Entrepreneurs are always in “sell mode”, but that doesn’t mean they need to be BS-artists.  Most entrepreneurs aren’t born liars, but we’re brought up in a system that rewards bad behavior and taking the easy way out by lying instead of being truthful, something that eventually catches up with you.

If you’re an entrepreneur, here are 5 common lies you’ve probably told.

Lie No. 1: “I have no regrets” or “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t do it any differently”.

Conventional wisdom suggests that you should not regret anything.  Highly unlikely if you ask me; the key is how you manage the things you regret and what you do about them: do you let them affect you and cloud your judgment in the future?  Do you dwell on the mistakes you have made or have you learned from your errors and ensure to avoid them in the future?

The U.S. and China currently have the world’s largest potential smartphone and tablet markets, but many other countries are ripe for wider smart-device adoption in 2012.

Flurry, a mobile analytics company, has crunched numbers from the past month to paint a picture of what the global smart-device market looks like now, and where it’s headed next. It identified what smart-device markets have the most potential for future revenue, making them fertile ground for everyone from equipment manufactures to app developers.

The postdoctoral years are a critical time in a budding scientist’s career. Decades ago, doing a postdoc was a voluntary option for new PhDs who were not quite ready to commit to a permanent position. Now postdoctoral positions are required training for the next generation of scientific leaders in academia and industry.

According to Peter Peters, founder of the Postdoc Career Development Initiative, based in the Netherlands, the main concerns plaguing today’s postdocs are landing a permanent position after 10-plus years of training and adjusting to the responsibilities of running a lab.

Drug development does not evoke thoughts of inspirational film making. The process is long, expensive and fraught with failures along the way. Come to think of it, that description rings true for a number of movies as well.

Pharmas have figured prominently in many movies, more often than not coming off as the bad guy. Big Pharma has a thick skin. That’s needed in order to deal with the pressures from Wall Street, scrutiny from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and criticism from dissatisfied patients. But some movies might cut a little too close to the bone for pharmas’ comfort.

Here’s a list of the top movies that Big Pharma loves to hate. I’m sure I’ve missed a movie or two but I’m also pretty sure that the pharma depictions in these movies have struck a nerve with a pharma executive.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a business, 2012 is a great year to make it happen. And if you’re already in business for yourself, you can make 2012 the year you take it to the next level. You might think that the economy being in the dumps will be an obstacle and make starting a business more risky, but when you compare the risk of entrepreneurship with the risks of having a job these days, you’ll find that you have more control over your future as an entrepreneur.

So how can you make sure your entrepreneurial plans pay off? There are 5 important things I think you need to do to find success as an entrepreneur:

1. Do what You Love If you take just one piece of advice about starting a business, this should be it. If you’re doing something you love – something you’re passionate about – nothing can stop you. Challenges that all entrepreneurs face (like poor economic conditions and unexpected changes in the market) will be small speed bumps rather than brick walls, if you’re doing what you love to do and making a living at it.

We have spent a year looking at the most influential business books and authors. Here is a complete syllabus for an education in being a leader. Which are your favorites? And which leadership classics did we miss?

Susan Desmond-Hellmann, chancellor of UCSF, identifies traits that appear over and over again in successful entrepreneurs. The first trait is a relentless tenacity mixed with optimism, a quality she describes as being like "a dog on a bone." The other critical trait is not being afraid to be embarrassed. According to Desmond-Hellmann, risk-taking entrepreneurs make choices others may find embarrassing, but entrepreneurs must continue to follow their own path.

As people lurch into the New Year vowing to lose their holiday pounds, my hunch is millions of consumers will be aided by a few fitness devices and apps scored this holiday season — all designed to help them count their steps, calories, sleep and other personal metrics. But in the emerging world of connected wellness tools will newly aware consumers be using apps or devices? Or does it even matter, since the service is king?

