By now, you've filed your corporate taxes.

No business owner looks forward to being audited by the IRS, not the examination part, and not the potential penalties.

The good news is that if you’re smart—and yes, honest—you probably won’t be audited. Here’s a look at some of the most common audit “triggers”: the red flags that are likely to pique the taxman’s interest.

Over the last two weeks Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox have all released new versions of their browsers. But the most hype has circled around Firefox 4's launch yesterday.

People have been scrambling for the new browser. After just over 24 hours, Firefox 4 has already been downloaded more than 9 million times.

And with good reason. It's the most popular alternative to Internet Explorer, and it's the browser of choice for those who want a customizable web experience.

Crowdfunding- a new way to gather support for musical projects.

With the advent of modern social networking (and sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), and a habit of building a mailing list, musicians are more connected to an extended network of friends and supporters than ever before.

As a Co-Founder of RocketHub, one of the world’s largest crowdfunding platforms, I have seen thousands of projects raise funds and awareness via this new form of micro-patronage. Crowdfunding platforms can offer the credibility and infrastructure necessary to successfully harness the financial power of the crowd, but because crowdfunding is a new trend, many artists misunderstand how to effectively leverage the tools available to them.

Last week, the Kauffman Foundation released details from a six-month study that cataloged the capabilities of the region’s four top economic development groups: Ann Arbor Spark, TechTown in Detroit, Automation Alley in Troy, and Macomb-OU Incubator.

Collectively, the report boasts, the groups “have created more than 1,000 jobs and invested approximately $18 million in hundreds of start-up companies while securing more than $101.2 million in additional capital.”

Sounds good, right? Left unanswered, however, is whether these accelerators are helping to create companies and jobs for the benefit of the whole region or for their own pockets of geographic influence. In other words, can these four disparate groups rise above their own agendas and pool their resources for the good of the regional economy?

The 2011 Virginia General Assembly recently passed several budget measures that could advance the development efforts of innovative technology companies across the state.

The Virginia Biotechnology Association, an affiliate of BIO, lauded the passage of these legislative moves despite the current tight budgetary climate and called them the most productive for the bioscience industry in the last decade. VABIO was heavily involved in outreach efforts supporting the budget measures.

In his annual report to China's top legislature at the National People's Congress in Beijing earlier this month, Premier Wen Jiabao highlighted the need for government science funding to be allotted and spent more efficiently — raising the hopes of Chinese researchers that the funding system will soon be overhauled.

Currently, a Chinese researcher's funding is based on the number of papers they have listed in Thomson Reuters' Science Citation Index and the impact factors of the journals in which they are published, rather than on an evaluation of the work's scientific importance.

Just looking at the stacks of gift cards for sale at many stores will tell you that there is a card for everything. This includes Facebook. According to The Vancouver Sun, this is the beginning of a new style of ecommerce.

These are the early days of the virtual goods economy (you’re probably already taking part if you’ve ever bought a song on iTunes or an app for your smartphone), but this is also the very early stage of F-Commerce (or Facebook Commerce).

Not every adult is made to be an entrepreneur, and the same can be said about our children. So how do you know if your child will be the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson?

The Bulletin has asked Asher Epstein, managing director of the University of Maryland’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the Robert Smith School of Business, and Robert Baum, associate professor of entrepreneurship, a couple questions to find out.

We are getting to the end of the series on M&A. Two more M&A Issues to talk about and then I am done. The final two are consideration and price. Today I'll talk about consideration and next week I'll talk about price.

Consideration is the way in which you and your shareholders will get paid. The most common way to get paid is cash. The other common way to get paid is in the buyer's stock. You may also get paid by accepting a note (an IOU) from the buyer. And of course, many transactions include more than one form of consideration. A combination of cash and stock is very common.

Everyone has million dollar ideas, but people rarely act on them.

For entrepreneurs, one good idea can provide an extraordinary amount of hope. Even though the chances of success are minimal, these ideas give people something to aspire to greater than a boring cubicle and a nagging boss. Not to mention, these ideas make some people obscenely loaded.

If you're waiting to act on one of these ideas until you think of something brilliant, don't. In fact, you might want to dumb yourself down a notch. With the Icanhascheezburger.com’s of the world getting acquired for $2MM, it doesn’t take something uniquely awesome to rake in the dough.

I hear these three terms used interchangeably, but in my mind, they all mean slightly different things. It’s semantics, of course, but here’s my take on what these three words mean. Which do you identify with the most?

Small Business

Wikipedia: A small business is a business that is privately owned and operated, with a small number of employees and relatively low volume of sales. Small businesses are normally privately owned corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships. The legal definition of “small” varies by country and by industry, ranging from fewer than 15 employees under the Australian Fair Work Act 2009, 50 employees in the European Union, and fewer than 500 employees to qualify for many U.S. Small Business Administration programs. Small businesses can also be classified according to other methods such as sales, assets, or net profits.

On the last Program for International Student Assessment, a well regarded standardized test, students in Shanghai outscored their American counterparts in every subject. But it's not just the Chinese we're trailing; we ranked 23rd and 32nd, respectively, in science and math, well behind dozens of our international economic competitors. Additionally, the World Economic Forum ranks the United States 48th in quality of mathematics and science education.

Norman Augustine, lead author of the Congressional report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economy, believes that our public school system compares abysmally with those of other developed nations, particularly in the fields of science, mathematics and technology.

