When Steve Jobs died in October 2011, crowds of mourners gathered outside of Apple stores, leaving impromptu memorials to the fallen businessman. Many in Occupy Wall Street, then in full bloom, stopped to mourn the .001 percenter worth $7 billion, who didn’t believe in charity and whose company had more cash in hand than the U.S. Treasury while doing everything in its power to avoid paying taxes.

A new, and potentially dominant, ruling class is rising. Today’s tech moguls don’t employ many Americans, they don’t pay very much in taxes or tend to share much of their wealth, and they live in a separate world that few of us could ever hope to enter. But while spending millions bending the political process to pad their bottom lines, they’ve remained far more popular than past plutocrats, with 72 percent of Americans expressing positive feelings for the industry, compared to 30 percent for banking and 20 percent for oil and gas. 

Title II of the JOBS Act called upon the SEC to implement rules lifting the ban on general solicitation in Rule 506 offerings, where all purchasers are limited to accredited investors.

This might have been a relatively straightforward instruction, except that Congress also required that the implementing rules must somehow call on issuers to "verify" the accredited status of the purchasers. While at the time no one actually said or intimated that the industry has seen widespread cheating to get around the accredited investor standard - verification was not a concern when the standard was modified by Dodd-Frank a few years back - several floated a vague presumption that went unchallenged: if issuers are tweeting broadly for angel investors, non-accrediteds will get caught up in the hype and lie, or issuers will be somehow inclined to look the other way, even though they didn't when 506 was "quiet."

Earth's global thaw has reached Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak, researchers said today (May 14) at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico.

Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 590 feet (180 meters), Sudeep Thakuri, a graduate student at the University of Milan in Italy, said in a statement. Located in the Himalaya Mountains on the border between China and Nepal, Everest's summit is 29,029 feet (8,848 m) above sea level.

Over the past 30 years that I have worked as a researcher in academic institutions, I have received millions of dollars in public and private funding.

Yet, I hold no patent, I have not started a company and I cannot point to any commercial product that has emerged from my laboratory.

The federal government, given its current push to align scientific funding with industry aims via the National Research Council, may look at this as an irresponsible waste of time and resources. I beg to differ.

Austin has one of the nation’s most active angel networks through the Central Texas Angel Network, known as CTAN. Last year, CTAN, with 100 members, invested about $8 million in 28 companies, including 13 new companies and 15 portfolio companies. Every angel investor is doing it because they are passionate, said Michele Skelding, a CTAN member and angel investor. She spoke at the RISE Lunch & Learn panel Tuesday on Angel & VC Funding at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in Austin.

What do Millennials want? Flexibility and independence top the list, according to a new study, “Millennials and the Future of Work,” from oDesk and Millennial Branding that polled nearly 2,000 people aged 19 to 30. Here’s some of what the study found, and what it means for your business.

Millennial Workers Want Freedom and Flexibility

Millennial workers want freedom and the flexibility to work how they want.  Many Millennials have a “freelance” attitude. Almost nine in 10 (89 percent) say they prefer to work when and where they choose (compared to a corporate, 9-to-5 job). When comparing freelance work to “regular” jobs, Millennials say freelancing gives them more freedom to:

The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors. Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.

When Jon Bonanno, chief commercial officer of the clean-tech startup Empower Micro Systems, got up to face a small, packed room in Santa Clara, California, last week, it wasn’t like the polished “demo days” run by the highest-profile Silicon Valley startup accelerators. There was no stage, not even a screen for the projector. The sound system buzzed with painful feedback. The 100 or so guests stood or sat in folding chairs under bright fluorescent lights in a space adjoining a large startup workplace that contained a distinct no-no of Silicon Valley office culture: cubicles.

Zhongguancun Science Park (Z-Park, the "Silicon Valley of China" in Beijing) today announced the inaugural Technology Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition at a press conference in San Jose. This new competition is guided by Z-Park and undertaken by Entrepreneur China Magazine and Hanhai Z-Park. This competition aims to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in both China and Silicon Valley, tap into high-tech talents and promote the convergence of technology and finance across the globe. 

The millenial generation, also known as Generation Y, consists, at least by some, of those born between 1982 and 1993. These are adults from 21 years old to 33. The older Gen Y population didn't grow up with cell phones or the Internet, but by the time they were in their mid-teens, cell phones were small enough to carry around comfortably, and the Internet was just starting to commercialize.

