Mindless angel investing in unvalidated ideas will get a jolt. Over 100,000 startups have received small amounts of drip financing, and less than 1 percent have managed to get Series A funding. This tells me that there are a lot of angel investors out there who are facing write-offs of their hard-earned money.

What does 2013 hold in store for the world of social media? CNET predicts:

1. MySpace relaunches; no one cares (no-brainer)

2. Twitter-Instagram photo rivalry continues to develop

3. Tout (video-sharing service) breaks out

4. Bigger bucks for Twitter (ads possible)

5. Facebook buys RockMelt? (its own browser)

About 40% of all the energy used in the United States is consumed by buildings: lighting them, heating them, cooling them. While we innovate new, clean power sources, it’s also important that we build new offices and houses that don’t waste energy.

Visions to solve these problems include rolling skyscrapers, zero-energy houses, and totally sustainable soccer stadiums. But besides the important work of reducing energy consumption, we also saw building projects this year that worked on making architecture more humane and better able to serve the people using it.

Peter Drucker and Clay Christensen have repeatedly pointed to process, knowledge, and long-term vision for sustained innovation. So why are we still rushing to the finish line half-baked?

In a recent post by Alan Hall at Forbes, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen is quoted:

Our current economy, however, has gone off of the rails in large part because we are focused almost entirely on efficiency innovations--on streamlining and wringing bottom line savings and additional profits out of our existing organizations.

...We are focused on the wrong metrics. Our universities are training entrepreneurs--and investors--to focus on fast and efficient return on capital investment. Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return.

With the Affordable Care Act now the law of the land, a value-based healthcare regime where hospitals are rewarded for keeping patients well, for being efficient and cost conscious is the path we are on. Instead of growing nostalgic for an easier time – never a recipe for success — hospitals need to review their operations, both clinical and business.

Here are the five New Year resolutions that any hospital or health system eager to secure their future in 2013 and beyond should adopt.

A lively conversation has ensued over at the Medical Devices LinkedIn group in response to a member who posed the question: What are the three mistakes startups make that could act as advice for the industry moving forward?

One user tallied up the responses and found that most of the mistakes and pieces of advice were related to poor planning, followed by the marketing process and issues with the team. Here’s some of the insight and advice from those who have been through, or are going through, the process of starting up a company.

Our time and what we do with it is our most precious commodity, and one of the most challenging tasks we manage, given our fast paced, hyper connected, massive content driven world.

It is imperative that we wrap ourselves around this, so that it doesn’t wrap itself around us.

Do you wonder why the years  fly by more quickly as we age? I do, and there is an explanation for it.

In an article from Psychology Today:

“The best answer for this phenomenon is that the early years are full of first-time events – your first date, the birth of your first child, that first big vacation, etc. First occasions are novel events and we tend to make more detailed and lasting memories of those first times. When we repeat the event, year after year, it is less likely to make a unique or lasting impression.”

For years, I have patiently waited for innovation in educational technologies, otherwise known as edu tech. For a variety of reasons, the field simply didn’t take off in the last two decades.

But this decade, I think, it is showing signs of a real, exciting, renaissance. Whether it is in the massively open online courses like Khan Academy and MIT’s OCW or edX, or various tablet and smartphone applications that are enriching the field, we’re seeing serious, high velocity action.

Today I would like to introduce you to three startups that have started showing good traction.

Avaz

In 2008, Ajit Narayanan, based in Chennai, India, was approached by Vidya Sagar, an Indian NGO focusing on children with special needs, and asked to design an assistive technology device that would address the marked absence of tools for children with the inability to speak (non-verbal children). In 2009, the Avaz tablet was born.

Perhaps it’s just me.  I find that spending close time with loved ones over the holidays—snuggled in warm homes barricaded against cold storms—often makes one reflect on the big questions…

What makes humans human?  What makes things valuable?  Why do we form families, communities, organizations?

These are fundamental mysteries about human nature.  Perhaps less obviously, however, they are also fundamental questions about business.  We rarely connect these two notions, yet human nature and business are intimately bound.

If you are an American between the ages of 24 and 32, there is a fairly high probability you own a smartphone. In fact, you probably have a laptop and a tablet to go with it. You have an average of 268 Facebook friends and own a high-definition television.

At least, that is the way research firm Forrester profiles you in its sixth annual State Of Consumers And Technology Benchmark report. The report finds that  Generation Y (defined as 24-32 years old) are at the pinnacle of Internet adoption and activity, are the most likely to own multiple connected devices (like smartphones, tablets and PCs) and are increasingly mobile. Generation Y has a 72% adoption rate for smartphones and uses them for all varieties of interaction with information and communication and commerce. About a quarter of the denizens of Generation Y have tablet computers, like iPads or Android slates. 

Even as the Internet keeps growing and evolving, the fallout from major regulations expected in 2013 threaten to change its very nature.  