As part of a larger research project on innovation and business platforms we have interviewed a range of global companies about their innovation practices and strategic concerns. The research is due out later this year. Here are some early results. What are people in large companies saying about the pressures of innovation? The findings, in our view, point to a need to overhaul how we see innovation. Solutions will not be found in new innovation tools like open innovation but require fundamental reappraisal of how markets function and the competitive position of the enterprise.

1. There is pressure to move from episodic to continuous strategy: the question repeated in different ways by executives responsible for innovation is how do I deal with disruptive change and continuity at the same time? We phrase that as episodic versus continuous change. A related component is the challenge of making fundamental change acceptable. Many organisations acknowledge the power of the corporate immune system to kill new ideas dead before they have a chance to grow and in effect to maintain an episodic culture.

Tony Fish’s advisory company, AMF Ventures delivers strategic advise to big web and mobile players including Microsoft, Vodafone, Nokia, O2 and Intel. As well as working on strategy Tony is an investor focussed on teams which he believes are on the edge of great new business propositions. We asked Tony to describe the entrepreneurial decision process and how it relates to executive decision making.

My decision processes tend to be biased towards serendipity (connection) over business plan, purpose over profit, and team over individual. A corporate executive, driven by the vision of his company CEO, is led from the top. Theirs is a world of structure, policies and push; there is a need for plans and approval, controls and processes. This core thrives on stability, sameness and routine.

Every time I challenge a business plan with little or no budget for marketing, I get the answer that they will be using “viral” marketing, which costs nothing. The founder explains that the product is so “buzz-worthy” that usage will spread rapidly through word-of-mouth only, meaning people loving it and recommending it to their friends.

First of all, Seth Godin pointed out a couple of years ago that viral marketing does not equal word-of-mouth. His view is that word-of-mouth is an unsolicited consumer action, positive or negative, which usually fades quickly, like a good or bad restaurant review.

Viral marketing is a deliberate marketing action, designed to grow attention at a compound rate, without further stimulus, by word-of-mouth. It usually implies an opportunity to win big, like a lottery, or experience something sensational, like an incredible video or free product. Martin Zwilling

As the United States and its European allies launched air strikes against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi on Saturday, my thoughts, like those of many others, focused on civilians and their safety. This includes men and women serving in uniform. No soldier I know wants to inflict harm on ordinary citizens. To avoid that, while also ensuring its victory, the military prepares rigorously through training, simulations and drills. “Failure is not an option.”

Mike LaValle, a former soldier, agrees. Moreover, he believes that it is military preparation that makes soldiers ideally suited for the life of an entrepreneur. It is a life he has chosen. LaValle, a West Point grad, former Army infantry platoon leader and Afghan war veteran, has dived head-on into the life of start-ups along with Tian He to launch Gojee.com, a food technology platform. The platform will be released in May.

The stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan has raised alarm over the possible health effects. However, so far, radiation levels outside of the plant remain relatively low and unlikely to cause health problems.

The health effects of radiation depend on the dose a person receives. The acute effects of radiation sickness usually begin when an individual receives a dose of radiation that is one sievert (the standard international measurement of radiation exposure) or above. Most of the workers hospitalized after the nuclear disaster that destroyed a reactor in Chernobyl in 1986 received estimated doses of between one and six sieverts. Because such levels are rarely encountered, radiation levels are most often given in millisieverts (one thousandth of a sievert) or microsieverts (one-millionth of a sievert). For comparison, a chest x-ray delivers about 0.2 millisieverts of radiation, and the average person in the U.S. is exposed to about six millisieverts of radiation per year, about half of which is from natural sources and another half from medical procedures.

In the wake of the devastating loss of life in Japan, the urgent question is where the next big earthquake will hit. To answer it, geologist Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham and his doctoral student Gal Hartman of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Physics and Planetary Sciences in the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences are examining coral reefs and submarine canyons to detect earthquake fault zones.

Working with an international team of Israelis, Americans and Jordanians, Prof. Ben-Avraham and his team are developing a new method to determine what areas in a fault zone region are most at risk. Using a marine vessel, he and his colleagues are surveying a unique geological phenomenon of the Red Sea, near the coastal cities of Eilat and Aqaba — but their research could be applied anywhere, including Japan and the west coast of the U.S.

From cancer treatments to breakthroughs in virtual-reality product development, many of Iowa's greatest scientific and technological advances have come from our public research universities. This cutting-edge research lays the groundwork for an innovation economy in Iowa that will continue to generate high-paying jobs and keep our state globally competitive.

Universities have embraced the role of turning advances into viable commercial opportunities and state policy-makers have been supportive. But the marketplace is not easy to penetrate. Investors want to know that products are viable and have a market, a rigorous process that takes time and money. The Iowa Innovation Council, a working group of Iowa business leaders and regents university and community college representatives, will help push innovations more rapidly to the marketplace.

How influential are the people who check in to your startup space? Physical tech incubators and startup spaces like Dog Patch Labs or Kicks Labs, and counterparts like TechHub and WhiteBearYard in London or Innovation Works in Beijing often make a lot of the hot young talent they attract. But there’s never really been a way to sort the wheat from the chaff – until now.

PeerIndex, which competes with Klout in measuring the niche expertise and influence of Twitter users, has worked with social media agency Raak to mashup its platform with location based social network Foursquare.