emerging technology : Innovation + Job News

A Maple Grove med-tech company has won approval to begin a large clinical trial for its implantable neuro-stimulator, which is designed to help people with obstructive sleep apnea.

Inspire Medical, founded in 2007 with technology spun out of Medtronic, announced last week that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration signed off on a 100-plus-patient clinical trial for the therapy.

"It's the key trial that collects the data necessary for U.S. approval," CEO Tim Herbert said.

The study will test an alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which the tongue and throat muscles relax during sleep and cause the airway to collapse. People with the condition briefly wake up and gasp for breath as many as 30 to 50 times an hour.

The most common treatment today is called continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP. It's a mask that needs to be worn while sleeping and that blows air down the airway with enough pressure to keep it from closing.

"It's a very effective therapy. It's a very efficient therapy. The problem is you have to wear that mask and it's not really comfortable for a lot of people," says Herbert.

Herbert says research has shown that about 50 percent of people who are prescribed a CPAP are no longer using it a year later. Untreated, the condition can increase the odds of a stroke, hypertension, not to mention fatigue.

Inspire's treatment is an implantable system, similar to a pacemaker. Only instead of sending electrical pulses to the heart, the device sends tiny jolts to a nerve under the chin that controls the tongue and throat muscles.

The system is approved for sale in Europe. The company's clinical trial will begin enrolling patients early next year and likely take about two years to be completed. The company has 12 employees and outsources its manufacturing work to other companies, including Medtronic.

Herbert said the company is working toward having the therapy approved for sale in the United States by 2013.

Source: Tim Herbert, Inspire Medical Systems
Writer: Dan Haugen

A Minnesota startup company has licensed a University of Minnesota sensor technology for a product that could help copper and other metal mines reduce their chemical use.

United Science, based in Center City, Minn., is developing a device that looks like a pH meter and aims to help miners more accurately mix the chemical slurries used to separate materials.

The chemicals are used during a process known as flotation. The raw ore is placed in the solution, which binds to the metal, causing it to float to the top, while the ore and clay sink.

As United Science founder Jon Thompson researched the process last year, he saw a large, unmet opportunity in helping mines mix these chemicals more precisely.

"You had ten different people measuring it in ten different ways, and none of them had a real analytical measurement," says Thompson. "I saw one guy actually put his finger in the mining solution and taste it and said, yup, there's enough in there."

The only consistency in how mines mix these slurries: they all use more chemicals than they actually need, because they don't want to risk using too little and losing copper.

Thompson thinks his product can save money for the mines by conserving chemicals. He's partnered with a Pennsylvania company called FLSmidth that makes flotation equipment.

The sensor technology was developed by Philippe Buhlmann, an associate chemistry professor at the University of Minnesota. United Science's first product is for use in copper mines, but Thompson says it could be tailored to function for coal, lead, gold, nickel, uranium, and iron ore.

Thompson has grown the company from a one-person operation last year to six employees today.

Source: Jon Thompson, United Science
Writer: Dan Haugen

A Minneapolis imaging company is hoping its MRI technology can become a magnet for investors.

Steady State Imaging recently disclosed that it's seeking to raise $4 million to continue refining and commercializing its technology, which enables MRI machines to image both soft and hard tissues. The fundraising round kicked off in October with the sale of $250,000 in equity, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The technology is a software platform called SWIFT (short for SWeep Imaging with Fourier Transformation), which was developed by Dr. Michael Garwood at the University of Minnesota's Center for Magnetic Resonance Research and can be installed on existing MRI machines, much like a firmware update can upgrade a cell phone or video game console.

Currently, MRI machines are good at imaging soft tissue in the body, such as your brain or muscles, but it's not the best option for imaging hard tissue like bone or cartilage. X-rays are still the most common method for imaging those harder tissues, despite the risks from ionizing (x-ray) radiation.

"Dr. Garwood's technique really broadens the applicability of MRI. It allows for really good imaging of hard and soft tissues," says Steady State Imaging CEO Danny Cunagin. "You can kind of think about his invention as combining an X-ray machine and an MRI machine in one device, without the ionizing radiation of X-rays."

Another benefit of the software is that it allows MRI machines to run much quieter than most do today, which makes it more patient-friendly, says Cunagin. It's currently for sale for in the pre-clinical market, and Cunagin says they expect to announce a clinical partner within the next three to four months.

