Entrepreneurs are all about firsts, and the most important is you making a great first impression – on investors, customers, new team members, and strategic partners. Poor first impressions can be avoided, but I’m amazed at the number of unnecessary mistakes I see at those critical first introductions, presentations, and meetings.

The key message here is “preparation.” People who think they can always “wing it,” bluff their way past tough questions, or expect the other party to bridge all the gaps, sadly often find that what they think is a win, is actually a loss which can never be regained.

We've all met people that we instantly like because of a great first impression, and want to do business with. Here are some common sense things that they do and you can do to maximize the first impression that you impart in any business environment or discussion:

1. Dress appropriately from the perspective of the person you are trying to impress. This one is so obvious that I hesitate to mention it, except for the fact that I see it ignored so often. Maybe you love wearing Hawaiian shirts to work, but when you visit a traditional banker to close on a loan, it will be worth your time to put on a solid shirt and jacket.

It’s that time of year. The time where you start looking at your website and tilt your head wondering if it’s starting to sound a little stale to readers. If it’s been a few years since you’ve updated your content, your site could probably use a good scrub. A lot changes in a year – trends, tools, keywords, methodologies – and you want to make sure your Web site is giving users (and the search engines) the most up-to-date information about your company. The best way to do that is to give your website a quick content audit to determine what exactly it’s saying about you.

Below are five ways to tune up your content for 2011. You want to start the New Year off on the right foot, don’t you?

1. Highlight your strengths.

You’ve probably heard it a lot over the past year – marketing is storytelling. Each sentence on your site should be part of a larger effort to tell your brand’s story and lure readers in. To capture people’s attention, your content has to be telling a story that displays your product/company’s strength and tying it back into how it will solve a problem they’ve expressed. Does the content on your site do a good job highlighting your strengths or is it simply a list of features? Do you show customers how your product will help them achieve a larger goal or are you waiting for them to put it together themselves? If it’s the latter, you need to go in and tweak your message. What’s different about your product or service? What goes above and beyond in a way your competitors don’t? Revamp your copy to include these selling points and clearly outline the benefits you offer to customers.

California has been the number-one state for venture investing for more than 30 years. It doesn’t matter whether you measure VC activity in dollars, deals done, or capital under management. Actually, based on certain measures, California today accounts for a larger slice of the venture capital pie than it did 30 years ago.

California’s Dominance in Venture Capital

National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) data shows that, in 2009, half of all venture capital dollars invested in the United States were deployed in California. And over the 29-year period from 1980 through 2009, the state was responsible for 44.1 percent of all venture capital investment dollars. In no year since 1980 did California account for less than 32.2 percent of the dollars that VCs put into startups.

As companies age, they turn into their predecessors.

As Microsoft started to falter in the early 2000s, it began to look like IBM -- overly safe, overcome with meetings, run by marketers, and bound by process.

Now that Facebook is displacing Google on top of the heap, it's inevitable that Google will begin to look a lot like Microsoft.

Venture capitalists and CEOs are showing renewed confidence in the state of venture capital, especially in the IT, digital media, mobile and cloud computing sectors, according to a recently released survey.

The National Venture Capital Association polled around 330 U.S. venture capitalists and 180 CEOs of venture-backed companies in order to get their predictions for what will happen in 2011. The survey, released Tuesday, paints an optimistic picture of investment in the new year.

Of VCs surveyed, 51% said they expected venture investments to pick up in 2011, compared to just 24% who think it will remain the same and another 24% who think it will decrease. Their optimism spans across both later stage and earlier stage investments, and in fact, 30% of VCs intend to increase their co-investments with angel investors.

In this post on Fast Company, the author Kaihan Krippendorff suggests the 5 new year resolutions that could make you more innovative.

1. To be more innovative, you need more diverse sources of information and inspiration. Resolve to read magazines you've never considered, watch movies you think you'd hate, and attend lectures of topics apparently unrelated to what you do.
2. Innovators are "intense observers" and so are able to spot customer needs and emerging "weak signals." This year put up your antenna. Pretend you are the producer of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show and need to know which issues and topics people care about this week and this month.

The economic downturn has forced cities and states across the country to be more creative as they compete to attract companies and stimulate local economies. In just the past year, local economic development agencies have turned to social media tools and tactics to enhance their efforts nationally and locally.

According to a 2009 survey conducted by the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) and marketing agency Development Counsellors International (DCI), 57% of IEDC members surveyed said they were using social media tools. Of that, 63% had used them for less than a year. At the time, developers primarily focused their social media efforts on internal or regional uses, such as disseminating news and providing links to resources that support local businesses. LinkedIn (LinkedIn) was the social network of choice.

You’re going to get a lot of these year-in-review posts over the next two weeks until the Snooki-filled ball drops, closing out 2010. Since influencers are what makes the greentech industry world go round, we thought we’d bring you the 10 individuals we think had the biggest effect on the greentech sector this year. Some are obvious, and some may be surprising, but here’s who we thought changed the landscape for better or for worse:

1. DOE Secretary Steven Chu. An obvious one, but Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu had arguably the biggest influence on the greentech sector in 2010. The DOE has funneled billions from the stimulus package into greentech sectors across the smart grid, green cars, energy efficiency, carbon capture and sequestration, and clean power. As a scientist he “gets” the issues, and also is on the cutting edge calling for open research and collaboration. I’m clearly a fan.

