January 23, 2012 marks the 6-year anniversary of my company WatchMojo. In today’s post, I’m taking a look back at six of the most essential lessons I’ve learned over the years, starting from the beginning.

YEAR 1 (2006) — LEGAL: GET EVERYTHING IN WRITING

There’s no such thing as true loyalty in business; instead, it’s all about mutual interests at a given time. Clichés aside, businesses have a mob mentality with employees and employees in turn have a mercenary outlook towards their employer. As such, when you decide to leave a company and start your own business: get everything in writing. When you announce your resignation and tell folks you want to start a business, they tend to be supportive. But once they see you actually launch it, their jealousy and pettiness comes to light.

China's emergence as a 'next Silicon Valley' had many flavors at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. There, companies like Huawei, Haier, Lenovo and scores of other home-grown Chinese brands touted new mobile phones, tablet PCs, smart TVs and other gadgets for the growing global consumer electronics sector.

The China tech story is not just about the mass manufacturing and mass marketing of  consumer electronics devices. In China today, design engineers are rapidly gravitating toward the fabless semiconductor model.

It's a big business and technology shift for Chinese electronics makers, but it will, inexorably, help position China's native suppliers, which are legion, to create much higher value products for both the home and export markets. Japan and Korea will feel this soon and are well aware that they will be facing a much more competitive China in the extremely price sentive global consumer electronics marketpalce in the years ahead.

If you’ve ever returned from a business trip with a stack of business cards, you’ve no doubt wondered — as you’re manually typing in all those names, phone numbers and email addresses — if there’s a better way.

It turns out there are lots of better ways. Too many, in fact, and that’s the problem. The lack of a standard means that a great solution like the Bump app will only work if the person you’re trying to link up with has the app, not to mention an iPhone or Android-based smartphone. You could, of course, use your phone’s camera to take a picture of the other person’s business card, but that would still require that he or she has a business card in the first place. And after you do that, you’ll still have to manually enter the information anyway.

I read with some interest and trepidation the article in Co.Design entitled “Do Innovation Consultants Kill Innovation?“. Like many people who write for the web, I recognize a catchy title is meant to attract readers and create a distinct point of view. As a person who earns a living as an innovation consultant, of course I’m concerned when anyone seems to cast doubt on my chosen trade. So, perhaps it’s a good question to ask – should innovation become a profession – whether inside an organization where innovation titles are appearing with increasing frequency, or should we expect to see more innovation consultants as the importance of innovation creates a potential vacuum of innovation talent?

When questions like this arise, my first notion is to consider the past and look a previous disruptions in thinking or in technology. I’d like to consider disruptions because that’s what I believe is underway – a disruption to how businesses run. The traditional business methods are being swept away by increasing levels of global competition, free trade, economic calamities, the fact that the internet is lowering costs of entry into many businesses, increasing consumer demands and decreasing product life cycles. I could go on but frankly I don’t need to. Innovation is becoming an ever more important capability, and that disrupts the status quo, business as usual way many businesses are run and have been structured. So, if you believe as I do that a disruption is under way, then it makes sense to see how people and firms reacted to previous disruptions.

The next game-changing Internet startup might come from Ghana.

“There are smart people all over the world, and one asset that Africa has is its people. It has a young and growing population,” says Ylva Strander, former managing director of the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana.

MEST -- a comprehensive support program focused on developing software entrepreneurs in Ghana -- is an initiative of the Meltwater Group, a SaaS company based in San Francisco. MEST is funded by the Meltwater Group’s non-profit arm, the Meltwater Foundation.

One of the hottest buzzword for startups these days is “pivot.” The term, introduced by entrepreneur and venture advisor Eric Ries in an article on Lessons Learned a couple of years ago, is properly used to describe smart startups that change direction quickly, but stay grounded in what they've learned. They keep one foot in the past and place one foot in a new possible future.

Over time, this pivoting may lead them a bit away from their original vision, but not away from the common principles that link each step. The pivot has to leverage previous learning about customers, technology, and the environment. The alternative is more risky, simply jumping compulsively from one vision to another, and is likely to lead to a death spiral.

