Perhaps not surprisingly, the company that became the most valuable in history this past summer--per market cap--also is the world's most innovative, at least according to a recent survey of nearly 700 top executives.

For the third consecutive year, Apple topped the annual 2012 Global Innovation 1000 study, conducted by global consulting firm Booz & Company. The study analyses the top 1,000 public companies in research and development spending and asks business leaders which companies are the most innovative.

2012 was a big year in mobile. We have never seen a year like this where there were so many quality devices from so many disparate suppliers all competing for the interest of consumers and enterprises. What were the best of the best? We rank the top 10 smartphones and tablets below:

1. Samsung Galaxy S III

Samsung pulled off a feat in 2012 that only Apple had previously been able replicate year after year. It released a flagship device that was highly anticipated by both Samsung fanboys and the consumer populace as a whole. While there may not have been any lines at AT&T or Verizon stores the day the Samsung Galaxy S III was released, smartphone enthusiasts indeed waited for the release of the S III with great enthusiasm, and have purchased the smartphone in droves.

Pre-Money and Post-Money Valuation of the Venture Before examining how much equity the crowdfunders would end up with, it is important to grasp the concepts of pre-money and post-money valuation.

Pre-Money Valuation

The pre-money valuation is made by VenReport’s analysts after the process of due diligence has been carried. Taking the crowdfunding startup’s assets, liabilities, technology, intellectual property, etc into account, VenReport determines a value for it. However, our analysts do not add the amount of money the crowdfunders will invest in the company in this valuation for equity crowdfunding for startups.

Apple's stock is in a funny place right now. After a big moonshot, it's fallen back to earth. And now it's locked in this mid to low $500-range. Analysts who had been universally bullish are reconsidering their positions and cutting price targets. What's wrong?

We reported last month that SecondMarket and AngelList had hatched a plan to let accredited investors make small-dollar investments — as low as $1,000 — in Silicon Valley technology startups. Today, we learned that the experiment has been declared a success and that this partnership will continue with a new batch of hot startups.

AngelList‘s founder Naval Ravikant said this opportunity is intended to be “training wheels” for budding angel investors. Now they have an opportunity to build a diversified portfolio with as little as $20,000 to invest in total.

That's the question put to scientists this year by the Flame Challenge, a contest first conceived by actor Alan Alda, famous for his roles on the TV shows M*A*S*H and "The West Wing." The directive? For scientists to explain this complex concept in ways that will inspire and interest 11-year-old children.

The Flame Challenge gets its name from last year's inaugural competition, which posed a question from Alda's own childhood: What is flame? As an 11-year-old, Alda had asked a teacher this question and gotten back the baffling, one-world answer, "oxidation."

One in nine people with diabetes saw their blood sugar levels dip back to a normal or "pre-diabetes" level after a year on an intensive diet and exercise program, in a new study.

Complete remission of type 2 diabetes is still very rare, researchers said. But they added that the new study can give people with the disease hope that through lifestyle changes, they could end up getting off medication and likely lowering their risk of diabetes-related complications.

"Kind of a long-term assumption really is that once you have diabetes there's no turning back on it, and there's no remission or cure," said Edward Gregg, the lead author on the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Personalized medicine -- the ability to tailor therapies to patients' individual genetic characteristics -- has long been the holy grail of the life sciences industry. The effort has produced a string of recent successes, including a host of drugs targeted to people with specific genetic profiles, the European approval of the world's first gene therapy treatment, and a much-heralded leukemia treatment pioneered at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) that uses tweaked versions of patients' own cells to eliminate their cancer. While these advances are certainly exciting for patients, they raise a host of ethical, legal and financial challenges that people working in the field will need to address before personalized medicine can become a thriving business.

The challenges are so great, contends Wharton health care management professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel, that claims of a renaissance in medicine brought on by individualized approaches often seem hyperbolic. "Before we buy into this, we need to remember that almost every evaluation of what drives health care costs up points to new technologies," says Emanuel, who is also a professor of medical ethics and health policy at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine. "We need to be skeptical. We need to see the data before people buy into the idea that personalized medicine is going to produce cost savings and be so much better for the system."

In more than three-quarters of the interviews I do I'm asked why I've chosen to keep my company HootSuite headquartered in Vancouver. The question is repeated and repeated again, drilling in one simple point: nobody thinks British Columbia, or the rest of Canada for that matter, is a good place for a tech start-up to grow up.

Well the truth is that there are many advantages Vancouver has over other cities in terms of the technology industry. We have an incredible and unique talent pool of developers and IT professionals ready and eager to sacrifice safer, likely higher-paying jobs in order to take the risk and jump into a start-up. We are also close enough to Silicon Valley to be accessible, but far enough away that our companies are given room to evolve on their own terms and not simply fall into line with the biggest industry players.

FROM AUTOMATED CARS TO SMARTER SMARTPHONES, HERE ARE THE IDEAS THAT WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE.

Yes, it’s already that transitional time when our current year ends and another begins, and today and tomorrow are quickly changing hands. Rather than look back at significant trends of the past 366 days (2012 was a leap year, remember?), we asked a wide variety of technologists, designers, and strategists across Frog’s studios around the world to take a look to the future. The near future, that is. “Near” in that 2013 is not only upon us, but also “near” in that these technologies are highly feasible, commercially viable, and are bubbling up to the surface of the global zeitgeist. We believe you’ll be hearing a lot more about these trends within the next 12 months, and possibly be experiencing them in some form, too.

