We’ve reached the home stretch of 2011. All too soon, fall will give way to winter, and holiday music and merchandise will be all around us. For the small business owner, this is the time of year to make sure you have everything squared away for 2012–because when it comes to some of these decisions, waiting until you write your 2012 New Year’s resolutions will be too late.

Here are five things to consider for your small business while it’s still 2011.

I asked a company the other day whether or not they were going to take advantage of a great event here in NYC.  Its an opportunity to pitch Sony on a biz dev deal--a no brainer for nearly any company given the scope of Sony's areas of interest.  (applications are due this Monday the 31st)

The company said no because their main angel investor didn't think it was a good idea to let an audience see their pitch.  He was afraid someone would steal the concept.  I asked them how they felt, and they knew that if all it took to replicate their idea was seeing their high level biz dev pitch, they wouldn't have much of a company.  Then I asked how much of the company the investor owned.  The answer?  None.  He was in on a convertible note and, if the note converted at the cap, it would be about 10%.   They knew it wasn't a controlling share, but it was the bulk of their angel capital and they couldn't have worked on their company without it.  They felt an allegiance to him to listen to how he thought the company should be run.

It would probably surprise most technology executives to hear that the majority of startup companies never receive venture capital funding. In fact, I recently read that not even 1 percent of all startups receive outside funding. Dell, for example, started privately with less than $1,000. The benefits of financial independence often outweigh the loss of business control that VC funding can create.

While the global economy is sluggish with concerns of a double-dip recession, the prevailing wisdom among entrepreneurs and venture capital companies is that good ideas with strong management will get funded in any climate.

Firms like Apple (AAPL), Cisco (CSCO), Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) received large rounds of financing in tough economic periods, showing that as some firms hibernate, entrepreneurs innovate.

Yesterday I sat down with an ambitious young entrepreneur who was having a hard time raising $10 million dollars. I seem to be having a lot of this same conversation recently.

In today’s world I can promise you that raising $10 million dollars for a concept is next to impossible. I feel like saying that unfortunately it still does happen (but there is something else at play…a serial entrepreneur with a long term track record, an expert with a revolutionary and proprietary technology, a wealthy investor with an idea meets the right team to execute, etc). Still those “starts’ give everyone else a false hope. At other times, doing so has been much more likely (before the financial crisis, or the late 1990s, for example).

Every few years, public officials and the news media perform a ritual form of "disestimation" when a population clock reaches a big milestone. Population experts at the Census Bureau and around the world are constantly estimating the populations of each nation. Their estimates are pretty good, predicting when, say, the world's population reaches six billion—they might even be able to guess when the six billionth person is born to within a few hours. That's about as good as any possible measurement of population can get. Populations constantly fluctuate, with people dying and being born at irregular intervals, often far from the eyes of people who count such things, so it's impossible to know at any given moment the true number of people alive on earth.

The economics of the consumer electronics industry dictate that on a long enough timescale, all products will become low-margin commodities. The companies that make products household names are destined to fade from the public’s memory. Will Apple suffer the same fate as others before it, such as RCA, who revolutionized television sets in a similar fashion but were relegated to the dustbin of history decades later?

It’s products will most certainly be commoditized, but thanks to its ecosystem of software and services (the Stores and iCloud), it will largely avoid the fate of RCA (and may just re-revolutionize the television itself).

Startup RentAStudent has a lofty goal: to be a Craigslist-like service that connects startups and small businesses with talented students for one-time projects.

“A lot of businesses are struggling now to get all the work they need done with small budgets, and a lot of students are looking for ways to get exposure.” RentAStudent CEO Morgan Dierstein told VentureBeat. “We help both parties connect.”

RentAStudent’s purpose is to connect students and businesses for any imaginable project. Companies that may not be able to afford established freelancers, but are willing to take a shot with a college student, are the big winners here, especially in this tight economy. Students are helped because taking on a single project is easier than signing up for an internship and there’s money in it.

This week, IBM named its first-ever female CEO, Virginia Rometty.

In an industry that historically lacks gender balance, this move struck the VentureBeat staffers, including publisher Alicia Saribalis, as momentous.

But in reflecting on the events of the day, we also pondered whether the female tech CEO presiding over an established company (examples also include Meg Whitman and the gone-but-not-forgotten Carol Bartz) was an anomaly attributable to the extraordinary moxie and hard work of a few individuals, or a rising trend whose day had finally come. Are we, the technology industry, starting to see women more fairly, or are these women ahead-of-their-time enigmas?

We’ve covered how to effectively pitch your startup to the tech press before, and at the Future of Web Apps conference in London this month, entrepreneur and angel investor Dave McClure was in attendance to give his advice on how best to pitch to a venture capitalist. It was interesting to note some of the similarities between pitching for money, and pitching for press.

