YouTube has released its official list of the most watched videos of 2011. Mirroring the results of Google’s Zeitgeist — which revealed the most searched terms of 2011 – the official video for Rebecca Black’s Friday heads up a top ten made up of music videos, adverts and, of course, cats.

The world’s most popular sharing platform has some pretty impressive stats behind it. For instance, 48 hours of video were uploaded every minute in 2011 and YouTube received more than 3-billion views a day. Despite the fact 70% of its traffic comes from outside the US, the majority of the top trending videos still come from America.

In Europe, most sports leagues participate in a system of Promotion and Relegation. At the end of each season, the top three teams in the second league get promoted to the first league and the bottom three teams in the first league get relegated to the second league. This maintains the intensity of games for low ranked teams at the end of the season, among other things. Now here’s an odd fact: The very best players only play in the first league — it’s in their contracts. If their team gets booted to the second league, these folks roll off and immediately find first-league work, typically with some of the recently promoted teams.

If you’re a newly promoted team, you need to augment your roster quickly in order to compete. Rock stars that were impossible to attract in the second league suddenly want a tryout. Winning in the first league is all about signing a few new superstars and integrating them effectively with your existing team.

A few months ago, it looked like the tech industry’s initial public offering window had slammed shut. But thanks to a year-end rally started by Groupon and rounded out by Zynga’s $1 billion stock market debut, it looks like 2012 could be a big year for the tech IPO market, according to a new report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

As of the end of last week, the fourth quarter of 2011 had seen 28 IPO pricings on the U.S. stock market, according to PwC’s quarterly IPO Watch survey. Technology companies were responsible for a solid chunk of those, as the sector has contributed eight of the 28 total offerings in the quarter thus far. The IPO activity surged more as the year’s end drew closer. Three IPOs priced in October, fourteen in November and eleven in December. Notably, the tech sector may have spurred on the rest of the economy: November’s surge in activity was “initiated by the highly-anticipated Groupon IPO,” PwC said.

A Mediterranean diet with large amounts of vegetables and fish gives a longer life. This is the unanimous result of four studies to be published by the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg. Research studies ever since the 1950s have shown that a Mediterranean diet, based on a high consumption of fish and vegetables and a low consumption of animal-based products such as meat and milk, leads to better health.

Study on older people

Scientists at the Sahlgrenska Academy have now studied the effects of a Mediterranean diet on older people in Sweden. They have used a unique study known as the “H70 study” to compare 70-year-olds who eat a Mediterranean diet with others who have eaten more meat and animal products. The H70 study has studied thousands of 70-year-olds in the Gothenburg region for more than 40 years.

As a practitioner in both consulting and local government, I have observed that in local communities nothing seems to prompt productive action better than a local crisis or strongly felt threat like a factory closure.

Unfortunately, we are often inclined to take action to close the barn door only after the horse has escaped.

That may be why “college town economic development” could be considered the ultimate oxymoron.  Higher education has been a growth industry for half a century. As a result, college towns and university neighborhoods have prospered in good times and bad and typically see little reason to pursue economic growth.

Immigrants have started nearly half of America’s 50 top venture-funded companies and are key members of management or product development teams in almost 75 percent of those companies.

Those are the results of a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy, which cites the numbers in calling for changes to immigration policy to make it easier for immigrant entrepreneurs to come to the United States and begin building companies.

Venture capital funding hasn’t hit the peaks it saw in early 2000, but it’s still going strong — particularly in Silicon Valley and for software companies.

Our analysis of venture funding from a variety of data sources revealed some interesting facts about last quarter’s deal flow.

Last quarter, venture capital firms invested $6.95 billion into 876 deals, averaging $7.9 million per deal, with the vast majority of funding funneling out of Silicon Valley in the form of expansion and later-stage investments in the software and biotech industries.

It's been a year, hasn't it? Not always as good as we'd hoped, but never as dark as we feared. My take? We've learned. And with that knowledge, we're moving on. That's why this month I'm making some prognostications about 2012 by revisiting our hottest topics in 2011.

The #1, #2 and #3 Nano-Topics to Watch in 2012 are the same as for 2011: globalization, commercialization and partnership -- as I reported from Zurich, Cyprus and Boston gatherings. It's clear that we can't talk about one without the others -- the SWOT analysis brings them all to the table. Is it a threat to America's technology leadership? An opportunity for our innovators? A call for more government funding? A plea for less interference? All that and more.

StartupBus, the hackathon/road trip combo started by Elias Bizannes nearly three years ago, is doubling the number of events it runs in 2012. There will be a maximum of twelve buses that run in the new year, up from six previously. But here’s the fun part: the organization will determine which regions get their own Startup bus through an online competition requiring hopefuls to “vote up” their region through social media.

Starting today, the organization is launching the voting website at StartupBus.com/unlock, which now features nine cities plus three schools (dubbed “tribes” in StartupBus lingo): Stanford, MIT and Harvard.

The CRCF issues 29 awards to 22 organizations with grants totaling $3.6 million to spark innovation, company formation in the Commonwealth

Herndon, VA (PRWEB) December 21, 2011 The Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) announced today 29 Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund (CRCF) awards totaling $3.6 million made to 22 organizations from academia, the research community, and industry in the Commonwealth for the purpose of funding targeted areas of research with commercial promise aligned with the Commonwealth Research and Technology (R&T) Strategic Roadmap.

