If you’ve ever needed to create a simple banner ad, you might want to try one of these six online tools.  Each of these tools offers an online banner creation service, most free, but some have premium options if you want to upgrade.

As with many things that are free in life, there’s a catch: Most of these sites want your e-mail address.  You also have to put up with annoying sites or special offer popups.  But stay focused and you’ll find all of these  sites offer value and a speedy result.  Whether you are pleased with the result or not is a matter of taste — but the price is hard to beat on these tools.  So let’s get started:

Bannersketch is a totally free banner creation service that amazed me with its directory of free templates. The actual service and process was pretty easy, but I could not get it to change the color of the text in the ad–thus, as you’ll see below, white text on a light background. Not very easy to read.

Kima Ventures is an international seed fund that launched this year with the goal of investing in 100 startups in two years. How are they doing? Well, they've invested in 42 companies so far and have raised their goal to 200 startups. They're part of the new wave of super angel funds that is taking France by storm, but they invest all over the world, including in the US.

The fund is the brainchild of Xavier Niel, the self-made billionaire founder of Free, France's biggest independent ISP, and new part-owner of Le Monde, France's most prestigious newspaper, and of Jeremie Berrebi, a French-Israeli serial entrepreneur.

By Karen Lee Sippel

Just days ago, participants in Egypt’s celebration of Global Entrepreneurship Week got a sneak peek at a new social game aimed at entrepreneurs from around the world. As the official game of GEW 2010, Global Innovation Game creates a marketplace for ideas in which players devise solutions for problems challenging communities the world over. Players take on the role of innovator, investor or both.

Currently, GiG is focused on three topic areas – energy, health and transportation – but as the game community shows interest, there are plans to expand topics to include education, the environment and other critical issue areas. Top players will be rewarded with in-game rewards and yet-to-be-announced real-world prizes, sure to be useful to fledgling entrepreneurs.

In a post a couple of months back, we explored an emerging generation of software that can assist in turning creative inspiration into products by helping employees and managers act on the ideas, to move them through organizations, get financial support, and eventually be productized. 

I spoke with Luis Solis, executive vice president for growth & innovation at Imaginatik, one of these new tool providers that is launching what it calls an “innovation as a service” offering, applying the principles of collaboration and crowdsourcing to the innovation process.  What struck me, however, is Luis’ emphasis on first enlightening management and promoting a climate of innovation, more so than introducing tools and technology to try to force innovation. Here are his thoughts on what is needed to make innovation happen naturally in today’s organizations, then be able to take advantage of new collaborative tools:

What roadblocks to innovation do you typically see in your work?

Posted on Entrepreneurship.org: Angels Decreased Appetite for Seed and Startup.

Here's the alarming statistic:

Angels’ seed and start-up stage investing declined to its lowest level in several years...

The question remains: who will pick up the slack? Will SBIR be renewed at a moment in the economy when seed capital is most crucial?

More importantly, will the politicians elected to office in Washington (on both sides of the aisle) finally find the will and inspiration to alter the face of our economy, by shifting the focus from protecting jobs at large corporations to encouraging business creation?

With consumers looking for some relief from increasingly complex and expensive wireless data plans, Starbucks is obliging. This past summer, the company made its Wi-Fi network free for customers. And in late October, it added something extra: the Starbucks Digital Network, which will deliver exclusive content to anyone who logs on at its 6,800 company-operated coffee shops in the United States.

Consumers can expect to see wireless access used as an enticement more and more—where it makes economic sense. Mobile devices such as new tablets and e-book readers will increasingly come bundled with data services that are free for a certain period, or subsidized and packaged so that the wireless-specific costs are hidden. Amazon's Kindle was an early example of this trend. Businesses are also pursuing sponsorship models that give users free access while using certain applications or after viewing ads.

In this economy, the creative job hunt is even more difficult than in years past. My Modern Met has compiled 10 interviews with artists in an article that can help inspire those seeking, considering or currently employed in the arts. However hard the search might be, creative types choose their professions because they are able to do what they love for a living. Whether they be illustrators, graphic designers, the following 10 people enjoy what they do.

According to the Conference Board research group, in an article published by the AP, 45% of Americans are satisfied with their job, down from 49% in 2008, and 61% in 1987 (when the survey was first conducted). The other 55%? Unhappy.

