Would-be entrepreneurs need cash to launch new businesses, but countries are far from equal when it comes to funding young, innovative and growth-oriented companies, according to a new OECD report.

Venture capitalists in Israel allocate more financing to young companies than any other country in the OECD, with the equivalent of 0.18% of GDP dedicated to seed, start-up and early development capital. The United States, Sweden and Finland are among the other leading providers of venture capital, and are not surprisingly also among the most entrepreneurial nations.

If you Google “entrepreneur” you get a lot of mindless cliches like “Think Big!” For me, being an “entrepreneur” doesn’t mean starting the next “Facebook”. Or even starting any business at all. It means finding the challenges you have in your life, and determining creative ways to overcome those challenges. However, in this post I focus mostly on the issues that come up when you first start your company. These rules also apply if you are taking an entrepreneurial stance within a much larger company (which all employees should do).

For me, I’ve started several businesses. As I’ve described in the rest of this blog, some have succeeded, many have failed. I’m invested in about 13 private companies. I’ve advised probably another 50 private companies. Along the way I’ve compiled a list of rules that have helped me deal with every aspect of being an entrepreneur in business and some in life.

PwC Luxembourg, in cooperation with Plug and Play, an accelerator of over 300 startups from all over the world, will launch a Luxembourg-based European Accelerator, which aims at granting innovative companies access to funding, markets and extensive expertise. The overall goal of PwC’s Accelerator is to build up a two-way bridge between Luxembourg, Europe and the Silicon Valley to help these high tech companies succeed in this overseas journey and offer the right business solutions and business contacts on the ground. It will also contribute to create the first European Community of professionals to assist the acceleration of these companies and promote a culture of entrepreneurship and high potential companies.

PwC Luxembourg, the leading professional services firm in Luxembourg, in cooperation with Plug and Play, based in the Silicon Valley (USA), has decided to launch PwC’s Accelerator, one of the very first business accelerators in Europe plugged with the Silicon Valley. This new innovative offering will help high tech companies develop and market products.

Healthcare venture investing reached its highest level in five quarters, with signs of a resurgence in early stage investing.

Healthcare companies received $1.9 billion in investment during the second quarter, up 21 percent from the prior quarter and up 16 percent from the like quarter last year, according to a report from New York research firm CB Insights. There were 147 venture-backed healthcare deals in the quarter.

The quarter’s largest healthcare deals included: California-based defibrillator company Cameron Health ($107 million), Massachusetts-based cancer drug developer Tesaro ($101 million) and Massachusetts-based osteoporosis drug developer Radius ($91 million).

Despite the recent spate of startups scoring millions and even hundreds of millions in venture capital, the number of U.S. funds raising venture capital totaled only 37 in the second quarter of 2011, a 23 percent decrease from the second quarter of 2010, according to data from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). This marks the lowest number of VC funds since the first half of 1995.

They may be smaller in number, but the amounts these VC funds are raising continue to climb. The 37 funds raised $2.7 billion in the second quarter of 2011, a 28 percent increase from the same period in 2010.

About half that total was raised by Palo Alto-Calif.-based Accel Partners, which gained a reputation as an industry leader for its 2005 investment in Facebook and 2009 investment in Groupon.

Pierre Andre Senizergues is the owner of Sole Technology, a skateboard footwear and apparel company that produces brands such as Etnies. He’s also a former world champion boarder. And now the 48-year-old entrepreneur has commissioned Francois Perrin, of the L.A.-based architecture firm Air Architecture, to build him a California home that doubles as a skate park. Did we mention that he’s really, really into skateboarding?

Slated for completion next year, the mid-lifer’s Malibu dream house is shaped like a flattened tube, with walls that curve into the ceiling, making every surface fully skateable or grindable. Even the furniture is fair game, says Perrin: "Closets and drawers could be integrated in the curve, too." He, along with the designer Gil Lebon Delapointe, carved the 2,200-square-foot floor plan into three distinct spaces: the living room, dining area, and kitchen; a bedroom and bathroom; and an official skateboard practice area. The house will also sport a few green touches: It will be constructed of local materials and make use of natural ventilation, as well as solar and wind power. In addition, rainwater will be collected and stored for landscaping.

