Tiny crystals called quantum dots emit intense, sharply defined colors. Now researchers have made LED displays that use quantum dots. Five years ago, QD Vision demonstrated its first, rudimentary one-color displays, using the nanoscale crystals. This year it demonstrated a full-color display capable of showing video. The company says it could be another five years before the technology appears in commercial displays. Samsung might get there first—it's also developing quantum-dot displays, and demonstrated a full-color one in February.

Quantum-dot displays could use far less energy than LCDs. Another ingenious way to reduce energy use is make displays that emit no light at all, but instead reflect ambient light, an approach being taken by Qualcomm with its full-color Mirasol displays, which use only a tenth of the energy of an LCD. The technology has started to appear in tablet computers in South Korea.

2011 saw the personal computer continue to be marginalized. Although PCs are still the workhorse computing device in homes and offices, the most exciting innovations over the last 12 months were centered on very small-scale computing, very large-scale computing, and networked combinations of the two.

Developments in small-scale computing, in the shape of consumer mobile hardware such as the iPad2 tablet or Galaxy Nexus smart phone, were naturally the most visible. Most of these lightweight devices use ARM-based chips, prompting Intel, best known for its desktop and laptop processors, to develop prototype smart phone and tablet devices that will almost certainly herald the arrival of new challengers to Apple's iPad and iPhone in 2012 and 2013.

Venture capital investments saw an upswing in activity in 2011 with e-commerce taking off in a big way. Most venture capital firms had multiple exposures to this space – either through fashion, baby products, or generic e-tailers. The year also saw emergence of nearly half a dozen seed-stage funds looking to raise $20 million-$25 million to plug the gap between angel funding and series A round. Here are the most active venture capital firms in 2011.

By Value

Sequoia Capital India ($69.5 million): Sequoia Capital, the US-based marquee venture capital firm which backed companies like Google and Apple, kept up the investment pace in spite of the departure of all four founding MDs of its India office. The venture capital firm, currently investing from a $300 million fund raised in 2008, continued to invest in the e-commerce space besides focusing on areas like mobile and healthcare. Most recently, Sequoia invested $4 million in Freecultr, an apparel e-com venture backed by the Smile Group. It also completed several follow-on rounds in 2011. While the venture firm is focusing on India consumer Internet, it also has a big focus area of Cloud and Big Data globally.

The founders of Google, Genentech, Netscape, and Yahoo! have two things in common: All of them are university inventors whose companies grew out of the technologies they developed on campus. And all of them are male.

Male academics are much more likely than their female counterparts to start companies to exploit their inventions, studies show. That’s a problem, because if female academics aren’t building businesses based on their research, they aren’t benefiting from the rewards that high-growth, high-tech companies emerging from universities provide.

Mark Suster has a great post on this topic. In typical Mark fashion, it is long, with a lot of detail and substance. I highly recommend all entrepreneurs take the time to read it end to end.

For those who won't take the time to read it end to end, I'll summarize it.

Many high growth companies can be profitable. They have enough revenue to cover their essential costs and could easily decide to show a profitable income statement. But they don't make that choice. Instead they invest heavily in the business with the expectations that those investments will produce more revenue (by hiring salespeople), or additional products (by hiring engineers and product managers), or additional geographies (by hiring an international team), or any number of other value enhancing aspects of the business. The result of that decision is that the business loses money or simply breaks even (I prefer the latter approach).

It’s almost the New Year, which means an endless supply of predictions about trends in 2012 (and the years beyond) are pouring into our inboxes. Below, we look at some of our favorites.

ROCK-BOTTOM SOLAR PRICES

Solar for everyone! Earth2Tech predicts that 2012 will continue the trend of rapidly dropping solar prices (the price of solar dropped a whopping 40% in 2011), leading to even more solar companies going out of business because of an oversupply of panels. The good news is that low solar panel prices make renewable energy more attractive and accessible to consumers. It won’t be long before you feel compelled to slap a few cheap solar panels on your roof.