As Google continues to build its high-speed Google Fiber network in Kansas City, more startups are moving into the neighborhood to make the most of the new service.

The first neighborhood to get Google Fiber, known on the map as Hanover Heights but locally as the Kansas City Startup Village, is the new home of early stage startups co-locating near one another to collaborate, leverage resources and to build a community based around growing a tech business.

“The number of startups in this region of several blocks is over 10 now, but it’s happened quickly and every day I hear of someone new moving in,” Mike Farmer of mobile search app Leap2 tells Mashable. “The Kansas City Startup Village was not formed with some grand strategy or goal in mind — it came together organically.”

What are the top business-to-business sales trends for 2013? Here's my list based upon my experience of studying some of the world's best sales organizations this past year.

1. Sales Force Behavior "Modeling"

Models are verbal descriptions and visual representations of how systems work and processes flow. Models enable repeatable and predictable experiences. More organizations will study their top salespeople in 2013 to understand how they formulate their winning account strategies based upon customer politics, evaluator psychology, and the human nature of executive decision makers that are unique to winning every account.

It all started with a simple question: “What in the world was going on with the world?”

It wasn’t a small or easy-to-answer question, but it was fairly straightforward.

When I looked at the world of work and the business marketplace, I could feel that something was different. Something had changed. You’ve probably noticed this, too. Strategies that used to be tried and true now seemed flimsy and false. Business models that raked in money just ten years ago were now crumbling. Yesterday’s “best practices” felt stale. I wanted to know why. More importantly, I wanted to know this:

If the old stuff wasn’t working, what was?

Nike and TechStars have launched the first Nike+ Accelerator programme, a platform which will feature 10 companies on a three-month immersive, mentor-driven initiative. The project is looking to support digital innovation by connecting with outfits that share Nike’s commitment to ‘help people live more active lives’.

The Nike+ Accelerator programme will accept applications from companies wanting to use Nike+ technology to create products and services that will inspire athletes across a broad range of activity and health goals including training, coaching, gaming, data visualisation and quantified self. Mentors include Stefan Olander, Nike’s vp of digital sport, David Cohen, founder and CEO of TechStars, Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare, and guru Tim Ferriss.

One of my Twitter buddies recently joked that the ideal fitness device will be a neck collar that monitors the food going down your throat and then chokes you when you hit your calorie limit.

These devices don’t do that. But they may get you to hum the tune to “Chariots of Fire” when you exercise and motivate you to take an extra step or two. After all, they track your every move, and they won’t lie to you.

Take it from me: These are powerful motivators, and any one of them would be a good choice for you or your loved ones.

The European Union took a step closer to an EU-wide patent yesterday (11 December) with lawmakers voting to cut the cost of protecting inventions and a top advisor to Europe's highest court rejecting a challenge to the new scheme.  

Twenty-five of the EU's 27 industry ministers agreed on Monday to allow inventors to register their idea with one EU agency, signing off on a project first put forward in 1973 but which was delayed by a series of disputes, including over where to site the new patent office.

The European Parliament voted yesterday in favour of the plan which will see a common patent in place on 1 January 2014, if the judges in the highest EU court dismiss objections by Spain and Italy when they make a definitive ruling next year.

The European Commission closed an antitrust inquiry into e-book prices yesterday (13 December) after Apple and four international publishers agreed to ease pricing restrictions on Amazon and other retailers. The decision hands online retailer Amazon a victory in its attempt to sell e-books cheaper than rivals in a fast-growing market publishers hope will boost revenue and customer numbers.

The EU executive said that the concessions from Apple, USA publishers Simon & Schuster and Harper, France’s Hachette Livre, and Germany’s Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck soothed concerns that their pricing deals curbed competition.

Most of us still look at China, the world’s second-largest economy, as the undisputed leader among major developing countries. In the long run, however, I’m betting on India to emerge as the more significant global economy.

Those who are dazzled by China often forget that much of the rapid growth before 2008 was caused by the shift of global manufacturing from Europe and the U.S., not by domestic-oriented activity. China’s economy remains export-driven, with consumers accounting for only 38 percent of gross domestic product, far below the levels of many developing and developed countries.

Consider this: Venture capital funding is often responsible for taking startups from the napkin sketch and slide deck stage to products and services that disrupt their respective industries and deliver handsome returns. Yet according to the National Venture Capital Association, out of every 100 business plans pitched to VCs by entrepreneurs, only about 10 will get a second look, and only one of those will score funding.

To make things tougher on founders, total venture capital investments for the first three quarters of 2012 were $20 billion into 2,661 deals. A MoneyTree report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data from Thomson Reuters estimates that this year will fall behind 2011’s total of $29 billion investments in 3,906 deals.

Hiring great people is one of the biggest challenges leaders face. Look for these 5 traits and you'll find employees who aren't just good, but exceptional.

There’s one mistake I made earlier in my business life when it comes to people: only hiring when there was a defined need. One day, I realized that if we could afford it, it’s just as important to hire exceptionally talented people even when you don’t have an opening. On occasion, when we found a gifted person, an A player beyond doubt, we’d hire her and “park” her in the organization. At first, we would just give the person something to do. Always, after a few months, she was working 10-hour days and making a big contribution. Inevitably, we found an important role for her, or she found it on her own. I never regretted hiring an A player.

What do I look for? Five key things, in this order.

1. Intellectual firepower

2. Values

3. Passion

4. Work ethic

5. Experience