Opera Software has released its State of the Mobile Web report for November 2010 today, but has also taken the opportunity to look back at the preceding months to summarize trends and statistics related to global mobile Web usage for 2010. The findings? Mobile Web surfing is way, way up.

Opera served 340 billion pages during the first 11 months of the year compared with only 129 billion pages during the same period in 2009. There are now 80 million users on the mobile Web using Opera's Mini browser - a 91.8% increase from last year. And Facebook and Google are still top Web destinations, but the two have swapped the number 1 and 2 slots as 2010 draws to a close.

Opera releases its "State of the Mobile Web" reports after each month ends, so this will be the last report released in this calendar year. That means this year-end report is shy one month: December. However, there's still a lot of data that can be analyzed from the first 11 months of the year.

Earlier this year, 500 Startups, the seed fund run by Dave McClure, announced that it was creating a $250,000 micro-fund dedicated to companies that were based on Twilio’s telephony platform (Twilio is one of 500 Startup’s portfolio companies). Today it’s announcing the first three winners, each of whom will receive $10,000 in return for a 1% stake in the company.

The three companies are Textaurant, OrderMapper, and Voicendo. Textaurant is a service that lets restaurant customers ‘put their names down’ for a table without having to sit around on a restaurant bench for 20 minutes. Instead, they receive a text or voice message (via Twilio) when it’s their turn (this sounds like an alternative to those vibrating gizmos that some establishments hand out). The company says that there’s been a 5-15% decrease in no-shows for restaurants on busy nights that use the service, and that most customers are happy to give the restaurant their phone number to take advantage of it. Come to think of it, I’m surprised this kind of SMS-service hasn’t taken off sooner.

Sorry, we like toys around here and we don’t care what you think. Tonka trucks, robotic spiders and portable gaming systems should make everyone smile. These things are just for young kids anymore. Just think about the rage you can unleash on your office with a motorized Nerf gun.

CrunchGear saw plenty of new toys in 2010 but the following video reviews were our favorite. Join us on a look back at the year’s best toy videos.

There are over now 85 million people that belong to the Linkedin Social Network. Who are some of the most "connected" innovators among Linkedin? Searches on Linkedin reveal that SolutionPeople Innovation's Gerald "Solutionman" Haman is ranked as the 14th Most Connected Person on Linkedin. With 30,000 Direct Connections Haman, now has over 5 million Level 2 Connections and almost 18 million Level 3 Connections on Linkedin.

Running a start-up is anything but a life of wine and roses. Seasoned entrepreneurs know that, but budding ones are often a bit naïve. After running down five ugly truths of the startup world last week, Jason Baptiste is back with another half-dozen truths that can help prepare people for their entrepreneurial endeavors.

There is no silver bullet - There shouldn’t be (and usually never is) a single deal that can make your company. Certain deals or customers can take you to another rung on the ladder, but there are still many more rungs to climb along the way. Don’t look at a deal as the end game to the startup, but rather as a means to a specific milestone that is in the near future. It’s much easier to lose a deal than it is to secure one. By training yourself to diversify your risk and the milestones that advance your company, you control the destiny of your company, not any single partner. The success of a startup is the compilation of luck infused with many little wins along the way.

Last week, in the spirit of a season in which most of us look at the end of one year, and the start of a New Year, as an opportunity to reflect on our jobs, I offered a set of questions to help you figure out whether it was time to move to a new company or even a new career. This week, in that same spirit, I’d like to address myself to leaders at every level of the organization who want to keep their best people and get the best effort out of them.

Here, then, are five make-or-break questions for leaders who want to make a fresh start for the New Year.

Last night was there was a rare total lunar eclipse, which occurs around once a year.

This is when the earth blocks the sun from the moon. The result, which can be seen from many places around the world for over an hour, is a darkening moon as the eclipse begins and a red moon when the sun is mostly eclipsed and the reddish reflection of the earth shows on the surface.

This was also the first time a total lunar eclipse occured on the winter solstice since 1638, meaning the moon was especially high in the sky.

Check out photos below:

2011 will be the year of the municipal default. At least that's what analysts like Meredith Whitney predict, as do bond investors that have been fleeing the muni market.

There are many reasons to be worried. First, the expiration of Build America Bonds will make it harder for cities to raise funds.

Second, city revenues are crashing and keep getting worse. Property taxes haven't reflected the total damage from the housing crash. High joblessness is cutting into city revenues, while increasing costs for services.

American internet companies are the dominant tech companies around the world, with one glaring exception.

In China, and Asia more broadly, they're struggling to make a mark.

It's not for lack of trying, either.

U.S. tech companies keep trying to enter the Asian markets, and yet, they learn the hard way, over and over again, that Asian tech companies are entrenched, smart, and understand their markets better.

For a country used to winning, it's an embarrassing prediciament.

On July 6th 2010, I launched Crowdfunding Formula to give entrepreneurs like you a new, easier way to raise money.

And the response has been amazing. Hundreds of you got Crowdfunding Formula and started raising money really quickly.

At that time, I made two predictions...

The first was that Crowdfunding would grow like mad. That prediction has come true as Kickstarter, one of the several Crowdfunding platforms, has already been used by entrepreneurs to raise “between $15 million and $20 million” this year according to co-founder Perry Chen.

As an aspiring startup founder, I’m always on the lookout for blogs that will help me become a more adept entrepreneur. Fortunately for me and for the startup community there’s a lot of really talented entrepreneurs who write regularly about what they’ve learned so you can benefit from their experiences.

