at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Dr. Aiyar will help advance fundamental research discoveries to new therapeutics, diagnostics and devices that can be used clinically and commercially.

“We’re pleased to add Dr. Aiyar to our roster of Entrepreneurs-in-Residence,” said Rich Bendis, BHI President and CEO. “He is now our third EIR – joining Todd Chappell, who is EIR at NIH, and Ken Malone, our EIR working with the University of Maryland Ventures. The growth of this program will be a benefit to BHI and our partner organizations for years to come, and will result in transitioning more early-stage biomedical technologies to commercial potential. ”