Most business presentations stink. Period. They are bloated PowerPoint-laden ramblings that ignore audiences' key concerns and fail to tell a simple story. Here are 5 ways to make your presentations the happy exceptions.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution that’s a lot easier than losing 10 pounds--and with the tough marketplace we face in 2013, it will make your business more competitive.

Are you a team manager or a sales director responsible for delivering weekly presentations to your teams? Do you lead conference calls with hundreds of employees listening in? Are you the CEO? If so, resolve to limit your presentations to no longer than 15 minutes--including Q&A. It’s not hard. And in today’s world of YouTube attention spans and tough decisions, your listeners will thank you.

Should I really become an explosives worker? Spencer Thompson's Sokanu wants to be like a Match.com for careers.

There aren't many 21-year-olds you should talk with for career advice. But when that 21-year-old, like Spencer Thompson, has built an elegant website that uses survey questions and data to find a career that suits you best, you might want to listen. Sokanu (pronounced “so can you,” though Thompson acknowledges the name scans more “like a Japanese noodle company”) contains a database of some 500 careers, with metrics on what sort of person thrives in that career. By posing a series of survey questions, Sokanu can begin matching you with your ideal career.

Today, Sokanu launches a new service called “Career Stories,” about how people came to be what they are. Here, lessons on choosing a career at a time when some people question whether the very notion is obsolete.

The standard-model performance review is an unhelpful barrage of built-up criticism. Instead, give feedback consistently so that your employees hear the good with the bad and make improvement a matter of routine.

Let's cut to the chase: If the only feedback your employees get from you is in the form of a 6- or 12-month performance review, it’s time to change your approach to feedback. Dropping bombs on employees once or twice a year only serves to build up pressure and make feedback sessions feel like indictments. And most importantly, it does little to alter behavior and improve performance and productivity, which should be your goal.

Recent economic reports point to a national economic recovery that is moving in the right direction, albeit slowly. The unemployment rate continues to edge down, housing prices are recovering, and GDP growth has been relatively strong. That modest aggregate progress belied tremendous variation in the rate of recovery across the nation's major metropolitan economies through the third quarter of 2012.

This edition of the Metro Monitor finds that from July to September of this year, employment growth across the 100 largest U.S. metro areas remained steady, but was slower than during the relatively strong months of January to March. Meanwhile growth in output accelerated across the 100 largest metro areas, matching the rate from the first quarter. Unemployment rates continued to fall in more than half (65) of all large metropolitan areas, but remained above 6 percent in all but 14 of these places. Home prices reversed course in most large metro areas, posting gains after two consecutive quarters of losses that had carried most places to new lows.

In the early 1990’s, I attended a startup conference, where the speaker emphasized that a large percentage of entrepreneurs end up getting divorced. Forgetting what the rest of the presentation was about, I left with the idea that starting a company had the potential to ruin my marriage.

At the time, I was working for MIT, with dreams of starting a business. By 1996, I was ready to pull the trigger and start a company — but the alarming divorce statistics had left their mark. My wife, Laura, and I had a baby with visions of expanding the family, and an old home with a mortgage requiring extensive repair.

Academics, SMEs and large companies are doing much more research in partnership. Science|Business looks back at some of the highlights of the move to open innovation in 2012, and the policy initiatives that are supporting this

Parliament takes tough stance on Horizon 2020

After many discussions, debates and a series of draft parliamentary reports in 2012; MEPs in the European Parliament’s Research, Industry and Energy (ITRE) Committee almost unanimously adopted a series of amendments on the six legislative proposals that make up Horizon 2020, the EU’s next research funding programme.

It is expected that next year’s Irish Presidency will push for a deal with MEPs ahead of a meeting of research ministers in May 2013 – but the likelihood is that a political logjam over the broader, Commission-wide budget will hold up resolution of the R&D slice of the budget, about 8% of total EU spending. The latest, private betting among budget negotiators is that this could push a decision into Autumn of 2013. With Horizon 2020 set to kick-off in 2014, there is little time to lose.

