January saw the recorded music industry announce another set of grim figures while waving a white handkerchief. An International Federation of the Phonographic Industry report showed that the growth of digital music halved over 2010, with its chief executive, Frances Moore, stating that digital piracy remains the biggest threat to the future of creative industries.

But away from the crumbling of traditional structures that have for decades supported musicians, film-makers et al, there's been a feelgood story brewing online that suggests that our enthusiasm for giving money in exchange for creativity has far from disappeared. Crowdfunding is a modern spin on the ancient system of patronage, and the polar opposite of file-sharing; if we're fond of what someone's doing, we give them some cash. Sometimes we get something in return, but more often it's just for the karmic glow of having helped a project to come to fruition.

A few days ago, my boyfriend sent me a link to a video he said I absolutely had to watch. He first saw it in a seminar at work.

The short video introduces viewers to Dewitt Jones, a National Geographic photographer, who shares some of his thoughts on creativity and, essentially, everyday life.

In the video, he talks about a key lesson he’s learned: There are amazing things for all of us to see every single day. Whether we actually see these remarkable things depends on our perspective, or as Jones says, on our ability to be creative.

January brings with it enough hype and hyperbole to confuse even the most hardened of technology trend watchers. With CES now behind us and a few weeks to hone our forecasting skills, here are the trends we believe are worth your attention and the ones that should be looked at with a skeptical eye.

Top 5 overhyped technology trends for 2011

1. Google Chrome OS An innovative new OS for netbooks sounded great — in 2009. Consumers looking for netbooks are already shifting their attention to tablets, a trend which will intensify as Android tablets hit the market en masse later this year. Chrome OS will be among the biggest casualties of this shift, as businesses will ignore Chrome OS and consumers will be too busy playing Angry Birds on their iPad 2 to care.

As the global economy struggles to correct itself, and social-media marketing becomes a strategic imperative, small businesses will have exciting opportunities to expand in new directions this year.

The need for trust, value and brand transparency, among other trends from last year, are just as important today. But the current shift to geotargeting, mobile marketing and online reputation management require that small businesses modify their plans to surpass competitors.

I hear a lot of concern that professionalism is dead or at least dying in the workplace as this new generation of workers has been entering the workforce.

Those of us preparing college students for their careers face it almost everyday as professors – students who seem to lack the professional skills and even basic social skills that they will need to succeed in business. We have students who text message as we talk to them in our offices, who wear their hats on backwards, who sleep in class, who check Facebook during lectures, and even some who answer a cell phone call during class.

The Tennessee Technology Development Corporation (TTDC) is now accepting applications for three grant programs designed to stimulate science and technology research, commercial development of products and services, and entrepreneurship in our state.

The TTDC Technology Maturation Fund is a competitive funding program that will award grants of up to $50,000 to researchers affiliated with qualified institutions or for-profit entities partnered with Tennessee research institutions in order to commercialize intellectual property and accelerate the development of projects that have commercial potential.

New Orleans experienced an unprecedented influx of entrepreneurial talent and energy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but activities like meet-ups and networking can take those entrepreneurs only so far. At some point new ventures need capital, and that’s just what John Elstrott and Ralph Maurer, faculty members at the A. B. Freeman School of Business, hope to provide.

Ralph Maurer, left, and John Elstrott, center, faculty members at the A. B. Freeman School of Business, are part of the management team behind the New Orleans Startup Fund. (Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano)

Elstrott and Maurer are part of the management team behind the New Orleans Startup Fund, a new nonprofit venture capital fund created to provide local high-potential ventures with seed capital, a critical need in the entrepreneurial community.

I floated a message in a bottle out to the small business community, asking how owners and entrepreneurs keep their heads on straight, staying positive and focused, during the inevitable trials, tribulations, and stresses of business life. Little did I know how many bottles full of interesting experiences and wisdom would come back.

I don’t know about you, but my DNA and psychological makeup are always conspiring against me, narrowing my vision to the latest fire I need to put out, or making me worry about too many things I probably shouldn’t worry about. I know better, but I am a (recovering) obsessive and pessimist, so every day is a battle to avoid distraction and overreaction to the ups and downs of my business. So, I thought I’d cast a net out into the entrepreneurial community to see how my peers deal with their “downs.”

President Obama’s second State of the Union address presented a comprehensive economic philosophy for the progressive movement in this century. The mantra of the conservative movement since Reagan popularized the now-defunct concept of trickle-down economics has been clearly stated and often repeated: tax cuts, less government. Ask anyone what forms the basis of the conservative economic philosophy and those four words will be among the first you will hear.

But what is the correspondingly simple mantra for the progressive economic philosophy? That is a harder question to answer, even for progressives. But after last night’s address we now have a strong candidate: innovation and competitiveness.

As more and more electrified vehicles hit the floors of car dealerships, conventional wisdom has it that the market won’t get moving without richer incentives and dense battery-charging networks.