The dust has yet to settle in the wake of the contentious International Telecommunications Union's (ITU) conference in Dubai, but its repercussions could spit the Internet into two parts: One free and open one, the other closed and censored, depending on which country you are in. Even here in the U.S., pending legislation could further challenge how citizens communicate online and via phone, and how and by whom those communications be me monitored and retrieved.

In the spirit of the post-holiday season, allow me to present my final list of 2012: six innovators who are pushing technology in fresh directions, some to solve stubborn problems, others to make our lives a little fuller.

Watch for more from all of them in the new year.

1. Keep your hands off my robot: We’ve all seem videos of adorably cute robots,, but when you actually have to work with one, they apparently can be less than lovable. That’s where Leila Takayama comes in. She’s a social scientist with Willow Garage, a San Francisco area company that develops robots, and her job is to figure out how to get humans to connect with mechanical co-workers.

No two successful people are the same. But Inc's Mehdi Maghsoodnia, who has spent 20 years investing in and starting companies, came up with four common characteristics the best entrepreneurs possess. They are:

Adventurous - "Starting a company or investing or joining a startup is like embarking on a four-week backpacking journey with enough food for one week," Meghsoodnia writes. "You have to be comfortable with uncertainty."

A meme is a video, image, or idea that spreads over the Internet. For example, "Gangnam Style" is a meme with multiple layers as the song, music video, and dance went viral across the Internet. Know Your Meme, a website dedicated to researching and documenting Internet memes and viral phenomena, declared "Gangnam Style" its best meme of 2012. 

By definition, most entrepreneurs are thought leaders. They have the ability to recognize a market need, the skills to design and implement a solution, and the drive to start a business from that solution. It all comes from within themselves. A business leader does the same thing and more through the people around them. Most entrepreneurs are not both.

In reality, a successful startup can be built by a thought leader, but growing a successful business requires a business leader. That’s why venture capital investors often replace startup CEOs as a condition of their scale-up investment. That’s why so many startups plateau after gaining some initial traction, and are run over or acquired by their competition.

During periods of economic turbulence such as this one, it is natural for business leaders to go back to the "well," so to speak, to drum up new business or put forth new efforts to innovate within your company. Here are some thoughts, strategies, and knowledge that may help in looking to assets and resources in your area or innovative regions that could propel your efforts.

The End Game Innovation has been and should remain the end game, since it is truly how companies are driving and sustaining growth in today's economy. And innovation is not just defined through the building of new products; it is also the creation and transformation of knowledge and new processes and services that meet a market need. It's about new ways to partner, and innovative interactions, entertainment forms, and ways of communicating and collaborating. Innovation truly distinguishes the leaders in today's economy.

We dived into our data to determine which stories created the greatest buzz. This year's most popular reads provide a myriad of tools and tips for the entrepreneurial journey. They include success secrets from industry titans, guides to navigate the latest in social media marketing, and even the British billionaire's impassioned call for excommunicating the office tie.

Here is a countdown of Entrepreneur.com's top stories of 2012.

10: Seven Secrets of Self-Made Multimillionaires 

Sales pro and 'Turnaround King' Grant Cardone examines the habits of the super-rich, and how to make them your own. 

9: Richard Branson's 5 Rules for Good Business

Opportunities for disruptive ideas have never been more abundant. Here's the maverick entrepreneur's take on how to make the most of those innovative ideas.

8: Why This Tiny Cube Might Be Your Next Office PC 

Another year has come and gone, and it’s time to look back on 2012 at the most intriguing gadgets and doohickeys of the year. In particular, here are five technologies that stand out, looking back–largely because the rest of their stories remain unwritten.

1. Wireless charging

This may be the year we recall as having finally sent wireless charging on its way (see “The Long and Winding Road to Wireless Charging”). As an IHS analyst recently put it to a CNET reporter, “we are getting closer to the mainstream.” Around five million devices using wireless charging were sold in 2012, but we might see numbers closer to 100 million in the coming two to three years (see “Wireless Charging–Has Its Time Finally Arrived?”). Madison Square Garden and Virgin Atlantic are among those who have started to build out some wireless charging infrastructure for sports fans and frequent flyers.

The New York Times reports that, as big stores like Borders disappear, “many public libraries are seeing an opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of traditional bookstores.”

Is that the right direction for libraries to take? What are libraries for, and how should they evolve?

Can government play a positive role in economic development?

To understand who built what in the construction of the American economy from its pre-industrial origins, a look at one of the drivers of U.S. innovation — venture capital — is instructive.

For more than three decades American venture capitalists have concentrated their activities and earned their returns in a very small number of industrial domains. In booms and in slumps, in bull markets and in bear markets, the information and communications technology and biomedical sectors together have consistently accounted for 80% of venture capital investment.