That's right. 2011. These six ideas emerged in 2010 as powerful "innovation invitations" and seem sure to intensify in power and influence. They'll increasingly be a source of, and resource for, innovation differentiation in 2011, if not for your organization, then for the firm you most dread competing against.

1. Contestification

Whether Google Demo Slam or Sprint's App Competition, digital media has become an innovation battleground for customers, clients, prospective partners, and young talent. Frito-Lay has already made competition the cornerstone of its Super Bowl advertising, and Toyota, desperate to remind people what a wonderful corporate citizen it can be, invites aspiring innovators to suggest how the firm's technology can be used for good in unexpected ways. Crowdsourced contestification is becoming institutionalized as a way firms can grow their own innovation nations. If you're not running an innovative innovation contest to invite participation and build brand, then you're reacting to your competitor's competition. Will your contest be competitive with their contest? Who's running it? Who's judging it? Who's winning it?

In this remarkable performance at the US naval academy, the Kings Firecrackers jump-rope team conduct a high-intensity, skip-rope-fuelled close-order drill that seriously agogified me.

Every organization, no matter how small, has one or more people who are quite simply obnoxious, and they drain energy from everyone and can strangle your company. Sometimes they are also intellectually brilliant, or closely related to the boss, so there is no easy way out.

In fact, they may even be the boss. So if you find this article taped to your desk, it may be time to look in the mirror. At any rate, if you are stuck working in an office, at least you deserve some clues on how to recognize the different types, and know it’s time to run:

1. “I knew that was going to happen.” This know-it-all has an answer for everything, and is proud to let you know, always after the fact, that they actually predicted ahead of time every calamity that has befallen the world and the office.

Navigating an airport can be stressful even for experienced travelers so designers Kang Eun-Kyung and Park Ji-Eun thought a compass built into one’s boarding pass would be a great idea.

The result is the Airport Compass, which is powered by a solid-state thin film battery, which needs very little energy and is flexible.

Apple's iPad and Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox 360 (formerly Project Natal) may have taken the spotlight in the world of digital wonder this year, but there are plenty of other cool technologies to go around. Some, such as Literacy Bridge's Talking Book and GeoPalz's kid-friendly pedometers, are targeted at a very specific audience whereas others, including a solar-powered portable digital sound system and a low-cost high-definition Web camera, have much broader appeal. Still others, for example the treadmill desktop, are decidedly low-tech but no less interesting. This year, there's even a gadget to help your favorite golfer improve his or her swing.

Income inequality in the U.S. is higher than it's been since the 1920s. That's tough news for most Americans, but for the top 1% who own or control about one-third of the wealth in the country, life could hardly be better.

Just take a look at these overpriced luxury tech products that came out in 2010.

Most of us say we would never buy such frivolous gadgetry, but the truth is we simply can't afford this kind of conspicuous consumption.

Tech entrepreneur Steve Perlman has his name on more than 100 U.S. patents. He is particularly excited about his latest, but miffed at the same time.

His company, OnLive, has pioneered the concept of running fast-action videogames over the Internet without the need for users to own a gaming console or a PC with a fancy graphics card. The software runs on servers OnLive maintains “in the cloud,” as people like to say in Silicon Valley. Those machines handle the chore of rendering sophisticated gaming images and compress them so they can be delivered to any computer with a Web browser, or to an HDTV equipped with a small add-on device OnLive sells.

Brad Dwyer, 22, launched his entrepreneurial career around a Facebook game he put together while procrastinating instead of studying for a test at Iowa State University in 2008.

"It was just something that I programmed over a weekend and put out there to see what kind of reception it would get," Dwyer said.

The game, called Hatchlings, is similar in concept to the "Where's Waldo?" book series from his childhood, but allow users to seek out eggs of several varieties (think Easter eggs of various colors and designs) that would be hidden in their friends' Facebook profiles.

"The first day it was out there, it organically grew to several hundred users and started an exponential growth curve," Dwyer said. "So at that point I thought, 'Wow, maybe this is a bigger idea than I thought,' so I started working on adding new features and keeping it going."

There’s always talk about a startup’s end game – whether it’s in the form of an acquisition, funding announcement, or eventual flame out. But we rarely hear about the harsh realities that entrepreneurs face. This isn’t meant to be a downbeat and negative article, but actually quite the opposite. By knowing the harsh realities that lie ahead, you can be prepared when they come about. Here are some of the oft unspoken realities I’ve noticed entrepreneurs face regularly.

