Consumerization, social networking, mobile commerce, cloud computing—these are only a few of the trends that are making 2011 look like a very exciting year in the technology industry. The phenomenal success of the iPad—and the many followers popping up in its wake—is in truth dependent on their accompanying applications and services, and only makes clearer the long-term shift in value from hardware to services of every description. This shift will also be the key to increased M&A activity this year, as companies try to pull together hardware, software and services into fully integrated enterprise and cloud computing solutions.

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At MaRS, we spend all our time thinking about how to help Canadian technology and social businesses grow.

One of the ways we do this is our blog. It’s a way for us to keep you informed about the trends that might affect your business, the tips and tools for building that start-up better as well as the stories of other Canadian entrepreneurs who are making it happen.

Did you miss a post? Never fear! Here’s the list of the most popular blog posts of 2010.

The 2011 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit will convene the key players in the nation’s energy innovation community to spur the networks that will bring about the next Industrial Revolution in clean energy technologies.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has made it clear that he wanted to US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to clear out some of the backlog on patents, and it quickly became clear early last year that the way the USPTO was doing this was by simply approving more patents while giving less scrutiny to the patents in question — meaning that we’re now getting a ton of bad patents approved. It seemed like an obviously bad sign when we passed the total number of patents approved in 2009 by October of 2010.

Now the final numbers are in: nearly 220,000 patents granted (219,614 if you want to be exact), a massive 31% increase over 2009 and still significantly more than ever before in history. The highest previous year was 2006, when a mere 173,772 patents were granted. So this is still 27% more patents granted in a single year than ever before. I find it hard to believe — as USPTO supporters claim — that the Patent Office suddenly figured out how to approve 30% more patents without decreasing the quality. Patently-O put together this lovely chart to demonstrate the pattern:

Historians have an envious perch from which to offer a definitive opinion on when a business model started to come apart. For Kodak, the arrival of the first digital cameras for consumers at the end of the 1980s would be such a landmark.

What are the ways you can recognize warnings in real-time that your business is under attack? Business consultant Rita McGrath offers three such signposts in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review. They are:

1. Fewer innovations. The first sign is when next-generation innovations offer smaller and smaller improvements. “If your people have trouble thinking of new ways to enhance your offering, that’s a sign,” McGrath says.

Most leaders are interested in growing their businesses through innovation, but it's risky business: most innovation efforts fail. After years of helping to make innovation happen as chief communications officer at Steelcase and as a consultant, I have a point of view that I'm willing to bet on. Innovative ideas, initiatives, products, culture transformations, you name it, have little chance to succeed if they aren't enabled by smart communications. This includes communication within the core team, broadly in your organization, and with key stakeholders outside the organization, including your distribution channel partners, suppliers, journalists, investors and of course, existing and potential customers.

I’ve long believed that entrepreneurs are different.

We all know successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of school, and people with high IQs that cannot manage a business. I used to call this “street smarts,” but recently I found a better explanation, called multiple intelligences.

Successful entrepreneurs always seem to have several good intelligences.

We’ve all heard the old joke: “In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.” This quote epitomizes the true essence of commitment.

We all know at least one self-professed entrepreneur who claims to committed, but seems to treat it like a part-time hobby, won’t put any personal skin in the game, and is quick to give up when things are tough.

There are no middle roads to real commitment, and if you are not ready to fully commit to all the rigors of a startup, you are better off sticking with your current role.

When people in the US think of European startups, they often either think of them as copycats, or as small -- or, often, not at all.

And yes, there are plenty of copycats, and European startups do grow more slowly on average than their US equivalents.

But there are also plenty of European startups that are downright huge, and that lead the world in innovation from a product, technology or business model perspective as well as anyone out of Silicon Valley. And there are startups that grow extremely big extremely fast. And there are iconoclast moguls.

Last Friday, as I was meeting in my office in Washington, DC with Nazeh Ben Ammar, president of the Tunisian American Chamber of Commerce, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, now the former president of Tunisia, was fleeing his country. As my guest awaited word on when the airport would re-open and Lufthansa would be permitted to return him home to his family in Tunis, we talked about his country, entrepreneurship and a new generation of youth in the Arab region.

Of particular note, was his observation that perhaps the WikiLeaks scandal might be having some unintended consequences. As relayed to me, revelations in U.S. embassy cables gave credibility to accusations of corruption at the highest level of government and resonated strongly with young Tunisians. Such open media attention raised the public’s temperature and provided cover for the genuine public dissent that began last month. Now it appears the Arab region must respond to an increasingly open source world where new, fearless generations will rebel – not as extremists, but as educated, yet unemployed citizens. If accounts from the dissenting young Tunisians on news channels are any indication, the uprising is at its core not so much a call for personal and political freedom, but one for economic freedom and opportunity.

