No entrepreneur is without a smartphone or tablet anymore, it seems. In fact, it’s hard to remember what, exactly, we did before we had the ability to stay on top of everything from operations to pitch deck edits on the fly (or in the middle of a family vacation — hey, it happens!). But with the proliferation of “apps” — particularly those targeting business owners and their employees — it’s hard to know which ones are worth the download.

I asked a panel of 13 successful young entrepreneurs the following question:

What was the most useful mobile app for your business in 2012 and why?

As a manager, asking questions can be a powerful means of focusing an employee's thoughts and encouraging him or her to come up with a solution independently. Socrates made the technique famous, allowing his listeners to reason out their own conclusions about life and the nature of things rather than imposing his own philosophy on them.

One experiment you can try is to spend an entire conversation asking only questions, says LeeAnn Renninger, director of professional-development organization LifeLabs. Rather than giving direct advice, phrase your statements as questions to lead your employees to a solution. Ask things like, "What are your thoughts on this so far? What have you tried? What options are you leaning towards?" The answer will often present itself. More: Why the Best Managers Ask the Most Questions

His words were unequivocal, his face somber. To Oprah Winfrey's direct questions about whether he had used banned substances to enhance his athletic performance, Lance Armstrong, seven-time winner of what is considered to be the most grueling sports event in the world, cycling's Tour de France, answered simply, "Yes."

The man who became an American hero of mythic proportions by beating life-threatening cancer, dominating his sport and raising many millions of dollars for cancer sufferers is now, once and for all, life-size.

Along with your promise to yourself to finally get in shape and start saving money, below are 5 “to do” items for your small business, guaranteed to make just about any business more profitable in a new year and beyond:

1. Get Up to Date on Technology

Are your business’s computers and peripherals outdated? Is your company network as secure as it needs to be? Are you still paying for software downloads or discs when you could get the same software cheaper in the cloud on a month-by-month basis?

Now’s the time to do a tech overhaul.

Assess what you have, figure out what you need and determine how to afford it. You don’t have to go for the latest bells and whistles, but you do need to get technology that can serve your business needs now and grow with your business in the year ahead.

People often ask me, “what’s the difference between a venture partner and an entrepreneur in residence (EIR)”?  Patrick Lor joins the iNovia team as an EIR as of this month, so I’ll use Pat’s work with iNovia as a case study to address this question.

Pat has been a venture partner with iNovia for some time. Venture Partners are individuals we work with to expand the areas in which our fund can competently invest. They’re usually repeat entrepreneurs with whom we have longstanding relationships, and are often active angel investors in the areas in which our funds focus. As with Pat, they’re generally also investors in one or more of our funds, which assures an alignment of interest. Most Venture Partners are otherwise fully employed so we need to be judicious with our demand on their available time; this often means including them in diligence with a company only after it has been fully screened. In some cases, our venture partners will invest in companies we’re looking at along-side the fund, and occasionally the companies will leverage their expertise by bringing them onto the board of directors.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 18, 2013 Silicon Valley was a laboratory for technology creative destruction.  Since the 1990's, American technology workers have had to reinvent themselves, go back to school, move to a different industry, create a different occupation, or move away from California. 

Silicon Valley changed forever the global technology paradigms and America's bedrock U.S. Constitutional powers and unlimited economic opportunities. Silicon Valley, once the Valley of Heart's Delight turned into a Gold Rush for lawyers, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, big government politicians, massive construction projects, and technology workers from developing countries replacing America's technologist.

Public companies are safer, more boring, less innovative, and take fewer risks than startups, right? That’s a pretty common perception, but now we have a better picture of precisely how much less innovative companies that go public truly are: 40 percent.

Stanford professor Shai Bernstein tracked almost 2,000 technology companies that went public. After the IPO, companies became more “incremental,” less ambitious … and lost their top inventors and innovators. Mediocre performers, however, stayed behind.

Australia has thriving environment for surfing, tourism, and wildlife. It does not, however, have a vibrant startup ecosystem. The University of Melbourne in Australia is attempting to invigorate the local scene by forming its own accelerator program to support student-run startups.

The Melbourne Accelerator Program is modeled off Standford’s StartX student incubator, which nurtures aspiring entrepreneurs through “experiential education.” MAP also seeks to smooth the journey from idea to market and spur innovation. The first six-month program began in June and included four companies. Participants received $20,000 in funding, mentoring, and office space.

You know that you want to quit your job and that you want to start a startup. You’ve had this desire for quite sometime now and you really must begin.

But you don’t.

You don’t because you’ve got responsibilities. You don’t because you’ve not got the perfect time. You don’t because you don’t have enough cash. You don’t because you procrastinate.

