Even with an exceptional idea, budding entrepreneurs can struggle to move past the brainstorming stages. They face challenges in execution like building a cohesive team, coming up with a business plan and even understanding how to present their product or service.

This week mentors on WSJ Startup of the Year, a documentary on WSJ.com, offered some words of inspiration for all entrepreneurs. Here’s what some science… read more

“The restless genius” (Wall Street Journal) Ray Kurzweil comes to Cal Performances’ Wheeler Auditorium on Saturday, April 13 at 8:00 p.m. He has been nicknamed the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison” by Forbes for making cutting-edge technological advances including the first flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano.

In addition to his… read more

In an article for CNN, inventor, futurist and author of five books, including one of Glenn Beck’s favorites, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Ray Kurzweil provided five staggering predictions as to what we could expect in the 2020s and 2030s, including among others major advancements in medicine and 3D printing.

Kurzweil developed the theory of the “Singularity” whereby he predicts that human intelligence and artificial intelligence… read more

A number of experts believe that Moore’s law is just a special case of a more profound principle stated by Theodore Wright in a 1936 paper, “Facts Affecting Costs of Airplanes.” Ray Kurzweil more recently restated Wright’s Law, as it came to be known, as “The Law of Accelerating Returns.”

They assert that “practice makes perfect” and there are “economies of production.” The power and economics… read more

This led one audience member to put the idea to Ms. Huffington that maybe the U.S. should become a third world country.

On the other side of the debate were the optimistic technologists, lead by the prolific inventor Ray Kurzweil, who points to the dramatically increasing price-performance of phones and computers, to assert that innovation in solar energy, battery storage (and other areas such as water… read more

No disrespect to the man who let there be electric light, but Ray Kurzweil is Thomas Alva Edison on steroids. That might not be evident on a visitor’s first trip to his Kurzweil Technologies, a sleek yet modest office in Wellesley Hills, which is rather ordinary looking for the headquarters of a futurist who’s striving to live forever.

Still, the 62-year-old inventor is aware of the Edison comparisons, and… read more

As advanced machine learning transitions from a primarily scientific pursuit to one with high industrial importance, Google’s bench is probably deepest.

Names it has lured from academia into full-time or part-time roles include Sebastian Thrun (who has worked on the company’s autonomous car project); Fernando Pereira, a onetime University of Pennsylvania computer scientist; Stanford’s Andrew Ng; and Singularity University boss Ray Kurzweil. [...]

Her is the first film Jonze has written himself, and it’s stunning. Set in a future Los Angeles, there was much chatter about artificial intelligence afterward in the Q&A, which Larry Ellison moderated.

Jonze mentioned Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who works at Google and who Mike Mills also cited when I interviewed him last week for Nowness, about a film he made about the future for SFMOMA. [...]