oDesk is a marketplace for online work teams. Each month, it publishes a report with information the service collects from its own community of employers and job prospectors.

For its year-end report, oDesk looked at prior data from its own database of 890,000 contractors and 220,000 employers. The service has more than a million users and over $12 million in work performed each month.

The company used that data to report about the top markets, categories and jobs for 2010, as well as what to expect in 2011.

Union Square Ventures is raising $200 million for a new fund called the Union Square Ventures Opportunity Fund LP. According to an SEC filing, the VC firm already raised $135 million for the fund from 19 investors. The last time Union Square raised money was for its $156 million Union Square Ventures 2008 LP fund.

Union Square Ventures is the leading early stage VC firm in New York City led by Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, and Albert Wenger. The filing also lists a new partner, John Buttrick. Its portfolio includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, Tumblr, Boxee, Disqus, Etsy, Clickable, and Indeed.

In the flurry of activity at the end of the 111^th Congress, the reauthorization of the "America COMPETES Act" went mostly unnoticed. But it is a little bill that Washington hopes will prove transformative. The law—its cringeworthy official name is the America Creating Opportunities To Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act—overhauls the way the federal government supports private-sector R & D, and one of the main ways the government hopes to support R & D is with prizes. Lots of prizes.

Hanny van Arkel had been using the Galaxy Zoo Web site less than a week when she noticed something odd about the photograph of IC 2497, a minor galaxy in the Leo Minor constellation. “It was this strange thing,” she recalled: an enormous gas cloud, floating like a ghost in front of the spiral galaxy.

A Dutch schoolteacher with no formal training in astronomy, Ms. van Arkel had joined tens of thousands of other Web volunteers to help classify photographs taken by deep-space telescopes. Stumped by the unusual image on her computer screen, she e-mailed the project staff for guidance. Staff members were stumped, too. And thus was christened the celestial body now known to astronomers worldwide as Hanny’s Voorwerp (Dutch for “object”).

2010 saw an explosion of 3-D products for consumers and also the arrival of augmented reality as a mainstream technology. In both areas, however, only some commercial implementations proved ready for prime time.

3-D TVs, Cameras, and Camcorders Galore

3-D was a hot topic at the start of the year, partly because of the 3-D blockbuster movie Avatar, which came out last December. Many predicted that 3-D technology would move quickly from the movie theater into the home, and major electronics companies including Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Sony, Philips, and Toshiba announced plans to release 3-D televisions and Blu-ray players ("Home 3-D: Here, or Hype?" and "Here Come the High-Definition 3-D TVs"). But obstacles—particularly the need to wear 3-D glasses costing upwards of $100 per pair and the limited amount of 3-D content available to watch (a handful of DVDs and few TV transmissions)—have prevented 3-D TVs from becoming wildly popular, at least for now ("Will 3-D Make the Jump from Theater to Living Room?").

The firm, based in Palo Alto, California, is still investing in start-up companies out of its initial fund of roughly $40 million, but plans to raise a second fund in early to mid-2011, said the limited partner, who wished to remain anonymous.

The plans to start a second fund come as a new generation of fast-growing Internet start-up companies, such as online coupon provider Groupon and social gaming firm Zynga, moves into the investor spotlight. Earlier this month, microblogging sensation Twitter raised $200 million in new funding from several venture firms.

The global recovery is set to continue, commodity prices are going to boom, but there are threats that could take down the economy, according to Danske Bank.

Their 5 themes to watch include are largely optimistic, but there are also serious concerns the debt threat could rise and cripple global markets.

Even if that threat becomes real, it should still be a great year for equities, according to Danske.

On December 7, 2010, the cruise ship Clelia II had begun the final crossing of its weeklong Antarctic cruise. What remained of the journey was the notoriously dangerous Drake Passage between Antarctica and South America. And that day the ship was hit by a massive wave that shattered one of its bridge windows and damaged the Clelia'snavigational equipment.

Its 88 passengers were primarily American retirees, many of whom had paid more than $9,000 for their Antarctic adventure, and whose daylong stranding in the rough waters of the Drake Passage was the most dangerous thing that happened on their adventure in the Southern Ocean. Luckily for them—and the surrounding ecosystem—the ship was quickly repaired, averting a tragedy the humans on board and the surrounding wildlife that would have been affected if the ship had sunk and/or spilled fuel.

If you asked me to tell you a list of three of the best decisions in my life, I can certainly tell you that regularly writing is one of them. It’s the reason I’m an author here at OnStartups, made many new friends, had interesting opportunities cross my radar, and most importantly had the chance to share knowledge that has helped other entrepreneurs.

