The hugely popular crowd-sourced funding website Kickstarter is planning to officially launch in the U.K. later this year, it announced on its Twitter feed Monday.

"People in the U.K. will be able to launch projects on Kickstarter starting this autumn! More info soon!," Kickstarter said.

Those in the U.K. can already set up Kickstarter fundraising projects, but they need to have a U.S. bank account to do so. Meanwhile, U.K. startups already have a number of local alternatives to Kickstarter, such as the fundraising platform Crowdfunder and the newly launched Seedrs.

President Barack Obama has one. Comedian Stephen Colbert has one. Elvis Presley has one. Even computer software magnate Bill Gates has one. And now, Bob Marley–the late popular Jamaican singer and guitarist–also has one. So what is it that each of these luminaries have? The answer: they each have a biological species that has been named after them.

Paul Sikkel, an assistant professor of marine ecology and a field marine biologist at Arkansas State University, discovered and just named after Marley a “gnathiid isopod”–a small parasitic crustacean blood feeder that infests certain fish that inhabit the coral reefs of the shallow eastern Caribbean. Sikkel named the species Gnathia marleyi.

Cities like Omaha, Des Moines, and Kansas City have long been great places for American business and agricultural and commodities fortunes to be built, but today's entrepreneurs are working with software and digital tech, not cattle and corn.

Traveling across America, running sales and marketing for Truist, a social responsibility-powering tech company, Jeff Slobotski regularly visited the country’s startup hubs. Slobotski, intrigued by his experiences, began chronicling his travels on a personal blog. But in 2008, he took another look his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, and the surrounding Midwestern region. He was impressed by the burgeoning startup scene in his own backyard. "It is this incredible hidden gem," Slobotski says with joy. Inspired, he created a new site to exclusively cover startups in Omaha and the Midwest--Silicon Prairie News was born.

It’s time to transform the focus, mission, and rhetoric of liberal arts and combine its focus on cross-disciplinary critical thinking with real world experience. Here’s one proposal.

Nearly 50% of students today leave college without earning a degree. The data suggests students drop out from lack of funds, interest, mentorship, and real world relevance. Even at elite private universities where student completion rates soar to over 90%, everyone is in reform mode, trying to find the best education students need for the complex, fast-action webby world they are inheriting. Some want to argue that online course offerings (including those offered free by universities like MIT, Harvard, or Carnegie Mellon) are the answer. Well-constructed online courses do work exceptionally well in certain fields, especially technical ones that yield to individualized, challenge-based learning. But skills-acquisition is no substitute for a college degree. Just ask companies like Google and Apple. They may pick the cream of online student crop for by-the-job, outsourced tasks that come without benefits or job security, but typically they do not look at those with online diplomas for future innovative corporate leaders.

On Monday (July 9) President Barack Obama signed the US Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (S. 3187) into law, reauthorizing user fees that the FDA charges pharmaceutical and device manufacturers as they gain approval for their products.

The law also establishes a new user fee program—raised as part of Obama’s newly-legitimized health care legislation—that will require companies making generic versions of protein-based drugs, or biologics, called biosimilars, to pay upon approval of their generic products. The newly signed law also makes several changes to FDA policy meant to speed the approval process for drugs and devices, enacts changes aimed to increase the safety of the drug supply chain, and incentivizes the development of new antibiotics.

When it comes to getting a job, your résumé can be the difference between being hired and being passed over. While there is no simple formula for your résumé that will help you get the job for which you are applying, making a mistake is a surefire way to lose out on the position. 

If you unfortunately are passed over for a job, at least you can take solace in the fact that you did not make one of the mistakes listed in a poll of 2,298 hiring managers conducted by CareerBuilder.  Some of the most egregious mistakes include: 

There's a power struggle underway in Silicon Valley. At stake: Power itself.

One of the most influential venture-capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz, is turning the usual rules of start-up investing on its head as it's telling entrepreneurs it prefers situations where the founders, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, have controlling stakes. Spencer Ante reports. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Over the past two years, one of the most influential venture-capital firms has turned the usual rules of start-up investing on its head. Andreessen Horowitz is telling entrepreneurs it prefers situations where the founders have controlling stakes, reckoning that they'll be better able to resist outside distraction and focus on making great products.

