Science and technology can seem remote from the unfolding dramas of the world but they were never far from the front line in the first months of the Arab Spring.

When revolution broke out in Egypt's Tahrir Square in January, scientists were there in force, helping to plant the seeds of change. When dictatorship was replaced by a move towards a more democratic system of government that openly encourages debate and dissent, and is more committed to meeting the social needs of their people, science began to germinate in Egypt and elsewhere.

Thus, the swift announcements in Egypt of the planned construction of the new Zewail City of Science and Technology, of an ambitious science spending plan and, later, of a national research network. Scientists in Egypt also felt they could speak out against what they saw as inappropriate development.

To solve its big economic problems, the United States needs to think small.

It is a well-worn observation that technological innovation leads to economic growth. But ever since Sputnik, the U.S. government has primarily focused on funding innovation via large universities and research institutions. This funding is not insignificant -- $143 billion in fiscal 2011, according to the National Science Foundation. Unfortunately, government grants focused on fostering novel technologies are cumbersome to apply for and incur mountains of paperwork once you get them. Small-scale innovation is nonetheless alive and well -- and will likely lead the recovery, whenever it happens.

Once you’ve checked off “Finish turkey leftovers” and “Take down holiday decorations,” you can officially mark the end of 2011 and turn your attention to 2012. Out with the old and in with the new, right? Not so fast.

Before we move ahead, let’s take a moment to look back at 2011 and some of the major trends that affected regional economies and technology-based economic growth.

More recognition for regional economies: Industry, local, state and federal governments as well as philanthropy, began to view regions as “economic drivers” to help influence the national economic recovery. Initiatives like the Clinton Global Initiative – America and Brookings Institution Metropolitan Business Plan supported the premise that the staying power of American competitiveness will depend on the viability and sustainability of regions.

During the holiday season, you must have received countless mailings and calls from around the country asking for your donations to charitable causes. It can be overwhelming. After all, how do you choose among feeding the hungry, curing diseases, helping wounded veterans, educating at-risk youth, and protecting the environment? While you may already have your favorite charities, including some halfway around the country or around the world in your home countries where you came from, I am urging you to give locally, where you and your family and community now call home. There are many great reasons to give where you live, but here are a few that have compelled me to give locally each year.

As our third full calendar year at New Geography comes to a close, here’s a look at the ten most popular stories in 2011. It’s been another year of steady growth in readership and reach for the site.  Thanks for reading and happy new year.

10.  The Other China: Life on the Streets, A Photo Essay Argentinean architect and photographer Nicolas Marino offers a set of stunning photographs from the streets of Chengdu and Shanghai.

9.  Six Adults and One Child in China Emma Chen and Wendell Cox outline the rising numbers of elderly and increasing age dependency ratios in China and across the globe.  Chen and Cox outline a number of solutions, including “extending work and careers into the 70s; means tested benefits; greater incentives for having children; and measures to keep housing more affordable and family friendly,” but conclude “the ultimate issue will be maintaining economic growth.”

The past few years have been nothing if not a boon for entrepreneurs looking to cash in on venture capitalists’ lust for all things cloud.  All the activity has been great, and we’ve seen some exciting new companies emerge and prosper — companies such as Heroku, RightScale and New Relic — but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Startups that want to get noticed, get funded, and ultimately have a winning exit must either find their own unique niche or stake out ground on a different field altogether.

Here are 10 cloud computing startups that launched in 2011 and that have a chance to make it big in 2012.

The past year in technology was pretty wild.

The really big Internet IPO returned and the massive venture capital funding bubble inflated, which seems difficult considering that the venture capital industry is far smaller than it was three years ago. But look at some of the crazy valuations on revenue-less photosharing start-ups like Color and Path. And there is clearly another bubble inflating in the cloud computing sector, with every company that uses a distributed architecture now calling itself a “cloud company.” So what does 2012 have in store? Here are my predictions.

Last year, I published a list of my predictions for 2011 in the areas of healthcare, innovation and technology. Now after a year, I checked these items and actually many of them proved to be right (year of tablets, Prezi.com skyrocketing, Siri leading the way for voice controlled apps, etc.), but now it’s time to come up with the predictions for 2012. Here are my 12 predictions, please feel free to add yours in the comment section.

1) Digital only class in social media for medical professionals and e-patients. Well, that’s quite an easy prediction, as I will launch the global form of my social media in medicine university course this February.

A year ago, the folks behind the the nonprofit TED launched TED Books — short, digitally distributed nonfiction works spun out of the guest talks at TED’s exclusive conferences.

One of the newest books to emerge is Smile: The Astonishing Power of a Simple Act, based on a popular TED presentation in March of this year by serial entrepreneur Ron Gutman. Gutman runs HealthTap, an 18-month-old online health network that has already raised roughly $14 million from investors. And he says he settled on the TED talk — which went viral —  because of happiness research he has come across over time which suggests that people who smile more live longer, enjoy happier marriages, and in some cases, even make more money.

Yesterday, I talked with Gutman about his findings and the new book. Our conversation has been edited for length.

AngelPad, the startup incubator launched by seven ex-Googlers in August 2010, is taking a look back at how far it’s come in the months since and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. So far, AngelPad has helped 37 companies get off the ground, but it wasn’t until this year that things really got going: 29 of those 37 startups emerged from AngelPad’s incubator in 2011 alone.

Out of the 37 companies, 31 have received funding, totaling just over $25 million.

According to one of AngelPad’s founders, Thomas Korte, the average funding amount for its startups is around $750,000. Of course, he admits that averages don’t always give the most accurate picture since a few highs and lows can distort things. MoPub, for example, is on the high-end, having raised over $7 million. There were a couple of others with high numbers over a million, too, Korte says.

