Venture capital investments saw a revival in 2011, with e-commerce taking off in a big way. Of the top five deals in the venture space, four happened in the e-commerce space as these companies started investing in marketing and supply chain logistics. Mobile value-added services and technology companies also continued to attract venture funds.

The year 2011 also saw increasing emergence of nearly half a dozen seed-stage funds which are looking to raise $20 million-$25 million to plug the gap between angel funding and series A round. On the backdrop of a few successful exits in Indian VC space, Limited Partners are now increasingly looking at this asset class. Here are the top five VC deals of 2011, according to VCCedge, the financial research arm of VCCircle.

When viewed through the lens of funding for startups, 2011 was a fickle, back-and-forth, hot-and-cold kind of year that could never quite make up its mind.

And by that we mean, confusingly: The state of the venture capital industry was good, but it was also bad. Or, in other words, it was the Year of the Mixed Signal.

"It's becoming like a sport to predict what will happen," said Anand Sanwal, the chief executive of research firm CB Insights.

There’s an unpleasant moment that occurs for entrepreneurs more often than it should. Someone asks for your business card, and you hand it over. They say, “Great, I’ll check out your site!” You say, “Excellent, but ignore the ‘Shop’ section — it’s out of date. And, oh yeah, the email newsletter link isn’t working, but I can add you manually to the list if you want. And … well the design is a little embarrassing …”

By this point, the person who was excited about your product just moments ago has finished the drink they were sipping and is looking for a polite way to exit the conversation — immediately.

In their desperation to be innovative, companies often brainstorm themselves into idea overload, generating ideas that ultimately are failures. But what if companies could focus those brainstorming efforts and develop an efficient, targeted process for creativity? InnovationManagement asked Tony Ulwick to share his thoughts on how to leverage the creativity and get a better outcome.

There are countless inventions throughout the year, but only a few have the capacity to change the world.

From a sassy digital personal assistant to a mirror of the future, here are our picks for the most impressive breakthroughs in science, technology and medicine.

Forget the standard, "Tell me about yourself," question. Some interviewers go above and beyond to test their prospective employees.

Before they were banned, Google asked interviewees some of the most ridiculous questions we've ever heard of, including how much it would cost to wash all the windows in Seattle and why manhole covers are round.

Go-to people get things done. As an entrepreneur, you need these people, and you need to be one, if you expect your startup to be successful. That may be easier said than done, since resumes do not tell the story, and without real nurturing, they won’t stay around long.

To highlight how rare this breed is, Jeffrey Gandz of the Richard Ivey School of Business relates a quote from a new CEO in a large company, "I have more than 1000 people in my head office organization, 900 can tell me something’s gone wrong, 90 can tell me what’s gone wrong, 9 can tell me why it went wrong, and one can actually fix it!"

With none of Wilbur Wright’s humility, here are my predictions for some significant business developments in 2012.

1.       Social business will take off in 2012, but companies will struggle to adopt. Management consultants will champion ‘digital transformation’ initiatives ala Y2K in order to help companies change business processes and worker behavior. But the real gains will be made where companies can find ways to adopt social and collaboration tools without making workers change their daily work habits. This evolutionary approach to social business adoption will trump ‘rip and replace’ methodologies being promoted by some social business software vendors…including one that recently went public.

8 Musts to successfully raise seed capital for your startup

8. Put together an A-team….that means people who have done it before mixed with a few newbies

7. Define your nearest market, not the one for the grand vision

6. Know your subject matter better than anyone can find through research on the internet

5. Know every single competitor and near competitor that raised funding, and why you deserve money

Some of the coolest gadgets Technology Review has come across in the past year.

This was supposed to be a big year for energy-related technology.

It was supposed to mark the ascendance of the electric car as the first full year of sales for GM's Volt and Nissan's Leaf, which represent the leading edge of electric vehicles planned by major automakers. But GM fell far short of its sales goals for the year, no doubt plagued by high costs due to expensive batteries. And the company ended the year under a cloud of smoke as the Volt's battery pack caught on fire after safety testing.

It was the year by which advanced-biofuels companies were supposed to be producing 250 million gallons of fuels from grass and wood chips to meet a U.S. federal mandate. But the EPA had to waive the mandate, decreasing the goal to just 6.6 million gallons, because no large advanced-biofuels plants were up and running. The year ended with the demise of one of the first advanced-biofuels companies, Range Fuels, which shut down operations and was forced to auction off assets.

In a single minute there are over 695,000 status updates on Facebook. That's just one example of the mind boggling scale of online activity.

The following infographics show a bunch of other incredible things that happen in 60 seconds (via Barry Ritholtz).

