Yesterday we posted on micromanaging bosses, a top office pet peeve, and advised those bothered by their boss’s excessive interest in every detail of their work to keep calm and avoid getting emotional. This may be sound advice for this and many other aggravating office situations, but it needs a little elaboration — exactly how do you keep your annoyance from flaring up and getting the best of your intention to act rationally?

When you feel yourself edging closer to losing your cool at the office, Gretchen Rubin, blogger and author of The Happiness Project, suggests you take a moment of self-reflection. But rather than just provide a platitude, she adds six specific questions you can ask yourself to short circuit a temper tantrum.

The EPA and the SBA have announced a collaborative effort known as the Water Technology Innovation Cluster (WTIC), designed to develop and commercialize technologies to solve environmental issues, encourage sustainability, and create jobs.

WTIC will begin efforts in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, focusing on clean water solutions.

CHICAGO, Jan. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today several leading industry groups announced the creation of the Illinois Technology Alliance (ILTA), a new coalition focused on ensuring innovation and economic growth in Illinois by leveraging existing government affairs efforts. The collaborative effort will work to advance policy initiatives in the 97th General Assembly and beyond that support job creation and economic strength for critical industry sectors, including high tech manufacturing, information technology, biotech, life sciences and venture capital.

Since the economic recession began in 2007, major budget changes have taken place at the state and national level. In many cases this resulted in increased taxes in many states, damaging to success of small businesses.

The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council recently release its Small Business Survival Index for 2010. The index ranks the climate for small businesses in the 50 states (and D.C.) based on public policy factors that include 38 major government-related, or imposed costs.

We have compiled a list of 100 amazing “degreeless” entrepreneurs who have risen to the top.

Some high-profile entrepreneurs you will recognize immediately, while others you may be discovering for the first time. Many of them didn’t complete elementary school, and still more are considered high school dropouts.

Their backgrounds and industries run the gamut. However, they all have at least two things in common: incredible success and no college degree.

A lot of factors come into buying a home, but sometimes the decision is obvious.

Zillow has identified a set of cities where all indicators point to stagnant or declining prices. Even as home prices drop around the country, these cities have a particularly bad outlook.

Of course we're talking about housing as an financial, not a personal decision. As with all investments, you're welcome to take a contrarian risk.

If I could write a letter to my nine-year-old self, what would it say? Maybe I would have skipped the year in private art school ($30,000 before interest) and opted for a year apprenticeship in Venice (which in theory would have made me money).

More importantly, where would I be? I am 27 and the executive director of a successful non-profit environmental consulting firm. After 5 years of blood, sweat, tears we have a functional board, and have worked with other non-profits throughout Oregon conducting watershed assessments and endangered species habitat restoration planning.

When I asked for recommendations a couple of weeks ago for sites to feature in our "Never Mind the Valley" series, I was overwhelmed with the response. It's quite encouraging, in light of all the reports of global recessions, slumps, and downturns, to hear from so many people saying that their community is a thriving site for entrepreneurship. You can still send me your recommendations, and I'll be working my way through them in the coming weeks and months.

But we'll kick things off with Nashville.

Venture capital returns are going up.

That is my conclusion from two recent press releases: the 2010 fund-raising data from Dow Jones, and the 2010 review of exits from the National Venture Capital Association. Neither release reads that way but the laws of supply and demand make it, from here on in, pretty inevitable.

Looking first at cash invested into venture funds themselves, the Dow Jones press release shows that funding fell to “a seven-year low” of $11.6 billion in 2010. The real meaning of this becomes clear if you take a much longer perspective and look at venture capital funding over the past 25 years and compare that to the overall size of the U.S. economy. The assumption is that the best way to think about the supply of capital is in relation to the size of the overall economy and thus, the overall pool of likely opportunities.

Operating a small business online can be just as taxing as operating a brick-and-mortar store.

However, given the right tools you can make the process go much more easily. We’ve listed a few of these tools to add to your entrepreneur’s toolbox.

Only one to four percent of angel investor applicants successfully raise angel investment, according to the Angel Capital Education Foundation. I suspect that part of the reason that the success rate is so low is because entrepreneurs are using the following ill-advised tactics to meet potential investors.

