Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.

Helpers do what you say, while good help does what you need, without you saying anything. People who can help you the most are actually smarter than you, at least in their domain. Top entrepreneurs spend more time putting the right team in place to accomplish their objectives than they spend on any other components of their job.

Some entrepreneurs are so in love with themselves (narcissistic) that they insist on answering every question, and making every decision. That’s not only impossible, but also counterproductive. Effective entrepreneurs team with or employ people who can provide the answers directly, pertinent to their particular area of expertise.

Imagine that at your next routine check-up at your doctor’s office, you are given a new shirt to wear during your appointment. When the nurse comes in to check your vitals, she doesn’t bring a thermometer, or a blood pressure gauge. In fact, she doesn’t have to touch you at all. Instead, she finds your heart rate, blood pressure readings and body temperature on a computer and tells you that the shirt you are wearing transmitted the information.

On the top floor of an ugly office building in Mountain View, Calif., a dozen entrepreneurial dreams are taking flight. Raissa Nebie, a 31-year-old former investment banker from Ivory Coast, is putting the finishing touches on Spoondate, her top-secret dating site for food lovers. Andrew Maguire, a recent Columbia University grad (who talks really fast), is racking up listings for InternMatch, a Web service that pairs college students with paid internships. The airy space, with few walls, a panoramic view of Silicon Valley and a gaggle of first-time CEOs like Maguire and Nebie, is home to 500 Startups Accelerator, the latest high-tech incubator.

If all this seems a bit 1999, it is. Technology incubators, which invest in and nurture new tech businesses, proliferated during the last dotcom boom but then got a bad reputation in the bust, when firms like CMGI and eCompanies lost billions of dollars on countless start-up failures whose names have long been forgotten.

After years of tight credit, funding is beginning to trickle back into small business.

Unfortunately, that trickle won’t necessarily reach everyone. If you’ve had past credit issues, for instance, conventional funding may be almost impossible to obtain. Or you could be an entrepreneur with an idea that banks won't touch with a 10-foot credit line.

The good news is that investment firms, websites and other resources offer a variety of alternative funding sources. Here are three that may be new to you.

Business incubators, known as business "accelerators" in Europe, serve as homes and training grounds for new companies, providing them an affordable start-up environment and a variety of administrative, consulting and networking services.

When President Obama came to Cleveland on Feb. 22 to talk about ways to help small businesses, Sen. Sherrod Brown used the opportunity to tout legislation he has written called the Business Incubation Promotion Act, which would help create more business incubators in hard-hit regions of the country.

In an opinion piece he penned for The Plain Dealer, Brown said: "For every $10,000 invested in business incubators, up to nearly 70 local jobs are generated."

The formation of a new venture fund in Grand Rapids begins, at least on one level, filling a gap in the availability of capital in West Michigan for startup businesses.

The organizers of Michigan Accelerator Fund I, which just finally received the $6 million in seed money awarded last fall by the state, hope the venture can spur the creation of subsequent funds — both their own and funds by other prospective investors in the region.

The fund will invest in early-stage companies that are pursuing commercialization of a product or service and need capital to beta-test or validate their concept or develop a prototype. It’s an area where entrepreneurs, after going through their “friends and family” for backing, often find a lack of available capital.

Making the decision to become an entrepreneur is a major commitment, with huge implications for skills and lifestyle. Yet there is no standardized testing or certification required or available anywhere to help you decide if you are a good fit for entrepreneurship, or entrepreneurship is right for you. An MBA or other academic credentials just don’t do it.

Therefore, the least you can do is take advantage of some of the self-assessment tools around, and follow a new guide on the subject, “The Entrepreneur Equation,” by Carol Roth, which highlights personal characteristics and skills required. Some day, I expect there will be a more formal certification required, like lawyers and accountants have to pass, to hang out their shingle.

Some have already taken to calling the events in the Middle East "the Arab 1848." Future generations, perhaps, will talk about the "spirit of 2011" when the ground begins to crumble beneath their own autocracies.

But are the same factors at work today as they were in past revolutionary surges? Some are undoubtedly similar -- throngs of disgruntled people have taken to the streets, questing for freedom and economic opportunity. Others, like the use of social media from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter, are undoubtedly new and different. Do the unfolding events of 2011 fit with our existing understanding of revolution or might they warrant updating?

About 400,000 people work at IBM, scattered in offices all over the world. To help them work together, the company has been conducting large-scale internal experiments with social software. What started as ad hoc experimentation has become a focused effort driven by the company's senior management, reaching almost all the company's employees.

As far back as 1997, IBM built an Intranet directory in an effort to help employees find others with the skills and experience they were looking for. For several years after that, employees informally built applications on top of that infrastructure. While many of those tools were helpful, they often didn't have the technical support they needed to really improve work at the company, says John Rooney, who heads the Technology Innovation Team in IBM's office of the CIO. "Projects might be running on a server under someone's desk," he says.

