Hey startups: do you have what it takes to bring home the big check? From hundreds of applicants, our judges -- Joel Cutler of General Catalyst, David Pakman of Venrock, Rick Heitzman of FirstMark, Stuart Ellman of RRE, Habib Kairouz of Rho, and Laura Sachar of Starvest -- will winnow the list down to seven. Each will present on stage and withstand the judges' grilling. One lucky winner will pocket $100,000: a $25,000 investment from founding sponsor General Catalyst Partners and $75,000 in goods and services to boost his or her startup. Even more valuable than the cash investment is the exposure and networking opportunities you'll receive if you're chosen as one of the seven finalists.

SALT LAKE CITY — Surrounded by supporters urging the federal government to tackle illegal immigration, Gov. Gary Herbert signed into law Tuesday a series of bills passed by the Utah Legislature that have been described as a "Utah solution" to the issue.

"Utah is doing the right thing, is doing the hard thing. Doing nothing is not an option," Herbert said in a brief signing ceremony in the Capitol's Gold Room attended by business, legislative and religious leaders, including Presiding Bishop H. David Burton of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Asked by a reporter for the LDS Church's public position on the immigration bills, Bishop Burton said the church had endorsed the Utah Compact. "We feel that the Legislature has done an incredible job on a very complex issue," Burton said.

Egypt_Entrepreneurship_Report

What if someone sold socks that didn’t match? In his new book Disrupt, Luke Williams, a veteran of frog design, talks about how that offbeat question was the impetus for the launch of Little Miss Matched, a company whose purposely mismatched socks proved surprisingly popular with young girls. It’s one of a number of examples Williams cites of new business innovations that began with what he calls “a disruptive hypothesis.” Another better-known one is Netflix, whose business model provided an answer to the question, What if a video rental company didn’t charge late fees?

It’s interesting that when you deconstruct stories of innovation, you find that many of them start with a question--often one that could be considered provocative, naïve, or maybe even a little crazy. In my own research into the design world, I found that breakthroughs ranging from the OXO potato peeler to the Cheetah prosthetic foot could be traced back to someone, somewhere, asking “What if…?”

In the past few years, online crowdsourcing has emerged as an ultra-popular method of finding solutions to difficult problems such as infant mortality rates and out-of-control oil spills. Could crowdsourcing help Japan quell its nuclear disaster and help the country get back on its feet?

The Global Innovation Commons, a repository of innovations that can be used because of patent expiration, abandonment, invalidity, or lack of in-country protection, has compiled a list of patent disclosures and open source technology that could be used as part of Japan's earthquake response--or even to cool down the rapidly worsening nuclear reactor situation in Fukushima.

Google has announced a new program for nonprofits, which they say will include a grant for adwords, exclusive tools, and collaboration forums. "Instead of applying to each Google product individually," nonprofits can apply for a suite of tools here, according to Google's blog post.

The user-friendly site, Google.com/nonprofits, looks like it aims to simplify and educate how nonprofits can use the wide array of google products for their organization (like this video below).

The first of proposed £200 million network of Technology and Innovation Centres to be set up around the UK was announced today (17 March). The centre in High Value Manufacturing, will be formed from a group of existing research and technology facilities, providing an integrated capability and covering all forms of manufacture using metals and composites, process manufacturing technologies and bioprocessing.

At the same time, the formation of nine new university-based Centres for Innovative Manufacturing with government funding of £45 million was announced. These centres will be charged with taking basic research and developing it to the point where it can be taken forward to commercialisation by the TICs.

The formation of the first TIC follows the publication a year ago of a report by the entrepreneur Hermann Hauser, in which he said the UK’s approach to exploiting basic research is sub critical, lacks a national strategy, does not meet business needs and overlooks relevant expertise.

The Commission is stepping in to provide a focus for small-scale and disparate attempts to applying new thinking and techniques to unmet social needs, with the launch yesterday (16 March) of Social Innovation Europe.

While there may be many examples of social innovation in action, for example, in cooperative movements or microfinance schemes, to date it has not been seen as a distinct field that has the potential not only to deal with social problems, but also to promote the development of a new commercial sector of specialist companies and service providers.

Social Innovation Europe will provide access to expertise and build a network of practitioners who are involved in devising new ways to confront issues such as promoting active ageing, responding to climate change, and helping local communities apply innovation to create sustainable cities.

This week’s tax question:

I’m used to getting stock options, but my new employer offers restricted stock instead. Does this change what I’ll owe in taxes, and do I need to do anything now?

We passed the question on to Steve Henley, national tax practice leader at , the seventh largest accounting provider in the U.S. Here’s his answer:

The receipt of restricted stock as part of compensation results in tax consequences that depend upon whether the taxation is delayed to a future year or whether a special election is made to be taxed in the current year.

Cyber security isn’t as sexy as social media among venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. But it’s a critical technology sector that has been gaining momentum with the economic recovery and the rising threats from cyber criminals.

That was the message for security entrepreneurs and investors from a group of venture capitalists and security experts at today’s Information Technology Security Forum at Stanford University. They said that cyber security’s hot segments include protecting mobile devices and cloud services from new kinds of ever-evolving threats. (Critical vulnerabilities were found in Adobe products just this week). And the emerging threats can only be dealt with by combining the forces of governments, law enforcement, big companies, start-ups and venture capitalists.

An escalating crisis at nuclear power plants in Japan following a massive earthquake and tsunami has not changed the investing thesis about clean technology, according to a number of leading venture capitalists and researchers.

