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If you've been dreaming about starting your own business here in Portland, here are two resources that might be helpful to you:
The Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development is currently taking applications for its "Top Gun Prep", an online business development course tailored for first-time entrepreneurs. Check out the syllabus here. 
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For five years now, the Picnic music and arts festival has been taking place in Lincoln Park, in downtown Portland. This blog has noted the 2010 and 2011 versions -- here we are at 2012, and Picnic just keeps getting better and better.
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Wedged between I-295 and the bottom of Munjoy Hill on the northern tip of the Portland peninsula is the East Bayside industrial area, a triangle-shaped district of warehouses and contractors' shops. There's lots of workspace available there, and it's still relatively cheap, which means it's attracting a growing number of small businesses run by young entrepreneurs.
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Editor's note: the following is a guest post from Jennifer Hutchins, the executive director of the Creative Portland Corporation.
If the number of Facebook “likes” on my recent post are sufficient proof, I’d venture to guess that I’m not the only Portlander who has had a similar post-cappuccino experience—one that exemplifies why this city is just so damn great.
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As you probably know, late last week, a Russian kangaroo court handed a two-year Siberian labor camp sentence to three women from Pussy Riot, the punk performance art collective that attracted the ire of the increasingly autocratic Putin regime with videos like their Red Square performance of "Putin Pissed Himself in Fear" and their Punk Prayer in the state-controlled Orthodox Church.
But one of the big reasons that Pussy Riot is in the news at all happens to live right here, in Portland, Maine.
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Disclosure: I'm not big on British folk rock, or massive crowds. So when 16,000 concertgoers were expected to descend on the Eastern Prom this past weekend for the Mumford & Sons' "Gentlemen of the Road" tour, my wife and I were sure to embark on our weekend trip up the coast as early as possible.
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With the backing of tech giants like Google and O'Reilly, plus major national foundations, the nonprofit Code for America is working with individual cities to develop software to improve public services, sponsoring fellowships to support developers working in the public realm, and advocating for governments to share their data more openly and in a way that supports third-party application development.
The organization is also encouraging the establishment of local "brigades" who can work on local issues and spread the open-government gospel.
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When I walk out my front door and head downtown, the odds are good that I’ll run into a friendly neighbor sitting on his stoop, or have a chance to chat with an acquaintance who’s lingering outside the storefront window of one of our local businesses. If I'm in the mood, I can claim a bench in Monument Square just to people-watch as a broad cross-section of humanity — tourists, families, the homeless, and suited businesspeople out on lunch break — walk by and mingle with each other in their own chance interactions.
