Three months. 75 investors. US$650,000 raised. My company, Love With Food, graduated from 500 Startups’ accelerator program about a year ago and we raised US$650 000 in June of 2012. It was three painful months of fundraising. If you think fundraising was a piece of cake just because we were a 500 alum, think again. When I first began fundraising, all I heard was words of discouragement. Most told me the food space is hard and being a solo founder makes my path even more difficult. Fundraising is one of the most painful things I’ve done in my life. It’s physically exhausting and worst of all, it was mentally torturing. My mind started to play games with me, and every waking moment, I had to fight thoughts of being a failure and was at the brink of giving up countless times.

A startup called IntelligentM wants to make hospitals healthier by encouraging workers to clean their hands properly. Its solution is a bracelet that vibrates when the wearer has scrubbed sufficiently, giving employees a way to check their habits and letting employers know who is and isn’t doing things right.

Some 100,000 people a year in the United States alone die because of infections that arise from hospital visits, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a lot of these infections occur because doctors, nurses, and technicians don’t wash well enough. The problem has garnered more attention lately, in part because Medicare and other payers have stopped reimbursing hospitals for expenses related to treating hospital-acquired infections.

Maria Raquel Legaspi has been in Manitoba long enough to root herself. She’s a nursing resource coordinator at a local regional health authority and a cofounder of the Philippine Nurses Association of Manitoba. With her common-law husband, she opened a school for the Filipino martial art of Sikaran. And she’s acquired a local’s intimate knowledge of the weather. “If you don’t know how to dress, you get frostbite,” she says by telephone from her home in Winnipeg. “When you get the northern winds coming,” adding one of her frequent laughs, “hide!”

Everyone has an opinion about technology. Depending on whom you ask, it will either: a) Liberate us from the drudgery of everyday life, rescue us from disease and hardship, and enable the unimagined flourishing of human civilization; or b) Take away our jobs, leave us broke, purposeless, and miserable, and cause civilization as we know it to collapse.

Yes, we all need to heed our callings, follow our north stars, and not settle for a jobs, but pursue careers.

Thing is, during anyone's career, sometimes it gets weird--and getting weird can pay off. Over at Forbes, Jason Nazar gets it done.

(Warning: these practices may work for these people, but this writer takes no responsibility for the strangeness that may cause in your life. Although, as a lifelong advocate of eccentricity, I encourage you to try them on.)

Someday you will be able to ask your browser or smart phone open questions like "Where should I take my wife for a good movie and dinner?" Your browser would consult its intelligence of what you and she like and dislike, take into account your current location, and then suggest the right movies and restaurants. If you are the first to deliver this, your startup might be the next Google!

This has been a long-time dream of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who (really) invented the World Wide Web. He calls his dream the ‘Semantic Web’ (or Web 3.0), meaning it understands user context. He and many other experts believe that the Semantic Web will act more like a personal assistant than a search engine.

A European Commission initiative to tackle the 10 most burdensome regulations for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) received backing from EU heads of states and governments at a summit last Friday (15 March). The European Commission had asked around 1,000 SMEs and business organisations to identify the top 10 most burdensome EU laws in order to change or reduce them.

EU leaders have told the Commission to set out in June how it wants to reduce the burdens for SMEs. By the autumn, the EU executive will produce a list of unnecessary European rules that need to be reversed.

A video interview with Warren Buffett on the power of innovation has officially launched the start of the PYMNTS.com's The Innovation Project™ 2013, a two-day program to challenge the way the payments and its broader commerce ecosystem thinks, talks, delivers and ignites innovation. Buffett sat down with Business Wire CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz and offered his view on the current landscape of the payments industry and his optimism for the economic future in his keynote introduction to the program, held at Harvard University. Business Wire is owned by Berkshire Hathaway and a joint venture partner, along with Market Platform Dynamics (MPD) in PYMNTS.com.

Google has launched a £2m competition for non-profit organisations to help them develop technology-related projects with social benefits, which will be judged by web luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The Global Impact Challenge is designed to recognise organisations working with technology to try and solve issues affecting humanity, covering areas such as health, science or education.

I guess this was inevitable. Two things are always meant to collide — a startup journalist and a television show about startups. Dragons’ Den is a reality television show that features entrepreneurs from various sectors pitching their business ideas with the hopes of securing funding from a panel of venture capitalists (the dragons). The British version of the show is currently headed into its 11th season and somehow the products just keep getting more bizarre.

