Last week Governor Branstad rolled out his "Jobs Plan" for putting Iowans back to work. A major part of his plan is the restructuring of the Iowa Department of Economic Development.

The Iowa Partnership for Economic Progress, under the leadership of Debi Durham, will eliminate the alphabet soup of incentive programs, develop a customer service attitude, use best practices of public and private sector, and create a 501c3 non-profit organization to house the Iowa Innovation Council.

One of the most common complaints I have heard from economic development professionals is that the incentive system is too complicated. The Governor's plan will correct that and expand opportunities for growth, retention and recruitment of business.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam —Vo Van Toi’s high-tech laboratory clashes against its impoverished surroundings. Outside, cattle roam swampy fields and squatters sell sugarcane from wooden huts. Inside, he shows off his near-infrared spectroscopy machine, which measures oxygen content in blood, and a CT scanner.

The contrast sums up Vietnam’s current state of development: It’s a relatively poor nation, with per-capita GDP of $3,000, trying to follow its larger Asian neighbors’ leap into an era of skyscrapers and international commerce. To do that, it needs to bring in a plethora of new technology — and the innovators who come with it.

So where can Vietnam get its base of engineers, scientists and academics?

From abroad, especially from overseas Vietnamese who know the language and culture. They, like Vo, are invigorating the country’s growth that reached double digits before the 2008 economic downturn.

RISD grad Seth Goldenberg believes an entirely new way of thinking is needed to move the economy in a new direction, and he wants the most creative people to determine which challenges they must tackle.

He has returned to Providence and launched a new design studio, where he helps clients hone their business strategies while setting his own idea in motion.

Goldenberg has created his alma mater’s Office of Public Engagement, challenged big-time designer Bruce Mau in Chicago to take new risks and directed and curated all cultural special events for the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Empty coffers and rising gas prices may be the talk of the town, but cities across the country are finding innovative solutions to costly commutes by providing cheaper, healthier alternatives. In Lincoln, Nebraska, a 2011 Smarter City for transportation, low-income riders pay a mere $7.50 for unlimited bus rides all month long. Getting from place to place is more affordable in New York—at an average annual household cost of $5,289—than in any other large city. And at an average of 9,920 miles a year per household, New Yorkers travel fewer miles in the car than residents in any other region in the country besides Jersey City, New Jersey.

"By and large, ‘location efficient’ places – with essential services that are nearby or accessible by many transportation modes – lower transportation costs for residents,” says Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT). “Cities and regions that foster compact, walkable, transit-rich communities can reduce reliance on automobiles and help lower at least one expense for households struggling to get by in the current economy.”

When you set out to start a business of your own a great option that can get over looked is franchising. Franchising gives you many of the same advantages of running your own business but comes with some great perks like training, credibility and a plan to start and grow right from the start.

One thing that deters many people is the costs that are involved to get into a franchise, but there are many options out there that require minimal investment. To help find some solutions for young entrepreneurs we went to our friends at FranchiseHelp.com to help answer some of these common questions…

* Which franchise would appeal to my experiences and interests as a recent college graduate?
* Which franchises feature low startup capital requirements?
* Which franchises are friendliest to young entrepreneurs?

Below is the list we came up with of not only cost effective franchises but also businesses that would be of interest to a younger business owner…

Noble Life Sciences, a relatively new company that assists clients in conducting research to advance human health, particularly through the facilitation of personalized medicine, has signed a 78-month lease for 6,200 square feet of laboratory and administrative space at 22 Firstfield Road, a roughly 50,000-square-foot building in Gaithersburg that is 100 percent leased and home to tenants such as ATCC, Intercell and MaxCyte.

In the new lease transaction, Scheer Partners Founder and President Robert Scheer, Senior Vice President Henry Bernstein and Vice President Matt Brady represented Noble Life Sciences. The building's owner, Pasadena, Calif.-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities, represented itself.

The Supreme Court heard arguments Monday about the rights of universities and colleges in patenting and technology transfer, an area of recent interest to higher ed in Delaware.

Generally, non-profit institutions have patent rights over any invention their faculty creates through the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 . This is the case even though the federal government funds most of university research through competitive grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Too bad, Mr. Seeker… because whether or not YOU are using Facebook to assist your job search, up to 85% of recruiters now use Facebook during their vetting process – and they’re using it to eliminate you from consideration.

“But I have all my privacy settings engaged. They can’t see anything.”

– Ms. Candi Date

Sorry, Candi… with just a couple clicks through the friends in your network I can learn enough to decide whether you are worthy of consideration as a candidate – or not.

Hosting provider Peer1 decided to get all geeky ahead of South by Southwest and created what it’s calling the Map of the Internet. Unlike cute maps showing web sites or personal viewpoints this map illustrates what ISP is connected to what Internet Exchange or university network across a vast array of networks stretching around the world. It’s pretty sweet to look at, and Peer1 is handing out posters of the map at SXSW for the truly nerdy (I’d put it next to my spectrum-allocation charts).

Rajan Sodhi, VP, Marketing & Communications at PEER 1, said the map was created using data from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis and contains information on 19,869 web players that are connected by 44,344 connections. The size of the nodes and the thickness of the lines indicates the size of those particular providers and their connections. Check Google at I8 or Verizon at F15.

The frenzy to buy up as much stock as possible in the most buzzed-about Internet companies in the world is spurring something that many venture observers claimed was a thing of the past—the mega-venture fund.

