A rocket-propelled life-preserver which can be launched up to 500 feet has won the 2010 James Dyson Award, one of the world's most prestigious student-design awards. Australian student Samuel Adeloju, who invented the so-called Longreach buoy, wins $15,000, as well as $15,000 for the industrial design department at his alma mater, the University of New South Wales.

The UK's six largest banks are to pledge around £1bn (€1.15bn) to a new venture capital fund to help provide funding to the hard-hit SME sector, according to reports.

Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Barclays, Santander UK and Standard Chartered are all to inject tens of millions of pounds into the fund in the near future, growing to £150m - £200m (€172.9m - €230.5m) over the next few years.

The move represents a move by the banks, many of which were bailed out with taxpayer funds during the financial crisis, to address criticism from the government and the public that they have not been lending enough to small businesses.

While moves to develop an EU patent have intensified with the Belgian presidency, which believes it can reach a consensus by the end of the year, a new study shows that three European countries are among the six nations dominating innovation in the clean energy sector.

According to a comprehensive new study by the European Patent Office (EPO), Germany, France and the UK join Japan, the US and South Korea in leading the emerging green tech revolution, filing 80% of all patent applications in the field.

EPO Chief Benoît Battistelli said China, India and Brazil are catching up quickly and have ramped up their efforts in niche clean tech sectors. China is now the major player in the wind energy sector, despite having published very few patents in this industry until five years ago.

Over the next ten years the green economy is going to change virtually every major aspect of our lives for the better. These changes are as sexy and irresistible as new technology. In fact, when we talk about designing scalable solutions for sustainable communities much of it IS new technology. But it's also new business, better design, increased efficiency, stronger community, and old-fashioned common sense.

The green economy is unstoppable because sustainable solutions are also smart, effective solutions. It's clear from our inability to pass climate legislation that we're not going green because it's the right thing to do. We're going green because it's simply the smart thing to do.

This is ordinarily a busy month for conferences, and two new mega-events are joining the party this year: FutureM Boston (starting today) and Boston Region Entrepreneurship Week (starting Oct. 13.). One will spotlight local companies helping to shape the future of marketing, and the other is planned as a celebration of "the entrepreneurial spirit."

Thus, it seems like the right time to assemble a list of some of the Boston area's most innovative people. The criteria were simple: smart people who are working on important projects at companies of any size, or who support entrepreneurship in essential ways.

Personal branding for entrepreneurs in many cases is a massive paradox. On one hand, in the authentic, transparent business world we are living in right now, it is 100 percent imperative to have a personal brand–a human presence led by you. We all know that the cliche statements are true: People form relationships with people.

On the other hand, having a strong personal brand can also be a challenge of scalability. Can I scale myself? Am I too accessible? What happens if I go away?

COTEC Portugal organized on 7th October at Porto, the VI Meeting COTEC Europe, an event that unites the Spanish counterparts, Italian and Portuguese in order to enhance contacts and exchange of experiences between entrepreneurs and business leaders from the three countries.

Fundación COTEC, Fondazione COTEC e COTEC Portugal irão debater b oas práticas no âmbito da inovação, com especial enfoque na valorização do conhecimento gerado nas universidades, na promoção do crescimento das PME e na sustentabilidade da gestão da inovação empresarial. COTEC Foundation, Fondazione COTEC and Portugal will discuss COTEC b oas practices in innovation, with special focus on the enhancement of knowledge generated in universities, the promotion of SME growth and sustainability of the management of business innovation.

O COTEC Europa conta com a participação do Rei Juan Carlos de Espanha, do Presidente da República de Itália Giorgio Napolitano, e do Presidente da República de Portugal Aníbal Cavaco Silva. The COTEC Europe with the participation of King Juan Carlos of Spain, the President of Italy Giorgio Napolitano, and the President of Portugal Anibal Cavaco Silva.

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Bendis' Presentation to follow.

Angel investor groups across Texas are forming an alliance to attract more investors, make larger joint investments in young companies and simplify the process for entrepreneurs.

"Our goal is to make it easier for entrepreneurs to get their deal in front of multiple angel networks," said Jamie Rhodes, chairman of the Central Texas Angel Network in Austin who is leading efforts to launch the alliance. "This is incredibly important, since angel investing is such a major part of the economy, which is in the doldrums. Start-ups create the vast majority of jobs in the nation."

At least seven of 18 Texas angel groups are backing the nonprofit alliance, which should be formalized next year under the potential name Alliance of Texas Angel Networks. In addition to Rhodes' group, the alliance includes the Baylor, Concho Valley, Houston, North Texas, South Texas and West Texas angel networks.

Starting Monday, startups that use CrowdFlower's crowdsourced labor service will have the chance to receive investments of up to $10,000 each, courtesy of startup accelerator and seed fund 500 Startups. The Crowdflower Fund, a $250,000 platform micro-fund, will offer investments in up to 10 companies for a one percent stake. A lucky few startups may also qualify for $50,000 investments and an invitation for an upcoming accelerator program at 500 Startups' office space in Mountain View, California.

The partnership between 500 Startups and CrowdFlower, which offers a labor-on-demand service for companies that need simple jobs completed quickly (making sure that business listings are accurate, for example), makes sense. "[500 Startups founder] Dave McClure was an investor at CrowdFlower when he was at Founder's Fund," says Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower. " We had been looking for a way to work together. We want to help more startups use our software in innovative ways, and Dave wants to fund innovative startups."

