Seattle-based Delve Networks won the “best presenting company” award from the attendees of the first annual Angel Capital Expo, hosted by Keiretsu Forum Northwest on Tuesday. More than a dozen companies across different fields presented to investors, including Humanity Interactive, Iverson Genetic Diagnostics, and Exro Technologies. Delve Networks started in 2006 (formerly called Pluggd) and makes video hosting and searching software.

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Seattle-area startup Findood, an online marketplace for specialty foods, took first prize at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum on Wednesday. The other four finalists were Dibspace, DigitalScirocco, Geedra, and HeatFlow Technologies. Also presenting to investors were Aurumis, CoCollage, Glue, Greenbridge International, PodCurry, Re:Source Fitness, and Serra Media. Findood won a package from Swift HR, office furniture, and a year of free office space from WRF Capital.

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‘Tis the season for startup-pitching events. Last week, it was the Zino Society’s investment forum in Seattle. Today it’s the DEMOfall09 conference in San Diego, where four Northwest companies are presenting. And tonight there is nPost’s networking and demo event for tech startups at the Columbia City Theater in South Seattle.

But there is also a notable newcomer to the scene. Alibaba, the Hangzhou, China-based Internet commerce firm, and Inc. magazine announced today the semifinalists in their U.S. entrepreneur competition, called “Newpreneur of the Year.” Thirty entrepreneurs will compete in six cities across the country, including Seattle, for 12 spots in the next round of competition, where the public will vote for the businesses they think have the most potential to revive the economy. (The other cities are New York, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, and Los Angeles.) The final round will take place on Nov. 18 in San Francisco, where one winner will take home $50,000, and four others will split another $50,000.

The Seattle semifinalist event is on Oct. 20 at the Edgewater Hotel. Five local entrepreneurs will pitch their companies and ideas, ranging widely from alternative energy, medical devices, and retail, to the decidedly low-tech world of kitchen and fashion accessories. The winners will move on to the final 12 in the nation. Here’s a snippet on each of the Seattle contenders:

—Jessica Aceti will be pitching Cap-sac, a modern line of convertible accessories, including a fanny pack for your head. The product folds into itself and can also be used as a purse. (This I have to see, though it’s safe to say I’m not the target audience.)

—Steven Bohannon from Bainbridge Island, WA, will pitch Feed Your Mind, a vending machine company focused on providing healthy, nutritious, and entertaining alternatives to traditional vending offerings. Its product mix includes crossword puzzles, games, new and used books, playing cards, maps, and nutritious snacks. Machines will be placed strategically where consumers get stuck waiting—at hospitals, airports, bus and ferry terminals, and so forth.

—Burt Hamner of Seattle will pitch Hydrovolts, the renewable energy company we’ve profiled before in Xconomy. Its key technology is a hydrokinetic turbine that can be placed in a water current (like a canal or stream) to provide electricity for up to a dozen homes. Hamner is no stranger to pitch competitions; Hydrovolts won the “audience favorite” prize at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum last March, and took home the $50,000 prize in the Zino Society Green Investment forum in May.

—Cindy Sawyer of Bothell, WA, is pitching ToweLocs, a locking device that keeps kitchen and hand towels secured, and prevents them from falling to the floor. It may sound mundane, but it’s the kind of simple, stylish home accessory that might just take off if it solves a real problem for people.

—Joel Smith of Edmonds, WA, will pitch Forward Mobility, a line of medical mobility products to help disabled customers maintain their independence. The company is looking for funding to finish the production tooling of its new walking leg brace, the Freedom Leg, which allows a person to walk on an injured leg with zero weight put on the knee and below.

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The Seattle-based investor and entrepreneur network Zino Society hosted its fourth annual Zino Zillionaire Investment Forum today at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Seattle. The event drew 28 companies, some in technology and some non-tech, each making a pitch for a chance to win one of two $50,000 investment prizes.

