Two more companies receive state funding
July 31, 2009
he Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) today awarded two Kentucky companies a combined total of up to $250,000 from the Cabinet for Economic Development’s High-Tech Investment Pool.
Gryphon Environmental, LLC – Hartford, Kentucky; up to $100,000 toward the development of the company’s patent-pending technology to filter and dewater municipal and industrial wastewater. Current industry practice can result in sludge with a high water content, which is often hauled and landfilled or land applied. Gryphon’s technology uses a vacuum and air injection system that employs certain thermodynamic principles to yield a much drier sludge that is less costly to transport and can be used as a coal dust additive or fabrication material. Not only can the new technology reduce processing and landfill costs for cities and companies, it can make wastewater treatment environmentally friendly and profitable. The funds will be used to purchase equipment for testing and validating production units, as well as for equipment to fabricate the systems. (www.2gryphon.com)
Jacobs Automation, LLC – Campbell County, Kentucky; up to $150,000 toward the development of the company’s automation technology marketed to the packaging, material handling and converting industries. The company’s product, PackTrak, consists of a track on which independent “movers” are driven by a direct-drive linear motor. By replacing rotary driven chains, belts and gears with a direct-drive linear motor that controls each mover’s motion on the track via customized software, users can realize increased production rates and reduced energy consumption, as well as a reduction in changeover times and maintenance costs associated with conventional systems. Siemens, one of the world’s largest automation companies, provided seed funding for the development and integration of the PackTrak technology into its SIMOTION control software platform. The state funds will be used to pay patent expenses and to build two PackTrak demonstration units. (www.JacobsAutomation.com)
3 Northern Kentucky companies receive funding
July 30, 2009
The Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (KSTC) awarded $355,000 to three companies with assistance from the Northern Kentucky ezone, a division of Northern Kentucky Tri-County Economic Development Corporation (Tri-ED).
Pilus Energy received $250,000 and is the first company in Northern Kentucky to receive funding from the Kentucky New Energy Venture fund. The company is developing a patent-pending, hybrid microbial fuel cell reactor with an ultra/supercapacitor to harvest electrons and hydrogen gas from their proprietary bacteria, which consume sewage, fertilizer run-off, animal wastes, rotting plant materials, and other organic materials.
Dito Solutions, based in Florence, Kentucky, has developed and is marketing DitoAdvisor.com – the first comprehensive financial planning and management web site delivered directly to consumers. A consumer will be able to receive honest, independent and objective financial advice on virtually any significant topic in personal finance by using Dito Advisor. Dito Solutions received $75,000 from the Rural Innovation Fund subsequent to performing milestones required with a $25,000 grant the company received in September 2008.
Analytical Solutions and Providers (ASAP Analytical), a small, veteran owned privately held company, recently introduced a new InfraRed Detector (IRD). The IRD allows forensic chemists to identify the molecular structure and chemical fingerprint of new illegal chemically altered drugs. ASAP was awarded $30,000 from the Rural Innovation Fund.
Strategic Communications: Four tips for your startup
July 27, 2009
This is the first in a series of guest posts by members of the Peritus PR team about how to effectively build a communications strategy for your startup and other topics of interest. The first post is authored by Matthew Henderson from their Lexington office.
Chart a course that brings you the best results. Winning Matters.
At Peritus, we use strategic communications to bring clarity to issues that are crucial to the success of different businesses and organizations. When launching a new product, proper planning and message formulation are essential to growth an overall successful launch. Below are four common steps to chart a course that will bring the best results for your high tech startup:
1) Plan: No matter your product, proper planning is essential and provides a roadmap to the future. First and foremost, you must identify your overall goal, or what you want to achieve with your product/company or what is your vision? (i.e. acquisition; long term sustainability, etc.). Your plan should also include:
a. Background: research
b. Message: correct language (i.e. it’s community, not industry)
c. Tactics(s): Media advertising, Digital advertising, Earned media, Public Affairs what tactic(s) will you use?
d. Implementation: timeline, or step by step process, with an end date
e. Budget
f. End state: exactly where you want to be
2) Identify: Identify your target audience, or your “constituents”. For example, if you are a tech startup, identify all those who your product might appeal too. Local, national and state trade groups are a good place to start.
3) Educate: Now it’s time to educate your target audience, or your constituents, about your product. How will you do this? What are the best cost-effective outlets to reach your constituents? Paid/earned media? Or, if the job needs precision targeting, hire a PR/ Public Affairs firm?
