This week, I drop in on four student teams as they try to persuade a group of dragons to support projects they prepared as part of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition. The Imagine Cup is one of the largest international technology competitions for third level students in the world, and these students were selected from last year's national competition to pitch to the dragon panel.

Who would have guessed that crowds are so complicated?

Merging into a crowd may be easy for humans, but for the animators and technologists at film studios that make the computer generated animation and special effects we love to marvel at, a crowd is an art form. Two crowd experts, technical director Paul Kanyuk of animation studio Pixar, and production technology lead Hans Rijpkema of Los Angeles-based special effects company Rhythm and Hues, discuss the art of creating believable crowds in films like Ratatouille, Wall-E, Night at the Museum and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

HP Ireland managing director Martin Murphy discusses the importance of technology and innovation in a downturn

In the Geek Bookshelf, Dr Chris Horn discusses Tracy Kidder's classic 80s nonfiction book about the race to create a new computer, The Soul of a New Machine

Anthony Dunne, professor and head of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art and partner in design company Dunne and Raby -- www.dunneandraby.co.uk -- discusses his controversial and provocative design projects around technologies of the future

New media guru Joe Rospars is the man behind Barack Obama’s phenomenally successful use of Web 2.0 technologies in his presidential campaign.He was in Dublin this week to talk about the Obama campaign’s use of new media -- which included Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, email, discussion lists, YouTube and text messaging -- and take questions during the launch of Fianna Fail’s new website

Irish Times journalist John Collins talks about his recent visit to MacWorld and CES; Science Gallery director Michael John Gorman on the Gallery's first year and what lies ahead in 2009