It's time to nominate your favorite small business owner for the National Small Business Week Awards.

And the Small Business Administration has created a website that offers an easy way to recognize and follow the contest candidates.

According to the SBA, the online portal, "will make it easier to submit and track submissions." The awards include the National Small Business Person of the Year and the Women's Business Center of Excellence Award.

You can also go here for complete rules and to download and application. Entry deadline is Jan. 3.

National winners will be chosen from the state winners.

Quail Ridge Books & Music, Raleigh's 28-year-old independent book store, is on the market.

Owner Nancy Olson, who founded the shop in 1984, is retiring, and looking for a buyer "who can keep the printed word going in the age of Amazon and Kindle." The bookstore stocks about 70,000 titles and more than 17,000 households are loyalty program members. Quail Ridge is also a hotspot for book signings.

Read Josh Shaffer's story here.

A venture aimed at developing, evaluating and commercializing a simple test for fecal bacteria in water, foods and on hands won $15,000 last night in the 8th annual Carolina Challenge.

KM Water Solutions, led by Alice Wang, Alan LeFebvre and Mark Sobsey, seeks to commercialize the Compartment Bag Test. The test uses a color-changing agent that can be easily read and scored by eye to detect fecal bacteria and improve drinking water.

Carolina Challenge is a business and social venture competition aimed at promoting entrepreneurship at UNC. Each team must include a  student, faculty or staff member who present their business plan to a panel of judges made up of successful entrepreneurs and UNC community members.

The winners were announced at a ceremony last night at Top of the Hill Restaurant in Chapel Hill. Runners-up included Everyday Glucose, glucose that fits inside a wallet or pocket, YardSprout, which finds experts to grow and sustain land and the Meateorologist, a price forecasting and analytics model for the meat industry.

For those wondering where the Triangle's leading entrepreneurs went this morning, they were all in Durham meeting with Obama Administration officials and some of corporate America's biggest names.

The occasion was a convening of Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which includes former AOL CEO Steve Case, Citigroup Chairman Dick Parsons, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

It was one of five similar economic meetings held across the Triangle this morning in advance of Obama's appearance today at the Durham headquarters of LED-maker Cree.

The group that met at Durham's American Tobacco Campus was focused on entrepreneurship.

After a tour of American Underground, the the ATC space designed to foster start-ups, the council members joined Triangle business leaders at the headquarters of advertising agency McKinney.

The goal, as stated by Austan Goolsbee, chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, was to talk about things that both the government and the private sector can do to make life easier for entrepreneurs.

The issues raised this morning will be familiar ones to anyone who has followed similar discussions in the past: Access to capital, particularly early seed money; the transfer of promising technology from the labs and classrooms of the area's universities to the private sector; the existence of a mentoring network to help entrepreneurs grow; and the access to talented employees.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of private equity firm The Blackstone Group, will be in Durham on Monday to announce a new charitable initiative designed to further entrepreneurship.

Schwarzman will be joined by a bevy of state politicians and university officials, including Gov. Bev Perdue, Senator Kay Hagan, Duke University President Richard Brodhead, N.C. Central University Chancellor Charlie Nelms, North Carolina State University Chancellor Randy Woodson and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp.

The event is being held on the American Tobacco Campus at 11 a.m.

Blackstone's charitable foundation earlier launched a $50 million entrepreneurship initiative, called LaunchPad, that is working with universities to develop programs for aspiring entrepreneurs. 

The foundation hopes to make LaunchPad a national model for developing entrepreneurship through higher education.

It has committed to expanding the number of LaunchPads in the U.S. over the next five years.