When a new year begins, we business owners wonder what’s in store for the upcoming 12 months. After all, with technology moving faster than ever, who could have foreseen the takeover (then falter) of daily deal sites a year ago? Or the ability of Google to take some sites to their knees with Panda? Here’s hoping that 2012 brings nothing but good things to the world of Internet marketing.

Please note: These are my own non-psychic predictions and not the opinions of Small Business Trends or anyone else!

Prediction 1: Daily Deals Will Shake Out. In 2011, everyone with an Internet connection created a daily deal site. And businesses were only too happy to sign up with all of them in an effort to get new clients. But as many retailers realized that they were losing money because they weren’t properly managing their daily deals, many backed off. In 2012, I predict that some smaller players will shut down, while bigger players like Groupon will gobble up some of the moderately successful daily deal sites. We’ll stop being bombarded by 20 emails a day of great deals.

Put the punch back in your purpose.

There is power in the perspective that comes from revisiting why you exist as a business and exploring the beliefs and operating values you live by. While the bottom line is a non-negotiable, how you get to it is. Make sure your entire organization understands your reason for being and that leading with values is what will make the journey one to be proud of beyond the dollars and cents. Can everyone answer what difference are you making in people's lives, why you exist and what you believe in as a brand?

Start your own love fest.

Fed up reading stories about Zappos being the best company on the planet for customer service and culture, Southwest for their brilliant simplicity, or TOMS for their generosity? Don't use them as examples. Use them as incredible inspiration to light a fire in your brand's soul. Get under the hood of your brand, dig for where it intersects with the passion points in your consumers’ lives and the reasons people come to work every day. Find your internal and external champions and explore how they are deployed.

Rather than looking back (which I’m sure we will), I thought it would be nice to look forward to 2012 and beyond and note some of the gadgets that will change the world in the next few years. I’ve included mobile, gaming, and computing gadgets but I think 2012 will also be the year of Windows Phone, 3D printing, and fitness technology that actually makes a difference.

I’m not expecting much in the way of massive change this next year, just more of the same, but better. Here are our picks for the best of 2012.

Innovators all!

That should be a natural, legitimate, goal for all organizations, but earlier this month, when I asked thirty-five senior managers from a well-known, successful, European consumer goods company “how many of them had innovation responsibilities?” the response was less than 20%. Clearly, I had set them up with a disarming question, but the results were so disappointing that we were all impressed with the need to rethink the value that we bring to our organizations — and to ensure that innovation was included among our responsibilities, no matter what our functional description. Innovation is more than R&D and technology! After all, innovation in supply-chain has helped make  Zara the success it has become, and Apple‘s retailing innovation is often overlooked until you walk into one of their amazing stores. Google and Pixar are justly celebrated for what can only be thought of as HR innovations, in order to get more fulfillment from the high-powered talent that they employ. Can we really think of any corporate function that could not use a bit more innovative thinking?

Research and development (R&D) efforts worldwide will grow to encompass more than $1.4 trillion in spending in 2012, conclude economic forecasters.

In the"2012 Global R&D Funding Forecast"  report released by Battelle and R&D Magazine, a look ahead suggests that Asian economies will increase R&D spending on innovation by 9%, Europe by 3.5% and U.S. spending will increase by 2.1% next year. Overall, spending will increase at a 5.2% rate from last year, a healthy rate of increase.

"China's profile as the second-largest sponsor of global R&D continues to increase, whether measured in terms of funding or generation of intellectual capital," says Battelle CEO Jeffrey Wadsworth, in the report's introduction. "Even so, with over $400 billion in annual R&D funding from both public and private sectors, the United States continues its historic and world-leading commitment to innovation as an essential catalyst for prosperity and growth."

It's that time of the year again, the time when the year just plain ends. Alas, we can't just let 2011 go that easily, especially since travelers spent it both up in the air and up in arms over a crazy range of topics, encompassing everything from nudie scans to tarmac delays. Needless to say, we're ready for 2012, but first we're taking a brief look back at the best of 2011 with the Jaunted Travel Awards,—or as we fondly refer to them—The Jauntys.

