People are always asking me for an inside tip on Internet sites that will be “the next big thing.” Those are hard, since someone has to invent something innovative, but I do have some views on other ideas whose time has come and gone.

In some cases, these are concepts that have already been done too many times, and the space is crowded. In others, the concept has been tried too many times, or no one has yet succeeded in making any money. Or both. Here are my favorites:

The U.S. Senate is considering legislation that would create a pool of 75,000 immigrant visas. The idea behind these visas is to encourage new business startups. Supporters cite data suggesting Startup Visas, as they are called, could eventually create 1.6 million new jobs over the next decade.

According to an article in The Economist, the United States is falling behind due to its immigration policies. A number of top CEOs have recently stated that the nation’s immigration policy needs to be less restrictive. They say the system should encourage people wishing to come to the U.S. to start new tech businesses here.

Have you ever had a sudden inspiration? The proverbial “Aha” experience?

These “insight moments” tend to happen when you’re not actively working on a problem—they come to you when you least expect it. You might be exercising, gardening, or taking a shower. (For me, they always come when I’m listening to a lecture on a completely different topic.) Ideas come at these surprising times because of incubation—when you take time off from work, it frees up your conscious mind and allows your subconscious mind to “incubate” on the problem.

Jeff Bauman was among those standing in the wrong place -- near the finish line of the Boston Marathon -- when the first bomb went off. Within seconds of the explosion rescue personnel and people who had just come to see the race were swarming over the area helping the victims. Three came to Bauman's aid, putting him a wheelchair and, while the ashen-faced Bauman clutched what remained of his left leg, rushed him to the medical tent. As they did, a news photographer took what became an iconic picture of the tragedy.

More people than ever are starting their own businesses. And as all these newly minted entrepreneurs enter the world of being their own bosses, they are all starving for much needed startup funding.

Investors take two forms – angel or venture capitalists. Angles look more towards the person and their team, while venture capitalists focus on the ability to pay back their investment. For a percentage of equity in your business, and often a say in how it is run, you could sell your soul – I mean part of the ownership of your business – to either investor type, in exchange for some cash to get your business running.

Today, Time magazine put out its 10th annual Time 100 list, a collection of the "most influential people in the world." This year's list includes influencers from the worlds of politics (Barack Obama, Rand Paul) and activism (Malala Yousafzai, Aung San Suu Kyi) to music (Jay-Z, Frank Ocean) and Hollywood (Jennifer Lawrence, Bryan Cranston).

The list was especially tech-heavy, with names like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Minecraft developers Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, OkCupid co-founder and Match.com CEO Sam Yagan, Apple designer Jonathan Ive, Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, Google Ideas founder Jared Cohen, Samsung CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon, tech incubator Kai-Fu Lee, and Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei.

Overall venture capital activity slowed in the U.S. during the first three months of 2013, with venture capitalists investing $5.9 billion in 863 deals nationwide, according to the MoneyTree Report released today.

Compared with the previous quarter, VC funding was off nearly 12 percent and the deal count was down almost 15 percent. Venture firms invested $6.7 billion in 1,013 deals in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

1. Your significant other's support is hugely important. They can hold you up or pull you down.

2. Building a powerful business network is 100 percent essential. Much of your business will come from being known.

3. This job is really, really hard, and you just won't know the answers some days.

Do you talk to your customers? I mean that literally. If a customer tries to reach you by telephone, will you take the call with a minimum of hassle and fuss, or will you route them through voice mail, not publish your number on your website and otherwise make it difficult for them to connect with a human voice?

I would suggest that for the health of your business, you make sure someone personally answers that ringing phone.

No matter how much technology we throw at it, the diabetes epidemic just won’t budge. Today, 8.3% of the U.S. population has the disease--a problem that cost the country $245 billion in 2012 alone. That hasn’t stopped individuals and organizations from imagining solutions.

For the past few years, drugmaker Sanofi US has run the $100,000 Data Design Diabetes challenge, a call for entrants to design data-driven diabetes solutions. This isn’t a challenge for flash in the pan ideas that disappear soon after winning. Past competitions have yielded successful initiatives like Ginger.io, a behavioral health analytics startup that recently raised $6.5 million.

