Before NASA's Curiosity rover was en route to Mars to answer questions about the planet's potential to host microbes now or in its past, the robot first had to cut its teeth in California's Death Valley. One of the hottest places on Earth is also one of scientists' favorite terrestrial stand-ins for Mars, due to its arid climate and unique geology.

Death Valley is one of several places around the world that serve as Mars stunt doubles as NASA scientists test the gadgets that will probe the Red Planet. Some of these places are hot, some are cold. Some are arid, some are covered in ice. All of them are among the harshest places on Earth, which is why scientists continue to trek to these spots to test their high-tech toys before shooting them into space.

The venture capital industry exists to help entrepreneurs turn business ideas into actual, functioning businesses. Most business ventures fail, but there is the occasional home run that can pay for many earlier failures. Other business ventures may not turn the initial founders into billionaires, but can turn into steady businesses that create jobs and incomes for employees and the upper management team. Below is an overview of the stages of venture capital funding, and the most likely parties to secure funding to turn a business concept into reality.

Invest in Yourself In an ideal world, an individual with a business idea would also have the startup capital to see the idea turned into a fully functioning operation. The reality, of course, is that those with a potentially lucrative idea usually must seek outside sources of funds to make the business idea a reality. Frequently though, individuals can fund the initial idea generation, including creating a business plan and the necessary market research it requires. They should also have some early capacity to apply for patents, establish trademarks and start to develop any related protective measures for the idea, and begin to formalize the underlying product or service enterprise. Funding levels can range from hundreds of dollars to several thousand.

Entrepreneurs can be a wacky bunch, but it can get weird to see some of these personality traits in the people you select to help build your business.

When you look at entrepreneurs who have built businesses larger and longer-lasting than themselves, you see some fascinating and surprising characteristics. Some of these attributes are contrary to the stereotypes that are propagated by television and movies.

The Internet and social media have totally destroyed the meaning of the word “friend” and even changed it from a noun to a verb. On Twitter and Facebook, many young people follow hundreds of friends before age twenty, all without ever having physically said or heard a word from most of them. Facebook users with “whale” status (5,000 friends), are not even rare any more.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t confuse online friends with real friendships. Real friends help each other. In my experience, many of the people who “friend” me online today have only their interests in mind, and they aren’t interested in knowing me or helping me at all. Businesses ask customers and other businesses to “Like” them and “friend” them. Are these real friends?

Here’s a new mission for Starbucks: make coffee in a more energy-efficient way. The retailer plans to launch on Wednesday a competition that will pit 10 of its stores against one another to see who can cut electricity use the most in 30 days.

The competition is part of a 1-year project by the coffee retailer and Snohomish County Public Utility District in Washington State to use energy data and the contest to influence behaviors and reduce energy consumption. The goal is to figure out what triggers can successfully prompt actions and whether people will continue to be mindful of conserving energy long after the competition is over, said Andrew deCoriolis, director of marketing and engagement at Lucid Design Group, an Oakland, Calif., startup that is providing the technology for the project. The utility is working with Portland Energy Conservation, a nonprofit in Oregon that designs energy efficiency programs, to run the project.

This year’s Olympics earned the nickname “Socialympics.” It has inspired huge waves of tweets, brought down the reputation of old media giants, and earned athletes millions of new followers in weeks.

Since the Beijing Olympics four years ago, the use of Facebook and Twitter has exploded. In 2008, there were only 6 million people on Twitter. Now, the network has rocketed past 600 million. Athletes can engage directly with their fans; social media marketing and analytics companies can track shifts in public opinion and serve real-time advertising; and for the first time, London’s tech startups have benefited from an influx of tourism.

It's not just mobile health (mHealth) that is growing fast. The overall digital health sector - which includes mHealth, B2B apps and consumer services such as ZocDoc - is also rapidly expanding. That's if venture capital funding is anything to go by. A report by financial services company Burrill & Company states that private financings in digital health more than tripled in the first half of 2012. This follows a June report from nonprofit foundation Rock Health that showed "skyrocketing" VC funding in the sector.

According to Burrill & Company, digital health investments "grew to $499 million in 46 transactions during the first half of the year, compared to just $156 million in 19 transactions for the same period in 2011."

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch published a piece arguing software is better at investing than 99% of human investment advisors. That post, titled Thankfully, Software Is Eating The Personal Investing World, pointed out the advantages of engineering-driven software solutions versus emotionally driven human judgment. Perhaps not surprisingly, some commenters (including some financial advisors) seized the moment to call into question one of the foundations of software-based investing, Modern Portfolio Theory.

Given the doubts raised by a small but vocal chorus, it’s worth spending some time to ask if we need a new investing paradigm and if so, what it should be. Answering that question helps show why MPT still is the best investment methodology out there; it enables the automated, low-cost investment management offered by a new wave of Internet startups including Wealthfront (which I advise), Personal Capital, Future Advisor and SigFig.

“Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on brilliant entrepreneurs and founders,” Derek Andersen tells me over coffee, “so we want to find them wherever they live, give them a stage and an opportunity to share their hard-won experiences with those who need it and might benefit from it.” That mission statement sounds like it might have come from one of the founders or mentors of Y Combinator, 500 Startups, DreamIt, AngelPad or Seedcamp. But Andersen isn’t a venture capitalist, nor is he building yet another accelerator or incubator. He’s not even interested in equity.

It sounds crazy, right? But Andersen is talking about Startup Grind, an events-based community for entrepreneurs he founded in 2010. For those unfamiliar, the company grew out the casual, episodic meetings Andersen had with friends and fellow entrepreneurs in his office in Mountain View, in which they’d gather at night to brainstorm, give feedback on ideas and business models and talk about being an entrepreneur. The meetings were productive, so Andersen decided to make them a monthly thing.

