The finalists for the 2010 Crunchies Awards have been chosen. Over 243,000 votes were made across all categories and many outstanding achievements were discussed. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce this year’s finalists for the best in technology for 2010.

Categories range from Best Social App and Best Mobile App to Best Angel of the year and Best New Startup or Product. Even Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange made the list, as well as first time nominees Quora and Instagram. Mobile apps dominate throughout and last year’s overall winner Mark Zuckerberg is up for CEO of the Year.

A new report shows that most companies developed at Y Combinator, the much-watched Silicon Valley incubator known for both the geeky prowess of the startups it grooms and the Hollywood glitz of the investors it draws to its Demo Day events, launched on the cheap. The Y Combinator graduates, including much-discussed stars like travel site Hipmunk and online-storage service Dropbox showed a strong preference for cost-saving cloud-computing services for storage and processing and Web-based software like Google’s Gmail for internal communication.

Roughly 3 out of 4 companies participating in Y Combinator’s incubator program used Gmail, Google’s mail service, as their primary email service. That includes some of Y Combinator’s most successful companies like Disqus and video streaming site Justin.tv. (The rest hosted their own email rather than using a Gmail competitor like Hotmail.)

Cleantech had a record year in drawing in venture capital in 2010, with $7.8 billion invested globally, according to a new report from the Cleantech Group. The last half of 2010 saw two consecutive quarters of declines, however.

Overall, global investing totals saw a 28 percent increase compared to 2009, making it the highest year for investment after 2008 ($8.8 billion). The drawback in the last half of 2010 seems to reflect some skepticism among venture capitalists on capital-intensive investments that are risky and can take years to bear fruit. Instead, investors are looking more towards capital investments like energy efficiency. One company that has done well in that space is Opower, which recently raised $50 million in a round led by Accel and Kleiner Perkins.

Federal government agencies provide about $33 billion a year to universities to conduct scientific research. That continuing investment expands human knowledge and helps educate the next generation of science and technology leaders. New discoveries from university research also form the basis for many new products and processes that benefit the nation and its citizens. In fact, in the knowledge economy, technological innovation and the scientific research on which it is based are critical for much of the nation’s productivity growth.

Download the PDF

My picks for favorite startup sectors to improve your fundability in the new year include green, biotech, and renewable energy (also called alternative energy or sustainable energy). In previous articles, I’ve put some definition around the green and biotech investment categories, so I’ll try to do the same here for renewable energy.

Renewable energy is any source that can be produced cleanly, will not disappear like fossil fuels, and is less polluting. The Clean Technology venture capital sector, which includes alternative energy, soared 68 per cent year-on-year during the first quarter of 2010. I expect another increase this year. Here are the key components, as summarized by the New Alternatives Fund:

In a decade in which most colleges cling to every dollar they can scrounge from an impoverished student populace, one college is giving money away. Grinnell College, a private liberal arts college in Iowa, will give $300,000 in prizes to “Young Social Justice Innovators” under the age of 40, who show “extraordinary accomplishment in effecting positive social change.”

Little league baseball player at batMentorship is a critical catalyst for passage, transition and development as a pre-entrepreneur. But mentorship, like entrepreneurship, can break down in the nitty gritty details. My intention is to tell you how to avoid these five mistakes many entrepreneurs often make when they try to get mentored by a VC. It falls under what my mentor, Mark McCormack, taught me.

None of us ever hopes to need — or give — cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). But in case of emergency, it pays to understand new guidelines for the procedure, which make it easier for untrained bystanders to perform CPR.

The American Heart Association now advises both trained and untrained rescuers to begin CPR with chest compressions and, in most cases that do not involve a drowning victim, to do away with the resuscitating breaths altogether. Studies have shown that using chest compressions only is just as effective in re-starting a failing heart as doing the full version of CPR.

Danny SchreiberLincoln Journal Star reporter Richard Piersol has shed a lot more light on Nebraska Global, the venture capital fund whose website launch (the company's first "press release" of sorts) we covered on December 22nd: "Venture capital fund Nebraska Global opens in Lincoln."

Piersol's article, "New company aims to develop home-grown software entrepreneurs" (left, screenshot from journalstar.com), makes sure to point out, however, that the principals of Nebraska Global and some of the fund's investors aren't labeling it "venture capital." Instead, Nebraska Global managing principal Steve Kiene is calling the $20 million raised to start Nebraska Global "patient capital."