College kids, company employees, soccer moms, and stay-at-home moms do one thing when they turn on their computers (or smartphones) — log into their Facebook account and start liking and sharing everything their friends have published. This has sort of become a routine for most of us. It has in turn changed the world of marketing altogether. While a few years ago everyone was focusing on targeted ads through advertising networks as Google Adsense, they are now turning to social media.

One key to beating the competition is to adopt a strategy that sets your business apart. It’s important, now more than ever, that business people be aware of how competitors are marketing, hiring, protecting their intellectual property, leveraging the social media wave, deploying leadership techniques and the full complement of techniques it takes to be successful in a highly competitive business landscape.

With graduate enrollment on a long, steady decline and undergraduate enrollment poised to move in the same direction, the board that oversees 17 state colleges and universities is embarking on a $1.2 million study that it hopes can help it reverse the trend.

Maguire Associates, a Concord, Mass., company, was hired last fall by the Connecticut Board of Regents for Higher Education to help the system not only attract students, but make sure they stay through graduation.

This article examines an experiment in open innovation applied to scientific research on Type 1 diabetes at Harvard Medical School. In the traditional research process in academic medicine, a single research team typically carries through each stage of the process—from generating the idea to carrying out the research and publishing the results. Harvard Catalyst, a pan-Harvard agency with a mission to speed biomedical research from the lab to patients’ bedsides, modified the traditional grant proposal process as an experiment in bringing greater openness into every stage of research.

'A lot has been said and written lately about the rise of social entrepreneurship. Not only does the world suffer from an increasing number of challenges that need solutions, it also seems that more and more people feel drawn to a career as a social entrepreneur.

While a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit, a social entrepreneur also measures positive returns to society and the wider environment. Social entrepreneurship is commonly associated with the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors but it does not necessarily exclude for-profit business objectives. Common initiatives include community interest activities, social engagement and education, micro credits, cooperative farming, business development, supporting arts or vocational training.

We've seen digital technology disintermediate everything from record companies to university curriculum. Yet banking has remained rather immune to all this disruption.

Sure, ATMs and online banking may threaten the bank teller's union, but central banking's monopoly over money has hardly budged. Just like we have to get our food from real plants and animals, we have to get our money from real banks. Or at least it appears that way to most of us.

Royal Dutch Shell is making a significant push into venture capital investing and collaboration with early-stage startups in the energy space, said Marvin E. Odum, president of Shell Oil Co.

Andy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency “There’s never been more universities, individuals, small groups around the world, in China, all over the U.S., all over Europe, that we are directly investing in,” said Odum, speaking on stage at The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Friday.

If you are a VC who wants to track your investment peers or someone in biz dev looking to stay on top of deals made by certain investors or someone who needs to know what deals certain investors are making, you can set up a personalized feed to track these investors. It’ll take 27 seconds or less with the 4-steps shown below.

Example

You’d like to know any new investments made by the following six investors.

• Accel Partners 
• Sequoia Capital 
• Greylock 
• Andreessen Horowitz
• Kleiner Perkins 
• General Catalyst

A certain song has been running through my head the past few days. Lately, it strikes me as an anthem of sorts for biotech venture capital in 2013.

It’s Fleetwood Mac’s classic break-up song, “Go Your Own Way.”

Allow me to explain. Biotech venture capital has been going through a shakeout now for a couple years, which I’ve written about quite a bit. If you want to be charitable, there are maybe half as many venture firms investing in life sciences companies today as there were five to 10 years ago. There are maybe only a dozen firms left in the U.S. who can say with a straight face that they still are active investors in early-stage biotech startups. It may be harder now than it’s ever been to raise money for a new biotech idea.

Third Rock Ventures has spent the last six years betting big on early stage biotech investing when most other VC firms have been hunkering down or getting out of healthcare investing altogether. Now Third Rock has been rewarded with another $516 million to keep doing what it’s been doing.

The Boston and San Francisco-based firm, founded in 2007, said today it has raised its third fund, bringing its total assets under management to about $1.3 billion. The firm said this round was “oversubscribed” meaning that there wasn’t enough room to accommodate all the limited partners such as endowments and pensions who wanted a piece of the new fund.