Over seven years as a Cincinnati journalist, Laura Baverman covered lots of stuff, but mostly startups and entrepreneurship, retail, urban development and real estate. In October 2012, she left her job as a columnist, blogger and business reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer, got married and moved to Raleigh, N.C. She currently writes regular columns for UPStart and USA Today.
Some may have been doubted whether a pair of Raleigh entrepreneurs could pull off a national-in-scope bitcoin event, but this morning's announcement that Edmund Moy, former director of the U.S. Mint and a vocal supporter of the currency globally, will headline the August 15-16 conference should put to rest any skepticism.
The Triangle is about to get some pretty major national and global attention.
Moy is one of the highest profile economic leaders to express support and hope for the currency, and this will be his first public speaking engagement on the topic. In a December 2013 blog post published on Money News, he wrote that digital currency promises a cheaper, more secure and efficient way to transact money. That means no more currency wars, exchange rate challenges and arbitrage.
“There could be less friction and more transparency for every transaction,” he wrote. --Read On
If you watched the opening ceremonies of the 2014 FIFA World Cup on June 12, then you couldn't have missed the seemingly miraculous moment when a paraplegic wearing a robotic suit kicked the first soccer ball of one of the world's most anticipated sporting events.
It was the first time a paraplegic person has walked on his own using a device controlled entirely with his own brain, and in the days since, it's given hope to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world confined to wheelchairs.
The feat hits close to home for the Triangle. Much of the innovation, science and technology behind that momentous walk and kick happened in a lab at Duke University and under the tutelage of a professor and neuroscientist named Miguel Nicolelis. When his homeland of Brazil won its bid to host the 2014 World Cup in 2008, he pledged to showcase his 25 years of work to the world. And that he did.
Below are two really cool videos explaining his mission and work. The first announces his World Cup ambitions and the work of his Walk Again Project, a global consortium he formed to assist his efforts. The second is a talk he gave at the TEDMED conference in Washington D.C. in 2012.
When Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann visited the Fortune Magazine newsroom several years back, managing editor Andy Serwer remembers the pitch being pretty peculiar.
"Imagine you had a collection of forks..." Silbermann said and Serwer recounted during an interview last week at UNC's Journalism School.
That was long before Silbermann built a $5B valuation social media platform that now impacts even the business of Fortune. But the story is an example of the unique experiences Serwer has collected over 30 years at the magazine, the last eight of which running the newsroom.
ExitEvent intern Sarah Headley was selected as one of three journalism students to interview Serwer last week, and the insightful discussion covered everything from startup founders, to women in journalism, to the changing business of media (and changes in business in general).
Some may have been doubted whether a pair of Raleigh entrepreneurs