10 tips for pitching to VCs

Deviating from the topic in the conference programme which had been 10 Tips for Web App Success and Profitability, Dave started: “I don’t know shit about that. So I’m going to talk about this instead. Though if you want to make a profit, I think you should sell something – way too few people are trying to do that these days.”

1. "I want to put a ding in the universe." - Steve Jobs

2. "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them." - Alfred North Whitehead

3. "Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk

4. "If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong." - Charles Kettering

5. "Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller

WASHINGTON, IND. (WTHI) - A southern Indiana city's unique approach to solving a long running and potentially expensive sewage problem is getting attention around the state and across the nation.

The city of Washington was one of more than 100 communities facing possible legal action from the E.P.A because of pollution caused by its combined sewers.

The city's unique green solution is not only cleaning up the water but also saving a lot of money.

Remember that Target commercial last year that poked fun at homemade Halloween costumes? Some people, including me, were not too fond of the message it sent. This year at New York Comic Con, the GeekDads and GeekMoms hosted a discussion panel and my topic was “five reasons you should build your kid’s costume.”

Here are the reasons I presented to a packed room of Comic-Con-style parents.

Reason 5: Making something with your kids sends a positive message.

When you make something practical with your kids, you are helping them become self-sufficient. Consumerism is the norm for kids these days, but I want my children to realize they are not reliant on commercial products for everything; that’s why it is important to let the kids participate in some aspect of the build process. This activity will help foster creativity and teach problem-solving. It’s also a chance to teach the lessons of reuse, recycle and remake.

More than 90 percent of entrepreneurs fail. The top 3 barriers to entrepreneurship are the following:

1) Procrastination: Procrastination they say is the thief of time. There is no tomorrow because it never comes. What you do today will affect how your tomorrow will be. Out of laziness, resistance and complacency entrepreneurs are forced to shift activities. If you want to draw a business plan it must be now; if you want to write a proposal, it must be now; if you must register your business, it must be now; if you must quit a job and start your own business it must be now. A lot of entrepreneurs have great vision and dreams but a lot are in the “someday island”. They hope to achieve them someday. They never get there in actual fact. Write the dream on paper, figure out areas of strength and areas of resistance, set time against your dreams. When you have done this, employ your passion and go get it.

The managing director of Wisconsin's biggest venture capital firm called for state legislators to separate controversial certified capital companies - or CAPCOs - from a proposed venture capital bill to give it a better chance of passing in the next few weeks.

Citing "a lot of resistance" to CAPCOs, John Neis, of Madison-based Venture Investors, suggested focusing what little time remains in this session on passing a "fund of funds" approach, in which the state would hire a manager to invest in a variety of venture capital funds.

"It's my personal belief that if we're going to get something passed, it's going to be a fund of funds, not a CAPCO," Neis said at a lunch Thursday at the University Club in Milwaukee sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee business school.

Anthony Favazza has just made his elevator pitch for DiningCircle, a software company that he says will revolutionize the way restaurant reservations are made.

One of his listeners, fellow entrepreneur Ryan Bell, suddenly becomes animated. He once ran a restaurant, and he knows intuitively what sort of problems, such as keeping track of tables, DiningCircle's software can solve. Bell suggests that Favazza mention such specifics in his pitch.

WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama issued on October 28, 2011 a Presidential Memorandum (PM) directing all Federal agencies with research facilities to improve the transfer of research from their labs to the marketplace. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in collaboration with the National Science Foundation (NSF), is piloting a program to provide Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awardees with comprehensive intellectual property support through the agency’s small business programs and resources, a press release by the USPTO stated.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Venture capitalist Bill Gurley has noticed something new this autumn: a big jump in the number of what he calls "legitimate introductions" that he receives each day to entrepreneurs who hope he might invest in their start-up companies.

The money-seekers are companies that have benefited from a tidal wave of early-stage investing in start-ups and who now need funding from mainline VC firm's such as Gurley's Benchmark Capital to take them to the next level. But many companies, even some that have done fairly well in their initial phase, are finding it increasingly difficult to

Virginia “Ginni” Rometti is the ninth CEO in IBM’s 100-year history.  (Founder Thomas J. Watson and son combined to lead the company from 1914 to 1971.)   IBM’s announcement earlier this week that Rometty will succeed Sam Palmisano as CEO is notable for how non-controversial it was given some other industry successions of late. This even though Rometti is IBM’s first female CEO and now arguably the most powerful women in business.

Here is the chronological list of IBM’s CEOs throughout its history.

HP will be keeping its PC division after all, according to a press released put out by the company today.

“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG (personal computing group) within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said chief executive Meg Whitman in a statement.