We’ve called it the rise of the quantified self, as mobile devices and an always-on connection meet cheap sensors that can connect back to the web. Dedicated devices such as the Body Bugg or the FitBit (see disclosure) take advantage of sensors to track movement and even sleep, and then send data back to a web-based portal. On the Apple-only app side, iTreadmill, Lose it, The Eatery and others help with tracking steps, making sure you eat well and other wellness goals. The Android market has MealSnap and RunKeeper, while blending the two are dedicated products such as the Nike+ system that links a physical sensor to a variety of apps such as RunKeeper.

YouTube may have already picked the biggest videos to hit the web this year, but there’s a host of great videos that didn’t make the cut. From vigilante cyclists to deadpan taxidermists to obligatory cute kittens, the web was full of strange, funny, sad and infuriating events and characters.

We decided to cap off the year with a list of 10 viral videos we especially liked. While you’ve probably seen at least half of these, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen them all. In trying to define “viral,” we’ve decided not to count any stunningly made professional videos. No music videos starring the notorious Rebecca Black or mega-popular Katy Perry, no crazy views of Earth from space and no stunning visions of the future are in the mix here.

Watching an entrepreneur fail is sad, but watching them fail from a lack of nerve is tragic.

Excitement

At the beginning of this year Bob, one of my ex-students was in entrepreneurial heaven. He had an idea for a new class of enterprise software insight-as-a-service based on big data web analytics as a Cloud and SaaS (Software As a Service) application.

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery, iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments.

If you’re asking which startup to build, not whether to build, you probably have several half-baked ideas and don’t know which one to devote yourself to. Or you have no idea at all.

Max Levchin and Peter Thiel would tell you innovation is dead and that you should go work on real, world-changing, notable problems. They say too many young companies are solving small problems and creating features. TechCrunch writer Rip Empson would ask you to not build a copycat app. Paul Graham of Y Combinator would tell you to check out instead his list of 30 startup ideas he’s looking to fund.

Not everyone is cut out to work for a startup. It involves a lot of hustling, a lot of nail-biting, pizza-eating, sleeping at your desk, tears, failure, confusion, and on and on. And wearing your startup’s t-shirt. All the time. That being said, it can also be extremely rewarding and, with all the cash flying around Silicon Valley (and beyond), aspiring entrepreneurs are flocking to startups.

So, say you’re one of those people who is champing at the bit to go work for a startup, what do you do next? Well, you can try this, or in the event you’re not quite ready to grow a mustache, you can check out things startups should know when looking for top talent, and, hey, Justin Kan has written about how to get a job at a startup even if you don’t have a lot of experience. But what about the programmers and developers out there looking to work at startup? Is no one thinking about them?!?

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One of the best things any investor can do is to pull back from the day to day of getting pitches and think about high level trends.  What areas are going to change?  What areas need to be disrupted?  What types of things might happen in 2012, as opposed to needing another 3-5 years to come to fruition.

The thing you need to be careful of, however, is only paying attention to big trends, because you never know when you're thinking big data and you miss the awesome direct sales jewelry company.

That aside, here are ten areas I think you'll see some interesting things happening in 2012...

Healthbox, an innovative new program aimed at accelerating the growth of healthcare startups, announced today its inaugural class of 10 entrepreneurial teams. The 3-month program, which launches January 9th, will provide each of the 10 companies with critical resources that promote rapid development, including access to an extensive mentor network, structured forums led by business experts, a collaborative workspace, and $50,000 in seed capital. The program culminates in an organized Investor Day where participants will present their businesses to a targeted group of investors.

"We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with 10 passionate teams that represent some of the best entrepreneurial talent in healthcare. Their business ideas are spurring new ways of thinking and collaborating in the industry. Healthbox is committed to advancing their development and helping to bring sustainable innovation into the marketplace," says founder Nina Nashif.

The founders of an ASU student startup, called G3Box, have been named "College Entrepreneurs of the Year for 2011" by Entrepreneur Magazine.