Here are the six finalists in the two categories, announced by the Zino Society at a reception this afternoon:

Technology—Photon Machines, Enroute, and Giftango.
(I wrote about Portland, OR-based Giftango raising $500,000 from the Oregon Angel Fund earlier this week.)

Non-technology—MicroGreen Polymers, Harbor Wing, and Zero Crossing.
(Luke profiled Arlington, WA-based MicroGreen earlier this summer, when the company raised $1.6 million from WRF Capital and local angel investors.)

The winner of each category, who will receive $50,000, will be announced in late October, after Zino Society members perform due digilence on the finalists. Stay tuned…

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After a scorching week of 90-degree temperatures, what could be better than kicking back with a nice cold one, catching up with friends and colleagues—and seeing five of Seattle’s top rock bands with tech affiliations duke it out for prizes and the adulation of the crowd?

It’s all happening this Thursday evening at Xconomy’s Battle of the Tech Bands, at WTIA’s summer celebration down at the Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle. The Battle will take place from 6-9 pm. Get your tickets online here, by Tuesday 5 pm, as they are going fast…

The bands (listen to their songs here) will be competing for two prizes—Audience Favorite (voted on by the crowd via SMS), which wins one year of band promotional services from Nimbit, and Most Innovative Band (voted on by our judges), which wins free studio time from The Hive Recording Studio. Both winners will also receive free press releases to promote their shows, tours, and albums with traditional and online media outlets, courtesy of Marketwire.

We’ll also be giving out raffle prizes throughout the evening, including a Seattle harbor cruise for four from Argosy Cruises, museum passes and a gift certificate from the Experience Music Project, Guitar Hero III courtesy of Guitar Center, and Seattle Mariners gift packs (see the event site for a complete list). All raffle ticket proceeds are going to our charitable partners, Technology Access Foundation and Jack Straw Productions. Thanks to all for their generous donations.

And last, but not least, check out Paul Allen and Bill Gates in cartoon-land, as they prepare to compete in the Battle. I’m actually starting to believe they might be there, although I don’t know about the costume (that puts it over the top). It’s the latest installment of Protingent Man by David J. Locher, courtesy of Donn Harvey at Protingent Staffing:

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Amazon.com wants your brain. Well, actually it wants your creative ideas for a television advertisement. The “Your Amazon Ad Contest” announced yesterday is giving customers of the Seattle, WA-based internet retail giant a chance to send in their own ads for the website. Two winners, one picked by Amazon and one voted on by people on the site, will win $10,000 in Amazon.com gift cards each. The ads will be shown in a to-be-announced movie festival and may end up on national television.

“User-generated content is the hallmark of Amazon from the very start,” said Steven Shure, the company’s vice president of global marketing, in an interview. He says he considers the contest an expansion of other opportunities customers have to add to the site—if a bit more formal than book reviews. “We believe customers know and care about Amazon,” he says.

It’s unclear how many and what quality of entries Amazon will receive by the July 17 deadline, which is why there is no guarantee that the ads will appear on TV. “We’re not going to air bad ads,” Shure says. If the same ad is picked by both the Amazon jury and the audience vote, its creator will receive the full $20,000—nothing to sneeze at, between Amazon’s constantly growing range of goods and the current economic climate. The prize money was picked as an “amount that would be meaningful to an individual,” Shure says.

Five finalists will be announced on August 24, and people will be able to vote for the audience prize winner until September 6, with the final winners revealed on September 21. (To submit an idea, go to www.amazon.com/yaac.)

Depending on the success of this contest, it may be repeated, Shure says. It also may be adapted for foreign markets, as a global outlook is the overall focus of Amazon’s marketing, he says. “If something works, we’ll keep trying it.”

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With summer on its way in, we’re starting to gear up for Xconomy’s Battle of the Tech Bands, which is happening on July 30 at the WTIA Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle. If you or someone you know plays in a band that has at least one member who hails from a Northwest tech, life sciences, or tech-investment firm, we want to hear from you (application info and event details are here).

