Hmmm…. 2012…. Not your average date in the calendar, according to everyone from the ancient Mayans to hordes of New Agers who are busy getting ready for “galactic alignment”, to popular fiction’s high priest of secret mystical knowledge, Dan Brown, to Hollywood’s master of the cataclysmic blockbuster, Roland Emmerich. 2012 has been the inspiration for hundreds of books and hundreds of thousands of websites focused on spiritual transformation, the end of “The Great Cycle”, “Harmonic Convergence”, and “Balancing the Cosmos”. In fact, NASA’s public outreach website “Ask an Astrobiologist” has already received over 5,000 questions from the public about what next year might bring, some asking whether they should kill themselves, their children or their pets as we approach impending doom!

So when we sat down to write our 10 predictions for 2012 we did so with a degree of humility, certainly not claiming to know anything more about next year than any of the reputable parties mentioned above. But we did come up with a few developments that we believe we could be looking back on one year from now – that is, if we’re all still here by next December 21st, after we reach “Timewave Zero” and “Geomagnetic Reversal”, not to mention Earth’s collision with the planet “Nibiru”.

In any market where the number of new businesses triples in the course of two years, you know that something unusual is going on. (And make no mistake—most venture incubators are businesses, founded and funded by people hoping for real returns, whether social, financial, or both.) You naturally begin to wonder whether a bubble is forming, in the classic sense of an episode of vertiginous growth disconnected from economic fundamentals such as market demand. And since bubbles are, by definition, unsustainable, you wonder what’s going to happen when they pop.

If you ask me, there is clearly an incubator bubble. Whatever your opinion about the existence of a bubble in the larger world of Internet startups—Sarah Lacy and Dan Primack offered interesting, opposing views on that this week—it’s hard to imagine that today’s tepid consumer and business markets have room to absorb all of the products and services offered by the hundreds of new startups that the incubators are now churning out each year.

Think of your body like a car. Negative behaviors are like the parking brake — they keep you stuck. Positive behaviors are like the accelerator — they push you forward.

If you stomp the gas while the brake is on, you'll stay stuck, or move very slowly. Conversely, if you release the brakes you'll move forward faster with the same amount of effort.

Most people really aren't aware of the biggest brakes in being healthy, fit or trying to lose weight. These are the top seven brakes, or seven powerful ways to make sure you maximize your weight gain this holiday season. So, if you don't actually want to get as big as possible before the end of the year, do the opposite.

Though Florida was hard hit by the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and unemployment in the state sits 1.5 percent above the national average at 10.1 percent, in the first quarter of 2012, employers in two of Florida’s metropolitan areas are planning to increase their workforces at a rate that outpaces every other metro area in the country, according to employment services firm Manpower Group’s latest employment outlook survey, released earlier this month. In Cape Coral-Fort Myers, and in Lakeland-Winter Haven, a net 17 percent of employers plan to add employees in the first quarter of next year. Two other Florida metro areas, Bradenton-Sarasota-Venice and Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, make it into Manpower’s top 15, both with a 12 percent net hiring outlook.

CAN entrepreneurship be taught? That was the rhetorical question posed by US agricultural academic Randy Westgren on a recent visit to Melbourne. "I hope so because I'm teaching it," Professor Westgren, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Missouri told his audience at a lunch presented by the Marcus Oldham College Centre for the Study of Rural Australia.

Participants in the four-module course, taught by Prof Westgren (pictured), designed around the agricultural and food sector, have ranged in age from 22 to 72.

The first thing they are taught is "opportunity recognition".

Ernest Hemingway apparently got the answer wrong when F. Scott Fitzgerald told him “the rich are different from you and me” and Hemingway responded “Yes, they’ve got more money.”

His answer should have been: “They own businesses.”

The chart at the bottom of the page shows the probability that a taxpayer includes a partnership or S-Corp on his or her federal income tax return. As you can see, the odds of having business income increase substantially once adjusted gross income (AGI) exceeds $100,000. More than 40 percent percent of people with an AGI of $250,000 or more have one of these two types of businesses. More than 72 percent of the really wealthy – people who earn more than $1 million per year – have a partnership or S-Corp. And nine-in-ten of the super wealthy – people with an AGI in excess of $10 million – have one of these.

