In the perennial horse race between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley, New York-area companies have pulled ahead by a nose.

While Northern California's tech community still receives the lion's share of venture funding, Big Apple startups raised $566 million in the first quarter, up 18.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009 and 32 percent over Q1 of last year, according to a report released last week by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Seventy-five New York City companies got funded in the first quarter, up 13.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009 and 11.9 percent year-over-year.

Q1 - Location: Do you work from your home or a traditional office? If you work from home, how do you keep your home and business lives separated since both are under the same roof?

Q2 - Personalization: If you work in a traditional office, are you in an enclosed office or a cubicle? In either case, how much freedom do you have to personalize your workspace?

Q3 - Productivity: Is your office space conducive to productivity? If it isn't, what would you like to change about the space?

Q4 - Entertainment: What's your pick for the best office or work-related movie or television show of all time?

Q:  I am concerned with protecting the intellectual property for a business startup that I'm currently engaged in. It has to do primarily with a certain business process/practice. How can I protect these practices?

A:  You're wise to be concerned with protecting your company's intellectual property, as that can provide a valuable asset for the business over the long haul. Although different courts have been wrangling over this recently, depending on nature of the "business process/practice" you're referring to, it's possible you may be able to get patent protection for your particular business methods.

I wrote last month about how federal credit-card reform left business credit cards out in the cold. Now, reports are coming in that business-card owners may be getting some breaks that stem indirectly from the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) act.

Apparently, some major banks are making the CARD-required changes for business cards as well, possibly because it's just easier to have one set of rules for all its cardholders. Bank of America will join this group by July, offering its two million business-card holders a freeze on rate increases for existing balances, the elimination of overlimit fees, 45 days' advance notice of rate changes, and 25 days from statement closing dates to due date.

As small businesses continue to play a significant role in the changing economy, technologies addressing their unique requirements follow suit. One of the most compelling concepts at play in enterprise technology with profound implications for small businesses is hosted Voice over Internet Protocol, which enables smaller businesses to conduct national and even global communications with increased functionality and reduced cost.

With the promise of minimum hardware investment, lower phone bills and converged voice and data services, hosted VoIP holds the potential to set an efficiency standard for a powerful segment of the global economy. This is probably why analysts have pegged the VoIP industry to reach 79 percent of all U.S. businesses within the next three years.

Many entrepreneurs have been hanging on to the knot at the end of their rope for more than two solid years, waiting for the economy to improve. Two new studies show an increasing number of them are concerned that knot's not going to hold them long enough to see a turnaround. Studies from Discover and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) show more owners think business conditions are deteriorating. In the March Discover study, 53 percent of owners believe the economic climate will get worse in the next six months, compared with 37 percent who said that just a month ago. 

Over at the NFIB, their monthly Small Business Economic Trends report shows owners hitting an eight-month confidence low in March, which the NFIB described as "a very pessimistic reading." The number of owners reporting it's harder to get loans now rose to 15 percent. One ray of hope: 15 percent of those surveyed plan to hire, up a couple of points from last month. Presumably that's a different 15 percent than the ones who couldn't access capital.

A couple of intriguing contests for hot startups close their application process at the end of the day Monday, April 12 -- so act fast to get your company a chance to be heard at one of these entrepreneurial conclaves.

First up: a contest to win a chance to present at the second annual Startup 2010 conference, to be held in New York City on May 20. Winning entries compete for a $100,000 grand prize, including $25,000 cash and goodies including free office space, legal services, Web hosting and more. This year's Startup conference has a "mobile" theme, so if your company's in that space you may have an advantage here. The application will ask you loads of questions about your business model, customers, target market, the works.

The mating dance that entrepreneurs do with prospective investors--venture-capital firms, angels or even just friends and family members--has obvious parallels to the dating scene.

On the one hand, you don't want to seem so eager for a term sheet that the investor thinks you're desperate and tries to low-ball you. On the other, you don't want to appear so aloof and arrogant that the investor passes on your deal because he doesn't think you need his money.

I confess I love books that try to rock the business world. Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson fits that category because they definitely toss out the old business rules.  While I liked a lot of Rework, it's likely because it applies to internet-based businesses like mine. Sure, many of their "new rules" will work in other industries, but some won't. 

So much is packed into Rework, here are just a few of the book highlights that jumped out at me.

If you're plugged in and tuned in to topics related to government regulation of the internet, you have probably heard the term net neutrality. If you find the term confusing, join the club. Most people have never heard of it, and even fewer people understand it.

With net neutrality all internet traffic is treated equally. If you are part of an access network run by a company that owns a certain news station, for example, with net neutrality, that company cannot block access to other news stations.

There's good news and bad news about angel investing. On the bright side, investments have stayed fairly stable in the angel-investing world as compared with venture capital's recent decline. On the bad-news side, a new study from the Center for Venture Research shows a substantial proportion of angels have recently lost their taste for investing in startup companies.

Does your marketing need a boost? Ten small businesses can win a year-long, $5,000 marketing overhaul from Project Rev -- just one of the free resources I've gathered for this week's Wednesday Web Resources.

Sponsored by business-forms maker Deluxe, Project Rev will help winners with whatever needs work in their marketing plan -- logo design, public relations savvy, Web site design, you name it. They're choosing winners May 4, so get on the stick if you want to be considered.

Whether we like it or not, social media's tentacles now have an impact on how we handle employees before, during and after the course of the employment relationship. As Renee Jackson points out in the National Law Journal, "[t]he increased use of social media in the workplace . . . presents both opportunities and risks for employers ."  Here are just a few of the "no-nos" you'll want to avoid:

OK, so the Small Business Administration's share of the stimulus funding went pretty fast, and some of its hardship-loan programs were kind of a boondoggle. But the Small Business Administration's Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) has a new initiative to help small businesses compete better in the 21st Century.

The problem with most small-business owners, Michael Gerber famously wrote in his book, The E-Myth, is that they're technicians, not managers. In other words, they can bake a great cake but couldn't run a bakery if their lives depended on it.

Turns out that cake-baking (or plumbing, hair styling or bookkeeping) is a good skill to have these days.