Walk through Home Care Assistance's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters and you’ll find an energetic group of people, most of them in their 20s and 30s, talking social-media campaigns and brainstorming ways to improve the user experience. While their peers are working on the newest app or web platform, this crew is focused on innovating a different area altogether -- home care for seniors.

The company was founded in 2002 by two clinical psychologists, Jim and Kathy Johnson. After struggling to find quality care for Kathy’s parents, the husband and wife duo created their own model for placing part-time and full-time caregivers in seniors’ homes.

A recent National Science Foundation (NSF) survey showed R&D spending at universities increased 6.3% between FY 2010 and FY 2011. This increase included $4.2 billion in expenditures funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), or 10.2% of the federally funded R&D expenditures for FY 2011. Fields with increases of more than 10% between FY 2010 and FY 2011 included atmospheric sciences, economics research, and chemical engineering, among others.

For updates on the federal research and development budget for FY 2013 and the recently released AAAS sequestration report, please visit the AAAS R&D Budget and Policy website.

In 2013, think inside the box and give your staff these precious gifts to drive innovation forward:

1. Give them Hope: Hope is defined as a positive motivational belief in one's future; the feeling that what is wanted can be had; that events will turn out for the best. Without hope, tasks such as innovating become difficult if not impossible. Researcher Armenio Rego says, "Hope is important for innovation at work because creativity requires challenging the status quo and a willingness to try and possibly fail.  It requires some level of internal, sustaining force that pushes individuals to persevere in the face of challenges inherent to creative work."

2. Give them Voice: Giving your employees a voice in matters boosts their creativity. Research shows that, over time, procedural fairness (giving people the opportunity to express their views) has a positive maintaining effect on creativity whereas stifling their views decreases creativity. Be consistent over time.  Don't let distractions or a crisis cause you to change the rules. Give them a chance to speak about anything related to the innovation challenges you face - focus, methodology, budget allocation, team formation, and so on.  Most importantly, let them speak about the nature and value of their own ideas.

One basic market trend—consumers’ rapidly shifting attention to mobile devices—forced many Web, software, and hardware companies to take big risks this year.

Facebook’s IPO in May should have marked a triumph for its hoodie-wearing CEO, who made social networking a dominant technology on the Web.

But now Facebook users are rapidly shifting their attention to mobile devices, and the company’s uncertain business model for those smaller screens has required it to devise new ways to make money. Its $1 billion purchase of the popular mobile photo network Instagram underscored the business significance of these shifts.

Mumbai: Early-stage transactions rose to a three-year high in 2012 on the back of increasing angel and seed deals, despite weak investment sentiment. In fact, angels and seed funds emerged as the key backers of early-stage companies in 2012 as venture capital investors directed their attention to transactions valued larger than their typical sweet spot of $2 million to $4 million. There have been 156 angel and seed investments worth $66 million this year so far, compared with 78 such deals worth $24 million in 2011 and 32 deals worth $14 million in 2010, according to estimates by VCCEdge, an investment tracker.

2012 has been an amazing year in technology.

We’ve seen the clash of titans in mobile as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released new phones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. We’ve seen a single network connect over a billion people worldwide. We’ve seen the once-great mobile company of the far European north forced to hawk its headquarters to raise cash. And we’ve seen social media move from cutting-edge to mainstream as the Obama campaign celebrated four more years.

A lot more changed in 2012 than you probably realize. We've gather up a list of thirteen things that you might have used or done in 2011 that you probably didn't have to use or do in 2012.

The rise of Snapchat, an app that allows you to send self-destructing messages, mirrors the rise of Pinterest, a digital scrap book site. Pinterest got big with "normal" people before the tech press and investment class realized it was getting popular. Same with Snapchat. It was popular with teenagers before the technochamber caught on.

The year featured major investments in exciting new technology companies, from business software makers, biofuel farmers--and one troubled electric carmaker.

The past twelve months didn’t offer the rush of new venture capital funding many had hoped for. Indeed, a lack of major acquisitions and the high-profile slumps of Facebook’s and Groupon’s public offerings put a damper on investors’ appetite for venture-funded deals, says Tracy Lefteroff, global managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers venture capital practice. “We didn’t see many deals where venture guys were fighting to get in. You didn’t see that frothy activity.”

There we were, circled around a bachelor party campfire and drunk on keg beer, discussing the viability of using Kickstarter to fund a sex toy startup. My buddy Derk (he goes by Dangerous D at karaoke) had designed and handmade a compact speed controller for small vibrators (pic below). He was selling them at $75 a pop and apparently – I have yet to see or try one – they were getting rave reviews. Dangerous D’s Magic Box, he called it. Another friend and I were passionately trying to convince him to quit his job as a store manager and start a sex toy startup. We were positive, and a bit drunk, that all he needed was a successful Kickstarter campaign. The video would obviously be key.

It was then I knew that 2012 was the year of crowdfunding. It’s a household term now. This year saw the birth of the Pebble Smartwatch, iPhone-powered gTar, OUYA gaming system, and literally tens of thousands of arts, media, and design projects. And those were just on Kickstarter. Other projects turned to Indiegogo, RockThePost, and Quirky. Some startups like Lockitron even went at it alone, conducting their own crowdfunding campaign themselves.

CrowdFunding will lead the way!

The first half of 2013 will be a time when self-assessed delivery, customer and consumer communication and angel experience in quality control and supply chain operations will become key topics.  Governance topics will evolve subsequently by Q3 2013.