Steady State Imaging was incorporated in 2005 and relaunched in 2008 under new leadership. It employs about half a dozen people at its office just west of downtown Minneapolis. Cunagin says the latest round of fundraising will allow the company to refine the software based on feedback from existing users, as well as prepare for commercialization in the clinical market.

Source: Danny Cunagin, Steady State Imaging
Writer: Dan Haugen

Could the clothing we wear someday help us monitor our heart rate, track our performance, or even recover from injuries?

That's the future Lucy Dunne is exploring as an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota's apparel design program

Dunne studies wearable technologies, sometimes referred to as "smart clothing." The term describes to clothing or accessories that incorporate come sort of electronic component.

It's an emerging field with a lot of interest but few products on the shelf so far. One example would be Nike shoes that can send information to an iPod or iPhone. Then there are tackier, or should we say more novel, applications, like the mp3 player jacket or light-up T-shirts.

More serious applications, though, revolve around sports and medicine. One challenge with integrating body monitoring technology into clothing, says Dunne, is that in order to pick up a quality signal, such as a heartbeat, most sensors need to be tightly affixed to the body, often with a strap or a patch.

"I was originally a clothing designer, and in clothing design you can't ask the consumer to make those kinds of compromises, where they're uncomfortable or they feel like they look weird," says Dunne. "So my interest is in translating those sensing techniques into everyday clothing."

Dunne recently received a garment-tech innovation award for her work studying how signal quality is affected by looser fitting clothing (or "Joint Sensing in Everyday Clothing: Analysis of Garment Ease and Signal Noise in a Garment-Integrated Optical Bend Sensor.")

The hope is that her work will one day lead to everyday smart clothing that does more than light up or play music.

Source: Lucy Dunne, University of Minnesota
Writer: Dan Haugen

When you hear Toro Company and cutting edge, the first thing that comes to mind is probably hedge trimming, not innovation.

But the company has been tinkering now for nearly a decade on next-generation fuel cell vehicles at its Bloomington R&D facility.

Jack Gust, Toro's chief research and development engineer, says there's a growing demand from customers for electric vehicles. The types of turf vehicles it manufactures have to be light, and so several years ago they set out to find electric sources with the most energy-per-pound. Hydrogen-powered fuel cells are among the best potential sources by that measure, along with hybrid and lithium batteries.

The company started visiting fuel cell suppliers and attending conferences to learn about the technology early last decade, and then built its first hydrogen-powered prototype vehicle in 2004. After showing off the vehicle at trade shows, the company got a request from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to build four more, which are used at Niagara Falls State Park.

The Toro Company announced its third hydrogen fuel-cell project last month, a collaboration with Eden Prairie aerospace and defense firm ATK on two mid-duty utility vehicles for the military.

Gust says they've concluded that fuel cell technology is technically viable--"it works," he says--but it still costs too much today to mass-produce hydrogen-powered vehicles. The goal is to learn the technology now so that if and when prices improve the company can be ready to enter the market.

"We're kind of dabbling," says Gust. "Each time we do it, we're trying to just grow our knowledge on what we learned from the prior attempt. Each time we'll assess the technology a little more."

Source: Jack Gust, The Toro Company
Writer: Dan Haugen

A local software shop is experiencing some healthy growth.

PowerObjects helps companies configure and customize Microsoft Dynamics relationship management software, which helps organizations keep track of information about their clients, customers or sales leads.

The company was Microsoft's fastest-growing partner in its last fiscal year. COO Jim Sheehan says revenues are on track to be 40 percent over last year. In June, PowerObjects announced an expansion of its office in the SO|HO building in downtown Minneapolis, where it employs 32 people.

Sheehan credits the company's growth to its "laser focus" on Microsoft Dynamics software. Until three years ago the company was much less specialized and did a variety of custom software projects for customers.

"It was pretty scary for us. We had a few million dollars in business in other software lines, and we said: Nope, we're going to get rid of it all," Sheehan said, and focus exclusively on implementing Microsoft Dynamics software.

As a result, they're known at Microsoft, and that's resulted in some major business referrals.

It also has an expertise in software for health care and life sciences--"pretty much anything that relates to or could touch a patient," says Sheehan.

The company also has about 15 employees in Texas at offices in Dallas and San Antonio.

Source: Jim Sheehan, PowerObjects
Writer: Dan Haugen

The company that invented the first refrigerated trailer in 1938 is now working on technology to make them more energy-efficient.

Thermo King held an "innovation showcase" last month at its headquarters in Bloomington, where it employs more than 500 people.

The company makes refrigeration systems for the trucking industry, as well as heating and cooling systems for buses and trains.

Most conventional heating and cooling systems draw their power from the same diesel engine that drives the vehicle. Thermo King recently introduced systems that run separate from the primary engine, tapping into an electric battery or a separate diesel engine.

"There's a lot of buzz around these electric systems," said Chris Casazza, president of Thermo King in North America.

According to the company, the new systems are more energy-efficient, less complicated to install and maintain, and less expensive over the lifetime of the system.

Casazza said the company is seeing growing interest from vehicle manufacturers in trying out the new units. Meanwhile, the company's overall revenues for the year are about 20 percent ahead of last year.

Source: Chris Casazza, Thermo King
Writer: Dan Haugen

An Eden Prairie company has helped build a prototype of futuristic gas-electric hybrid car that gets better than 200 mpg.

Stratasys, which manufactures 3D printers and rapid-prototyping systems, printed all of the exterior components for Urbee, an ultra-green vehicle being developed by a Winnipeg engineer group called Kor Ecologic.

The car is the first to have its entire body created by a 3D printing process. The companies are showing off the prototype in Las Vegas this week at the 2010 SEMA Show, an annual automotive trade show.

Urbee aims to be one of the world's greenest and most fuel-efficient vehicles. The hybrid vehicle reaches better than 200 mpg highway and 100 mpg city. It runs on electricity and either gasoline or ethanol.

Jim Kor, president and chief technology officer for Kor Ecologic, said in a press release that Stratasys' technology made the design and prototyping process more efficient by eliminating tooling and machining steps.

Statasys is a public company with about 360 full-time employees. Its machines are used by designers and engineers in the aerospace, automotive, medical device and consumer product industries.

The company's technology was also used to help create another experimental green car, the T.25 City Car, which was unveiled in July.

Source: Joe Hiemenz, Stratasys
Writer: Dan Haugen

A Twin Cities software entrepreneur has announced plans for a new venture called Project Skyway that will aim to connect young entrepreneurs with mentors, resources, and funding.

Cem Erdem, born in Turkey, founded Augusoft in 1994 after reading about the Internet in a magazine on his flight from Turkey to the United States with his new wife.

The company makes online software for education administration. A decade and a half later, Erdem has a management team in place that can run the company without his day-to-day involvement, freeing him up to take on a new challenge.

Erdem says he's decided he wants the next phase of his life to be about helping other entrepreneurs achieve their goals faster, better, and more efficiently than he was able to do.

Project Skyway will be a new-business seed fund and incubator, launching in July 2011. The details are still coming together, Erdem admits, but above all he wants it to be a connector.

Erdem envisions a program that will build connections among ideas, entrepreneurs, investors, and other innovation hubs, and bring them together both online and in physical space.

He believes there are probably would-be entrepreneurs attending community colleges, as he did, who are not being reached out to. He wants to use his education connections to cast a broad net for potential entrepreneurs and bring them into an innovation community.

"Lots of people have e-business ideas, but they are not necessarily the programmers. They don't know how to take a concept to the virtual world, and we can help them with that," says Erdem.

Some of the other values that he's making a priority as he develops the program include a focus on long-term value, ethical practices, and making sure the program is accessible.

Erdem admits it's a "high-level model" right now. He's prepared to spend his own money getting the program off the ground. He's not seeking funding help, but he is seeking ideas.

Erdem says people looking to get involved should contact him at [email protected].

Source: Cem Erdem, Augusoft
Writer: Dan Haugen

Paging Dr. Device Overload...

A recent survey showed nearly three out of four physicians carry around a smartphone. Yet, when it comes to receiving hospital alerts, many still have to carry around a separate tool belt of pagers or hospital-specific devices.

A fast-growing Minnetonka software company is working to free up some pocket space for doctors with a pager-replacement smartphone application.

Amcom Software has sold hospital call-center technology since the mid-80s. Chris Heim and Dan Mayleben bought the company in 2007 and have since grown annual revenue from $11 million to about $50 million.

Some of that growth is due to acquisitions, says Heim, but some comes from growing interest in new products such as Amcom Mobile Connect. The app lets physicians receive pages on their BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android smartphones.

"We've got pictures of doctors carrying five different devices," says Heim. "What this application allows them to do is consolidate down to one device."

Since releasing the product in December, several major hospital systems have bought in, including Park Nicollet Health Services in St. Louis Park.

"I think there's an increasing awareness within healthcare that communication is the root cause of a lot of inefficiencies," says Heim.

