The debt ceiling debate is over for the time being, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. President Obama, the House and the Senate agreed on a compromise that increases the debt ceiling by as much as $2.4 trillion dollars. On top of the $900 billion spending cut over the next ten years from federal programs, agencies and day-to-day expenditures, the agreement called for the formation of a special “super committee” that must identify further spending cuts by Thanksgiving. If this committee deadlocks or if Congress reject the committee’s recommendations, automatic across-the-board spending cuts of at least $1.2 trillion will go into effect.

Though the debt compromise is considered by most as sub-optimal, the alternative would have led to a U.S. default. Given the painful things that have already happened in the markets, who knows how much greater the pain would have been if, over the last week, we instead were watching the U.S. Treasury determine who would and would not get paid. In that scenario, I think we could have faced a downturn and volatility in the markets that exceeded 2008 and rivaled 1929. All this market turmoil does nothing to help entrepreneurs, particularly for ones seeking access to capital and other financial resources.

How do you get ideas to spread, especially in organizational communities of practice (often behind the firewall) to encourage innovation?

In Connecting Ideas with Communities, I figured that if you want to foster large-scale change in an organization or even a network, then you would:

• Connect the right Mavens with the potential Innovators,
• target the Early Adopters via the Connectors, and then
• find the Salespeople who will influence the Early Majority.

The oft-quoted 90-9-1 rule, would infer that you only need 1% Creators (Mavens):

User participation in an online community more or less follows the following 90-9-1 ratios:

• 90% of users are Lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users are Commenters. They edit or rate content but don’t create content of their own.
• 1% of users create content and are Creators.

Entrepreneurs are always getting advice about how to pursue investors: how to properly obtain an introduction to a venture capitalist, how many slides to include in a PowerPoint presentation, how to handle questions when pitching to a room full of "angel" investors. They read it on blogs, hear it from mentors, and sit through endless panel discussions. So when do entrepreneurs get a chance to give tips to those all-powerful Keepers of the Checkbook? Hardly ever, is the answer. Offering honest feedback to a VC or angel investor — whether they've put money in or passed — can sour the relationship. Besides, aren't venture capitalists infallible?

TheFunded, of course, has collected anonymous ratings and comments about venture capital firms and individual partners since 2007. But after a serial entrepreneur e-mailed me earlier this month to vent about a local VC who had neglected to so much as visit his Web site prior to the meeting, I thought it might be a good idea to gather some feedback from Boston-area entrepreneurs, intended for Boston-area investors. (Though much of what they had to say probably applies to start-up investors anywhere.) My criteria: everyone I asked has been successful in raising money from angels or venture capital firms, so there's no hostility here from entrepreneurs who were unable to find backing.

The emails from small business owners typically start out something like this:

Hi! So we took your advice and created a Facebook page for our business. Now that we have the page created, we’re not sure what to do with it. What’s next? What should we be using it for?

If you’ve ever stared at your Facebook Business page and wondered what, exactly, you were supposed to do next, you’re not alone. Obviously the best way to use your Facebook page will depend on what type of business you’re running and what you’re hoping to get out of your investment there. However, if you’ve been finding yourself at a total loss for how to use Facebook to connect with your audience, here are few ideas to help get you started.

The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords. Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they are associated with more qualified traffic and users that are most likely further down their path of intent. The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process.

The Importance of Relevance

Relevance is the key factor to consider when choosing the right keywords for SEO. Remember, the more specific you are, the better. For instance, if you own a company that installs swimming pools, which keyword do you think is more likely to attract qualified prospects for your business?

The Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program was designed by the Government of Canada to help businesses get started and get their innovative products and services from the lab to the marketplace. This new program, a $40 million initiative, was launched as a part of the 2010 budget to promote economic growth. The maximum value of funding available through this program is $500,000 and CICP targets innovations in these four areas: environment, safety and security, health and enabling technologies.

