Startup veterans Geoff Ralston, Tim Brady and Alan Louie are launching Imagine K12 today, an education focused startup accelerator/investor that is modeled closely after Y Combinator. The goal of the new project is simple – “To effect positive change in the K-12 education space.”

Everyone thinks they know exactly what schools need to do to start actually educating the youth of America well enough that they’ll have a fighting chance in the world. I, for example, think all we need is to bring good, old fashioned corporal punishment back into our school system. Right after we fire all the teachers, of course.

Right now the UK media is making a lot of noise about new Visa rules which mean “super-investors” willing to put £5m into a UK bank account will get the right to stay indefinitely in Britain after only three years. This is two years faster than the average migrant who still has to wait five years. Deposit £10m and the time drops to two years. Clearly the new rules are aimed at high-value investors and entrepreneurs.

However, what the media is missing is the new rules governing entrepreneurs wanting to enter the UK. Now, beginning April 6th, “high-potential” entrepreneurs will be allowed to come to the UK so long as they have £50,000 in funding from a reputable organisation.

That is ridiculously good news for tech startups wanting to set up shop in the UK, and startups in the UK wanting to hire in talent they can’t get locally – CTOs for instance. Plus, entrepreneurs will be allowed to enter the UK with their business partners as long as they have access to joint funds.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - The Oklahoma House has approved legislation to revive an economic development tool that supporters say will help attract businesses to the state and create jobs.

Lawmakers voted 79-17 Wednesday to create the Oklahoma Quick Action Closing Fund. The measure amends the Oklahoma Opportunity Fund, which was created in 2006 but declared unconstitutional by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The measure by Rep. Skye McNeil of Bristow would authorize the governor to dip into the fund to provide financial incentives to companies considering relocating or expanding in the state.

Today we are looking at 15 young women who are building and running some of the next great companies. These women who range in age from 15-29 are running multi-million dollar business in a diverse set of industries. Check out these women and the companies they are building…

Sarah Prevette

Company: Sprouter.com

Age: 28

Sarah Prevette wanted to find a better way to get answers to her pressing business questions so she started an online community for it called Sprouter. Sprouter is a fast paced environment that focuses on connecting entrepreneurs to socialize and share tips. Sarah has grown Sprouter to 10′s of thousands of users and is backed by angel investors. The community has been featured in numerous publications and is posed to grow as we continue to see growth of online communities and networking.

A number of the cleantech efforts between the United States and China reflect the need for cooperation on issues surrounding climate change and clean energy as it is a major factor in the relations of these two countries. Although there are still issues to resolve in many of the collaborations, it is believed that if the United States and China can continue in their cleantech collaborations, that it will show the world that two major players on the international platform are serious about combating the challenge of climate change, and it will also encourage other countries to create alliances. Through collaboration, the two largest greenhouse gas emitters will be able to create technologies required to combat climate change. Not only that, but tangible benefits will be developed, not just for the United States and China, but the world as a whole.

Kima Ventures is almost certainly the most active angel investor in the world: it wants to invest in 100 startups each year, every year. Forever. And they'll invest in any country in the world.

Kima is run by two entrepreneurs. The first is Xavier Niel, French billionaire telecoms entrepreneur who runs Iliad, France's biggest independent ISP, and owns Le Monde, its daily paper of record. The other is Jeremie Berrebi, serial French-Israeli entrepreneur. They started Kima Ventures in 2010 with the goal on investing in 50 companies per year, and then decided to kick it up a notch and invest in 100 per year.

Many business blogs will pose the question “what is innovation?” and then descend into an erudite semantic fog. Let’s just answer the question and do so in a way that points forward to responsibilities and actions.

First, a general definition: innovation is anything “new and useful.” All three words are essential, and no more. Thus, a clever invention that never helps or delights anyone isn’t innovation, nor is a very useful ripoff of an old product. “New and useful” can apply to processes or services as well as physical products, of course.

