President Barack Obama’s proposal last week to drive additional career training through community colleges included a less publicized benefit for entrepreneurs: a White House plan to train five million small-business owners to enhance their entrepreneurial skills.

Obama has asked Congress to create an $8 billion Community College to Career Fund that would, in part, offer training for up to five million small-business owners. The plan, according to the White House, would create online courses, and what the White House calls, “an intensive six-month entrepreneurship training program’’ that would lead to entrepreneurship certification for 100,000 small-business owners.

MOO.com pioneered business cards the size of a stick of gum; the company expects to churn out 100 million in 2012. Here's how to leverage that small bit of paper into a big branding opportunity.

Richard Moross wants you to know that business cards are alive and well. As the CEO of MOO, the company that pioneered those clever mini cards with do-it-yourself design options, Moross says the business of printing may be 500+ years old, but it's doing quite nicely, thank you very much.

Why do we get some of our best ideas in the shower?

Harvard University researcher and psychologist Shelley H. Carson, author of “Your Creative Brain,’’ says distraction isn’t always a bad thing.

If you are stuck on a problem, an interruption can force an “incubation period,’’ she says. “In other words, a distraction may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on the ineffective solution.’

Australian angel investors will give preference to projects in biotechnology, clean technology and web-based software this year, according to the results of the 2011 National Angel Survey.

The survey, conducted by Bentleys for the Australian Association of Angel Investors, is based on the responses of 88 members of Australia’s angel investment community.

In the 2011 calendar year, survey participants invested $5.4 million in angel capital in more than 90 entrepreneurial businesses, Bentleys associate director Tim Bridges says.

China has reached a "turning point" in its economic development, with the pace of growth likely to nearly halve in the next two decades, World Bank and Chinese government researchers said Monday.

The Asian giant must overhaul its economy to avoid a sudden slowdown in growth, such as scaling back its vast and powerful state-owned enterprises and breaking up monopolies in strategic sectors, the analysts said in a report.

After averaging 10 percent annual growth for the past 30 years, China's export and investment-driven economic model was no longer sustainable, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said at the launch of the "China: 2030" study.

The founder was home in his kitchen cooking dinner when the call came. It was one of those moments when the color seems to drain out of the food in front of you. The voice on the other line was the contact at the company that has been trying to acquire his small startup for several months. “Our engineers looked at what you showed us during the due diligence and told our CEO, ‘It doesn’t look so hard, we can build it ourselves.’”

His thoughts flashed to the NDA the two companies had signed. He tried to focus on not exploding in a stream of curses. What about the fancy dinner with the top brass? The handshake deal not to shop his company around to any other bidders? The 12-month roadmap he had laid out for the board? The quickly dwindling cash reserves in his own bank account?

1. Twitter

For linking users worldwide in real time and becoming as important in TV, news, and politics as the events themselves. It’s impossible to talk about media without Twitter. The now-ubiquitous microblogging services has more than 200 million registered accounts and was recent valued at $8 billion. Twitter has come a long way since it started out as a combination blogging-social-networking platform; it’s now crucial for advertisers, marketers, and media. TV producers watch as Twitter comments about their shows come in and adjust content accordingly. Twitter partners with tons of media companies, working with the New York Times for elections and the Weather Channel, adding tweets to TV broadcast and local tweets to weather.com. Twitter has also been a powerful political tool, and not just for American politicians. Demonstrators in the Arab Spring movements used the site to stay in touch and pass along information. Twitter enabled that communication faster than any other medium could. The rapidity with which information is disseminated is one of Twitter’s key additions to today’s media.

As internship recruiting season wraps up around college campuses, we decided to revisit the nerves and nightmares of the interview session.

We surveyed some current analysts about the classic and ridiculous questions they were asked when applying to the Wall Street internship that got them to their current position.

Google is an unconventional company.

That extends to the company's official policy on job titles which can be summarized as: whatever you want to put on your business card is pretty much OK.

As a result, some Google employees have come up with some pretty offbeat titles for themselves.

A few years ago, we couldn’t have imagined that there would be actual jobs for people to “play” on Twitter all day. And yet, an entire category of employment has sprung up around Internet Marketing and Social Media. This infographic by Onward Search looks at where social media roles are, as well as what they’re paying.

Shows like Numb3rs and CSI have popularized the idea of experts solving problems using data analysis. Now the "knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha wants to help nonexperts try their hand at it.

Wolfram Alpha looks like a Web search engine but can answer queries such as "how old is President Obama?" or "heart disease risk 50-year-old male." New features launching Wednesday allow users of a premium version to upload their own data to have Wolfram Alpha chart, visualize, and analyze it. The tools could appeal to those who feel swamped by spreadsheets, numbers, and lists, claims Stephen Wolfram, founder of the company behind the site, Wolfram Research. The premium version will cost $4.99 a month, or $2.99 a month for students.

