More and more, I have entrepreneurs coming to me before a major competition, pitch event, or conference saying, “We only have _____ (fill in the blank with any single-digit number) minutes to present. How do we get it all in?”

I also coach hundreds of accelerator demo days, and with each event they seem to have more presenters and less time.

But here’s the thing: Even though that window of opportunity to pitch seems so brief, when you’re onstage and talking, five minutes is a really long time. If you can’t tell your story in that much time or less, your audience will start tuning out, checking their email, and texting before you can say, “We’re gonna change the world and we’re raising a seed round.”

When it comes to entrepreneurial hubs and good places to start a business, reports that name Silicon Valley and Boston as technology and healthcare clusters are only telling part of the story.

Those places may have the greatest volume of health and technology companies, but from another angle, cities like Salt Lake City, Utah, and Indianapolis, Indiana, may have just as many advantages.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation took a different approach to identifying entrepreneurial clusters and plotted the geographies of companies on nearly 30 years’ worth of Inc. 500 lists to identify areas where the fastest-growing, privately held companies are located.

The average angel is 47 years old, makes $90,000 a year, invests in one out of every ten deals he sees, shovels $37,000 into each deal, and lives in California.

The halo and the wings? Those are just for show.

Except for the double-Y chromosome part — which is something women that Change.org’s Jennifer Dulski is trying to change — that’s all in a new infographic from Investor Pitches, the company that will help you put together the pitch deck that just might win you that $47,000 investment.

I never intended to disrupt my career over and again, eventually becoming a free agent. And yet it turns out that the odds were pretty good that I would disrupt myself out of corporate life — and that you might, too.

My decision to go independent was set in motion over a decade ago. When my husband was on the hunt for an academic job after completing his PhD, his choices were Boston and San Antonio, both of which had the potential to cut my Wall Street career short. Because of my Institutional Investor ranking, and advances in technology that made virtual co-location possible, I was able to persuade Merrill Lynch to let me work out of my home in Boston. When I left Merrill in 2005, most people didn't know I had been working remotely for four years; my standing as an analyst had actually improved during that time.

It’s crazy starting up, isn’t it? There are a number of things that require your attention and almost all of them at the same time. Bogs you down completely, making you go helter-skelter looking for resources to help you in your tasks.

Well, the good thing is that I’ve been there, done that. I’ve gone through this myself and totally identify with your current mental state.

And that made me put together this ultimate guide for awesome resources you will need for each aspect of your startup. Right from getting you started to helping you manage your operations and down to helping you grow.

So let’s get started.

For creating a new kind of mobile, social, and local retailer and streamlining point-of-sale payments. When Square launched in October 2010, it was a mere dongle that plugged into iPhones, enabling anyone--especially small businesses--to accept credit card payments. No more. Square has since set out to transform the entire payments process, launching an iPad app designed to replace the cash register and point of sale credit card equipment and processing and its Card Case app brings the future of the digital wallet to smartphones today without having to wait for a tap-and-pay system of embedded chips and readers.

Daniel Pink likes to take an unexpected, if not completely contrarian, view of the universe. He carries a notebook with him at all times and jots down things he sees or hears that he might want to think about later.

So when Pink, bestselling author of Drive and A Whole New Mind, ran across statistics showing that one in nine Americans worked in sales in 2000 and that the same proportion of people worked in the profession last year, it piqued his curiosity.

"You would have thought that the Internet would have disintermediated sales," said Pink. "Doesn't the widespread availability of broadband Internet and the introduction of gadgets like tablets and smartphones remove the need to have salespeople? Why would consumers need someone to pitch or answer questions about a product or service when they can research and even buy it via a few clicks on a website?

The original "lifecaster" Justin Kan has started five different companies including Justin.tv and Kiko. Today, however, he's fully invested in Silicon Valley startup Exec, which he founded with his brother in February 2012.

Exec is a dispatch platform for short part-time work, where you can find an on-demand personal assistant. The difference between Kan's company and others in this space is that everyone costs $25 per hour, no matter the task.

What would a civic innovation ecosystem look like? We know that no single app, policy, or tool is a panacea for open government. But a systems approach can create capacity for continuous innovation and sustain a culture of open government.

In Sacramento, the need for open government could not be greater. A third of our employment base consists of public sector workers - nearly twice the statewide average. But this also is a major opportunity for us to innovate.

The internet has changed the power dynamics of our world. Increases in information, connectivity and high populations of enabled individuals forces us to review the system and reconsider whether it still operates in this brave new world. This is a world where we are all empowered and responsible for defining its future.

A system can be defined as “a set of interacting or independent components forming an integrated whole”. All systems have some level of structure (defined by its component elements), behaviours (such processes, required resources, information etc) and relationships (how the components fit together to allow the system to fulfil the behaviour). Some systems are unconscious such as the universe system. Other, smaller intelligent life designed systems, such as our political, economic, education, social systems have a level of consciousness as provided by the very nature of the human condition. At every level there is a system within a system within a system. It is the dynamic interplay between these systems which results in change (which is neither positive nor negative — just different).

It seems crowdfunding for equity in the US will take at least another year before it transforms the legislative and regulatory Securities & Exchange Commission Act of 1933 and 1934.  The US is the first and only country in the world actually changing its charters to allow crowdfunding for equity to roam freely among its citizens.  The negativity from naysayers has been adamant and deliberate. Yet we maintain that the industry is estimated to reach $6 billion in 2013.

