Entrepreneurs are expected to file more than 24 million returns for the 2010 tax year. And one of the payoffs of owning a company is being able to write off numerous business expenses through deductions. Here are 10 you may not know about.

It is estimated that entrepreneurs will file over 24 million tax returns in 2011. One of the beauties of owning a business come tax time is the ability to write off numerous business expenses through deductions.

For those who started a business last year, there's an additional bit of good news. Filers are entitled to a new, higher deduction for startup costs incurred in 2010.

There are also certain types of expenses that small-business owners cannot deduct, including personal expenses, capital expenses (such as business assets and improvements), or the expenses used to figure the cost of goods sold. (Here’s the Internal Revenue Service’s explanation of the latter.)

Venture capital investment in Michigan companies from January through March plunged to its lowest quarterly level in seven years, according to a new report released today.

Only $3.1 million went to six companies in the state in this year's first quarter, compared with $14.2 million in four deals in the year-ago period.

The new figures are from the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

Ronald Reed, chairman of the Michigan Venture Capital Association and managing director of Birmingham-based Seneca Partners, said there were no unusual factors that caused the drop in investment dollars.

Venture capital dollars continued flowing into Oregon during the first part of the year, according to new data out this morning from the National Venture Capital Association.

Although Oregon's haul remains small by national standards, and hasn't increased significantly from last year, it provides a grounding for future entrepreneurial activity in the state.

Oregon startups attracted $41.4 million in the first quarter, compared with $45.2 million invested during the same period last year. It's a little above the $39.2 million the state landed in the fourth quarter.

Nationally, VC investment was up 5 percent from the fourth quarter.

More than half of Oregon's total, $22.0 million, went to a single company -- Tigard-based Agilyx Corp., a waste-reduction and clean energy company that won backing from prominent Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Our economy is slowly getting back on its feet, but the real estate market remains weak. But how weak is it, exactly, where you live? If you're selling a home, how likely is it you'll have to cut your offer price? And will you have to do it more than once?

Those are difficult questions, which were basically impossible to answer until today, when the launch of a remarkable interactive map created by Trulia, a real-estate listings website, makes them much easier to answer.

This morning, we sat among 750 VCs and entrepreneurs and watched eleven promising startups present.

Each was selected from a pool of 600 applicants, making Techstars NYC harder to get into than Harvard or Yale.

Each startup was excellent, and we're sure you'll hear more from them in the future. Some, like Immersive and Nestio, stood out above the rest.

How would you feel if a company you sold for $5 million less than five years ago was now reportedly fetching offers as high as $10 billion?

That's almost exactly what's happening to the dozen or so original owners of Twitter.

Recently we've been discussing at many organizations what it takes to get innovation done in large businesses with embedded behavior and practices. One side of the coin is obviously the impact of Disruptive Technology, but the other is purely the issue of Innovation Management or creating an organization that embraces or assists innovation.

In a recent workshop I was conducting in Amsterdam, John Chaplin (Ixaris) related a session he had with a bunch of senior banking executives tackling the problem of creating innovation within large organizations. The bankers were asked what the issues with 'innovators' were. More often than not it was sighted that strong innovators clashed with the organization culture and so eventually they were fired because they were too good at their job.

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms” ~ Muriel Rukeyser

On January 5, 2007, I was sitting out on my lanai looking out at the lake and golf course in Ft. Myers, Florida. I was officially and unexpectedly in between careers and jobs, living in a town where I literally knew one person. I had made a voluntary career transition in August 2006 and decided to embark on yet another adventure in my life–one that did not turn out the way I had anticipated.

I was stunned, uncertain and yet strangely excited. The question came into my head, “What do you really want to do, not what do you have to do?” I really wanted to start my own company using all of my gifts, talents, passion and expertise to help others and do what I do best: teach, guide and train. On February 4, 2007, I launched Train with Shane. I just celebrated 4 years in business.

Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) on Thursday rolled out a five-year economic development plan that was long on strategy but short on dollars to implement.

The plan, Charting Maryland's Economic Path, was developed after 18 months of input from more than 250 business owners from across the state, according to O'Malley's office.

While some of the initiatives in the plan — including the $70 million InvestMaryland fund to help bioscience and other technology companies launch and grow — have already passed legislative muster, other initiatives will have to wait until the economy is on the rebound in three to five years before there is the money to fund them, said Kathleen T. Snyder, CEO and president of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce and an ex-officio member of the Maryland Economic Development Commission, which developed the plan.

A little feedback can go a long way. In Brighton, in the United Kingdom, a group of residents living on Tidy Street are recording their daily electricity use on a giant infographic painted on the street outside their homes.

Members of the Ames Seed Capital Fund may soon have a new option to put their money to work, helping to create business growth and jobs in Mid-Iowa and profits for their investments.

A new Ames/Story County Seed Capital Fund would combine $1.75 million from Ames investors with approximately $750,000 from investors elsewhere in Story County, members of the private investment fund learned at their annual meeting Wednesday at the Ames Holiday Inn. Individual investors must pledge at least $15,000 to be part of the fund.

If the fund is fully invested, it will result in $2.5 million to grow jobs, industry, tax base and return on investment, Seed Capital Fund board president Roger Underwood said. This would be the sixth investment pool created in the 10-year history of the Seed Capital Fund.