CICP will help bridge the pre-commercialization gap for innovative products and services through a number of supportive actions;

If there's one thing entrepreneurs like to do, it's network. And Maryland's entrepreneurs are apparently about to get that in a big way this November. The state's technology development entity, TEDCO, is spearheading the first Entrepreneur Expo on Monday, Nov. 14, at the BWI Airport Marriott in Linthicum Heights.

The event is taking place during the worldwide Global Entrepreneurship Week.

The event has the title of "Harnessing the Power of Innovation in Maryland."

As a business owner it’s easy to get that “Same Stuff, Different Day” feeling: Every day you face the same frustrations, same roadblocks, same employee headaches, same problems with vendors and suppliers and, yes, even customers.

And before you know it you’re in an SSDD rut.

How do you get out? It’s not easy, but it can be done.

While you can’t change what you do — you still have to deal with employees and vendors and suppliers and customers — you can change your approach.

Many have written the Motor City off for dead. But three key figures from, of all things, the world of basketball give me hope that the city will reemerge as a powerhouse for innovation and new high-growth startups.

The airport is usually all I ever see of Detroit. I never spend any time there — I just connect. And, though the sleek and modern terminal is brimming with life, all one needs to do is look down at the ground on takeoff before one wonders if there really is life in this city. All you see is miles and miles of empty parking lots.The expansive freeways seem underutilized — a somewhat ironic twist for the city that invented automobile production. The airport is full of nothing but connectors like me — none of the locals are traveling.

What would you do with internet connectivity 100 times faster than you have right now in your home? How would access to an ultra high-speed broadband network fundamentally change the communities of which you are a member?

These questions were at the heart of live video-feed remarks by Matt Dunne, Manager of US Community Affairs for Google at the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce 2011 Innovation Conference as he discussed the Google Fiber build out in Kansas City Kansas and Missouri.

Whether you’re a leader in the public, private or nonprofit sector, you are undoubtedly facing the same challenge. It may be described as ‘the need to innovate’, ‘continuous improvement,’ ‘process reengineering’ or some other buzzword. Whatever the label, the definition is the same: Do more with less and do it better.

Last month, Forbes magazine published the results of a study examining the world’s most innovative companies. It should come as no surprise that companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google were among the top 10.

And the driver behind those innovative companies and results? Leadership.

It’s tough to get federal funds for anything these days, unless you’re the military.

The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy have teamed up with the Navy to spend up to $510 million over the next three years to advance drop-in biofuels for aviation and marine applications to power the military.

The agreement is no surprise. Just last week, the U.S. Army announced the creation of an Energy Initiatives Office to help the agency centrally plan and deploy renewable energy projects. The Army is looking to get 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025.

Some are expecting the cleantech graveyard of startups to start filling up, particularly in the second quarter of 2012. But how companies wind down, sell off their assets, or morph into new much slimmer versions of their former selves, is a personal choice for the companies and investors. Here’s 10 ways you can do it:

1. Make a firesale look like a lucrative acquisition: If you’re selling off your company for pennies to a competitor or larger firm, there’s no reason you have to let the world know. Make the terms of the deal undisclosed, so no one never knows you didn’t have the exit of your dreams. This doesn’t work so well if the acquirer is a public company, as the terms could come out in SEC filings.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had a surprise when he walked into Larry Page’s office in 2002. Page is the co-creator of Google and the man who gave his name to the idea at the company’s foundation: its PageRank search algorithm. But Page had something rather different to show Schmidt: a machine he’d built himself which cut off the bindings of books and then scanned their pages into a digital format. Page had been trying to figure out whether it might be possible for Google to scan the world’s books into searchable form. Rather than instructing an intern to rig something up, or commissioning analysis from a consulting firm, he teamed up with Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, to see how fast two people could produce an image of a 300-page book. Armed with a plywood frame, a pair of clamps, a metronome, and a digital camera, two of Google’s most senior staff tried out the project themselves. (The book went from paper to pixels in forty minutes.)

