It’s time to give your staff a little something nice. But, hey, do them a favor and put more thought into it this year rather than just pass out the same bland checks or company coffee mugs.

Still short on cash? That’s not an excuse. See the list below for 10 creative ways to mix things up a bit this holiday season and give employees a boost — without breaking the bank.

1. Try their luck

Over the course of his 30 year career, New York-based CPA Steven Elliott has received everything from gifts of wine to engraved pens to a company bowling night. His all-time favorite: lottery tickets. “You often come out with nothing. But there is that chance that maybe, just maybe, you might walk away with something.” And one year he did: $400.

What do website gadget developer LabPixies and insulin pump maker Medingo have in common? It's not only that both companies are based in Israel. They also are among the country's start-ups that have attracted the attention of international investors, with U.S. Internet giant Google recently snapping up LabPixies and Swiss pharmaceutical multinational Roche buying Medingo, a subsidiary of local medical device conglomerate Elron Electronic Industries. Israel is indeed becoming fertile ground for the likes of Google, Roche and other companies looking to acquire innovative businesses to add to their portfolios.

That's why when U.S. software firm Microsoft was scanning the globe for new sites to expand its international research and development presence a few years ago, Israel was on its itinerary, according to Zach Weisfeld, the firm's country director of business development and strategy.

For biotech to blossom in any European region, several key parameters must exist locally and simultaneously:

• Intense and excellent academic research in life sciences with effective technology transfer;
• Entrepreneurial spirit;
• Proactive venture capitalists;
• Government incentives for young innovative companies;
• Experienced management;
• A supportive stock market.

      And some might add: a sunny environment with good international schools for kids of management and biotech-savvy large pharmaceutical companies. I will focus on academic research and financial support of startups. The most important factor in biotech cluster success is academic research. Although some companies, like the French firm Carmat, an EADS spinoff which is developing the most advanced totally artificial heart, come out of corporations, they benefit from academic backing. Carmat would not exist without the academic support of Paris VI University.

It's been a fun year for tech fans.

We saw the rise of tablets like the iPad and Galaxy Tab, envelope-pushing smartphones like the iPhone 4 and Nexus S, and surprise hits like Microsoft's Kinect and Amazon's third Kindle.

We also saw hints of more cool stuff for 2011 like more tablets, new computer technology, and much more.

Whether it’s a business or personal interaction, multiple studies show that as much as 50-90% of the communication is nonverbal. That means that people who are addicted to text messaging and e-mail may be sending only half the message, and receivers often misinterpret even that half.

Yet the use of text messaging for business purposes continues to grow, in concert with more of Gen-Y entering the workplace, and a continuing increase in the global rate of texting by everyone. This total rate now exceeds seven billion texts sent per day, according to a new mobile marketing website (more than one per day for every person on earth).

But are these text messages an efficient and appropriate business tool? Where body language is part of the message, it definitely is not.

For some people, 2010 was a great year. Ninety-seven people did particularly well and reached a new level of wealth; these people went from being millionaires to billionaires.

We compared Forbes' 2010 billionaire list to their 2009 rankings and found 20 of the 97 new additions. From the co-founder of Bloomberg LP to a KFC chicken supplier, here are 20 people who reached all-time financial highs this year.

We threw in a bonus too: this blonde bombshell's net worth with shock you.

A few islands of safety in a double dipping national housing market are found in the South and Midwest.

Trulia's Tara-Nicholle Nelson says these areas "never had the inflammatory price bubble in 2005-06, so they simply haven't had the dramatic price deflation or foreclosure crisis experienced in other parts of the country."

San Francisco also makes the list based on strong secular trends.

Trulia picked the top markets based on affordability and trends in job growth and migration.

For our first Early Success story, we spoke with 2008 Wharton undergraduate Nat Turner. As a student, Nat co-founded Invite Media, an online advertisement buying platform which went on to be purchased by Google for $81 million.

For more information, read our Q&A with Nat Turner in the November 2010 edition of Get It Started, WEP's newsletter.

The Megalobster
There may be nothing new under the sun, but there’s a lot of weird stuff in the water. Way more than we thought, according to the Census of Marine Life, a project 10 years in the making that involved 2,700 scientists in 80 countries who put together “a map of where we haven’t been,” according to Ron O’Dor, one of the program’s senior scientists. Using everything from fancy submersibles to old seafood-restaurant menus, the scientists produced more than 2,600 papers, the highlights of which were released in a 64-page report in October.

Among the “large, active and conspicuous organisms” that no one knew existed is a new species of spiny lobster, Palinurus barbarae, which was found by a Spanish fishing boat on the Walters Shoals in the Indian Ocean, 400 nautical miles south of Madagascar, and classified by South African marine biologists. It’s more than half a meter long. “This was a lobster that had never been described,” O’Dor says.

The editors asked Tyler Cowen, the economist who helps run the blog Marginal Revolution, to read the previous nine Ideas issues and send us his thoughts on which entries, with the benefit of hindsight, struck him as noteworthy. Do any ideas from this year’s issue look promising? “I recall reading the 2001 issue when it came out,” he says. “And I was hardly bowled over with excitement by thoughts of ‘Populist Editing.’ Now I use Wikipedia almost every day. The 2001 issue noted that, in its selection of items, ‘frivolous ideas are given the same prominence as weighty ones’; that is easiest to do when we still don’t know which are which.”

The official start date for your startup is the date you incorporate the business. This is obviously important for tax purposes, but may also dramatically influence how potential investors, customers, and competitors look at you.

My rule of thumb expectation is that it should take two months to set up the legal entity, six months to finalize the business plan, and by the end of the first year have a prototype product ready for customers. At this point every potential investor will listen. Timelines which vary dramatically from these will be questioned, and need to have good explanations.

