Recently Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, founder and CEO of WatchMojo, wrote a brief post about the Lies Entrepreneurs Tell.  In the article he makes the point entrepreneurs are “always in sell mode, but that doesn’t mean they need to be BS-artists”.  Their common lies include  “I have no regrets” or “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t do it any differently”; “It’s not personal, it’s business”; “We’re not raising money”; “We’re not looking to sell”; and “I’m your biggest fan.”

Ashkan has an interesting point – entrepreneurs can be so damn good at “selling” that they begin to say things that aren’t exactly true.  This may be due to a few factors: we actually believe the words we are saying, we feel the means justify the ends or we just want it so bad we are willing to cross over the line into fallacy in order to get what we want.

The Battelle-R and D Magazine annual Global R and D Funding Forecast released today shows global research and development (R and D) spending is expected to grow by about 5.2 percent in 2012 to more than $1.4 trillion. R and D funding growth will largely be driven by Asian economies—a number projected to increase by nearly 9 percent in 2012. Elsewhere in the world, growth remains strong and stable in the aftermath of the global recession.

The disaster at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, set off by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off Japan's east coast, scored a 7 out of 7 on the International Atomic Energy Agency's International Nuclear and Radiological Events Scale. The metric ranks severity based on many parameters, including an incident's effects on humans and the environment. According to the Japanese government, decommissioning the plant will take 30 to 40 years, and cost an estimated $15 billion.

Many nations reacted by scaling back their nuclear ambitions. Germany led the way, announcing that by 2022, all 17 of its nuclear reactors will be shut down. Those reactors, according to the World Nuclear Association, generated 133 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or 28.4 percent of the country's electricity.

We've been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. It is creating a layer of intelligence that anyone can mine in Web searches and that content creators can use to hone their services.

This is happening more readily because sharing our opinions and photos and status updates online isn't just a stand-alone application anymore—it's now an activity embedded into other things. If you're reading an article online and want to recommend it, you don't have to click over to Facebook to tell your friends you liked it; now that more and more sites are connecting themselves to Facebook's "Open Graph," you can register your approval on Facebook directly from the article's page. This means that your friends can be guided to it when they show up at the same site. Google launched something similar this year, so that you might see certain search results higher if they've been recommended by friends. That was just part of Google's efforts to improve its grasp on social networking this year. After failing last year to gain traction with a Twitter-like network called Buzz, the search giant rolled out Google+, a service that embeds information sharing into many of Google's services.

Will 2011 be remembered as the year that, as the world's population hit 7 billion and problems in our economic model became increasingly apparent, we began figuring out how to transform the global economy to green growth?  I certainly hope so.

A green economy, as defined by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is one that "results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities."  An economy that works better for both people and the planet - it almost sounds too good to be true. But this year, the ideas of green economy and green growth became the subject of much buzz that has the potential to turn into action starting in 2012.

The former chief of advanced manufacturing for Rockwell Collins has been named CEO of the new Iowa Innovation Corporation.

The council elected Jack Harris of Cedar Rapids president and CEO at its meeting last week, at which it completed its organizational process. Harris was director of advanced manufacturing for Rockwell Collins until his recent retirement.

This year's crop of healthcare buzzwords and catchphrases includes a handful of terms that are really oxymorons. By oxymoron, of course, we mean one of the words or phrases in the expression contradicts the rest. But if you think about it, that's the very theme of health reform today.

Innovators are looking at their systems and turning them upside down, contradicting old assumptions and turning volume-based care and payment systems into long-term wellness programs. Payment systems are now based on quality metrics and accountability for months and years after the initial visit.

Where is Latin America on the world map of innovation excellence? According to INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index, the whole region is pretty much nowhere. The bleak news from the 2011 index, published about 6 months ago, is that only Chile made it into the top 40 (at number 38). Costa Rica and Brazil followed, at numbers 45 and 47 respectively. Then came Argentina, ranked at 58, and Uruguay at 64. Colombia, Paraguay and Panama were all ranked in the 70s, Mexico, Peru and Guatemala in the 80s, El Salvador, Ecuador and Honduras in the 90s, and finally Venezuela came in at 102, Nicaragua at 110 and Bolivia at 112, which puts these last three economies almost on a par with countries like Swaziland, Tanzania, Rwanda, Cambodia and Madagascar.

Meet the Raspberry Pi — a bare-bones computer the size of a flash drive that costs $25.

Yes, it's real. And it's coming out next month, according to a new blog post by its developers on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website.

This little guy runs a stripped down version of Linux, an open-source operating system. Here are the specs:

• 700-megahertz processor (the iPhone has a 1-gigahertz processor)
• 128 megabytes of RAM (the iPhone has 512MB)
• SD Card slot for storage
• USB port
• HDMI Port

A huge health-care company like Johnson & Johnson requires a steady stream of innovation, but that's getting harder and harder to create. So the 125-year-old company is getting more aggressive at mining ideas from outside. It's seeking out very early ventures that it once would have considered far too risky and seeding them with money or dishing out advice on how to nudge untested ideas out of the laboratory.

Its accelerator program for small and high-risk startups, known as RedScript Ventures, was launched in 2009 and was named for J&J's red cursive logo. If J&J has invested in a startup or is considering buying it, RedScript tries to speed up its progress by consulting with the startup on anything from clinical trials to the economics of medical devices.

In a recent international conference in Istanbul, Usama Fayyad, Executive Chairman of the Jordan-based Oasis500 business accelerator, said: "It is not about creating jobs. It is about creating new companies." The simple concept and the explanation that followed made me realize: Usama, along with many others in the Middle East and North Africa facing a monumental challenge of unemployment, understands something that we in Washington are still struggling with: the solution to our unemployment challenge will not come from existing large companies hiring more employees. Rather, it will come from the creation of new small and medium businesses. While this concept seems obvious, it bears repeating.

