The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) just published its Business Tax Index 2012.  The list covers what the SBE Council’s formula determines is the ” Best to Worst Tax Systems for Entrepreneurship and Small Business.”  Topping the list of the most favorable states for small businesses and startup entrepreneurs and investors are:

1) South Dakota

2) Texas

3) Nevada

4) Wyoming

5) Washington

Are we ready to quit letter grades?

Dump standardized tests?

Turn inside-out the role of schools as the authorities of knowledge?

While educators try to imagine it, students who’ve already freed themselves are galloping through the digital world.

At their best they are collaborating, creating, seeking justice, making art, defining their significance.

“Don’t we want to create students who can do that?” says Michael Wesch, a gone-viral phenomenon on the Internet who essentially launched himself digitally five years ago from the basement of his small farmhouse outside Manhattan, Kan.

Whoever has been stealing Mark Wotton's newspaper should look out: He's formulating a revenge plan, and it involves ninjas.

Net ninja: Sensor-laden, Web-connected Ninja Blocks can carry out preset actions in response to stimuli. For example, you might tell the block to sound an alarm when your cat jumps on your sofa. Ninja Blocks Well, technically, it involves Ninja Blocks—little computerized, sensor-equipped boxes that Wotton helped create. The blocks connect to the Internet to carry out preset actions in response to stimuli. For example, via an online service called Ninja Cloud, Wotton could set a Ninja Block equipped with a motion detector to automatically take photos of the paper thief and upload them to Facebook.

On a recent Tuesday night, about 100 computer science students from Stuyvesant High School, New York City's most presitigious public math and science high school, gathered at the Foursquare offices in New York City's SoHo neighborhood. There were two draws that might lure any adolescent over the past century: free pizza and an endless supply of soda. And then there was a draw that seems oh-so-2012: the chance to rub elbows with high school alumni who work at New York-based tech start-ups.

The first-time event was created by veteran Stuyvesant computer science teacher Mike Zamansky on a simple premise: If high school students can meet entrepreneurs and tech whizzes, they might find inspiration. They might meet a mentor. They might meet their future selves.

About 45 newly minted college graduates begin training in June to work for two years with small start-ups in struggling communities through a just-launched non-profit called Venture for America. Companies in Colorado and Massachusetts are offering paid summer internships to college students and new graduates through Startup America, a national initiative. A competition at Harvard, which opened an innovation lab in November, is providing funds and workspace to teams of students who have proposed ideas such as a car-sharing business in India and a restaurant offering interactive menus.

The flurry of opportunities reflects the mixed job picture for young adults. Corporations plan to hire 10% more new graduates this year compared with 2011, says a survey last month by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which tracks job hiring trends for recent graduates.

On Monday afternoon, the Senate is poised to consider — if only briefly — the so-called Buffett Rule, President Obama’s plan to make sure that millionaires pay at least as much of their income in tax as middle-class Americans. Supporters, however, are not likely to find the 60 votes necessary for the Senate to actually debate the bill.

As with seemingly every proposed tax increase, opponents object that the Buffett Rule will hurt small businesses. “It represents a huge tax increase on job creators,” Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who leads the House Budget Committee, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last Tuesday. “About 80 percent of our businesses file their taxes as individuals, so they would get hit by this Buffett Rule. Everybody thinks we’re just going to tax the hedge fund manager and the movie star, what you’re getting is that successful small business.”

The TechStars Boston accelerator program for startups will now take place twice a year, managing director Katie Rae tells me. That will double the number of new ventures that can participate in the program, to about 24 annually.

And Rae and Reed Sturtevant, who helps run the Boston program, say they are hoping to expand its focus, explicitly inviting robotics, bio informatics, health IT, digital manufacturing and edutech companies to apply. The fall program will begin in September.

Google does a lot of different things. It’s safe to say that we have all figured that much out over time. What is most interesting from the company at times though has nothing to do with search or social. Their “Think Quarterly” publication from the UK office of Google is just one of those things.

Incubators are hot. There are more than a thousand in the U.S., and the proliferation is causing some tech-industry watchers to fret. The flock of incubators is spawning a glut of wanna-be entrepreneurs ready to quit their jobs, commit their lives to a 10-week incubator program and end up with nothing but broken dreams and a souvenir hoodie.

But that's their problem. Your problem - if you're building a cool startup and you don't have millions from Andreessen Horowitz - is how to choose the incubator that will nurture your company and launch you toward fame, fortune and a Facebook acquisition.

Social media acts as the perfect tool for crowdfunding and allows for creative ideas to gain increased exposure and maximise social interaction. You could even argue that social-media made crowdfunding possible (along with the Internet!). Either way, Facebook and Twitter are the most commonly used social media sites harnessed for crowdfunding campaigns; both of which are vital ingredients for any crowdfunding project (and platform).

Regions often compete with each other to attract companies, talent and investment to spur economic growth and job creation. While this approach is often successful, regions should also focus on growing their own companies and industry clusters, too. Why?  Because regions will most likely have a better chance of yielding greater results over the long term. And, these days regions need to be focused on sustainable strategies that produce tangible economic benefits.

But how do you accomplish this? Where do you begin?

