Rice University’s national competition to find the brightest young entrepreneurs was sponsored by Fortune Small Business for the first time this year and while the sponsor was new, the quality of entrants matched previous years.

The winning entry ‘Death to scalpers’ took home the first prize of $327,000 for their idea to transform secondary concert ticket sales.

Team members Andrew Mills, Barry Kahn and Jitendra Dalvi from the University of Texas have developed a software application to compete head-on with established companies such as Ticketmaster and eBay’s StubHub. The software will turn a primary seller’s e-commerce website into an electronic market to handle primary and secondary ticket sales.

Conventional wisdom has it that search engines are more interested in substance than style - content rather than looks. But a patent application by Yahoo may turn that notion on its head. The US search giant, currently fending off an unwanted approach from Microsoft, is considering how best to take into account the layout and design of a web page, not just its content.

Like many women, Elaine Cato often wondered why looking good for an evening out was always a no-win choice between traditional bras with a back-strap and backless bras that never worked properly.

Soon after the birth of her second daughter in 1998, Elaine was all set for a New Years party and needed a little support for her bust. But her desire to wear a black, backless dress for the party would be frustrated by having to choose between backless bras that didn’t really do the job or accept having to wear the all-too-obvious conventional bra with backstrap.

Never one to accept defeat, Elaine set about developing a backless bra that would do the job properly. Determined to alter one of her bras, the Nashville Mom used her own basic sewing skills to create a backless bra with five configurations.

It seems that almost everything can be rented online these days and one enterprising Texas Mom decided that toys should be no different to films or handbags.

Frustrated by a room full of toys that her infant twins were no longer interested in, Lori Lamb Pope expected to find somewhere to rent toys from on the internet.

To her surprise she couldn’t find anyone and so the idea for Baby Plays was born – an internet business that lets parents receive 4 or 6 toys every month through the post. And with all the toys ready-to-play (no assembly needed) the business has proved to be a real blessing for busy parents hard-pressed to find the time to scour toy shops.

Search engines are a mystery to most people even if most businesses know their web site should take search engines like Google seriously.

But for companies like Yodle therein lies an opportunity.

Yodle operates in the very competitive online advertising and search engine optimisation industry but is carving a very successful niche for itself and has recently secured a further $12 million of VC funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.