Yet our research on demand for electric cars in very large urban areas1 shows that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and battery-only electric vehicles could account for 16 percent of overall new-car sales in New York, 9 percent in Paris, and 5 percent in Shanghai by 2015. That’s true even with today’s financial incentives and limited public charging facilities.2

I spend most of my time at Babson launching projects in other countries to foster entrepreneurship, but I was in the U.S. this week, the White House specifically, for the start-up of Start-Up America. Bravo President. Bravo White House. Bravo corporate America. Bravo private foundations, think tanks and NGOs. Bravo entrepreneurs. Bravo venture capitalists. This could be a good one. Start-Up America is getting a few things right, not to be taken lightly; but it is far from a done deal:

* Obama has convened a broad group of entrepreneurship stakeholders. Many governments play too interventionist a role, and forget that to succeed, entrepreneurship requires an entire ecosystem, each aspect with its own committed stakeholders, not just government reform and support.

Just as the Internet replaced telephone operators and the nightly news anchor as the default source of information, teachers may be next on the chopping block. Automated learning is a cheap solution to recession-swelling class sizes and renewed calls to make technological innovation a centerpiece of education.

Districts all over are experimenting with teacher-less computer labs and green-lighting entire classrooms of adult-supervised children exploring the Internet--an Android powered tablet designed specifically for students. Teachers' unions' protests notwithstanding, the cybernetic takeover might mean a redefinition of "teacher" as a research assistant or intellectual coach, since subject-matter lecturers are no match for access to the entirety of human knowledge.

Biosciences and Job Growth

America’s bioscience industry is helping to diversify and grow the U.S. economy. American bioscience innovations in health, energy and agriculture are creating high-skill, high-wage jobs, driving economic growth and output and helping to improve the quality of life for Americans from coast to coast.

Defining the "Biosciences"

The biosciences are a diverse group of industries and activities with a common link- they apply knowledge of the way in which plants, animals, and humans function. The sector spans different markets and includes manufacturing, services, and research activities. By definition, the biosciences are a unique industry cluster and are constantly changing to incorporate the latest research and scientific discoveries. The bioscience industry sector is defined as including the following four subsectors:

* Agricultural feedstock and chemicals
* Drugs and pharmaceuticals
* Medical devices and equipment
* Research, testing, and medical labs

Since its inception in 1996 the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research has become firmly established as the foremost global award for research on entrepreneurship. This Prize is awarded annually and it consists of the statuette "The Hand of God”, created by Swedish Sculptor Carl Milles, and a Prize sum of 100,000 euros.

TechStars, the Boulder-born business incubator, is expanding to include entrepreneurship boot camps in 12 U.S. cities, creating a network of startup accelerators that aims to create 25,000 jobs nationwide by 2015.

The TechStars Network was among several partnerships between the tech industry and the federal government announced Monday as part of the Startup America program.

Water flowing into the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic Ocean is about 2 °C warmer today than it has been for at least 2,000 years, according to a study published in Science1. The findings add to the picture of Earth's warming waters and melting sea ice, and the researchers suggest that the temperature rise is linked to amplification of climate change in the Arctic.

Robert Spielhagen, a palaeoceanographer at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and his colleagues focused on the Fram Strait, which runs between Greenland and Norway's Svalbard archipelago, and which hosts the biggest channel of warm water flowing into the Arctic. The current of warm water lies 50 metres below the surface, and can reach a balmy 6 °C in summer — warm in comparison to the frigid Arctic, where icy surface waters can be -2 °C.

– When Jabber Jury officially goes live with its online programming at 10 a.m. Tuesday, it will be largely due to out-of-state venture capital that funded the Chicago startup.

The company had little more than a concept to show investors last November when it attracted $1.2 million from Everett Palmer, a venture capitalist at Lightwater LLC in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. Palmer knew president and chief executive Kevin Wielgus and liked Jabber Jury’s concept, which invites users to view videos depicting two sides of a dispute and vote on who’s right. “This will be the Facebook of conflictainment,” Palmer said.

MANCHESTER, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FIRST ® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a not-for-profit organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen, announced today that FIRST ® LEGO® League (FLL®) teams across the globe can compete for the chance to win a cash award and recognition toward patenting a proposed invention in the newly created FLL Global Innovation Award. The award, which provides FLL teams an opportunity to submit ideas stemming from their current season’s FLL Challenge, will first be ranked online by public vote and later judged by an expert panel to determine the winning idea.

One winning team will be granted a cash award of up to $20,000 presented by the X PRIZE Foundation, and the top three teams will be invited to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just outside of Washington, D.C. to present to a panel and to participate in an awards ceremony.

This Saturday I attended the Humanity+ conference in London which was packed full of incredible talks about the impact of technology on biology and what it might mean for medicine and human longevity (topics you might remember me covering when I wrote a series of posts on Kurzweil’s Singularity theory).

The second presentation was a standout from an instant impact point of view though. Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University has created a robot with a biological brain that learns. We only saw videos, but they were incredible to watch. The robot was built in 2008, so this is not new news, just new to me.

UPDATE: Even airplane pilots are caught up in the excitement. Check out this photo of pilots waving Terrible Towels.

EARLIER: Steeler Fever has taken over Pennsylvania in anticipation of Sunday's Super Bowl XLV.

At St. Clair Hospital, newborns are being wrapped in the Steelers' trademark Terrible Towels this week because "They’re born Steelers fans here in Pittsburgh,” according to Sharon Johnson, a clinical supervisor at the hospital.