Many entrepreneurs have a great idea for business. They believe that they have all of the answers and are ready to get started. There’s only one small problem. They haven’t written much or anything in a proper business plan format. What’s really surprising is that they seem sincerely surprised when this deficiency is pointed out to them. They can’t understand why an angel investor just won’t hand them $1 million to get started – today. Well, here’s why. Every angel investor has a checklist of minimum criteria that they’ll need in a business plan to determine the investment viability of a startup company. Without this information, their checkbook stays in their pocket.

As you know, most PowerPoint presentations are boring and ineffective. Here’s why. We create them not to convey crucial information, but rather to help us ease our uncomfortableness with public speaking. I’m convinced this is true. We use PPT like a magician uses a lovely assistant — to misdirect the attention of the audience.

As a result, most slide decks are:

• Simply speech outlines. We encourage the audience to follow along by reading the screen rather than looking and listening to us. What could be more deadly?
• Jammed with much too much information, presented poorly. Your audience must decide whether to digest the slide or listen to the speaker — impossible to do both.
• Choreographed to bullet point style. Bullet points have no rhythm, no tempo, no liveliness — and neither do presentations that rely on them.

As a small business owner, you may think you don’t have to worry too much about creating a personal brand. Those ‘brand’ things are for bigger companies, the ones with budgets that rival a professional sports team. But the truth is, as a small business owner, you can benefit from creating a personal brand. In fact, you may even benefit more than the multi-million corporations.

How?

As a small business owner, developing a personal brand can help you and your company in the following ways.

You become an expert.

For better or worse, you are who people say you are. If you don’t take the steps to mold your own brand, someone may come along and help “mold” it for you. And it may not always be positive. By creating a personal brand, you help people get to know you for exactly what you want to be known for. Being active on your blog or site community, using social media, and taking steps to own your Google 10, can all be combined to give someone a compelling picture of who you are when doing research. Customers want to associate themselves with people they trust are experts in their field. By speaking and presenting yourself as an expert, you help elevate yourself onto a new pedestal and build social capital.

Temple University officials noticed something a little out of the ordinary when they looked at the results of the post-graduation survey of 2009’s undergraduate class: for the first time in the life of the survey, self employment ranked alongside banking, education and healthcare as one of the most popular career paths for recent graduates.

This came as a surprise to Rachel Brown, director of Temple’s career center, who noted that "self-employed" was not even a box to check off. Temple officials only found this contingent of would-be entrepreneurs when they investigated the unusually large number of students who selected “other” on the survey and wrote in that they were starting their own business or that they were otherwise self-employed.

It's pretty well known that dropping out is not an obstacle to being a successful entrepreneur. We can all rattle off the list of highly successful entrepreneurial drop outs, and we know that in startupland dropping out won't be held against you.

But in a recent blog post, Hunch cofounder Caterina Fake seems to be going further, arguing that if you want to be an entrepreneur, you should drop out.

From Women Entrepreneur:

I recently saw a tweet from a small-business owner who had just purchased a domain name and a hosting plan from a website company.

"There are all these other products . . . which ones do I need?" she asked the Twitterverse.

Choosing a domain name and website-hosting plan can be daunting enough for a small-business owner, let alone wading through the myriad add-on products offered by website hosting companies.

Many probably give up without ever knowing that a few key products can make a big difference in how they present their brand and do business online.

I have a few tips to guide you through securing a domain name and choosing a hosting plan. Then I'll follow up with the five best products for a small-business website.

A dozen foundations that have been key players in efforts to improve schools are pledging $506 million this year to spur education innovation, including a joint effort to help districts, schools, and nonprofit groups secure matching funds for the federal Investing in Innovation grant competition.

The new, collaborative effort is not a pooled fund of grants; each foundation will retain control over its contribution, and decide how it will award its funding. Nor is the initiative announced by the U.S. Department of Education April 29 a commitment of additional funding from those foundations—the $506 million represents the total amount of money they had planned to spend this year on what they consider education innovation.

“This is about being smarter and leveraging all of the funds available. This gives us greater visibility and greater focus,” said Bibb Hubbard, a program officer at the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the philanthropies. “This potentially could improve the way foundations collaborate.”

UNCTAD has introduced the topic of the "creative economy" in the world economic and development agenda.