Hmmm…. 2012…. Not your average date in the calendar, according to everyone from the ancient Mayans to hordes of New Agers who are busy getting ready for “galactic alignment”, to popular fiction’s high priest of secret mystical knowledge, Dan Brown, to Hollywood’s master of the cataclysmic blockbuster, Roland Emmerich. 2012 has been the inspiration for hundreds of books and hundreds of thousands of websites focused on spiritual transformation, the end of “The Great Cycle”, “Harmonic Convergence”, and “Balancing the Cosmos”. In fact, NASA’s public outreach website “Ask an Astrobiologist” has already received over 5,000 questions from the public about what next year might bring, some asking whether they should kill themselves, their children or their pets as we approach impending doom!

So when we sat down to write our 10 predictions for 2012 we did so with a degree of humility, certainly not claiming to know anything more about next year than any of the reputable parties mentioned above. But we did come up with a few developments that we believe we could be looking back on one year from now – that is, if we’re all still here by next December 21st, after we reach “Timewave Zero” and “Geomagnetic Reversal”, not to mention Earth’s collision with the planet “Nibiru”.

In any market where the number of new businesses triples in the course of two years, you know that something unusual is going on. (And make no mistake—most venture incubators are businesses, founded and funded by people hoping for real returns, whether social, financial, or both.) You naturally begin to wonder whether a bubble is forming, in the classic sense of an episode of vertiginous growth disconnected from economic fundamentals such as market demand. And since bubbles are, by definition, unsustainable, you wonder what’s going to happen when they pop.

If you ask me, there is clearly an incubator bubble. Whatever your opinion about the existence of a bubble in the larger world of Internet startups—Sarah Lacy and Dan Primack offered interesting, opposing views on that this week—it’s hard to imagine that today’s tepid consumer and business markets have room to absorb all of the products and services offered by the hundreds of new startups that the incubators are now churning out each year.

Think of your body like a car. Negative behaviors are like the parking brake — they keep you stuck. Positive behaviors are like the accelerator — they push you forward.

If you stomp the gas while the brake is on, you'll stay stuck, or move very slowly. Conversely, if you release the brakes you'll move forward faster with the same amount of effort.

Most people really aren't aware of the biggest brakes in being healthy, fit or trying to lose weight. These are the top seven brakes, or seven powerful ways to make sure you maximize your weight gain this holiday season. So, if you don't actually want to get as big as possible before the end of the year, do the opposite.

Though Florida was hard hit by the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and unemployment in the state sits 1.5 percent above the national average at 10.1 percent, in the first quarter of 2012, employers in two of Florida’s metropolitan areas are planning to increase their workforces at a rate that outpaces every other metro area in the country, according to employment services firm Manpower Group’s latest employment outlook survey, released earlier this month. In Cape Coral-Fort Myers, and in Lakeland-Winter Haven, a net 17 percent of employers plan to add employees in the first quarter of next year. Two other Florida metro areas, Bradenton-Sarasota-Venice and Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, make it into Manpower’s top 15, both with a 12 percent net hiring outlook.

CAN entrepreneurship be taught? That was the rhetorical question posed by US agricultural academic Randy Westgren on a recent visit to Melbourne. "I hope so because I'm teaching it," Professor Westgren, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Missouri told his audience at a lunch presented by the Marcus Oldham College Centre for the Study of Rural Australia.

Participants in the four-module course, taught by Prof Westgren (pictured), designed around the agricultural and food sector, have ranged in age from 22 to 72.

The first thing they are taught is "opportunity recognition".

Ernest Hemingway apparently got the answer wrong when F. Scott Fitzgerald told him “the rich are different from you and me” and Hemingway responded “Yes, they’ve got more money.”

His answer should have been: “They own businesses.”

The chart at the bottom of the page shows the probability that a taxpayer includes a partnership or S-Corp on his or her federal income tax return. As you can see, the odds of having business income increase substantially once adjusted gross income (AGI) exceeds $100,000. More than 40 percent percent of people with an AGI of $250,000 or more have one of these two types of businesses. More than 72 percent of the really wealthy – people who earn more than $1 million per year – have a partnership or S-Corp. And nine-in-ten of the super wealthy – people with an AGI in excess of $10 million – have one of these.

At last count, there were nearly 59 technology regions around the world that include the “Silicon” moniker including "Silicon Alley" in New York City, "Silicon Alps" in Austria, and "Silicon Wadi" in Israel.  It is absolutely the greatest brand name that any tech region can have in the world.  Undoubtedly this is a testimony to the decades of continuous innovation and prolonged success of the original "Silicon Valley" in California, home of such renowned companies as Intel, Apple, Facebook and Twitter to name a few.

In seeking a better understanding of the Silicon Valley’s economy, I have concluded that an effective framework is that of an ecosystem. The ecosystem model helps define and describe how various elements in a region interact to generate economic vitality through innovation while ensuring its survival.  An innovation ecosystem is a dynamic adaptive organism which creates, consumes, and transforms knowledge and ideas into innovative products via the continuous formation of new businesses in a complex matrix of relationships among key elements.

Lose your love handles; call your Mom more often; get that promotion – if you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions, and will publish one a day starting on December 27th and running until January 7th. Check back here to watch them unfold and get some advice from some of the tech industry’s most well-known names.