The Nebraska Department of Economic Development has outlined implementation steps for the new Angel Investment Tax Credit Program.

Investors can start applying for certification to be eligible for a 35 percent to 40 percent refundable state income tax credit for investment in certified Nebraska startups. The bill goes into effect Sept. 1.

The Angel Investment Tax Credit Program is part of the Talent and Innovation Initiative supported by Gov. Dave Heineman and approved by the Legislature this year. The package of bills aims to improve the state's economic climate for entrepreneurs, inventors and small businesses and as the governor has said, "put a laser-like focus on growing Nebraska's innovation economy,"

After a decade’s lull, the IPO is back, stoking dreams of entrepreneurs looking to cash out. Yes, dramatic market swings have changed some game plans recently, but in the first two quarters of 2011, 79 companies issued initial public offerings generating $24.3 billion, more than double the amount raised in the same period last year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Often overlooked by newbies: By the time a company is ready to go public, the founders usually have diluted their personal ownership stakes considerably through previous financing rounds.

It is not uncommon for angel investors and venture capitalists to seek up to 40 percent of a startup’s equity each time entrepreneurs raise capital. Over the course of multiple rounds, total ownership by outside investors can climb to 75 percent. At the same time, to keep employees excited, another 20 percent of shares have to be set aside for an options pool on an undiluted basis. The combination of new investors and an expanded options pool is a double whammy, reducing the ownership of founders (and previous investors) even more. By the time the company is close to listing, founders will be lucky to retain five percent to 10 percent of the equity.

What were you doing at 16 years old? Chances are you weren’t speaking in front of a group at a former US President’s Global Initiative, trying to raise half a million dollars in funding or cramming 4 years of high school into 2. But these things are exactly what Zak Kukoff of TruantToday is doing.

As a recent graduate of the grueling TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado, Kukoff has formed some incredibly actionable pieces of advice that apply to any entrepreneur, not just ones that haven’t yet gotten a driver’s license. I had the chance to talk with Kukoff for TNW Sessions (listen in to the interview here) and when we were done I asked him to share with us 5 things that you can start doing today to make you a better entrepreneur.

Jackson, Miss. (August 11, 2011) – Yesterday, August 10, the Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) and the Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) hosted a Creative Economy Summit at the Jackson Convention Center in downtown Jackson, Miss. At the event, Governor Haley Barbour and officials from MDA and MAC introduced and rolled out a new study of Mississippi’s creative economy.

The two agencies commissioned the study in order to better understand the people, enterprises and organizations that comprise this key sector in the state and to gauge the impact the creative economy has on the state’s overall economy. The study also provides suggested next steps for further growing the creative economy in Mississippi.

A Boston company wants to offer people free access to a communal broadband network if a user pays for about $300 in equipment, according to an interesting summary over at Stop the Cap. The site profiled NetBlazr, which hopes to deliver free broadband with speeds of up to 60 Mbps to companies that will share that access with others in range while turning over management of the gear to NetBlazr. From the post:

NetBlazr starts with gigabit fiber from Cogent Communications, and then delivers free or low-cost access to any customer willing to do two things:

Spend $299 for the basic installation kit, which includes a high-speed router, three antennas, and some cabling; Use the included equipment to receive service from NetBlazr and agree to share it with anyone in range of the wireless antennas included in the kit.

The Huffington Post has come across this fascinating five-minute interview of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s Palo Alto office in June 2005. The clip is apparently part of a longer 40-minute-interview from a documentary about millennials shot by Ray Hafner and Derek Franzese.  That interview has never been shown in full, and if I were Hafner and Franzese I’d be figuring out a way to do that stat, especially post-The Social Network.

Zuckerberg’s initial vision, “an online directory for colleges” seems remarkably short-sighted in light of the fact that Facebook users comprise now 11% of the world’s population and 35% of the world’s online population. In retrospect Zuckerberg may have wanted to put the fratty red beer cup down (Fun fact: He had just turned 21, also that’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz doing a keg stand).

We hear the word innovation a lot. When I hear it, my mind often jumps to technology or creative businesses or something big. But when I really think about it, there are many simple ways for small businesses to innovate. We can innovate by updating the way that we see things. We can innovate by using new technology to accomplish old jobs. We can also innovate by seeing our business, department or team from a different angle and working that new perspective into your company.

