We all know that we don’t get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day — where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee.

Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world.

DR. LEVINE’S MAGIC UNDERWEAR resembled bicycle shorts, black and skintight, but with sensors mounted on the thighs and wires running to a fanny pack. The look was part Euro tourist, part cyborg. Twice a second, 24 hours a day, the magic underwear’s accelerometers and inclinometers would assess every movement I made, however small, and whether I was lying, walking, standing or sitting.

James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity. To help me understand some of the key findings, he suggested that I become a mock research trial participant. First my body fat was measured inside a white, futuristic capsule called a Bod Pod. Next, one of Dr. Levine’s colleagues, Shelly McCrady-Spitzer, placed a hooded mask over my head to measure the content of my exhalations and gauge my body’s calorie-burning rate. After that, I donned the magic underwear, then went down the hall to the laboratory’s research kitchen for a breakfast whose calories were measured precisely.

A while back I emphasized how important is to have a company website these days (Publish Your Website Or Customers Won’t Find You). I should have added that a website not optimized for search engines is lost in the heap of a billion dead websites. Unless someone searches for your company by name, it won’t show up in the first few pages of any search results.

Search engines are programmed to rank websites based on their popularity and relevancy. These are subjective elements, but there are specifics that even a computer program can evaluate to set your ranking, and thus determine whether your site is alive and a good match to a specific search request. Yet recent research indicates that almost half of small business websites are still missing these basics, and thus are essentially dead to the search world.

Kansas’ Pipeline Entrepreneurial Fellowship program, imperiled by state budget cuts, has gotten a new and improved lifeline from Kansas City’s Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

The foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship, said Thursday that it was providing Pipeline with a three-year challenge grant worth as much as $800,000 to expand regionally the grooming program for high-potential entrepreneurs. Now, 5-year-old Pipeline, a 501(c)(3) organization, must match that in donations from other sources.

CEO Joni Cobb said Pipeline has been in conversations with other organizations and geographic areas in recent years, looking at the potential for expansion as part of Pipeline’s natural evolution. But the announcement that Pipeline could lose Kansas dollars “put a little bit more sense of urgency to determining the right path forward,” she said.

Sarah Endline asked Golden Seeds, a group of mostly women angel investors, to help contribute $1.5 million to expand her candy company. She sweetened her pitch with samples of dark cacao pieces, about 1 calorie each.

Endline, who got her MBA from Harvard Business School and worked at Yahoo! Inc. in marketing before launching sweetriot in 2005, already received about $1.5 million from the group, and other investors, in 2007. Turning to Golden Seeds again yesterday was a natural choice, said Endline, 39, because “we’re a women-powered, women-certified company whose core consumer is women.”

A report from the Association of American Publishers reveals that e-books sales experienced “powerful continuing growth” as they colorfully put it, and paper books of all types dipped, compared to the same period (January-February) from last year. This isn’t surprising news, mainly because it isn’t news — and even if it were, it’s just history repeating itself; we’ve seen the same thing happen to music.

The parallels are clear, though the situations and reactions of the RIAA and AAP are somewhat different. Mostly in that the AAP and other booksellers aren’t being dragged kicking, screaming, and suing into the future, but are embracing it despite its implications.

Over the past decade urbanists, journalists and politicians have hotly debated where Americans were settling and what places were growing the fastest. With the final results in from the 2010 Census, we can now answer those questions, with at least some clarity.

Not only does the Census tell us where people are moving, it also gives us clues as to why. It also helps explain where they might continue to go in the years ahead. This information is invaluable to companies that are considering where to expand, or contract, their operations.

The financial crisis caused a great deal of damage to the capacity of entrepreneurs to access traditional sources of funding, such as bank credit, credit card debt and home equity loans. And "friends and family," another common source of startup capital, are as financially stressed as the founders themselves.

To help fill the gap in funding, online platforms have emerged in recent years to connect entrepreneurs with investors. These Internet-age "yentas" extend entrepreneurs' reach and enable them to access resources well beyond their geography. As a result, startups in more rural communities or in places with a dearth of venture investors will benefit from the geographic neutrality of the Internet.

