A look at the news events, babies, hacking and diplomacy that defined the year.

If you’re like most people, each January goes something like this: You choose a problematic behavior that has plagued you for years and vow to reverse it. In fact, you can probably think of two or three undesirable habits—make that four or five.

Thus begins the litany of imperfections to be perfected commonly known as “New Year’s Resolutions.” All of which are typically off your radar by February.

As the United States geared up for an overhaul of its health-care system, we asked the provocative question: just why are new drugs so expensive? In our November cover story, “A Tale of Two Drugs,” veteran journalist Barry Werth took an in-depth look at how pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies determine the price of drugs, examining a life-saving treatment for cystic fibrosis and a cancer drug with marginal benefits. His insightful analysis suggests that putting a value on new drugs will only get more complicated and fraught with ethical challenges as treatments become more effective but often targeted at relatively small patient populations.

One year ago, Rahul Mewawalla was a senior executive building out the mobile arm of Nokia. Today, he is using his telecom industry expertise to help San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee launch the nation’s first entrepreneurship-in-residence (EIR) program for cities. The program pairs start-ups with government workers to improve government services in areas including transportation, energy, data services, and the environment. The selected start-ups are being challenged to come up with solutions that not only work for San Francisco but can also address similar problems in cities across the nation.

Image Courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Gary Maxworthy spent three decades in business until a personal tragedy prompted him to reexamine his priorities. He left the corporate world behind, set off to find his true calling, and in the process discovered both a new identity and the path to accomplishing his most important work fighting hunger.

In this telling, Maxworthy is an archetypal example of the reinvention mythology that seems omnipresent today, especially when it comes to those in the second half of life. Self-help columns are packed with reinvention tips. Financial services ads depict beaming boomers opening B&Bs and vineyards. More magazine, that bastion of midlife uplift for women over 40, even sponsored a series of reinvention conventions.

Image Courtesy of marin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

SaaS and app startups can literally be anywhere in the world. With the cloud, both sales and support functions are virtual — a top-notch software company no longer needs a large local sales force to sell its product via tons of in-person meetings. This opens up the possibility of launching your startup anywhere from Bozeman, Mont., to Tampa, Fla.

To find the best entrepreneurial hotspot these days, you might look at the top locations for venture capital investments or where the cost of living is lowest. But where’s the best place for you to launch your startup?

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/98193606@N00/3989122565 

When you’re self-employed, it’s easy to think that your schedule is 100% your own, and that you can pick and choose exactly how you want to spend your time. However, entrepreneurs work hard to please clients and build the perfect business — which means that personal time is often sacrificed for last minute projects, client meetings and tight deadlines.

Image Courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

On Dec. 18 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gave the crowdfunding industry an early Christmas present in the form of an increased limit companies can raise through crowdfunding. The new limits, included in a package termed Regulation A+, drastically increase the amount of capital companies can raise through this method.

WANT TO HAVE MORE PRODUCTIVE MEETINGS? TAKE A LOOK INSIDE THE INSPIRING OFFICE OF FIRST ROUND CAPITAL'S PHIN BARNES, WHO CAREFULLY CHOSE EVERY PIECE TO SPARK REVEALING CONVERSATIONS.

Phin Barnes's office is like a Hidden Pictures Puzzle. The more you look around, the more you notice. Neon-speckled sneakers are tucked into shelves and on side tables, a series of Venture Capital for Dummies books are stacked under another side table, and decorative lanterns from Fab are used in lieu of desk lamps. Further discussion with Barnes reveals that every piece of the non-aggressively hip decor in his otherwise standard office space has a distinct purpose.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

1. Utilizing Social Graphs – Implementing social graph application programming interfaces (APIs) for crowdfunding platforms will make it easy to see friends of friends who are investing in crowdfunding campaigns due to popular social media networks such as Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, Meetup, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and others. Data mining and big data services will become very sophisticated services for the crowdfunding industry. Once these services get started it will be very hard for fraudulent companies to succeed because they will vetted by millions of investors working together to form a policing crowd.

Image: http://medcitynews.com 

The problem: Competition with Ohio and Indiana for jobs has Northern Kentucky business leaders wanting more tax incentives for investors in startup companies.

Ohio and Indiana, along with 20 other states, have incentives for these types of investments, known as angel investments.

Ohio’s incentive, which allows an investor or investors to recoup up to 25 percent of their state taxes, dried up as of 2012 when it hit the state’s $45 million cap. Many have lobbied to increase the state’s limit.

