PeoplesVC.com today announced it has opened the doors of its stock crowdfunding platform to small businesses seeking capital.

Startups and existing businesses can raise up to $1,000,000 through equity-based Crowdfunding Portals, as a result of new legislation that passed recently on April 5th. The new law, which is part of the JOBS act, allows companies to sell stock directly to the public, and also authorizes general solicitation through social networks and other on-line avenues. PeoplesVC.com moved out of its Beta mode today and opened its doors to businesses so they can get listed on its Crowdfunding Portal while the SEC finalizes its guidelines.

Odds are, there's an important document or two that you know you should have, but that you just haven't gotten around to getting yet.

Check out our gallery to see how many of these 10 must-have documents are in your possession -- and which ones it's time for you to take action on. Having them handy is bound to help you sleep better at night.

To test your mental acuity, answer the following questions (no peeking at the answers!):

1. Johnny’s mother had three children. The first child was named April. The second child was named May. What was the third child’s name?

2. A clerk at a butcher shop stands five feet ten inches tall and wears size 13 sneakers. What does he weigh?

3. Before Mt. Everest was discovered, what was the highest mountain in the world?

4. How much dirt is there in a hole that measures two feet by three feet by four feet?

5. What word in the English language is always spelled incorrectly?

You have a brilliant business idea and you can’t believe no one has thought of it before. Well, maybe this is because it’s not that great of an idea. Don’t worry, many start-up ideas – and actual start-ups — are doomed to fail. Case in point, two such companies that have recently popped up on our radar are Critter and LinkedOut.

Many entrepreneurs pivot through numerous business ideas before coming up with a concept that results in the formation of an actual business. However, coming up with a great business idea is only first of many challenges entrepreneurs must face as they bring their ideas to life.

When entrepreneurs come to me with that “million dollar idea,” I have to tell them that an idea alone is really worth nothing. It’s all about the execution, and investors invest in the people who can execute, or even better, have a history of successful execution. Execution is making things happen, and for startups it usually means making change happen, which is even more difficult.

For most people, execution is one of those things that seems obvious after the fact when done correctly, but is hard to specify for those trying to learn to do it better. Recently, I finished a new book on this subject, “The 4 Disciplines of Execution,” by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling, which seems to talk to startups as well as the corporate world it was written for.

Imagine you have just finished a successful brainstorming session and you’re sitting in front of a long list of great ideas. Now what? Gijs van Wulfen shares five important learnings on how to pick the right idea.

Think different. That’s the essence of creative processes in coming up with ideas for innovative products, services or business models. An awful lot brainstorms or ideation workshops take place to generate fresh new ideas. At the end of idea generation you end up with a wall of ideas. Which is great! I like to quote the American chemist and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling who said “the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas”.

Generating ‘outside the box’ ideas is often not the problem in an ideation workshop with 10 people or more. No. It is the moment when you go from the divergence into the convergence phase, which is critical for your innovation success. Imagine you have a wall of 500+ ideas in front of you: and now what? How do you pick the right idea? That’s the question.

Dan Shipper is 20 years old and he just finished a grueling week of college finals at the University of Pennsylvania where he's a philosophy major.

His week of finals were made even harder when a startup, Y Combinator's 42Floors, made him a job offer that went viral.

Jason Freedman, 42Floors' founder, wrote a post titled Consider this a job offer to work at 42Floors and poured his heart out to Shipper:

Innovation is a buzzword businesspeople can't live without, but over the years, its meaning has gotten lost in the abyss of business jargon.

We've compiled 27 great quotes from some of the world's most creative minds — and some recently departed  ones — about what innovation really means and how we can bring it out.

Excellent teams don't just come together by accident. It takes a lot of hard work to create synergy.

This was a theme at the recent Behance 99% conference on creativity in New York City, where innovative minds like Nest Founder Tony Fadell and Warby Parker CEO Neil Blumenthal spoke about how to come up with — and act upon — big ideas.

The conference was hosted by Behance Network, which is an online platform devoted to showcasing creative work. (The company also just raised $6.5 million from Jeff Bezos and other investors.) Founder and CEO Scott Belsky held a workshop on how to create effective teams, based on his book, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality.

As I noted in my earlier article, rules and conventions about when to use and not to use commas are legion. But certain errors keep popping up. Here are a few of them.

