The Royal Oak-based production firm PixoFactor is taking Dare Comics' acclaimed comic The Hunter from the pages and putting it on the tube, DVDs, and making an interactive downloadable game. All in a days work, eh?

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England's Dare Comics has announced that its critically acclaimed comic, The Hunter, is to be produced as a nine episode motion comic series by the Royal Oak production company PixoFactor.

PixoFactor is also developing a downloadable interactive game based on The Hunter, which will be released alongside the motion comic. 

Details of the game aren't being publicly released, but PixoFactor president Sean Hurwitz said that "The Hunter has a unique set of powers that have enabled us to incorporate some stunning gameplay. Linking the game to the motion comic series is going to allow us to do things the world has never seen before."

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Different states are taking different approaches to promoting and assisting small businesses. In Michigan, through the Michigan Small Business and Technology Center and the Kauffman Foundation, the training and retraining of laid-off workers seems to be filling a void.

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Last June, the Michigan Small Business and Technology Center began to train laid-off workers to start new ventures.

So far, 527 people have taken the course, which the center offers in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. To date, 160 people in the Michigan program have introduced new business ventures, and more than 125 owners of existing businesses have enrolled in separate courses to bolster their chances of surviving. Another 1,000 would-be entrepreneurs are expected to complete the program this year.

The unemployed workers, many laid off from the auto industry, come to the program with an idea for a small business and must search for capital on their own. The program, said a spokeswoman, Jennifer Deamud, "preps the company for a loan and makes connections for the owner."

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Who needs a dry erase board when you can just write on the wall, or the table, or the chair? The catch is that it's still all dry erase! A couple of mad scientists - A.K.A. entrepreneurs - thought about a world where dry erase board paint existed. They sought out to create it and found an Ypsi company to help them realize their dream.

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For three years, former classmates Morgen Newman, John Goscha and Jeff Avallon sought help from specialty paint and chemical coating laboratories. Two labs claimed it was impossible. Whiteboards are made using high-intensity ovens. IdeaPaint needed something that could be applied with a roller in a single coat. That wasn't going to happen, the scientists said.

The young entrepreneurs refused to believe it. "Our joke was, if we could put a man on the moon, we can make dry-erase paint," says Newman, 25.

Then they found CAS-MI Laboratories in Ypsilanti, Mich., where the scientists were willing to give their plan a shot and even cover some of the development costs.

With the help of $1 million from family, friends and a few angel investors, the group spent the next four years fine-tuning their recipe.

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Driven through Berkley recently? No? Well Business Week has, and deems it one of the most affordable suburbs in the nation.

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This tree-lined neighborhood has several parks and a well-regarded school district—Newsweek ranked Berkley High School one of the best in the state a few years ago. Even with a high unemployment rate, activities for both adults and children are organized by local community groups and businesses, such as sports leagues, yoga classes, and ice skating lessons. The downtown area was revitalized in 2002 with bricked crosswalks, new sidewalks, and benches.

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Do you remember where you were when JFK was shot? Were you laid off recently from a manufacturing job? Well the new web site, www.50plusprime.com, is just for you. It aims to pair baby boomers with online, non-credit courses to help out in the new economy.

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Online, non-credit courses with the LEARN program aim to help baby boomers laid off from manufacturing industry jobs answer that question, said University of Michigan professor Lynn Wooten, who helped to develop the program's curriculum.

Courses made available at www.50plusprime.com will aim to provide tools and the plans to find work in sectors identified as areas of growth in the state. Those areas include health care, technology, and sustainable energy, said Wooten, who teaches human resource management with the U-M Ross School of Business Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship.

"There is a bridge between your former career and your new career," said Tony Fama, the president of the company that runs www.50plusprime.com. "Courses show where to go to school, the salary levels, where they can get financial aid, things like that, but it won't teach them to be a registered nurse, it will guide them. As the year progresses and we launch other classes."

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Nothing says progress like an innovation index. Right folks? No, really, all kidding aside, in the third quarter the University of Michigan-Dearborn College of Business's innovation index showed the greatest quarterly increase since its 2006 inception.

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Some signs of job creation were enough to boost innovative economic activity in Michigan during the third quarter of 2009, according to the "innovation index" compiled by scholars at the University of Michigan-Dearborn College of Business.

After a drop to 80 in the second quarter from 96 in the first quarter of 2008, the index showed a third quarter improvement, jumping to 86.9.  

"The 6.9 (point) increase for the quarter is the largest since the index was created in 2006," said Lee Redding, associate professor of business economics and director of the Innovation Index at the UM-Dearborn College of Business.

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Tax incentives worked for the film industry. So, why not for the green industry? Looks like that'll be the idea here.

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Today, the Michigan Economic Growth Authority is expected to approve tax credits for Dow Chemical projects to make solar roof shingles and lithium-ion battery cells, adding a total of 2,500 jobs in the Midland area.

Also, Dow and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory got the green light Wednesday for a $20-million research center to develop low-cost carbon fiber used in wind turbines.

"Dow and Dow's progeny have spawned this huge effort to move to green manufacturing," Gov. Jennifer Granholm said Wednesday, citing a cluster of related projects that have brought 5,000 jobs to the struggling Saginaw Bay area.

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If you put your ear up to a conch shell you hear the ocean. If you work at U of M and have access to NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer satellite, you might hear the sun.

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Scientists can now listen to a set of solar wind data that's usually represented visually, as numbers or graphs. University of Michigan researchers have "sonified" the data. They've created an acoustic, or musical, representation of it.

The researchers' primary goal was to try to hear information that their eyes might have missed in solar wind speed and particle density data gathered by NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer satellite. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles emanating from the sun.

The process of sonification isn't new. It's how Geiger counter radiation detectors emit clicks in the presence of high-energy particles.

"What makes this project different is the level of artistic license I was given," said composer and recent UM School of Music alumnus Robert Alexander.

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