Let’s do this again.

This week, Michigan rolled out Angel 2.0, a three-year, $27 million effort to encourage wealthy individuals to fund promising high startups in the state.

“This is a huge deal,” says Paul Brown, vice president of capital markets for the Michigan Economic Development Corp. who’s supervising the program. “Angels had been advocating for this for years.”

Winter is only halfway done, but while they've been stuck indoors, entrepreneurs have been busy churning out some amazing new business concepts.

Each day, we scour the web for these daily million-dollar ideas and ask you to vote for them.

Here is a list of the fifteen hottest ones we've seen this winter, based on readers' votes.

AOL is opening a new office, in Florida, where the engineers are cheap. Software engineers, developers, and programmers in Florida have a median salary of $84,201.

That's $18,565 less than the median salary for the same position in California.

As tech companies slowly take over the world, software engineers, developers, and programmers are in huge demand. But some areas of the country pay much better in such positions, than others.

My partner David Beisel has an excellent series on his blog about Finding the Perfect Startup job. I’d recommend it to anyone in the process - he offers both very practical and in some cases, counter-intuitive advice.

Definitely read his series first, but here are a couple additional tips that I find I give folks in a similar situation:

* Narrow the Universe. Not all startup jobs are created equal. The less focused you are the more daunting the task of finding a great role. Plus, working at a startup requires a great deal of commitment - it’s not an easy gig. So folks who are hiring can sense whether you really care passionately about the role, stage, industry, and specific company you are talking to. Practically, I think it makes sense to narrow things down by geography, stage, or sector (or all three). Sector is the most important, because by doing the work to do this, you actually gain more market intelligence and become a better candidate in the process. You will become fluent in the topics that matter in the industry, the big and small players, the investors that focus here, etc. By the way, if you aren’t excited enough about a sector to at least do this work, why do you think you will be excited about working 80-hour weeks in this sector?

A few weeks back I took a call from a group looking to start a new seed fund. After exchanging backgrounds and niceties I asked why they wanted to start the fund. Their response? To make money.

My response? They’d make more money putting their cash into a money market account. That’s not very sexy or exciting but it’s reality. Today’s data from Cambridge Associates backs that up. From the report:

The median net return to VC fund investors has not been positive for any vintage year since 1998. Just think about that for a moment. Despite the past decade’s many hits (Google, YouTube, EqualLogic, etc.), the typical VC fund has lost money for its limited partners. Even the top-quartile benchmarks aren’t very impressive over the past decade, with the best figure coming in at 5.59% for 2001 vintage funds.

Cellphone dead zones might soon become a thing of the past.

Technology developed by three graduate students in engineering at Stanford University could allow wireless systems, including telephone and WiFi networks, to simultaneously send and receive information, doubling their speed and improving their performance—and keeping them from deafening themselves.

As it is, a signal transmitted on a network to the other is stronger at its point of origin than incoming signals are. In essence, each end of a network is talking so loudly it can’t hear what the other end is saying.

There’s not an entrepreneur on the planet who likes thinking about taxes. I know, it’s only February, so you’re likely still in deep denial about April 15. But it’s time to get organized! Almost every aspect of your business has tax ramifications and if you don’t know what they are, you’re inviting trouble down the road (can you say “audit?”).

For tips, I recently spoke to Sandy Botkin, a CPA, attorney, former trainer of IRS attorneys, and the CEO of The Tax Reduction Institute in Germantown, MD. He’s also the author of “Lower Your Taxes — Big Time 2011-2012.” Botkin shared 10 common tax misconceptions that both fledgling and experienced small business owners are guilty of. How many of these phrases have you uttered?

Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country.

We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA’s most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz, who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Internet’s monetization.

The VC partner, somebody I greatly respect said, “Yeah, we like Gil and what they’re doing. I’m just not sure you can build a great technology firm outside of Bay Area.”

Vijay Govindarajan does not believe in failure, though he thinks your company should try it.

Govindarajan, a business professor, student of corporate innovation, and occasional sports buff, recently released his eighth book, a veritable how-to guide for CEOs and entrepreneurs titled The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge.

As the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Govindajaran has spent decades analyzing how companies make mistakes, grow, make more mistakes, and grow more. "You call it failure," he says. "I call it a knowledge-building exercise."

By creating a distinctive username—and reusing it on multiple websites—you may be giving online marketers and scammers a simple way to track you. Four researchers from the French National Institute of Computer Science (INRIA) studied over 10 million usernames—collected from public Google profiles, eBay accounts, and several other sources. They found that about half of the usernames used on one site could be linked to another online profile, potentially allowing marketers and scammers to build a more complex picture of the users.