An emerging rise in investment in from petrochemical majors and governments in Asia, Europe and the Americas aims at extracting sugars from seaweed for ethanol, advanced biofuels, drop-in fuels, biochemicals and biopolymers.

For more than 100 years, China and Asian nations have grown seaweed also known as macro-algae for food, animal feed, pharmaceutical remedies, and cosmetic purposes.

Why Macro-Algae? A new study, Algae 2020, Vol 2 (October, 2010 update) finds experts from Korea, the Philippines, Norway, the US and Chile agree seaweed grows faster than terrestrial crops, has a high sugar content for conversion to advanced biofuels and ethanol, absorbs more airborne carbon than land-based plants, has no lignin, can be easily harvested compared to microalgae, requires no pretreatment for ethanol production, can be harvested up to six times a year in warm climates.  The Algae 2020 study details emerging projects in macro-algae driving increased investment in projects around the world, as highlighted below.

If you work in education technology, get ready. The Gates money is coming. Waves of it.

This fall the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several partners will announce a new project aimed at harnessing technology to help prepare students for college and get them to graduation. The senior program officer leading that effort is Josh Jarrett, a former software entrepreneur with a Harvard M.B.A. who joined Gates after five years with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. In an interview, he previewed that program and offered his take on the online-learning scene.

Q: You’ve teamed with Educause, the college IT group, to start a program called Next Gen Learning Challenges. Describe the project.

A: What we envision is a multiyear, multiwave program, where every six to 12 months we issue a new set of challenges. And we’ll issue a set of challenges this fall around shared open-core courseware, around learning analytics, around blended learning, and around new, deeper forms of learning and engagement using interactive technologies. There’s a big gap between R&D and high-impact solutions at scale. We’re trying to participate in some of the effort to help those most promising solutions get across that chasm.

Scientists have identified a way that the United States could immediately save the energy equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil a year — without spending a penny or putting a ding in the quality of life: Just stop wasting food. Their study, reported in ACS’ semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology, found that it takes the equivalent of about 1.4 billion barrels of oil to produce, package, prepare, preserve and distribute a year’s worth of food in the United States.

Michael Webber and Amanda Cuéllar note that food contains energy and requires energy to produce, process, and transport. Estimates indicate that between 8 and 16 percent of energy consumption in the United States went toward food production in 2007. Despite this large energy investment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that people in the U.S. waste about 27 percent of their food. The scientists realized that the waste might represent a largely unrecognized opportunity to conserve energy and help control global warming.

Last week, the Center for American Progress held a well-attended session entitled How to Keep the Fuel of Creation and Innovation Burning and the definition of creative economy included folk arts, film architecture, the video game industry and publishing. In an example given of how creative economy does not just employ "creative types," there was mention that movies also involve truck drivers and accountants.

The forum was moderated by Judy Woodruff (The NewsHour on PBS) and the panelists were:

Paris Barclay (First Vice President, Directors Guild of America and Emmy-Award winning Movie and Television Director and Producer, whose credits include Glee);

This is ordinarily a busy month for conferences, schmooze-fests, and seminars. But cramming the calendar even more this year are two new mega-events: FutureM Boston (starting today) and Boston Region Entrepreneurship Week (starting Oct. 13).
One will spotlight Boston-area companies helping to shape the future of marketing, and the other is planned as a celebration of “the entrepreneurial spirit.’’
With the focus on creating companies and propagating big ideas, it seemed like the right time to assemble a list of some of the area’s most innovative people. The criteria were simple: smart people who are working on important projects at companies of any size, or who support entrepreneurship in essential ways.

A startup called Recorded Future has developed a tool that scrapes real-time data from the Internet to find hints of what will happen in the future. The company's search tool spits out results on a timeline that stretches into the future as well as the past.

The 18-month-old company gained attention earlier this year after receiving money from the venture capital arms of both Google and the CIA. Now the company has offered a glimpse of how its technology works.

Conventional search engines like Google use links to rank and connect different Web pages. Recorded Future's software goes a level deeper by analyzing the content of pages to track the "invisible" connections between people, places, and events described online.

What entrepreneurs and executives can learn from sailors

Very few civilians have the opportunity to experience life on a nuclear aircraft carrier up close and personal. Recently, I had the extraordinary experience of spending a day and a night at sea in the Pacific on board the USS Nimitz. I was part of a Navy outreach program to give ordinary landlubbers like me a perspective on the mission and operations of a naval strike group.

I was excited. Who would turn down a chance to get on top of a nuclear power plant driving 100,000 tons of steel through the ocean, with 5,000 men and women handling scores of aircraft, carrying thousands of pounds of bombs and missiles, burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel a day, with margins measured in inches, and tolerances of seconds? What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve always been a numbers guy. Growing up, I was always pretty good at math. And I enjoyed it – when I went off I thought I wanted to be a math major (until I figured out that at least at my university, all of the math majors were a bit off in the head (and, also, way smarter than me)). I ended up majoring in economics because the math parts of it were attractive.

So it pains me when I have to say that in business, our attempts at measurement are often ill-founded. Many times we end up using numbers as a defense against ambiguity and uncertainty. Most of the time, instead of trying to measure things, we might be better off just getting more comfortable with these states – because bad numbers are worse than no numbers.