Is your company in danger of becoming insolvent?

Many consider the risk, but too many fail to raise the red flag. As I recently noted, troubled businesses that wait too long to seek financial help end up hurting the Australian economy – to the tune of $13 billion every year.

That’s why I welcome the present reform initiative by the Federal Government and the ASIC to encourage directors to seek help earlier.

The main reforms are based around the notion of creating a “safe harbour”. In this scenario, a director who engages a turnaround professional (or other advisor) to help restructure/turn around their business would be protected for a period of up to 3 months from insolvent trading issues whilst the turnaround plan is being developed and executed. That way the director can make an informed decision on the merits of continuing on without the threat of potential insolvent trading issues affecting their decision making.

Most high level executives do not expect a lot of recognition from others. Neither do they give a lot of recognition to others.

Many managers are like the classic husband who, when his wife complains that he doesn't tell her he loves her any more, responds that he told her he loved her when he married her -- and would have let her know if anything had changed.

1. "If you can dream it, you can do it." - Walt Disney

2. "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, and magic and power in it. Begin it now." - Goethe

3. "The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo

4. "It's not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?" - Henry David Thoreau

GETTING yourself stuck in a creative rut can completely halt your productivity and hold you back. In my day-to-day, it’s difficult to write about things like credit cards and debt in an engaging way without at least a little creativity.

When you find yourself struggling to think of something new and innovative, consider these words from 10 great thinkers.

1. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

- Scott Adams (American cartoonist)

Allowing yourself to make mistakes, without fear of failure, can be liberating for your creativity. This kind of anxiety keeps you from expressing your opinions and ideas, so get rid of it.

An executive summary of the 2010 State Tech and Science Index is available here.

Complete rankings and the interactive data site is available here.

With competition rising from abroad and federal budget allocations under fire, states are facing increasing pressure to nurture their own innovation assets in order grow and sustain diverse economies for the future. Some states, including top-ranked Massachusetts, have successfully built and leveraged their science and technology resources through investment and long-term planning.

A few days into the new year and most of us are already beginning to waver in our earnest resolve to skip dessert, hit the gym every morning, and finish War and Peace. It's a well-known phenomenon that recurs every year and that economists have formalized into a theory called hyperbolic discounting.

"We are more optimistic about our future and our future selves than we are in the present," says David Rose, an entrepreneur and founder of Vitality, a medical-monitoring startup. In other words, it's easy to make plans about how healthy, responsible, and efficient we will be next week but hard to execute them once next week becomes today.

Perhaps the one thing that unites SEOs, content marketers and anyone with a website is that we all want our content to go viral. And we all sometimes struggle with getting it to do so.

While there are tons of posts on how to promote content or how to woo bloggers, sometimes a mini-case study is the best way to show these principles in action and master the steps.

Although many businesses utilize some contractors or temporary staff, the magnitude of the trend towards contingent labor (contractors, hourly, part-time) may surprise you.

According to Aberdeen analyst Christopher Dwyer in a June 2010 report entitled “Contingent Labor Management,” contingent workers already make up 20 percent of the labor force – and could reach 25 percent in the next year. And the slow recovery from the recession is only reinforcing the trend.

Two-and-a-half years ago, we described eight technology-enabled business trends that were profoundly reshaping strategy across a wide swath of industries.1 We showed how the combined effects of emerging Internet technologies, increased computing power, and fast, pervasive digital communications were spawning new ways to manage talent and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures.

Since then, the technology landscape has continued to evolve rapidly. Facebook, in just over two short years, has quintupled in size to a network that touches more than 500 million users. More than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 450 million of those people the Web is a fully mobile experience. The ways information technologies are deployed are changing too, as new developments such as virtualization and cloud computing reallocate technology costs and usage patterns while creating new ways for individuals to consume goods and services and for entrepreneurs and enterprises to dream up viable business models.

Minnesota’s angel tax credit has helped loosen investors’ checkbooks to the tune of $30 million so far, including more than $10 million for medical-related startups.

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development has posted an updated list of credits issued under the state’s angel investor tax credit. Dated Jan. 20, it’s the first update since Nov. 8.

The numbers show a busy couple of months for the program’s administrators, with the number of deals benefiting from the credit climbing from 19 through early November to 66 as of late last week. Just over a third of those deals involved medical companies, adding up to $10,013,546.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TiE Boston, a nonprofit organization that fosters entrepreneurship in the New England area, today announced the launch of TiE Angels, an angel investment group comprised of charter members of TiE Boston. TiE Angels' mission is to provide entrepreneurs access to seed capital and ongoing strategic and operational support. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to visit TiE Angels website (www.tieangelsboston.com) to submit their business plans for investment consideration.

According to the latest Money Tree Report, venture capital funding increased by 19 percent in dollars and 12 percent in the number of deals in 2010 over the prior year, the first such annual increase since 2007. However, according to the most recent data released by the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research, angel investors across the country put much less money into startup deals during the first half of 2010 than they did in 2009 or 2008. The study found that in the first half of 2010, 65 percent of membership in angel groups were “latent” angels, or individuals who have the necessary net worth but have not made an investment — an increase of non-participation from 2009 of 54 percent and 36 percent from 2008.