The firm—which controls a $2.7 billion war chest and invested in Facebook Inc., FB -2.92% Zynga Inc. ZNGA -1.80% and Groupon Inc., GRPN -6.20% —has naturally won support from entrepreneurs. One of its champions includes Jason Goldberg, the co-founder and CEO of online design retailer Fab.com Inc., which raised $40 million in an investing round led by Andreessen in December.

Healthcare IT has become a new priority for East Coast accelerator DreamIt Ventures with the hire of a veteran angel investor group director.

Karen Griffith Gryga recently joined the accelerator’s Philadelphia office. Earlier this year it added a minority-led business component and started a program to work with startups based in Israel.

She has worked as executive director of Mid-Atlantic Angel Group, which has invested in life science and technology companies.

Communitech today announced the first cohort of companies participating in HYPERDRIVE, its $30 million startup incubator, which includes seven diverse, rising-star startups ready for prime time. HYPERDRIVE was introduced only 10 weeks ago and has already seen significant interest from funders and partners. The announcement will be highlighted at a HYPERDRIVE kick-off event today at The Communitech Hub.

"HYPERDRIVE is an excellent example of the kind of innovative ideas we have here in southern Ontario," said the Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario). "It is these types of creative partnerships that will position our regions start-up businesses for success, leading to jobs, growth and long-term prosperity for our people and our communities."

Getting from Washington, D.C., and Baltimore to New York City could get a lot easier and quicker under a plan unveiled Monday by rail operator Amtrak.

Amtrak is proposing to build a six-track, high-speed rail station under Union Station in Washington. The addition is aimed at increasing the rail station's capacity and could lay the groundwork for a 94-minute commute from the nation's capital to the Big Apple by 2030.

If you’re currently pursuing your MBA, chances are that you hope to one day be in a position of managing your own team within a business environment. Or, you may have a goal to open your own business at some point. But as you work toward upper level management, it’s important to take into consideration all of the qualities that go into making an effective manager. In today’s ever-increasingly cutthroat work environment, a common notion among employees and bosses alike tends to be, “he who works latest works best.” And while it seems that the 40-hour work week has been largely dispensed with in our hardworking culture, new studies show that working more very seldom produces better results. Employees work many more hours now than they have in the past, but it’s coming at the expense of health, happiness, and even productivity. While it looks good to be the first to arrive and the last to leave work each day, it turns out that putting in 60 hours of work each week may do more harm than good in achieving end results. This infographic examines some of the lesser-known statistics regarding overtime work and its effects, and through it one thing becomes extremely clear: To boost productivity and foster excellent employees, the best thing businesses can do is to bring back the 40-hour work week.

Inc.'s Jeff Haden recently published an article, How the Rich Got Rich, and examined an annual IRS report, 400 Individual Tax Returns Reporting The Largest Adjusted Gross Incomes.

According to the IRS report, here's how the top 400 made their fortunes (their average earnings in 2009 were $202.4 million): Wages and salaries:  8.6% Interest: 6.6% Dividends: 13% Partnerships and corporations:  19.9% Capital gains: 45.8%

Although every startup is unique, there are certain common avoidable mistakes that can lead to legal complications which jeopardize the long-term success of the business. I’m not suggesting that every startup needs a lawyer, but you should definitely pay attention, and not be afraid to consult legal counsel if any of these raise qualms for you.

Like other environments, most legal issues don’t result from fraud, but from ignorance on specific requirements, or simply never getting around to doing the things that common sense would tell you to do. Here are five of the most common examples:

Like many I read the headlines about Pinterest moving from Palo Alto to San Francisco and thought about the trend it portends.

For those not familiar with the local geography, Palo Alto is the north end of what most consider “Silicon Valley” although nobody local calls it that. Palo Also is about 35 miles south of San Francisco.

Palo Alto is home to Stanford. It is the birthplace of Hewlett Packard. And Facebook. It is adjacent to Mountain View, home to Google. Further to the south are the legendary companies of Cisco, Apple, Intel, eBay, Yahoo!, Juniper and countless others.

