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.

I've been saying for a while now that I think mobile economics will trend toward web economics as the mobile web goes mainstream. In other words, the business models that work best on the web will ultimately work best in mobile.The corollary to that is that the business models that don't work well on the web will not work well in mobile in the long run.

And that includes tablets. There is some discussion in the tech blogs today about why iPad magazine sales have been disappointing. I don't understand why anyone would ever think that adding a presentation layer on top of web based content would make it something people would want to purchase when they are not willing to purchase the same content directly on the web.

As the sunset of 2010 gives way to the dawn of 2011, here at the Digest we resist the holiday temptation to look back over the challenges and highlights of the year gone by, and instead once again roll out our crystal ball as we list the Digest’s 10 Biofuels Predictions for 2011.

Last year’s predictions: 6 marks out of 10

For our 2010 batch of predictions, we give ourselves 6 marks out of 10.

We gave ourselves 1 full mark for predicting the spread of Low Carbon Fuel Standard activity, the boom in renewable chemicals, a jatropha revival sparked by new investments in SG Biofuels, and increased traction in heterotrophic algae and cyanobacteria.

The OECD points to annual growth rates of between 5 and 20% in its countries' creative and cultural industries. Also the demand for goods and services produced by the creative industries is anticipated to rise further. Sky News Business speaks to Mark Phibbs (Adobe) about the concept of the creative economy.

This Guide to Angel Investing Organizations is a detailed listing of more than 225 angel investor groups throughout the United States and Canada – as well as several international organizations. Although this guide is substantial, it does not purport to be fully comprehensive. Some of the information herein may be incorrect, and there may be Angel Organizations not listed in this guide. I have not included SuperAngels or the various accelerator/incubator programs in this list by intent.

The organizations are categorized by state (with every state but West Virginia represented), as well as National, Canada and Other International sections. The listings note the name of the organization, location, and website (which will allow you to obtain contact information in most cases). In many cases, notes about investment criteria are provided, to speed your evaluation of appropriate angel networks.

I frequently ask myself why it is that patents continue to come under attack by those who want to pretend they are only a burden on society and provide no benefit. Believing patents provide no benefit to society demonstrates a failure to understand fundamental aspects of the patent system, disclosure and publication of applications, as well as the basic economic reality that to innovate requires funding. Innovation, particularly cutting edge innovation, requires quite a bit of funding, sometimes many millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of funding. Where will that money come if there is no reasonable expectation of recouping the investment? Free-riders are not innovators and policies that encourage free-riders at the expense of innovators are nonsensical.

Those that look at the patent system and see no benefit for society are either the most intellectually dishonest people you will ever meet, or they are taking a ridiculous and objectively incorrect position because of some agenda. There really is no other way to say it. Just look at the number of patent applications that have been filed since 1975 (see chart below). As patents became more valuable more applications were filed, but a fraction of those applications filed actually are patented, which means that society gets the benefit of the disclosures in those applications without having the burden of having to live with an issued patent. What a deal! Without a patent system that provides for acceptably strong patent rights many, if not most, of these innovations would either not exist or they would be held as trade secrets. A secret doesn’t benefit society, but disclosed patent applications and expired patents do.

Over at Make: Online, we are running a series of posts called "The Best of Make." Here are the Top 10 Tools, and the Top 10 Blog Posts from 2010. Show here: a steam-powered record player (the 4th most popular post).

Since yesterday was 10.10.10, we’ve decided to celebrate this cosmic alignment of numerical symmetry by illuminating the measurements of magnitude. Today, we are taking five different looks at one of the most difficult concepts for the human brain to quantify and understand: The size and scale of the universe.

1.  The Bayh-Dole Act turned 30.  In an interview with Gene Quinn of IPwatchdog.com, former senator Birch Bayh described the essence of his goals in creating the Bayh Dole Act:  “there’s something to be said for the private enterprise system and we think we ought to hook the private enterprise system up with the intellectual enterprise in our universities so we have the entrepreneurial skills of the free enterprise system and the intellectual capacity of our researchers, we meld those together.”   At an AUTM-sponsored event in DC, I had the good fortune to hear former Senator Birch Bayh speak about how the Act came to be.  Bayh described his and Senator Bob Dole’s bi-partisan efforts, back in the 1970s, to pass legislation that would make federally funded university research more commercially accessible to the tax-paying public. 

This hodgepodge includes a host of intermediaries under the auspices of the Small Business Administration. Gaining prominence are Community Development Financial Institutions (previously known as Community Development Corporations); these entities have more resources to throw around thanks to sponsorship in recent years by the U.S. Treasury. Development programs tend to offer larger loans at lower rates than banks do, though you'll be expected to create jobs (or at least maintain them) in the community.

As 2010 comes to a close, we asked several venture capital investors to reflect on the past year and give us their outlook for 2011. We’ll be bringing you their responses over the coming days.

Next up in the series is Peter Boni, president and chief executive at Wayne, Pa.-based Safeguard Scientifics, which provides growth capital for life sciences and technology companies. Boni, who assumed this role in 2005 after a career serving as CEO for several publicly-traded and privately-held companies, will be keeping a close eye on the Food and Drug Administration while hoping for a shakeout in the venture industry.

It’s a long way from an entrepreneur’s “idea” to a working product with a real market and paying customers. A necessary intermediate step for proof of concept, credibility with potential investors, and communication with your team, is a working prototype. Building a prototype should be an early and high priority task for every startup.

A prototype doesn’t need to look great, or be built to scale, but it better accurately translate your vision into something real and tangible. For less tangible products, like software, it should simulate the look and feel of the final product on relevant base hardware. Here are some key objectives to keep in mind when designing your prototype:

1. Validate the customer need and opportunity. I always hate it when I see startups invest millions of dollars in technology before they validate their ideas in the market, only to find that customers seem to be looking for something slightly different. Test your idea early in a form that is easy and inexpensive to modify.