This was Facebook’s year. The social network made its debut on the public market, and it crossed the unprecedented one-billion-users mark. For many of the social network’s earliest employees, it was the stuff dreams are made of.

But so much happened to make those two dreams into realities. And the realities weren’t always all they were cracked up to be: The initial public offering got off to a painful start. In fact, stock prices for Facebook still haven’t recovered. And a billion users means a billion opportunities for bullying, privacy mishaps, and user data breaches.

Our last SBIR Insider of 2012 brings some clarity on size standard / eligibility issues, Commercialization Readiness Program (CRP) administrative funds, as well as items such as agency compliance with the new rules and regulations. There is also considerable uncertainty due to possible sequestration, "fiscal cliff" compromises, and we have sad news on the passing of another SBIR champion.

Happy 2013! It’s now time to make some changes to your organization. Whether you decide to make a personal resolution or one for the whole company, a purposeful New Year’s resolution can make all the difference for your 2013 success. I spoke to entrepreneurs with unique resolutions to get some inspiration for my own. While the resolutions were all unique, they hit a few key areas.

The Fun Resolutions:

It is important to remember the fun when setting goals for the new year. These entrepreneurs are doing it really well. My Social Cloud is a company that allows you to manage your online life by keeping your passwords and important URLs in the cloud.

Mark Cuban doesn't have much patience for dreamers. "Everyone has ideas, most don't do the work required to get the job done," the billionaire tech entrepreneur wrote this week in a question-and-answer session on social-news site reddit. He was fielding questions about what entrepreneurs need to know when starting a business.

One of his characteristically blunt pieces of advice involved encouraging entrepreneurs to skip business school. "I think an MBA is an absolute waste of money," he told reddit users. "I don't give any advantage to someone in hiring because they have an MBA." In lieu of an expensive graduate degree, Cuban recommends filling your knowledge gaps with free online courses. Last month, Entrepreneur.com mentioned some of these resources, such as those available from Udacity and Coursera, in an article about startup tutoring platform InstaEDU. More: Mark Cuban: What Entrepreneurs Need to Know Before Starting a Business

Franchising has changed dramatically over the last five years. There are more multi-unit and area developers, more high-tech ways to optimize sales and leaner and meaner corporations honed by the recession. At the same time, franchising remains subject to the challenges it has always faced: the fads, the bubbles and the whims of public taste. We can't say for sure how the next year in franchising will shake out, but here are our picks for the trends that will have the biggest impact.

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, committed $5 million in the first venture capital fund offered by Icon Venture Partners, a new firm that will focus on investment in early-stage enterprise technology firms.

The university's $1 billion endowment fund has been invested in the firm's predecessor, Vesbridge Partners, according to support materials for the Dec. 13 meeting of University of Minnesota Board of Regents. The size of investments in Vesbridge's funds could not be learned.

The U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) published a final rule on Thursday that will implement changes to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, such as eligibility criteria that now includes companies that are majority-owned by multiple domestic VCs. The rule is implementing the SBIR/STTR Reauthorization Act, which was signed into law this year and extended the SBIR program through Sept. 30, 2017. The changes take effect on Jan. 28, 2013 (see BioCentury, Oct. 17, 2011).

Most startups dream of attracting a celebrity endorsement, and assume that it will take their startup to the stars. There have been some “famous” successes in this regard, such as Charlie Sheen using Twitter last year to promote Internships.com, as well as some failures, including Airtime, launched early this year as a star studded affair, without the star studded success.

Startups using celebrities is such a hot topic these days that Gary Vaynerchuck, noted author and entrepreneur, has coined a new term “star-ups” for the phenomenon. New books are popping up on the subject of how and when to seek celebrity endorsements, including “Will Work for Shoes,” the latest by Susan J. Ashbrook, who has courted celebrities for twenty years.

Too many entrepreneurs confuse motion with momentum and results. We all know someone who repeatedly tells us how “busy” they are, when it’s hard to see what they get done. Momentum is moving things forward (mass x velocity). Founders or employees in constant motion, but with no momentum, will never get off the ground.

It is true that motion in any direction is often better than no motion at all. But motion without momentum is even less productive than no motion at all. For a more complete discussion of this phenomenon, see the book entitled “Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder than Ever but Accomplishing Less”, by Brent Petersen and Gaylan Neilson.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scott Harrison knows his charity has funded nearly 7,000 clean water projects in some of the poorest areas of the world in the past six years. How many of those wells are still flowing with drinking water months or years later, though? That’s a tough question to answer.

His organization called Charity: Water has funded projects in 20 different countries. It’s committed to spend 100 percent of each donation in the field to help reach some of the 800 million people who don’t have clean water and resort to drinking from swamps, unhealthy ponds or polluted rivers. Organizers send donors photos and GPS coordinates for each water project they pay for.

My co-founder and I both attended Wharton as undergrads, where we “concentrated” in entrepreneurship (in addition to finance, accounting, legal studies and philosophy). We wrote multiple business plans, negotiated the details of term sheets and collaborated on teams vying for theoretical capital within the confines of a semester.

While the skills learned no doubt gave us perspective and provided a structure for entrepreneurial thinking, after two years of living a startup, it’s become apparent to me that studying entrepreneurship was just as abstract — if not more so! — than my studies in philosophy, especially with respect to starting and building a bootstrapped company.

Name: Enloop

One-Liner Pitch: Enloop helps entrepreneurs figure out whether their idea would really make for a good business.

