We all know that small business lending is down. Still, despite the lending challenges facing small business owners, there are loans being approved and, although it’s never easy nowadays, qualified small business owners are getting approved for many different forms of financing to start, build and grow their businesses.

Here’s the question: Are you getting the right loan and borrowing the right way so you do all you can to ensure that you can get the next loan you’ll need for the continued growth of your business?

Last Friday was the last day of the Federal 2011 fiscal year, and award announcements were flying out of DC all afternoon. Several caught our attention including the announcement of the six winners of i6 Green Challenge, which is part of the Obama administration’s Startup America initiative.

The i6 Green Challenge is an initiative designed to leverage federal dollars and cost-share dollars to “drive technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in support of a green innovation economy, increased US competitiveness and new jobs.”

Translation: This is funding to prime the venture capital pump. Venture capitalists tend not to invest in early stage R&D, preferring to jump in later in the process after research demonstrates a promising, realizable commercial product.

Would you rather have a job that pays $80,000 a year that lets you get 7.5 hours of sleep a night, or a job that pays $140,000 a year and allows you time for only six hours of sleep a night?

According to a recent study from researchers at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, the result may depend quite a bit on whether you’re a student or whether you’re working full-time. Here’s what they found:

• Adults want sleep. A representative survey of 1,000 adults, conducted by researchers at Cornell, found that 75% of respondents preferred the $80,000 job that let them get 7.5 hours of sleep.
• Students want money. Some 69% of them said they’d take the job that paid more but allowed them less sleep.

In these challenging times, NGO managers and fundraisers are under more pressure than ever to diversify their funding sources. While sources of funding are numerous, identifying viable prospects, and navigating the complexities of applying can be extremely challenging.  As a consequence numerous sources are overlooked and NGOs get often discouraged by the complexity of donor’s systems ending up with not even applying for those funds.

While managers of NGOs may accurately realize the importance of fundraising, without thorough knowledge of the donors’ landscape they waste valuable time and money figuring out how the system works. Increased understanding of these different avenues however, can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of fundraising campaigns. This series of interactive web-based seminars aims to inform managers and fundraisers on types of funding available to them through the US foundations, the European foundations, the European Commission, and the Corporations.

The advent of cheaper sensors and wireless transmitters, along with ubiquitous computing power in the form of smart phones, is making it easier and easier for patients with chronic diseases to track their conditions at home. But many health-care providers seem reluctant to adopt these technologies.

Experts say this is, in large part, because of the reimbursement system in U.S. health care, where physicians are paid for each test or office visit they provide. Outside a few specialties, doctors won't get paid for monitoring data that's been gathered remotely.

The Lumoback, a Band-Aid-like sensor that is affixed to the back, could soon stand in for the legions of mothers commanding us to sit up straight. This wearable sensor monitors posture and sends vibrations to your lower back if you slouch. It connects wirelessly to a smart phone app that helps guide correct posture and tracks posture over time. It also connects users to other resources for a healthy back. The app won a competition for best health app at the Body Computing conference at the University of Southern California last week.

Next time your boss is extra snippy and impatient, take note of whether he or she has to take the stage any time soon.

A new survey out of the U.K. shows that public speaking has a marked negative effect on higher-ups (via Management Today).

It makes 41% of them irritable, 42% of them report losing their sense of humor, and 40% say they lose their appetite too. Almost half experience insomnia before a big speech, according to the survey, conducted by The Aziz Corporation, a communications consulting firm.

UK Conservative MEPs Marina Yannakoudakis and Vicky Ford called for more support to allow working mothers and other women to start up or grow their SME at their party's annual conference in Manchester yesterday, echoing similar calls made in the European Parliament.

Yannakoudakis recently drafted a report adopted by the European Parliament calling for seminars and training sessions to help women exploit the European Progress Microfinance Facility, a fund designed to help women and other under-represented groups.

The call came as new data supported the view that women – and especially those in rural areas – are better placed than men to exploit social media and the internet to set up businesses.

In 2009, according to data from the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), companies sponsored over $4 billion worth of university research in the United States.  Universities, rather than industrial labs, conduct the majority of federally-funded research in cutting-edge fields such as biotech, clean energy, and nanotechnology, often giving them a clear lead in the race to create ground breaking new initiatives in these fields and at the same time making them high-value open innovation partners.  Some corporate innovation managers are surprised to discover that U.S. universities own large and diverse patent portfolios that originate from the cutting-edge scientific research that goes on in university research labs.  Today, universities own nearly one-quarter of new U.S. patents on the fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology.[i] How do you tap into university know-how?

Northern European countries are reaping more than twice the benefits than their crisis-riven southern counterparts from the internet as a contributor to their net GDP, according to a new survey.

Between 5.8% and 7.2% of total GDP in Denmark, Sweden and the UK can be attributed to the internet-based economy, but Spain and Italy are lagging on 2.2% and 1.9% respectively, according to the Boston Consulting Group report, called 'Sizing the digital economy'.

