Many entrepreneurs, having wrapped their passion and intellect around their “next big thing,” can’t wait to hit the bricks and share their insights and enthusiasm with waiting investors, convinced that the check writers will “get it” and willingly part with their investment dollars. Unfortunately – and, in some ways, fortunately – the fundraising process is complex and requires focused preparation. Entrepreneurs who prepare carefully will be in a much stronger position, both to articulate their plans well and to execute on those plans when they secure investment capital.

Starting an IT business may not be for everyone but for those who would prefer to be their own boss, entrepreneurship can be a most enlightening, challenging and rewarding journey. Successful entrepreneurs have three essential characteristics - the correct attitude, the ability to persevere and a personality. Entrepreneurs also need to be all-rounders, understanding all aspects of business. Most entrepreneurs start on their own and so will need to be able to manage the different spheres of their business effectively, such as administration, logistics, sales, accounting, client relationship management, etc.

Accelerators are of great interest to many startups: the funding and mentoring they offered has huge appeal to both first-time founders and more seasoned entrepreneurs. But what exactly are the benefits they offer — and are there ways for startups to get some of them even without joining an accelerator?

As I moved from the acceleration side back to being an entrepreneur, I wanted to systematically list what I’d learned and work out what entrepreneurs could generally benefit from. I also ran a survey and a string of interviews to find the value that startups expect from accelerators — and ask why they actually got. My findings form the backbone of my book Speed Up Your Startup: What Entrepreneurs Should Learn From Accelerators To Succeed With Their Businesses. 

The emergence of a large entrepreneurial community is essential for the development and growth of any country. For there to be a sizable number of new enterprises and for these to grow and thrive; they need funding, and this funding usually comes from venture capital (VC). In the U.S., large, venture-backed companies — Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Google, Medtronic — are major parts of the economic landscape. A recent study by the National Venture Capital Association and HIS Global Insight estimates that 11% of U.S. jobs were created by VC-backed companies.

In Latin America, on the other hand, the VC industry is still nascent. At a recent meeting at the at the Multilateral Investment Fund (the investment and granting arm of the Inter-American Development Bank), Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School said the Latin America VC industry still has to go through the growing pains that Silicon Valley did 40 or 50 years ago during its embryonic days.

Rock Health, the seed accelerator for startups focused on the health space, landed a big, new partner back in August: The well-known Silicon Valley venture firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The result of the new partnership? The promise of a considerably larger seed investment for its next batch of startups, as Kleiner joined Rock Health’s existing partners in offering $100K in seed funding to each founding team.

This represents a five-fold increase in funding for Rock Health’s fourth class, as the startups that launched as part of the accelerator’s first three classes — 36 companies in total — each received $20K. Today, the healthtech accelerator offered the first look at the fourteen startups that will be taking advantage of the additional funding and participating in Rock Health’s fourth batch.

Twenty-one years ago, Microsoft debuted the first Surface tablet, complete with handwriting recognition and gestures. It wasn’t called the Surface then. In fact, the prototype tablet that a young, charming Bill Gates showed off was an unnamed prototype from NCR running Windows 3.1.

In a video lost among the millions on YouTube, Gates marked the debut of Windows for Pen Computing, the first tablet interface for Windows.

Next week, Microsoft will debut its Surface, a tablet that the company introduced in June. Surface will come in two flavors, one based on the full-fledged Windows 8 operating system, and one running a derivative for ARM processors, called Windows RT, which will be priced at $499 and up.  

North Carolina has received $15.2 million in its second round of funding from the U.S. Department of Treasury State Small Business Credit Initiative, according to a news release issued by Gov. Beverly Perdue’s office. The initiative makes capital available for small businesses throughout North Carolina.

The SSBCI program, a component of the Small Business Jobs Act that President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010, funds the North Carolina Capital Access Program, the North Carolina Loan Participation Program and the North Carolina Fund of Funds Program.

More entrepreneurs want to be socially responsible these days, but fear a negative impact on profits, growth, and the ability to find an investor. In the short run, there are real costs associated with the “triple bottom line” of maximizing profit, people (social), and planet (environment). But very quickly, it is becoming obvious to startups that the value and satisfaction exceeds the costs.

To legally facilitate startups who want to give top priority to socially conscious solutions, eleven states, including New York and California, have passed legislation allowing incorporation as a Benefit Corporation (B-Corp). The B-Corp status is meant to reduce investor suits, and gives consumers an easy way to spot genuine social commitment, without assuming it is a non-profit.

On July 21, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed gingerly out of Eagle, Apollo 11's lunar module, and joined Neil Armstrong on the Sea of Tranquility. Looking up, he said, "Beautiful, beautiful, magnificent desolation." They were alone; but their presence on the moon's silent, gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive collective effort.

Eight years before, President John F. Kennedy had asked the United States Congress to "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." His challenge disturbed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's original plan for a stepped, multi-generational strategy: Wernher von Braun, NASA's chief of rocketry, had thought the agency would first send men into Earth's orbit, then build a space station, then fly to the moon, then build a lunar colony. A century hence, perhaps, humans would travel to Mars. Kennedy's goal was also absurdly ambitious. A few weeks before his speech, NASA had strapped an astronaut into a tiny capsule atop a converted military rocket and shot him into space on a ballistic trajectory, as if he were a circus clown; but no American had orbited the planet. The agency didn't really know if what the president asked could be done in the time he allowed, but it accepted the call. 