Fears of a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan sparked a new wave of criticism of nuclear energy — and a rally in clean-energy stocks on Monday. But that interest quickly waned as stocks in the sector dropped back from that day’s highs as the stock market experienced a broad sell-off.

And that brief surge of interest never touched the private investment community, because venture capitalists typically focus on longer-term plays, said Steve Minnihan, a partner at Lux Research, a firm which specializes in cleantech.

Startups. We know the mantra: Team matters. Is this philosophy exaggerated? Overrated? Cliché? No. Team is the only thing that matters.

Whatever you’re working on now, the half-life of innovation is so rapid now that your product will soon be out-of-date. Your existence is irrelevant unless you continue rapid innovation.

Your ability to keep up is dependent on having a great team of differing skills. Individuals don’t build great companies, teams do.

The nature of the Internet and global knowledge is such that even if you’ve stumbled on to a super interesting area of innovation there will be many teams tackling the same problem at exactly the same time. If you develop something novel that catches a spark you’ll have the world gunning for you over night. In this globally connected world product leads disappear in nano-seconds.

Startup veterans Geoff Ralston, Tim Brady and Alan Louie are launching Imagine K12 today, an education focused startup accelerator/investor that is modeled closely after Y Combinator. The goal of the new project is simple – “To effect positive change in the K-12 education space.”

Everyone thinks they know exactly what schools need to do to start actually educating the youth of America well enough that they’ll have a fighting chance in the world. I, for example, think all we need is to bring good, old fashioned corporal punishment back into our school system. Right after we fire all the teachers, of course.

Right now the UK media is making a lot of noise about new Visa rules which mean “super-investors” willing to put £5m into a UK bank account will get the right to stay indefinitely in Britain after only three years. This is two years faster than the average migrant who still has to wait five years. Deposit £10m and the time drops to two years. Clearly the new rules are aimed at high-value investors and entrepreneurs.

However, what the media is missing is the new rules governing entrepreneurs wanting to enter the UK. Now, beginning April 6th, “high-potential” entrepreneurs will be allowed to come to the UK so long as they have £50,000 in funding from a reputable organisation.

That is ridiculously good news for tech startups wanting to set up shop in the UK, and startups in the UK wanting to hire in talent they can’t get locally – CTOs for instance. Plus, entrepreneurs will be allowed to enter the UK with their business partners as long as they have access to joint funds.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - The Oklahoma House has approved legislation to revive an economic development tool that supporters say will help attract businesses to the state and create jobs.

Lawmakers voted 79-17 Wednesday to create the Oklahoma Quick Action Closing Fund. The measure amends the Oklahoma Opportunity Fund, which was created in 2006 but declared unconstitutional by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The measure by Rep. Skye McNeil of Bristow would authorize the governor to dip into the fund to provide financial incentives to companies considering relocating or expanding in the state.

Today we are looking at 15 young women who are building and running some of the next great companies. These women who range in age from 15-29 are running multi-million dollar business in a diverse set of industries. Check out these women and the companies they are building…

Sarah Prevette

Company: Sprouter.com

Age: 28

Sarah Prevette wanted to find a better way to get answers to her pressing business questions so she started an online community for it called Sprouter. Sprouter is a fast paced environment that focuses on connecting entrepreneurs to socialize and share tips. Sarah has grown Sprouter to 10′s of thousands of users and is backed by angel investors. The community has been featured in numerous publications and is posed to grow as we continue to see growth of online communities and networking.

A number of the cleantech efforts between the United States and China reflect the need for cooperation on issues surrounding climate change and clean energy as it is a major factor in the relations of these two countries. Although there are still issues to resolve in many of the collaborations, it is believed that if the United States and China can continue in their cleantech collaborations, that it will show the world that two major players on the international platform are serious about combating the challenge of climate change, and it will also encourage other countries to create alliances. Through collaboration, the two largest greenhouse gas emitters will be able to create technologies required to combat climate change. Not only that, but tangible benefits will be developed, not just for the United States and China, but the world as a whole.

Kima Ventures is almost certainly the most active angel investor in the world: it wants to invest in 100 startups each year, every year. Forever. And they'll invest in any country in the world.

Kima is run by two entrepreneurs. The first is Xavier Niel, French billionaire telecoms entrepreneur who runs Iliad, France's biggest independent ISP, and owns Le Monde, its daily paper of record. The other is Jeremie Berrebi, serial French-Israeli entrepreneur. They started Kima Ventures in 2010 with the goal on investing in 50 companies per year, and then decided to kick it up a notch and invest in 100 per year.

Many business blogs will pose the question “what is innovation?” and then descend into an erudite semantic fog. Let’s just answer the question and do so in a way that points forward to responsibilities and actions.

First, a general definition: innovation is anything “new and useful.” All three words are essential, and no more. Thus, a clever invention that never helps or delights anyone isn’t innovation, nor is a very useful ripoff of an old product. “New and useful” can apply to processes or services as well as physical products, of course.

Now let’s get more specific and in a way that points to action. An expanded definition (perfectly compatible with “new and useful”) is that innovation consists of the “three I’s”, namely inspiration, invention, and implementation, in that order, and again with all three essential before we can say we are innovative. Thomas Edison’s light bulb wonderfully illustrates all three.

Grasshopper Group posted a comic on its blog that in an effort to dispel some of the romantic ideas about working for a startup.

It's a funny look at what life is really like as you sweat out building a new company from scratch.

It features helpful quotes from the likes of Tim O'Reilly, Mark Cuban, and Pandora's Tim Westergren.

How does it compare to your own startup experience? Let us know in the comments!