What kind of business should you form? An LLC, C-Corp, or S-Corp? Unfortunately, the answer is always the same: It all depends. But the following factors may help clarify the decision for you. Given that an LLC, C-Corp, and S-Corp all offer the same level of liability protection, here are five key factors to consider when deciding which business entity to form:

Consider a C-Corp if you:

1) plan to attract venture capitalists or other larger investors who want to avoid pass-through tax entities;

2) expect that the tax rate from a marginally profitable C-Corp will be lower than your tax rate for other ordinary income, and you do not intend to distribute the profits from the C-Corp.

Grow Venture Ccommunity, a Virtual Silicon Valley platform creator, has launched a new model to make startup funding globally more transparent and effective.

GrowVC, the first global crowd funding platform, is an online venture community and micro-funding network that has grown to over 9 000 entrepreneurs, investors and experts from 200 different countries.

“Since we launched the platform in 2010, we have been listening to our community for the right time to move to the next level. With our new model, we open our service and startup funding opportunities to a larger audience. Users can now use the service for free and gain easier access to the community of entrepreneurs and investors”, said Jouko Ahvenainen Grow VC Chairman and Co-founder.

Effective innovators in the life sciences industry have measurable results to show for their efforts.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, companies that describe their innovation strategies as very effective produce almost twice as many new products or NMEs (new molecular entities) than other companies-an average of 7.2 per year compared with 3.8 for all other companies.

Never has the need for new products been more crucial in the life sciences industry. Payers and patients are pushing back against rising healthcare costs. At the same time, companies are dealing with the loss of intellectual property protection on blockbuster drugs that bring in tens of billions of dollars in revenues. Changing demographics-aging populations and growing

Brad Feld put a great post up yesterday titled Note to CEOs: Decisions come from you, not the board which makes the point that it is a mistake for CEOs to blame the board for a decision that has been made, either because they don’t agree with it, or because they want to distance themselves from it.  Either way the CEO is abdicating some responsibility for the decision, and that undermines his or her authority and de-motivates anyone who sees what is going on.  Nobody tries as hard to do things they know their boss doesn’t believe in.

I’ve seen this play out in a large number of boards and problems have always followed.

The right way is for the board to present a consensus, including the CEO.  Behind closed doors there may be heated debate and even disagreement, but presenting a united front is a pre-requisite for good leadership.

There's a debate going on right now over how many jobs tech startups create.

As Fortune reporter Dan Primack notes, the US lost over 1 million jobs over the past year. And a lot of people look to high-growth companies to make up the shortfall. VC Andrew Parker wrote that the big web 2.0 companies (the Facebooks and Twitters) have probably created 15,000 jobs; extrapolating with the long tail, he guesstimates that the last wave of VC-backed companies have probably created around 75,000 jobs.

Parker writes: "we need 18 times the job creation we’ve accomplished in this wave of web services investing to overcome the 1.29MM non-farm jobs lost in the US economy over the past two years."

Entrepreneurship is on the rise: More people worked for themselves in 2010 than during each of the previous 15 years, according to a report by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a think tank that focuses on entrepreneurship.

But is self-employment a good choice for new college graduates? Scott Gerber, founder of The Young Entrepreneur Council and video-production company Sizzle It!, says so.

U.S. News talked with Gerber about thinking outside the corporate box, tips for launching a business, and how he jumped on the entrepreneurial train. Excerpts:

Why is entrepreneurship so hot right now?

European VCs are too risk averse, not entrepreneur friendly and under value companies, says the CEO of a U.K.-based start up that announced its first funding.

Astute readers will have noticed that yesterday’s announcement by DataSift of their $6 million funding round was all from U.S. venture capital firms. This was no coincidence.

“What disappoints me the most is that I am a huge advocate of Europe, but as a businessman you are always going to go with the best valuation and the best partners,” says DataSift CEO Nick Halstead.

And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Mr. Halstead says he spent two months pitching European VCs, using the same pitch as he used for U.S. investors.

The rise in the unemployment rate last month to 9.2 percent has Democrats and Republicans reliably falling back on their respective cure-alls. It is evidence for liberals that we need more stimulus and for conservatives that we need more tax cuts to increase demand. I am sure there is truth in both, but I do not believe they are the whole story. I think something else, something new — something that will require our kids not so much to find their next job as to invent their next job — is also influencing today’s job market more than people realize.

Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.

The European Commission published its 2011 Innovation Union Competitiveness Report-IUC

Building on the Innovation Union Scoreboard, it represents the first comprehensive analysis of recent trends and long-term evolution in research and innovation performance in all 27 EU Members States and 6 Associated Countries.

1. "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin

2. "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

3. "If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless." - Darryl F. Zanuck

4. "If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself." - Henry Ford

5. "Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

It’s easy to know what the superstar looks like after the person’s star already is shining. But it’s much harder to identify that diamond in the rough. BusinessWeek reports that 90% of managers believe they are in the top 10% in performance.

This is hilarious.  Until you are working with one of those people. And then you start to ask yourself: Am I like this? Am I delusional? How strong a performer am I really?

It’s hard to look at yourself objectively, but a while back, I noticed that I was good at recognizing talent. The last company that I founded,Brazen Careerist, focuses on identifying high performers for companies, and helping people early in their career reach their potential. So I have a lot of experience in this area, and I’ve noticed that there  are a few telltale signs of “star” potential.

(July 12, 2011) –Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern PA has received a grant awarded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to launch a digital media startup incubator with Philadelphia Media Network, Inc. (PMN), owner and publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and philly.com. The strategic partnership will also include Drexel University, DreamIt Ventures, and the Philadelphia Foundation.