2013 will show that the self-administration and fraud prevention software, associations and Best Practices (such created by Scott Purcell of Arctic Island) as part of CFIRA (Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates) have dozens of steps defusing fraud in addition to the double layer policing of SEC and FINRA.  You could also consider hiring the SEC regulations and guidance from the world’s number one rated law firm in the space: Ellenoff, Grossman & Schole law firm in NYC.  Douglas Ellenoff made a considerate personal investment to emerge as the leading law firm on these topics – we have seen him, and no other practicing lawyer, at all CFIRA meetings with the SEC since their first April 20, 2012 meeting.

When it comes to the mobile industry, we talk a lot about new devices and the virtues or detriments of each one. Is the iPhone 5 the best thing ever or does the Samsung Galaxy S 3 blow it out of the water? These questions, while pertinent and fun to talk about, really are ancillary to what makes the mobile industry run.

Why do people buy smartphones and tablets? It is not because they have quad-core processors or super fast LTE connections. People buy mobile devices for what can be done on them. Apps, and the services that run them, are truly the backbone of the mobile industry.

In 2012, the slow recovery dominated both the economic news and the worries of most Americans, but the underlying components of the weak job market were not always fully dissected. In fact, job growth was so paltry in large part because it was so unbalanced. Since the recession ended in June 2009, three key sectors – government, construction and information – that together account for 22 percent of all employment lost more than 1 million jobs. Equally significantly, two of them, government and construction, generally add a disproportionately large share of jobs during a recovery. With government contracting and construction stalled, that did not occur.

As 2012 comes to an end, it seems apropos to make some predictions for 2013 on the record. Trust me, if any of these predictions are demonstrably fulfilled I’ll remind you of my prescience this time next year. Otherwise, we may never speak of these predictions again.

People will continue to confuse the use of the word “social” as used in the disparate senses of social media and social entrepreneurship, which are entirely different things, even though social entrepreneurs depending heavily on social media.

If you are thinking of starting a small business, you might care about potential profits. While your skills as an entrepreneur and the quality of your business idea certainly influence what you will earn, so does the industry in which you operate. In fact, as figures from business data aggregator Sageworks Inc. show, small business profitability varies a lot across industries.

Using its proprietary database of private company financial statements collected from accountants and financial institutions that supply information on their clients, Sageworks’ analysts provided me with a list of the most and least profitable industries in 2011 for businesses with $5 million or less in sales.

As the calendar turns to another year, it’s the perfect time to take stock of your business and make some important changes for an even better year ahead.

Here are five simple things you can do to start the year off right:

1. Retool Your Pricing and Packages

The ideal time to re-evaluate your current pricing and packages is the New Year.

If you’re a solo professional or small business owner, you have undoubtedly realized that no one is responsible for giving yourself a raise but you. Too often, self-employed individuals end up working for the same rate year after year because they’re too busy to evaluate just how much their time is worth.

‘Tis the season to be jolly—and to recap the top stories of the year from Xconomy Boston.

As always, these aren’t necessarily the highest-traffic stories, though in some cases they are. More importantly, they are stories that best represent what we as a staff try to deliver to our readers every day: real stories, features, narratives, Q&As, and news analysis about the people, companies, and trends that are shaping the future of innovation in New England and beyond.

With just a little more ado…let me tell you that our picks for 2012 span the fields of software, mobile, e-commerce, health and fitness, travel, politics, fashion, angel investing, venture capital, talent clusters, big data, drugs, genomics, life sciences, health IT, water, energy, and even a fast underwater ship.

It’s fun to look back at our Web traffic statistics once in a while, because the stories that prove most popular with readers aren’t always the ones we would expect. I wasn’t surprised that our series of stories about Google (looking at Google Transit, Google’s M&A strategy, the Google Lunar X Prize, and the Knowledge Graph) did well, since everyone wants to know what Google was up to. But I was surprised that my rant about Twitter’s crappy new iPad app took off so virally, and that our guide to Bay Area coworking spaces has become such an important resource for local startups.

Below, for your reading (or re-reading) pleasure, is an annotated list of the 20 most-viewed stories from Xconomy San Francisco this year. I’m including a few stories here that were posted to our National page but mainly pertained to events or companies in the Bay Area.

The big not-so-secret in Web publishing is that it’s easy to get sucked into an obsession with getting the most eyeballs possible. With people constantly scanning for interesting things to read, and more outlets than ever, the competition for a good chunk of attention can quickly become tiresome.

We try to avoid chasing that ghost at Xconomy, hewing as much as possible to the mission of writing about things that we think are interesting and important, with a depth of thought and reporting that is not typical for online technology journalism.

Meditations on “infinity” (with apologies for taking liberties in the Holiday spirit)

Les deux infinis 

Infinity has at least two meanings. We sometimes forget that the word is used very differently in math and in science, and we conflate the two.

For the mathematician, infinity is an abstraction with a pure and definite meaning, with some but not all the properties of a number. There is the magic that says that the infinity of even integers is exactly the same as the infinity of all integers, even and odd. More amazing is that the count of all fractional numbers like 1.65 and 3¾ and 0.142857142857142857… is also this same infinity. Yet there are infinitely many different infinities, labeled אo, אl, etc. and in the same sense, each can be demonstrated to be not equal, but “larger” than the one that precedes it.