At last count, there were nearly 59 technology regions around the world that include the “Silicon” moniker including "Silicon Alley" in New York City, "Silicon Alps" in Austria, and "Silicon Wadi" in Israel.  It is absolutely the greatest brand name that any tech region can have in the world.  Undoubtedly this is a testimony to the decades of continuous innovation and prolonged success of the original "Silicon Valley" in California, home of such renowned companies as Intel, Apple, Facebook and Twitter to name a few.

In seeking a better understanding of the Silicon Valley’s economy, I have concluded that an effective framework is that of an ecosystem. The ecosystem model helps define and describe how various elements in a region interact to generate economic vitality through innovation while ensuring its survival.  An innovation ecosystem is a dynamic adaptive organism which creates, consumes, and transforms knowledge and ideas into innovative products via the continuous formation of new businesses in a complex matrix of relationships among key elements.

Lose your love handles; call your Mom more often; get that promotion – if you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions, and will publish one a day starting on December 27th and running until January 7th. Check back here to watch them unfold and get some advice from some of the tech industry’s most well-known names.

The Hive tips a hat to the season's unsung heroes whose inventions, from the ornament hook to the fire log to the idiot string, make the holidays suck a little less. Your life would be dark and sad right now if not for the California Cedar Products Company. Never heard of them? They’re the guys who, in 1968, combined wax with 174 tons of shavings from their pencil factory to create the world’s first commercial fire logs.

The fire log--that modest purveyor of Christmas cheer, that wintertime convenience that relegated the axe to a place it’d never been in history, the hipster wall--is one of five seasonal inventions that the Toronto-based branding studio The Hive celebrates in a larky set of holiday greeting cards.

Nobody expects much from the week between Christmas and New Year's. That's why it's the perfect time to make some foundation-level renovations to your schedule, and your career.

Even when Christmas and New Year’s Day arrive on separate weekend days, the working week between them feels short--or at least, short on work. You talk to more voicemail prompts than people, your email notifier is so quiet you actually wish for open-ended inbox killers, and budgets and reports land in an alternate universe that rejoins our own in early January. Great time to open up Hulu in a side window, right?

We’ve all heard the adage, “Follow your passion and the money will come.”

When you’re thinking about starting your own business, this saying might not be very comforting. There are no guarantees of monetary success with entrepreneurial endeavors. In a troubled economy like this one, however, there is really no guarantee when you work for someone else, either. So, if leaving a day job to pursue your entrepreneurial passion seems like a good idea, what’s holding you back?

Likely, many things are. One of the big trip-ups to starting a business is the concept of passion itself. Deeply ingrained in our DNA is the want to do things we love: to tinker, to create, to solve problems, to help others, to build. But what if your passion doesn’t have the potential to rake in a lot of income? Should you still follow your heart and build a business around it? Or, should you abandon your passion and look for entrepreneurial opportunities with bigger income potential?

PRESENTING THE BEST INTERVIEWS OF 2011 ON AMERICAN ENTREPRENEUR RADIO Guests: Bill Strickland, Ray Lane, Robert Shapiro As 2011 winds to a close, join The American Entrepreneur, Ron Morris as we revisit our best interviews from 2011 on American Entrepreneur Radio.

It’s that holiday time, time to look-back with misty eyes at the glories of yesteryear. In our case, at the 11 Hottest Trends of 2011, in what proved to be a vintage year for biofuels. There were IPOs a go-go, a big comeback from biodiesel. The global ethanol fleet has acquired new popularity amongst advanced biofuels developers looking for capital light steel in the ground. Meanwhile, gasification got hot. Seemed like every algae venture headed for Algstralia, and Brazil and the US Navy became everyone’s new best friends.

But it wasn’t all holly-jolly and ho-ho-ho. The long awaited biofuels shakeout began, with the are-they-with-us-or-are-they-not at Qteros, and the keel-over of Range Fuels. Who’s next, we wonder? Meanwhile, alcohol-to-jet fuel technology got hot, in part because oilseed-to-jet is so darn hard to find at scale.

The four states with the nation’s largest biotech clusters showed that they too were not immune to challenges common to most U.S. regions seeking to build their life science presence. Hurdles included a capital squeeze particularly for early-stage biopharmas, the reality of the industry’s international growth, and the need to attract new businesses and retain existing ones.

