No, not that kind of passion. I’m talking about projects that are related to work, but are things you love so much that they don’t feel like work. Working on these projects makes you feel energized, excited and yes, passionate, about what you do. Such projects might be in your day job, a side project or a hobby.

It can be too easy to slip into the daily routine of work and the rest of your life without thinking about what you love to do. The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on what you really want to be doing.

AS a national strategy, China is trying to build an economy that relies on innovation rather than imitation. Clearly, its leaders recognize that being the world’s low-cost workshop for assembling the breakthrough products designed elsewhere — think iPads and a host of other high-tech goods — has its limits.

So can China become a prodigious inventor? The answer, in truth, will play out over decades — and go a long way toward determining not only China’s future, but also the shape of the global economy.

While the price of gold skyrockets at $1400 an ounce, far-sighted individuals in Barcelona, Spain, and Santiago, Chile, are looking to corner the market on a more renewable resource: entrepreneurship, or emprendimiento. This scarce and valuable resource drives economic growth and social development. Despite what policymakers will tell you, it is the root cause of national competitiveness, clusters, the knowledge economy and innovation systems. Not the other way around.

With that in mind, ambitious new organisations like Start-up Chile and Barcelona Activa are mining the world’s “entrepreneurial supply chain” in the belief that globally-oriented entrepreneurs will kick-start the next economic revolutions in Latin America and Europe.

In November, Start-Up Chile welcomed 25 teams of ambitious young entrepreneurs from 13 countries, including France, China, Portugal, Spain, Israel and India. "Today it is about global entrepreneurship," said founder Nicolas Shea, who returned to his native Chile from Silicon Valley to create Start-Up Chile. "Unlike countries such as Ireland or India, the Chilean diaspora is very small, so we need to accelerate with people from all around the world. “

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Rich Bendis has been nominated as a top speaker candidate in the Innovation and Creative category from Speakers Platform.

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Voting is open until Jan 11, 2011!

Was 2010 the year geek became chic? Tough to make a case against it -- Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was on the silver screen, deep-space tech bailed out some caved-in miners, and Julian Assange became the pallid rogue who kept governments guessing. But they weren't alone: Techland takes a look back on the top 25 nerds of the year.

The Midwest can’t compare to the coasts in volume of venture capital investment, but a strong performance last year has some predicting the region to be 2011′s hottest growth market.

Through the first three quarters of 2010, the amount of venture money invested in Midwestern startups grew 45 percent to $818 million, according to the National Venture Capital Association. That’s a higher amount than Midwestern venture investment in the full year of recession-plagued 2009.

So here we are in a new decade, and the technologies that are now available to us continue to engage (and enthrall) in fascinating ways. The rise and collision of several trends—social, mobile, touch computing, geo, cloud—keep spitting out new products and technologies which keep propelling us forward. Below I highlight seven technologies that are ready to tip into the mainstream 2011.

Before I get into my predictions, let’s see how I did last year, when I wrote “Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010.” Some of my picks were spot on: the Tablet (hello, iPad), Geo (Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, mobile location-aware search, etc.), Realtime Search (it became an option on Google) and Android (now even bigger than the iPhone). Some are still playing out: HTML5 (it’s made great strides, but isn’t quite here yet), Augmented Reality (lots of cool apps have AR functionality, but for the most part it is still a parlor trick), Mobile Video (FaceTime and streaming video apps pushed it forward), Mobile Transactions (Square and other transaction processing options came onto the scene), and Social CRM (Salesforce pushed Chatter, and tons of social CRM startups pushed their wares, but enterprises are always slow to adopt). And one got pushed to 2011: Chrome OS (we are still waiting).

As we begin 2011, optimism is on the upswing. And we’ll need it: The technology industry has a lot of potential, as embodied in these 10 trends we’re seeing, but it will take continued growth — and a lot of hard work — to make them happen. What do you think of our crystal ball-gazing? Vote for your favorite trend in our poll at the end.

1. Apps spread everywhere – Sure, apps were a big story last year. But in 2011, they will be a tidal wave. Apps have become far bigger than the iPhone. Other smartphones have them. So do tablets and connected TVs. The Mac is getting apps, and so is just about every other hardware platform. It’s a shift in how we consume software, since nobody wants to take the time to download applications. People want to use apps on the go and in real time, as they need them. Apps work with a simple tap, not complex commands or a sequence of clicks. They are the quickest way to get things done. As they spread far and wide, we will need something to manage them. Discovering the right app is still going to be a tough problem, as no one has come up with the equivalent of search, which solved the problem of navigating through millions of web sites. As users embrace more and more platforms, they will want their favorite apps to be available on all of them.

