What’s the difference between a coworking space, startup incubator and a startup accelerator?

We hear this question a lot. Especially since we have been known to call RocketSpace all of above, while growing into what we’ve ultimately become – a tech accelerator.

Here are the quick rules of thumb for the three concepts.

A coworking facility, like WeWork, is an office space that attracts people who want to get out of the house and engage in an office environment. The coworking crowd consists of a diverse set of members: individual entrepreneurs, freelancers and independent contractors. Events and classes are held on the premises, but services are usually limited. Coworking spaces typically operate on a monthly fee basis.

Most high level executives do not expect a lot of recognition from others. Neither do they give a lot of recognition to others.

Many managers are like the classic husband who, when his wife complains that he doesn't tell her he loves her any more, responds that he told her he loved her when he married her -- and would have let her know if anything had changed.

Similarly, most managers act as if the act of hiring an employee is recognition enough -- this in spite of the fact that every one of these managers wants to be valued and appreciated by their superiors, and is regularly disappointed by the lack of appreciation coming their way.

So sue me: When a company gets a cease-and-desist letter from taxicab regulators, you know it has an interesting business model. That’s what happened to UberCab, a startup since renamed simply Uber, whose app acts like a pocket limousine dispatcher.

Uber is simple: ask it to send you a car, and soon you’ll see a black limousine inching toward you on the screen. Limo drivers who sign up use the app, too, and see the location of fares. The experience is intimate; soon you’ll be IM-ing John, Bill, and the rest of your fleet of drivers.

For the first time in 10 years, startup companies majority-owned by venture capital funds are eligible again for hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants available to small businesses each year.

Legislation, buried in a national defense spending bill adopted on Dec. 30, allows federal agencies to award a portion of their Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants to VC-backed startups.

It’s a reversal of a 10-year-old policy that excluded firms that were more than 50 percent owned by VC investors.

As the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel consolidates several of its major areas, it has tapped a science veteran of almost 30 years to ensure it is ready to meet the needs of its federal military and research customers.

“We need to make sure we strategically invest program development funds to best support our customers,” said Charles Goldblum, who was recently named business area executive for the lab’s new department.

The Research and Exploratory Development Department was created this fall to develop and nurture new technologies to meet emerging national challenges.

Healthcare venture capital is still breathing and soon may be off the oxygen tank.

The sector closed out 2011 in strong fashion and posted a five-quarter high in funding and recording “solid” deal activity, according to the latest quarterly report from venture capital database CB Insights.

Of course, one quarter does not a trend make. Nonetheless, the strong fourth-quarter performance is welcome news for healthcare investors and entrepreneurs feeling beleaguered by a weak IPO market, regulatory uncertainty and a future of declining reimbursements from payers and providers. In the fourth quarter of 2011, healthcare VCs invested $1.9 billion in a total of 172 deals, according to CB Insights.

Every Michigan needs its Ohio State, and New York City has been working hard to become one to Silicon Valley.

In the last year, the city has pumped up its digital initiatives, welcomed prestigious startup accelerator TechStars, opened new offices for Twitter and Facebook and announced plans for a 2.1-million-square-foot Cornell tech campus.

Along the way, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has framed New York City as a Silicon Valley rival.

A New York-based store focused on mobile health apps for healthcare professionals and patients is developing a certification program.

Happtique‘s program would evaluate and certify healthcare apps. The program would articulate quality and performance standards for an app’s clinical relevance and technical functionality, developed by members of a blue ribbon panel in the next six months.

The voluntary program will be open to all app developers and will be funded by developer application fees.

GOP Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills and Dem Sen. Tim Cullen of Janesville say neither of them would vote for a version of a proposed venture capital bill that contained certified capital companies, or CAPCOs. But the two are determined to co-sponsor a revised version of the bill before the end of this month that they hope will win bipartisan support in both houses before the end of the legislative session in April.

Although they say they have not yet crafted the bill, it would differ from earlier versions in that it would call for less overall investment -- anywhere from $100 million to $140 million -- compared with $200 million to $500 million in earlier proposals -- and would include stricter oversight and transparency to ensure taxpayers are protected.

A bill that would create a venture capital fund to encourage investment in start-up businesses in Wisconsin failed last spring in Madison, and has been reintroduced in various versions since. Darling and former GOP Sen. Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac had pushed their own version of the bill, which they called the Badger Jobs Now Bill, prior to Hopper being recalled from office in August. Darling survived a recall attempt.

2011 has been a big year for health sciences technology and, specifically, mobile health. Venture capital investors, looking for the next big thing, are beginning to invest in companies developing mobile applications in the health and wellness sector. Smartphones are making new health care applications feasible, and one doesn’t have to look far to see tangible examples of companies creating some buzz. Fitbit, Lark, Zeo, and Jawbone (UP) have all raised capital and developed hardware solutions often tied to Apple’s iOS or Android based phones. Hundreds of companies are targeting weight loss, wellness/ fitness and women’s health with software-only applications. Incubators like Rock Health are popping up, bloggers are beginning to write about the sector, and gamification has become a term commonly used in healthcare. As cleantech investing predictably dies, mobile health and Health 2.0 are taking its place.

The business press loves to create mythic heroes of industry and we love it, too. To a point.