Now let’s get more specific and in a way that points to action. An expanded definition (perfectly compatible with “new and useful”) is that innovation consists of the “three I’s”, namely inspiration, invention, and implementation, in that order, and again with all three essential before we can say we are innovative. Thomas Edison’s light bulb wonderfully illustrates all three.

Grasshopper Group posted a comic on its blog that in an effort to dispel some of the romantic ideas about working for a startup.

It's a funny look at what life is really like as you sweat out building a new company from scratch.

It features helpful quotes from the likes of Tim O'Reilly, Mark Cuban, and Pandora's Tim Westergren.

How does it compare to your own startup experience? Let us know in the comments!

Most entrepreneurs expect to face the “normal” challenges of starting a business, which include finding the right opportunity, building and executing a winning plan, and financing their venture. But many forget the pitfalls associated with traditional business jobs which can apply even to the smartest and most dedicated people running their own business.

Often these facets of entrepreneurship don’t rear their ugly head until well down the road. Yet before you start, you should think about what the impact might be on your psyche, and how to neutralize these challenges in your own plan. I’ll summarize them here, but you can see more detail in an article by David Finkel in D&B Small Business Solutions:

1. Long-term daily job grind. Sometimes entrepreneurs are so set on creating a successful business, they forget to create one that they love to work on every day. After a time, they find that they have merely created a job for themselves, with the same rote responsibilities and stress that they experienced in a prior corporate world. Daily attendance is mandatory in order for the business to succeed and be profitable, and the so-called freedom is hard to find. Vacations and time-off don’t happen for years.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman gave a speech today about how entrepreneurs can “invent the future”. Speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, he recited a list of 10 rules of entrepreneurship.

Hoffman, who is now a partner at venture firms Greylock Partners, cautioned that he “reserves the right” to change the list later on. But for now, here are his rules:

1. Try to create “disruptive change” — “It’s got to be something that changes an industry.” As one rule-of-thumb on how to judge whether your idea is disruptive enough, Hoffman said it should take $10 revenue and replace it with $1 of revenue, because that’s creating opportunities for new ecosystems.

I’ve had a crash course in nuclear physics this week. I took basic Physics in university, but my major was History, so I never really got into it. This interconnected world sure makes it easy to learn informally though.

From Twitter, I was led to an excellent overview of how the Fukushima Daiichi reactor works at Why I am not worried … which is now being hosted by MIT’s Nuclear Information Hub:

The solid fuel pellet (a ceramic oxide matrix) is the first barrier that retains many of the radioactive fission products produced by the fission process. The Zircaloy casing is the second barrier to release that separates the radioactive fuel from the rest of the reactor.

One of the most impressive innovators in education today is Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, an online learning portal. A former hedge fund analyst from Boston, Khan stumbled upon the idea for his free web-based academy while trying to teach math to cousins in New Orleans. In an effort to bridge the time and distance gap, he started making 10-minute videos of math lessons and posting them on YouTube. Much to his surprise, Khan found his cousins preferred learning from him via YouTube to learning from him in person. While they were grappling with new concepts for the first time, it was less intimidating to have their cousin not hovering over them, asking, “Did you understand this?”

Soon, Khan noticed other students had discovered his videos and were using them to learn math. The feedback from these unintended beneficiaries was encouraging and heart-warming. (“This is the first time I smiled doing a derivative.”) Realizing he might have an innovative educational model on his hands, Khan – who by then had moved to California with his family – left the hedge fund and launched his online academy with himself as sole faculty member. His portal now has more than 2,200 short video lectures. Most of them are about math; additional topics include physics, history and economics, among others. The total number of lessons Khan has delivered over the past five years is now nearly 42 million.

Scientists at Bangor University have shown for the first time, that sharks visit shallow tropical reefs or ‘seamounts’, to benefit from cleaning services and rid themselves of cumbersome parasites. The strategy is risky however, since by being there, they become vulnerable to interference from human activity.

The paper published in PLoS ONE, (14 March 2011) describes the first observations of thresher sharks venturing into shallow coastal waters to interact with cleaner wrasse, a type of small fish that groom other fish species. Thresher sharks live in the open oceans and much of the knowledge of them to date is based on fisheries bycatch.