The field is already shaping up to be pretty competitive. How will we choose the finalists and the overall winners, you ask? Very carefully. To that end, we are enlisting the help of some of the Seattle area’s finest tech and music minds (and ears) to serve as judges for the event, in addition to the Xconomy staff. Their duties will range from vetting demos and selecting the finalists to helping us decide which bands get the awards on the big night.

We thought you might like to know a little bit about the judges we’ve recruited so far. Their professional expertise spans the worlds of software, venture capital, and music history. Their musical tastes span everything from heavy metal and Eddie Van Halen to post-punk and alternative rock. Without further ado, here are the luminaries who will help us decide the outcome (not sure who will be the Simon Cowell yet):

—Peter Blecha, music historian, author, and former senior curator of the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Peter is the author of the recently released Sonic Boom! The History of Northwest Rock: From “Louie Louie” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Backbeat Books, 2009). He calls himself a “rock and roll archaeologist,” and has been a drummer with a number of bands in the Seattle area, including The Debbies.

—Steve Hall, managing director at Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, the group that manages Paul Allen’s investment holdings. Steve leads the firm’s early-stage venture capital investments across the technology, life sciences, and alternative energy sectors. He also plays a mean lead guitar, and notes that he has been brushing up on his Eddie Van Halen guitar solos in the past year.

—Jeff J. Lin, Microsoft program manager of Virtual Earth 3D. Jeff is the co-founder, guitarist, and pianist of the Seattle-based band Harvey Danger. You probably know them from their infectious hit single of the late 1990s, “Flagpole Sitta” ( “I’m not sick but I’m not well, and I’m so hot ’cause I’m in hell…”). Harvey Danger has released three full-length albums, played shows with bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Green Day, and once appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman.

We’ll have more details on the judges and prizes soon. But don’t delay, the deadline for submissions is June 12 (event details and info here). If you want to enter, please e-mail your band’s info to techbands@xconomy.com.

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The Seattle music scene is one of those cliches that people around the country always ask me about, along with the coffee and the weather. But I don’t mind, not one bit. From Jimi Hendrix to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, from the Presidents of the USA to Death Cab for Cutie and Fleet Foxes, the Northwest has produced some of the highest-flying acts in the business. (OK, I also have to mention Sleater-Kinney, Pedro the Lion, and Sir Mix-a-Lot…despite those atrocious Burger King ads.)

Here at Xconomy, we are all about bringing the tech-business community together in new and exciting ways, in addition to our core mission of providing authoritative, hyperlocal coverage of the innovation scene. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from our experiences in our network cities, it’s that really active innovation scenes go hand-in-hand with an abundance of creative talent and a strong arts culture. In particular, we’ve found an astounding amount of overlap between the music scene and techies/researchers working in innovative fields like software, gaming, and biotech.

So, on behalf of our whole staff, Luke and I are thrilled to announce that we are teaming up with the Washington Technology Industry Association to bring you the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands. The contest will be featured at the WTIA Annual Summer Celebration on the evening of Thursday, July 30, 2009, outside the Pyramid Ale House in Seattle. The WTIA Summer Celebration is one of the foremost networking events of the year, and now it will be even more of a blast. Here is more info on entering the band contest, and event registration.

“We’re really happy to be partnering with the WTIA on this amazing event,” says Xconomy co-founder and CEO Bob Buderi. “We’ve held some great battles in Boston. We expect Seattle to bring it.”

Here’s how it works. The Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands is open to all bands (amateur and pro alike) that have at least one member who works at a Northwest technology, life sciences, or tech-investment firm. Why enter? For starters, you’ll get to show off for your friends; meet fellow entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, developers, and engineers; and, oh yeah, possibly take home some serious loot—if you’ve got the chops. There will be two grand prize winners: the audience will pick its favorite band, and so will our esteemed panel of judges (more on prizes and judges to come).