Your first iteration of an idea will be wrong – Very few people get it right out of the gate – but as it turns out, this is actually a good sign. No idea survives its first interactions with its customers. This sort of failure requires you to synthesize feedback to adapt to the customer. You could be prideful, not listen to what your customers are telling you, and keep things the way they were, but that leaves you with no customers and a product you may not even use yourself. It’s okay if things change up a bit when it comes to your idea and its implementation.

Software is constantly trying to figure out what you mean, and often it guesses wrong. If you were curious about employment at the maker of iPods and typed "turnover at apple" into Google, the top results would be for apple turnover recipes.

It's not just search engines—the same problem crops up in software that aims to translate, recognize speech, analyze the mood surrounding a product launch, or deliver targeted advertisements.

A startup called Idilia, based in Montreal, Canada, has built software to make all these applications better at what they do. The software focuses on the problem of word-sense disambiguation—choosing the meaning of a word based on what makes the most sense in context. Word-sense disambiguation is an old artificial intelligence problem that has proved thorny over the decades. For a computer to apply a word correctly in context, it has to have a huge amount of background information—not just what's in a dictionary but also a map of how words fit together both grammatically and conceptually.

Boston has long led New York in most things venture capital, and is showing no signs of letting up.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for the Boston vs. New York rivalry's southern faction. First, Tom Brady smacked the f'ing snack out of Rex Ryan's mouth. Then the Red Sox got their men, while Brian Cashman just got Cliff Lee's voicemail. Oh, and Paul Pierce thinks that most Celtics/Knicks games play out like Globetrotters/Generals.

In the spirit of piling on, let me remind everyone that Boston's venture capital market is still far more vibrant than New York's venture capital market.*

Yeah, I know you've read differently. Some Boston-based VCs might even have told you differently. But that's all a load of bull.

Hot sectors will continue to be well funded even in the equity gap. We are seeing strong demand for deals in digital media, e-commerce, mobile software, cloud, cleantech and digital security and this will continue for some time.

Venture capital: hot sectors well fund. Jonathan Coker, investment director at MMC Ventures gives his predictions on the venture capital market in 2011

Many women are turning to social entrepreneurship because they tend to work more with their hearts, says American serial social entrepreneur and Ashoka Fellow Christina Jordan. Women tend to be very nurturing and their work is an extension of how they see the world.

According to Jordan, the gender differences come in when it comes to scale. “From my experience in social entrepreneurship, there seem to be more men who take on more large-scale initiatives than women do. That doesn’t necessarily mean that women’s initiatives are not successful; it’s just that they don’t necessarily tend to be driven by the same desire for ‘big’. Women seem to be driven by the desire for impact that’s tangible to them.”

Actors want to direct. Directors want to produce. And consultants want to be keynote speakers. And why not? The pay is good. It doesn't take much time. And it's a lot less heavy lifting than most consulting gigs.

Easier said that done, however. Delivering a kick ass keynote is not as easy as it looks. If you want to get into the game, begin by reviewing the following guidelines to see if you have what it takes.

1. Be in tune with your purpose: If you're going to hold an audience's attention for more than 10 minutes, you've got to begin by holding firm to your purpose... your calling... what gets you out of bed in the morning. If it's missing, all you could ever hope to deliver is a speech -- which is NOT what people want to hear.

If your purpose is clear, you're home free and won't need a single note card.

If you have only a few seconds to communicate the essence of your company, what is the most important message to deliver?

When confronted with this question, most entrepreneurs think about their elevator pitch - sixty seconds of highly condensed hyperbole intended to entice an investor to ask for more. But all the workshops and how-to blogs offered on elevator pitches have probably done as much damage as good. Almost every guide to developing an elevator pitch suggests that you pack the six to eight key points of your 85 page business plan into 120 words. The result is usually an unintelligible gibberish of techspeak embedded in a cloud of superlative adjectives:

“We have a highly disruptive technology that enables us to fulfill the promise of the Information Age. Our mission is to become the global leader addressing the huge market opportunity in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 space. We have a world-class team of PhDs who have developed our patent-pending proprietary SaaS solution, launching in nine months, that will enable our customers to dramatically enhance their BI deployments and increase the actionability of their analytics.”