In North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park (RTP), drug developer Ascletis, a joint venture of Chinese and U.S. entrepreneurs, is preparing to establish a U.S. headquarters for R&D. It expects to bring some 20 of its scientists to the campus of The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences. Hamner and Ascletis signed a memorandum of understanding in July, two months after the company said it raised $100 million in Series A private equity financing.

Across the U.S., in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, CA, Epitomics signed a lease to expand its facilities by 10,000 square feet. Within its new space, Epitomics plans to build a GMP manufacturing lab for diagnostic products. This is part of a larger expansion by the company into that specialty both in the U.S. and China, Guo-Liang Yu, Ph.D., Epitomics’ president, CEO, and chairman of the board, told GEN.

Venture capital investment in Canada dipped 2 per cent in the second quarter of 2011 on sluggish fund-raising activity, data showed Tuesday.

According to the report released by Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA), VC invested across Canada totaled $328-million between April and June compared to $335-million invested the year before.

“After a period of steady, if moderate, expansion in VC invested, it is very concerning to see weaker dollar flows at this point”, said Gregory Smith, President of the CVCA and Managing Partner, Brookfield Financial. “Clearly there is demand coming from young, entrepreneurial businesses – a fact that is borne out by year-over-year growth in company financings – but this demand is not being met by an adequate supply of value-added risk capital.” added Mr. Smith.

Just because entrepreneurs have an idea or a business plan or even a product doesn’t necessarily mean they are worthy of receiving startup funding.

That need to create quality deal flow for angel investors as well as increase the success rate of entrepreneurs in fundraising has led to the creation of a new economic development effort in Minnesota. Called the Minnesota Angel Network, the group that launched Tuesday aims to screen worthy startups looking to raise between $50,000 and $4.5 million and put them through an educational program that will fill the holes in their business plans and get them ready to face the big, bad world of fundraising.

“We want to make sure wemeet the needs of the investor,” said Todd Leonard, executive director of MNAN. “Investors are saying, ‘We don’t want to look at every deal.’”

Historically manufacturing has been a bellwether of economic activity.  Unfortunately, The Economist says that manufacturing employment fell by 5,000 jobs in May after rising steadily in previous months.  Some good news is that just last month, President Obama recognized the importance of manufacturing when he was quoted as saying, “We… have always been a country that makes stuff.”  Also, Business Week recently claimed that “We… make more than twice as much stuff (in inflation-adjusted dollar terms) than we did 40 years ago.”

Despite recent setbacks and tectonic shifts in our economic landscape, manufacturing continues to be a major player in our economic fortunes.  According to Brookings Institution, a strong manufacturing sector is key to the future prosperity and long-term competitiveness of the United States. In a recently published paper “Building a Long-Term Strategy for Growth through Innovation,”  they proposed several recommendations to jump start manufacturing and put America back on the path towards healthy economic growth.

On August 16, at the White House Rural Economic Forum, President Obama will announce new jobs initiatives recommended by the White House Rural Council for growing the economy and creating jobs in rural America.  The Council’s recommendations focus on key areas of need in rural communities, including helping rural small businesses access capital, expanding rural job search and training services, and increasing rural access to health care workers and technology.

“These are tough times for a lot of Americans – including those who live in our rural communities,” said President Obama. “That’s why my administration has put a special focus on helping rural families find jobs, grow their businesses, and regain a sense of economic security.”

You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” With that being the case, a video must be worth even more. It seems like almost every marketing website we go to these days has a video on the front page, set to automatically play when a visitor hits the site. The reason for this is because videos are terrific attention grabbers and require less energy than having to read a lengthy business or service description.

YouTube has millions of registered users around the world, which makes it the leading website to market a video. But simply making a video and uploading it to YouTube is not likely to bring you the results you’re hoping for. Getting as many views as possible along with “likes” and positive comments are all good measurements of your video’s success. But what does it take to maximize these numbers?