Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Following the Clean Energy Council Fellows
Breaking down the MIT $100K
Flash Slideshow: Mass High Tech All-Stars Thought Leadership Roundtable
Seven new Providence-based companies made their pitches to investors yesterday, as the culmination of the first complete season for Betaspring, an incubator program founded in the Ocean State this year.
Five of the seven presented web and software plays typical of pre-seed incubators — but two have designed devices they plan to launch on relatively limited capital. By far the coolest idea — and the one that drew the most investor attention — was the Leotus air conditioner, a self-contained unit designed to hang over either side of a windowsill, allowing windows to open and close when it’s installed.
“In New England you only use your air conditioner three weeks a year,” said VP of marketing Ploipailin Flynn. She and her co-founders, who developed the idea at Brown University, have a provisional patent on the device and are looking for seed funding to develop a prototype and seek a partnership with an Asian manufacturer.
Due to Brown, the Rhode Island School of Design and a strong light manufacturing sector, Providence is a natural place for device companies, said Betaspring managing partner Allan Tear. “We felt we weren’t going to win if we said we’re just like Y Combinator in providence,” he said, referring to the California-based program that focuses on web technology companies. “We needed to find something unique about being here.”
A second device company, NuLabel Printing Solutions Inc. , is making backless labels for the shipping industry. The company’s patented label paper is coated with a chemical that turns sticky when fed through a device designed to attach to the front of commercial printers — much like already available automatic cutter or re-feeder attachments.
Backless labels can bring companies like FedEx a net savings on materials, but competitors haven’t figured out how, yet. Printer manufacturers have attempted to make a printer, and adhesives makers have tried to make a paper product, but, “No one’s really attacked it from both sides,” said Mike Woods, head engineer for the startup.
Web plays coming out of Betaspring’s inaugural year include the mapping startup Expedit.us, which has a devious strategy for mapping the nation in terms of landmarks, rather than the distances and street names used by existing wayfinding applications.
The company has launched minivite.com — an evite lite that invites users to make quick invitations to informal events and draw their own landmark-based directions.
“It’s a Trojan horse,” co-founder Matt Gillooly explained. “When folks are filling in their invitations, they’re telling us what landmarks they know and use.”
Good luck to Gillooly mapping the city of Providence, where an ongoing Big-Dig-style highway project keeps the road map shifting weekly.
A mobile startup, Accelereach, has developed a mobile application for health and wellness managers that automates routine communications — like asking a diabetic to provide daily blood-glucose levels.
“Sometimes they need to give a lot of personalized care. Other times they just need a number,” vice president of technology Nathaniel Webb said of disease management program managers. The company is beginning work with its second beta customer, Providence-based Shape up the Nation, he said.
Ji Kim, founder of Dijipop LLC , has a plan to automate how retailers and manufacturers collaborate for online co-op ads. When retailers like Best Buy want to cooperate on an ad for a device sold in their online store, the process currently takes weeks of planning and development, said Kim, a long-time interactive advertising executive. He’s filed a provisional patent on his technology.
A sixth company, Minds in Motion Electronics LLC, is making software designed to make educational gaming more effective by linking it to a third-party headset that measures brain activity — electroencephalography. The headsets, made by venture-backed NeuroSky, have the ability to measure when students’ attention flags, at which point Mime’s software will intervene with a dopamine-boosting casual game, said CEO and co-founder Alex Baker.
The last presenter of Betaspring’s Demo Day was a social entrepreneurship company. Feed My Future was founded by two Johnson and Wales University professors who are convinced they can use social media to ease the national burden of college-loan debt. The company’s site is designed to let students ask for help from family and friends by posting their debt in a telethon-style format, and accounting for their own efforts to clear it. Gift-givers, on the other hand, can be sure their monetary gift goes directly to the debt balance — not to spinning rims for the student’s SUV, said co-founder Mehdi Moutahir.
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