Year-end lists inevitably leave room for debate and criticism, and ours is no exception. It was an eventful year, and we relied on voting among Scientific American editors to cull our candidates. Any of these notable achievements were certainly worthy but didn't make the final cut. The runners-up were:

• The discovery in South Africa of a new hominid, called Australopithecus sediba, that could be a lost member of our family tree 

• The emergence of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," a controversial way to recover natural gas trapped in deep rocks

It won't get the same press as the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, but the U.S. made an important conservation leap this week by banning the deadly practice of shark finning.

The Shark Conservation Act, passed Tuesday, bans the controversial yet lucrative fishing practice of catching sharks, cutting off their fins and dumping the still-living creatures back into the water where they slowly and painfully drown.

Shark fins are highly prized for their use in shark fin soup. Many shark populations around the world have dropped 90 percent or more as a result of rampant overfishing.

We’ve written before about how software that makes buildings more energy-efficient will become an appealing sector in smart buildings. Well, smart buildings will need smart lighting. And so 2011 will be a year in which lighting systems — especially ones using light-emitting diodes, or LEDs — will be on the rise.

Networked lighting’s pitch is energy efficiency, a green strategy that promises return on investment, which is a must when selling to commercial entities. (That’s why, for example, electric vehicles been rolled out sooner and caught on faster among business buyers than consumers.) The basic premise of these lighting systems is that buildings and warehouses can save money by programming lights to automatically dim or shut off based on when the building is in use, as well as other factors, like the amount of sunlight streaming through windows.

Entrepreneurs hear that VC pitches ought to be short, 10-20 slides. What most don’t know is that there is no way they can deliver a presentation that short by just “writing” the slide deck.

An entrepreneur I’ve known for a long time came by my ranch over Thanksgiving break to show me the first pass of his new startup slide deck.

My eyes were glazed by slide 9.

It was over 35 slides long, with each slide feeling like it had 12 lines of 10-point type. It had a problem statement going back to the invention of the telephone, an opportunity claiming to exceed the Gross National Product and it had every possible product feature with enough left over for three other startups products.

My first reaction was, “you got to be kidding.” Yet I was hearing the pitch from an experienced entrepreneur with multiple wins under his belt. He had raised money from name-brand VC’s in past startups and knew what a fundable VC slide deck looked like. What was going on?

The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the ratification of a brand-new START treaty represent milestone achievements for the suddenly prolific lame duck Congress, and the press has covered these developments accordingly. But Congress passed another law amid this flurry of activity—the America COMPETES Act—and although the media didn’t cover this move nearly as vigorously, it is potentially quite significant and praiseworthy in its own right.

America COMPETES authorizes continued growth in the budgets of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Science Foundation, 3 agencies focused on incubating and generating innovations designed to keep our country at the forefront of an increasingly competitive global economy.

Beyond this, in what many hope will become a bona fide turning point in the effort to leverage American ingenuity and innovation, America COMPETES empowers all federal agencies to sponsor prize competitions to spur innovation, solve particularly vexing problems in their domains, and advance their missions.

Since Edison’s day, we have been generating electricity in basically the same way: by using massive, centralized power plants.

Along the way, utilities have become enormous entities with thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue. Many of them are public companies that pay generous and reliable dividends, making them a favorite investment for grandmothers everywhere.

But the model now faces two distinct challenges. First, a majority of scientists, policy leaders, the public and business executives and others have come to the conclusion that greenhouse gases need to be reduced.

Tis the holiday season, when Santa’s workshop hums with elfin activity. But what about America’s workshop?

We have come to expect that the lion’s share of the toys under our Christmas trees will say made-in-China. But is it also inevitable that in a globalized economy, the United States should cede its place as a leading manufacturer? We think not. Our nation’s manufacturing base not only provides jobs, wages, and economic security for the middle class but also drives the process of economic innovation that is essential for our overall competitiveness. Manufacturing truly is the gift that keeps on giving, through new ideas about how to make things better, resulting in new jobs and new companies that can compete ever more effectively in global markets.

Slate has produced a sobering time lapse animation showing the inexorable spread of diabetes across America.

The rise in diabetes is, of course, linked to the rising rates of obesity across America. But what's truly stunning is just how prevalent the disease has become, and how meteoric the growth rates are. Here's what the country looks like on a county-by-county basis in 2004. The darker the color, the higher the incidence of diabetes:

Most people in Ohio’s biomedical industry would’ve considered 2010 a good year if just one key thing happened — voters renewed the state’s $1.35 billion, 10-year Third Frontier program, which is designed to energize Ohio’s economy by investing in cutting-edge technology.

It happened. And elation ensued in board rooms, investors’ offices and research laboratories.

By a nearly two-to-one margin, voters approved Third Frontier with a $700 million, four-year extension that’ll keep it alive until at least 2016 — and beyond, the industry no doubt prays. From CEOs to scientists to venture capitalists, nearly everyone in the industry will tell you that Third Frontier has been absolutely critical to the success of Ohio’s growing biomedical industry, which now boasts more than 1,600 organizations with a combined payroll of nearly $4 billion, according to BioOhio.

The technology world is well-known for its hype and hyperbole, not to mention more than a little vaporware. And, as part of the industry for more than a quarter century, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who’s more of a skeptic than I am.

A lot of stuff hasn’t lived up to the hype, and there’s sure to be plenty more:

* Virtual reality, for one thing, comes to mind.
* I won’t be surprised if home 3D falls flat, as well, at least until we can chuck the glasses. Yes, I’ve seen demos of 3D technology without the glasses. It’s coming … eventually.
* Come to think of it, I don’t really get electric cars, either. I mean, why pay more for a car you have to plug in when you can get a hybrid?