Innovation can no longer be the preserve of the traditional notion of science-and technology-based ‘invention’ or new knowledge creation. This model, dominant during the 20th century, is being replaced by the concept of innovation as bringing together existing knowledge and combing this to create something new. When innovation was framed on the Edison or Marconi model of product invention, there was an underlying assumption that improvement equated to technology advancement. But today, innovation is as much about new services, value propositions and business models. Pioneering medical services in India for example, have radically reduced the costs and improved the quality of cardiac and cataract surgery not through the introduction of breakthrough technologies, but by reorganising activity systems. And, although they may not be some of the world’s favorite airlines, the new business models adopted by low-cost carriers, has made them some of the world’s largest and most profitable.

At the same time, the notion that innovations that are still technology-based, have to be bleeding edge is no longer true. The most successful and widely adopted innovations aren’t always the ones pursuing ever greater functionality. Take one of the biggest success stories in mobile telecoms over the last decade. It wasn’t the much hyped (and extremely costly to providers) 3G platform which offered bleeding edge mobile internet services, but a very simple and crude data service called SMS, or text messaging that captured people’s imagination and had a radical impact on the way we communicate.

Nestled in a steep fjord beneath three kilometers of Antarctic ice, the lost world of Lake Ellsworth has haunted Martin Siegert’s dreams ever since he got involved in subglacial research a dozen years ago. Finally, the time has come for him to explore its mysterious waters.

Next week, Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol, UK, packs his bags for the long journey to the opposite end of the world. Once he has reached the Rothera Research Station of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) on an island off the Antarctic Peninsula, he and his science crew will fly about 1,000 kilometers into western Antarctica. On 5 December, the real work begins: drilling straight down through the ice to the pristine lake beneath. In its shadowy waters they hope to find forms of life that have not seen the light of day in millions of years (see ‘Trapped under ice’). And in the lake bed sediments, the team will search for records of the poorly understood history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, potentially revealing how the mighty glacier has waxed and waned over time.

No one starts a business with the expectation that it will fall into bad standing. However, things can happen. For example, in the flurry of building a business, a small business owner may forget to send in their annual report to the state – or they may not even realize that an annual report is required in the first place.

No matter how you find yourself in the situation, know that you can get your business back into good standing. And it may not be as hard as you’d think. Here’s what you need to know to get back into good standing, or keep your business out of trouble in the first place.

As the year comes to an end, many of us have already been reflecting on how far we’ve come in the past year and what theme we want to set for ourselves in 2013. So when we asked the members of Connect: Professional Women’s Network, a LinkedIn group powered by Citi, what big ideas were going to change the world next year, they were up to the challenge. From tackling climate change to an anti-social media movement to drastic changes to our tax structure, their ideas ran the gamut. Check out the slideshow below for more highlights from the group.

Peter Thiel, famous for co-founding PayPal and being an early investor in Facebook, has put a small grant of $300,000 into a Canadian inventor who has spent years working on the idea of harnessing man-made tornadoes to produce power. The funding was made through Thiel’s Breakout Labs, which is part of the Thiel Foundation and which gives small rounds of funding for cutting-edge, early-stage science and technology research ideas.

The entrepreneur behind tornado power is Louis Michaud, who is a Canadian engineer that has spent years “trying to be taken seriously,” as Toronto Star reporter Tyler Hamilton describes him (he profiled Michaud in his book Mad Like Tesla). Michaud’s startup is called AVEtec and his technology is called the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE). Breakout Labs describes the technology as:

More robots are popping up in operating rooms around the world. The da Vinci Surgical System robot is now used in four out of five prostatectomies in the United States, and more than 1800 of the machines are installed at some 1400 hospitals worldwide. In August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared a robot-assisted system for minimally invasive treatment of coronary artery disease. Although today’s robots are still controlled by surgeons, some researchers say that may not be the case in the future. Bioengineers at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., have demonstrated that an autonomous robot can perform simple surgery, such as taking a sample of a cyst, on its own. Since then, other researchers have wondered whether fully autonomous robots could perform more complicated tasks.

Innovation has been a driving force behind health care from the beginning, yet with the U.S. health care system in the midst of an unprecedented transformation and a focus on lowering costs, many are asking, “What will become of innovation?”

The answer to that question is also a potential solution for hospitals facing financial pressures – a solution that has the power to improve patient care as well.

A growing number of hospitals are looking to develop a new revenue stream through the commercialization of medical innovations. They’re not doing it alone.