Identification Crisis If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Educate your lawmakers on the importance of innovation in job creation and building the economy. Join the Innovation Coalition, a national network of technology and entrepreneurial associations, for the 2012 Fly-In Day. Members of the Innovation Coalition and innovation leaders from around the country will:

-meet with policy makers to discuss initiatives in key research and technology sectors -emphasize the role innovation plays in creating a thriving economy  -brief lawmakers and their staffs about the innovation process and the important role that innovation can play in job creation and economic growth  

New nerve cells formed in a select part of the brain could hold considerable sway over how much you eat and consequently weigh, new animal research by Johns Hopkins scientists suggests in a study published in the May issue of Nature Neuroscience.

The idea that the brain is still forming new nerve cells, or neurons, into adulthood has become well-established over the past several decades, says study leader Seth Blackshaw, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. However, he adds, researchers had previously thought that this process, called neurogenesis, only occurs in two brain areas: the hippocampus, involved in memory, and the olfactory bulb, involved in smell.

Local leaders and business developers met Monday at the ex- Pfizer location in Ann Arbor to discuss how Michigan's University Research Corridor, which the University of Michigan is a part of, has become an “economic engine” and a nationally recognized hub for research generated technology and small business development.

In addition to the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Michigan State University are part of the URC and together, the institutions have had a net economic impact on Michigan's economy of $15.2 billion, according to officials.

The institutions formed the URC to leverage their collective assets, encourage collaboration, and increase business partnerships, with the goal of accelerating statewide economic development.

People aren't the only ones at risk from eating mercury-contaminated fish, since coal-burning power plants have liberally sprinkled the toxic metal across the earth's waters.  But it appears that captive dolphins have a little less to worry about in that regard than their wild counterparts.

A new study by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the National Aquarium in Baltimore found that the aquarium's captive bottlenose dolphins have lower levels of mercury in their bodies than wild dolphins tested off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of Florida.

Malica Astin, 11, never paid much attention to how much physical activity she got. But one day she played basketball while wearing a small activity tracker called a Zamzee on her waist. Later, she plugged it into a computer's USB port and uploaded the data captured by the device's accelerometers. Unlike a FitBit, a popular pedometer geared to adults, Malica's Zamzee didn't tell her how many steps she took or calories she burned. Instead, it gave her points for the movements she made.

Even months later, she recalls the details of that first windfall: 758 points. And why not? The points are a currency that she can spend in the virtual world of Zamzee.com, where she created an avatar and outfitted it with braces, a necklace, and a hula skirt.

Watch never-before-seen videos of an amazing new condiment lubricant that makes the inside of bottles so slippery, nothing is left inside. This means no more pounding on the bottom of your ketchup containers--and a lot less wasted food.

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the "secret" trick: smacking the "57" logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.

I teach entrepreneurship to about 50 student teams a year from engineering schools at Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia. For the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps this year I’ll also teach roughly 150 teams led by professors who want to commercialize their inventions. Our extended teaching team includes venture capitalists with decades of experience.

The irony is that as good as some of these nascent startups are in material science, sensors, robotics, medical devices, life sciences, etc., more and more frequently VCs whose firms would have looked at these deals or invested in these sectors, are now only interested in whether it runs on a smartphone or tablet.

And who can blame them.

A multi-institution proof-of-concept funding program is seeking applications for digital health projects for the first time, in addition to its life science tracks, according to a statement from the University City Science Center.

The QED Proof-of-Concept Program, run by the University City Science Center, was the first program of its kind for life sciences and includes 21 institutions across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Its fifth round, launched today, will give support for up to 16 projects, six more than in previous rounds, and provide funding for up to four of them. The deadline for application submissions is the end of July.

Silicon Valley’s brightest young minds will vie for $150,000 in rewards as part of a full-day entrepreneurial challenge at Stanford University this Tuesday.

The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES), the student-run organization behind the event, has birthed a number of successful companies in its fifteen-year history, notably Kiva, CourseRank and Togetherville. BASES is a hotbed of social entrepreneurship, which is the practice of using business and business process to drive social or environmental change.

BASES events are typically well-attended by entrepreneurs and investors in search of the next big idea. This year saw an upswing in international interest with 1,000 applications pouring in from around the world. The event is supported by the who’s who of Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

According to some doomsayers — such as engineering professor and entrepreneur Steve Blank in a recent interview with The Atlantic — innovation is dead and Silicon Valley is just a muck pond full of VC money where social media companies breed and reproduce like mosquitoes. They’re partially right, of course, but they’re also missing the bigger picture. Much of Silicon Valley’s most-innovative efforts might be coming out of Google and Elon Musk’s mind, as Blank says, but cloud computing has made innovation something anyone can do.

Todd Hoff of High Scalability took up for today’s startups against Blank in a post on Monday detailing Pinterest’s phenomal growth and growing Amazon Web Services-based infrastructure. Here’s what he had to say to the naysayers: