Entrepreneurs are in for some big changes in 2013. That's the prediction of Ingrid Vanderveldt, Dell's "entrepreneur in residence" who works with the Dell Center for Entrepreneurs. Here are the rest of Vanderveldt's predictions for this year.

Alternative financing strategies: Most businesses are still bootstrapping, but are encouraged by alternative funding options as more borrowers and lenders are getting creative. Crowdfunding (i.e. Kickstarter), peer-to-peer lending sites and Dell Innovators Credit Fund are just a few examples of innovative funding tools increasingly available to business leaders.

Investors may have pumped 45 percent more money into digital health companies in 2012 than they did in 2011, but new data shows most of them are either still apprehensive or haven’t yet found the kind of deals they’re looking for.

Rock Health’s year-in-review report on digital health investing delivers insights about investors’ interests in the sector that are optimistic yet laced with buts.

Digital health companies raised $1.4 billion in 2012 compared to $968 million in 2011. But, more than 20 percent of that was raised in conjunction with the five biggest deals of the year (for Castlight Health, GoHealth, Care.com, 23andMe and Best Doctors).

In the deal to eliminate the fiscal cliff that passed Congress last week, capital gains tax relief was given to some investment groups that could help bolster Nashville's investments in startup companies. The American Taxpayer Relief Act includes a 100 percent exemption on Qualified Small Business Stock through 2013 and applies retroactively to investments made in 2012, addressing the expiration of the exemption in 2011, according to Angel Capital Association, a trade association of angel groups and private investors investing in high-growth, early stage ventures.

New Enterprise Associates raised the most money of any venture capital firm in 2012. New Enterprise, headquartered in Chevy Chase and has a Timonium office, raised $2.6 billion last year. That topped the 182 venture capital firms that raised a total of $20.6 billion in 2012, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. That dollar figure was up 10 percent from 2011. Meanwhile, Chevy Chase’s Global Environment Fund also made the list, raising $18.9 million in 2012.

In the world of big pharmaceutical companies, there exists a void that is the transition phase between promising academic laboratory discovery and the validation of a particular compound’s commercial viability – the so-called “Valley of Death.” This gap exists due to the high amount of risk associated with testing the feasibility of a product so early in the pipeline, which naturally places it far from an exit. This gap has long been an issue for the industry at large, because even though many investors don’t wish to invest so early, avoiding it leads to a diminished pool of strong future investment opportunities, and, on a larger scale, limits how many compounds will successfully make it to market. This is not due to shortcomings in trials, but rather, because of a pure shortage in capital. Most of the large pools of capital, especially venture capital, are no longer making allocations in this area. And despite the fact that large pharmaceutical companies are beginning to invest earlier and earlier in the pipeline, they can’t bridge the whole valley on their own

As work weeks get longer each year and free time seems to slip away quicker than ever, it's essential to make the most of time we actually have at least some control over: the weekend. Time management expert Laura Vanderkam recently came out with a new e-Book, What The Most Successful People Do On The Weekend.

In 2006, as an executive at Yahoo! I wrote an internal memo outlining my observations about the state of the company and suggesting some dramatic remedies for getting it back on track. The primary point was that the company lacked a cohesive vision and I used the metaphor of spreading peanut butter to describe how Yahoo! was investing too thinly in too many different areas.

Some months later the memo was leaked to the Wall Street Journal and for better or worse, “the Peanut Butter Manifesto” has followed me ever since. Its essence even lives on at Yahoo! in new CEO Marissa Mayer’s PB&J program—one of the many important steps she’s taking to rebuild a great company.

Hey, remember back when mobile was the next big thing? These days, it’s just the thing. If you don’t have a mobile strategy, you might as well not have a strategy at all. As the space evolves though, so does the way we use mobile devices. Think about it, what was once just a means of calling people in an emergency is now your diary, calculator, gaming centre and means of accessing the internet. With that in mind MEF, the global community for mobile content and commerce, has unveiled its predictions for the path mobile is likely to take over the next few months.

Last year I predicted that social media would lose its sizzle. Since then, the bubble has burst for companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. The tablet computer market, on the other hand, is booming, voice recognition is becoming a standard feature in new computing devices, and there have been, as I alluded to in 2012, notable cloud-computing failures and security breaches in the past year.

I am glad to have been wrong about LinkedIn. It is a great company with a stellar management team. Also, tablet prices haven’t quite hit the $100 mark in the U.S., as I predicted they would. But I still anticipate they will, and likely very soon.

According to a new report from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), U.S. venture capital firms raised $20.6 billion from 182 funds during full year 2012.

That’s a nearly 3-percent drop by number of funds compared to full year 2011, and a much steeper 18-percent decline compared to 2008.

That said, the $20.6 billion raised in 2012 exceeds the total of capital raised by U.S. VC firms in the three years prior. Only 2008 saw $25,6 billion raised, but again, that was from way more funds – namely 215.

Healthcare accelerators kept growing in 2012, helping startups find investors and refine elevator pitches. We asked a few of these startups what their plans are for 2013. Here is what they said. — Ryan Luce, president and founder, CorengBiggest challenge in 2013: Staying focused on our key business goals, driving investment, and having fun!

Hope for 2013: Leverage the SBIR grant we received from NIH into matching tools for more conditions, helping more people learn and connect with clinical trials.

