The Hive tips a hat to the season's unsung heroes whose inventions, from the ornament hook to the fire log to the idiot string, make the holidays suck a little less. Your life would be dark and sad right now if not for the California Cedar Products Company. Never heard of them? They’re the guys who, in 1968, combined wax with 174 tons of shavings from their pencil factory to create the world’s first commercial fire logs.

The fire log--that modest purveyor of Christmas cheer, that wintertime convenience that relegated the axe to a place it’d never been in history, the hipster wall--is one of five seasonal inventions that the Toronto-based branding studio The Hive celebrates in a larky set of holiday greeting cards.

Nobody expects much from the week between Christmas and New Year's. That's why it's the perfect time to make some foundation-level renovations to your schedule, and your career.

Even when Christmas and New Year’s Day arrive on separate weekend days, the working week between them feels short--or at least, short on work. You talk to more voicemail prompts than people, your email notifier is so quiet you actually wish for open-ended inbox killers, and budgets and reports land in an alternate universe that rejoins our own in early January. Great time to open up Hulu in a side window, right?

We’ve all heard the adage, “Follow your passion and the money will come.”

When you’re thinking about starting your own business, this saying might not be very comforting. There are no guarantees of monetary success with entrepreneurial endeavors. In a troubled economy like this one, however, there is really no guarantee when you work for someone else, either. So, if leaving a day job to pursue your entrepreneurial passion seems like a good idea, what’s holding you back?

Likely, many things are. One of the big trip-ups to starting a business is the concept of passion itself. Deeply ingrained in our DNA is the want to do things we love: to tinker, to create, to solve problems, to help others, to build. But what if your passion doesn’t have the potential to rake in a lot of income? Should you still follow your heart and build a business around it? Or, should you abandon your passion and look for entrepreneurial opportunities with bigger income potential?

PRESENTING THE BEST INTERVIEWS OF 2011 ON AMERICAN ENTREPRENEUR RADIO Guests: Bill Strickland, Ray Lane, Robert Shapiro As 2011 winds to a close, join The American Entrepreneur, Ron Morris as we revisit our best interviews from 2011 on American Entrepreneur Radio.

It’s that holiday time, time to look-back with misty eyes at the glories of yesteryear. In our case, at the 11 Hottest Trends of 2011, in what proved to be a vintage year for biofuels. There were IPOs a go-go, a big comeback from biodiesel. The global ethanol fleet has acquired new popularity amongst advanced biofuels developers looking for capital light steel in the ground. Meanwhile, gasification got hot. Seemed like every algae venture headed for Algstralia, and Brazil and the US Navy became everyone’s new best friends.

But it wasn’t all holly-jolly and ho-ho-ho. The long awaited biofuels shakeout began, with the are-they-with-us-or-are-they-not at Qteros, and the keel-over of Range Fuels. Who’s next, we wonder? Meanwhile, alcohol-to-jet fuel technology got hot, in part because oilseed-to-jet is so darn hard to find at scale.

The four states with the nation’s largest biotech clusters showed that they too were not immune to challenges common to most U.S. regions seeking to build their life science presence. Hurdles included a capital squeeze particularly for early-stage biopharmas, the reality of the industry’s international growth, and the need to attract new businesses and retain existing ones.

All four top-tier biotech states—California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Maryland—did, however, find numerous ways to address these challenges. They rolled out new financing programs or tweaked existing ones. In some cases they reached out to regions around the world. In others they identified promising niches within their clusters. Signs of success could be seen in a series of new construction and expansion projects.

There’s a scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — one of my all-time favorite novels — where  the little girl-narrator, Scout, sees pretty white snow flakes falling and assumes the world is ending. She’s never seen snow before, since it’s a very rare occurrence in rural Alabama. The world didn’t end then, and it’s not ending now, but it’s just one more bit of evidence that weather is a very wacky thing.

Unless, like Scout, we’ve never experienced a genuine snowfall, we probably take snow a bit for granted. It’s just another form of precipitation, after all, and we have a pretty solid grasp of that particular cycle. Just for the record, snow is not frozen raindrops; that would be sleet. Under certain conditions, water vapor can condense directly into tiny ice crystals, skipping the raindrop phase altogether, and usually forming the shape of a hexagonal prism (two hexagonal “basal” faces and six rectangular “prism” faces).

So you have an idea that's going to save the world or at the very least alter a small portion of it in a positive way. Congratulations, the trends seem to be in your favor.

Be it environmental, educational, or philanthropic, the rise in "social" entrepreneurship in the past decade has been astounding. In addition, most large-scale corporations have embedded the notion of doing good into their bottom line and most MBA programs now have core classes dedicated to the topic.

Yet, in order to make a potentially game-changing idea a long-standing reality, it is highly recommended that social entrepreneurs look at their business model and ask a very simple question: Could my company be a profitable one?

As storms become more powerful and more damaging, will living on the coasts become simply impossible? Insurance companies might try to price you out before we find out.

More than a month after Hurricane Irene narrowly missed making landfall on Wall Street and pummeled the East Coast with floods, the effects of the storm continue rippling outwards. Congress narrowly avoided a government shutdown over a bitter dispute over FEMA funding after a summer of disasters had drained its accounts. Meanwhile, insurers are potentially facing $5.5 billion in losses, not counting flood damage (which isn’t covered under most homeowner policies) or economic losses stemming from power outages and destroyed roads or rail.

