An Entrepreneurs’ Budget – Launched by StartUp Britain | StartUp Britain
With this year’s annual Budget in March, StartUp Britain saw an opportunity to engage with entrepreneurs, investors and the SME community to start a dialogue – through direct consultation and by social media – around the ideas that entrepreneurs thought would be most successful in supporting them.
The report itself contains policy proposals on encouraging investment in start-ups and growth companies, plus on reducing burdens on founders and the self-employed…
Cultural Enterprise Office - Starter for 6
Case studies from the 2010 Starter for 6 programme
(via Somalia: On Scene in Baidoa After Ethiopia’s Rout of Al-Shabab - The Daily Beast)
The previous occupants of the crumbling palace left its interior covered with multicolored chalk drawings and painted graffiti. The childishly rendered pictures give the place a kind of schoolroom look. That is, except for the subject matter: AK-47s and tanks spewing bullets and flames; exploding airplanes; cellphones, complete with painstakingly detailed buttons, the detonators of choice for the roadside bombs that are used by the Islamist radicals of Al-Shabab. Guiding us through Somalia’s onetime presidential palace in Baidoa, Capt. Mahamoud Yissak seems almost regretful for the fighters, who mostly fled when the Ethiopian Army captured the city. “They’re only teenagers,” the Ethiopian officer says. “They think only about jihad.”…
Source: thedailybeast.com
(via Increasing demand and climate change threaten global water supplies – UN report)
12 March 2012 –
The UN World Water Development Report, which will be launched at the World Water Forum in Marseille, estimates that there will be a 70 per cent increase in demand for food by the year 2050, leading to a 19 per cent surge in water used for agriculture. At the moment, 70 per cent of freshwater is already being used for agricultural purposes…
Source: un.org
3D-printer with nano-precision | Physorg.com
Printing three dimensional objects with incredibly fine details is now possible using “two-photon lithography”. With this technology, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be fabricated. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) have now made a major breakthrough in speeding up this printing technique: The high-precision-3D-printer at TU Vienna is orders of magnitude faster than similar devices (see video). This opens up completely new areas of application, such as in medicine.
Source: physorg.com
5,000 APIs: Facebook, Google and Twitter Are Changing the Web | Programmable Web
Our API directory has hit another major milestone. We now list 5,000 APIs, just a short four months since passing 4,000. No longer is the web simply about links connecting one site to another. Instead, developers are using tools to connect data and functionality from one site to another site. It’s an incredible transformation that has happened over a very short period of time. APIs are at the heart of Google’s strategy and they led directly to the growth enjoyed by Twitter and Facebook.
Source: blog.programmableweb.com
Headquarters of new eco-friendly bank based in Edinburgh | News | Edinburgh | STV
The headquarters of a new eco-friendly investment bank will be based in Edinburgh.
The bank, which will focus of green energy projects, will be split between the Scottish capital and London in order to give it “greater commercial reach”. The main transaction team will be based in London…