The latest example is Greylock Partners, which has reopened its last fund and boosted its size to $1 billion from $575 million. The expansion enables the firm to invest up to $200 million in growth investments, and it’s no mystery which companies it will be looking to invest in. It’s already a stakeholder in Facebook and Groupon, two of the four biggies, along with Twitter and Zynga, that are driving some of the most prominent VC firms to push all their chips into the middle of the table.

Business success begins in the mind of the startup founder and his team. A winning startup is a team of entrepreneurs who build and run the business as an extension of who they are, rather than some extrapolation of the Google or Facebook model.

It’s not so easy to fake the important attributes when the going gets rough. So before you risk it all by jumping into a startup, do a reality check on your own mind to see if you can find a majority of the following attributes, summarized from the book “You Can Win” by Shiv Khera:

1. Positive believing. This starts with positive thinking that your startup idea will work, but is a lot more. It is a confidence bolstered by intelligence, preparation, and experience that your business model addresses a need in the market, provides a solution, and will beat the competitors.

Zynga is reported to be raising $500 million at a $10 billion valuation. Twitter recently raised $200 million at a $3.75 billion valuation, and turned down a rumored offer of $5 billion from Facebook (which, itself, is valued at $50 billion). Meanwhile, Groupon turned down a reputed offer of $6 billion.

As these companies start going public will these seemingly high valuations have a larger impact? Are we facing a new bubble?

Here it is: We followed the rumors, the leaks, the speculation and the comings and goings of various peers and future competitors, but Apple's finally gone and revealed the updated iPad. Who presented the event? None other than CEO Steve Jobs himself.

The iPad 2 is powered by an Apple A5 chip, a dual-core CPU that somehow consumes the same amount of power as the iPad 1's A4 unit, but delivers "up to 2X" the speed. This also leads to faster graphics, which Jobs quoted as being "nine times" better than the iPad 1. The A5 is the "first dual-core tablet to ship in volume."

A vision of the city as a glistening, well-oiled machine underlies IBM's new website, City Forward, which is officially inaugurated today. The City Forward initiative, which has been revving up for a few months now, collates the massive amount of data relating to cities in one clearinghouse, making it easier to use for those who make or influence city policy.

Put another way: "City Forward substitutes data for intuition," said IBM's Stanley S. Litow in a release.

While Americans are focused on a possible government shutdown and heated budget standoffs in the states, the U.S. Senate is considering legislation that isn’t getting much attention, but is even more important because it threatens to destroy one of the greatest aspects of American exceptionalism – innovation.

Did you know that Americans are responsible for roughly 90% of new inventions?

While overregulation and taxation harm America’s ability to compete with other countries to attract and keep businesses that create jobs, our greatest stock in trade is the American spirit that fosters innovation, and the world’s strongest patent system to protect inventors’ rights.

A new high-speed lane will be built along the region’s Animal Health Corridor thanks to a $1 million investment by the Kansas Bioscience Authority (KBA). At its board meeting in Washington, DC today, the KBA approved seed money to establish a public-private consortium called the National Center of Animal Health Innovation. The “center of innovation” will bring nine area animal health companies, plus regional universities and government agencies together to accelerate job creation, research, development and commercialization of the next generation of animal health and nutrition products.

“This proposal is part of an overall strategy to position Kansas as the nation’s innovation hub for animal health and animal disease research and product development,” said Tom Thornton, President and CEO of the KBA. “The center will be led by and responsive to industry. Already, these leading companies have identified opportunities to work together to support new product development to advance the competitive position of their companies and the regional economy. Bottom line, we are talking about the potential to create new products, new companies, new jobs and whole new industries for Kansas.”

AUGUSTA, Maine — The state should market its “innovation-based” industries more aggressively and do more to help companies export products to help grow the economy, legislators were told Tuesday.

Members of the Legislator’s Labor, Commerce, Research and Economic Development Committee received the annual update on the impact state money had over the last year in stimulating the state’s high-tech sectors, which range from aquaculture to advanced materials and even includes traditional sectors like forestry and agriculture.

LINCOLN — How sweet is too sweet when it comes to state economic development incentives?

State legislators again are wrestling with that question as they decide how aggressive Nebraska should be in encouraging “angel” investments in promising, but not-yet-marketable, inventions or high-tech innovations.

“Angels” — typically successful entrepreneurs or groups of investors — have been credited with helping finance some of this generation's most successful startup companies, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Nebraska consistently ranks at the bottom for encouraging potentially high-growth, high-risk ventures. But as part of his economic development proposals this year, Gov. Dave Heineman has offered an ambitious program to put the state near the top of the list.

Escape the City is a very niche job website. It was specifically designed for people that want to get off the rat race treadmill and don’t want jobs in normal places.

Escape the City advertises a spectrum of refuges, from marketing and management posts to one-off charity events. Log on now and you could apply to run a post office in Antarctica, help out at a wine company in Portugal or travel India as a Rickshaw Run manager.

With March Madness just around the corner, we thought we'd get in on the action.

We're launching our own "bracket style" tournament to find the next big thing. We'll be picking 64 startups to face off in Startup Madness. In order to quality for the bracket, your startup must meet the following requirements:

* Haven't raised funding of $250,000 or more and haven't generated revenue of more than $250,000 in a single year.
* Have a live, usable public site or an accessible demo on their home page
* Have not already been in the TechStars program - this is not for TechStars companies or alumni companies
* Must be an internet, software, or hi-tech company