We want to help you secure funding for your next idea or innovation, and help you push into new and exciting markets. So last post we started to count down the “Top 10 Things You Must Do To Secure Funding For Your Business”.

If you missed it, here’s a quick recap:

* Number 10: Have a detailed Business Plan
* Number 9: Be clear about your Financial Requirements
* Number 8: Be able to articulate your ideas in an Elevator Pitch
* Number 7: Present the strengths and weaknesses of your Management Team
* Number 6: Define your Business Strategies

Let’s finish the Top 10 …

Andy Didorosi is just back from Manhattan, NY, and full of real estate ideas. Not that it takes a trip to the Big Apple to get him inspired, but, he figured, why not check out what other businesses like his are doing?

That’s the kind of sharp thinking that has catapulted Didorosi, 24, to owner of the nearly 1-year-old Paper Street, a small-business incubator in Ferndale off East Nine Mile Road. Housed in a space that once was the Jarvis Property Restoration building, Paper Street rents office space to some 13 companies.

The idea to open an incubator was actually incubating in Didorosi’s mind for the past two years, yet it wasn’t until a fateful turn of events in his other job in the racing field that Didorosi was inspired to create Paper Street.

Most startups fail. But every once in a while, the stars align and a cool-sounding idea actually works. Incubators try to improve those odds by giving entrepreneurs all the early-stage advice and financing they need. We've scoured the web to find nine internet startups with humble beginnings at tech incubators that are still thriving today.

While some are merely popular, but not yet profitable, others are winners by any measure. Start the gallery to see the nine biggest successses to emerge from an incubator so far.

Every entrepreneur is flooded with information from all directions, but despite their best efforts to absorb it, they likely miss the information really needed to start a business. These days, we all have to rely on a few trusted sources to digest and filter information, net out the relevant messages, and steer us with links to accurate details.

These trusted sources are a new breed of professionals who may soon carry the new title of “information curator,” evolved from the “museum curator” role, where a domain expert filters and communicates the important elements of a past civilization or technology. The evolution and the real value of curator are outlined in a great new book “Curation Nation,” by Steven Rosenbaum.

As the EU prepares to launch a pilot innovation partnership on "active and healthy ageing," patient groups are stressing that the initiative should not only focus on medical innovation, but also address age-friendly environments and access to health care.

The EU's 27 ministers in charge of competitiveness yesterday (9 March) endorsed European Commission proposals to launch a European innovation partnership on active and healthy ageing.

The goal of the partnership, which will involve private and public partners, is to increase the life expectancy of Europeans by an average of two years by 2020.

Federal agencies should focus on selecting and fostering key attributes when developing the next generation of government leaders, human capital experts say.

Such an approach to leadership development is critical to innovation in government, according to a report released Thursday from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and Hay Group, a consulting firm. Attributes found in an innovative leader can be learned and fostered over time if the employee is committed and receives constructive feedback, the report found. But the process can bog down if there is an inability to foster new ideas, gaps in communication, a system that rewards the status quo, or limited funding.

Researchers who have spent the last two years studying the security of car computer systems have revealed that they can take control of vehicles wirelessly.

The researchers were able to control everything from the car's brakes to its door locks to its computerized dashboard displays by accessing the onboard computer through GM's OnStar and Ford's Sync, as well as through the Bluetooth connections intended for making hands-free phone calls. They presented their findings this week to the National Academies Committee on Electronic Vehicle Controls and Unintended Acceleration, which was brought together partly in response to last year's scandal over supposed problems with the computerized braking systems in Toyota Priuses.

WASHINGTON — The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America’s energy and global warming challenges may have evaporated as quickly as confidence in Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors.

Until this weekend, President Obama, mainstream environmental groups and large numbers of Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed that nuclear power offered a steady energy source and part of the solution to climate change, even as they disagreed on virtually every other aspect of energy policy. Mr. Obama is seeking tens of billions of dollars in government insurance for new nuclear construction, and the nuclear industry in the United States, all but paralyzed for decades after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, was poised for a comeback.

Now, that is all in question as the world watches the unfolding crisis in Japan’s nuclear reactors and the widespread terror it has spawned.

Unemployed Americans are turning to entrepreneurship more than ever before, pushing the rate of startups to a 15-year high, according to a new study released today by the Kauffman Foundation. But while more individuals are starting businesses, they’re often opting to go it alone rather than creating companies with the target of hiring.

That trend could be troubling to the fragile jobless recovery currently under way in the U.S. “Far too many entrepreneurs are choosing jobless entrepreneurship, preferring to remain self-employed or to avoid the economic responsibility of hiring employees,” Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, said in a press release. Notwithstanding that 565,000 new businesses were created in 2010, the quarterly employer rate dropped to 0.10 percent last year.

David Kappos, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, says the United States needs new ways to measure innovation and also to give fast-track status to green technologies.