Every week I check out what some of our Small Business Trends experts have to say over at American Express OPEN Forum. And this week innovation has caught my eye – again.

AMHERST - The University of Massachusetts system largely avoided immediate spending cuts that accompanied passage of the debt-ceiling compromise in Washington last week, school officials said Monday.

But the university might not be so lucky come the next round of budget cuts, officials said, noting that UMass is highly reliant on federal money to fund the $489 million in scientific research it conducts annually.

That sentiment reflects the uncertainty that follows the resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis in Washington last week. University officials and budget analysts said Congress has yet to identify specific cuts in discretionary spending.

The New Age of high-growth women entrepreneurs is about to transform economies across the globe and create millions of jobs.

If this sounds like a grand statement, it is not, from listening to Sharon Vosmek. As CEO of Astia, the premier venture accelerator for women-led high growth companies, Vosmek is passionate that women entrepreneurs will create the next high-growth firms, and pull the global economy out of the doldrums. Literally.

Vosmek points to the data. It is underpinning Vosmek’s crusade to take women-led high-growth entrepreneurship global and to next scale. It is compelling. Data shows that if women CEOs had the same access to capital as male CEOs, six million jobs would be added to the economy in five years; two million in year one alone.

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have identified a gene for endurance, or more precisely, a negative regulator of it. Not having the gene relates to greater endurance in the knockout mice that were studied. The investigators also showed that the gene is linked to Olympic-level athletes in endurance sports such as swimming compared to athletes in sprint sports such as the 100-meter dash. The study appears online this week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The work has implications for improving muscle performance in disease states including metabolic disorders, obesity, and aging.

“We have shown that mice lacking the gene run six times longer than control mice and that the fatigable muscles of the mouse — the fast muscle in the front of the leg — have been reprogrammed and are now fatigue-resistant,” explains senior author Tejvir S. Khurana, MD, PhD, professor of Physiology and member of the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute. “This has wide ramifications for various aspects of muscle biology ranging from athletics to treating muscle and metabolic diseases.”

Dear Colleagues and Friends of Puerto Rico,

My name is Mariano Garcia-Blanco.  I am a Puerto Rican scientist, Professor at Duke University School of Medicine, and Trustee of the Puerto Rico Trust for Science, Technology and Research (the Trust). I write to you as a concerned citizen because today, in my view, the Trust is under siege by elements within the current Government of Puerto Rico and I need your help to save the Trust.

The Trust was created to guide the development of an economic sector or sectors known as the ‘knowledge economy’, which is globally competitive, is based on technology, and promises high quality jobs.  The vision is that this development would complement existing economic engines and would significantly improve the economy of the archipelago.  Some positive effects will be felt in the short term, but the greatest promise is for sustained economic health in the long term.  Central to this long-term solution is stable governance, which was explicitly and implicitly provided for in the law that created the Trust.  Essential for stable governance is autonomy from the government and its political volatility.

The Detroit Creative Corridor Center’s (the “DC3”) core task is to develop, implement and manage the creative economy initiative (the “Initiative”). The Initiative is the strategic plan to grow Detroit’s creative economy, with a concentrated effort around cultivating creative density in Detroit’s Creative Corridor, defined as the area encompassing Downtown, Midtown and New Center Detroit. It will accomplish this through a series of partnerships and targeted interventions whose combined efforts will position Detroit as a global center of creative innovation.

When discoveries from academic labs are developed into a blockbuster drug, universities often rake in big dollars from licensing revenue. With the translation of its life sciences research into commercial applications in mind, Harvard aims to put more financial muscle behind its 4-year-old Accelerator Fund, Xconomy's Greg Huang reports.

Huang got the scoop on Harvard's plans to raise $20 million to $30 million for the fund from the two bigwigs behind the effort: tech transfer legend Isaac Kohlberg, who serves as the Ivy League school's tech development head and senior associate provost, and Curtis Keith, the scientific chief of the Accelerator Fund and a co-founder of drug developer CombinatoRx (now called Zalicus). Kohlberg says the 5-year goal of the program is to have up to two drugs stemming from Harvard research enter clinical trials and for a start-up advancing Harvard technology to be in talks with a potential buyer.