Last Thursday night, Robin R. Murphy, director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University, held a goodbye party in College Station for Japanese robotics researchers who had come to the center for workshops on using their creations in an emergency.

The next day, the workshops became reality. The massive earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Japan that Friday meant the scientists, already booked on a plane, were rushing home to help.

Satoshi Tadokoro of Tohoku University, based in Sendai, one of the cities hardest hit by the disaster, raced back with his team to offer the use of a robot developed at Tohoku. The snakelike robot can enter tight spaces and use a camera to survey them, something particularly helpful in collapsed buildings, says Ms. Murphy.

Have you ever wanted to make your own app? APC Mag discusses the upside to Google’s new App Inventor for Android.

Millions of years of human evolution had come to this: a picture of a cat that meows and vibrates the phone when you touch the screen. It was a small victory – and one to which I had, admittedly, been guided by Google’s well-written tutorials – but the immensity of the accomplishment was not diminished by my friends’ puzzled stares.

As a four-time intern and former intern manager, I’ve seen it all — from great programs that motivate great workers to soul-crushing menial work that inspires interns to show up to the office too hungover to function (Yes, this happens. Quite a lot, in fact.)

But with a solid hiring plan, you can avoid the underachievers and find motivated interns who really want to put in a solid summer (or semester) of work, who will show up on time in office-appropriate clothing, and not spend the day on Facebook (unless that’s what you’ve hired them to do). Here are six tips:

1. Make sure you really want one

Hiring an intern isn’t going to save you time or ease the burden of anyone’s workload (at least not at first). You’re going to have to help him understand the office culture, teach him something worthwhile, and show him how to make a contribution. All of this takes time – and it will change your workday.

Kelli Schmith (@MarketingVeep on Twitter) posed a question via Twitter recently about what project management techniques people use on marketing communications efforts to bring them to closure when running out of time. That’s an intriguing question, and it caused me to list (in no particular order) project management techniques I employ when time is running down to complete a project:

* Figure out what we’re delivering that hasn’t been promised and stop spending time on these things.
* Cut out clear “nice to haves.”
* Eliminate unexpected things whose absence won’t be missed.

The NIH has released a Special Announcement SBIR Solicitation targeting the development of medical technologies to reduce health disparities. This topic was originally released in 2009, and reissued in 2010. Phase I grants for up to $200,000 per year for up to two years are allowed. This is an increase from the standard $150,000 per 6 to 12 months.

How do you remember the names of new business associates?

Do you:

A) repeat their name five times in your head while shaking their hand?
B) try to cement the image of their face with their name by sheer mental power?
C) associate the name with a famous actress and picture her doing a headstand on a balance beam?

If you answered A or B, you are fighting an uphill battle, one that–if you’re over 40, especially–you’re probably losing.The best answer is C, according to journalist Joshua Foer, who has discovered and elucidated memory-enhancing strategies in his memorably-titled book, Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, a story of his journey from Joe Average Memory to winner of the U.S. Memory Championship.

Policy makers from the government of Singapore to the European Union have advocated “embracing failure” to encourage entrepreneurship. During this year’s launch of the White House initiative Startup America, one attendee made an impassioned plea that the United States follow this advice. After all, wasn’t it the fearlessness of America’s great pioneers—their willingness to stumble during their quest—that led them to succeed against all odds?

Well-intentioned though they may be, these attempts to celebrate failure are misguided. Fear should not be confused with anxiety—and celebrating failure seems aimed at reducing anxiety.

Anxiety, Freud is said to have explained, is when you irrationally react to a simple stick as if it were a dangerous snake. Fear is when you react to a dangerous snake as if it were, well, dangerous. Anxiety is dysfunctional, but fear can be good: It helps protect us from things that are dangerous—such as risk taking. Entrepreneurs, in my experience, develop a healthy fear of what can go wrong. They just don’t let it paralyze them.