GUEST MENTOR James Beshara, co-founder and CEO of Crowdtilt.com: Here are the top five trends I see in tech startups for 2013:

1. Our phones are becoming our remote controls for life. If we have a need for it in our daily lives, there should and will be an icon and app for it on our phone. It's as simple as that. Our phones are our emergency kit for first-world problems.

Whether it's a taxi or a ride in the rain (Uber, Lyft), a mechanic (YourMechanic), a doctor's appointment (ZocDoc), the literal remote control (AppleTV), a personal assistant (Exec), a cake-baker (Zaarly), groceries (Instacart), or you're getting a little chilly and want the temperature in the house turned up (Nest), our phones are the concierge. I expect this phenomenon to continue in 2013 and as we run into times in our daily lives when we don't have an icon for it just yet. Someone will be working hard to create it.

I understand that many of these services are not rolled out across the entire country (much less the world), but trust me when I say that the convenience these services offer blows my mind every time I use them.

2. Crowdfunding behavior will spill beyond their silos. We as Internet consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with a new, or some would say, a very old, style of commerce. It's one where a patron, client or customer purchases something that doesn't exist yet -- a la Groupon (via bulk-buying and daily deals), Kickstarter (via crowdfunding a documentary or a hardware product into existence), or our own site, Crowdtilt, making ambitious group experiences possible. These new types of consumer models require money, a group of people, and a threshold of demand that must be met before the exchange is made. This communication through commerce makes a lot of sense for all parties: A seller is guaranteed demand before production and a buyer gets to take advantage of the de-risked production, getting a higher ticket item for a lower price than she or he would receive otherwise.

In 2012 we also saw massively successful crowdfunded projects like App.net and Lockitron.com raise millions on their own, with commerce models borrowed from crowdfunding sites. In 2013, I think this commerce model will continue to spill beyond the silos that pioneered the models in the first place.

(Crowdtilt just launched the world's first international crowdfunding API this month, so you can say this prediction is either completely self-promotional or that we believe in this trend so strongly we put our money where our mouth is by fostering it.)

3. Sensors, your time is now. In our pockets, we've got a device that can control, read and display information from the world around us -- and it can do it all continuously and wirelessly.

Furthermore, we have hardware tinkerers coming out of the woodwork to blow us away with their inventions and innovative uses for inexpensive, readilyavailable sensors. From things like Xbox Kinnect and Belkin's Wemo Motion, to Fitbit and Jawbone's Up, to replacements for standard cardboard board games (Sifteo), or startups like Wattvision (wattvision.com), sensors are being used in incrediblyinexpensive and impressive ways.

And this doesn't even include the contactless payment systems using NFC/RFID ('near field communication' and 'radio-frequency identification') readers and devices that we've been hearing about for a few years now. (RFID readers and devices are projected to triple in sales by 2014 and reach a world-wide market size of $20bn USD.

If smart devices like our phones, our tablets and the sophisticated consolenavigation systems in our vehicles are the brains, it's time to give them limbs.

4. 'Hollow Giants' looking for business models (or suitors). Tumblr, Foursquare, Quora and Twitter are perceived as massive companies within the startup ecosystem. But in terms of revenue-generating businesses, they barelyregister on the radar. And since the Facebook IPO, social hasn't really had the shine it once did within the public or private markets.

Do I think social is dead? No. On the contrary, I think the Web is still ripe for a more social experience, but I think that while these companies have proven they can get an audience, the time has come to see whether they can build a business off that audience or whether that audience is worth an acquisition by the likes of Google or Yahoo.

Whatever these massively funded and massively valued startups do in 2013, their behavior will likely be dictated by the need to prop up their massive valuations. This kind of pressure or challenge is nothing new for the founders and executives that got their companies to this point, but it will be interesting to see which direction each startup takes in the next 12 months.

5. It's been easy to start a business in 2012, but to stick around past 2013 will be tough. I'm told it's been a good day to be an entrepreneur. I'd say it's been a great day to be a consumer. We've got apps, services and competition for our dollars and eyeballs, and smart people working to solve a lot of our problems.

An entrepreneur has had good terms on financing the past two years, but has it really been that good to be her in this environment? Financing doesn't make a company. Making a company makes a company, and that's never been tougher. For every reason it's been great to be a consumer, all the apps and all the services, it has meant that the competition to build a great company has never been tougher. There's competition for eyeballs and customers, of course, but there's also increased competition for further financing or competition in finding the key hires that can take your company from 5 to 50 and from 50 to 500. The number of startups have out-paced the amount of funding there is (commonly referred to as a series-A crunch), but perhaps more importantly, the amount of startups launched in the past two years has outpaced the amount of great people out there to hire.

In 2013, we're going to see a lot of consolidation of entrepreneurs coming together to build companies. You know, like they said in Lost: 'Live together, die alone.'

Some honorable mentions include: The continued rise in collaborative consumption and our growing 'Global Village' (built on identity and reputation, like Lyft's donation model or the growing comfort with renting out your apartment or car via Airbnb or GetAround), the rise of data analytics and data science (we solved storing it, now, um, what can we do with it?), and the impending awesomeness of QR codes (totally kidding or am I?... I am).