We need innovators to restart the jobs engine. With their bold new ideas, entrepreneurs and next-generation leaders are our best hope for scaling high-growth businesses. If we want more jobs, we need more Steve Jobs.

But Uncle Sam doesn’t seem to get it. Old man Washington wages partisan war, disregarding his own house on fire with unemployment. Today only 58 percent of the population is working, the lowest number in nearly three decades. And 46 million Americans are on food stamps, a national record.

Luke Fishback is a smart guy. After graduating college with an engineering degree, he got a job at Lockheed Martin. But within a few years, he had had enough.

Why?

Well, Luke realized he was an entrepreneur at heart, and needed to start his own company. In fact, Luke had been an entrepreneur earlier in his life. When he was just 14 years old, he started Luke's Garbage Service, a waste disposal and recycling service for a rural community in Georgia.

So Luke started a company called PlotWatt. The company creates technology that helps people reduce their energy bills by providing customized money-saving recommendations.

But there was one thing Luke was missing: money. Luke needed money to build his team, develop his technology, and start marketing his company.

Fortunately Luke didn't follow the failed path that most entrepreneurs take; which is to try to secure millions of dollars in venture capital right away.

In the 1970s, with the backing of a Saudi prince, Georges Mougin proposed dragging icebergs from the North Atlantic to the drought-stricken shores of Africa.

Most experts laughed at him, and ever since, iceberg towing has been a mainstay of business opportunity scams and lore.

Well, it turns out that the “experts” were wrong. It is possible. And very feasible.

Cut to 2009 and French software firm Dassault Systemes, who thought maybe Mougin was on to something after all and contacted him to suggest modeling the whole idea on a computer. After applying 15 engineers to the problem, the team concluded that towing an iceberg from the waters around Newfoundland to the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa, could be done, and would take under five months, though it would cost nearly ten million dollars.

Duane Zobrist writing for Fast Company:

The struggling economy has turned up the volume of the voice inside the heads of potential business owners that says, “What do I have to lose?” The excuse of job security given by employees as the reason they never started a business has been disproved by the current recession. An untimely firing has awakened many to the fact that nothing is guaranteed, and loyalty doesn’t exist when it clashes with corporate profits. So instead of taking another job they can’t stand and may be pulled out from under them anyway, many are taking a leap into the entrepreneurial world.

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is difficult for anyone, particularly when our smartphones buzz with each new email, no matter whether we’re on the way to the gym, in the grocery store, or relaxing at home. But the challenge can be exponentially harder for today’s entrepreneur. Starting a business requires a little insanity, to be sure, but you don’t want the lifestyle to send you over the edge.

So how do successful entrepreneurs stay sane while they prosper at work and at home? For me, finding balance boils down to taking it one day at a time, one step at a time, and always staying present in the moment while running and growing my business. Here are a few tips I like to incorporate into my daily routine:

There’s no doubt that if you can find a way to influence the top influencers in your industry, you are on your way to becoming an influencer yourself–in other words, finding your way into the secret club. But it’s not easy. Here are some tips for finding your way into the ranks of the top influencers in your niche.

Be Remarkable If you want to be remarkable, you have to do something remarkable. Look at all the influencers in your industry and you’ll see the same thing. These are people or businesses that have done something that makes a difference, or gets attention, or really makes a mark. You simply cannot become an influencer without doing something remarkable. Other influencers know what it took to get to their position, and they are looking for new members of the club who understand that they need to do the same thing. Unfortunately, doing something remarkable requires effort and a lot of hard work. If you can’t do that, you’re out before you were even considered. Get to work.

Over the last few weeks, six teams have been working out of Teens in Tech Labs HQ in Mountain View, CA building a product that they launched at the 2011 Teens in Tech Conference.

The incubator program lasted a little over eight weeks and was very hands on, in terms of mentor and advisor involvement. The Teens in Tech Incubator program came out of an idea that entrepreneurship doesn't have a start age — you can be an entrepreneur at any age. It was started by Daniel Brusilovsky a 19 year old serial entrepreneur.