Rather than let the New York innovation community have all the fun, patches of startups are sprouting up across the Hudson River in New Jersey. The Garden State’s innovation scene is more diffuse compared with the concentrated activity in Manhattan and Brooklyn. But New Jersey coworking spaces such as JuiceTank Innovation Lab and Cowerks are looking to grow and accommodate help nurture more startups.

The allure of the innovation scene means more communities want in on the startup action. Coworking for technology startups is a big phenomenon across the country — Xconomy’s Guide to Bay Area Coworking Spaces includes listings for 28 coworking operations, several of which have multiple locations. New York rightly gets a lot of attention on the East Coast, but emerging coworking spaces in New Jersey include Mission Fifty in Hoboken, The Co-Working Space in Woodbridge, and C3 Workplace in Sparta. Montclair-based accelerator TechLaunch was formed by a collaboration of entrepreneurs, Montclair State University, and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority. The Tigerlabs entrepreneurship campus in Princeton offers coworking space, accelerator programs, and seed capital.

Everyone can recognize a great manager a mile away, so why is it so hard to find one? We all remember a few that are “legends in their own mind”, but that doesn’t do it. In fact, the clue here is that the view in your mind is the only one that matters, rather than the other way around.

Almost every one of us in business can remember that one special manager in their career who exemplifies the norm, who commanded our respect, and treated us like a friend, even in the toughest of personal or business crises.

Last night Amy and I watched the movie Something Ventured: Risk, Reward, and the Original Venture Capitalists. This was my reward (I got to choose) since she watched both football games yesterday (and today). We have a 15 minute and 30 minute rule on any movie – after 15 minutes the chooser asks “still into this movie?” If the answer is no, we stop. This question gets asked by the chooser again after 30 minutes. If the answer is yes, we go for the duration, even if someone falls asleep. For example, after 15 minutes the other day, Amy said “still in” on my choice of The Hebrew Hammer. After 30 minutes, we were both “no’s” and that was the end of that.

I figured Amy would veto Something Ventured after 15 minutes. I’d heard from a number of VC friends that it was really good, but the idea of watching a documentary on the history of the creation of the venture capital industry doesn’t sound like an awesome Saturday night movie choice. But after about ten minutes, Amy said, “Wow – this is great!”

We've told you before that smartphones and PCs are becoming more human, with their ability to see (camera) hear (phone) and feel (gyro/accelerometer). Now, a tiny San Francisco startup, Adamant Technologies, is trying  to give your iPhone the senses of smell and taste, too. The company has created a computer chip that works with a bunch of tiny sensors that "can take the sense of smell and taste and digitize them," explains Sam Khamis, Adamant's founder and CEO.

It's impossible to get every last drop out of a bottle, whether it contains ketchup, mustard or jelly. Until now. Five MIT students: Dave Smith, Rajeev Dhiman, Adam Paxson, Brian Solomon, and Chris Love, along with their professor, Kripa Varanasi, have made a major breakthrough.  Last spring, they invented LiquiGlide, an edible, plant-based coating that can be placed on any surface, from glass to ceramics. Liquid-based products that encounter the surfaces will slip right off, whether it's ketchup in a bottle or rain on a jacket.

Investment Bankers have traditionally been the gatekeepers of access to the capital markets.  It is time for crowdfunding to play a greater role.

The caliber of underwriting firm is often an indication of the quality of the issuing company. The investment banks are paid well for that implicit endorsement, but that puts their reputations on the line. Their success is tied to the execution, after market performance and perception of the deals they complete –so they had better be selective and smart.

Five companies are slugging it out in what may be the most competitive and unique business battle of all time. It is larger in scale with more at stake than battles in other industries including transportation, energy, and finance.

More remarkable is how different the combatants are from one another.  Instead of similar companies competing (Toyota versus General Motors, for example), these companies hail from different business bases: an electronics manufacturer, a lifestyle computing company, an online retailer, a search engine, and a social network.  In order: Samsung, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.  I call them the Fabulous Five.

The fiscal cliff deal reached over the New Year's holiday in Washington wasn't the political grand bargain envisioned just after the November elections. In fact, it was more of a stopgap measure that kept federal income tax hikes from falling on middle-class taxpayers and which called a two-month timeout on automatic spending cuts.

Still to come: Debate over across-the-board federal spending cuts that were slated to take place Jan. 1, a decision on whether to raise the nation's debt limit, pursuit of comprehensive tax reform and hard questions about how to pay for major entitlement programs such as Medicare.

In the latest issue of Wired, the article Better than Human predicts that remarkably intelligent robots are poised to wheel, scamper, or perhaps hover into your workplace and wrestle the keyboard or pen from your puny and incompetent humanoid hand. That’s right, the machines have figured out how to do your job and they’re tired of you messing it up. It’s an entertaining read, and there are some threads of logic to be found, but it’s mostly unrestrained futurism.

The article argues that robotics and AI have reached an “inflection point” that will rapidly change the usefulness of machines, setting them on course to take over every job that is currently done by a human by the end of this century. But, in a neat and reassuring twist of logic—based, evidently, on the lesson of the Industrial Revolution—the piece also concludes that this technological revolution will create just as many new jobs as it destroys. So there’s no need to cancel your magazine subscription and head for the hills with a shotgun. We and our robot coworkers will live happily ever after, it seems.