VentureBeat.com: An waste-heat energy recovery startup received a round of funding that should help it build a real-world, proof-of-concept system, according to a recent piece by Chris Morrison. Need more power? Try recycling what you’ve already used details the news for us: "Another significant funding deal for the energy conservation crowd was announced this morning, with ReGen Power Systems taking $5 million for an engine that converts waste industrial heat into power. That may sound a bit boring, but the investment and technology are a harbinger of big changes to come." The first installation will be a smallish 10KW engine with plans to increase the size to 500KW should the concept work as intended. As an investment, the technology used by ReGen seems like a good one. Morrison writes, "the heat recyclers they’re building aren’t just for the largest, hottest smokestacks, but will instead address nearly all industries. Ultimately, that could save gigawatts of energy, and generate billions of dollars in revenue yearly."

In a separate piece from VentureBeat.com, Camille Ricketts reports on the purchase of Transmeta by a video chip company. Ricketts notes, "Video processor developer Novafora announced today that it will acquire microprocessor and semiconductor company Transmeta for $255.6 million. Primarily, the Cupertino Calif. firm is interested in its acquisition’s low-power technology, which it plans to integrate with its own processor to offer more video capabilities on a range of video devices." For more complete details, check out the rest of the story.

New Scientist: The bounty on prior art to bust bad patents takes on a second life with the advent of a new startup leading the "good" fight. Cash prizes offered for patent-busting evidence from the Tech department explains: "Article One Partners, a New York-based website, is inviting visitors to help bust patents by finding "prior art", evidence that a patented idea is not original. That can be anything from an earlier invention to a fictional machine in a newspaper cartoon. Supplying information that helps bust a patent could be rewarded with $50,000." This idea has been tried before with limited success and some skeptics fear that the rewards are no where near high enough and claim there are better ways to cure the plague of bad patents. "Ron Riley, president of the Professional Inventors Alliance, which represents independent, but commercially successful, inventors, is doubtful that Article One can improve patent quality. The way they intend to use information in some ways resembles the way patents are often wielded as a way to "earn money through litigation, not protect innovation", he says. "We need to leave the patent system alone, and fix the patent office," he told New Scientist. Fewer undeserved patents would be issued if the number of patent examiners had grown in step with the volume of work the USPTO must do, he says."

PEHub: Adeo Ressi, founder and CEO of The Funded.com, sings an off-key tune a recent column, Adeo Ressi Sings Like A Canary. Much like President-elect Obama, Ressi thinks change is the key to saving the VC business. "Now, the venture capital industry faces a second major collapse in eight years without a substantive period of prosperity in between. Limited partners are pulling billions out of the model, are selling positions and may end up rejecting capital calls. It seems logical that this may be the right time to re-examine many of the underlying principles of how venture capital operates to improve an important and broken service of capitalizing growing businesses. It also seems logical that all of the venture capital stakeholders, from entrepreneurs to limited partners, should be involved in a dialog about how to improve the state of affairs." Ressi has been the subject of a flurry of media attention after his Harvard Business School presentation excoriating the venture capital model of funding and seems to be weathering the blizzard of criticism with aplomb.

TechCrunch.com: Mike Masnick crafts a tale worthy of a quick read chronicling the path to financial ruin based on a never-ending succession of easy "marks" in a recent posting, Suckers And Transparency: Preventing Another Financial Crisis. Masnick writes, "The more I read about and understand different aspects of the current financial crisis, the more it becomes clear that basically the same thing happened here, but just on a much, much larger scale. It was a giant game of hot potato, where folks were passing along toxic assets looking for the last sucker to take them -- except the process of finding that last sucker became so valuable, that many of the firms in the business of finding new bigger suckers... found themselves. In many cases, the suckers were, in fact, unsophisticated investors like the school districts we described recently, but the various banks got so tied up in the process that they started betting on these things themselves." When selling an addictive and deadly intoxicant (fraudulent, high interest derivative financial instruments like CDOs), it's all fun and games until the dealers start snorting the goods, nu? The piece provokes many interesting comments and if an understanding of the house of cards that was (is?) in the process of tumbling down is the goal, should be on the short list.