In the past year and a half, Xconomy has put on its Battle of the Tech Bands twice in the Boston area, and they have been smash hits, the most recent drawing upwards of 450 people and raising a bunch of money for some great local charities. (My band played a guest set at the last Battle, so I can personally vouch for how much fun it was—yes, I lead a double life in music, as I suspect many around here do.) The winning bands have received free studio time and promotional services courtesy of local companies. We also gave away some fabulous door prizes, like Roomba vacuum cleaners from iRobot, Zune music players from Microsoft, and Rock Band video game bundles from Harmonix Music Systems.

So please join us for the inaugural Battle in Seattle. If you’d like to be considered for a slot in the Battle of the Tech Bands, send your band’s info (including MP3s, URLs, contact info, and the tech company or companies your band represents) to techbands@xconomy.com. Complete details for entering the contest are here—the deadline for band submissions is Friday, June 12.

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The ballots are in, and the University of Washington’s annual Business Plan Competition is officially under way. The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Foster School of Business has run the event for the past 11 years, awarding some $757,000 in prize money to 71 student companies that have crafted the most compelling and innovative business proposals each year. (We reported on last year’s winner, Impel NeuroPharma, and finalist Voltan Biofuel, which became AXI.)

After a long weekend of deliberations, a screening committee of 81 judges has narrowed down this year’s field of 90 submissions to 33 teams that will present in an “investment round” of pitching to live judges. The investment round takes place on April 28, and the teams that advance will submit full business plans by May 18. The final rounds of the competition and the awards ceremony will take place on May 21.

Most of the proposals are based on novel technologies from the UW, but there are a few from other universities including Washington State and Seattle University. Three of the teams (HydroSense, NanoCel, and Ecowell) already placed in the top three of last week’s Environmental Business Competition at the UW, as Luke reported.

Here are five other teams that caught my eye (and why):

—3 Phase Energy Systems, a UW team developing a way to harness wasted exhaust energy and feed it back into the power grid. (Energy efficiency is a growing market and seems to offer the kind of potential for 10-fold, venture capital-style investment returns.)

—CareerLuv, a UW team working on a proprietary software algorithm to help match job hunters with career opportunities. (It’s a crowded field, but if they have an edge, they could break into the market with very little capital.)

—Dose Safety, a Seattle University team developing software to effectively operate an artificial pancreas consisting of a continuous glucose monitor and insulin pump. (This could serve a critical and growing need for treating diabetes, but the issue is how well it works and how simple it is to use.)

—Soluxra, a UW team working on cheap, energy-efficient solar cells based on organic polymer materials. (This could be an important piece of the renewable energy pie; Rachel profiled the work here.)

—TracRx, a UW team working on a medication tracking service to help patients stick to their prescribed medications and doses. (This project sits at the booming intersection of healthcare and IT, and fills a crucial need to help caregivers keep track of the myriad medications that many patients need to take.)

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The Clean Tech Open, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, CA, announced today it is expanding its 2009 business competition to include cleantech entrepreneurs in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The fourth annual competition will award $50,000 each to three winners in the Northwest, in addition to winners in California and the Rocky Mountain region. Regional winners will then compete for a national grand prize of $250,000. The Northwest chapter is based in Seattle and co-chaired by John Pierce.

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Just a friendly reminder to all of you who trade pipettes, protractors, and powerpoints for whammy bars and hi hats at the end of the day: The deadline to enter Xconomy’s second annual Battle of the Tech Bands is midnight tonight. It’s shaping up to be a spectacular show and the prizes are pretty sweet, so sign up before your van turns into a pumpkin. Eligibility details and instructions for entering are here.

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Last night, Amazon Web Services announced the winner of its second annual AWS Startup Challenge: Yieldex, based in Colorado, California, and New York, helps advertisers and publishers manage their inventory by predicting how ads will perform on different websites. The company receives $100,000 in cash and Web services credits, plus a potential investment offer. Yieldex was one of seven finalists invited to pitch their startups at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

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The Automotive X Prize in Los Angeles announced today it has chosen its first 22 teams to compete for $10 million in prizes that will be awarded for developing super fuel-efficient vehicles (100 miles per gallon or equivalent is the nominal goal). Among this first wave of contenders are three Northwest teams: Bellingham, WA-based Avion; Kinetic Vehicles, based in Cave Junction, OR; and the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

—Avion has built an aerodynamic, diesel-powered, ultra fuel-efficient sports car. The company is led by Craig Henderson.

