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Large business, such as Unilever, and other companies are investing in new products and services that are aimed at serving the World's poor. Companies are motivated not only by doing the right thing, but by being smart about finding profitable business models that can serve over 2 billion people at or near the bottom of the economic pyramid.

A new report published by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development focuses on how companies can address the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals by making such investments.
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Nanotech Material Toxicity Debated: More Oversight Being Urged by Environmentalists
San Francisco Chronicle

Are the materials used in nanotechnology entirely new substances? A growing number of environmentalists think so and are urging more regulation in the production and use of nanomaterials.

Nanoparticles and nanomaterials -- tiny substances measured by the millionth of a millimeter -- often display unusual properties that might someday radically improve manufacturing, energy production, electronics and medicine.
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Stars Rise at Startup Summer Camp
Wired News

An innovative corporate incubator keeps student hackers stocked with ramen and Coke over the summer in exchange for a stake in their fledgling ventures. Having just finished his sophomore year at Stanford University, Sam Altman spent this summer holed up in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment paid for with a little bit of startup funding, writing code for hours on end and eating so much ramen he ended up sick from vitamin deficiency.

Altman loved it so much he hopes he and his two partners in discount noodles and 12-hour coding binges won't ever become juniors. He might well get his wish. His fledgling company is close to signing a deal to test his location-based social-networking software with one of the country's largest cell-phone providers, and is in talks with prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

The sophomores were just one of eight groups selected for three months of summer seed funding from Y Combinator, a startup incubator founded by Paul Graham, a writer and programmer known for creating the first web application.
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