By the time they were in their mid-20s, they were taking photos with their phones and chronicling their lives on social networks. They were multi-tasking; they weren't having luck finding jobs; and they were watching the rise of Google, Amazon and Facebook. What's a kid to do in this environment? Become an entrepreneur. 

Startups provide leadership in the market. Entrepreneurs provide leadership to their startup. There are many styles of leadership, like dictatorial, laissez-faire, and democratic. One that I hear discussed more these days, in this age of relationships, is called “servant” leadership.

What is servant leadership? The servant leader serves the people they lead through mentoring, direct assistance, listening, and acting on their employees input. It’s the opposite of self-serving, domineering leadership, and makes those in charge think harder about how to respect, value and motivate people reporting to them.

Here you get my current top 5 list of strong open innovation initiatives and efforts. Your comments and suggestions for other companies are appreciated!

1. Google Glass – for taking an open approach for a disruptive offering

I take it as a clear sign of the changing game of innovation that Google early on recognized that they needed to be open on their efforts with the Glass. Now, they are building an ecosystem that can help develop the apps that will make people buy and use the Glass. Read more in this blog post: Google Glass versus Apple: Different Takes on Open Innovation

Social media is massive now, we get it. You don’t need me to tell you that Facebook’s 1 billion monthly active users and Pinterest’s meteoric rise mean big business (and big bucks) to savvy companies. But with this rise comes a boom in business for self-proclaimed social media gurus, and I should know. That said, there’s no excuse for the boom in bloated job titles, from ‘Digital PR Commando’ to ‘New Media Ninja’, that is sweeping through LinkedIn like a trending topic. In fact, someone’s even created a social media job title generator, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

As people, businesses and things get more and more computer-oriented, learning how to program at a young age is becoming a crucial skill. As important as it might be, it’s still a difficult business getting into — teaching the language of computers. The trick is getting people’s attention in the first place. Schools are generally too traditional or just don’t have the budget for it. So, people have to come up with potential solutions: giving you free or cheap means to learn the ins and outs of programming via the web and other popular interaction tools like games.

Inmates were the entrepreneurs at this unique and revolutionary Demo Day held at San Quentin, a prison located outside San Francisco. One by one the participants of the second class of The Last Mile's accelerator program pitched their businesses to the small audience. 

The Last Mile accelerator is unequivocal proof of how giving people the right tools and education can empower them to give back to their societies.

Because it’s often so difficult for entrepreneurs to obtain seed funding for their startups, bootstrapping is one of the best methods to self-fund their projects. And offering a service is one of the best ways to go. This, by the way, remains a controversial point of view, and most industry observers will take the position that companies get distracted if they try to bootstrap a product with a service. At 1M/1M, we take a pragmatic and contrarian position, and back it up with numerous case studies. From where we sit, bootstrapping products with services is a tried and true method.

Analyses of the longest sediment core ever collected on land in the Arctic, recently completed by an international team led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, provide “absolutely new knowledge” of Arctic climate from 2.2 to 3.6 million years ago and show that with estimated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) similar to today’s levels, the Arctic was very warm, with no ice sheets.

“While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there,” says Brigham-Grette.

Here is a leadership lesson: Be selfish. Be very selfish.

For this message to be an effective leadership tip, we need to understand what selfishness is. Selfishness is typically defined as "concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself." If someone hears that the CEO is being selfish, the thought that is likely to come to mind is, "The leader is maximizing personal financial rewards even at the cost of the company's interests." If that is the case, it is unfortunate and unacceptable. But there is a fundamentally different way to view selfishness. If leaders selfishly take care of their feelings, it will benefit not only them, but also everyone around them, including the companies they lead.

Let's say you believed deeply in the importance of sleep health, and you wanted to start a movement to change people's attitudes and behavior. Maybe, like Arianna Huffington, it's a personal crisis that convinces you. Or maybe it's a key piece of research or two that opens your eyes, as it were, to the dangers of too little sleep:

If all the world's accelerators got together on a ship, it's likely the lot of them would sink.

Except, well, there's actually an accelerator program taking place on a ship - and, despite its physical location on the vast and open seas, it's the perfect metaphorical harbinger of just how crowded the market for startup hopefuls has become.

In Canada, there are the so-called household names, the likes of Montreal's FounderFuel, Waterloo's Communitech and Extreme Startups in Toronto.