First, Kappos says his office is looking at new ways of measuring innovation. After all, open-source software, which explicitly rejects traditional intellectual property rights, powers large parts of the technology industry, such as the Android mobile operating system. Additionally, corporations often take out huge pre-emptive patents to prevent competition from forming.

Y Combinator, a startup funding firm, has announced their Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator program. New York startups can get a $25,000 investment, free legal services, office space in New York, and have 140+ mentors including Fred Wilson and Esther Dyson by joining the program.

As venture capitalists scramble to get a piece of Silicon Valley's new Web boom, entrepreneurs like Aaron Levie are finding they have the upper hand.

Mr. Levie, 26 years old, founded online storage provider Box.net in 2005. While his 140-person Palo Alto, Calif., company has money in the bank, Mr. Levie saw the Web investing environment heat up recently, driven by interest in fast-growing start-ups such as Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc.

So Mr. Levie decided to tap that interest and raise new capital. In less than three weeks last month, he closed a hefty $48 million round of financing from venture-capital firms including Meritech Capital Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. In the process, Mr. Levie said he turned down several other venture firms that wanted a piece of the deal.

Can cleaner sources of energy not only power our economy but also drive a recovery from the Great Recession? That's the question confronted by policymakers across the U.S.—and by debaters in the Intelligence Squared series held March 8 at New York University.

The list of political proponents of a clean, green energy economy is long, ranging from President Obama down to John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania. And the anecdotal evidence thus far seems strong: 2,600 manufacturing jobs in Colorado as a result of Danish wind turbine-maker Vestas—plus the farmers in that state who reap profits from the wind blowing over their fields while continuing to grow crops like wheat. Or the green jobs growth in China, Germany or California.

At some point in their life, hopefully everyone strives to be the best in their chosen profession. Most people think that being the best requires more intelligence, more training, and more experience. In reality, in business or even in sports, the evidence is conclusive that it is as much about how you think, as what you do.

I saw this illustrated well recently in a sports excellence book called “Training Camp: What the Best Do Better Than Everyone Else”, by Jon Gordon. His evidence and real life stories conclude that top performers in all professions have the same key traits listed below. I agree they certainly apply to the great entrepreneurs I have known. You need to think about how they apply to you.

What separates successful entrepreneurs from you? If you are already successful, then what have you got that others don’t? Well, the truth is each of us have different qualities that help us succeed, but very few successful entrepreneurs have low self confidence. Being sure of yourself at every step of the way is crucial to finding success. It will dramatically improve your marketing, product development, and pricing.

I started making more money with my business when I realized I was really good at what I do. Understanding that gave me the confidence to price my products and services at a rate that was fair to myself. I started making more money when I had greater confidence in the products that I created. Realizing that helped me write and talk about them in a way that my time and energy deserved. I started making more money when I turned down potential projects and clients that I knew weren’t worth my time. Figuring that out helped me allocate my time and energy to projects and clients that valued what I offer.

IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.

Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.

They wanted to build better bosses.

So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.

Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.

Do it! Cut the cord and free yourself from the tyranny of the cable mafia. The movement is slowly gaining traction but the whole task is daunting. What do you do next? Where does your TV content come from? What are the options? So many questions you need answered before you take the scissors to the coax line.

What follows are the basic steps along with the best alternative services. Follow these steps and the transition from cable to Internet streaming will be painless as possible. Still, before you proceed, you must know that there is a break-in period. Cutting cable might be hard for some. Some will go crawling back to their cable provider. But press forward and take it a day at a time. You’re going to be a better person without it.

Electric-car maker Tesla Motors announced this week an update to its plans to deliver its Model S sedan, a hotly watched launch for the company.

It’s not just electric-car fans who are itching to hear the progress on the Model S (pictured), which starts at $57,400 before federal tax incentives. Investors are watching the Model S’s progress closely too. This represents the first time Tesla is building a car from scratch, and the company aims to ramp up to a capacity of 20,000 of Model S cars a year by 2013.

Investors are looking for Tesla to hit the benchmarks it has set for itself. Tesla has to get the $42 million former NUMMI factory up and running, train hundreds of new hires and actually become a successful startup in the auto manufacturing business. The factory is meant to be a future ground for other Tesla models, too.

Unless you really don’t give two hoots about the world of technology, it’s highly unlikely you would have missed the big brouhaha between San Francisco-based startup Square and VeriFone, a payment processing equipment & services provider. VeriFone accused Jack Dorsey’s product of not being secure and being easily hackable. Dorsey denied.

This week’s dust-up makes me wonder if VeriFone quite understands its own business. To me, they are a company that provides payment-processing services to big retail outlets, fast food chains and other large transaction volume establishments. That’s what really makes them a good company. Square isn’t going after those customers.

Plans have been announced for an £89m innovation centre which aims to place Scotland at the forefront of new and emerging 21st Century technologies.

The centre, at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, will engage academics and industry in areas such as energy, pharmaceuticals and engineering.

It aims to create 700 new research jobs and support 850 existing research jobs.

Ministers hope the project will increase research investment in Scotland by up to £150m in five years.