As much as we love a business visionary like, say, Steve Jobs--and we love him to pieces--we are not Steve Jobs, and never could be. Nor should we. All leaders have their own unique talents, which they will use in different ways to bring out the best in themselves and others. Here are 5 ways to discover your own strongest qualities and put them to work in business and in life.

1. Don’t compare yourself with others--but do approach people who inspire, and even intimidate, you.

TrueBridge Capital Partners’ employees may not be the only ones cheering at the final closing of its second fund of funds.

The wrap-up of TrueBridge-Kauffman Fellows Endowment Fund II LP is welcome news for the folks over at the Center for Venture Education, which sponsors the Kauffman Fellows program, a two-year venture capital training program that seeks to foster leadership and diversity within the venture capital industry.

Chapel Hill, N.C.-based TrueBridge was founded to help support the fellows program, and it devotes a portion of both the fee income and the profits that it generates from its funds of funds to the program. Since TrueBridge raised its first fund of funds, a $310 million pool closed back in 2008, it has funneled between $1.5 million and $2 million to the program, TrueBridge General Partner Edwin Poston told VentureWire.

Generally speaking, I like traveling and usually don’t mind not having super reliable access to the Internet while waiting for flights. This, of course, is the complete opposite if it’s a business-related trip and I’m having to work from afar.

It stands to reason that when I travel for work, I either breathe a sigh of relief or roll my eyes in frustration when I see the itinerary for work trips showing which airports and airlines I’ll be in and on.

For the last few years, I was teaching startups to think like designers. But I eventually realized that you need someone to model and inspire design thinking within the company. If you don’t have a designer in your founding group, it’s harder to have a culture of design. You see the reasons why all the time: A consultant comes in to improve a design and when they leave, the transformation eventually dies.

This was my aha moment; it challenged whether I was making an impact. My solution? Do the opposite of what I’ve been doing. Rather than spending as much energy training nondesigners, I figured I’d help designers succeed as part of the founding DNA of startups, thus making great design a natural expression of their operations.

The Edward Lowe Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship as the strategy for economic growth, has contracted with the University of Central Florida’s successful GrowFL team to provide economic-gardening services for other communities and states.

The Florida Economic Gardening Institute at UCF, which administers the GrowFL Program, is the first organization in the nation to be certified by the Michigan foundation as a Level III top-ranking economic-gardening provider.  As a result of that certification, the UCF program was selected to work as part of Lowe’s National Strategic Research Team to help share techniques about economic gardening.

Name: J. Craig Venter Title: CEO, Synthetic Genomics Location: La Jolla, Calif.

Why algae? You look at the potential output from algae, and it’s one to two orders of magnitude better than the best agri­cultural system. If we were trying to make liquid trans­portation fuels to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S., and you try and do that from corn, it would take a facility three times the size of the continental U.S. If you try to do it from algae, it’s a facility roughly the size of the state of Maryland. One is doable, and the other’s just absurd.

Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring alga that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world, and after a century of looking, people still haven’t found it. We hope we’re different. The genetic tools give us a new approach to being able to rewrite the genetic code and get cells to do what we want them to do.

Supporting small business was among the top economic stories of the year, and the rise in lending to those growing companies was the most important development in 2011.

It’s a story we saw developing since the credit crunch tightened the spigots on funding for small businesses. When the big banks said no, small banks and non-bank lenders increasingly said yes. Over the course of 2011, big banks rejected loan applications about 90 percent of the time. Smaller banks approved nearly half of small business funding requests, while alternative lenders granted approvals more often than not.

Where is social entrepreneurship heading in 2012?

There has been a shift in the entrepreneurial movement over the past decade in both the aims of new businesses or how entrepreneurs-to-be would like their business to operate and generate income. The growth of social entrepreneurship is driven by the urge to identify innovative solutions to pressing social issues, and to operate as a financially self-sustainable organisation. A social entrepreneur typically focuses on the potential of the entrepreneurial activities in creating social capital to further social and environmental goals. Below are some of the general trends of social entrepreneurship that I believe will be seen in 2012.

This report is part of a series of co-publications between the Directorate General Information Society and Media, Directorate for ICT Addressing Societal Challenges and the Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group (OISPG). OISPG is an industry-led industrial group to support policies for Open and Service Innovation, towards open innovation ecosystems and user-centric service architecture, at the European Commission.

Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE), argues, "key to achieving many of our competitiveness and innovation ambitions in the coming years (…)" is "to embrace open innovation and platforms, so that we avoid wasteful platform competition,and anti-competitive lock-ins, as well as stimulating development and investment in new generations of online services" (Neelie Kroes, 2010).

The last two years have seen the idea of a "green economy" float out of its specialist moorings in environmental economics and into the mainstream of policy discourse. It is found increasingly in the words of heads of state and finance ministers, in the text of G20 communiques, and discussed in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication.

This recent traction for a green economy concept has no doubt been aided by widespread disillusionment with the prevailing economic paradigm, a sense of fatigue emanating from the many concurrent crises and market failures experienced during the very first decade of the new millennium, including especially the financial and economic crisis of 2008. But at the same time, there is increasing evidence of a way forward, a new economic paradigm—one in which material wealth is not delivered perforce at the expense of growing environmental risks, ecological scarcities, and social disparities.