The “Fourth Economy Community (FEC) Index” was released today listing the nation’s top 10 small-sized Fourth Economy Communities. This category features counties with between 100,000 to 150,000 residents that are ideally positioned to attract modern investment and managed economic growth.

“The ‘fourth economy’ defines our nation’s current economy, reflecting a combination of the previous three: agrarian, industrial, and technological,” said Rich Overmoyer, Fourth Economy President and CEO. “This new index is intended to serve as a dashboard for community stakeholders to gauge their capacity to attract and retain modern investment.”

If you’re a startup, you’ve probably considered joining an incubator. But residency can be competitive and the requirements stiff. TechStars and Y-Combinator are well-known incubators that offer funding, mentorship, and access to a community of venture capitalists and anointed digerati — but only for a select few. Applicants also have to provide detailed business plans and disclose development, operational, marketing, and sales activities to get into the club.

There’s another alternative that might actually be a better fit for the majority of startups: co-working spaces.

Is Silicon Valley still the one tech hub to rule them all? And will it remain so in the future?

Techcrunch just posted some intruiging new research from the Startup Genome project on the world’s top tech hubs and their defining characteristics. A post of this kind is bound to lead to an argument over whose tech hub is best, but let’s start with the statistics.

In terms of total number of startups, capital raised and startup success rate (defined as companies at the “scale” stage) Silicon Valley still rules. Silicon Valley has 3 times as many startups as New York, 4.5 times as many as London  and 12.5-times the number in Berlin. The average startup in the Valley also raised 2-3 times as much capital  as its global equivalents in the early stage of its development and had the most helpful mentors.

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We are in the golden age of seed financing. Venture capital funds, seed funds, super angels, angel groups, incubators, and “friends and family” are all playing the seed financing game and investing early in startups in an attempt to land the next Facebook.

As a result, the pendulum has swung dramatically in the founders’ favor, and the issuance of convertible notes for seed financing has never been more prolific. Indeed, as a corporate lawyer for 18+ years, I have seen this development first-hand.

It’s April 8 and I haven’t started on my taxes yet. They’re due in about a week, but a combination of travel, the workload here at VentureBeat, and the general fear of what I owe have kept me from taking the first step.

Thankfully, it’s now easier than ever to tackle my taxes, courtesy of a slew of new mobile tax apps. Computers have simplified taxes beyond the dark days of pen and paper, first with boxed software, then with online solutions that were able to keep information from the previous year’s taxes. But now, if you’re lucky, you can get the job done simply by snapping a photo of your W2 with your phone.

Canadian tech startup companies now have a new avenue to commercialize innovations, scale their businesses faster and achieve market success with the introduction of Communitech's HYPERDRIVE program that will provide capital of up to $700,000 for high-potential companies - with a $30 million program to draw on. Backed by key investment firms and angel funders, service providers, strategic partners and mentors, Communitech plans to put innovation into HYPERDRIVE.

"We're revving up the opportunity for tech startups to get traction in the industry sooner, with more support from investors," said Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech, the organization representing 800 tech companies in Waterloo Region. "HYPERDRIVE will speed time to market and help surface the next big tech stars in Canada and beyond."

Big cities get all the attention as drivers of the economy and innovation, but a new ranking of smaller areas that are driving change shows they can get in on the action, too, by investing in a few key areas.

How can smaller communities achieve and sustain economic growth, even in the face of national economic volatility and companies exporting jobs overseas?

According to Fourth Economy, an economic development consultancy, the key ingredients are "investment, talent, sustainability, place, and diversity." And to make its point, the Pittsburgh-based group is ranking how various-sized communities are performing against those criteria.

Possibly the most interesting running conversation I've been having with entrepreneurs lately is how they can keep their companies independent without having to go public and turn their cap table into a casino. There are a bunch of entrepreneurs thinking seriously about this issue and I've been thinking seriously about it too.

Of course if you bootstrap your business and never take outside investors then this is not an issue. You control the timing and the choice of exit and there are no investors to concern yourself with. But there are plenty of entrepreneurs who have built interesting businesses using outside capital - angel, seed, VC, or some other form - and they have a portion of their cap table that is seeking a return on their capital on some reasonable timetable.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is making available $9 million  to help about 50 small businesses advance innovative energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies.

The funds are for outside-the-box approaches that improve manufacturing processes, boost the efficiency of buildings, reduce reliance on oil, and generate electricity from renewable sources to bring new clean energy solutions to market faster.

Contrary to popular perception, a large proportion of obese Americans can and do lose weight, say researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. What’s more, they say, the old tried and true methods of eating less fat and exercising are some of the most effective paths to weight loss success.

The research results appear in the April 10 online issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“This is great news because studies have shown that even a 5 percent reduction in weight can lead to improved health,” says lead author Jacinda M. Nicklas, MD, MPH, MA, a clinical research fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “With more than a third of Americans now obese and fifty to seventy percent of them trying to lose weight, this is important because the health risks associated with carrying that extra weight are substantial.”