4) Activate: Now that you have your identified your audience and educated your audience, it’s time to activate your audience. Put your plan in motion! How will you do this? Grand opening? Digital grand opening? Media event? A high dollar pitch meeting?
Three entrepreneurs pitch
July 22, 2009
Three entrepreneurs took their pitch to the Lexington Venture Club:
CMStext-platform for ads by text for small businesses
Comfort Stepz-patented orthotic socks
Connectedpatients.com-in hospital room touch screen devices for entertainment and information
we will have full profiles shortly.
Mobile Dev Camp
July 16, 2009
SpringStage is sponsoring a Mobile Dev camp in Lexington. These events have been held in several other states (California, Texas, North Carolina etc) and now will be in Kentucky. The event is Saturday at 348 East Main Street (The Awesome Inc rental hall) in Lexington. We interviewed a couple of the presenters to get their take on the rapidly evolving mobile industry.
Noah Kagan was the product manager for the original facebook mobile, then went on to join the core team at Mint to do marketing, and is now making sure game & app developers get paid with Gambit.
Two of the companies you worked with, Facebook & Mint, were both web base services that benefit greatly from a mobile app. How quickly did they recognize the importance of mobile and how was the process of taking a successful product and porting it for use on a mobile device?
At Facebook we recognized the mobile necessity way before the iPhone became popular. A lot of the product decisions were out of necessity, we wanted to look up people and add friends on our regular razr phones and smart phones. At Mint it was more of a maintaining and promoting the brand. Many of your financial decisions are made away from a computer so having an overview of your finances comes in handy. Porting them to the mobile device was very tricky for both companies. Fundamentally, mobile is about providing real-time information that is relevant and only what the user actually needs. With Facebook we thought people would get bored and phones are great for time killing so we added features like random photo browsing and some easter eggs around special types of pokes. The main thing to consider for the mobile experience is what really matters and why does the user need it in real-time.
Do you think the future of mobile is going to be dominated by existing players meshing their basic web presence with mobile or is it likely that the new mobile only developers will continue to hold their own?
So far the success of mobile has been from existing players porting over the web traffic /products to a mobile presence. The mobile app stores, primarily iphone are decentralizing this away from the existing players. I think mobile in America is about 5 years behind internationally what it could be doing and it is an open season for new companies to establish a presence on the phone.
Brendan Lim is the director of mobile solutions at Intridea. He’s going to be giving an intro talk about the Palm Pre’s SDK.
How do you see palm’s entry fitting into the competitive marketplace for mobile apps?
I believe Palm’s App Catalog has a really good chance at being successful. The Mojo SDK has a low barrier to entry due to the fact that if you know HTML and JavaScript, you could essentially start writing your own apps relatively easily. At first, Palm’s App Catalog will only cater to the Pre, but there’s information that they will also include apps for the old Palm OS. Also, due to the limitations of the API, I doubt we will see many applications for the Pre that have to do with any high-end gaming.
Would you recommend programmers building apps for all platforms or just start with one? And would you develop first for the palm platform?
I would recommend starting off with what you’re comfortable with, at first. I started off with Android development, then quickly went to iPhone development, and just recently, Palm. I was already familiar and comfortable with Java, so it made Android feel more at home for me. Also, since I have an iPhone myself and because we’ve had to do iPhone development for clients, I chose to dive into development on that platform as well. Palm’s barrier to entry is rather low since you only really need to have an understanding of HTML and JavaScript to get started, so I can see many people starting with the Palm platform once the SDK access opens up.
Guest Post: Software should help, not hinder
July 13, 2009
This is a guest post by Jim Clifton. Jim is COO of Bridgepoint Medical and formerly directed venture finance for Kentucky Science & Technology Corp. He also spent several years with a couple of software startups.
Good software design and sales begin with a thorough understanding of the underlying business process the software is to enable. Layering software on a misunderstood and broken business process only exasperates operational issues and masks root causes.. Software should GREATLY impact the overall performance of any process, not hinder.