All four top-tier biotech states—California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Maryland—did, however, find numerous ways to address these challenges. They rolled out new financing programs or tweaked existing ones. In some cases they reached out to regions around the world. In others they identified promising niches within their clusters. Signs of success could be seen in a series of new construction and expansion projects.

There’s a scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — one of my all-time favorite novels — where  the little girl-narrator, Scout, sees pretty white snow flakes falling and assumes the world is ending. She’s never seen snow before, since it’s a very rare occurrence in rural Alabama. The world didn’t end then, and it’s not ending now, but it’s just one more bit of evidence that weather is a very wacky thing.

Unless, like Scout, we’ve never experienced a genuine snowfall, we probably take snow a bit for granted. It’s just another form of precipitation, after all, and we have a pretty solid grasp of that particular cycle. Just for the record, snow is not frozen raindrops; that would be sleet. Under certain conditions, water vapor can condense directly into tiny ice crystals, skipping the raindrop phase altogether, and usually forming the shape of a hexagonal prism (two hexagonal “basal” faces and six rectangular “prism” faces).

So you have an idea that's going to save the world or at the very least alter a small portion of it in a positive way. Congratulations, the trends seem to be in your favor.

Be it environmental, educational, or philanthropic, the rise in "social" entrepreneurship in the past decade has been astounding. In addition, most large-scale corporations have embedded the notion of doing good into their bottom line and most MBA programs now have core classes dedicated to the topic.

Yet, in order to make a potentially game-changing idea a long-standing reality, it is highly recommended that social entrepreneurs look at their business model and ask a very simple question: Could my company be a profitable one?

As storms become more powerful and more damaging, will living on the coasts become simply impossible? Insurance companies might try to price you out before we find out.

More than a month after Hurricane Irene narrowly missed making landfall on Wall Street and pummeled the East Coast with floods, the effects of the storm continue rippling outwards. Congress narrowly avoided a government shutdown over a bitter dispute over FEMA funding after a summer of disasters had drained its accounts. Meanwhile, insurers are potentially facing $5.5 billion in losses, not counting flood damage (which isn’t covered under most homeowner policies) or economic losses stemming from power outages and destroyed roads or rail.

First it was smartphones integrating cameras. Could we be about to see the inverse - cameras integrating smartphone technology? That's the concept being explored by Seattle design company Artefact. They've come up with an intriguing prototype for a camera that incorporates smartphone technology - a.k.a. a SmartCam. Artefact claims that innovation has stalled in the camera industry, that there hasn't been much new in camera devices over the past 10 years. They're aiming to shake up the camera industry and are already talking to camera companies (and others) about implementing their vision. I spoke to Artefact's founders to learn more.

This is the fifth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming - and producing - media is changing with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad, RSS Readers on smartphones and online radio in cars.

What happened to startups in 2011? E-commerce and mobile payments continued to grow, and group buying startup Groupon went public. Facebook, the biggest social network around, expanded in a huge way, announcing Timeline, frictionless sharing and a settlement (finally) with the FTC. It also swallowed up many promising startups, including group messaging service Beluga, social network-enhancing service Friend.ly and software company WhoGlue.

The mixing of social gaming and mobile payments, social network alternatives to Facebook, consumer cloud storage and apps that actually make you feel productive (read: not like you're just wasting more time online) came out on top as just a few of the most important startups of this year.

Spontaneous snapshots. Intimate moments. Unexpected exposures. There was no one formula for this year’s most viral photographs. Most were based on news events, such as the death of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi—but these photos ended up becoming the news themselves. They shocked us. They awed us. They inspired us to feel. But the most powerful feeling was the impulse to share.

The best viral images of 2011 are those we found flooding our email inboxes and Twitter feeds this year. One thing weaves the images together: each photographer netted a once-in-a-lifetime picture. From Royal Wedding mania and a bloodied despot to an utterly unexpected leopard on the loose, photographers both professional and amateur brought us the scenes of unpredictability and chaos that gripped our world over the past 12 months. As shocking as the subject matter is the simplicity of some images. A few came from mobile phones. Most were snapped without a thought of—or time to handle—composition or lighting. One was even taken by a man who would be dead minutes later.