Why It's Taking Off: The online service makes it easier for small and medium-sized companies to write business plans and vet their ideas.

Coming up with a good idea is just the first test for aspiring entrepreneurs; the next big test is figuring out whether that idea is actually a viable business. That's where Enloop comes in.

If you were expecting the Internet to upend TV like it mangled the print media business, you may have noticed by now that things aren't so simple. 

The Web is very good at delivering text and static images, but when it comes to TV-quality video content, it turns out that cable providers are still much better at that. Internet TV has two serious handicaps: content and the user interface. In 2012, the status quo crept forward in both areas, albeit slowly. Next year, TV will continue its gradual evolution toward something completely different from what we grew up with. 

Every day, inside our body, there is a war going on. Microscopic invaders of one kind or another try to make a meal of us, and our immune system fights back, seeking out the invaders and destroying them. One of our body’s most important foot-soldiers in this war is the T cell, a type of white blood cell with receptors that can recognize foreign substances. Like all white blood cells, T cells originate in the bone marrow, but then they migrate to an organ called the thymus (hence the “T” in “T cell”), where they evolve into specialized immune system warriors. Mature T cells, which leave the thymus and circulate around the body, come in different types. One type, the cytotoxic T cell, specializes in attacking and killing cells of the body that are infected by viruses, bacteria, or cancer.

There has been a lot of discussion out there about the Series A crunch, the consumer sector falling out of favor, VCs getting more conservative, the need to focus on revenues instead of users, and so on and so forth.

All of this is going on and the environment is certainly getting tougher for entrepreneurs. As I have said before, we have had the wind mostly at our back for the past seven years and I feel the winds changing on us. They are headwinds not tailwinds right now.

It’s almost 2013, and many seed-funded companies are hoping the New Year will yield a big, fat Series A check. As we all know, and as the recent report from CBInsights reminded us, there is a “seed cliff” that is showing no signs of letting up.

As a seed-stage and first-round investor at Blumberg Capital, I sit right in the middle of this purported “crunch.” We mostly do seed funding, but about a quarter of our investments start with Series A. We see consistent deal flow coming in for both, and we have a number of companies that are looking for follow-on funding. I am spending much of my time these days helping our seed-funded companies with their fundraising strategy. In light of recent media reports, here’s what I’m telling my startups: Plenty of companies are getting Series A funding, and if you play your cards right, so will you.

Todd Sherer, PhD, is Director of Technology Transfer at Emory University. Sherer and his staff in the Office of Technology Transfer manage more than 800 active technologies developed through basic research. But he is not just the Director of Technology Transfer. Sherer is also the current President of the Association of University Technology Managers(AUTM), which has as its core purpose the supporting and advancing of academic technology transfer both within the United States and around the globe.

On December 10, 2012, AUTM published the results of the AUTM U.S. Licensing Activity Survey: FY2011, and the AUTM Canadian Licensing Activity Survey: FY2011. Among the findings of the survey were that the 58 institutions (i.e., 31 percent of the 186 respondents) reported that 2,821 of their licenses paid $662 million in running royalties based on $37 billion in product sales, implying an average royalty rate of 1.8 percent.  The survey also contained very positive news about startups founded around university technologies. Some 66 institutions (i.e., 35 percent of the 186 respondents) reported employment of 24,653 by 1,731 operational startups, an average of 14 employees per startup.

This year, many high-profile startups and private companies landed great gobs of cash to help expand or fund new products. E-commerce, cloud, and green energy companies were especially sexy to financiers.

Using data that PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association compiled, we took a look at the 15 largest funding rounds of the year to get a better sense of popular trends. While there is an overhyped “Series A crunch” supposedly happening right now, many of these mostly late-stage deals looked great. Note that this data consists of funding that was actually distributed to a company, so previously reported amounts that were committed by firms could differ from this data.

If you spent more than 5 minutes on Crowdsourcing.org in 2012, you probably already know what a big year it was for crowdfunding, both worldwide and here in the United States. 

Earlier this month we took a look at the top 5 highest-grossing crowdfunding campaigns of 2012, highlighting the most successful multi-million dollar projects that raised amounts that would have seemed like pure science fiction at the end of 2011.

But mountains of dollars don't paint the full picture of what crowdfunding is today. Not every project needs more than a million -- or even 5,000 -- dollars to be a success. The crowdfunding platforms not only brought in bucks in 2012, they were also platforms for innovation in fields as diverse as marketing, film distribution and citizen science.

While 2012 was an amazing year for crowdfunding, 2013 should outdo it. Here are my half dozen predictions for the year – and why this new form of capital formation will continue to soar.

1. The Global Crowdfunding will double in annual revenue to $6 billion in 2013

Crowdfunding was exploding quietly in 2012 for the non-believers and loudly for the embracers between March 8, 2012 and President’s Obama signing of the JOBS Act into law on April 5, 2012. Some of the largest sites in the world for rewards and donations – Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Grow VC and Rockethub – saw their daily traffic and donation amounts double within a few months. Kickstarter has had its issuers raise a cumulative $200+ million in sales 2008-2011 to reach an addition $145+ million to a total of $345+ million by year end 2012. To give you an example, LendingClub reached $75+ million per month in debt lending as a crowd funding platform in November 2012.  It is the largest U.S. peer-to-peer lender and will hit an additional $1 billion in loans 2013 vis-a-vis the cumulative $1 billion it lent since inception 2007.