Richard Bendis will speak at the Translational Research Forum during the 2013 BIO International Convention in Chicago. During the forum, speakers will address issues with current translational research models, explore new funding and collaboration opportunities, evaluate how to apply them to federal, academic, and private institutions. The session will take place Monday, April 22, from 4:35 p.m. – 5:25 p.m.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

You know the feeling.

Some people tell you you’re crazy.

Some tell you that you shouldn’t do it. I mean, whatever will people think of you?

But, to every entrepreneur, the desire remains. The desire to follow the idea, to see it sprout.

A little more than a year ago the American Heart Association launched an accelerator to fund biotechnolgy and medical device startups to fill a crucial gap in research funding caused by the increasing hesitance of investors to risk support on early-stage innovation. Now, it’s getting ready for a $2 million fundraising round to invest in two companies by the end of the year. It’s also working with sister organizations and mission-driven investment organizations to identify areas of common interest.

In a phone interview with MedCity News, Ross Tonkens, the director of the Science & Technology Accelerator, and Major Gifts Officer Mark Germano said they’re forming a group of donors who can provide expertise to screen applications. These donors have investment backgrounds steeped in biotechnology, drug development and medical devices. They also have expertise in legal issues, commercialization, IP, regulatory, clinical trial design and conduct issues. In a lot of cases, these are people who have had personal or close contact with people who have had cardiovascular disease or a stroke and want to see things move from the (lab) bench to bedside.

What talented people want has changed. They used to want high salaries to verify their value and stable career paths to allow them to sleep well at night. Now they want purposeful work and jobs that fit clearly into the larger context of their career. And that means they want jobs that are sensible parts of an ongoing journey through a series of professional endeavors — not some supposedly linear path toward "success".

The difficulty is that companies haven't quite figured out how to provide this. In fact, for all its accomplishments, business in the 21st century has a dirty little secret: Statistically speaking, companies aren't sure how to hire the right people.

If you want to give your kid every opportunity to succeed, it’s hard to argue with teaching them to code. Some of the wealthiest and most influential people of our time began programming young, and who wouldn’t want that kind of future for our kids?

Yesterday, we reviewed Hopscotch, an iPad app that teaches children the basics of any modern programming language. However, that’s just one of the many options out there. Here are six free tools to get kids excited about code. Whether she’s 5 or 15, and whether she wants to learn Ruby or Java, there’s something here just for her:

One market that has always seemed immune to disruption (as popularized by Clayton Christensen in the Innovator’s Dilemma) has been the market for money itself.

While all sorts of companies were being disrupted — by fledgling competitors introducing lesser-featured products no one really wanted — those who financed the disruptors gained most. Venture capitalists and investment bankers reaped the benefits when those fledgling companies’ innovative features finally moved into mainstream markets.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Post Office intercepted letters addressed to Sen. Roger Wicker (R–Miss.) and Pres. Barack Obama that contained a mysterious white powder. The substance turned out to be ricin, a deadly toxin that can kill within days. But just how dangerous were these attacks?

Since the Obama administration was first warned about the dangers of new ricin attacks in 2010, it has requested periodic updates on the white, powdery substance—from where it is being produced to the places it’s being shipped. In 2011 U.S. counterterrorism officials received word that al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen was making efforts to get large amounts of castor beans, the plant source from which the toxin is produced. That same year four American men—Frederick Thomas, Dan Roberts, Ray Adams and Samuel Crump—were arrested for plotting to poison hundreds with ricin as well as blow up government buildings.

A fire anywhere is cause for concern, but a fire at a fertilizer plant is a potential catastrophe.

That's because ammonium nitrate, a chemical commonly used in agricultural fertilizers, is a highly explosive compound, as shown by the massive fireball at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, Wednesday (April 17).

One of the quirks of academic science is that earning a graduate degree in science doesn’t necessarily prepare you for teaching, which is one of the principal things one does after earning a graduate degree in science. Graduate school is primarily about learning how to be a scientist—developing new ideas, designing experiments to test them, finding funding to support those experiments—and those tasks have very little to do with the process of undergraduate education, right?

We have the pleasure of presenting the Accelerating Entrepreneurship in Africa report compiled by the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic foundation established by Pierre Omidyar — the founder of eBay — in partnership with global strategy consulting film, Monitor Group. This epic 48-page report is the result of a three-phase research project launched in 2012 aimed to better understand the state of entrepreneurship in Africa.