"These results show that some users can be profiled just from their usernames," says Claude Castelluccia, research director of the security and privacy research group at INRIA, and one of the authors of a paper on the work. "More specifically, a profiler could use usernames to identify all the site (profiles) that belong to the same user, and then use all the information contained in these sites to profile the victim."

European Union lawmakers approved plans to create the first region-wide patent system that leaves the door open for opponents Italy and Spain to join at a later stage.

The European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, France, today adopted the proposal, allowing supporters of the plan to press ahead without the full support of all the EU’s 27 nations.

“For far too long EU inventors and innovative companies have faced a significant competitive disadvantage compared to their global rivals,” Malcolm Harbour, a U.K. Conservative lawmaker who chairs the assembly’s internal market committee, said in an e-mailed statement. “As China is now a major patenting power, it’s time we took action.”

Universities are becoming a vital part of national and international economies.

That involvement has taken three forms.

First, there is the general hum of industrial-research contracts. Universities have carried out research for firms for so many years that this activity has simply become business as usual.

Second, there is the generation of spin-off companies, licenses, and patents. This is the kind of involvement which preoccupied universities in the 1990s and 2000s.

When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced the company's partnership with Microsoft last week, he said that it would transform the smartphone market into a "three horse race," with the alliance taking its place alongside Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

Elop may be guilty of wishful thinking, but he has some history on his side -- a partnership between the right companies at the right time can turn weaklings into competitors, place sudden pressure on market leaders, or turn a startup into the next multibillion dollar giant.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which plays a key role in federal IT research and development and standards setting, continues to be a winner under the Obama administration's budgets. The administration's $1.0 billion fiscal 2012 budget request represents an 8.9% increase over last year's request and a 16.9% increase over 2010 appropriations.

"The NIST mission is well-aligned with the President's goal of driving economic growth through innovation, and it's in that context that we've seen increases in the programs," NIST director Patrick Gallagher said in an interview with InformationWeek, calling the proposed budget increases "sizable."

Startups are the new shiny toy these days. Groupon and Mint are among the constantly quoted examples of what can go right with a business startup, but what percentage of startups actually enjoy that kind of phenomenal success?

Before you jump right into a startup, consider these four reasons it might be worth thinking through.

4 Reasons You DO NOT Want to Have a Startup

1. Money Burns Like Kindling

Whether you’re bootstrapping your startup or actually get seed money or VC capital, I guarantee the money will disappear quicker than you planned. A VC in Silicon Valley wants you to meet in his office…tomorrow. Bam: $2,000 for travel expenses. Another mobile carrier said they’d consider hosting your app, if you make 20 hours’ worth of programming changes. Bam. Another $1,000 gone, with no guarantee of revenue as a result. Things break. Conferences come up. Money dwindles.

Some people say “fake it ‘til you make it,” but I think that cliché has an unnecessary air of phoniness about it. Still, if you are starting up or running a small business, making your company look bigger and more established to the outside world can have dramatic results.

Mind you, I am in no way suggesting misrepresenting yourself or your company, nor advocating flash over substance. And I’m certainly not suggesting that you behave like a big, impersonal corporation. What I am saying is that image does matter, and you should cast your business in the best possible light. To me, the more fitting chestnut is “dress for success.”

Saul Berman thinks the freemium business model pioneered by Silicon Valley startups is a lot of bunk.

But… he admits, it has also managed to totally disrupt all kinds of industries. And that should get every executive’s attention, he writes in his book “Not for Free: Revenue Models for a New World,” due out next week.

Berman is an IBM executive who leads a management consulting division that works primarily with huge corporations, so his book is mostly directed at folks working in big business. But Berman makes a point in his book that applies to companies of all sizes and, I think, especially to local businesses that are trying to compete with the big businesses next door.

President Barack Obama's FY12 budget request includes fewer ambitious proposals related to TBED than his previous budgets, but his new request offers increases for many R&D programs and several new efforts to promote high-tech development at the regional level. The proposed budget eschews most of the savings measures proposed by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform last November (see the November 17, 2010 issue of the Digest), which would have eliminated several agencies and reduced research funding. Instead, the Administration has proposed increases for research, particularly clean energy and renewable fuels research, and focused on reorganizing existing programs to achieve savings through efficiencies.

It is often assumed that a business greatest assets are its product offering / market share, cash flows or investments such as land and buildings.

While these are good to have, they are by no means the most important assets an entrepreneur has, more so for the family run businesses.

Entrepreneurship is not, contrary to popular opinion, about money. It isn’t even about starting and running a profitable business.

Getting a job isn't always easy. Sometimes, it's just about being in the right place at the right time.

If you're having trouble landing a job or switching careers, maybe you're not looking in the right city. CareerBliss, an online career resource, analyzed data to determine what cities listed the most job openings per metro-area.

While highly populated areas made the list, there are also a few smaller populated cities like Hartford, Connecticut that are hiring like crazy.