The bottom line is, you don’t because you’re afraid. The rest are all excuses.

Whenever I see the movie "Sideways," I think of all the contacts in my professional network. There’s a touching scene in the film when Miles patiently explains to Maya why he’s so into Pinot. “It's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention …. only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.”

Entrepreneurs are usually highly creative and innovative, but many innovative people are not entrepreneurs. Since it takes a team of people to build a great company, the challenge is to find that small percentage of innovative people, and then nurture the tendency, rather than stifle it.

A while back I read a book titled “The Rudolph Factor,” by Cyndi Laurin and Craig Morningstar, which is all about finding the bright lights that can drive innovation in your business. The story most specifically targets big companies, like Boeing, but the concepts are just as applicable to a startup with one or more employees.

The number of startups getting seed funding in 2012 jumped by 65% over the previous year to a total of 1749, according to a recent report by CB Insights. “Seed investments” are early stage financings (typically less than $1.5 million) made by either Angels or venture capitalists, or both. This is great evidence that the recession drag on funding new startups is behind us.

In another report more specifically on Venture Capital Activity for 2012, CB Insights noted relatively flat but still healthy funding levels, compared to the previous year (down in total dollars by 7.5%, but up in total deals by 7%). Thus the venture capital industry isn’t dead yet, despite all the rumors, and more startups are getting money, even at Series A and later levels.

After rising in 2011, U.S. venture capital investment fell 15% last year.

Taken at face value, that’s bad news for startups. But what does it really mean?

VentureSource The $29.7 billion invested in 2012 was slightly ahead of 2010, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. And the $35.1 billion invested in 2011 was the most since 2001, as the tech boom took its final gasps. Since then, venture investment has stayed in a range of about $20 billion to $35 billion a year.

Nominate an innovator whose work is improving the lot of poor and vulnerable people.

New Year’s Eve of 2012 came and went this year as it does every year. Some partied. Some slept. But for those of us who are paying attention to the world of equity crowdfunding, Dec. 31, 2012 was supposed to be a day of reckoning. But it wasn’t. President Barack Obama signed the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act on April 5, 2012. The legislation required the SEC to issue final regulations regarding the crowdfunding portion of the JOBS Act within 270 days of the law’s enactment — by Dec. 31, 2012. The SEC missed this deadline and isn’t even close to issuing those final regulations. Without them, equity crowdfunding remains illegal.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) a number of companies showed wares developed using the crowdfunding finance model popularized by Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and a variety of other firms.  Some of these devices were recently reviewed in another Forbes article and include:

Two watches: the Pebble and ConnectedDevice’s COOKOO, A minimalist home phone by UrbanHello, The Turtle Shell line of loudspeakers by Outdoor Technology, Robots designed to look like the Android mascot by Reality Robotics,

With the rising popularity of mobile health app and mobile health use, marketers are keen to know who it is that is using these digital tools to monitor their health. The infographic below, courtesy of Indus Net Technologies, provides data not only about the growing enthusiasm for mobile apps, but also who is most likely to download a health app and what is the profile of an average mobile health user. (The data comes from mhealthshare.)

So health marketers listen up. The average age of a mobile health user is 35 and a majority of them (54 percent) are male. A whopping 87 percent of them own a smartphone and of those, 33 percent own an iPhone. Another huge majority — 85 percent — use social media for health and 61 percent have downloaded an mhealth app.

A new report from advertising giant McCann reveals several insights on shifting attitudes toward health from an attitude shift away from doctors having the biggest impact on wellness to a stronger sense of personal responsibility. It also highlighted the role of data and medtech in our lives.

New wellness ecosystem: There is a shift under way from the doctor being central to our wellness to ourselves. Personal responsibility seems to be a growing mantra. And although we’re not exactly fending for ourselves in the near future, doctors will be only one aspect of our wellness. Pharmacists will play a bigger role; so will technology, from online diagnostic tools to healthcare social media.

There was some good news but a lot of bad news for death rates in the US compared with other industrialized, high income countries in a study of 17 industrialized countries. Americans are more likely to die younger and have higher rates of diseases and injuries compared with 16 other countries including Japan, Canada, Australia and many European nations, according to a report from the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine.

Even Americans with health insurance, college educations, higher incomes and healthy behaviors seem to be sicker than people fitting this description in other countries. The U.S. ranks at or near the bottom in nine health areas including: infant mortality and low birth weight; injuries and homicides; teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections; prevalence of HIV and AIDS; drug-related deaths; obesity and diabetes; heart disease; chronic lung disease; and disability.