New research from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Postdam, Germany, aims to quell the frustration and strife that can come when multiple people use a single touch screen. The project, called Bootstrapper, uses cameras below a table to identify different users by their shoes. Each set of shoes is linked to an account that keeps track of a person's actions and preferences.

Unlike other approaches to differentiating between users, Bootstrapper uses low-cost hardware and allows a person's hands to freely interact with the surface. As an added benefit, a user's preferences can be stored according to her shoes, so when she leaves the table, it's easier to resume an activity when she returns.

Optogenetics has been hailed as a breakthrough in biomedical science—it promises to use light to precisely control cells in the brain to manipulate behavior, model disease processes, or even someday to deliver treatments.

But so far, optogenetic studies have been hampered by physical constraints. The technology requires expensive, bulky lasers for light sources, and a fiber-optic cable attached to an animal—an encumbrance that makes it difficult to study how manipulating cells affects an animal's normal behavior.

I mentioned this article to someone recently who was surprised at the limited number of debt options for startup companies.  I asked her to do some research and encouraged her to come on and comment on the story if she has some other suggestions.  It’s not that we’re discussing the “only” debt options for startups but, rather, we’re talking about the most common options or the solutions that can be employed by the majority.  The answers to all your prayers may not be here but it’s important to clearly understand your options and the beginning of empowerment is to know what can and can’t be done so that decisive action can be taken.

Now that we are solidly into 2012, it’s time to stop dreaming and start doing.  One of my business resolutions was to create product and service offerings that are rooted in targeting my ideal customer, what’s important to them when they are buying what I’m selling and then developing an offer that is structured for exactly how they want to buy.

Over the last few years, I’d done a decent job of targeting my customers and understanding what was important to them, but I’ve never really created an offer around exactly how they want to buy.  I’m not going to kid you – it’s been a challenging process that’s involved daily quiet sessions picking through my brain, observing my customers’ behavior and trying to parse out exactly what’s going to resonate with them.

The number of US patents granted to inventors in Abu Dhabi is expected to soar in the next two years thanks to the emirate's new innovation programme.

From one US patent in 2010, authorities envisage nine by 2014.

Yesterday, the Abu Dhabi Technology Development Committee (TDC) launched the Takamul programme, after it filed 13 inventions with the US Patent Office during its one-year pilot phase.

This is from where the nine new patents are expected to come.

TDC - a government body formed to coordinate the development of science and technology in the emirate - funded 50 to 90 per cent of the approximate Dh70,000 filing fee.

Entrepreneur –  the word sounds good. It brings to mind, ownership, power, wealth. But do not be deceived. While it’s probably true that many entrepreneurs do spend their days telling people what to do from their snazzy offices equipped with Nespresso machines and personal bathrooms, or having important tele-conferences on-the-go on the iPads. It must also be true that a large number of ‘entrepreneurs’ spend their days like me, fighting traffic on the way to make a delivery which probably pays less than what I have to spend on gas for that trip, staying up all night trying to design a flyer on Microsoft Powerpoint and then being only able to print 10 copies on my deskjet printer which has run out of ink, dashing home to grab a bag of ice from my freezer because we’ve run out of ice at the shop, or spending half the day trying to figure out why the power suddenly went out because nobody knows and everyone is expecting you to come up with the answer because you’re the boss. But hell, how am I supposed to know I am just a 28 year old struggling entrepreneur and NOT A BL**** ELECTRICIAN.

It is not a surprise that when you walk and text, you see a massive drop in viewing your surroundings, but did you know that when are walking and texting or talking on the phone at the same time, your speed of walking declines by a whopping 16 percent? That’s the finding of a study from Stony Brook University, reported in the online edition of Gait & Posture and conducted by Eric Lamberg and Lisa Muratori, who studied 33 participants. In a news release, Lamberg noted:

We were surprised to find that talking and texting on a cell phone were so disruptive to one’s gait and memory recall of the target location,” says Eric M. Lamberg, PT, EdD, co-author of the study and Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Physical Therapy, School of Health Technology and Management, Stony Brook University.

