If you’re a women founder or co-founder of a startup, you have a chance to win an amazing prize package, if you can create the perfect pitch to potental funders.

It’s Women 2.0’s 3rd Annual Pitch 2009: Startup Competition, and five emerging businesses will be chosen to pitch live on May 7.

Prizes include:

• One-on-one meeting with Michael Moritz
• 3 months of office space and mentoring
• Marketing strategy
• PR strategy
• Legal support

Now there is an entry fee of $25. And you may think you’re leaping through hoops to apply. (I think it’s fun stuff, but others  may differ). Youll need a business plan, a paper napkin idea presentation & a video.

For more information go to http://www.women2.org/pitch2009/

Then you might want to check out BusinessWeek’s new contest to name the top young entrepreneurs in the US.

In the process the company is looking for startups with serious potential and the leaders who are making it happen.

But you need to hurry, as the deadline is July 21.

Nomintate yourself, or someone you know at http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/

Entrepreneur Magazine and the Women Presidents’ Organization have launched a search for the 50 Fastest-growing women-owned or women-led companies in North America!

The competition finds the 50 Fastest™ women-owned/women-led companies in North America. Companies will be ranked according to revenue growth from 2003 to 2007. The Top 50 fastest-growing companies will be publicized in the November 2008 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine.

To be eligible, companies must be…

• privately-owned
• women-owned/led
• must have generated $100,000 in annual revenue by the first week of 2003
• must have reached revenues of $1 million by year-end 2007

Go to http://www.womenpresidentsorg.com/media_room/50apply.php to apply.

MSNBC’s Your Business is holding a contest for small businesses to win a free consultation with the experts from the show.

In addition, you’ll get some free publicity (if you want to admit you need help!) by appearing on the show.

Go to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23792218/

The deadline is April 20.

TechStars is offering 10 slots to be mentored this summer to grow your startup, plus award up to $15,000 in seed money in their annual contest.

Winners will need to spend most of their time in Boulder with the TechStars staff. Winners have full use of TechStars’ offices, access to legal advice, and are able to tap into a strong list of startup mentors to help them build their idea. In return, TechStars takes 5% of the equity in each startup.

According to TechStars officials, 8 of the 10 companies are now angel or venture backed, are profitable, and/or have had acquisition offers.

Applications are being  accepted until the end of March. You can apply online at http://www.techstars.org/apply .

Then you need to check out the contest over at Greener Assets.

You can have the chance to win  a copy of Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise The Interface Model. Mid-Course Correction is the personal story of Ray Anderson’s realization that businesses need to embrace principles of sustainability, and of his efforts, often frustrating, to apply these principles within a billion dollar corporation that is still measured by the standard scorecards of the business world.

Head over to Green Assets today and enter to win! 

We had one final entry before the deadline on Monday from Service Untitled titled Seth Godin on Customer Service. That brings the total to 6. The other 5 can be found here.

With such a few number of entries each person had great odds for winning.

I used a random number generator to pick the winner…drumroll please…

Jeff Husacker of The Freestyle Entrepreneur takes home the prize!

I’ll be sending Jeff a copy of The Entrepreneurial Imperative by Carl J. Schramm along with a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com.

Jeff’s muse for his article Forbes: Head To Head: U.S. Congress’ Small Biz Agenda was Maureen Farrell at Forbes.com. I’ll be sending Maureen a copy of Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough by Jonathan M. Tisch and a 2nd $25 gift certificate to Amazon.com.

The outcome was disappointing - I expected a lot more submissions since it’s so common for people to find something interesting online and blog about it. Maybe it was the prizes, or the short timespan and the lack of pre-promotion I did for it. Ah…lessons learned.

In the meantime John and Maureen get a couple of interesting books and some money to spend at Amazon and the rest of us were treated to a handful of interesting, entrepreneurial stories.

You can expect more contests in the future - but any feedback is always appreciated as well!

A few days ago I announced a contest to win a couple business books. OK, so I’m not giving away a video IPod (I’ve got a budget people!) but it’s still a fun contest nonetheless.

And the goal isn’t to just win a couple books, but to connect people to a bunch of great entrepreneurial content.

I’m extending the deadline for another week — till March 12th, 2006.

I’m also going to ask people to link back to the original post so it’s easier for me to track your submissions. Please email me anyway, to let me know about your submission.

So how’s the contest work?

Simple –

1. Find a great blog post about something entrepreneurial. Be creative; I’m flexible in terms of what I consider “entrepreneurial.” If you don’t know where to look, check out some of the best entrepreneurship blogs out there.
2. Write on your own blog about the blog post you enjoy. Extend the original author’s thoughts. Respond to the original author. Do something to keep the conversation going. Make sure you link to the original blog post as well.
3. Link to the contest post here. (Email me too!)
4. And that’s it!

It’s a simple contest. People should have fun with it - you probably read a ton of great stuff daily, and now you can add to the mix with your own thoughts. The prizes include a couple books - one goes to you, one goes to the person you link to in your blog post. So if you win (winner selected randomly) you’re winning a prize for someone else too. How cool is that?

We’re right smack in the middle of EntrepreneurshipWeek USA so now is a great time to hold a Business Book Contest.

In fact, I’ve got 2 books to give away in this contest, and in the spirit of giving and sharing here’s how the contest will work:

1. Find a great blog post about entrepreneurship that really hits home for you (on someone else’s blog.)
2. Write about that blog post on your own blog, and add your own thoughts to the mix. Make sure you link to the original blog post too.
3. Link back to http://www.startupspark.com (in your blog post) and email me with the URL of your blog post (so I can check it out!)

That’s all there is to it. I’ll work on collecting all of the submissions and posting them here. The cool thing is that we’ll get your blog posts about entrepreneurship with links to other people’s blog posts about entrepreneurship as well - doubling the entertainment and value.

A few more details:

• Only 1 submission per blog please. If you write more than one appropriate blog then you can submit for each blog.
• The contest ends Monday, March 5th. All submissions need to be in by Monday at the latest.
• A winner will be picked randomly, and announced on Tuesday, March 6th.
• The winner will receive The Entrepreneurial Imperative by Carl J. Schramm, President of the Kauffman Foundation.
• The person that the winner has linked to in his/her story will also win a book - Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough by Jonathan M. Tisch.

Find a great blog post about entrepreneurship that you want to highlight. Write about it and link to it. Let me know about it. You could win a cool book on entrepreneurship and the person you’re linking to will also win. It’s like a “pay it forward” contest…

And, we’ll create a nice big spider web of entrepreneurial content for everyone to enjoy.

Good luck!

Over at Pimp Your Work (a fellow b5 Business Channel blog) they’re running a great contest for some free software.

They call it a “pimpalicious” contest. I’ll admit using that word kind of scares me (as does the picture on their blog) but their content is a ton of fun…and worthwhile too!

They’re looking for your “best work-related tips” which you can leave via a comment on the contest post or you can email them at pimpyourwork@gmail.com.

At this point you’re probably saying, “What are the prizes! Tell me dammit!”

Here they are:

• MindManager (Win or Mac)
• Activewords (it lets you automate tons and tons of functions on your machine)
• Anagram (it lets you make To-dos, appointments, and contacts right from your Outlook e-mails
• GyroQ for MindManager
• GryoQ Developer Licenses
• ClearContext (that awesome Outlook add-in that has made my e-mail easy to deal with)

That’s a fine-looking list of prizes, and I know the folks behind Pimp Your Work put a lot of effort into securing them.

So go check out Pimp Your Work and good luck winning that software!