Industry clusters can serve as a basis for regional growth. They are often geographically bound, with interconnected businesses, suppliers and service providers all working together. The cluster concept has been validated by early thought leaders including Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter and well-respected organizations like the Brookings Institution and Council on Competitiveness.

Back when rumors of Google’s fabled augmented-reality glasses began picking up steam, one of the most frequently repeated bits was that they bore a striking resemblance to (rather old) Oakley’s Thump mp3-friendly sunglasses. The concept that Google eventually revealed looked nothing like them, but it turns out Oakley may eventually throw their hat into the smart eyewear ring.

In a brief interview with Bloomberg, Oakley CEO Colin Baden revealed that the company has been working on a way to project information directly onto lenses since 1997. Once perfected, the technology would allow the company to create a rival to Google’s Project Glass

While most of us are still reeling in shock after last week’s one billion Instagram buy, Peter Thiel — through both Founders Fund and the Thiel Foundation — is leading the charge into a future where humans don’t age or suffer from cancer, among other things. Call it crazy or whatever you’d like, but there’s no doubt that people who are trying to drastically change the world for the better often do.

If a hologram can give a concert, it’s not that far-fetched to imagine a future where humans don’t die. As part of its commitment to improving the quality of human life in general, Thiel’s latest project, Breakout Labs, is awarding $5 million to companies who push the envelope with regards to “revolutionary” scientific innovation.

What if the unthinkable happened and the U.S. government imposed a mandatory and public ranking of research universities and individual faculty according to their “research excellence?”   Just to be clear, I’m not advocating that such a ranking be be done.  However, no matter how stringently one might disagree with the idea of mandatory public rankings based on data that is currently largely private, I’ll bet that in the next few years, we’ll start to see policy makers cautiously exploring this idea.

Next year, those of us engaged in the university R&D ecosystem will get a rare opportunity to see speculation in action. The U.K. university system is about to launch a major new government-mandated university assessment process, the “Research Excellence Framework,” or REF.   When I was in the UK recently, the upcoming REF dominated discussion at dinner tables and coffee breaks.

In today’s business startup environment, if you don’t move fast, you get run over. Without a sense of urgency, people and businesses just can’t move fast enough. Speed is the driver because customers have a zero tolerance for waiting, and there are always competitors gaining on you.

John P. Kotter in his book, "A Sense of Urgency," delves into the how-to required of entrepreneurs on that first step, avoiding pitfalls along the way. He is convinced that increasing the sense of urgency is the toughest of the steps necessary for effective change.

Investing in women-owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is one of the best ways to simultaneously achieve economic, financial, and social impact. Research shows that women-owned SMEs are significant accelerators of economic growth. Because women are also responsible for nearly two-thirds of worldwide consumer spending, leading corporations are seeking competitive advantage by including more women vendors in their global value chains to better serve and understand their customers. Moreover, women tend to spend more of their earned income than men on the health and education of their families, yielding significant social impact and bolstering future gains in productivity and inclusive growth.

Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Americas (WEAmericas) leverages public-private partnerships to increase women’s economic participation and address three key barriers women confront when starting and growing SMEs: access to training and networks, access to markets, and access to finance.

THE lights dimmed. The crowd hushed. The teleprompters flickered.

Kazuo Hirai stepped up and flashed a winning smile: it was show time. The scene was oddly upbeat inside the Sony Corporation last Thursday as Mr. Hirai, the company’s new chief executive, faced the cameras. He outlined a strategy that, he vowed, would return the troubled electronics giant to profit.

“The time for Sony to change is now,” said Mr. Hirai, who formally took up the C.E.O. post on April 1. He posed for the cameras, one finger held high in a No. 1 sign. “I believe Sony can change,” he said.

Entrepreneurship is all about breathing life into an idea; it's about making mistakes, learning from them and then walking right into. Yet another fall entrepreneurship is about madness, lots of common sense and passion to win.

Sehgal: When I was about nine my father went to Japan and brought me a remote control car. All my friends wanted to play with that car. The problem was batteries, which were costly to buy. So, I told them, "Okay fine, everybody who wants to play with the car will bring 4annas (25 paisa)." I realised at that time you can make money out of the cars. That's why cars are very exciting.

Silicon Beach is spreading to Venice.

The quirky beach-side community drew hundreds of attendees to a packed town hall meeting dubbed The Emergence of Silicon Beach on Thursday to discuss the burgeoning Westside tech scene and how to attract firms and talent to the area.

Executives from Google, local start-ups Viddy and Mogreet, and accelerator Amplify were on hand for a panel moderated by Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who repeatedly told audience members that they were witnessing a “Venicessance.” Nearly two dozen tech companies set up booths to tout their products and ideas to about 400 attendees.

When I first heard the term crowdfunding (also called crowd investing or crowd financing) I thought it had something to do with music festivals and punters throwing their loose change in a hat at the end of the event. Once I delved a little further into it, I started thinking it was the next wave of group buying or a new form of philanthropy/sponsorship. Quickly, I realised it was much more than this.

While the concept has been around since the late 90s, it’s only really starting to take off. This might be a result of the current economic climate, where money and jobs are scarce, and globalisation and social media are on the rise. You’ve probably already heard of some of the major players, Kickstarter, Indiegogo (US) and Pozible (Australia).