The Idea:

Build a startup incubator that runs online. This incubator could leverage expert mentors all over the world while lowering the barrier of entry for founders and entrepreneurs (who would no longer need to move). Your talent pool wouldn’t be constrained geographically. Theoretically this gives you a huge talent advantage.
What makes an incubator great?

Nobody runs an incubator better than Paul Graham. Paul launched YCombinator in 2005, and many (myself included) would consider YC to be the best incubator worldwide. They aren’t perfect, but they get a lot of things right. After interviewing several YC alum I can confidently say YC’s biggest strength is their people network. Anyone can offer money to a startup but the connections that Paul Graham and company provide are simply unrivaled.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- In an old East Village music hall in downtown New York, more than 500 investors from around the country crowded into a dimly lit auditorium to hear 11 startups pitch.

Those 11 startups were chosen from 600 applications for seed accelerator TechStars first New York City program. The accelerator offers up office space, intensive mentorship from some of tech industry's top figures, and access to many of the field's most prominent investors.

An annual early-stage biotechnology conference hosted by Merck and Co. (NYSE: MRK) in Boston has resulted in over $100 million in investments over the past six years, from venture capital firms and other sources- and that dollar figure is growing.

The seventh annual Early-Stage Life Sciences Technology Conference, co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Association of Technology Transfer Offices, was held April 14 at Merck Research Laboratories in Boston and included 16 investor pitches by emerging life sciences companies.

The companies included Newton, Mass.-based AcuityBio, which is seeking a $2 million investment to advance its drug delivery platform that is designed to prevent post-surgical cancer recurrance. Boston-based Cellgenix Diagnostics is looking for between $3 million and $5 million in funding to conduct clinical trials for its test to determine which cardiac patients would benefit from drug-eluting stents, and which would have better health outcomes using bare metal stents, which are less costly and have fewer side effects that the newer drug-eluting versions.

Q: When is it better to work with contractors rather than hire employees?

The following answers are provided by the Y.E.C. Mentors. Co-Founded by Donna Fenn and Scott Gerber, Y.E.C. Mentors is an initiative of the Young Entrepreneur Council, a nonprofit organization that provides young entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, community and educational resources that support each stage of their business's development and growth. Y.E.C. Mentors' members are successful executives, serial entrepreneurs and thought leaders.

A: Use Contractors in Non-Core Areas

In early stages when you are testing almost everything, it might make sense to work with contractors in certain non-core areas of your business such as in recruiting, public relations or people who can provide critical early introductions. Sometimes contractors can later turn into full time employees if the experience is positive for both sides.
--Alexandra Wilson (@GiltAlexandra), Gilt Groupe

Washington, D.C. (PRESS RELEASE – April 15, 2011) - The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) published the “Business Tax Index 2011: Best to Worst State Tax Systems for Entrepreneurship and Small Business.” The index ranks the 50 states and District of Columbia according to the costs of their tax systems for entrepreneurship and small business.

Raymond J. Keating, chief economist for SBE Council and author of the report, said: “Higher taxes have an impact on a state’s competitiveness. There is a reason why low tax states are better able to attract investment, and ‘Business Tax Index 2011′ helps to shed light on the tax burdens that are affecting the decisions of individuals and businesses. In many states, elected officials continue to propose tax increases – and actually raise them – in order to fund out-of-control government spending. High levels of spending translate into increased tax burdens on the entrepreneurs and investors who drive economic growth and job creation.”

A man in Denmark is setting up a lottery that would allow startups to trade 1% of their equity for a user base.

Startups that participate in the Startuplotto will set a minimum number of sign-ups for which they’re willing to part with their equity. The lottery will introduce one company every month to members of its listerv, who can enter the lottery by signing up for the startup’s service. If enough people sign up, then the equity will be raffled off to one of those new users.

