An advisory committee urged U.S. securities regulators on Wednesday to relax outdated rules that trigger public financial reporting for companies, but it stopped short of backing a new capital-raising strategy known as "crowdfunding."

In a public meeting, members of the Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies voted on two proposed regulatory changes for the Securities and Exchange Commission to consider that would help private companies raise capital.

Governor Bobby Jindal announced today four economic development reforms he will pursue in the upcoming legislative session to make Louisiana more competitive than other states to secure economic development projects. The Louisiana Department of Economic Development estimates that these four proposals will generate at least 10,000 new direct and indirect jobs in the next five to ten years.

Governor Jindal said, “If our goal is to truly become the best place in the world to raise a family and start a career, then we must continue to make Louisiana more competitive with the rest of the country and the world. That’s why we’re proposing four new reforms to improve Louisiana’s business climate so that we not only compete with other states for economic development projects, but so we win and bring more new job opportunities here for our people.

AOL Venture, the venture capital arm of AOL, is one part early-stage investment firm and one part incubator of new and unique AOL products. The focus on seed and series A rounds is unusual among corporate investors, and founding partner Mike Brown, Jr. says it is because the fund is focused on helping entrepreneurs succeed early on and building AOL’s reputation in the early stage community. Though relatively young, AOL Ventures has already assembled an impressive portfolio of investments, including participation in rounds with startups like Bit.ly, About.me, OpenX and NewsCred.

A US-based start-up is planning to open thirty stores on the same date and at the same time, using crowdfunding to finance the rapid expansion, suggesting start-ups here can do the same.

New Perspectives Café, which offers unique food and beverages from around the world, will open 30 stores in the US at exactly the same time on April 16.

But rather than rely on the usual means of financing store openings, such as angel investors or bank loans, the company is choosing to use the increasingly popular method of crowdfunding.

The long-awaited and anticipated digital health accelerator “StartUp Health” has officially launched it’s Website and opened its doors in New York City.

The new initiative has the bold aim of cultivating over 1,000 digital health startups over the next ten years, which it hopes will generate more than 100,000 jobs.  StartUp Health is chaired by Jerry Levin, former Chairman of TimeWarner.  Levin’s co-founders, Steven H. Krein and Unity Stoakes, founded OrganizedWisdom together, which is a so-called “digital doctor’s office” and patient portal, among other ventures.

I’m sitting on my balcony on the ninth floor of a hotel overlooking Miami Beach thinking about motivation. Specifically, mine. I’m deep into writing the first draft of Startup Communities and – with Amy – decided to plant myself in a warm place for two weeks as I finished up this draft.

We got here late Monday night. Today is the first day I wrote any words on the book. I procrastinated as long as I could and finally opened up the doc in Scrivener and started writing after my run today. I pounded out a solid hour of writing before shifting gears, responding to some email, and writing a few blog posts. I know that I can only productively write for a max of four hours a day before my writing turns into total crap so I’ll be happy with another hour today. I’ll then consider myself fully in gear for four hours tomorrow.

Every organization, no matter how small, has one or more people who are quite simply obnoxious, and they drain energy from everyone and can strangle your company. Sometimes they are also intellectually brilliant, or closely related to the boss, so there is no easy way out.

In fact, they may even be the boss. So if you find this article taped to your desk, it may be time to look in the mirror. At any rate, if you are stuck working in an office, at least you deserve some clues on how to recognize the different types, and know it’s time to run:

“I knew that was going to happen.” This know-it-all has an answer for everything, and is proud to let you know, always after the fact, that they actually predicted ahead of time every calamity that has befallen the world and the office.

As a Davos novice, it was fascinating for me to observe how entrepreneurship was reflected in the Davos dialogue among the world's movers and shakers. Given that the term "entrepreneurship" has achieved cult status in policy speeches, I was disappointed at our leaders' superficiality and misconceptions, and its de facto low priority. That may sound surprising, and the Forum has indeed been working diligently in recent years to address this with sessions such as "Education-Entrepreneurship-Employment," "Innovation Ecosystems 2.0," and "Fostering Entrepreneurship Ecosystems," but it will take time -- and maybe more, to elevate entrepreneurship to its rightful status alongside the environment and corporate governance.

On the face of it, these people may not have much in common, but they all topped Lemelson-MIT’s 2012 list of great innovators, with names that will go down in history (and occasionally, infamy). So what exactly unites these revolutionary thinkers?

We’ve been talking about innovation a lot in the lead-up to our 2012 Innovation Awards on February 23rd, and while approaches and implementation differ wildly, one point that keeps arising is that Innovation is all about people, about those brave souls with the gumption to push a wild idea through to completion.

Finding the people with the right skills is a major challenge for any business, so how do you spot these people, and how do you harness their ideas?

Are you a woman entrepreneur with big plans and the passion and vision to grow your company?

Do you know a woman entrepreneur on her way to creating a market-leading company?

The fifth annual Ernst & Young Entrepreneurial Winning Women Program is a national competition and executive leadership program that identifies a select group of high-potential women entrepreneurs whose businesses show real potential to scale — and then helps them do it.

