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Qinetiq's CEO Leo Qinn is backing his current blood letting, and recorded as having purchased 50,000 shares in the company at a value of 106.80p per share. The deal cost him a total of £53,400 and takes Quinn’s total shareholding in the company to 653,301 shares with a current value of just under £700,000.

Scottish technology businesses are being offered £3m of investments from the Connect Scotland Investment two day conference in Edinburgh mid November. It comes against a background of banks not lending at reasonable rates for mortgages, but creaming it in on well above prime. Bank fees and costs for small and medium sized enterprises rising since the end of 2009 with a highly restrictive lending criteria, with routes such as factoring seeing an increase in in the past year, but its charges of better use within the business.

RAF Kinloss and RAF Lossiemouth contribute £158m in gross income to the Moray economy and collectively support 5,710 full time equivalent (FTE) jobs in the region according to independent economic consultants Inverness based Reference Economics calculations, in work commissioned by Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE). However as traditional employment such as fishing has been wiped out, with few alternatives being presented, Just how quickly can such an economic prop be supplemented or replaced?

The 3rd call for proposals for Satellite Navigation research and development (R&D) under the EU's 7th Framework Programme (FP7) makes available €38m in funding and is open to companies and research organisations in various areas such as ICT, Transport, Mobility, SME, Security, Electronics and Aerospace. Closer to home and high technology, ADS Scotland is organising a Workshop at Strathclyde University in September.

Super-fast, fibre-based broadband is now available to the first homes and businesses in Bothwell and Newton Mearns, BT has announced. Around 7,500 local householders and firms are poised to join the high-speed revolution as engineers complete the upgrades, making Bothwell and Newton Mearns two of the first areas in Scotland to benefit from BT’s roll-out of fibre-based broadband.

Dr Roderick Smart, a 61-year-old, born and brought up in the Black Isle near Inverness and still owned his family home in Fortrose, who worked for Minova RSA developing cement liners and sprays to secure mine shafts was shot dead in a car jacking as he filled up his vehicle at a petrol station in Johannesburg.

Fusion for Energy has signed a contract that will amount €156m for the supply of ten winding packs for the ITER Toroidal Field (TF) Coils with a European consortium of companies bringing together Iberdrola Ingeniería y Construcción SAU, ASG Superconductors SpA and Elytt Energy SL. Europe will manufacture 10 of the 19 TF Coils for ITER, including a spare one. Japan is responsible to produce the remaining nine.

The defence research group, QinetiQ is axing 391 jobs, and in negotiations with the Ministry of Defence over cutting a further 300 in what has been rumoured as a minimum 700 head chop, mainly at Malvern and Farnborough. No press release is filed for this and July publicity is given to the Talon robots deployment in Afghanistan.

Two recent reports Blueprint for Scotland from the Scottish Council for Development and Industry and Rebalancing Act from NESTA, supported by Oxford Economics are interesting exercises on how to foster economic growth, but with the November 2010 Manufacturing Technology Scotland show in Glasgow being postponed until 2011, action on recommendations need to be able to be as effective and as fast as possible.

LifeScan Scotland Ltd, Inverness has been voted the best in the UK at encouraging interest in the young for science subjects. One of four accolades awarded annually by the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network (STEMNET) which among other activities recruits those in related industries to become STEM 'ambassadors' promoting science subjects at schools and clubs.

An iconic step towards the making of an affordable "quantum computer has been made by the ability of an electron to exist in two places at once being controlled in silicon for the first time. The research findings - published in Nature by a UK-Dutch team included Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University, the University of Surrey, University College London, and FOM Institute for Plasma Physics near Utrecht - marks a significant step towards the making of an affordable "quantum computer".

While footballers watched their sets for games transmission from Rustenburg, the South African Department of Science and Technology announced that the first four telescopes in the MeerKAT precursor array, also known as KAT-7, were linked together recently as an integrated system to produce the first interferometric image of an astronomical object. Interferometry refers to the astronomic technique in which radio signals collected at the same time by a system of networked radio telescopes are processed into a high-resolution image.

High technology may be great at getting drills to work at 5,000 ft depths. It has been less perfected to close off wells at those depths as the Gulf spill spells out. US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has told BP that the company should stop the 'top kill' operation, its attempt to plug the well with pressuried driling mud long enough to be able to seal it permanently with cement. Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they are worried it was putting too much pressure on it.

Systems engineers from one of Scotland's lead technology Institutes, the Institute for System Level Integration (iSLI) are emerging from their ivory tower to demonstrate just how businesses can deploy existing technology and by using the latest technical developments become international success stories. Meantime their website carries a search for livewire to join an ARM EngD advanced Hardware Description Language, that will be integrated into a Java compiler, runtime and Eclipse development environment.

Conor Venture Partners, a lead Finnish early-stage technology VC, has announced the €46.5m first closing of its second early-stage venture capital fund. Operating from Finland and following in the footsteps of Conor’s first fund, the new fund will invest in early-stage technology centric companies rooted in the Nordics and Baltics.

Four in ten of Scotland’s internet users say e-voting would make them more likely to back a candidate in next week’s General Election. The 2010 Virgin Media Business E-Politics Online Study finds that the number of Scottish voters in the country backing a digitised ballot over the traditional paper system had jumped from 14% to 42% since the last Parliamentary election, slightly below a UK average of 43%.

As the European Hubble telescope makes its noisy, spectacular and deserved headline 20 years celebration, a much quieter telecommunications enabler US Anadigics celebrates its 25 years, and the almost sleepy English Malvern Instruments drops pdfs onto your desk from a newsletter that will tell you that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released three gold colloid reference materials nominally 10, 30 and 60nm in size,and by-the-way that Malvern has won its 5th Queen's Award, but fails to mention it has clocked up more than four decades of enablement.

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