The creative economy is an emerging concept dealing with the interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology in a contemporary world dominated by images, sounds, texts and symbols.

Today, the creative industries are among the most dynamic sectors in the world economy providing new opportunities for developing countries to leapfrog into emerging high-growth areas of the world economy.

It's 2020. You drive your plug-in hybrid electric car home at 6 p.m., plug it in, let it charge via the solar panels on your roof or the wind power coming from the grid, and you leave it charging until the morning. Sounds simple enough, right? It's not. Utilities have a long way to go before they're prepared for the impending onslaught of energy-sucking vehicles--and they might not all be ready in time.

One utility that thinks it will: Southern California Edison. The utility covers a massive swath of land that includes 5 million meters, 14 million residents. By 2020, the utility's customers could have up to 1 million EVs on the road. But SoCal Edison is already gearing up for the early adopters, explained Pedro Pizarro, the executive vice president of Power Operations for Southern California Edison. "If you have a block with three or four Priuses, that's probably an early adopter neighborhood," he said. SoCal Edison is in the midst of surveying its customers to find out which ones plan on buying EVs early. The zip codes with the highest amount of early adopters will likely receive upgraded wiring and circuitry that can handle all the excess pressure on the grid from EVs.

We're getting it from all sides. Small business is being pushed by big bullies. What we get from SBIR funding is tantamount to lunch money -- just enough to keep us from starving. But they want it. Want it all. Want it bad enough to lie and cheat to get it.

Yes, lie.

The bullies make statements asserting that VC funded businesses can't participate in SBIR. Of course they can. The companies just can't be controlled by VCs and still be eligible. And they tearfully make statements asserting that VC controlled company SBIR eligibility was "taken away" in 2002. Bullfrogfeathers. It was never allowed. Tell a lie often enough and people begin to believe it. Trouble is, it's our elected officials who believe the lies. Or (tucking campaign fund envelopes in their pockets or purses) choose to ignore the truth.

“An improved exit environment is increasing liquidity opportunities for venture firms and providing better returns to limited partners,” the latest Silicon Valley Venture Capital Confidence Index survey notes, according to VentureBeat.

Further, the report adds, “disruptive market opportunities are being exploited by venture-backed firms, making them attractive acquisition targets by corporations who may have cut their R&D budgets … and are now flush with cash.”

The European Commission published Friday a report which outlines the double taxation problems that arise when venture capital is invested cross-border, as well as possible solutions.

The report sets out the findings and recommendations of an independent group of EU tax experts, which was set up by the Commission to look at how to remove the main tax barriers to cross-border investment in venture capital. Venture capital is a vital source of growth for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), according to the Commission, "therefore, facilitating venture capital investment within the EU is crucial for good economic growth."

The Commission will now consider how best to follow up on the findings in the Report, , in line with its broader agenda to eliminate double taxation in the EU.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Draper Fisher Jurveston's past investments include electric-car maker Tesla Motors, algae biofuel firm Synthetic Genomics, thermal solar firm BrightSource Energy, as well as dot-com classics such as Hotmail  (MSFT 30.73, -0.27, -0.88%) and Baidu.com  (BIDU 710.69, +0.82, +0.12%) .

The firm has also taken stakes in information-technology power specialist SeaMicro, building-software maker Scientific Conservation Inc., and Power Assure Inc., which helps manage electricity at data centers.

Now Jurvestson, who serves as a managing director of the firm, is about to close Draper Fisher Jurvetson's 10th venture capital fund, which will partly take aim at opportunities to curb the roughly 3% of U.S. electricity output that goes toward running information-technology systems.

New software to support economical building techniques and technology to improve the quality of dairy products are just two of the projects inspired by federal research in 2008, according to a report the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released this week.

The annual Technology Transfer report details how the laboratories of key federal agencies collaborate with non-federal organizations to give social or economic purpose to research activities.

Eleven federal agencies have significant laboratory operations that engage in R&D and work with organizations in industry, academia, the non-profit sector, and state and local governments on improvement projects. They are: the Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Commerce, Defense, Energy, Heath and Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NASA.

