Emerging Tech fund may diminish

Despite operating for much of the year under a cloud of suspicion, the Texas Emerging Technology Fund is expected to gain continued support during the coming legislative session, says the ABJ Entrepreneur.

But observers say the fund's size may be scaled down by legislators looking for political payback while reducing the state's budget woes. Whatever the reasons, a downsized fund would not be good news for the state's entrepreneurs who look to the ETF for seed financing, the report states.

The five-year-old fund was initially funded with $200 million to invest in innovative technologies developed in Texas. The state legislature typically replenishes it each session for a two-year period. By mid-October, the fund had distributed $300 million to early-stage companies and university research projects. It has been an economic development tool that made govenor Rick Perry proud. But the state's $24 billion shortfall is going to make full replenishment of the fund difficult to justify

The US Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has published a study that analyses how business travel has been affected by the economic downturn and by emerging technologies such as telepresence, writes Enterprise Communications.

The report, Flying on Business, examined the emergence of new technology such as video conferencing on the business travel market. CAA concluded that telepresence could potentially work for business travel in that it could also increase links with other economies, helping to boost business relationships and the requirement to schedule face-to-face meetings.

Harry Bush, the CAA's director of economic regulation, says, “It is an open question how far some of the economies made in the recession will permanently affect the way companies allow employees to travel. In the longer term, new communications technologies will have an impact, but seem unlikely significantly to replace business travel, as face-to-face meetings will remain important to business travellers.”

Nanotechnology researchers working on self-powered nanodevices - nanoscale systems that scavenge energy from their surrounding environment - have been experimenting with various power sources ranging from piezoelectric systems ("Electricity-generating silicone implants could power electronic devices") to sound ("Nanotechnology energy generation using sound"), Nanowerk reports.

However, the most abundant energy available in biosystems is chemical and biochemical energy, such as glucose. Researchers in China have now reported a nanowire-based biofuel cell (NBFC) based on a single proton conductive polymer nanowire for converting chemical energy from biofluids into electricity, using glucose oxidase and laccase as catalyst.

"We have demonstrated an innovative single nanowire biofuel cell for harvesting chemical/biochemical energy for powering in vivo nanodevices," Caofeng Pan tells Nanowerk. "The output of our NBFC is sufficient to drive pH, glucose or photon sensors. The high output power, low cost and easy fabrication process, large-scale manufacturability, high 'on-chip' integrability and stability demonstrates its great potential for in vivo biosensing."