The Office Visit

So maybe you are located out in San Francisco, California and you hop on to California Venture Capital to locate a VC firm in your neighborhood. It turns out that there are dozens of VC firms nearby so you throw on your best suit, stuff a pile of business cards in your pocket and follow your GPS to the front door of Sequoia Capital. Obviously you will be stopped at the front desk unless you have an appointment. Maybe you are good enough to sweet talk your way past the receptionist and you simply push your way in to introduce yourself to Mr. VC. Venture capitalists might like ambitious entrepreneurs, but don’t fool yourself, this tactic is not ambitious, it is disrespectful and will certainly end in failure.

Startups and entrepreneurs are drowning in the information overload, where the volume of data created is like a new Library of Congress every 15 minutes. That creates a huge gap between data and meaning, and makes quick decisions and action ever more difficult. We all need to take a little more time to think.

On the other end of the spectrum, some people “over-think” things to the point of inaction. Acting without thinking, and thinking without action, are both deadly to a startup. The challenge is to find the right balance, and to make the thinking deep and reflective thinking.

Consumerization, social networking, mobile commerce, cloud computing—these are only a few of the trends that are making 2011 look like a very exciting year in the technology industry. The phenomenal success of the iPad—and the many followers popping up in its wake—is in truth dependent on their accompanying applications and services, and only makes clearer the long-term shift in value from hardware to services of every description. This shift will also be the key to increased M&A activity this year, as companies try to pull together hardware, software and services into fully integrated enterprise and cloud computing solutions.

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At MaRS, we spend all our time thinking about how to help Canadian technology and social businesses grow.

One of the ways we do this is our blog. It’s a way for us to keep you informed about the trends that might affect your business, the tips and tools for building that start-up better as well as the stories of other Canadian entrepreneurs who are making it happen.

Did you miss a post? Never fear! Here’s the list of the most popular blog posts of 2010.

The 2011 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit will convene the key players in the nation’s energy innovation community to spur the networks that will bring about the next Industrial Revolution in clean energy technologies.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has made it clear that he wanted to US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to clear out some of the backlog on patents, and it quickly became clear early last year that the way the USPTO was doing this was by simply approving more patents while giving less scrutiny to the patents in question — meaning that we’re now getting a ton of bad patents approved. It seemed like an obviously bad sign when we passed the total number of patents approved in 2009 by October of 2010.

Now the final numbers are in: nearly 220,000 patents granted (219,614 if you want to be exact), a massive 31% increase over 2009 and still significantly more than ever before in history. The highest previous year was 2006, when a mere 173,772 patents were granted. So this is still 27% more patents granted in a single year than ever before. I find it hard to believe — as USPTO supporters claim — that the Patent Office suddenly figured out how to approve 30% more patents without decreasing the quality. Patently-O put together this lovely chart to demonstrate the pattern:

Historians have an envious perch from which to offer a definitive opinion on when a business model started to come apart. For Kodak, the arrival of the first digital cameras for consumers at the end of the 1980s would be such a landmark.

What are the ways you can recognize warnings in real-time that your business is under attack? Business consultant Rita McGrath offers three such signposts in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review. They are:

1. Fewer innovations. The first sign is when next-generation innovations offer smaller and smaller improvements. “If your people have trouble thinking of new ways to enhance your offering, that’s a sign,” McGrath says.

Most leaders are interested in growing their businesses through innovation, but it's risky business: most innovation efforts fail. After years of helping to make innovation happen as chief communications officer at Steelcase and as a consultant, I have a point of view that I'm willing to bet on. Innovative ideas, initiatives, products, culture transformations, you name it, have little chance to succeed if they aren't enabled by smart communications. This includes communication within the core team, broadly in your organization, and with key stakeholders outside the organization, including your distribution channel partners, suppliers, journalists, investors and of course, existing and potential customers.

I’ve long believed that entrepreneurs are different.

We all know successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of school, and people with high IQs that cannot manage a business. I used to call this “street smarts,” but recently I found a better explanation, called multiple intelligences.

Successful entrepreneurs always seem to have several good intelligences.