As expected, the past year was an exciting one for mobile tech. I did reasonably well on my predictions for 2011, but now it’s time to power up the crystal ball and gaze at what 2012 will bring. Make no mistake, the coming year will bring much change to the fast-paced mobile tech landscape. Companies will continue to battle for consumer dollars as both computing and mobile broadband advances put even more power in the devices we carry around with us and even the ones we wear.

While 2011 was a very busy year for the technology industry, the constant rate of innovation and activity in the market shows that things probably won’t slow down in 2012. Below, we’ve rounded up some of GigaOM’s biggest stories of the year — roughly in the order that they occurred — with a bit of insight on what each could mean for 2012.

Big-ticket product launches like the Galaxy Nexus and Kindle Fire got gobs of attention this year. But between the marquee product unveilings there were even better stories — telltale hints of what kind of tech might be in products five, 10 or 15 years out. The field of emerging technology let us sneak a peek at the wonders of the future.

It’s just a potential future, of course. One with lots of promise, but a lot of things need to happen for a breakthrough in a lab to become a mainstream product. Quirks need to get ironed out, money needs to be spent, and early adopters need to buy it — among a host of other variables. If even a single one of them doesn’t happen, it’s kaput for any tech, no matter how good.

We've all heard the statistics. Almost a year after their graduation, only 56 percent of 2010 college grads held at least one job. Half of college graduates reported that their jobs did not require their college degree -- they were waitressing, bartending, filing, or selling retail. The situation is even worse for students who majored in the humanities (as I did) or area studies, such as Latin American studies. Only 44 percent of these students held jobs meant for a college graduate.

Despite these grim facts, there is an upside to the bleak job situation facing new college grads. Now is as good a time as any to notice the problems in your community and find a new way to solve them. I'm looking at you, humanities majors and creative types. Starting your own business or nonprofit could be a great way to use your creativity and interest in the world around you, by developing scalable solutions to make a difference in people's lives.

In the midst of a struggling economy, there is one sector that is rapidly growing ’ booming, in fact. That sector is health care. Just as the baby boomers flooded the market with a demand for toys and diapers in the 1950s, so are they now flooding the market with a need for increased health care.

An aging population and major changes to the healthcare system in the U.S. translates into a huge demand for skilled workers who can tend to patients in all realms of health care. In the past eight years, health care employment has seen steady growth ’ one of the very sectors that can claim this bragging right. More recently, in the past twelve months, the health care industry has added an average of 24,000 jobs per month, according to government statistics, while other industries have been barely holding on.

And this trend is expected to continue. In the next ten years, more and more baby boomers will reach retirement age, and changes to the health care system under ’Obamacare,’ which have already begun and will continue through 2014, include mandating health insurance for American citizens, allowing children to stay on parents’ plans until age 26 and replacing paper records with electronic records.

On New Year's Eve, just as 2011 was running out, President Obama signed HR.1540, the bill that contains the SBIR reauthorization provisions, into law. Whew! Not that I thought he wouldn't, but...

Here's the White House Press Release on the signing: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/31/statement-president-hr-1540 . SBIR wasn't mentioned, of course. Sigh...

I do want to read the bill that was signed, just to make sure no Federal Agency sneakily weaseled out of their SBIR obligation. Not that I'd think that any of them would be so callous as to do that, but...

Reports from this year’s Venture predictions survey conducted by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Dow Jones VentureSource reports that the Startup ecosystem and the venture capitalists are abound to face realism rather than optimism. Dow Jones VentureSource database tracks the activity of private investment firms and venture-backed companies in all industries and stages of development, worldwide.

When compared to last year's survey, forecasts from venture capital professionals and venture-backed CEOs are less confident and more measured for the coming year, with few notable bright spots. With all the concerns, the enthusiasm still awaits for the IT investment, particularly on the consumer side. Also, the focus will be on the startup company momentum, especially job growth. Yet, it is predicted that in critical areas such as IPOs and venture fundraising are moderate at best, reflecting ongoing, unavoidable challenges faced by VCs and entrepreneurs alike.

High-technology entrepreneurship has been identified as an important driver of Singapore’s knowledge-based economy, and increased policy attention has been given to encouraging the formation and nurturing of high-tech start-ups, especially those with significant intellectual property (IP). To this end, in 2010 the National Research Foundation (NRF) engaged me, as director of the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, to conduct a study of high-tech start-ups in Singapore. While the survey covers many aspects of the high tech start-up dynamics, including characteristics of the founders, their sources of technology and funding, growth strategies, performance and challenges, this blog highlights some salient findings on only one aspect of the survey: the performance of start-ups that have received funding from venture capitalists or angel investors versus those that did not.

On Sept. 17, a couple hundred protesters demonstrating against the excesses of corporate execs and the pervasive influence of high finance in U.S. politics set up camp in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park and refused to leave. It was an unlikely occupation, one without leaders, agendas or even a clear sense of goals, but it soon was echoed in myriad cities across the U.S. and the world. To some, Occupy Wall Street is the left-wing iteration of the Tea Party, directing their rage not at big government but at the big banks that gutted the world economy and took billions in bailouts from the U.S. government while awarding themselves hefty bonuses.

Conquering the Rigidities that Stifle Business Growth by Claudio Feser, author of "Serial Innovators: Firms That Change The World."

Organizations age and die. They do so because—as they grow and mature—they develop rigidities, at both individual and organizational levels. The process of aging seems to unfold inexorably and naturally—similar to the processes of aging in biological organisms.

Claudio Feser is the author of "Serial Innovators: Firms That Change The World." But the truth is that the aging of organizations is not a natural, biological process. Rigidities—both individual and organizational—are man-made. They originate in two areas: in the human brain, and in organizational constructs composed of human beings.