Business is war. And as is this case with most wars, there are arms races: in strategy, advertising and perhaps most importantly, technology. The technologies that can make a big impact on business tend to bring with them a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. Those qualities can come from an existing technology reaching maturity, an emerging technology that could give early adopters a distinct advantage, or one that has potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.

Apparently, the month you were born in can determine the likelihood of your becoming a CEO. And no, this has nothing to do with astrology. According to a study to be released in Economics Letters by business professors in Shanghai, Singapore, and Canada (h/t Inc Magazine), babies born in March and April are most likely to become CEOs, and babies born in June and July are the least likely to become CEOs.

Immigration has been key to America's preeminence in science and technology, and yet we're losing our competitive advantage. The loss of highly skilled immigrants is a serious threat to our global economic leadership -- and the jobs that flow from it -- and eliminating government obstacles in the way of that talent should be a top priority for bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill once elections are over.

In a recent report titled "Not Coming to America: Why the U.S. is Falling Behind in the Global Race for Talent," the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Partnership for New York City wrote:

More than 40 percent of America's Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. In recent years, however, U.S. immigration laws have failed to keep pace with the country's changing economic needs. Artificially low limits on the number of visas and serious bureaucratic obstacles prevent employers from hiring the people they need -- and drive entrepreneurs to other countries, who are quick to welcome them.

A small group of leaders who work daily with area entrepreneurs is creating a formal group aimed at providing new entrepreneurs resources to grow their business and to give them a voice when it comes to public policy.

Entrepreneurship Wichita is spearheaded by Trish Brasted, CEO of Wichita Technology Corp., a public-private agency that assists high-tech startups. The group held its first meeting Monday night, and Brasted said 62 people, many of them entrepreneurs, attended.

Entrepreneurship Wichita, she hopes, will bring experienced entrepreneurs together as well as resources such as WTC and the Center for Entrepreneurship at Wichita State University.

Looking for the next Silicon Valley? You're not alone. With growth slowing or stagnant in economies around the world, executives, entrepreneurs, and investors are on the hunt for hotbeds of original thinking and new-business creation, in search of people and startups that might give their own companies and portfolios a competitive edge.

Fortune scoured the globe for cities that share the San Francisco Bay Area's potent combination of creativity and capitalism. We started with data from the Global Innovation Index (co-published by Insead and the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization), which ranks countries based on a number of factors, including educational institutions and digital infrastructure. Crucially, the index also looks at results -- it essentially assigns extra credit to countries whose companies and institutions push their products and ideas out into the world.

A national angel network recently relocated its headquarters from Nashville, Tenn., to Kansas City, Mo..

In addition to the move, Angel Capital Group – formerly based in Nashville, Tenn., —  also began offering a new member option for its investors and plans to open angel chapters in three new cities, including Omaha, in the coming months.

Josh Roberts, chief marketing officer of Angel Capital Group (ACG), said the move of the company’s headquarters to Kansas City in May was largely due to the fact that ACG chief executive Rachael Qualls (below) is originally from the Kansas City area. But Roberts said the growing startup community was a draw as well.

Now it looks like the profession - you could even call it the art - of venture-capital investing is leaving, too. Israeli high tech is being reduced to 20-somethings developing an idea, taking the money and running.

Israel hi-tech The Israeli high-tech cake was supposed to work like this. The schools and universities would add a few cups of talented engineers and the army a pinch of battlefield experience and budding entrepreneurs. Venture capital would be the baking soda, providing the financial and industrial experience to help the whole enterprise rise. Many of the resulting pastries would fail, but enough would emerge from the oven as...

Over the past couple of years, Union Square Ventures, already a leading investor in consumer tech startups, has been building up its portfolio in education. It made an early investment in education social network Edmodo in 2010 and, since then, it’s invested in Skillshare, Codecademy and Duolingo.

On Wednesday, Fred Wilson, a managing partner at the firm, gave a little insight into how he and USV view opportunities in education technology as part of an open online course on entrepreneurship in education, called Ed Startup 101. Speaking to a group of ed tech academics, researchers and entrepreneurs, Wilson talked about the role of venture capitalists, potential business models for freemium startups in education and a few areas that are most ripe for innovation.

Support for business development and commercialization opportunities takes a step forward with the creation of New California Ventures LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Fresno State Foundation, the Central Valley university says.

The entity was created to facilitate work that Fresno State’s Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s engages in with existing and start-up private companies to provide consulting services and some financial assistance to help launch private commercialization efforts.

In addition, New California Ventures is to work directly with central San Joaquin Valley entrepreneurs and Fresno State faculty researchers.

Nerds are taking over the world! Or at least its economy. But who are these software engineers creating the platforms, tools, and services fundamentally changing the way business is done? According to the info graphic below, they are an army 17 million strong. And their numbers are growing. They may not be cool, but they are the force pushing the global economy forward.

The software industry is booming, with billions of dollars circulating in annual investment, acquisitions, deals, and IPOs, not to mention sky-high valuations. Businesses across all industries and around the world are run on software, and as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it “software is eating the world.” So who are the people behind this seismic shift? These new titans of industry? Why, the nerds, of course! Specifically, nerds that code.

With young companies driving job growth in most areas of the country, I thought you might be interested in learning about a major, new program in CT to help start and grow new companies and increase the state’s economic competitiveness.   The program will be introduced by Governor Dannel Malloy and Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Catherine Smith on Thursday, October 25, at a press briefing in New Haven at The Grove from 3:00-4:00 pm.