Why You Should Write
You Will Meet Other Smart People

Writing has allowed me to meet a slew of smart people. Some of these people are now virtual acquaintances and some are very close friends on a personal and professional level. Each article that you publish is a synthesized thought process that may click with other entrepreneurs instantly. Have you ever had a feeling when reading an article that “Wow, they are thinking exactly what I’m thinking”? By writing, you are likely to encounter a handful of people that experience the same thing. Occasionally one of those people will reach out to you via email or bump into you at an event. You might make a new acquaintance, a new co-founder for the future, potential investor, hire,etc. At the end of the day, being an entrepreneur is about finding other smart (hopefully smarter) people to collaborate with and writing frequently helps make this happen.

I spend much of my day thinking about words, working on my novel, interviewing people, writing articles and examining films. I like to think of myself as a creative person—that is someone who seeks to build, design, and grow things or ideas from scratch, from blank pages.

In these economically difficult times it seems we need more creativity woven in our everyday lives more than ever; an artistic eye that can spot and make unique connections in the companies where we work, in the jobs that we seek, in the social media where we play.

The Department of Commerce’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today announced it is accepting nominations for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (NMTI).

Since establishment by Congress in the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980, the President of the United States has awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (initially known as the National Medal of Technology) annually to our nation's leading innovators.

The primary purpose of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation is to recognize American innovators whose vision, creativity, and brilliance in moving ideas to market has had a profound and lasting impact on our economy and way of life. The Medal highlights  the national importance of fostering technological innovation based upon solid science, resulting in commercially successful products and services.

If you know of a candidate who has made an outstanding, lasting contribution to the economy through the promotion of technology or technological manpower, you may obtain a nomination form from: http://go.usa.gov/1dU.

The deadline for submission of a nomination is March 31, 2011.

If you bounce from project to project and have a hard time focusing on just one, listen to this interview with Greg Thomson.

Lack of focus is what kept his previous businesses from reaching their potential. Once he learned how to work with his innate curiosity (not eliminate it, but harness its power), he made Tall Tree Games into a hit casual game company that generated $6+ million in its last fiscal year.

Listen to this program to hear how he’s doing it.

Every startup with any traction quickly reaches a point where they need to hire employees to grow the business. Unfortunately, this always happens when pressures are the highest, and business processes are ill-defined. At this point you need superstars and versatile future executives, yet your in-house hiring processes and focus are at their weakest.

The result is a host of hiring mistakes that sink many young companies, or take years to fix. The solution is to never forget that hiring is a top priority task for the CEO, which should never be delegated, and which often has to supersede the urgent crises of the day.

1. FDA’s decision to remove the breast cancer indication from the label of bevacizumab (Avastin).

2. Approval of Dendreon’s sipuleucel-T (Provenge), representing a new class of drug.

3. Sanofi-Aventis’ pursuit of Genzyme. It illustrates an industry move towards adding orphan and rare therapeutic areas to pharma portfolios. Another example of the trend came when Pfizer created orphan disease research division in 2010 and acquired FoldRx Pharmaceuticals.

Venture capital (VC) companies have performed poorly in recent years, according to Cambridge Associates’ recently released statistics.  Analysis by the consulting firm revealed that rates of return have dwindled substantially from the double-digit annual numbers they enjoyed in the 1990s.  As of June 30, 2010, five-year returns to limited partners (LP) were merely 4.27 percent; 10-year returns were negative 4.15 percent.

Because most venture capitalists are wealthy, you shouldn’t worry that poor financial returns are imposing true hardship on them.  But you should be concerned that their poor earnings are harming the ecosystem for developing high growth startup companies in the United States.

Small business owners desire certain things from a business bank — specifically, collaboration, openness and a good working relationship. However, a recent study from consumer satisfaction research firm J.D. Power and Associates reveals those needs are going unmet.

The U.S. Small Business Banking Satisfaction Study showed that small businesses’ overall satisfaction with their banks has dropped to 711 on a 1,000-point scale, down from 718 last year. The survey measured customer satisfaction with the overall banking experience by examining eight factors: product offerings, account manager, facility, account information, problem resolution, credit services, fees and account activities.

Last year we published the Top Web Design Trends For Small Business in 2010 and as I reflect on the  Top Website and Website Design Trends for 2011, I know for certain that technology is moving so fast that many new technologies will probably be introduced by the time I finish this article!

Websites as business tools will continue to be important. In 2011, shared content will become more significant, as people read it and then share it with their networks. Social optimization of websites coupled with integration of all marketing activities – e-mail, websites and social networks — will be the key to success.