‘Hate’ might be a strong word, but you get the point: Americans no likey their jobs. Reasons cited in the survey for contributing to unhappiness included:

• Only 43% of workers feel that they have job security.
• The average employee contribution for single-coverage medical care benefits rose from $48 a month to $76 a month between 1999 and 2006.

Brussels is a city at the crossroads of influences and has always been multilingual.

Multicultural Brussels has always known how to draw the very best from among the many foreign influences in its midst, whether they arrived with invasions which preceded Belgian independence in 1830 or form part of the migrant flows of today. Nowadays, some 300,000 foreigners figure among the approximately million people living in the city’s 19 communes. They represent more than 169 nationalities. Fifty percent of the inhabitants of Brussels are of foreign origin. Brussels is the embodiment of a major world city built on a human scale.

Milton Pappas and his partner Bliss McCrum taught me the venture capital business. I was 25 years old and straight out of business school at the time. Ten years later, I left their firm and started Flatiron Partners. I owe a debt of gratitude to Milt and Bliss and part of the reason I blog every day is to pay it back by paying it forward.

Milt had three things he would never invest without. I have kept them and they are mine now. They are:

1) A liquidation preference

2) A right to participate pro-rata in future rounds

3) A board seat (or an observer seat and information rights)

When working on your business, don’t just think about how much money your company made that day.

Think about how much you're going to make for investing an additional day into your business when you finally go to sell. Some of the following blogs were making $30,000 a day – now that’s what gets me excited about blogging.

The best part of these success stories isn’t so much the financial side. It’s the fact that people built something amazing, something to be proud of -- the money is just a bonus. I'm reminded of the saying:

"Entrepreneurship is about living a few years of your life like most won’t, so that you can live the rest of your life like most can’t."

We all have lousy days. You know the kind I mean — problem clients, cranky co-workers, bad evaluations or personal life stress collide and make for a really epic bad mood (and for some reason it always seems to be raining). So what can you do when the universe seems to conspire to make your life unpleasant?  Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, comes to the rescue with tips, and not just two or three. On her blog she offers a whopping 12 ways to deal with a terrible day (which is good, sometimes you need all the help you can get.)

• Resist the urge to “treat” yourself. Often, the things we choose as “treats” aren’t good for us. The pleasure lasts a minute, but then feelings of guilt, loss of control, and other negative consequences just deepen the lousiness of the day.

1. "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." - Albert Einstein

2. "If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself." - Rollo May

3. "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." - Oscar Wilde

4. "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." - John Steinbeck

5. "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away." - Linus Pauling

It’s often said that the best startups are founded by entrepreneurs who built the product for themselves.

While that rule doesn’t always hold true, I can say it’s it generally a good thing when entrepreneurs have deep domain expertise in the space where they are innovating.

Because of this, when the team is asked to introduce themselves, the best startup teams often dovetail into an explanation of why they started the company. For most entrepreneurs, there is a connection between where they came from and where they are going, but not every entrepreneur explains their background in this light. There is good reason, however, to weave your bio into a story of why you’re starting this company:

* First, it helps explain why you’re the right person to chase this business;

* Second, it helps provide you with credibility when you’re explaining the dynamics of the market which you are about to enter;

I enjoy good conversations. Social media doesn’t always engage relevant people in relative conversations because sometimes the context of ones content gets lost in the translation. Thus a “live” conversational exchange allows for corrections and adjustments to the context of what is being discussed.

Recently Dan Robles and I were having some dialog around the nature of social media specifically in context to knowledge exchanges, creativity and innovation. Dan’s thinking is always on the edge and his insights are very valuable and useful to those seeking the wisdom of what will be the next generation of social media. Below is a summary of our recent exchanges and I thought they may be useful.

In his best-selling book “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell made famous the natural human reaction of quickly judging other people. This behavior is especially true of VCs and angel investors. The first few minutes of an interaction are crucial.

The way an entrepreneur starts an investor pitch meeting can actually determine their success in that meeting. Those first 10-15 minutes, where the entrepreneur presents himself or herself – before they even present the idea – establish not only credibility, but the right to continue to pitch to an engaged audience.

Yet, it is amazing to me how few entrepreneurs start investor meetings crisply and confidently. The formula for the start of the meeting is almost always the same – you are trying to answer the simple question on the mind of the investors: Who are you and why are you here? But when asked to review their backgrounds, entrepreneurs often fumble through incoherently, or ramble on tangents that aren’t relevant to the situation.