If you think curling is weird, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Though none of these sports is featured in the Olympics like Canada's favorite broom-sport, most of them do stage international competitions that are taken very seriously by their competitors.

So prepare to see the way broomsticks, pets, trampolines, irons, and cheese are used underwater, in the air, and on mountains in the wide and wacky world of sports.

“What’s the hardest part of your job?”

“Tough conversations,” he answers with a sigh.

There it is again. Over the last six years, I’ve been conducting an informal survey in Fortune 500 companies. I keep expecting managers to say their biggest challenge is something like, “Keeping control of the budget.”

But tough conversations continue to be a serious issue. No matter your industry, or your position in an organization, engaging in important or difficult conversations is an uncomfortable aspect of our jobs.

HEC Paris, ranked #1 business school in Europe by the Financial Times, is starting a seed fund for startups launched by students and alumni.

The school is renowned in France for its entrepreneurship programs and many alums went on to become successful entrepreneurs. Its incubator regularly churns out tens of new startups each year. In a regulatory filing (French), the school says the fund will be at least 6 million euros and will co-invest with other seed funds and angel investors, and have at least a 10 year lifespan.

A VENTURE capital insider has identified five technology-related areas entrepreneurs should focus on if they wish to attract funding.

While her list isn't exhaustive, MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) board member Gigi Wang tips mobile location-based services, predictive analysis, vision computing, video analytics and unified advertising platforms as fields that will have investors circling like sharks.

It seems the venture capital firms' appetite is back with a vengeance following the global financial crisis and many are looking to offer seed-, early- and late-stage funding to budding talent.

U.S. technology innovation has relied on venture capital dollars for the last 50 years. That relationship resulted in it – and Silicon Valley – becoming the ones to beat.

Yet last year, only $12.3 billion of new money found its way into venture capital funds, less than half of that in 2008. As private equity amounts retreat, many American start-up financiers see a historic contraction ahead for the industry.

Part of that blame falls on U.S. venture capitalists, who now hunt elsewhere for big ideas. Many of them have their eyes on China for clean technology and other new platforms.

On Friday the International Game Developers Association will honor Jerry Lawson for all he's done to move the state of the art forward.

The honor has been a long time coming.

It was back in the mid-1970s that Lawson developed the first video game console system, breaking ground in more ways than one. You see, Lawson, 70, is black. And while we often try to pretend that's neither here nor there, the truth is it is here -- and it was even more-so there, when Lawson arrived in the valley in 1968.

Lawson started at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1970, when there were very few black engineers working in the valley. Within a few years he was launching and running the new gaming division, where he developed the Fairchild Channel F, a console that allowed players to change out cartridges loaded with games like "Video Black Jack," "Maze, Cat and Mouse," "Spitfire" and "Space War."

In every other form of fiction writing, the writer is the only one who starts with nothing. It all begins with the writer, and everyone else involved builds on the foundations of a script, or story, or manuscript, or feature, or whatever kind of bricks the writer laid down.

Not so with games, and that’s a hard pill for writers to swallow. It’s a genre that doesn’t really care for the writer, and does its best to manage without one altogether. You’re not quickly welcomed onto the creative team, and even if you are, the invitation generally doesn’t arrive until the stone of the game has been cut.

The US Chamber of Commerce to the EU is calling for simpler visa procedures to make it easier for scientists and researchers to move between Europe and America, in response to competition from emerging economies such as China and India.

John Vassallo, chair of AmCham EU, said increased cooperation on innovation and education could drive economic recovery on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Despite the economic crisis and the global downturn, the United States and Europe remain each other's most important markets," said Vassallo, who represents American companies active in Europe.

I’m keynoting this year’s Intersystems Global Conference on the topic of “Freeing the Data” from the transactional systems we use today such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Electronic Health Records (EHR), etc. As I’ve prepared my speech, I’ve given a lot of thought to the evolving data needs we have in our enterprises.

In healthcare and in many other industries, it’s increasingly common for users to ask IT for tools and resources to look beyond the data we enter during the course of our daily work. For one patient, I know the diagnosis, but what treatments were given to the last 1000 similar patients. I know the sales today, but how do they vary over the week, the month, and the year? Can I predict future resource needs before they happen?

President Obama this week released his budget proposal to Congress for fiscal year 2012, which begins in October of this year. The president’s budget matches his important State of the Union observation last month that “maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success” with new investment targets for an array of key science and innovation programs. Republicans have mapped out a different strategy, arguing that we need to cut almost all of these science R&D programs in a bid to reduce the federal budget deficit.

The budget debate every fiscal year sparks new questions about how much support the federal government should provide for the critical research and development in science and technology. But in this year of a politically split Congress, the question of “how much” is center stage. Perhaps the better question is not “how much” but “what for?” After all, if policymakers can agree on what has to be done to ensure our future economic competitiveness, then deciding how much to spend should become an easier task.