Rapidly dropping water levels of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the earth’s surface heralded for its medicinal properties, has been a source of ecological concern for years. Now a drilling project led by researchers from Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University reveals that water levels have risen and fallen by hundreds of meters over the last 200,000 years.

Directed by Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham of TAU’s Minerva Dead Sea Research Center and Prof. Mordechai Stein of the Geological Survey of Israel, researchers drilled 460 meters beneath the sea floor and extracted sediments spanning 200,000 years. The material recovered revealed the region’s past climatic conditions and may allow researchers to forecast future changes.

Cybersecurity is an issue all levels of government must address, and their response to potential threats has varied. Congress has introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. Each state has enacted laws aimed at protecting itself and businesses from cyber-intrusions. Even the smallest localities are aware of the risks that their networks face, especially since they may store information that is shared with state systems.

Utah's Chief Information Security Officer Boyd Webb says that states are "light years ahead" of localities. Michigan's Chief Security Officer Dan Lohrmann cautions against saying that states are ahead, as cities can be leaders in cybersecurity as well. He suggests that it may be better to group big states and cities together, and smaller cities and counties as another group.

As the potential returns from crowdfunding go beyond free T-Shirts and movie passes, the rules were bound to get more complex.

Last week, President Barack Obama signed into law the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act. Though the law contains many parts that could free up funds for startups, the most anticipated measure among the entrepreneurial set is the crowdfunding provision that legalizes investing in startups by non-accredited investors.

The computer algorithm that led to the Google search engine and a multi-billion-dollar business was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were working as graduate students under part of a $4.5 million National Science Foundation grant for a digital library project at Stanford University.

The Human Genome Project, funded by the federal government at a cost of $5.6 billion (in 2010 dollars) over 13 years, has had a fundamental impact on areas as diverse as human health, agriculture, forensics, and veterinary medicine, with an economic payoff in 2010 alone of $67 billion, according to a study by the Battelle Memorial Institute.

When Instagram launched its first app in October 2010, it did not strike most people as the kind of startup that would be acquired for $1 billion.

“We were all like, ‘what’s the big deal? It’s just photos and filters,” Brian Blau, a Research Director with the Consumer Technology and Markets Group at Gartner, tells Mashable. But in retrospect, he adds, “There’s something to be said around that simplicity.”

Let’s be honest here in saying that we’re predisposed to like author and artist Austin Kleon, because he not only reads newspapers, but they are the basis of his art.

The Austin, Texas-based author’s first book, “Newspaper Blackout,” was a collection of poems that had been redacted, CIA-style, as he likes to say, from actual newspapers.

That experience led him to think more deeply about the nature of creativity and how anyone, regardless of career, could become more creative in their work. Those meditations have been turned into a very simple, straightforward 152-page, 6-by-6-inch book, “Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative” (Workman, $10.95).

The concept of Open Innovation (OI) has gained tremendous traction in recent years, as companies realize the potential offered by capabilities, technology and resource outside the organization’s borders. The OI principles outlined in Henry Chesbrough’s eponymous book from 2003 fall into two main areas, “inside out” when your assets are used by others; and “outside in” when you use other people’s. Most OI uses the latter approach, and companies who employ it well need to consider many different things, one of which is how to structure and organize their OI efforts.

The organization of OI is best addressed from two perspectives, structural and human. Starting first with the options for how you draw your organogram on paper, there are three basic models. The first has a central group acting as a centre of excellence, spreading good practice throughout the rest of the corporation. The second is a devolved structure with OI people in each operating division. Finally, the hybrid model has both a central core team and OI people spread around the “coalfaces” of the company.

Periodically and cyclically, the economy will stink, even more so for people who are less experienced, educated or trained, the youngest members of the work force.

The Depression walloped one generation. The recession, oil shortage, and stagflation whipped mine. Many classmates avoided the job market, or the pronounced lack thereof, by diving into grad school and further debt, which drove them toward more lucrative professional if not necessarily innovative endeavors.

These are days of diminishing economic returns for the "millennial generation," adults 18 to 34, entering a challenging and rapidly changing marketplace.

Following an extensive national search, Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority (FRA) has named Steve VanNurden as its new President and Chief Executive Officer, beginning in late May. The announcement is made by John M. Shaw, Chair of the FRA Board of Directors, who said: "Steve, a seasoned leader in the life science/bioscience space, comes to us from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota."

The appointment of Mr. VanNurden is further evidence of the FRA's continued commitment to support the development of life science companies in Colorado in partnership with the State’s research institutions. He will be working with universities, local economic development agencies, state and local governments, and the bioscience industry to promote the successful development of the 180 acre Colorado Science + Technology Park, which is adjacent to the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.