The following is a list of the best startup blogs that I’ve run across, which I thought I’d share in the hope that you find something new for your collection. In no particular order…

1. Derek Sivers – Founder of CD Baby and several other companies, the word “wise” comes to mind. His post Let pedestrians define the walkways is always in the back of my head while I’m working on my startup.
2. Gabriel Weinberg – Ballsy Philadelphia-based founder of Duck Duck Go, an inspirational (and quite successful) one-man search engine startup. Really nice guy too.
3. IIlya Lichtenstein – Internet marketer who recently helped more than 150 startups with their marketing efforts and wrote about the lessons learned in a series of great blog posts.
4. Jason Baptiste – Boston-based cofounder of PadPressed. His posts on startups are some of the best I’ve read. See, for example, If You Build It, They Won’t Come (something I’ve learned the hard way) and 16 Ways Your Startup Needs to be Getting Customers.
5. Eric Ries – Eric has changed the way people approach building startups with the Lean Startup movement. He also coined the phrase Minimum Viable Product, which is now common lingo in the startup world.

Starting a company is really, really hard. Helping entrepreneurs start and build companies is really, really hard. Much has been written about the mechanics of entrepreneur/investor interaction, from how to pitch investors, structure the round, assemble board decks, undertake strategic planning, etc. But after more than six years of seed stage investing, perhaps the most important and least well-understood aspect of the relationship is the implicit covenant that exists between entrepreneur and investor.

Governor M. Jodi Rell recently announced that a key provision of the bipartisan Jobs Bill that Governor Rell helped shepherd to passage in the most recent legislative session is triggering a $72 million investment in at least 25 Connecticut small businesses, helping to create jobs, spur innovation and strengthen the state’s economy.

Advantage Capital Partners is the first venture capital and small business finance firm to be certified as a fund manager under the newly revised Insurance Reinvestment Tax Credit program, which was updated as part of the Jobs Bill. The program leverages private capital provided by insurance companies that is then invested by state-certified fund managers.

The Jobs Bill – passed by the Legislature in the waning days of the regular session – is a sweeping, bipartisan package that offers incentives for employers, supports small business and emerging industries, provides resources for tuition and training, helps manufacturers find efficiencies and includes accountability measures to safeguard state taxpayer dollars. The bill was the product of cooperative efforts Governor Rell began in the first leadership meeting of the legislative session.

News reaches WIREDVC HQ from snow-bound Scotland, that a new £20m ($31m) venture capital fund is to be launched by Steve Leach, the founder of digital advertising agency bigmouthmedia. To be named (unsurprisingly) The Steve Leach Partnership, the new firm is going to target Internet based businesses, but is understood to also have its eyes on at at least one Scottish renewable energy concern, starting next year.

Mr Leach is raising the money for his new firm by selling eighty percent of his holding in LBI, a Dutch agency that acquired bigmouthmedia earlier this year. He quit his executive duties at the agency last summer, following the takeover.

The Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM) is one of five new centres to be funded by the Government of Canada through the 2010 Centres of Excellence for the Commercialization of Research (CECR) competition. The CECR program is administered by the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) Secretariat, which supports successful research partnerships between universities, industry, not-for-profit organizations and government.

The centre was awarded $15 million over five years, allowing its members to address the barriers faced by the Canadian regenerative medicine (RM) industry, such as the licensing of early-stage RM technologies to companies outside of Canada before their market value is realized.

Hosted by the University of Toronto, CCRM brings together leading RM experts from the University of Toronto and McMaster University, with researchers from the Hospital for Sick Children, the University Heath Network, the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and Mount Sinai Hospital, to accelerate RM research and development, and create a commercialization pipeline that rapidly brings RM technologies to market. These researchers are working to harness the power of stem cells, biomaterials and molecules through innovative technologies to treat, and perhaps cure, diseased cells, tissues and organs.

Dear SBIR Insider,

This is a quick interim update as to congressional actions affecting SBIR/STTR reauthorization. It's hard to believe that things are still "fluid" in these waning hours of this 111th "lame duck" (some may say "insane duck") congress. As Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra said, "It ain't over till it's over." We may issue an update (perhaps with a call to action) at anytime, however we will have a full blown SBIR Insider for you later this week.

Regardless of the outcome of congressional efforts, the SBIR Insider wants to acknowledge the extraordinary work of all the congressional staffers and parliamentarians, who due to the stress and strain are buckling at the knees, but somehow manage to keep going under the extreme load during this manic period.

The retail season is in full swing for the holidays, and it couldn't happen without two giants of logistics, UPS and FedEx. As those brown UPS trucks remind us, the global economy thrives on "synchronizing the world of commerce."

Not long ago, I talked with FedEx founder Fred Smith at a World 50 meeting of executives in Memphis, Tennessee. More recently I visited the company's operations in the midst of holiday-season madness.

Although economic growth stagnated in 2009, a new survey says scientific research from about 150 universities created 555 startup companies and resulted in over 4,500 patent optioning and licensing deals last year, earning $1.8 billion in payouts for the institutions in the process. The numbers continue a decade-long trend of the increased role of universities in generating commercial products for businesses.

"Technology transfer" -- as the process of universities commercializing their findings is known -- allows businesses to turn the fruits of academic research into new technologies, such as new drugs and energy-saving products. In return, universities collect licensing fees or royalties, or a partial ownership stake in a product. Universities also typically have a small staff dedicated to brokering deals on hand -- not an insignificant source of employment itself.