It would be no fun if starting a business was simply plotting a straight line between your idea and success, with no challenges along the way. Zigging and zagging amongst the obstacles is the fun part of being an entrepreneur, and it’s what sets you apart from the average worker who knows exactly what he or she has to do every day to get paid. Relish it, or if it scares you, don’t try it.

That doesn’t mean that starting a business should be a random walk into the unknown. There are certain foundational elements that every entrepreneur must build on to succeed, as well as some critical tools we all need. I found these tried-and-true principles summarized very well in a recent book “The Zigzag Principle” by serial entrepreneur Rich Christiansen:

Popular video sharing site YouTube has released its top trending videos for the year and its no surprise that South Korean sensation PSY is at the top of the list. According to the site, when it looked back at the year that was, it found that Korean pop music crossed borders worldwide.

This comes as part of YouTube’s Rewind channel: an annual channel that looks back at the year on YouTube, similar to Google’s Zeitgeist.

According to an official blog post:

This year, Korean Pop music transcended boundaries and took the world by storm. Cover songs, parodies, and “do-it-yourself” music videos from all genres entertained us in countries near and far. And you participated in conversations at a global scale, uploading videos to share ideas on everything from nonprofit campaigns, to political satire, to new and surprising voices and talents. Plus, all over the world, you tuned in for the most up-to-date news footage of presidential elections, natural disasters and more.

We can only hope that one day soon there'll be no reason to single out women as a specific category when we look at up-and-comers in the world of business. But the current reality is this: While the number of U.S. companies owned by women is increasing faster than those of other groups, those companies are responsible for just 6 percent of the country's employees and 4 percent of revenue, according to a 2012 report commissioned by American Express Open. Meanwhile, many studies maintain that women have significantly reduced access to capital and encounter less favorable loan rates. And don't get us started on the discrepancies in compensation between men and women performing equal work.

As relevant (and dispiriting) as these financial truths may be, they are at odds with the fact that fundamentally women are a more powerful presence in business than ever, as a work force and as entrepreneurs, technicians and corporate leaders. Here, we've identified innovators from several significant sectors: science, technology, retail and health, not to mention social and business services. We are certain their contributions and influence will have a profound impact going forward.

There's one significant description that can be applied to all three winners of Entrepreneur® magazine's Entrepreneur of 2012 Awards: cool.

Our Entrepreneur of 2012, Limor Fried of DIY invention powerhouse Adafruit Industries, is the grand doyenne of the hipster-chic maker movement. Emerging Entrepreneur winner Jason Lucash of OrigAudio is meshing music, design and sustainability--essentially, everything trendy young consumers care about--in his groovy portable products. And while College Entrepreneur winner Bryan Silverman may have set his sights on a not-so-cool item--toilet paper--he's approaching it in a decidedly modern way: connecting it to digital media (yes, really) and capitalizing on his refreshingly candid acknowledgement of what people really do in the bathroom.

The most talked-about new startup fund offers less money to entrepreneurs than many parents give their kids for an allowance.

Maciej Ceglowski, founder and CEO of the social bookmarking website Pinboard, announced a new startup incubator last week called the Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud, which promises to give six successful applicants a whopping $37 to develop their ideas.

Yes, that's $37 without any zeroes after it.

Kendall Square has become a magnet for the global information technology, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical industries. Use the interactive map to see some of the big names of Kendall.

When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died last year, Cantabrigians gathered on Main Street in Kendall Square to mourn the passing of a tech industry god.

They stood near Jobs’ plaque on the Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame, where they laid flowers on the star bearing his name. The Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame had opened that year to honor and celebrate big names in business, and Kendall now seemed a place to go to honor an innovator.

The smartphone industry is at an interesting point in time. In 2007, Apple’s iPhone practically invented — or re-invented, if you will — the current smartphone age with a full capacitive touchscreen and support for mobile apps. Google Android followed in 2008 and although it was slow to catch up, is relatively on par with iOS in terms of usability and app support.

Can Microsoft and RIM succeed where others have failed?

These incumbents — Apple and Google’s Android partners — account for 89.9 percent of smartphone sales as of the third quarter of 2012, per IDC. Some alternative platforms, such as Palm’s webOS and Nokia’s Maemo software, entered the market only to disappointingly disappear: webOS is now an open-source platform and Maemo became MeeGo, which Nokia abandoned when it chose to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone software. Windows Phone has been around for two years but has relatively little in the way of sales to show for it.