When I first started in the venture business in late 1999 the market was hot and deals were getting done very quickly, and with hindsight some of them were done too quickly and without enough analysis. Investment memos were briefer then than they have become since and I remember people joking that in the ‘exit strategy’ section there was often little more than “This company will exit via M&A or IPO”.

One of the biggest red flags I see in many Internet-related business plans today is advertising as the initial revenue stream, or a key part of it. If challenged, the founder usually cites the Facebook business model (free service to users, revenue from ads), but forgets that Facebook has had several hundred million in funding, and has been profitable only in the last two years.

The most challenging time is your first couple of years, when your site is unknown, and your page-views are low. Until you get a million page-views per month, your revenue will be negligible, and advertisers won’t be interested in your site. Don’t count on that to fund your startup.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today announced that B&D Consulting Senior Vice President Dr. Phillip Singerman will join the agency's leadership team on January 31, 2011, as its first Associate Director for Innovation and Industry Services.

In this newly created position, Singerman will be responsible for NIST's suite of external partnership programs, including the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program, the Technology Innovation Program and the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.

Something surprising happened during the recent lame duck session of US Congress. Lost amid a flurry of year-end activity, the America Competes Act, which overhauls how the federal government supports private-sector R&D, was reauthorised to the tune of US$45 billion.

Renewal of the act has been seen as a major boost in the face of Republican Party attacks against science-funding “waste” and the end of the US stimulus package. And it’s an indication of the different approaches nations are taking to fund science in the face of continuing economic and political obstacles. While the US government is casting a wide net to fund science, the UK and Spain have cut science funding in real terms. France, China, Sweden, and Germany are among countries that are increasing science funding, despite making cuts elsewhere.

A brush fire has been swirling through the blogosphere of late over whether RSS is dead, dying, or possibly severely injured and in need of assistance. It seems to have started with a post from UK-based web designer Kroc Camen that got picked up by Hacker News and re-tweeted a lot. The flames were fanned by a blog post from TechCrunch that drove RSS developer Dave Winer into a bit of a Twitter frenzy. But is RSS actually doomed, or even ailing? Not really. Like plenty of other technologies, it is just becoming part of the plumbing of the real-time web.

Camen’s criticisms seem focused on the fact that Firefox doesn’t make it easy to find or subscribe to RSS feeds from within the browser (although Mozilla staffer Asa Dotzler takes issue with that case in a comment near the bottom of the post). Instead of the usual RSS icon, he says, there is nothing except an entry in a menu. But did anyone other than a handful of geeks and tech aficionados make use of those RSS icons? It’s not clear that many regular web users have done so — or ever will. Browsers like Internet Explorer have had built-in support for RSS for years, but there’s little sign of it becoming mainstream.

Mobile phones — and particularly smartphones, with their web browsers and GPS, photo-sharing apps and so on — have become such a crucial part of many of our lives that they are difficult to live without. The fear of losing a phone stems in part from the wealth of information we keep on our mobile devices, from photos to passwords and banking data. Imagine what the police could find out about you if they had the ability to search your phone and all it contains — something that is now more than just a hypothetical situation, at least if you live in California.

For some people, innovation is not enough. Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is one of those people. Let’s just say the Boston-area tech entrepreneur and billionaire philanthropist has earned the right to make such a claim.

“For innovation to have impact, it needs relevance,” he says. “Innovation plus relevance equals impact.”

Deshpande is talking about global impact, but his latest project is in his own backyard. Last month, his foundation committed $5 million over the next five years to support a new innovation center housed at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The Merrimack Valley Sandbox, as it’s called, will work together with local colleges and nonprofits to boost entrepreneurship among students and professionals, and to develop local leadership through mentoring and seed funding programs.

In the news, the main number you hear about the recession is the unemployment rate, which is hovering just below 10% -- as compared to 5% just a couple years ago. If you were only hearing that, the recession can seem less dramatic (if still quite harsh) than it is: All this hubbub about a mere 5% of the population?

The United States should capitalize on a new trend, convergence — which involves the merger of life, physical and engineering sciences — to foster the innovation necessary to meet the growing demand for accessible, affordable health care, according to a white paper issued Tuesday by 12 leading MIT researchers.

“Convergence is a broad rethinking of how all scientific research can be conducted, so that we capitalize on a range of knowledge bases, from microbiology to computer science to engineering design,” MIT Institute Professor and Nobel Laureate Phillip Sharp, one of the report’s authors, told the AAAS forum.