Whether we’re working or learning, how we communicate is a key part of everything we do. Some web tools hinder communication while others may enable it. Last year, in communication and working together, I looked at a communities & networks model by Lilia Efimova:

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

I find the model useful to look at what kinds of social tools are most suitable for the type of collaboration or cooperation we’re trying to foster. For instance, there is a big difference between Sharepoint and Facebook, though both enable some kind of collaboration. Structured, goal-oriented collaboration is typical of what happens inside the firewall in a controlled access environment. Informal, opportunity-drive (serendipitous) collaboration is more like the free-for-all of an event like #lrnchat. Communities of practice are a mix of both.

Japan's economy is struggling to recover from last month's earthquake and tsunami. A Japanese business graduate says entrepreneurship is the answer.
City lights and billboards are turned off in Tokyo

Kai Ryssdal: Emperor Akihito of Japan toured the earthquake and tsunami zone today. He spoke to some of the hundreds of thousands of people who've been displaced by the disaster. Latest total cost estimate for all the damage is said to be about $300 billion. This week Marketplace's Scott Tong has been talking to people who'll be helping the Japanese economy work off that debt.

Today, a would-be entrepreneur and his prescription for kick-starting Japan Inc.

A plethora of industry reports indicates that travel and tourism are back, and, by the end of 2011, will be better than ever. Revenue is expected to reach nearly $1.4 trillion, a record, says Toon van Beeck, senior analyst at research firm IBISWorld. This means the opportunity in the sector will be “the biggest it has ever been.”

Just consider this set of glowing forecasts for 2011: International trips will jump 5.5 percent, to 94.7 million; domestic trips will rise 1.2 percent, to 627.4 million; hotel revenues will go up by 4.4 percent, to $114.8 billion; travel agencies will bring in 3.3 percent more revenue, making the total $12 billion; tour operator revenue will grow 5 percent, to $3.7 billion; and even the RV parks and campgrounds industry will experience a 1.5 percent revenue increase, to $4.5 billion.

The faster things change– the more we adapt to acceleration – the less time we have to think about the other options.

The faster the social web grows and creates widespread influence across global markets the more accelerated the potential disruptions become. Some say this will take ten years to realize the full impact of what we are witnessing while others don’t even recognize the changes happening around the them. When we forget how business is and has been – and instead, focus on what business can be and should be – then we can rediscover and reignite new paths to thinking.

The video for this fill-from-the-bottom beer dispenser has been sudsing up the Interwebs for about a year now. Yet, strangely, it has never reared its frothy head as one of Anthill’s breathtaking (often thirst-inspiring) Beer O’Clock innovations.

Sure, we’ve brought you this beer tossing fridge and Melbourne based Beer Vaults, but not this well-lubricated lubrication machine that can crank out more than 40 pints a minute from a four-tap dispenser.

The BottomsUp system uses specially designed plastic cups with a lift-able cap on the bottom held in place by a magnetic ring. Posts on the dispensers push up the cap, allowing the beer to be pumped in. When the cup is lifted from the dispenser, the ring reseals the bottom.

Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of our portfolio company Stack Exchange, posted an excellent answer to the question in the title of this post on the Stack site OnStartups.

I'm not going to reblog the entire answer here. I'd encourage you to go read Joel's answer. However, I am going to highlight some of the most important points from Joel's post:

* Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a large stake.
* Before factoring in dilution from investors, the founders should end up with about 50% of the company, total. Each of the next five layers should end up with about 10% of the company, split equally among everyone in the layer. (go read Joel's answer to understand how he sets up these layers)
* It never makes sense to give anyone equity without vesting.
* Ideas are pretty much worthless.
* Nobody who is not working full time counts as a founder.

Each year, the organizers of MIT's CIO Symposium select a set of fledgling companies to demo their wares for the IT execs in attendance. The companies must be start-ups with less than $10 million in 2010 revenues, focused on selling to corporate customers.

The ten companies selected this year include a bunch from New England. (The company descriptions below were provided by the event organizers.)

- Apperian / Boston, MA
Apperian, the leading Mobile Application Management (MAM) company, takes enterprise apps to a new level of productivity

Friends tell you what you want to hear. Mentors tell you what you need to hear. When the message is the same from both, you don’t need the mentor anymore. In that sense, you should think of a mentor more like your advisor who has done all he can. You always need the friend.

Also don’t confuse a business mentor with a business coach. A mentor’s aim is to teach you what to do and how, in specific situations, unlike a coach who helps you develop your generic skills for deciding what to do and how. The mentor helps the entrepreneur fill an experience gap, and a coach helps fill a skill gap. Both may be required.

In what it hopes will be the final push, the European Commission yesterday (April 13) put forward two legal proposals to turn the long-held ambition for a single EU patent into reality, offering the come-on that if agreed, registering a patent enforceable in 25 member states will cost only €680.

One proposal deals with how patent holders obtain unitary patent protection while the other sets out the rules for language translation. The move comes despite ongoing uncertainty about the Patent Court that will be used to enforce EU patents, and the not insignificant fact that Italy and Spain have refused to sign up to the project.

This latest effort on the European Patent is part of a broader effort to revive and enhance the single market in a new act which is intended come into force in 2012 - the 20th anniversary of the creation of Europe’s open market.