I have outlined 10 Steps necessary for the implementation of crowdfunding for equity (where stocks are exchanged for cash via online sites), which was part of President Obama’s Jumpstart Our Business Startup (JOBS) Act, signed into law April 5, 2012 and soon to see its first anniversary.  The SEC had a deadline to interpret the intentions of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the JOBS Act and to translate those intentions into compliant laws and procedures.  The SEC has to date facilitated enacting 3 out of 6 title provisions of the Act – the outstanding three are Regulation A plus, exemption Regulation D, 506c that removes the solicitation ban from private offerings under SEC and crowdfunding offerings online (cash for stock).  Yet, crowdfunding for equity’s deadline passed without implementation on January 1, 2013 and here are some of the reasons.

Crowdfunding has the potential to provide new funding options for small businesses and stimulate job growth, and yet the S.E.C. has stalled on crowdfunding Rulings.

Other countries are off and running with equity crowdfunding, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Why is the U.S. still stuck in first gear and lagging behind the pack? Aren’t we innovators and leaders in entrepreneurship?

What’s going on with the S.E.C. crowdfunding Rulings, as spelled out in the JOBS Act? Why are they stalled? Will the S.E.C. abort crowdfunding before it gets a fighting chance?

A big step forward today for TechStars, the Boulder-based uber-accelerator founded in 2006 that has set up operations mentoring and funding startups in six cities across the U.S. and powering several more. The company today is opening TechStars London — the first TechStars outpost outside of the U.S. In doing so, it is also announcing a merger with Springboard, a UK-based accelerator founded in 2009 and modelled on TechStars.

Startups interested in applying can come from anywhere, not just Europe, but must physically come to London for the three-month program. Funding is $118,000 (€80,000). That’s the initial $18,000 plus the $100,000 convertible note that all TechStars companies get. The first program will start in July 2013, but the application deadline for this has yet to be announced.

Like many of you, I decided to join LinkedIn because of peer pressure. In 2005, I received so many invitations from friends that one day, I finally decided to take the plunge. Unbeknownst to me, this was the best decision I could have made as a recruiter, and it is the best decision you have made as a job seeker.

There are 200 million LinkedIn members (and growing), but this doesn’t mean there are 200 million expert members looking for jobs. Here are 5 ways to stand out from the crowd and win the hearts, minds, and attention of top recruiters.

We can work remotely and multitask and have flex hours--but doing so means we have to coordinate, collaborate, and communicate in ways we didn't have to 20 years ago. Here's what that extra effort looks like in action.

Life was simpler when we worked 9-to-5, in the same office, on the same days, and we had the evenings and weekends to take care of the other parts of life. Today, more of us work from different locations and across time zones, and, if we aren’t careful, our other priorities get lost in the shuffle.

We can telework from home two days a week to avoid sitting in traffic, or shift our hours to meet the plumber before going to the office. But to do this successfully, we have to coordinate, collaborate, and communicate with others in a way that wasn’t necessary back in those simpler days.

A new way to think about mistakes will both help you stop making them, and change the way you feel about them.

When LiveJournal user celandine13 made mistakes during piano practice, her teacher would help her debug the error of her ways:

He never seem to judge me for my mistakes. Instead, he'd try to fix them with me: repeating a three-note phrase, differently each time, trying to get me to unlearn a hand position or habitual movement pattern that was systematically sending my fingers to wrong notes.

What she unpacks from that finding--that wrong notes have a discrete cause, rather than from being bad at piano--has impacts for anyone who wants to improve their skills or help someone to improve theirs.

There's a new trend in the venture funding world where startups are landing really big seed rounds of well over $1 million. They're doing this by getting handfuls of angel investors involved, says Larry Augustin, a longtime angel and CEO of SugarCRM, a maker of business-application software. Huge seed rounds are driven in part by social networks like LinkedIn, he believes, because it's become so much easier to find angels or stay in touch with the ones you know.

At a signing ceremony in Brussels today, ministers from 24 EU member states have signed an international agreement on the Unified Patent Court to pave the way for inventors to register and protect their patents in the EU under one unitary patent system.

Ireland's Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton, TD, signed the Unified Patent Court Agreement along with ministers from 23 other member states at the first meeting of the European Competitiveness Council to take place during the Irish Presidency of the EU.

The agreement is the last part of a package of measures that will aim to provide a one-stop-shop for enterprises to register and protect their patents in the EU.

My experience with college faculty members is that, while they don’t particularly like being told what to do, they abhor a leadership vacuum.

Years ago, the college where I teach employed deans over each major discipline: humanities, social science, science, etc. Faculty members used to grouse about their deans’ decisions and complain that they didn’t have enough input. Then the administration changed the structure, replacing deans with committees made up mostly of faculty members—and people complained that there was no one to go to with problems, no one to make a final decision. Now we’re back to discipline deans.

A handful of colleges think they’ve found the secret to closing the gap between the types of graduates they’re turning out and the types employers say they need.

Spiders.

Not the hairy, creepy kind. The colleges are using artificial-intelligence spiders that crawl through search engines and read thousands of online “help wanted” ads to check up on the job market in real time—not two years after the fact, which is how long the federal government can take to report on labor trends.