“Hosting this technology incubator will enable PMN to identify and develop some of the newest, most creative mobile technology applications, social media and e-commerce ventures,” said Gregory Osberg, PMN President and CEO. “We are embracing the changes that are occurring in our industry, and our goal is to take the lead in shaping the way our readers – our customers – will do business with us in the future.”

The technology incubator is designed to stimulate the establishment and growth of digital media startup companies in Philadelphia and to inject a new culture of innovation in the media space. Set to begin operation in September, the program will provide four startup or early stage technology companies with a minimum of six months of office space -- at PMN’s offices at 400 North Broad Street – technical and administrative support, mentoring, and access to the region’s most powerful online platform, Philly.com, for launching their digital media “apps” or related products.

Entrepreneurs are often curious, passionate workaholics. Yes, that’s a generalization – but often true.

We want to learn more about things – our business, our world, our customers, our industry, our marketplace, our technology and other stuff.

And we each have our preferred ways of staying up to date. Watching TV. Listening to the radio. Reading books. Subscribing to magazines. Surfing the Web. Even getting an assistant or professional service to summarize the most relevant information for you.

One thing you cannot afford to do is fall behind. Information is indeed power, especially in today’s “knowledge economy”. And that’s why the staggering fact that the average American reads ONE book per year is so shocking. (I don’t know how different this figure is for other countries, but it’s probably representative).

JumpStart NYC is a proven, three-month educational program to help unemployed professionals apply their knowledge, skills, and abilities in opportunities at small, entrepreneurial companies.

One of Mayor Bloomberg’s initiatives to boost the New York City economy, JumpStart NYC has successfully delivered eight programs that help participants develop new skills, sample the environment at small, entrepreneurial companies/non-profits, and explore opportunities in New York’s entrepreneurial firms -- including New York City's budding "green" sector -- in many cases creating new career paths and opportunities.   JumpStart NYC was initiated by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). Its courses, events and seminars were developed by The Levin Institute (SUNY), and there's no cost to you.

The job of attracting out-of-state businesses and helping revitalize communities got a bit tougher for state officials when the Pennsylvania budget passed recently with a cut of more than $114 million to the Department of Community and Economic Development.

The 35 percent funding reduction to the agency affected dozens of programs and imposed consolidations designed to make recipients work together, regionalize or compete head to head.

It's the latest in a series of cuts that have left the DCED with a $213 million budget, down from $327 million last year and $631 million just four years ago.

We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky; hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble and investors are starting to openly wonder how this one will end.

The bubble is being driven by market forces on a scale never seen in the history of commerce. For the first time, startups can today think about a Total Available Market in the billions of users (smart phones, tablets, PC’s, etc.) and aim for hundreds of millions of customers. And those customers may be using their devices/apps continuously. The revenue, profits and speed of scale of the winning companies can be breathtaking.

Rules for building a company in 2011 are different than they were in 2008 or 1998. Startup exits in the next three years will include IPO’s as well as acquisitions. And unlike the last bubble, this bubble’s first wave of IPO’s will be companies showing “real” revenue, profits and customers in massive numbers. (Think Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, etc.)

Girls dominated the intellectual battleground of Google's online science fair, which amassed impressive contributions from 10,000 young prodigies in 91 countries. Of the 15 brainiacs flown to Google headquarters to be personally judged by an all-star panel of scientists, three girls, from age groups 13 to 18, took home a coveted trove of scholarships and Lego-based trophies for their contributions to cancer treatment and asthma reduction.

Competition was stiff. These adorably cheery gladiators rose above competitors with everything from brain-controlled prosthetics to natural language computer coding for robots. The grand prize winner, Shree Bose, will be whisked away for an all-expense paid trip to the Galapagos Islands to study marine life at the very footprint of Charles Darwin's own inspirations over 150 years ago.

During the past decades, large firms and especially multinational firms have been developing innovation networks with a true global reach. In these networks, innovation is created in different locations and shared among different partners in order to open, adapt, maintain or exploit new market opportunities.

The objective of the INGINEUS research project is to investigate what global innovation networks are, and what policy implications they pose for Europe. This Framework Programme 7 project is ongoing, but the researchers have published a policy brief summarising the findings of a survey conducted by INGINEUS, that highlights what 500 European firms see as the biggest barriers to engaging with these networks. It also summarises the perceptions of these companies as to what policies are the most relevant to help them engage in global innovation networks.

Looking for a job, or thinking of changing fields? CareerBuilder has a little cheat sheet that should help you make some smart choices. After all, it’s not just about which fields are expected to grow most quickly in the next few years (although you can get those stats easily enough from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site). It’s about where there are plenty of job openings, and not enough qualified workers to fill them.

Even though there are only two fields in which the number of job openings is actually greater than the number of job seekers, about one third of human resource managers say they have open positions for which they can’t find qualified candidates. Here are the most promising fields for job seekers, according to CareerBuilder:

Cloud developer: 0.32 active job seekers for every opening (in other words, there are about one-third as many applicants as there are jobs in this field)

In a sluggish economy with slow growth and high unemployment, innovation may be part of the solution.

Tom Clement is just the sort of entrepreneur the U.S. needs to propel the economy. He loves brainstorming and developing new ideas and turning them into products and companies.

Back in the mid-1980s, he climbed Mount Everest. When his friends asked if he was frightened, he told them no, just excited. Clement says starting a new business is a lot like scaling mountains .

"It's that same sense of just being out there, putting yourself out there — that part of you that wants to take a risk, that enjoys that feeling of uncertainty and needing to figure things out as you go," he says.