First it was smartphones integrating cameras. Could we be about to see the inverse - cameras integrating smartphone technology? That's the concept being explored by Seattle design company Artefact. They've come up with an intriguing prototype for a camera that incorporates smartphone technology - a.k.a. a SmartCam. Artefact claims that innovation has stalled in the camera industry, that there hasn't been much new in camera devices over the past 10 years. They're aiming to shake up the camera industry and are already talking to camera companies (and others) about implementing their vision. I spoke to Artefact's founders to learn more.

This is the fifth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming - and producing - media is changing with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad, RSS Readers on smartphones and online radio in cars.

What happened to startups in 2011? E-commerce and mobile payments continued to grow, and group buying startup Groupon went public. Facebook, the biggest social network around, expanded in a huge way, announcing Timeline, frictionless sharing and a settlement (finally) with the FTC. It also swallowed up many promising startups, including group messaging service Beluga, social network-enhancing service Friend.ly and software company WhoGlue.

The mixing of social gaming and mobile payments, social network alternatives to Facebook, consumer cloud storage and apps that actually make you feel productive (read: not like you're just wasting more time online) came out on top as just a few of the most important startups of this year.

Spontaneous snapshots. Intimate moments. Unexpected exposures. There was no one formula for this year’s most viral photographs. Most were based on news events, such as the death of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi—but these photos ended up becoming the news themselves. They shocked us. They awed us. They inspired us to feel. But the most powerful feeling was the impulse to share.

The best viral images of 2011 are those we found flooding our email inboxes and Twitter feeds this year. One thing weaves the images together: each photographer netted a once-in-a-lifetime picture. From Royal Wedding mania and a bloodied despot to an utterly unexpected leopard on the loose, photographers both professional and amateur brought us the scenes of unpredictability and chaos that gripped our world over the past 12 months. As shocking as the subject matter is the simplicity of some images. A few came from mobile phones. Most were snapped without a thought of—or time to handle—composition or lighting. One was even taken by a man who would be dead minutes later.

In the national scramble to create jobs, Massachusetts might appear to be at the end of the pipeline. It’s small, cold and snowy, has high taxes and not that many large employers.

It is often here, however, that new industries are created, sometimes by immigrants, college graduates or researchers. And to get started, these entrepreneurs usually depend on investors risking millions willing to bet new ideas will bring profits.

Funds from venture capital companies have helped nurture large companies such as Framingham-based Staples, as well as smaller ones such as Southboro-based software tester uTest, which recently received $17 million in venture capital to expand nationally.

We asked Silicon Valley’s best and brightest venture capitalists to help illuminate which trends will shape the coming year. Their answers may surprise you.

If the venture capital community has anything to do with it, this time next year, you’ll be monitoring your blood pressure with your iPhone, recruiting helpers from the Web to help around the house, and automatically receiving coupons for free coffee at your destination the next time you board a train.

In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship is the engine that is driving jobs creation and stimulating economic growth. We are in the midst of a “second bubble,” that is showing no signs of bursting anytime soon.

In 1897, Dr. Philip O'Hanlon, a coroner's assistant on Manhattan's Upper West Side, was asked by his then eight-year-old daughter, Virginia (1889-1971), whether Santa Claus really existed.

O'Hanlon suggested she write to The Sun, a prominent New York City newspaper at the time, assuring her that "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." He unwittingly gave one of the paper's editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, an opportunity to rise above the simple question and address the philosophical issues behind it.

During this season of massive over-commercialization, you may find it hard to believe there was a time when Christmas was no big deal. There were no stores full of toys, no songs playing 24 hours a day, and no Christmas trees with so many presents under them that they fill most of the room.

In fact, there were no Christmas trees at all. For most of the 2,000 years since the birth of Christ, Christmas was not a special holiday. If it was commemorated at all, it was with a candlelight service at the local church or cathedral and a special dinner at home. And that was pretty much it until the middle of the 19th century, when one man’s novella helped to transform the celebration.

He has been called “the man who invented Christmas.” His name is Charles Dickens. He is the author of a simple story he called A Christmas Carol.

How well did you do with your Christmas shopping this year? Did your daughter's face light up when she unwrapped Elmo? Did you delight your husband with Skyrim?

According to Kevin Ryan, CEO of the online luxury shopping website Gilt Groupe, the best Christmas gifts are personalized. They are either truly personal for the person you are giving it to or "memorable because it is coming from me," the Silicon Alley star told Big Think.

So how do you personalize a gift? In the olden days this might have meant knitting a scarf for your daughter or whittling a toy sword for your son. But why spend time knitting? That's what robots are for. Like the Picaxe Electronic Knitting Machine

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” These words have long been attributed to the Nineteenth Century American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet that didn’t sound like his usual eloquent self.

It turns out that his actual words were different: “If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

But the simplified version has become a popular metaphor about innovation -- and many have taken it quite literally! The mousetrap is the most frequently invented device in American history: the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted over 4,400 patents for new designs of mousetraps; it has rejected thousands more.

What if all that creative energy could be directed at solving some other everyday problems? There is no shortage of challenges. Ironically in our age of technology, hundreds of millions of people -- most of them poor, and a majority of women -- are still toiling away in tasks where simple machines or devices could reduce their daily drudgery.

Well first don't be good, always be great--if you can't be great, be lucky--and if you can't be lucky then get out of the kitchen and let someone great cook instead!

A few years ago I pitched an IPO to a large institutional investor--now many people say that bankers are dumb--actually they aren’t, they just like looking at things simply. In fact really good operational CEOs succeed because they can break complex problems down into simple forms and make clear decisions. This is a lot like good bankers--which is not to say that there aren’t some dumb bankers, in fact I have a list in my head, but it might look a lot like a list of people who said “no” ;-)

So great entrepreneurs have the following characteristics (as distinct from great CEOs, BTW):

1. They make money for everyone around them.