This solicitation brought in more than 90 eligible proposals from throughout Virginia, totaling nearly $21 million, and spanning the breadth of industries identified in the Roadmap as priorities areas for the Commonwealth, including: advanced manufacturing, aerospace, communications, energy, environment, information technology, life sciences, modeling and simulation, nuclear physics, and transportation; awarded projects represent the areas of life sciences, energy, advanced manufacturing and nuclear physics.

20-year-old Ernestine Fu joined VC firm Alsop Louie Partners as an associate in March and made the cover of Forbes magazine in August.

She's already made a name for herself as the youngest VC in Silicon Valley.

But her life for the most part, is pretty normal as she spends her days as a college student at Stanford University.

Over the past month I’ve been systematically cleaning up my social graph. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to do this, as I’m a very active user of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Google+ along with a bunch of applications that leverage these various social graphs. Historically, I’ve been a very promiscuous friender, accepting almost all friend requests.

While this strategy worked fine for me for Twitter (since I didn’t have to do anything, and could deliberately choose who I wanted to follow) this didn’t work for any of the other services. Specifically, Facebook had become basically useless to me, LinkedIn’s activity feed was pointless, Foursquare scared me a little, and Google+ was just a cluttered mess.

Summary:

Debunking the myth: What's really holding Quebec entrepreneurs back isn't their predominantly Francophone roots - it's the province's entrepreneurial culture, or lack thereof.

• There are 2.2 times more Anglophone entrepreneurs in Quebec than Francophone entrepreneurs. But there are about twice as many Francophone entrepreneurs in the rest of Canada as there are in Quebec.
• Native-born Quebecers, whatever their first language, who currently live and own a business elsewhere in Canada outnumber their Quebec-based counterparts by a margin of roughly 2 to 1.

The assignment seemed impossible – even a bit crazy. Find 30 scientists and innovators under age 30 who were worth highlighting in the pages of Forbes.

Sure, other publications find 35 or even 40 young-ish stars every year, but they tend to cross across a far broader swath. I wasn’t to include too many tech companies – there was another list of 30 being assembled for tech. The idea was that, as part of Forbes’ first 30 Under 30 project, we would be putting together not one but 12 different lists of rising stars in fields including not only science and tech but also energy, finance, art, music and law.

New statistics from Silicon Valley’s top law firms show that new startups spend around $80,000 on legal costs.

AttorneyFee, a website that compares lawyer’s fees, pulled recent numbers from Silicon Valley’s most prominent law firms. The digits reveal the average amount of money startups spend on legal fees, the annual increase in new businesses, and an boom in law firms’ digital presence.

Startups usually face several legal hurdles in the early phases of creating their businesses. Several law firms in Silicon Valley make their money by helping these startups get up and running, often for a hefty price. In 2011, Silicon Valley attorneys made an estimated $37 million in revenue from startups alone. Most of the money that startups raise in their first rounds of funding goes directly to legal fees; the average bill for series A financing is over $50,000.

Millennials are well-educated, tech-savvy, and independent. They're also cursed by a bad economy. But all this might have a silver lining...

You heard constantly about the millennial generation--that they're tech-savvy, and different from everyone that came before. It's not just hype, or vanity on the part of the youngsters: People who are 18-29 right now have markedly different attitudes, beliefs, and mores than any generation preceding them.

As we close out 2011, I did not want to forget to applaud the welcome attention this year brought to maximizing the entrepreneurial potential of women. A recent report, Overcoming the Gender Gap: Women Entrepreneurs as Economic Drivers, showed that despite the fact that about 46 percent of the workforce and more than 50 percent of college students are female, they represent only about 35 percent of startup business owners and tend to experience less growth and prosperity compared to firms started by men. Further, women take fewer steps to position themselves to start high-growth companies. At the university innovation level, female faculty patent their research at only about 40 percent of the rate of their male colleagues, and they tend to rely on formal university conduits to commercialize their research, rather than reaching out to private industry.

As Lesa Mitchell, Kauffman Foundation vice president for advancing innovation, and the paper's author, pointed out, "Women's entrepreneurship is an economic issue, not a gender-equity issue." And thanks to organizations like Astia and events like the Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac Global Women's Summit in Kansas City last month and the We Own it Summit in London in June, the next 10 years are being called the 'Decade of the Woman Entrepreneur'. This and other summits in 2011 brought together bright minds to address the motivations, funding issues, metrics and solutions for women's participation in high-growth entrepreneurship. With more data now available, at such events we can finally start separating more myths from reality.

1. "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." - Mahatma Gandhi

2. "Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa

3. "How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?" - Vincent Van Gogh

4. "Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love." - Martin Luther King Jr.

Kevin Byrne, vice president and chief operating officer of The University Financing Foundation (TUFF) has been elected 2012 president of the Association of University Research Parks (AURP).

Byrne will be the 22nd president of AURP over its 25-year history.  He will focus much of his attention next year on creating programs to help develop the next generation of research park directors and university administrators as well as strengthening old and creating new sources of revenue for AURP.  He also will work with his research park director colleagues to advocate expansion of federal and state legislation available for research parks.

New York City named Cornell University and its partner, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, as the winning institutions in its hard-fought competition to build an applied-science campus on donated city land.

The campus is "a dream that we have long held," David J. Skorton, president of Cornell University, told Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at a news conference Monday at Cornell's medical school in Manhattan.