"The College Entrepreneur of the Year" award is one of three awards bestowed by the magazine on the nation’s top entrepreneurs of the last year. The magazine received thousands of entries for the competition and then selected the top five entries in each award category as finalists. The finalists were then announced to the general public who voted for their top picks for each award. G3Box received votes from all over the world, including Ireland and Russia. A judging panel made the final decision.

SBA Gems, a new software application for smartphones and tablets that lets small-business owners and entrepreneurs quickly and efficiently find loans, grants and other useful resources, took first-place honors in a nationwide app-development competition sponsored by the Small Business Administration.  The Android app also won developer Somesh Kumar a $5,000 first-place prize.

The SBA's "Apps for Entrepreneurs Challenge," was a competition for software developers to build new and useful free tools for small businesses that entrepreneurs can access through their smartphones or tablets to search federal, state and local databases for vital information. Seven winners were named.

It’s early October in New York City and Roy Pereira is standing in the NHL Powered by Reebok store on 6th Avenue at 47th Street, just below a fairly low-tech sign scrolling updated preseason news about the Winnipeg Jets. On this night, the store is closed for a private party sponsored by the Maple Leaf Digital Lounge, an industry-led initiative founded last year and dedicated to helping Canadian entrepreneurs promote their businesses outside of Canada.

The event is part of New York’s sprawling Advertising Week conference, billed by its organizers as “the world’s premier annual gathering of marketing and communications leaders.” So it’s the perfect place, really, for digital start-ups and their founders to rub shoulders with potential clients, and perhaps even potential investors, here among pricey NHL jerseys, hats and other merchandise. Imagine a gathering of the world’s best salespeople, marketers and idea generators in a single place, each one aggressively pitching his or her best idea, and you can get a sense of the atmosphere. At one point, a very pleasant but slightly overenthusiastic pitchman nearly bodychecks me into a rack of Sidney Crosby jerseys. For a novice salesperson – a reporter, say – it can be intimidating.

Growing up, we Gen Y’ers ate tie-dyed bread and purple ketchup. We shopped exclusively at Wal-Mart. Gas was cheap, and the economy was good. We never bought organic food; much less, organic clothing. As kids, “things” came in and out of our lives quickly — purchased, used up, and thrown out.

Put simply, our parents’ generation did not collectively ask questions. Like where products came from, how they were made, and what the human and environmental repercussions were.

And so, entrepreneurs in the 90’s had it easy. No one flinched at cheap production in China. Free trade was a hot topic, but fair trade was rarely discussed. America at large was feeding kids, like us, purple ketchup — and making billions from the consumption of poorly-made, unhealthy, and even toxic products.

What stories dominated the green GigaOM clicks in 2011? This year was filled with smart thermostats, a dream of Apple getting into solar, the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the efficiency of cloud computing, Google’s green data centers and Tesla’s Model S.

So starting with #10 and running through to #1, here’s our top 10 green GigaOM stories of the year:

10). 25 battery breakthroughs for gadgets, electric cars & the grid: Innovation for batteries is struggling when compared to the progress of innovation in IT. Which is a big bummer because batteries are the pain point for mobile devices, wireless computing, and electric cars. These are 25 researchers and startups that are trying – hard!

Inevitably, year-end lists invite plenty of debate and criticism, and Scientific American's is no exception. Certainly, we could have included the discovery of new worlds beyond our solar system, including Kepler 22 b, an exoplanet in the "Goldilocks" zone of habitability, as well as the first known Earth-size exoplanets. Or noted the accumulating evidence suggesting that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to retrieve natural gas is likely to contaminate water supplies. (Final New York State regulations, expected in mid-2012, could determine the future of fracking in the U.S.)

Other candidates included the report of a new target against HIV, in which a doorway to infection (the so-called CCR5 receptor on immune cells) is blocked; the demonstration (using diamonds) that quantum entanglement can occur in everyday objects; and the MESSENGER spacecraft's photos of the planet Mercury, the first ever taken from orbit.