Beau Turner was pitching his mobile app, just out on the market, to the two men in the front row - Mayor Paul Fraim and City Manager Marcus Jones.

"Mayor Fraim could say, 'Let's play a quick five-minute game, Marcus,' " Turner suggested to the bemused city officials at a presentation Thursday. " 'Let's play at Waterside.' "

The game is "Zombie Tag: Challenge," pitting people against the brain-eating monsters. Apple stores Wednesday began carrying the 99-cent GPS-based app, which allows participants to chase one another on the streets of Norfolk - or anywhere else.

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that most Latin American countries ranked towards the bottom of a new United Nations index of innovation. What’s surprising — and depressing — is that, with a few exceptions, they are not even making the list’s sub-group of “innovation learners.”

The massive new study entitled Global Innovation Index 2012, done jointly by the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the France-based INSEAD business school, ranked 141 countries according to their innovation capabilities, or their overall capacity to invent new products.

Richard Bendis and Nish Acharya will talk about the innovation and entrepreneurship programs in Federal Government today. Nish will also discuss briefly the status of the EDA i6 competition and the noticeable increase in the quality of the proposals.

They will speak about the paradigm shift in the EDA programs from a "Bricks and Mortar" focus (hard) to a more innovative programmatic focus (soft) on innovation, commercialization and entrepreneurship.

Crowdfunding — where a crowd of people donates a defined amount of money for a specific cause — has grown from a $33 million market to a $128 million market in the past two years and is expected to reach $500 million in 2012. This is in large part thanks to platforms like Kickstarter, the JOBS Act and the growth of investment-based crowdfunding. While crowdfunding won’t completely replace more traditional fund-raising methods, we believe it is an important space to watch. This report examines the results of Daily Crowdsource’s recent in-depth research. The report will help individuals interested in running crowdfunding projects, investors and financial reporters.

Given all the analyses and post-mortems of America’s pharmaceutical industry, it is impossible to avoid the notion that a “lack of innovation” has left the industry in its current, sorry state.

Whether this is true or simply a platitude remains to be seen; yet, the decimation of the industry caused by a decade of massive job cuts virtually guarantees that however little innovation we had in the past, there will certainly be less of it now.

Let’s face it, apps are the new sexy.  They’re an easy path to success, right?

With companies like Instagram being purchased for $1 billion, everyone hopes their application is going to become the next big hit. But with the hundreds of thousands of apps on the market, only a few are going to be huge successes.

This is where platform choice becomes critical. Having reliable vendors, massive distribution channels, and the ability to rapidly bring products to market sounds like a gift from the startup gods. At the same time, relying too much on a single vendor, a single distribution channel or a single product can make it difficult to both scale and stay successful. The platform you choose may determine the fate of your business. Instead of relying upon OPP (other people’s platforms), why not build, control, and own your own?

RIM is wounded, and predators are starting to pick up the scent.

RIM has attracted the attention of IBM, which may be interested in buying RIM’s Enterprise Services unit, a pair of sources told Bloomberg.

Enterprise Services is RIM’s bread-and-butter. The link between BlackBerry devices and the software that manages them, the unit generated  at least $4.1 billion in revenue last year. It would take a pretty compelling offer from IBM for RIM to part with the unit — which is why the sale seems so unlikely.

It’s a commonplace among pundits and economic developers that smart people flock to “smart” places like sparrows to Capistrano. Reflecting the conventional wisdom, The New York Times recently opined that “college graduates gravitate to places with many other college graduates and the atmosphere that creates.”

Yet an analysis of Census data shared with Forbes by demographer Wendell Cox tells a different story. In the past decade, the metropolitan areas that have enjoyed the fastest growth in their college-educated populations have not been the places known as hip, intellectual hotbeds.

If HR rings you, call back quickly. If you email or text, the gig might be gone.

With the many ways we communicate today, a simple phone call could be all that it takes to secure that job you've been hoping for. Despite the simplicity of telephones, some Human Resource Managers are reporting they still see job applicants taking their dear sweet time to return calls. Or, even worse, not returning the call at all and instead emailing or texting back to the potential boss.

With help from some of those HR managers, here is a short phone etiquette crash course--for those looking for a job and for everyone else as well:

Ray Thomson laughs when he is compared to The Warehouse founder and philanthropist Stephen Tindall.

He admits they look alike. He has even been approached in coffee shops by eager young things looking for a bit of capital, advice or just to say "hello" to one of New Zealand's best-known businessmen, only to have them depart disappointed when he reveals he's not who they think he is.

Thomson might not be as well-known as Tindall, but they share at least two all-consuming passions: start-up businesses and New Zealand's economic future. For both, the two are inextricably linked.

Frank Partnoy describes himself as an inveterate procrastinator--and the banker/lawyer/author is not convinced that’s a bad thing. His book Wait: The Art and Science of Delay is an investigation into his own habits of prolonged decision-making and the shortsightedness that pervaded crisis-era finance. Fast Company talked with Partnoy about when to make decisions, how to manage time, and why better-paid people are less happy.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

FAST COMPANY: The question you’re asking in the book, “When do I make a decision?" is one of the most broad. How do you even begin to answer it?

FRANK PARTNOY: It’s going to be an imperfect answer. What I have arrived at is a two step inquiry about when, which is question one: what time-world are you living in, how much time is available, what’s the maximum amount of time that you have for a particular action or decision?