Many large corporations talk of transforming themselves to embrace open innovation, and opening up to external ideas.  But grand strategic statements and new corporate PowerPoint slides do not change the capabilities of an organisation.  The implementation of a more open approach rests also on the development of specific skills among individual employees. Research has identified what some of these skills are, and shown that these can be internally developed or accessed via various intermediary organisations.  Much of this research on open innovation has focused on the ways in which corporations - predominantly large multinationals -  have transformed themselves, or are attempting to do so.  However, there is much less discussion on the ways in which one particular type of open innovation partner - universities - also need to develop new capabilities.

It’s that time of year when I get about 2-3 weekly requests to meet for “coffee” with current students or recent grads who want to get into venture capital. I’ve found myself giving the same advice time and time again (as have others), so I decided to write a quick post with a few words of guidance.

#1. Build an orthogonal network. The value of a junior person at a venture firm is that he/she often has an orthogonal (meaning, in this case, non-redundant) network, compared to the aggregate of the firm. Unless a partner is looking for someone to simply execute on his/her own deal flow (which can be the case), that partner is really looking for someone who can bring in net new deals.

In a spare bedroom of his family's house in County Cork, Ireland, Cathal Garvey is repeating the feats that led to the dawn of the biotechnology age. He's growing bacteria. He's adding DNA. He's seeing what happens.

"To transform bacteria was once a huge deal, a new method," he explains. "Today, you can do it with Epsom salt and an over-the-counter brand of laxatives."

Garvey, who is 26, dropped out of a PhD program at a big cancer lab two years ago. Instead of giving up on science, however, he started doing it on his own, spending $4,000 to equip a laboratory in his parent's house. As a member of the "do-it-yourself" biology movement, Garvey takes inspiration from the early days of hobby computers, when garage tinkerers spawned companies like Apple and the rest of the PC industry. The idea now is that anyone—not only big-budget academic labs or large companies—should be able to practice biotechnology.

You may believe tech creates jobs, you may believe it destroys jobs.

Whatever the case, we know that in the tech world we are seeing entrepreneurial activity like never before. It’s not surprising that there is so much written about venture capital and startups in the tech world, and that there are so many incubators popping up.

Enter AngelHub.

Launched in September of last year, AngelHub connects early stage investors with capital seekers. The funds, expertise and networks of its group of angel investors and founders, aim to create an environment that is conducive to sustainable entrepreneurial success.

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai has nothing against the tech pioneers who started sending one another messages over the Arpanet — the Internet's predecessor — in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He just asserts that he was the first person to build an e-mail system that would evolve into the type of e-mail we use today, with fields for the sender and recipient, subject lines, and that devious BCC field. Last year, Time referred to Shiva as "the man who invented e-mail."

And today, Shiva, an MIT professor, is in Washington to donate the original code for his e-mail system to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Shiva started building the e-mail system at Newark's University of Medicine and Dentistry when he was just 14, in 1978. He copyrighted the term "EMAIL" in 1982, shortly after he'd started attending MIT as an undergrad.

It might not seem like it, but a huge amount of work goes into that little tiny search bar in the corner of your browser. Google employs literally thousands of people to make sure all its other services are working properly, too.

So, how do they get it done?

Edmond Lau, an ex-Google search technician, detailed the whole setup in a post on Quora. It's a pretty hefty setup.

Steve Jobs was a man who when he returned to rescue Apple in 1997, had a clear vision of the problem and a clear a vision for the market.  He understood our shrinking attention spans and the fact that you have seconds to get your audiences attention. He reignited a company around a simple idea — think different. And it worked.  With a lot of hard-work, blood-sweat and man-hours…it worked.

He had the guts to make it work.

In “12 Ways To Be Like Steve Jobs,” Laurel Delaney asks:

“Is it possible to integrate his brilliance into our work ethic?”

A Gaithersburg biotech that’s developing regenerative therapies for wound care has continued to broaden its scope by acquiring a North Carolina company focused on stem cell treatments for stroke and other conditions.

In an all-stock transaction, publicly traded Cytomedix agreed last week to pay $16 million — and up to $40 million, if certain milestones are achieved — for privately held Aldagen of Durham, N.C. As part of the deal, Aldagen investors bought $5 million of Cytomedix common stock in a private placement.

Area residents with ideas that could lead to a new business could win assistance to help move their idea forward. The Central Region Innovation and Commercialization Center is accepting applications for the 2012 “Buck$ for Bright Ideas” competition through April 18.

“Buck$ for Bright Ideas” is a publicly funded program that encourages residents in the region to act on their ideas. Applicants must reside in one of the 26 counties of the Central Region or be a full-time student at a college or university within the region. The Central Region includes the following counties: Daviess, McLean, Ohio, Hancock, Butler, Logan, Simpson, Warren, Allen, Barren, Edmonson, Grayson, Breckinridge, Meade, Hardin, Nelson, Washington, Hart, LaRue, Marion, Green, Taylor, Metcalfe, Adair, Cumberland and Monroe.

Attracting and retaining the world’s brightest students is on the mind of every university official. But a new, unprecedented study in the journal Science suggests leaders in higher education face an understated, even more pressing challenge: the retention of professors.

The good news, said Deborah Kaminski of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who led the study, is that men and women faculty in the areas of science, technology, and engineering are being retained at the same rate. The one exception is in mathematics departments, where women faculty depart their jobs significantly sooner than men.