Think back to 365-ish days ago. What was the hottest travel innovation then? Well, at the time we highlighted in-flight WiFi as the coolest thing, and not too much has changed for 2011. Or rather, everything has changed since now it's not just in-flight WiFi we're loving, but long-haul in-flight WiFi.

AS WE ENTER the twenty-first century, there is a pressing need for clear strategies. Because unless companies have a clear vision about how they are going to be distinctly different and unique, offering something different than their rivals to some different group of customers, they are going to get eaten alive by the intensity of competition.

There was a time when markets were forgiving, when there weren’t that many rivals and companies could drift along with ‘me-too’ strategies. But now ‘me-too’ strategies are punished quickly and mercilessly. So the stakes of having a clear strategy are higher.

Steven Austad, of the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has applied the longevity quotient—which he developed—to many species, including those depicted here. The quotient is determined by dividing the greatest recorded longevity for a species by the life span that would be expected based on the species's average weight. Except for humans and Brandt's bat, the scores refer to animals in captivity.

Venture capitalist Paul Holland isn’t just a general partner at Foundation Capital, he’s also a documentarian. He is the executive producer of Something Ventured, a documentary that explores the origins of the tech startup economy in Silicon Valley. The movie was inspired by a conversation he had with Bill Edwards, a man who helped found the modern-day California venture capital business model. Something Ventured debuted at SXSW 2011 and should be available next year on Netflix, a company in which Holland is an investor.

Check out the interview to learn Holland’s view on investing in clean tech and what he’s focusing his investments on right now. He also has the greenest custom home in the U.S., which is net energy positive, meaning it creates more energy than it uses. A huge advocate for student entrepreneurship, Holland describes how student entrepreneurs should be thinking and talks about two students who he met and later funded, that went on to run a billion-dollar energy company.

Recently Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, founder and CEO of WatchMojo, wrote a brief post about the Lies Entrepreneurs Tell.  In the article he makes the point entrepreneurs are “always in sell mode, but that doesn’t mean they need to be BS-artists”.  Their common lies include  “I have no regrets” or “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t do it any differently”; “It’s not personal, it’s business”; “We’re not raising money”; “We’re not looking to sell”; and “I’m your biggest fan.”

Ashkan has an interesting point – entrepreneurs can be so damn good at “selling” that they begin to say things that aren’t exactly true.  This may be due to a few factors: we actually believe the words we are saying, we feel the means justify the ends or we just want it so bad we are willing to cross over the line into fallacy in order to get what we want.

The Battelle-R and D Magazine annual Global R and D Funding Forecast released today shows global research and development (R and D) spending is expected to grow by about 5.2 percent in 2012 to more than $1.4 trillion. R and D funding growth will largely be driven by Asian economies—a number projected to increase by nearly 9 percent in 2012. Elsewhere in the world, growth remains strong and stable in the aftermath of the global recession.

The disaster at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, set off by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off Japan's east coast, scored a 7 out of 7 on the International Atomic Energy Agency's International Nuclear and Radiological Events Scale. The metric ranks severity based on many parameters, including an incident's effects on humans and the environment. According to the Japanese government, decommissioning the plant will take 30 to 40 years, and cost an estimated $15 billion.

Many nations reacted by scaling back their nuclear ambitions. Germany led the way, announcing that by 2022, all 17 of its nuclear reactors will be shut down. Those reactors, according to the World Nuclear Association, generated 133 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or 28.4 percent of the country's electricity.

We've been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. It is creating a layer of intelligence that anyone can mine in Web searches and that content creators can use to hone their services.

This is happening more readily because sharing our opinions and photos and status updates online isn't just a stand-alone application anymore—it's now an activity embedded into other things. If you're reading an article online and want to recommend it, you don't have to click over to Facebook to tell your friends you liked it; now that more and more sites are connecting themselves to Facebook's "Open Graph," you can register your approval on Facebook directly from the article's page. This means that your friends can be guided to it when they show up at the same site. Google launched something similar this year, so that you might see certain search results higher if they've been recommended by friends. That was just part of Google's efforts to improve its grasp on social networking this year. After failing last year to gain traction with a Twitter-like network called Buzz, the search giant rolled out Google+, a service that embeds information sharing into many of Google's services.