"For all its current economic woes,” the Economist magazine recently asserted, “America remains a beacon of entrepreneurialism.” That idea is at the heart of America’s self-image. Both parties celebrate entrepreneurial small business as the fount of innovation and growth. Even if America no longer manufactures its own smartphones or computers, we cling to the idea that American entrepreneurs invent most of the new products and services that matter to the world.

Americans also view entrepreneurialism as a vital route to upward mobility—a way for average people to build wealth, in the form of a business venture that can be passed on to one’s children or sold upon retirement. Whether it’s the family farm or the local diner, small businesses have traditionally provided citizens not only with income but also with a place to teach kids the value of responsibility and hard work.

The debate over the proper balance between taxing and spending has been raging in Congress, on the presidential campaign trail and in statehouses around the country, and no two states have settled it more differently this year than Maryland and Kansas, whose fiscal years began July 1.

Maryland, a state controlled by Democrats that has a pristine credit rating, raised income taxes on its top earners this year to preserve services and spending on its well-regarded schools — leading some business groups to warn that the state might become less competitive. Kansas, controlled by Republicans, decided to try to spur its economy with an income tax cut — which Moody’s Investors Service, the ratings agency, recently warned would lead to “dramatic revenue loss” and deficits that would probably require more spending cuts in the coming years.

Whether it’s 10% of your brain or 10% of your potential or no known percentage at all, most of us live without tapping into everything that we have. And for the independent minded small business owner that usually means there’s a team that could help us pursue a new project or develop a new portion of the business — if we knew how to tap into them.

Team Building Always Comes Back To Communication

What are you saying to your team? What is your team saying to you? To be effective you have to get clear about what you really want from your team and who they really are. Are they right for the job you’re giving them?

One of the stranger articles Inc. magazine ever ran was a 2002 piece about the neuroscience of innovation. Actually, it wasn’t really about innovation as much as where and how innovators get their ideas. Only it wasn’t that either. It was really about what kind of peculiar mind-hacks top innovators use to come up with their ideas and—the strange part—it opens with a discussion of inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s employment of lucid dreaming to solve vexing engineering problems.

Here’s a bit of the story:

Every evening before bed, Kurzweil plucks out a vexing problem — perhaps a business strategy, a technical conundrum, or even an interpersonal issue. First he posits the characteristics of a potential solution. Take, for example, the extraskeletal walking system for paraplegics that he’s considering developing. He wants it to be simple enough for a user to put on without help. Lying in bed, Kurzweil begins to fantasize about such a system, sometimes imagining that he’s giving a speech about how he reached his conclusions. “This has the purpose of seeding your subconscious to influence your dreams,” he says. Then he drifts off to sleep.

Are American workers losing their jobs to machines?

That was the question posed by Race Against the Machine, an influential e-book published last October by MIT business school researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The pair looked at troubling U.S. employment numbers—which have declined since the recession of 2008-2009 even as economic output has risen—and concluded that computer technology was partly to blame.

Advances in hardware and software mean it's possible to automate more white-collar jobs, and to do so more quickly than in the past. Think of the airline staffers whose job checking in passengers has been taken by self-service kiosks. While more productivity is a positive, wealth is becoming more concentrated, and more middle-class workers are getting left behind.

Northern Brooklyn is prepared to be recognized for more than its hipsters and artisanal foodstuffs. A coalition of business groups is launching a campaign to transform the triangle including Dumbo, Downtown Brooklyn, and the Navy Yard into a mecca for the technology and creative economy. The Brooklyn Technology Triangle coalition sent out a request for proposals today for master plans involving public policy, transportation, economic development and placemaking solutions to cement the triangle's position as a locale for high-tech growth.

The main goal of the coalition's requested proposal is to better link Dumbo, DoBro, and the Navy Yard through physical improvements. These improvements can include things like roadways, bike paths, and a series of inter-connected parks, or even connective retail corridors. They can also include aesthetic connectors like public art or consistent lighting and urban design principles. Of course, real estate is a big component of any possible plans. Suggestions for productive changes in zoning regulations will be welcomed.