I have spent some time in the software business as a product manager, several years running a tech investment firm and now run a health care services company. My first love has always been solving problems using process engineering, cost accounting and total quality initiatives as they relate to business operations. Most recently, I have jumped into a health care practice with the eye of improving the operations. The first thing I noticed was how broken the process was and how poorly designed and implemented technology (software) simply confused and compounded the issues and almost never met the stated goals and expectations. Some of this failure fell squarely on our shoulders – we simply did not have a good grasp on the process. But, the companies selling into this space NEVER ask any process questions and in fact the notion of “work flow” is completely foreign to them. They did what most software comes do, sell features and functionality and promised new and exciting technologies to come.
The first thing we did was go BACK to paper and document the process. But first, we sat and watched the people work and kept our mouths closed. Spend a week just sitting and watching — hard to do, but you will learn much more. Interestingly enough, if you ask someone how they do something, they will give you a detailed set of steps, but if you sit and watch you will see things they missed or little go-arounds they failed to mention.
So, this brings me to the notion that software is a product, or more accurately, my thought that it is NOT a product, but merely an enabling technological component of the process. What we need is a software sales person that is a process/workflow consultant that can fix our process and then apply their technology; I guarantee that any sales person who uses this skill will KILL their quota. The opposite is usually true — sales guy promises nirvana, operator is desperate and buys the hype, software is installed, process is worse, more complicated and takes a PhD to fix. That sucks, pure and simple.
My advice to early stage software companies is to invest in process (lean) expertise and go WATCH how your customers MAKE MONEY. Then document how your enabling technology will make them MORE MONEY. Stop with quotas, calls, etc. Put the customer’s process first and the rest will follow.
Yes You can build a tech startup in Kentucky
July 10, 2009
VC’s Fred Wilson and Matt McCall both have posts up about the fact that you can indeed build a tech startup outside of Silicon Valley. As Fred aptly puts it “… the idea that you cannot build an important tech company outside of Silicon Valley is ‘a crock of shit’.
I also hear this from many people within Kentucky, often from entrepreneurs looking for funding. The fact is Kentucky has advantages over places like silicon valley such as the cost of talent and other costs of doing business. If you cant raise funding here than bootstrap it etc. I would also add to Fred’s list a Lexington success, Exstream Software, Dan Kloiber and Davis Marksbury built that startup into a billion dollar company building software in Kentucky.
The lesson is pick where you want to live and work and then build your business, the rest is just a crock.
Company Profile: Bexion Pharma
July 6, 2009
Bexion Pharma is company founded by Ray Takigiku, PhD & Kevin Xu, MD, PhD, MBA. They are being incubated by bioLogic Copr in Covington, KY where Dr. Takigiku is also a co-founder. He was king enough to speak with me about the development of Bexion
What is your company’s 30 second elevator pitch?
Bexion Pharmaceuticals is developing a first-in-class biologic drug to cure cancer. Our drug is based on a human protein that creates a surprise and lethal attack on cancer cells. Our drug targets certain membrane patches that seem to exist on all cancer cells. Bexion has demonstrated both tumor targeting and potential treatment for a broad range of human cancers. Our initial focus is on gliomas and pancreatic cancer. The active biologic is expressed human Saposin C (present in all of our cells), which are formed into unique cancer targeting nanovesicles. Beyond intrinsic anti-tumor activity, SapC-DOPS has very strong development potential as a diagnostic imaging reagent and tumor targeting drug delivery vehicle for siRNA and antisense-based anti-cancer products.
What has been your company’s funding & growth so far?
We’ve been largely supported by our own pockets, Ohio and Kentucky state grants, and also Federal grants. Our founding team has grown to include Paul Correa, PhD as VP of Operations and it is our intention to remain small and efficient for the near term future.
What is the outlook for your business in the next eighteen months?
Bexion Pharmaceuticals is looking forward to opening a Series A round this summer and initiating IND-enabling studies before the end of the year.
What attracted you to entrepreneurship?
All of us have had satisfying and successful careers in big pharma, but have always had a strong desire to innovate and make a difference. We think the best way to achieve that is through entrepreneurship.
What have been the advantages and disadvantages of starting a high tech business in Kentucky?
No surprises, except pleasant ones! Among the disadvantages is scarcity of similar biotech-oriented companies, especially in Northern Kentucky where we are located…although our partners are creating them through bioLOGIC Corp, where our office and lab reside. Among advantages are a largely entrepreneurially minded business community, cost efficient location, and very supportive local and state government. We’re benefiting from Kentucky grants and incentive programs that are working really well for us. Down the road and with our growing success, we want to do our part to support education, workforce development and community service.