Image Courtesy of FrameAngel / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

America’s economy may be picking up steam, but it remains a story of parts, with the various regions of the country performing in often radically divergent ways.

To identify the regions with the most momentum coming out of the recession, we turned to Mark Schill, research director for the Praxis Strategy Group, who crunched a range of indicative data from 2007 to today for the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan statistical areas. To gauge economic vitality, we used four metrics: GDP growth, job growth, real median household income growth and current unemployment. To measure demographic strength we looked at population growth, birth rate, domestic migration and the change in educational attainment. All factors were weighted equally.

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_Tower_of_the_Americas.jpg 

The Federal Aviation Administration will authorize test sites for drone aircraft in upstate New York, New Jersey and at least eight other states, the agency said on Monday, preparing for a time when unmanned aircraft of various shapes and sizes cruise over the landscape.

The agency picked six institutions to operate test locations, which will explore how to set safety standards, train and certify ground-based pilots, ensure that the aircraft will operate safely even if radio links are lost and, most important, how to replace the traditional method for avoiding collisions. Integrating the aircraft into the nation’s airspace, set by Congress for 2015, will be phased in gradually.

This opinion piece from Bruce Katz is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers pick one big idea that will shape 2014. See the original article here.

As the United States slowly emerges from the Great Recession, led by our cities and metropolitan areas, a remarkable shift is occurring in the spatial geography of innovation.

For the past fifty years, the landscape of innovation has been epitomized by regions like Silicon Valley — suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing and recreation.

Image Courtesy of KROMKRATHOG / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The disease detectives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention named the top five global health threats they expect to tackle in 2014:

1. The emergence and spread of new microbes

While it's rare, CDC scientists do come across new diseases each year. In 2013, the new Heartland virus carried by ticks was confirmed in northwest Missouri. Federal health investigators collected samples in the state after two farmers from St. Joseph were sickened by the virus that carried a novel genetic profile.

By Rock Health’s count, 302 investment firms and “notable angels” put money into a digital health startup in 2013. Twenty-seven of them did it three or more times.

That’s a big jump from the eight who did three or more deals in 2012. An influx of digital health exits, final guidance from the FDA on mobile apps, more good opportunities or any number of other factors may have led investors to pony up capital for more of these companies last year.

However, a few who topped this list last year, like Aberdare and NEA, laid low this year.

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The coming year will surely include no shortage of new smartphones, tablets and other mainstream gadgets now entrenched in the consumer market. Some will focus on aesthetics, taking a page from Samsung’s curved-glass design for its new Galaxy Round. Others will opt for better cameras, higher-resolution displays, longer battery life and further, incremental advances.

Many new devices, however, will debut in 2014 with the hope of tapping into some as-yet unmet need. These gadgets—largely unproved, crowdfunded and in search of a following—combine wireless connectivity, GPS, sensors and other existing technologies in novel ways that promise to help us work more efficiently, track our health or navigate our surroundings.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com 

Heat gets a bad rap for fueling human hostility. But what's the deal when the mercury drops? The cold effect has been somewhat less studied, although there are hints that being uncomfortably chilly can contribute to conflict in some situations and quell it in others.

A Swiss-led group using tree-ring data to look at Central European summer climate patterns during roughly 2,500 years saw that periods of prolonged warming and of colder than usual spells coincided with social upheavals. As they reported online in January 2011 in Science, the researchers uncovered cold periods that overlapped with raucous historical events ranging from a Celtic expansion around 350 b.c. to modern migrations from Europe to the Americas in the 1800s.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com 

While crowdfunding is older than the Statue of Liberty in New York -- which incidentally needed crowdfunding from the American and French people -- the advent of web 2.0 and internet-mediated platforms has caused crowdfunding to gain a lot of traction in the last few years.

Industry estimates indicate that crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo funded over a million projects with more than $2.7 billion in 2012, an increase of 81 percent over 2011. The most successful examples of crowdfunding ventures include video game Star Citizen, smartphone Ubuntu Edge and smartwatch Pebble.

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last December, I ventured out onto that proverbial limb and made a few predictions about what 2014 was likely to hold for crowdfunding. Now that the New Year is almost upon us, it’s time to revisit these predictions. Let’s see how accurately my crystal ball viewed the future.

“The implementation of the JOBS Act will not lead to an explosion of equity crowdfunding.”

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net