Located in Toronto, Ontario (Canada) Vive Nano, a nanotechnology company acknowledged for its leadership in nanomaterial encapsulation technology, received Frost & Sullivan’s 2010 North American award for Technology Innovation earlier this year in April. (I only found out about this last week when Frost & Sullivan distributed a news release to Nanowerk. Did I miss Vive Nano’s announcement or did they just put up a news release and hoped someone would find it?) From Vive Nano’s website press release,

Vive Nano is proud to announce that it has been selected to receive Frost & Sullivan’s 2010 North American Technology Innovation of the Year Award for its unique encapsulation technology to synthesize nanoparticles. After evaluating the field of competing technologies, Frost & Sullivan was impressed by Vive Nano’s flexible process based on the principle of polymer collapse, using basic, benign, water-based inputs. Our process is green, scalable, and inexpensive – critical characteristics for addressing big challenges in global problems like food, water, and energy efficiency.

Frost & Sullivan is a global research organization of 1,800 analysts and consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies.

The news item on Nanowerk offers a little more insight into Vive Nano’s current initiatives,

Vive Nano’s current industry focus is on crop protection, with subsequent applications identified in cosmetics, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, and other industrial markets. …

Pesticide formulation is a core issue in the agri-food industry. Pesticide active ingredients for crop protection need to be uniformly spread in small amounts over a large area. Towards this end, it is ideally desired that pesticide particles should not agglomerate. Furthermore, formulations of pesticides should effectively address some key industry concerns such as higher manufacturing costs, harmful environment effects, and help deliver an active ingredient which has higher initial and residual efficacy. Among the various formulation techniques, encapsulation, in which the active ingredient is encapsulated by a synthetic or biological polymer to allow for prolonged release of the pesticide over a period of time, has gained prominence in recent years due to the long term advantages it offers.

You can view a silent and text-free animation of Vive Nano’s encapsulation technology here.

I found this description from the news item helpful in understanding the technology that the animation demonstrates,

One of the key attributes of Vive Nano’s technology is that the charged polymer surrounding the core repels other “like charged” polymers thereby preventing agglomeration and helps maintain the nano size of the particle. “Vive Nano’s technology offers some key advantages such as its ability to create nano particles for most chemicals on the periodic table and high scalability in manufacturing that allow it to scale to thousands of tons,” says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Avinash Bhaskar. “Further, the technology does not need a dedicated plant and is easy and cost-effective to implement.”

Vive Nano’s initial testing has successfully demonstrated that its nano technology-based formulated active ingredient is highly effective for killing weeds while avoiding the problematic chemical additives that are leading to product bans in a growing number of major markets. Vive Nano’s nanoparticles have the potential to result in improved crop yield and reduced environmental impact.

Congratulations Vive Nano!