Your senses switch to overdrive on Silicon Valley’s boulevard of dreams. Blossoming oleanders the size of camper vans line the median. Towering eucalyptus trees exude a mentholated scent as Sand Hill Road gently slopes down toward the San Francisco Bay from the Santa Cruz Mountains and edges Stanford’s idyllic campus. All along Sand Hill, basking in the sun, are the offices of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, the ones that place bets from the high hundred-thousands to the many, many millions, each one in the hope that a young, ambitious company might, with help, become the next LinkedIn, Salesforce.com or even Google.

San Francisco may not have intended to be become the startup mecca that it is today, but now the city government is working hard to make itself as friendly as possible to tech entrepreneurs. Makes sense, considering that there are 1,539 tech companies and 30,000 tech jobs in the city now — a number that’s been growing fast as older industries like high finance continue to suffer through the recession.

What that means is this. Mayor Ed Lee, who came to power last year with heavy support from the local tech scene, is announcing a new initiative today at the TechFellow awards ceremony, that has some intriguing ideas for making the city itself more relevant to the booming industry within it.

American business have long thought that they are harmed by cheap "knock-off" imports from overseas, especially from Asia and China. Once a product becomes successful, numerous imitations seem to pop out of nowhere. Without being able to stop these, many American business can suffer significant lost sales. The practice is so wide-spread that President Obama just put forth an "urgent agenda" that includes claims that China is taking American jobs, by "stealing" American technology.

What nobody has yet realized is that our own Congress is largely to blame -- not the Chinese. Yes, the Chinese do like to copy products, but in many cases they are largely within their legal rights. If a product is not protected by some form of intellectual property right, then anyone is free to make and sell that product. In most cases, the primary form of intellectual property right used to stop products from entering the United States is a patent.

Starting a company is always challenging, but for founders of life science startups, the regulations and funding hurdles make it dauntingly complex, overwhelming, and seemingly insurmountable.

This first-time conference will answer the critical questions that founders must address to start and grow viable life science companies. Industry experts and successful entrepreneurs will provide practical guidance on how to commercialize innovations in each of four sectors: medical device, therapeutics, diagnostics, and digital health. If you have a new startup in this space or are ready to start one, this two-day event may be for you.

Lots of industry people have been decrying what has been seen as a dearth of venture money for biotech startups in recent years. However, a recent analysis of the situation during 2011 suggests that all of the doom and gloom appears to be unfounded. And get this: Biotech venture investing saw significant growth last year, and even early rounds of financing picked up in the fourth quarter, according to research from OnBioVC.

As cited in Pharmalot, OnBioVC says biopharma companies secured $3.5 billion in venture capital in 2011, up 16% from the previous year. There was also a jump in the number of financing deals (160) versus 2010 (153). And, as in the past, biotech topped other life sciences sectors such as medical devices, diagnostics and biofuels in total capital raised by a wide margin. (For the record, FierceBiotech last month reported the surge in biotech venture investing last year with figures from the National Venture Capital Association and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.)

It's a great idea for entrepreneurs to take their kids to work. Never too soon to plant that seed and show kids you can be your own boss and shape your own financial destiny.

But would you take your kid to a pitch meeting with investors?

I ask because this seems to be a new mini-trend -- or at least it is if you're watching ABC's reality-TV show Shark Tank. And if the results are any evidence, other entrepreneurs might want to give some thought to bringing their children along, especially if the business involves children's products.

A collaboration among the University of Alabama, the state's two-year college system, AIDT and Mercedes-Benz could be the first tangible action from a new statewide economic development strategic plan.

Members of the Alabama Economic Development Alliance met, in private, for the first time last week since the Accelerate Alabama plan was unveiled in Birmingham in late January. The goal now is to begin implementing elements of the plan to ensure it doesn't become just another document collecting dust on a shelf.

The 76-page Accelerate Alabama plan includes 33 pages of what are called "accelerators" -- actions that need to be accomplished if the plan is to be fully realized. Among them:

Recruitment efforts that provide a trained work force ready to meet the needs of future prospects, sites with infrastructure ready for new industry, incentives and financing options, as well as a strategy for global recruitment and lead generation;

"Each year, SSTI provides Digest readers with a comprehensive review of technology-based economic development spending in the the president's federal budget request. The year's edition includes proposed FY13 spending on R&D, STEM education, manufacturing, broadband, small business support, technology transfer, entrepreneurship, innovation workforce initiatives and more. The full report is available for download in pdf format (561 kb).

President Barack Obama's FY13 budget request includes few major changes from FY12 due to the spending cap agreed upon in the Budget Control Act. Funding for most, but not all, TBED-related programs would maintain nearly level funding. The White House is accentuating the budget's generous support for advanced manufacturing, clean energy and STEM education, and again is asking that the R&D tax credit be made permanent.

I just gave up all parenting responsibilities this weekend to Mark Cuban. Meaning, my kids and I watched eight straight episodes of “Shark Tank”.

For the past two years, people have been begging me to watch “Shark Tank”. One friend of mine, who has co-invested with me on two deals, has given me two pieces of advice in life. One is: “you never know what someone is worth until they declare bankruptcy”. The point is, we all speculate that someone is worth $100 million or a billion or whatever, and the next day you read in the newspaper that they declare bankruptcy. Now you know.