—Kinetic Vehicles has developed MAX, a turbocharged diesel-powered roadster. Its fuel comes from petroleum, biomass, or straight vegetable oil. Jack McCornack leads the operation.

—Western Washington University’s Vehicle Research Institute (VRI) has developed a series of cars called Viking, which run on gasoline, electricity, or biomethane and compressed natural gas. The VRI was founded by Michael Seal in the 1970s and is now headed by Eric Leonhardt.

The Automotive X Prize, which is sponsored by Progressive Insurance, will kick off its competition next year, holding stage races in several cities. More than 100 additional teams have signed letters of intent to compete so far, according to the X Prize website. The winners are expected to be announced in 2010. “The technologies reflected in this first wave of Registered Teams are as diverse as the teams themselves, and we look forward to hearing more about their individual ideas in advance of the 2009-2010 stage race competition,” said Julie Zona, director of team development and relations for the Automotive X Prize, in a statement.

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Updated (see below): A student group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management has been named one of three national finalists in a contest seeking YouTube video proposals for the creation of a new X Prize in Energy and the Environment, the X Prize Foundation announced today.

Jonathan Dreher’s 2-minute proposal, “Energy X PRIZE: Reduce Home Energy Usage,” notes that renewable energy technologies could have a big effect on our energy future by increasing the supply of energy. However, he notes, “This approach is already getting plenty of attention and may not benefit from a prize for additional incentives. The other, often forgotten way, is to reduce our demand for energy.” And, as Dreher notes, “Unlike a technology-based X Prize, every American can participate.” He claims that a $10 million prize focused on energy conservation could have a $1 billion impact.

(Update, Nov. 17: I finally reached Dreher, who noted first off that he worked with two fellow students, Jeremy Stewart and Michael Norelli, on the proposal. All three are in a dual-degree program that will garner them a Sloan MBA and a master of science in engineering systems from MIT. Neither Steward nor Norelli was mentioned in the X Prize release.)

The X Prize Foundation, of course, is famous for its huge prizes that address key technology and innovation challenges. In 2004, a Burt Rutan-led team financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen won the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for suborbital spaceflight. Since then, the foundation has created the $10 million Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE, and the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE. The foundation and its partner, BT Global Services, are now in the process of developing prizes in Space and Ocean Exploration, Life Sciences, Education and Global Development, and, of course, Energy & Environment.

Which is what the Crazy Green Idea Contest is all about. The contestant whose video garners the most votes before the end of this month stands to take home the $25,000 top prize. And, according to today’s announcement, their Crazy Green Idea will be “explored as the next X PRIZE in Energy and the Environment.”

In addition to Dreher’s proposal, the other two finalists (out of 133 submissions—does that sound low to anyone?) were:

—Alan Silva, from Roy, UT. His idea, The Energy Independence X PRIZE, is described as: “A prize to develop energy-independent homes that exist completely off the grid.”

—Kyle Good, of Irvine, CA: His concept, The Capacitor Challenge, centers on development of “a new storage medium, an ‘ultra-capacitor’.”

We’ve embedded all three proposals below. You can find all the finalists and vote for your choice, here.

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A prize for a prize. That’s essentially the reason a trio of heavyweights—Ray Kurzweil, Xconomist George Church, and Saul Griffith—will be on hand at MIT this afternoon, as they help announce a $25,000 prize for whomever comes up with the best idea for a $10 million energy and environment prize to be awarded by the X Prize Foundation.

More specifically, the $25K will be offered for the best YouTube video proposal for the big kahuna energy prize. The contest itself will be formally announced at a forum called “Seeking Radical Breakthroughs in Alternative Energy—What I Would Advise the Next President,” which will be held at 4:30 this afternoon in MIT Building 34, room 101 (you can find a few more details here).