What do you think: Are we all underestimating the importance of email? Maybe because it gets lost in spam, or because of alternative channels in twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? A smart person reminded me recently that email is the backbone of social media.

And in a recent post on business etiquette in the American Express OPEN Forum, small business expert Steve Strauss wrote: “Email is now the dominant form of business communication and should be treated as such. Some uniform policies help everyone stay on track.”

"The proposed combination of Comcast and NBC Universal was approved by the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday, smoothing the way for the deal to close by the end of January." As the NYT's Brian Stelter notes, "Copps, the only FCCer to oppose deal, says it "confers too much power in one company's hands." His statement (Scribd). Here is the FCC press release (Scribd).

Innovators have to be very optimistic to believe they can create new technologies that will shake up a market. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that the high tech business leaders Xconomy writes about are looking forward to big things to come in 2011.

But these people—from diverse backgrounds in high tech, life sciences, and clean energy—have specific and clear views about what they expect will really work, and what they aren’t counting on, in the year ahead. To draw out some of the insights these folks have, we did an informal poll of sorts right before Christmas, in which we asked some of our Xconomists and other contacts to write short guest editorials about the biggest surprises in their field over the past year, or the top trends or innovations they expect to see in 2011.

“There’s not any other place I’d rather be right now,” Brandon McNaughton said standing at the door of his lab space at the University of Michigan’s Venture Accelerator, which opened officially on Tuesday.

Those aren’t words most would expect to hear from a California native looking to launch his own start up. But McNaughton, the founder of Life Magnetics—an Ann Arbor-based company that aims to provide a faster means for testing whether antibiotics are slowing bacterial growth by measuring the rotation rate of tiny magnetic beads placed in a bacterial solution—says he couldn’t have imagined his company taking off anywhere else.

Folks in Silicon Valley are fond of attaching friendly, anodyne labels to forces that seem bent on world domination (hello, Facebook). So it's no surprise that the latest group of alleged tech marauders goes by a name that might be better suited to a Japanese cartoon boy band: Beware the super angels!

These crafty interlopers represent a hybrid between the two investing models that have long ruled the normally placid world of startup funding. Super angels raise funds like venture capitalists but invest early like angels and in sums between the two, on average from $250,000 to $500,000. By being smaller, faster, and less demanding of entrepreneurs than VCs, super angels are getting first dibs on the best new ideas. Mint, Digg, and Ustream are three of the prominent super-angel-funded companies with traction.

Earlier this month President Obama signed the reauthorization of the COMPETES Act, which provides federal funding for science initiatives aimed at enhancing economic competitiveness. In addition to shoring up agencies like the National Science Foundation, the bill called on the Department of Commerce to create a new program charged with supporting the development of research parks and regional innovation clusters. Unheard of before World War II, these entities today represent the cutting edge in what insiders call TBED: technology-based economic development. By leveraging existing strengths and promoting cooperation between universities and private industry, TBED-minded regions seek to attract outside investment and carve out a niche in the global economy.

I’ve long believed that entrepreneurs are different. We all know successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of school, and people with high IQs that cannot manage a business. I used to call this “street smarts,” but recently I found a better explanation, called multiple intelligences. Successful entrepreneurs always seem to have several good intelligences.

The theory of multiple intelligences was developed way back in 1983 by Dr. Howard Gardner, at Harvard University. He suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, called the Intelligent Quotient (IQ), is far too limited. Instead, he now has broad acceptance for at least eight different intelligences that cover a broad range of human potential. These include:

• Linguistic intelligence (“word smart”). Linguistic intelligence is the ability to think in words and to use language to express complex meanings. Linguistic intelligence is the most widely shared human competence, most evident in poets and novelists. It is also evident in entrepreneurs writing good business plans and convincing investors.

One hundred-million-dollar business ideas are the stuff of legends. Usually we read about them in the context of an entrepreneur who decided to follow his passion, or a founder who just happened to be the rocket scientist of his industry. Most of the time, however, this is not where great ideas or great companies come from. I interviewed 45 company founders, each of whom started, grew, and sold a company for $100 million or more, or took their company public for $300 million or more. Here are some of their secrets.

Governor Dave Heineman’s economic development proposals to jump-start the state’s economy include one that would make use of so-called angel investors, to spur high-tech business development.

The tax credit program is contained in a bill introduced by Senator Abbie Cornett. Governor Dave Heineman says business leaders believe the state needs the angel investment program.