It used to be an iron law of personal finance that owning a home was the surest way to build lasting wealth. Then along came the financial crisis and the Great Recession, and, if we learned nothing else, we saw that home prices don't rise indefinitely, and can in fact be so wildly inflated that there's no prospect of ever getting back your purchase price. Looking back, if you lived in Las Vegas in 2007, it would have made a lot more sense to ignore that zero-down, all-interest mortgage offer for $1,000,000 and just keep renting a $1,500 condo on the Strip.

So now that the crisis is over, we should be snapping up houses again, right? Wrong. Some real estate markets remain so overheated or unbalanced that it still might make sense to keep on renting. And this infographic by Sha Hwang of WeePlaces, for Trulia, shows exactly where.

In case you hadn't heard, social networking is big. Sites like Facebook and Twitter dominate the tech news sites with every move they make getting attention. How much are they worth? Who's using them now? What changes are coming? As with everything, social networking has a history.

Looking back over the decades, we can see what has led up to this "social revolution" that is taking over the Internet and entering into our real lives. It seems that as a society, we share almost everything. What we eat, where we shop, what we're watching on television (or Hulu, or Netflix, or...)--slowly but surely everything is losing its status as "sacred" with sharing becoming the norm.

РАЭ-54 с борта НЭС "Академик Фёдоров" from North Pole on Vimeo.

The Akademik Fyodorov is a Russian research ship that's been to both the North Pole*, and to Antarctica. This time-lapse video packs an entire 201-day Antarctic expedition into 10 minutes, starting in Cape Town, South Africa, and traveling around the coastline of the Frozen Continent.

Jan 25, 2011 (The Wichita Eagle - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --

Venture capital started flowing again in Kansas in 2010.

But the number of deals and the amount of money invested were still below pre-recession levels, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/ National Venture Capital Association Money Tree Report.

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Dear SBIR Insider, 

Today we have a short SBIR Insider with some good news (potentially) and an important note for those of you participating in the current NIST SBIR solicitation.

HOUSE OFFERS UP SBIR/STTR/CPP CONTINUING RESOLUTION (CR)

Sam Graves (R-MO), the new House Small Business Committee chair, has sponsored H.R. 366, a short and sweet bill that is a continuing resolution (CR) to keep SBIR/STTR/CPP (and some other SBA programs) running "as is" for an additional 4 months, ending May 31, 2011. The current CR keeping the SBIR/STTR/CPP programs running will expire on January 31, 2011. Graves hopes this will allow enough time for a full SBIR reauthorization bill to be passed.

H.R. 366 should be considered as a non-controversial bill and will most likely be brought to the floor of the House for a vote by Tuesday. If passed, the bill will immediately go to the Senate where the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship is already "dialed in" to support the bill and try to get it quickly passed in the Senate.

This interview with Catherine Winder, president and executive producer of Rainmaker Entertainment, an animation studio, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

A. I learned that everybody needs as much communication as possible — you can’t overcommunicate. That came about through many different projects and situations I was in where people weren’t clear what the vision or the direction was, and you could see the creative, the production and the budget all being affected.

So it’s key to give everybody context and vision and clarity of what we’re trying to achieve. In our business, you only have so much time and money, and you’re trying to get as much creativity on the screen as you can. So you have to make sure that those parameters are set, and that everybody’s working toward the same goal.

In the flurry of activity at the end of the 111th Congress, the reauthorization of the "America Competes Act" went mostly unnoticed. But it is a little bill that Washington hopes will prove transformative. The law - its cringe-worthy official name is the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act - overhauls the way the federal government supports private-sector research and development, and one of the main ways the government hopes to support R&D is with prizes. Lots of prizes.

"Inducement prizes" (as opposed to "recognition prizes," like the Nobel or the MacArthur or the Pulitzer) make up a major part of the Obama administration's grand Strategy for American Innovation. Last year, outlining its vision for a more competitive America, the White House said the government "should take advantage of the expertise and insight of people both inside and outside" Washington by using "high-risk, high-reward policy tools such as prizes and challenges to solve tough problems." This fall, Challenge.gov, a portal featuring agencies' cash rewards for new ideas, debuted. And the America Competes Act, which passed in 2007, included a provision clarifying some legal issues around such contests.

Lack of confidence in your self, your product, and your startup is a surefire recipe for disaster. At the other extreme, too much confidence or arrogance can kill you just as fast. It’s always painful when a startup fails, but as a mentor to founders, I would hope that you can learn from these failings and not stumble on the same issues. I’ve written about these before, but since I see them so often, I thought it might be worth reiterating:

1. “Business plans are for dummies.” Some startups think business plans are only for investors. In reality, you should do a business plan primarily for yourself, as it forces you to think through all the elements. If it’s not written down, you can’t measure it, and thus you can’t manage it. Also written plans are much more effective communication to your employees, lawyers, accountants, and other key players in your rollout.