Catching the eye of a venture capitalist is hard enough. Convincing him or her to mentor you – especially if they’re not familiar with you and your work – is a much more difficult proposition.

It’s not impossible, though. What it takes is accelerated networking skills that allow you to beat the Catch-22s that so often trap entrepreneurs. Here are seven tips that will help you get your foot in the door.

Don’t ask for a coffee – I believe that anyone in this world can be gotten to and networked with. The first step is rarely ever a coffee.

Now that President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package has been out for a while, including $50 billion aimed at alternative-energy initiatives, applying for grants has become the rage for high-tech startups. I applaud the initiative, and encourage startups in this direction, but there are costs.

In the US, many entrepreneurs see grants as “free money,” since they are not loans and don’t have to be repaid. A grant is not an equity investment, so the entrepreneur doesn’t have to give up a stake in the company either. Typically they can be used to fund product development and commercialization that would otherwise require outside investors.

Imagine powering your household appliances with a wheel-shaped sail hoisted above your roof.

This idea may seem absurd to you, but it doesn’t to the energy and innovation folks behind General Electric’s Ecomagination Challenge, a $200 million innovation experiment where businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators and students share their best ideas on how to build the next-generation power grid.

oDesk is a marketplace for online work teams. Each month, it publishes a report with information the service collects from its own community of employers and job prospectors.

For its year-end report, oDesk looked at prior data from its own database of 890,000 contractors and 220,000 employers. The service has more than a million users and over $12 million in work performed each month.

The company used that data to report about the top markets, categories and jobs for 2010, as well as what to expect in 2011.

Union Square Ventures is raising $200 million for a new fund called the Union Square Ventures Opportunity Fund LP. According to an SEC filing, the VC firm already raised $135 million for the fund from 19 investors. The last time Union Square raised money was for its $156 million Union Square Ventures 2008 LP fund.

Union Square Ventures is the leading early stage VC firm in New York City led by Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, and Albert Wenger. The filing also lists a new partner, John Buttrick. Its portfolio includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, Tumblr, Boxee, Disqus, Etsy, Clickable, and Indeed.

In the flurry of activity at the end of the 111^th Congress, the reauthorization of the "America COMPETES Act" went mostly unnoticed. But it is a little bill that Washington hopes will prove transformative. The law—its cringeworthy official name is the America Creating Opportunities To Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act—overhauls the way the federal government supports private-sector R & D, and one of the main ways the government hopes to support R & D is with prizes. Lots of prizes.

Hanny van Arkel had been using the Galaxy Zoo Web site less than a week when she noticed something odd about the photograph of IC 2497, a minor galaxy in the Leo Minor constellation. “It was this strange thing,” she recalled: an enormous gas cloud, floating like a ghost in front of the spiral galaxy.

A Dutch schoolteacher with no formal training in astronomy, Ms. van Arkel had joined tens of thousands of other Web volunteers to help classify photographs taken by deep-space telescopes. Stumped by the unusual image on her computer screen, she e-mailed the project staff for guidance. Staff members were stumped, too. And thus was christened the celestial body now known to astronomers worldwide as Hanny’s Voorwerp (Dutch for “object”).

2010 saw an explosion of 3-D products for consumers and also the arrival of augmented reality as a mainstream technology. In both areas, however, only some commercial implementations proved ready for prime time.

3-D TVs, Cameras, and Camcorders Galore

3-D was a hot topic at the start of the year, partly because of the 3-D blockbuster movie Avatar, which came out last December. Many predicted that 3-D technology would move quickly from the movie theater into the home, and major electronics companies including Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Sony, Philips, and Toshiba announced plans to release 3-D televisions and Blu-ray players ("Home 3-D: Here, or Hype?" and "Here Come the High-Definition 3-D TVs"). But obstacles—particularly the need to wear 3-D glasses costing upwards of $100 per pair and the limited amount of 3-D content available to watch (a handful of DVDs and few TV transmissions)—have prevented 3-D TVs from becoming wildly popular, at least for now ("Will 3-D Make the Jump from Theater to Living Room?").

The firm, based in Palo Alto, California, is still investing in start-up companies out of its initial fund of roughly $40 million, but plans to raise a second fund in early to mid-2011, said the limited partner, who wished to remain anonymous.

The plans to start a second fund come as a new generation of fast-growing Internet start-up companies, such as online coupon provider Groupon and social gaming firm Zynga, moves into the investor spotlight. Earlier this month, microblogging sensation Twitter raised $200 million in new funding from several venture firms.