As a lead up to the March 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Congress, I will spotlight here a handful of the 120 nations gathering in Liverpool to develop the best entrepreneurial ecosystems. Today we look at Belarus.

According to a recent private research survey, 54% of entrepreneurs answered yes to the question “Have you ever thought about leaving Belarus?” It is not hard to imagine the reasons. Belarus suffers from systemic weaknesses, such as financial instability and corruption targeted toward business in the forms of threats of fines and confiscations.

In an effort to avoid losing the next generation of entrepreneurs, authorities have been discussing some important policy steps. The Belarus Government started by declaring a “2011 a Year of Entrepreneurship.”

On the heels of the fundraising data for 2011, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NVCA released the 4Q 2011 and full year VC investment data. It was yet another year when VC’s invested ($28.4 billion in 3,673 companies) meaningfully more than we raised ($18.2 billion by 169 funds) – and as I have said in the past, this just can not end well. Observers of the VC industry keep referring to the industry as “burning off the overhang.” As a point of comparison, Dow Jones reported that VC’s invested $32.6 billion in 2011. Why do these sources report such widely divergent data – all the time?

Out of the blizzard of data I looked at this weekend, I thought I might pull out some interesting insights and trends which might be emerging. Feel free to challenge some of my conclusions.

The world’s largest city classification and ranking with 331 benchmark cities classified, and top 125 cities ranked in 2011, of which the top 100 are listed below. Based on 2thinknow analysis of cities in what our analysts term the ‘global innovation economy’. Annual since 2007.

The city has been called many things, but on Tuesday the City Council will consider approving an official motto for 2012 in honor of Irvine's 40th anniversary.

The city held a motto contest early last year, soliciting six-words or less that encompass Irvine's record as one of the "nation's safest cities, an admired master community, and a model for quality of life and diversity."

Staff received about 200 entries and recommends that the council approve the "City of Innovation" as the motto for 2012, said city spokesman Craig Reem.

Click.

We all had them: times you reached for a camera to stop life for a second, to grab a memory. For decades, Kodak was the rock solid standard in photography and as the 131-year old company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, “Kodak moments” may be all that’s left of what was once one of the most powerful companies in the world. Kodak can’t compete let alone survive in this new world. The only thing keeping them alive is a trove of 11,000 patents, and even those don’t seem to be piquing anyone’s interest.

Click.

From household name to also-ran in a few years. This isn’t a story of a stubborn buggy-whip manufacturer going out of business for refusing to change. This is a carriage maker making a seemingly successful transition to the automobile and then, just as quickly, failing catastrophically.

So what happened?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

– A Tale of Two Cities,

Charles Dickens

IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, for entrepreneurial spirit to be spread over China, with Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen along with many other cities seeing bootstrap startups springing up. New terms are surprisingly effectively created to remove blockages and barriers and to foster companies in infancy. VC money is on table to be capitalized on for those with BPs or even merely ideas. Incubating programs like Innovation Works (Beijing), China Accelerator (Dalian) and Tisiwi (Hangzhou) are touting the young generation to start their own causes in a way that Y!Combinator, 500 Startups and TechStars work in the States. Cafes that couldn’t care less about coffees are proliferating in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Shenzhen. Market size are growing as China Internet users has reached 505 million and is expected to surpass 715 million in next year.

MEXICO CITY, Jan 20, 2012 (Tierramérica) - The development of the green economy is the subject of pitched debate among specialists. While some believe it will deepen social inequalities and increase corporate control over natural and biological resources, others highlight its potential role in protecting the environment and creating employment.

"The green economy does not challenge current systems of production, such as the agro-alimentary industry, nor does it aim in any way to change patterns of consumption," stressed Silvia Ribeiro, the Latin America director of the non-governmental Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group).

Ribeiro told Tierramérica that some of the most troubling aspects of the green economy include "the massive use of biomass for fuel production, and the use of new technologies like synthetic biology, which can generate high levels of toxicity."