A “fountain of youth” that sustains the production of new neurons in the brains of rodents may also be present in the human brain, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found.

The existence of a vital support system of cells around stem cells in the brain explains why stem cells by themselves can’t generate neurons in a lab dish, a major roadblock in using these stem cells for injury repair.

The scientists found that neighboring “epithelial-like” ependymal cells — not stem cells themselves – maintain a special structure that keeps neural stem cells “neurogenic,” able to make new neurons. Currently, when neural stem cells are harvested for growth in culture, however, the ependymal cells are not removed along with them, and this can be a problem.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — The robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks often begins speeches by reaching into his pocket, fiddling with some loose change, finding a quarter, pulling it out and twirling it in his fingers.

The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than I.B.M.’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.

Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp things and move about effortlessly in the physical world.

If you have had some success in a business, I’m sure you bristle just like I do when someone says “You were just lucky…” I’m a strong believer that we all make our own luck, which means that the harder we work, the luckier we get. In reality, “hard work” is just a catch-all term for a list of principles that good entrepreneurs follow, allowing them to work smarter and improve their odds of success.

A short list of these “hard work” principles, published recently by Anthony Tjan in the Harvard Business Review summarizes them as heart, smarts, and guts. I agree with these, and most people recognize them when they see them in others, but the terms are still a bit abstract for learning purposes.

From $20,000 signing bonuses and unlimited vacation time to a year’s supply of cold beer and free limousine rides, technology start-ups are doing everything they can to win the war for top technical talent.

VentureLoop That includes enlisting investors as foot soldiers.

While venture firms have always helped start-ups fill executive and board member positions, they haven’t typically sourced engineers to build product. This more specialized recruiting skill, at least historically, has been the role of founders and their first few hires.

Synthetic fat substitutes used in low-calorie potato chips and other foods could backfire and contribute to weight gain and obesity, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association.

The study, by researchers at Purdue University, challenges the conventional wisdom that foods made with fat substitutes help with weight loss. “Our research showed that fat substitutes can interfere with the body’s ability to regulate food intake, which can lead to inefficient use of calories and weight gain,” said Susan E. Swithers, PhD, the lead researcher and a Purdue psychology professor. The study was published online in the APA journal Behavioral Neuroscience.

Are your employees seeking work-life flexibility? While having flexibility in when, where and how you work is increasingly becoming the norm at companies of all sizes, a new study, the Work+Life Fit Reality Check, reveals there are still some roadblocks in the way.

Among the findings of the study, conducted by the Flex+Strategy Group:

• Eleven percent of respondents said that their use of work-life flexibility increased and 76 percent said it stayed the same during the recession.
• While in the recovery, 10 percent thought their level of use of work-life flexibility would increase and 82 percent felt it would stay the same.
• Compared to this time last year, 66 percent report they have the same amount of work-life flexibility, and 17 percent saw an increased amount.
• Sixty-six percent believe employee health, morale and productivity suffer as a result of having no work-life flexibility.

There’s a lot of talk in the marketing blogosphere about the importance of setting yourself apart from your competition–about how to be taken seriously, you must establish yourself as an expert in your field. And while that’s all well and good, no one ever really tells you how you’re supposed to establish yourself as an expert. What goes into becoming an “expert” and how do you know if you’re doing it right or you’re just spinning your wheels and getting no brand karma?

What should small business owners do to help brand themselves as authorities that users will trust?

Below are five tips:

1. Start Small: I’m sure there are a number of things you want to brand yourself and your company as being an expert on. However, start by picking one and building your empire from there. What is the one thing that your company does better than anyone else? Or what would you like to be known for doing better than anyone else even if you don’t right now? Become the go-to person for that. Once you get that under your belt, you can expand upon it and add a lot of related services.