For time and effort considerations, I tell clients that a sole proprietorship or partnership is the simplest setup, because it basically requires no legal forms. Incorporation as an LLC, a C-Corp or an S-Corp is more complex, but has the great legal advantage of limiting liability to the entity, away from personal assets.

The founder of ForeclosureRadar learned from his father's entrepreneurial example and found his opportunity in the real estate bust.

The gig: Sean O'Toole, 43, founded website ForeclosureRadar in 2006, just as the real estate bubble was getting ready to pop. His company tracks foreclosure auctions in California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Washington.

An early technophile: "My parents bought my first computer for me when I was 10. It was the first Apple II, and that really defines my life thereafter. By the age of 12, I could program in three programming languages, and I dropped out of college at 18 to form my first software company."

The way entrepreneur David Moyal tells it, he grew up as something of an Israeli version of David Copperfield, with a sickly mother and a father who put him to work as a small child. "My father was a baker and chef at catering halls, so I did dishwashing with him," Moyal recalls. His father used to warn him that people who went into the military at 18 often did not come back and told him: "Live now because you may not live later," he recalls. Moyal started particularly early, in fact. By age 11, he had moved out of the family's cramped one-bedroom apartment and was working in construction. At 17, he got his mother's permission to join the Israeli army early and ended up not only surviving it but thriving afterward, when he moved to the U.S. and went into business.

Moyal, who lives in Manhattan and Newport, R.I., has had his hand in restaurants, fitness centers, and real estate, among other ventures over the last two decades. Today he owns three New York-based businesses. There's Next, a lifestyle magazine for gay readers; NYC Data Group, a data center storage company scheduled to begin operating in 2011; and 1800 Postcards, a commercial printer he acquired in 1999. Next had $2.5 million in gross revenue in 2009, while 1800 Postcards took in $16.9 million. He's getting ready to launch Postcard.com, which will allow consumers to call in orders for physical post cards to be sent anywhere in the world for 99¢ apiece.

Regions all over the world have spent millions—sometimes billions—of dollars trying to create their own Silicon Valley. They drank the same Kool-Aid and used the same recipe: start with a research university; build a fancy tech park next to it; give tax breaks to chosen companies to locate in the park; attract venture capital by offering matching investments; and watch the magic happen.

Unfortunately, the magic never happened, anywhere.

All government-sponsored (top-down) tech-cluster efforts—everywhere in the world—either have failed or are on life support (though some pretend they are not). That’s because they all used the wrong ingredients. It isn’t real estate, universities, or VCs that make innovation happen; it is entrepreneurs. To create a tech center like Silicon Valley, you need to first attract smart entrepreneurs from all over the world. Then you have to create entrepreneurial networks; instill a spirit of risk-taking and openness; and build mentoring systems. You also need to provide seed financing to startups. The money is easy; everything else requires a change in culture that usually takes decades.

There’s a lie that companies and entrepreneurs tell themselves in order to commit to an acquisition.

Oh, we’re not going to change anything! We’re just going to give you more resources to do what you’ve been doing even better!

Yeah! They bought us for a reason, why would they ruin things?

It usually works for a little while, but big company bureaucracy– whether it’s HR, politics or just endless meetings– almost always creeps in. It’s a law of nature: Big companies just need certain processes to run and entrepreneurs hate those processes because they stifle nimble innovation.

Selling your business is an emotional rollercoaster. It is a unique mixture of fear, uncertainty, excitement, arrogance and eventually relief.  Knowing the appropriate time to feel each of these emotions comes from experience, and understanding what to expect may be helpful when you eventually sell your company.

Over the years I’ve realized that receiving your first letter of intent or “LOI” is a very confusing part of the business sale process. Experienced sellers (there are not many of these) realize there is about a 40 percent chance that a LOI will actually result in the sale of your company.  In fact, the majority of LOIs never actually turn into a closed deal.  There are many reasons for this, and how you approach, think about and react to your first letter of intent will dramatically impact your opportunity for a successful sale.

It’s a big time of the year for tree-tailers, so Intuit thought they’d offer a closer look at the industry.

The idea for this post, and in fact the idea of applying lean startup thinking to raising money came from a conversation I had with entrepreneur turned angel investor Sean Glass a week or two back.  Sean said he wasn’t going to get round to writing a post on the topic, and so I said I would give it a go.

Those of you who are familiar with Steve Blank’s and Eric Ries’ work on the advantages of being clear about your product and market hypotheses and then minimising the time/resource to test those hypotheses will already have worked out where I am going with this – it makes sense to take the same approach to raising money.  In fact, the process of raising money has many parallels with selling a product to consumers or businesses – it is just that the product is equity in your company and your customers are angels and VCs. 

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 17, 2010 ? The University of Utah overtook MIT to become America's No. 1 research institution when it comes to creating startup companies based on university technology, and it achieved the top ranking with a fraction of the research budget of other major universities.

The ranking, for 2009, is the result of the latest annual survey by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) of the nation's top research institutions. A year earlier, the University of Utah tied for first place with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was second to MIT for the previous two years.

The 19th annual "AUTM Licensing Activity Survey" ranked 181 public and private research institutions throughout the country. According the AUTM, the University of Utah created 19 companies based on university research in 2009, while MIT and the California Institute of Technology tied for second with 18 companies each.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Venture capitalists likely breathed a sigh of relief Thursday after the House of Representatives passed a tax bill that did not contain provisions over the tax treatment of carried interest.

VCs have been concerned that Congress could enact change to tax carried interest -- profits made after venture capitalists successfully cash out of their portfolio companies -- at higher ordinary income rates rather than at the capital gains rate of 15%.

Proponents of carried interest say it encourages firms to invest in young, risky companies and the results of not investing in these firms could be damaging to the economy.