The calculations were made on the basis of the consumption, investment and exports attributable to internet activity and display wide varieties in performance across the continent as well as untapped potential.

Special commercial embassies in Brazil and other fast-growing economies, easier terms for banking credit, and new investment funds designed to assist innovative businesses are likely to be touted in a European Commission action plan due later this year.

Drafts of the plan for SMEs' access to finance will be circulated next month with a view to final publication in December, EurActiv has learned.

The plan is a joint initiative of Michel Barnier and Antonio Tajani, commissioners for the internal market and enterprise respectively.

The main thrust of the action plan will involve the introduction of a long-touted initiative to facilitate venture capital for SMEs across Europe.

Clayton Christensen says that the most disruptive things start out as "toys." I was reminded of that yesterday as I was standing at the counter of a bike store in Calistoga filling out a list of bikes I was renting for our family and a few others. I had guessed the heights of everyone on my list and I wanted to take a copy of the list back to our house and make sure I had guessed correctly.

Former Google Engineer Gareth Jones is a number whiz, as you might expect.

Jones used "open sources of information on the internet" to create TechCompanyPay, a list of averages representing how well the biggest companies in Silicon Valley compensate their employees.

It only took Jones three hours to hotwire the site.

Inside this year's Digital 100, we found a number of companies that are ripe for an acquisition.  Content distribution, sports blogs, and e-commerce are all areas where the big guys could use their hefty balance sheets to snatch up some smaller companies.

If you get a virus on your computer, you’re not going to start sneezing right there in your bedroom or office (thank goodness). But a ruined reputation online can follow you and your business, just as a successful online reputation can help you get more business. The Internet carries opportunity as well as the risk of digital mayhem.

“This magical world is as fragile and vulnerable as your new car parked on a dark street in a bad part of town,” says John Mariotti in “The End of Your Digital Life as You Know It.” “Come back to it and it might be covered with graffiti or have parts missing.” He adds that “hackers are the modern equivalent of malicious vandals and criminals.”

To bring some order to the fuzzy world of cloud computing, the U.S. government's National Institute of Standards and Technology has created a standard definition  and a Cloud Computing Reference Architecture. Both are in the form of "Special Publications," which are not official U.S. government standards but are designed to provide guidance to specific communities of practitioners and researchers.

The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, currently in draft form, is based on NIST-sponsored workshops and public comments. The single definition helps ensure that government workers, industry, and other groups are talking about the same thing when they use the same words.

There’s always a new generation of entrepreneurs who disrupt business categories and create new ones. Here we feature the innovators on the Forbes 400 and the up and comers likeliest to make it into the ranks of the list, such as the founders of highly valuable startups Twitter, Groupon and Dropbox. This year’s Future 400 proves the Rich List is as dynamic as ever.

Mentoring America's Most Promising Companies Forbes aims to help entrepreneurs compete. That’s why we teamed with Clay Mathile, pet food billionaire and founder of the Aileron Institute, a non-profit boot camp for entrepreneurs, to help us in our hunt for America’s Most Promising Companies.

Discussions of improving postsecondary outcomes and increasing educational attainment frequently refer to the changing character of the student body.  It is easy to visualize “college students” as those who who graduate from high school, enroll full-time, and earn a college degree in the prescribed time frame. But many students – and a disproportionate number of those who never make it through – are older, enroll part-time, have dependents, attend two-year colleges.  Unfortunately, efforts to call attention to this reality are too frequently combined with the claim the “traditional” student is an anachronism – that over time students have come less and less to look the way they did in the 1950s and the 1960s. Fewer and fewer students fit the stereotype, the argument goes, so designing policies focused on those rare (and privileged) few misses the point.

Is there really a long-term trend away from traditional college students?  Let’s look at some simple data from the Digest of Education Statistics about fall enrollments over time.

FOR more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and “distributed” learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a videogame. Presumably, for the Friday kegger you go to the Genius Bar.

It’s true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by M.I.T. (The New York Times Company is in the game, too, with its Knowledge Network.) But the Internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world. Our top-rated universities and colleges have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got; thus elite schools have little incentive to dilute the value of the credentials they award.

They call themselves “Silicon Valley in a Box”. They define themselves as an “accelerator”. They are located in a building with a space of 170,000 sq.ft. There are hundreds of people working in the building. They have 250 companies stationed within the building, along with 70 data centres. They have 170-plus investors and venture capital companies among their partners. They have an in-house support system for accounting, book keeping, legal support, recruitment, talent acquisition, banking and technology services and support.

Their ecosystem includes government, universities, corporations and investors. They have country pavilions in the centre from a slew of European, Asian and Latin American countries and are opening similar centres in Egypt, Malaysia, Singapore and Canada. They have diverse partnerships with 100 business associations and corporations from several countries who visit their centre annually. If you go into their building, you will find slogans like “United Nations of Innovative Companies”. In five years, they have incubated 600-plus companies. And you will find in the centre flags of scores of countries, like one sees in UN buildings.