Olivia Fox Cabane makes her living by teaching people the skills needed to be charismatic, influential and persuasive. During her career, she’s been invited to speak at Harvard, MIT, Google and the United Nations. And through her new book, The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, Cabane wants to change the way you think about charisma.

While most people think charisma is so something you’re either born with it or you’re not, Cabane believes that charisma is nothing more than a set of attitudes, skills and behaviours that can not only be practiced and perfected, but can also be switched on and off when the need arises.

Have you heard of the Service Profit Chain? Several years ago I learned of this tremendous model at a seminar sponsored by Omnicom(NYSE: OMC), who purchased the company I founded, MarketStar Corporation.

Several distinguished Harvard professors created a theory in the 90s that they subsequently published in a book The Service Profit Chain – How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth To Loyalty, Satisfaction and Value (by Heskett, Jones, Loveman, Sasser and Schlesinger).

A few weeks ago, 32-year-old entrepreneur Wiley Cerilli sat down with his wife. He told her an email company, Constant Contact, wanted to acquire his two-year-old startup, Single Platform, for $100 million.

The couple came up with a list of things to buy and do if the deal went through:

• Get a new washer and dryer 
• Mount the TV 
• Buy new socks

When it comes to starting a business, there’s often some confusion about the process of business name registration. How are trade names and trademarks different? Does a trade name afford any legal branding protection? Can your trade name be the same as your trademark?

Simply put, a trade name is the official name under which a company does business. It is also known as a “doing business as” name, assumed name, or fictitious name. A trade name does not afford any brand name protection or provide you with unlimited rights for the use of that name. However, registering a trade name is an important step for some – but not all – businesses (more on this below).

It turns out JK Rowling was right after all: a café can be a very productive working environment. Just in case the Harry Potter books were not proof enough of this, along comes a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, which concludes that a moderate rather than low level of ambient noise "induces processing disfluency, which leads to abstract cognition and consequently enhances creativity".

As I drove south on a two-lane road in central Connecticut, raindrops began to blur my windshield, and I wondered if the farm workers I was scheduled to visit might be scurrying for shelter. My destination was Imperial Nurseries in Granby. It wasn’t the human workers I thought might be daunted by a little rain, but the prototype robots that were toiling in the nursery.

When I arrived in a distant part of the 350-acre spread, two squat robots were busily moving around young juniper shrubs in plastic pots. Charlie Grinnell, chief executive of Harvest Automation, the company that makes the machines, said, “If this turned into a downpour, we’d all be running for cover, but the robots would be fine.” Harvest was conducting a two-day field test of the robots at Imperial, which could eventually become a customer.

Ever since I was old enough to realize there would never be a want ad in a newspaper that described a job I wanted, I've loved working in cafes. I never really thought much about it until a few days ago when a baffled friend of mine asked why I was so into it.

His assumption? That working in a cafe would be a distraction. A distraction? Dude, quite the opposite.

And so, at the risk of trotting out a few half-baked conclusions that my non-cafe-going critics will have a field day trashing, here goes:

One of the strangest findings to emerge from the world of obesity science lately is that people who sleep less tend to weigh more. But until recently, we have been stifling our yawns and scratching our heads about why: Does lack of sleep alter our biology? Or does it affect our eating behavior? Now two brain-imaging reports suggest the answer is both.

The first study, published in March in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, looked at the effects of one night of no sleep. The second, published in April in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, tested the impact of nearly a week of more commonly experienced levels of sleep deprivation (four hours of sleep for six nights).

My friend Dan Pink asked me 5 questions about my new book for this post which appeared here on The Pink Blog.

My pal Saul Kaplan is a self-confessed innovation junkie. That’s all he seems to think, talk, and tweet about (with occasional detour for Boston sports teams.) He’s the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory in Providence and the proprietor of the most excellent annual conference of the same name.

Now he’s taken the wisdom he’s acquired over the years and turned it into a book about an urgent, but often overlooked, topic: Business models. In The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When the World is Changing (Buy it at Amazon, BN.com, or IndieBound), Kaplan outlines a set of principles that individuals and organizations can enlist to avoid getting steamrollered by competitors who do somewhat similar things but in distinctly different ways.

At least 68 “big” deals — investments of at least $2 million — have been done in digital health so far in 2012, according to a new report by the healthcare accelerator Rock Health. Nineteen states were in on the action.

Not so surprising, California lead the way in both the number of deals done and the overall investment. And traditional healthcare investing strongholds like Massachusetts were among those that did the most deals. But there were lesser known regions involved as well that invested significant dollars and did a notable number of deals, namely Texas, Illinois, Georgia and Connecticut.

It’s been ten years since I published – and a bit longer than that since I wrote – The Rise of the Creative Class. It would be an understatement to say that a lot has changed since then. We’ve see a whole series of world-shattering events—from the collapse of the tech bubble and 9/11, to the economic and financial meltdown of 2008, any one of which might have been sufficient to derail or reverse the changes in America’s class structure and the economic cultural and social trends I described in that book.