Teens in Tech and Appcelerator have announced the first crop of startups accepted into the Teens in Tech Incubator.

The incubator was announced at the beginning of 2011 as a way for aspiring teen entrepreneurs to get hands-on instruction and mentorship to bring their ideas to life.

Each team includes up to three members, all of whom are 18 or younger. The teams began their work with Teens in Tech and Appcelerator June 22. The incubator program will run for six weeks at Appcelerator’s Mountain View headquarters. The young hackers and entrepreneurs have been given advice and tutelage from an all-star lineup of mentors and advisors during “office hours” events and workshops.

In their early stages, when dedicated office space is unrealistic, unnecessary or too expensive, small businesses and startups tend to frequent coffee shops for their working and meeting needs. It’s nice to get away from the home desk, and a nice café can be just the spot for sparking creativity. But with the increasing amount of coffeehouse commuters, the guidelines for what’s appropriate and what’s just downright obnoxious can be a bit foggy.

Mashable interviewed three coffee shop vets and four coffee-toting, WiFi-using professionals about their best practices for entrepreneurs hoping to mind their Ps and Qs while working from their local café.

Most of the time, I’m all about providing encouragement and inspiration to entrepreneurs. They need it and they deserve it, because entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of our economy. But every so often, I try to give them a reality check, just to keep their feet on the ground and their nose to the grindstone.

Many years ago, I enjoyed one of Guy Kawasaki’s first books, “Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.” In his classical humorous and cynical style, he could reset your dreaming in a moment. Here is a sampling of ten themes from the book that I think are just as relevant today as they were then:

The reality of starting. It’s not going to get better – it already is. Startup folks are like medieval monasteries: always convinced that paradise is just ahead or that things only recently got worse.

The business plan has two purposes, to introduce your company to prospective investors and as a document investors who are in their due diligence process can look to for additional information about the company.

As I wrote in my last 50 Questions post, I wouldn’t advise that your business plan is the first document that you send to a VC, that should be an executive summary and covering email.  However, some people will ask to see a business plan before a meeting and for others the business plan will be the first contact they have with your business (particularly the partners of your sponsor) and so the business plan should work as an introductory document.  That means putting an executive summary at the beginning the contents of which should be as I described here (same post as linked above).  Note that the executive summary should stand on its own, i.e. the reader should be able to get an good high level feel for the whole business without needing to read any other part of the business plan.

Guts + ingenuity + hard work = success.

That's been the formula for prosperity in America since Benjamin Franklin climbed from his working-class Boston roots to retire on his riches at the ripe old age of 42.

Is it still? Yes. But these days, the formula is often applied by recent arrivals to our shores.

A recent study by Duke University, University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University found that almost 52 percent of Silicon Valley startups launched from 1995 to 2005 were founded by immigrants. A quarter of the patents filed during the same period came from immigrants. Research by the National Venture Capital Association shows that 40 percent of the publicly traded, venture-backed companies in high-tech manufacturing today were started by foreign-born entrepreneurs. These are pretty impressive figures when you consider that immigrants still make up just a small fraction of the population.

Many small business owners have faced tough times. In the past, entrepreneurs might have turned to small business loans to help them hang on until business improved. But when small business loans are difficult to come by, many owners consider using their personal funds.

It’s tempting to raid your retirement account or take out a home equity line of credit on your house to stave off a cash-flow crisis that threatens to sink your business. But before you do, consider the pros and cons, including longer-term financial consequences.

We reached deep into our archives and pulled out a list of our greatest hits — our favorite science videos from the past five years. 125 videos in total, and the list will grow from here. Right now, it covers everything from Astronomy and Space Travel, to Physics and Biology, and then Psychology and Neuroscience. Our recommendation? Just jump right in here. But if you want a little preview, then let’s start you off with ten slam-dunk videos from the collection: