The deadline is quickly approaching for those who wish to enter the Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition. Applications must be completed by Aug. 10 for companies and Sept. 30 for students. The awards will be announced Nov. 17 at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

The Accel­er­ate Michi­gan Inno­va­tion Com­pe­ti­tion is a global busi­ness plan com­pe­ti­tion high­lighting Michi­gan’s entrepreneurial ecosystem fostering inno­va­tion and busi­ness oppor­tu­nities. It tar­gets mid-to-late-stage busi­ness start-ups with the poten­tial to gen­er­ate an imme­di­ate impact on Michigan’s econ­omy, as well as stu­dent con­cepts with longer-term busi­ness viability. At stake is more than $1 mil­lion in cash win­nings, plus in-kind awards of ser­vices, staffing and soft­ware.

To apply, click over to the Accelerate Michigan website.

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We try to avoid the obvious pun around here,* but we are excited about XSITE 2011, our big full-day conference, which takes place tomorrow at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. We have had an outstanding response to this year’s event, with more than 400 people signed up—including around 100 startups (you can see the lineup here, and the startup list here). And now, on the eve of the event, we’d like to announce three great prizes that will go to the next three people to buy full-priced tickets to the event.

The prizes will be awarded in this order:

—Samsung SCH-LC11 4G Mobile Hotspot and 4G SIM card good for 30 days (courtesy of Google)

—$100 gift certificate to Gilt, the online fashion site (courtesy of Gilt Groupe)

—$100 gift certificate to Gilt (courtesy of Gilt Groupe)

Remember, you have to buy a full-priced ticket to qualify—student tickets, Startup Specials, and other discounted registrations don’t qualify. And you have to be present at XSITE to claim your prize.

Thanks to Gilt and Google for donating the prizes. Even if you don’t move quickly enough to grab one of them, we feel certain the event will be worth the price of admission. You can register here. Hope to see you there.

* Editor’s note: That’s just a lie.

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The Marconi Society, a group established in Palo Alto, CA, to recognize the creative spirit of Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi in today’s scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, has named Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and computer theorist Jack Kiel Wolf as winners of this year’s Marconi Prize.

Jacobs, 77, was cited for his contributions to digital and satellite-based communications. His work was fundamental to the technical and commercial success of Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), a method of digital wireless communications that became the standard for 3G cellular networks around the world.

Wolf, a UC San Diego scientist best known for mathematical research that helped lay the foundations for digital information and communications, died in his La Jolla home on May 12, just after he was selected for the prize. He was 76. The $100,000 honorarium awarded as part of the Marconi Fellowship and Prize will be split between the Jacobs and Wolf families. Past Marconi Prize winners include Adobe Systems founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Metcalfe, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

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Competition in the crowded daily-deals market got a little more pugnacious recently with an acquisition by group discount site BuyWithMe. The Boston- and New York-based company purchased LocalTwist, boosting BuyWithMe in San Diego and putting the company in a new market—Seattle.

The latter city, of course, is the home base of competitor Tippr, the Martin Tobias-led company that is currently suing BuyWithMe in federal and state court over two different issues. As my colleague Greg Huang notes, it’s all part of the “life-and-death struggle for third place” in daily deals.

Other stories that made the rounds at Xconomy in the past week or so:

—Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) had another confrontation with state government over the company’s extreme aversion to being deputized as a sales-tax collector. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law that state’s version of an “Amazon law,” trying to make the sales in Illinois subject to sales tax by targeting Amazon’s marketing tie-ins with affiliate websites.

With a steady drumbeat of regulation attempts happening in the states, I took a look at why these efforts are really a side issue in making a big national policy change. Long story short: More aggressive state regulations aren’t likely to make Amazon heel, but they could serve as another prod for Congress to finally act on a broader solution.

—Kirkland, WA-based wireless provider Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) saw more top names hit the bricks, just a few months after founder and local wireless legend Craig McCaw left his post as chairman of the board. Chief Executive Bill Morrow, Chief Information Officer Kevin Hart, and Chief Commercial Officer Mike Sievert are out in the latest shake-up. As The Wall Street Journal’s Russell Garland noted, Sievert’s last public words on Clearwire’s behalf were very likely at our big Mobile Madness event, where he sounded optimistic: “We lack for nothing except cash.”

New board Chairman John Stanton, another titan of the Seattle-area wireless landscape, was immediately tapped as interim CEO while the board searches for a long-term replacement. Asked whether he’d take over as CEO permanently, Stanton gave The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley an unequivocal no. Clearwire also said that it believes a resolution is near in a dispute over wholesale pricing with majority owner Sprint (NYSE: S).

—The center of gravity in the tech world shifted temporarily to some college town in Texas for the interactive portion of South by Southwest. Plenty of well-known names from the Seattle tech scene were … Next Page »

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Spit was Leon Noel’s inspiration for the startup, SocialSci, that caused him and co-founder Harley Trung to leave Yale University just months before graduating.

Well, more broadly, it was the hassle of getting participants for research studies while he was a biological anthropology student at Yale, Noel says. But spitting was part of the ordeal. To gather the necessary data for the scientific studies required by his major, he would plant himself on campus, ask students to spit in a cup, and fill out a 30-minute survey. Not surprisingly, it was challenging to convince participants to share their information, and completing any given study often took more than a year, he says.

“There has to be a better way to go about doing this,” Noel says he thought at the time. So he and Trung, a computer science major, started working on SocialSci.com in May 2009, as a “way to make the scientific process easier.” Initially, the website mapped the locations where labs and research houses paid for participants to physically come in and donate samples (like spit) or undergo medical tests like MRIs.

By the end of last summer, SocialSci started targeting another pain point in scientific research. “The online scientific survey was really where we could expand,” Noel, the company’s CEO, says. The idea was for a Web-based software platform where users could answer survey questions for social science studies from the convenience of their own computers, without researchers having to flag people down on the street or quad. And the goal was also to make the process fun and lucrative for those participating in the studies (more on that later).

Noel and Trung, SocialSci’s co-founder and chief technology officer, spent most of their senior year developing this side of the platform, but left school in February when they were accepted to this past spring’s installment of TechStars Boston, the startup incubator program.

And it looks like the bet is starting to pay off. They’re launching their private beta today, for 5,000 research participants. Researchers from more than 20 universities have lined up to submit studies to the online pool. (Xconomy readers: 250 of you can sign up here to avoid the wait list for the private beta release).

SocialSci also closed a $500,000 angel funding round earlier this summer, with investments from LaunchCapital, SOSventures, and angel investors like Will Herman and David Cohen. The startup now has six employees and operates out of Polaris Venture Partners’ Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge, MA.

As for related companies, sites like SurveyMonkey have long occupied the space of creating and distributing online surveys. But they … Next Page »

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The Cleantech Open, a national business plan competition for energy and clean technology startups, announced yesterday its 16 semifinalists for the Pacific Northwest region (as well as teams from other parts of the country). The Northwest companies are Aquapulser, Arcimoto, Clarian Power, Columbia Power Technologies, CyVolt Energy Systems, EnVitrum, Greenstone International, Hydrovolts, Innovatus Energy, LaserMotive, Mercurius Biofuels, Nanocel, Puralytics, and Zebigo. Also competing in this group are Current Motor Company (from Michigan) and viaCycle (from Georgia). The teams will compete for three regional prizes worth up to $30,000 each, plus a shot at a national grand prize worth $250,000.

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Technology Underwriting Greater Good, an organization launched last fall by Jeff Fagnan of Atlas Venture and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst Partners, will hand out $10,000 to one of three non-profit organizations at its first annual “Spring Fling” fundraising event this Wednesday, June 9. With a self-declared mission to pursue “open source philanthropy,” TUGG mainly supports organizations helping inner-city and underprivileged teens. The groups competing for the $10K prize are Bikes Not Bombs, techBoston, and More Than Words.

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Think it’s possible to shoot down a swarm of buzzing mosquitoes in mid-air? Or maybe you want to power up a remote flying vehicle? Tom Nugent is your man. The Seattle-area entrepreneur just might be the most versatile guy with a laser you’ve ever met.

Yes, a laser. Until recently, Nugent worked in the laboratory of Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, the invention company led by Nathan Myhrvold, where one of his projects was the so-called “photonic fence.” This effort has gotten lots of media attention, most recently for an impressive demo at the TED conference in February. That’s where Myhrvold showed a video of a laser burning the wings off a flying mosquito in super slow-motion. The idea is this technology, implemented on a larger scale, could help prevent the spread of malaria or protect crops against flying pests.

But Nugent’s focus now is on something that might be more practical: power beaming. That means using lasers to deliver energy to remote sensors, vehicles, or base stations. It’s a two-way trick: the receiver has to have a solar cell to convert the laser’s energy into electricity. But as long as the solar cell is viable, the technology could be useful in any situation where installing a wire is impractical, where batteries run down, or where it’s too expensive to truck in fuel.

That’s really just the beginning, to Nugent’s mind. One of his ultimate goals is to be able to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth from space, presumably to help solve global-scale energy problems. For now, though, he’ll settle for beaming power to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other remote devices, including very early technology that could help scientists develop something called a space elevator. These ideas, in sum, have turned into a small company called LaserMotive, based in Kent, WA.

Before dismissing these projects as far-fetched, a little background is required. The idea of power beaming has been around for decades. But advances in cheaper and more energy-efficient diode lasers have made it possible to pursue the idea commercially in the past few years. Even the rise of laser hair removal products (which you might see on late night TV) have helped things move forward. So in 2007, Nugent and fellow physicist (and Intellectual Ventures veteran) Jordin Kare, an expert on laser rocket propulsion and optics who worked on the “Star Wars” nuclear-missile defense system in the 1980s—decided to make a business out of power beaming, and co-founded LaserMotive.

“We think we can produce revenue while we get experience,” says Nugent, LaserMotive’s president.

Their first project: tackling the power beaming aspect of NASA’s “Space Elevator Games.” If you don’t know what a space elevator is, that’s OK—it doesn’t exist yet. The über-futuristic idea is to have a cable anchored to the ground, extending thousands of miles into space, that could be used to launch payloads into orbit. The space end would be unattached, and the Earth’s rotation would keep it taut so a robot “elevator” could move up and down the cable, carrying equipment. Sure, this would take billions of dollars and a few decades to get working, but it could ultimately make space operations much cheaper than using rockets. That’s the idea, at least.

If a space elevator is ever going to work, it will need power at multiple steps along the way. So, at “Level 1” of the NASA Power Beaming Challenge, held last November in Mojave, CA, Nugent and Kare’s team used a ground-based infrared laser to beam energy to specially designed solar cells aboard an 11-pound robot (see photo, left) driven by an electric motor. (All power must come from the ground.) The robot climbed a 900-meter length of metal cable suspended from a helicopter. Nugent and Kare’s was the only team to make it to the top with an average climbing speed of more than 2 meters per second—their robot went nearly 4 meters per second (9 mph)—beating out two other teams, who failed to reach the top. The prize was $900,000 (before taxes, Nugent laments—yes, it’s that time of year).

The upcoming “Level 2” competition will be held later this year, … Next Page »

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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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