Clean energy is hot topic in Hub

The clean tech hub. Copenhagen will be the place to be next month for the world’s policy makers, when the United Nations convenes its Climate Change Conference.

But for the doers who are developing technologies to combat climate change, Boston will be the center of the action this week.

Tomorrow, the nationwide Ignite Clean Energy Competition comes to the Massachusetts State House, with 10 teams of entrepreneurs presenting their business plans and angling for a $35,000 top prize.

Wednesday night, the New England Clean Energy Council holds its second annual Green Tie Gala at the John F. Kennedy Library, with tickets priced at $325 a head. Congressman Ed Markey, who will be traveling to Denmark next month for the UN conference, will be the featured speaker.

And on Wednesday and Thursday during the day, you’ve got the Conference on Clean Energy at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center, which will touch on new research coming out of universities, funding trends for energy businesses, and the latest breakthroughs in solar and wind. Steven Koonin, an undersecretary at the Department of Energy, will speak, as will Governor Deval Patrick.

Practice pitching. The tireless crew at DartBoston, which already organizes a weekly gathering and webcast for young entrepreneurs, is debuting a new event this month called Capitalize.

I love the concept: It’s a chance for a young entrepreneur to get into a venture capital firm, make a pitch for his or her business, and get candid feedback.

And other entrepreneurs get to be there to observe. There will also be a live webcast, since most venture capital boardrooms won’t hold more than 15 or 20 people.

I suspect tickets to the monthly Capitalize event will be tough to get; one of the DartBoston organizers, Cort Johnson, says they will be given to people who go to the weekly Pokin’ Holes event or watch the webcast.

As to how companies will be chosen, he writes in an e-mail:

We “are hand-selecting all of these companies to the extent that they believe they are ready to raise capital and they have some participation level in Dart like going to a Family Dinner or Pokin’ Holes.’’

Capitalize will take place at Venrock this month (where Cambridge partner David Beisel is also the organizer of the monthly Web Innovators Group gatherings); Flybridge Capital Partners in December; Bain Capital Ventures in January; and Kepha Partners in February.

All Twitter, all the time. I’m an avid user of Twitter, so when the San Francisco company Peek offered to send me a new device designed especially for reading and writing tweets (and nothing else), I said yes - even though I don’t usually review products, and there’s no local link at all here.

I think the concept behind the new TwitterPeek device (released last week) is that if you don’t have a smartphone with a keyboard, and you are not very good at typing short messages with your dumbphone’s number keys, you might want a device like this. (How big a market is that? We’ll see.)

There’s no long-term contract, and you can either pay $99 for the device and get six months of free service, or pay $199 and get a lifetime service plan. (As always, this doesn’t mean your lifetime, or the device’s lifetime, but rather the lifetime of the company selling the plan. Peek has been around since 2007, selling dedicated e-mail and texting devices with inexpensive connectivity plans.)

Here’s my Twitter-length review, with a bit more after it:

In 140 characters or fewer: The interface design of the new TwitterPeek device totally misses what makes Twitter work: absorbing lots of short messages with a glance.

This captures the essence of what doesn’t work about the TwitterPeek: The home screen shows you most of the Twitter user names of the people you follow, but just a few characters of the messages they have posted (along with the times the messages were posted.) You have to click a message twice with the BlackBerry-like scroll wheel to see the entire message.

With e-mail, this approach to reading a full message works, because just knowing who the sender is can be an indicator of which e-mails are most important. But with Twitter, it’s the content of the message that’s more important than the sender, and seeing the first 18 or 20 characters of a Twitter message usually isn’t enough to tell you whether it will be worth reading.

Looking at a string of complete Twitter messages is something you want to do with a glance, because of each message’s low “nutritional value.’’ You don’t want to have to drill down into each message to see if it is worth your time.

Aside from that, the device does what it advertises.

The keyboard is handy for typing (much better than the virtual keyboard on my iPhone). I liked the aqua color and light weight of the review device I was sent. Battery life and connectivity seemed decent.

One day, I left my cellphone at home but was able to communicate with my wife via Twitter’s “direct message’’ feature, in place of the text messages I would have ordinarily used, using just the TwitterPeek to coordinate a meeting.

That was convenient.