So far, about 2,000 people have signed up for the listserv, but Startuplotto creator Thomas Bro imagines lottery participant limits as high as 750,000 users.

Inc Magazine held its Growco conference April 6 -8, 2011. I attended — and the speakers were excellent. So I picked out 10 quotes to make you think harder about your own business and where it’s headed:

• “Instead of being ‘heads down’ we should be ‘heads up’ so we can spot trends” This is according to Josh Linkner,  the Founder of ePrize, a venture capitalist, and now bestselling author of Disciplined Dreaming. If you don’t stop and look around you, you miss the big picture – and you can’t look ahead. Are you taking time to look “up” in your day?

• “I have no good ideas. I ‘steal’ them from my staff.” Said by Duane Jebbett, CEO of Rowmark, a plastics maker from Ohio.  The point here is NOT about taking credit for your employees’  ideas.  It’s actually the opposite — it means to empower your staff to think and solve problems on their own.  So, are you encouraging your employees to come up with good ideas?  And do you adopt their ideas, or do you ignore them because they are not your own, as if their thinking doesn’t count?

The next time you need a little inspiration to help you get through a rough patch with your business, consider the success stories of entrepreneurs that began with nearly nothing. San Francisco Chronicle shares a couple of the most popular business stories available today.

Henry Ford

He started Ford Motor Company with just $28,000 – and that was not even Ford’s savings. It was money that he had borrowed from a variety of different investors. Ford made good use of the funds. He applied his talents to Ford Motor Company and became the first person to ever mass produce automobiles. Today, Ford Motor Company is a $56 billion dollar company with over $128 billion dollars in annual revenue.

Many entrepreneurs work hard on the proof of concept (technical), but skip any proof of the business model (revenue flow). In other words, once they are convinced that the product works, they assume their price, sales channel, and marketing will bring in the customers. These days, the technical side may be the easy part.

Proving the business model requires a different approach than proving the technical concept. For example, one CEO I know gave away his software product to the first ten customers. Customer personnel seemed to like it, and it worked, so he was totally devastated when he couldn’t sell one for a “reasonable” price in the first two months of hard work.

Last year’s 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser was a cause for celebration in the scientific community and sparked a yearlong “Laserfest” commemoration. But it also won some notice in Washington — in part because the laser resulted from research funded by a government grant in the 1950s. Science advocates on Capitol Hill won adoption of a congressional resolution noting the anniversary. President Obama said the laser “brought economic benefits unimagined at the start of the process.”

Indeed, at first, the invention was only of interest to physicists. It was “a cute thing; every physicist was thrilled by it,” recalls Michigan Republican Vern Ehlers, who earned his doctorate in physics the same year as the invention and pushed the commemorative measure as one of his final acts before retiring after serving 17 years in the House. Today, however, lasers are ubiquitous, found in everyday objects as diverse as DVD players, grocery store price scanners and tattoo-removal equipment.

Always use some bootstrapping

“Bootstrapping is the reality for 98% of start ups”, according to unreformed entrepreneur and former MaRS leader, Charles Plant.

What is bootstrapping, anyway?

Bootstrapping is using your own money and other types of money that are available to build your business.

At our last Entrepreneurship 101 lecture on bootstrapping, Charles discussed creative ways of growing your business without raising money from investors.

As a result of his experience with about a dozen emerging companies, Charles is a strong advocate of the bootstrapping model. To learn more about its pros and cons, watch the lecture video.

Have you ever thought about starting your own company? Do you have a great idea that you think could be the next Twitter? Perhaps it’s time you turned your dreams into reality. More and more, young women are not only starting their own businesses, but they are also achieving enormous success doing so. Take recent start-ups like Her Campus, Rent the Runway, and LearnVest: all three lucrative businesses were founded by women in their early twenties.

There are major pros to being an entrepreneur. You’re not tied to another person’s desk, schedule, or priorities. You can do what you love, do it your way, and have as unconventional a life and calendar as you choose. And your future—and earning potential—is wide open when you’re your own boss.