If you're a cash-strapped entrepreneur looking for an infusion of capital, you may be curious about angel investors. Very few start-ups will receive an investment from an angel—in 2007, fewer than sixty thousand companies received angel funding, a relatively small figure considering more than ten times that many businesses are started each year. But for the right small business, this type of capital can fill the gap between that money you've gotten from friends and family and the venture capital that you hope to secure down the road.

So who is an angel exactly? An angel is a wealthy individual willing to invest in a company at its earlier stages in exchange for an ownership stake, often in the form of preferred stock or convertible debt. Angels are considered one of the oldest sources of capital for start-up entrepreneurs; the term itself, by most accounts, comes from the affluent patrons who used to finance Broadway plays in the early twentieth century. In 2007, angels invested $26 billion in 57,120 ventures, which breaks down to about $450,000 a deal, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. That makes angels a potentially powerful resource for newbie entrepreneurs with promising young companies.

Even as the Detroit Red Wings seek to battle back in their NHL playoff series against the Phoenix Coyotes, entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan are working overtime to help the state meet an economic challenge far more imposing than the Coyotes are on ice. That’s how we see it here at Xconomy, and that’s why it is with special pleasure and excitement that we announce today that Xconomy is bringing its hyperlocal coverage of key innovation clusters to Michigan with the launch of Xconomy Detroit. The Motor City (with our coverage including much of the rest of Michigan and northern Ohio) is now the fourth region in Xconomy’s network, joining Boston, Seattle, and San Diego.

Regular readers of Xconomy will recognize right away that Detroit doesn’t outwardly have the hallmarks of the other innovation clusters we cover, all of which are leaders in key areas of information technology and life sciences, and boast vibrant venture capital and entrepreneurial cultures.

But the innovation story playing out in Michigan is just as important, and in fact, the stakes may be far higher. To compete globally and thrive far into the future, the American auto industry will need to continue to reinvent itself. At the same time, entrepreneurs and government leaders recognize that the region needs a much broader economic base. That has led to a profusion of investments in areas outside (or peripherally related to) the automotive industry, such as biotechnology, biofuels, batteries, medical devices, software, and homeland security.

There are plenty of places for entrepreneurs to hone their skills, but none is quite as unique as “World of Warcraft,” says John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC. In this entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University last week, Brown praises the massively multiplayer online game, saying it’s a great way to learn crowdsourcing, how to work with groups and fosters an environment where performance is both measured and critiqued.

Chances are that anyone seeking a place to live in and around the trendy Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Mich., eventually will come across property investment and management company Urbane Apartments. In fact, type "apartments Royal Oak" into the Google search toolbar, and the first result that pops up is the Urbane website--a destination highlighted by photos of the firm's modern, inviting rental units and the young urban professionals who occupy them.

With 16 apartment communities spanning across Royal Oak, Urbane has emerged as one of the region's fastest-growing property management companies. But the virtual prominence of its brand has little to do with its real-world scope. Credit instead founder Eric Brown's decision to extend the firm's message into the social media realm­--a move that not only slashed spending on paid property listings, but also afforded Urbane the tools to more accurately communicate the contemporary lifestyle experience so integral to its business.

Venture capital firms and angel investors around the country are trying a new investment model. Rather than target a small number of high-potential entrepreneurial companies with very large investments, there is a growing trend of investing smaller amounts of seed capital, called microfunds, with several entrepreneurs all of whom have promising ideas.

The venture capital firm Solidus Co. has pulled together a group from the Nashville entrepreneurship community to create a microfund to support local entrepreneurs and to help accelerate the growth of startups in the Middle Tennessee area.

JumpStart Foundry is focusing on very early-stage concepts. Over the next 12 months, the microfund intends to select 10 to 14 entrepreneurs for the program who will receive financial, business and technological support to accelerate their businesses' growth.

It seemed a dire way to ring in the New Year when in early January, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke told the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that the American economy isn’t innovating enough to create advanced new technologies.

“[T]oday, America has a broken innovation ecosystem that does not efficiently create the right incentives or allocate enough resources to generate new ideas, develop those ideas with focused research, and turn them into businesses that can create good jobs.” He added, “Our balance of trade in ‘advanced technology products’ turned negative in 2002 - and has shown little sign of abating.”

Locke said more resources need to be devoted to R&D, but even in cases where enough funding is being channelled into R&D, “We’re not doing a good enough job getting these ideas into the marketplace.”