The competition for the $25K prize should be tough. In addition to tapping various experts and its public YouTube call, the foundation is hosting the X PRIZE Lab @ MIT, a class this fall that focuses on the energy and environment sector. According to a press release, “The semester-long X PRIZE Lab class is asking students to conceive potential X PRIZEs that could help solve aspects of global warming and resource depletion. Last semester, the X PRIZE Lab @ MIT focused on healthcare. Students in the class proposed a Tuberculosis (TB) Diagnostics X PRIZE that would have the potential to save more than 1.6 million lives per year. The TB Diagnostics prize proposal was awarded a grant and is now being developed into an official X PRIZE.”

Here are the guidelines for your YouTube video submissions.

The winning video must answer the following three questions:

1. What is the specific prize idea?

2. What is the Grand Challenge or world-wide problem that you are trying to solve?

3. How will this prize benefit humanity?

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A team from Paris, France-based Voxmobili, which has operations in Bellevue, WA, has won $100,000 in Google’s Android Developer Challenge. The Paris-based team developed PhoneBook 2.0, a mobile-software package that combines instant messaging, social networking (showing contacts and locations), and live streaming in a secure way.

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Robert Langer is $1.2 million richer today. Langer, a renowned tissue engineer and drug delivery expert at MIT (and an Xconomist), has won the Millennium Technology Prize in Helsinki. It’s the world’s largest award for technology innovation, and is given to developers of a technology that “significantly improves the quality of human life, today and in the future.”

Langer, 59, has won a lot of awards in his career, but this is an especially big one. Past winners include World Wide Web pioneer Tim Berners Lee and Shuji Nakamura, developer of light-emitting diodes, according to the prize website. This year, Langer edged out Alec Jeffreys, developer of DNA fingerprinting techniques, and wireless pioneer Andrew Viterbi, founder of Qualcomm, among others.

The prize was awarded for Langer’s body of work fighting cancer, heart disease and other illnesses, according to a statement from the prize board. More than 100 million people are using advanced drug delivery systems, and the number is growing.

“It’s such a great honor — particularly given the quality of the people who have won it before as well as the quality of the innovations and people considered this year,” Langer told the MIT News Office.

So what does he plan to do with the money? “It’s so sudden, we haven’t figured it out yet,” Langer says via e-mail from Helsinki, where he accepted the prize.

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It’s been a big week for FloDesign Wind Turbine. On Monday the company placed first in the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Ignite Clean Energy Competition, winning $100,000 in cash and services. On Tuesday, the company netted an additional $200,000 in cash by winning the MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize Competition. Which means that the company, a spinoff of aerospace technology consultancy FloDesign in Wilbraham, MA, earned a total of $300,000 in a little more than 24 hours.

And there are hints of much more money to come. Xconomy has learned from a source with insight into the company that Al Gore, the former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner who is now a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has offered FloDesign venture financing totaling as much as $10 million.

FloDesign CEO Stan Kowalski volunteered in passing earlier in the week that he had talked to Gore, but when we followed up today he would not comment on whether the company is in discussions with Kleiner Perkins. However, Xconomy has confirmation of Gore’s involvement from another source—a person close to a Boston-area venture fund who says that fund had nearly finalized an agreement with FloDesign when Gore suddenly swept in and spirited off with the deal.

Kowalski, for his part, says it’s been an incredible week for the company. “We are still coming down to Earth,” he says. But it took a lot longer than 24 hours for the company to reach its breakthrough moment. “We’ve been working on the wind turbine concept for three years now,” Kowalski says.

FloDesign’s concept is radically different from today’s wind turbines, with their large propeller-like blades. Drawing on technology that the company initially developed for use in aerospace applications such as the engines on the Gulfstream II jet, the design resembles a turbojet fan, with all its blades placed inside a shroud. The design “will outperform existing turbines by a factor of three or more in a much wider range of wind resources,” the company says. (There’s a video explaining the concept here.)