Small and medium businesses (fewer than 500 employees) account for 52 percent of all U.S. workers. Small firms accounted for 65 percent (or 9.8 million) of the 15 million net new jobs created between 1993 and 2009 in the United States. No doubt, the sentiment expressed in Istanbul holds true throughout the rest of the world.

Using computer programs and mathematical formulas, Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and Steve H. Hanke, an applied economist in the Whiting School of Engineering, have created a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity.

Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, for instance, if Christmas fell on a Sunday in 2012 (and it would), it would also fall on a Sunday in 2013, 2014 and beyond. In addition, under the new calendar, the rhyme “30 days hath September, April, June and November,” would no longer apply, because September would have 31 days, as would March, June and December. All the rest would have 30. (Try creating a rhyme using that.)

I don’t read a lot of business books. (Actually, I never read them.) But I do read the lists of the best-selling business books. Those lists give you a lot of insight into the current trendy areas for leadership and strategy. That’s a good reason to run in the opposite direction. Fast.

These best-sellers all have jazzy titles like “What Would Lincoln Do” and “The Kindergarten Test: If A Five Year Old Can’t Understand Your Plan, Start Over.”

I made all those up, but you get the point. At Conduit, our 7-year-old Israeli startup, we don’t necessarily do things by the book.

We offer publishers mobile apps and web apps; social media connectors; toolbars and notification alerts--all designed to give publishers an ongoing presence in the digital lives of their users. Right now, publishers are reaching more than 250 million individual users through our products.

2011 was a huge year for infographic design. Large companies embraced data renderings as a business strategy like never before, whether it was to promote their brand (GE) or bolster their bottom line (the New York Times). Nowhere was that more evident than at Facebook. Timeline, the site’s most ambitious redesign to date, brought the central tenet of data viz--organizing unwieldy bits and bobs into a compelling, visual narrative--to millions of people around the world.

As infographics go mainstream, infographic designers grow bolder. Some of the most tantalizing projects we came across this past year stretched our understanding of what a data visualization can be: It can be a set of interactive commuter-train maps plotted not according to distance but time. It can be a metaphorical chart of how water flows from the source to the consumer. It can be the spikes and dips of the Dow Jones Industrial Average rendered as notes on a musical scale. Infographics have clearly evolved into something greater than just a way to make raw numbers more enticing. They’re a full-blown art form.

In this, our final Top Ten Newsletter of 2011, we've rounded up the most popular articles among readers this year. Read them today and join the conversation.

1. STRATEGY Have you tested your strategy lately? Ten timeless tests can help you kick the tires on your strategy, and kick up the level of strategic dialogue throughout your company.

2. STRATEGY Seven steps to better brainstorming Most attempts at brainstorming are doomed. To generate better ideas—and boost the odds that your organization will act on them—start by asking better questions.

Smaller regional and metro areas are emerging from amongst the field of usual big-city suspects as desirable locations for companies of all sizes. Our list brings these locations to light by showing how they stack up to the rest of the field when considering 14 highly regarded surveys.

We based our findings on 13 highly regarded location surveys from sources including Forbes, Newgeography, Brookings Metro Monitor, Fast Company, and CNNMoney. We used the findings of the Milken Institute's Best Performing Cities 2010 as the primary criterion. Each of the 100 Leading Locations on our list must appear within the top 100 rankings for large and small cities on Milken's report.

We also considered the results of our own Select Regionals Survey as a criterion to select the 100 locations that made the final cut. This survey, sent to nearly 300 U.S. regions and metros, considered the areas' top three greatest project investments of 2010, unemployment rates, and total capital investment pledged over the past year.

For the second year in a row, Area Development has conducted a survey of a select group of highly respected location consultants who work with a nationwide client base. We asked the consultants to name their top-5 state choices in 12 site selection categories. Here are the top overall states:

States were ranked in each of the 12 site selection categories based on the number of times they were named as a "top-5" choice by the responding consultants. Next, a top-5 state's ranking in each of the 12 categories was assigned a weight in accordance with its position in these individual categories. Based on these total weighted scores, Texas is far and away the consultants' #1 choice for doing business, followed by Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina (with weighted scores only a point apart), and finally Indiana in the #5 spot. Taking the #6–#10 rankings based on weighted scores are Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and — surprisingly — California, in that order.

In 2011, the tech world saw the release of game-changing gadgets including the iPhone 4s, Kindle Fire and iPad 2. But along with the good (and, yes, sometimes, the bad) came the bizarre.

And by bizarre, we mean the weird gadget creations and unexpected Internet sensations that went viral (cue Rebecca Black's "Friday").

Nonetheless, the strangest of the strange in the tech world made headlines by pushing the limits of technology, and this year it felt like there were more than ever.

One of the holy Internet startup commandments lately seems to be “Thou shalt not launch.”  But I launch all the time, and I love it. Why? Because my startup’s most valuable commodity is time. I need to get as much user feedback on my product as I can get – and I need it fast. There are half a dozen legitimate, well-funded competitors in my space with teams that are two to 10 times bigger than mine. If I want to succeed, I don’t have the time to mess around.

Here’s an example. Earlier this year, we launched our Android app and got lots of negative reviews because our pricing strategy didn’t work for the mobile app world. What did we do? We quickly changed our pricing, updated our app and (drumroll, please. . .) turned a lot of those unhappy users into engaged customers.