Instead, they have only become more deeply ensconced. At a time when the U.S. unemployment rate topped 10 percent, the rate of unemployment for the Creative Class did not hit even 5 percent. By late 2011, the social media site LinkedIn reported that the word most used by its members to describe themselves was "creative." As TechCrunch put it: "In a time of high unemployment, when traditional skills can be outsourced or automated, creative skills remain highly sought after and highly valuable. We all want to be part of the Creative Class of programmers, designers, and information workers. The term used to mean artists and writers. Today, it means job stability." The Creative Class has become truly global, numbering between one-third to nearly one-half of the workforce in the advanced nations of North America, Europe, Asia, and around the world.

The brain sees a qualitative difference between “small” objects—ones we usually pick up, such as paperclips or strawberries—and “large” objects—ones we use our bodies to interact with, such as chairs or cars. While researchers have previously identified brain regions that recognize specific objects like faces and letters, this discovery, published yesterday (June 21) in Neuron, is one of the first documented “rules” about how people interpret the world around them.

“This paper stands out in that it found a very large-scale organization that covers just about all the parts of the visual cortex that are responsive to shape of any kind,” said visual neuroscientist Ed Connor, director of the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study. “Instead of a finding of a small area of specialization, they are describing an overall organizing principle.”

In the past few months, QB3 has offered life science entrepreneurs a spread of new services. Among them, QB3 Startup in a Box, which provides everything you need—except for inspiration, hard work, and luck!—to turn an idea into a company. 

A key component of the Box is the QB3 SBIR workshop, which teaches entrepreneurs how to apply for federal SBIR grants. Shauna Farr-Jones, a grant writer and QB3 Innolab consultant, led the first session of the latest SBIR workshop at UCSF Mission Bay on Wednesday, June 20. Over 60 people registered.

The EU does not have enough entrepreneurs turning scientific breakthroughs into new products and services, writes MAIRE GEOGHEGAN-QUINN 

IN JULY, I will be announcing the last call for proposals worth €8 billion under the 7th EU Research and Technological F

ramework Programme 2007-2013: more commonly known by the acronym FP7. This is the largest publicly funded research programme in the world.

It financially supports research activities in a range of economic sectors, for example, in the fields of information and communications technology, energy, health, transport, agriculture and food, environmental services, advanced materials, industrial initiatives, nano-technology, bio-technology, security and space.

The day begins at Seattle’s new Surf Incubator as entrepreneurs trickle into work. They belong to around 30 startups, mostly without VC funding, who rent desks in the 8th floor, 15,400-square-foot office.

As they hunker down in the morning, they might get some help on finance or marketing issues from Surf’s partners. After lunch in the kitchen, they break for an educational event: a reading group on The Startup Owners Manual. Then, they pop into one of 11 meeting rooms for a quick conference.

A new study suggests that aspirin and other similar painkillers may help protect against skin cancer. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings indicate that skin cancer prevention may be added to the benefits of these commonly used medications.

Previous studies suggest that taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, which include aspirin, ibuprofen, and naproxen, as well as a variety of other nonprescription and prescription drugs, can decrease an individual’s risk of developing some types of cancer. Sigrún Alba Jóhannesdóttir, BSc, of Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, and her colleagues looked to see if the medications might decrease the risk of the three major types of skin cancer: basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and malignant melanoma.

If there is another massive layoff at Research In Motion, many in Waterloo are hoping that the technology cluster that has developed during the past five years would pick up the slack.

“I think we are in a better position now, as a technology cluster, to survive and to thrive than we were four or five years ago,” said Tim Ellis, chief executive of the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo, where many new startup technology companies are growing.

Although RIM has not made any announcement yet, the speculation that it could lay off somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 employees from its global workforce of 16,500 has people worried and talking.

The business community is reluctant to speculate on what it means.

“It is pretty hypothetical and I would prefer to see more information,” said John Jung, chief executive of Canada’s Technology Triangle, the region’s business development office.

Innovation and creation are at the heart of the biotech industry and close to the heart of international business development consultant Richard A. Bendis.

Bendis, 65, has devoted almost 40 years to helping enterprises grow, in both the public and private sector.

Most recently, Bendis was named CEO of the new regional effort to foster commercialization of federal and university laboratory innovations and increase access to early-stage funding for biotechs. BioHealth Innovation of Rockville is a nonprofit private-public partnership that leverages the resources of several biotechs and research institutions, including the University System of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., region.

Tom Kozel has been studying fungal meningitis for years.

It seemed like a rare disease until the Centers for Disease Control did some calculations and found it was killing about 500,000 people a year in Africa.

This prompted Kozel and his team at the University of Nevada, Reno to look at ways to change how the disease is diagnosed — and this research, in addition to saving lots of lives, provided a model that could be used to create jobs in Nevada, and brought royalty money back to the school.