According to Bill Aulet, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (and an Xconomist) who is one of the key organizers of the MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize Competition, a turbine that produces power efficiently even under low-wind conditions is the holy grail of the wind power industry. And since FloDesign’s turbine reportedly works well at slow wind speeds, “that’s a very attractive value proposition,” Aulet says. “Basically it opens up wind to a whole new dimension.”

Gore apparently agrees—but FloDesign now seems to want to avoid the crush of publicity that is likely to come along with the former vice president’s blessing. Last week, when I met Kowalski during the semifinals for the Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize, he hinted at Gore’s strong interest in FloDesign’s technology. But today, when I asked him to confirm Gore’s interest, he was demure. “Oh, I don’t know that he has interest,” Kowalski said. “There are many firms that have an interest in the technology, so we are under scrutiny or due diligence to see if it’s worthwhile to invest in.”

I also asked him specifically about receiving a $10 million term sheet from Gore and Kleiner Perkins.

“How much?” he asked.

I repeated the figure. “Oh, no, no, no. That thing is a long process.” Kowalski said.

Still, Kowalski confirmed that FloDesign is trying to raise somewhere in the range of $8 million in venture financing. The money will go into building a full-scale prototype wind turbine that can be certified by regulators; the enclosed-turbine concept has so far been tested only in small-scale models. Kowalski says the company already has orders for its turbine, though they’re contingent on the company hitting certain milestones in the development process. The first FloDesign turbine to hit the market, he says, will probably generate 500 kilowatts to one megawatt of electricity.

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Hello World, come on down… You’re the next contestant on the PRIZE is Right. That’s right, play the game, solve the challenge…and we ALL win.

Competitions and prizes are nothing new, but the era of high-profile, world-changing contests is upon us. History has seen its share of successful prizes, such as the 20,000 pound, British Longitude Prize of 1714, for determining a ship’s longitude. Or how about the $25,000 Orteig Prize, awarded to Charles Lindbergh for the first transatlantic flight between New York and Paris. But now, such competitions are raising more international publicity and awareness than ever before—setting goals that were once unimaginable, offering staggering sums to the winners, and attracting notable partners (who help publicize and pay for the prizes) who want to be associated with the radical change the prizes hope to inspire.

Last week, in partnership with Google, the X PRIZE Foundation (where I work) announced its latest challenge; The Google Lunar X PRIZE. Up to $30 million will be awarded for landing robots on the moon, transmitting high-quality photos and accomplishing various tasks. The X PRIZE, best-known for the success of the $10 million Ansari Space X PRIZE, awarded for launching a human into space twice within two weeks, requires that the teams in all competitions be 90 percent privately funded. This is meant to ensure a path to commercialization and benefit for all of humanity, not just governments.

But it’s not just space travel that the foundation is seeking to blast into orbit. Following the success of the first X PRIZE, the foundation launched the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, a $10 million competition for rapid and cost effective DNA sequencing technology, which, when successful, will usher in a new era of personalized medicine. Such goals, while so far unattainable, still attract support from pioneers such as Richard Branson and Stephen Hawking, who will be among the first to have their DNA sequenced by the competition’s winning team. I came on board with the X PRIZE Foundation in March to lead this effort. But I took on this responsibility only after careful consideration and realization of the power of such a prize to provide leverage to accelerate technology and spur the radical change we can make towards human health, happiness, and longevity.

The colors are shining. Al Gore has shown that green is good. Bono proved that red is supportive. And now Google, with its multicolored logo, is demonstrating its support and belief in the prize model. What’s most important, though, is the celebration. Our world, our culture, must celebrate these competing teams, the scientists, the engineers, the visionaries. Together, they are the problem solvers who are trying to save the world—and not just entertain it.

Inspiration, Creativity, Innovation… These are not just words meant for posters in an office. They are happening all around us, and corporate leaders, governments, and individuals have a responsibility to step up and cheer it on!

Marc Hodosh leads the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics and is chairman of Dean Kamen’s FIRST Robotics competition in Boston, which inspires thousands of high school students to pursue careers in science and technology.

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