Heim believes better communication can lead to better patient care. Amcom Mobile Connect improves on the pager by automatically sending confirmation messages when alerts are received and read, and allowing text replies.

Amcom has about 230 employees and was seeking to hire another 10 more.

Source: Chris Heim, Amcom
Writer: Dan Haugen

A pair of recent announcements put Minnesota at the forefront of digital government.

A survey by the Center for Digital Government gave Minnesota's state government a 'B+' grade and said it was "trending up" when it comes to using digital technology to better serve citizens and streamline operations..

Meanwhile, the state's Office of Enterprise Technology announced last week that Minnesota is the first state to move its collaboration and communications software into a cloud computing environment. (That means the applications are stored online rather than in servers owned by the state.)

The Center for Digital Government report highlighted Minnesota's innovation in the areas of finance and administration and energy and transportation. Only four states received a grade higher than Minnesota's.

An example of the state's recent successes, says OEM spokeswoman Cathy de Moll, was consolidating all state agencies into one centralized e-mail system. Innovations like this let the state "put our attention and dollars toward the kinds of applications that are directly related to citizen services," she says.

The announcement came two days after the state announced a first-of-its-kind cloud computing arrangement with Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite.

The move means the state no longer has to maintain its own servers and hardware for e-mail, file-sharing and other collaboration and communications programs. Instead, it leases those resources from Microsoft, which keeps the state's data in a private cloud environment.

Source: Cathy de Moll, State of Minnesota
Writer: Dan Haugen

Online advertisers go to great lengths to gather information about web users. They glean terabytes of data from web searches, social media profiles, and other sources in an attempt to target certain advertisements to certain audiences.

The problem, according to entrepreneur Aaron Weber, is that a lot of this information is outdated, incomplete, and still dependent on guesswork. For example, are those baby clothes you ordered a gift, or are you a new parent?

Weber's solution: instead of forcing advertisers to cyberstalk and guess what consumers want, why not let consumers just tell advertisers what they're interested in?

Weber is co-founder of Inveni, an online "taste profile" that lets Internet users consolidate product ratings from various websites and choose to anonymously share them with advertisers. In exchange, users get help finding other products they may like and hopefully get more relevant advertising at sites they visit.

"The whole goal is to align the interests of advertisers and consumers," says Weber.

The service launched in beta last week. For now it only supports movies and television programs, but Weber says Inveni plans to expand to include books, music, video games, and perhaps other products and restaurants after that.

Inveni will be incorporating display advertising on its site in the coming weeks. Users who choose to share information with advertisers will also have their anonymous information stored in a web cookie so advertisers on other sites can match ads to their taste profiles.

Weber previously co-founded W3i, an online software marketing company that he and his co-founders grew from their dorm rooms in St. Cloud to a $30-million-a-year company.

Source: Aaron Weber, Inveni
Writer: Dan Haugen

If inefficient data storage is the corporate equivalent of searching for your lost car keys, Digitiliti provides valet service. The downtown-St. Paul�based company offers an integrated data management service that files, stores, secures, and backs up company data seamlessly and automatically--functions that are typically spread across half a dozen software platforms.

"The biggest problem is that for data, there's a point solution for every problem," he says. "If you want to store your data, you buy backup software. If you want disaster recovery, you take it offsite. If you want to be able to collaborate, you buy software for that. We've integrated it into one system."

For this nifty achievement, the company picked up a Tech Award Circle gold medal in July and a nomination for a Tekne Award from the Minnesota High Tech Association in September.

The company launched in 2005 with a data protection service, but quickly identified the need for a broader product, explains Ken Peters, executive vice president in sales and marketing. The company's DigiLIBE (Digital Library) product launched two years ago, and has fueled remarkable growth for the tech company right through the recession, doubling the company's workforce to about two dozen.

In growth, Digitiliti has maintained its flexibility. Headquarters are located in St. Paul's artsy Lowertown neighborhood, an environment that "fosters innovation," according to Peters. And rather than bulk up on staff, they've taken a nimble approach to growth: "We have built a flexible workforce, both internal and external," he says. "Our approach is, hire the best talent. It doesn't matter where they're located."

Source: Ken Peters, Digitiliti
Writer: Joe Hart

A local software shop is up for an innovation award for a web app that streamlines the process of finding new patients for clinical studies.

Fortress Medical Systems, which is based in Hopkins, is one of five finalists for the Society for Clinical Data Management's 2010 Data Driven Innovation Award. The company makes software for managing clinical trial data, particularly for medical device studies, which require tracking of more variables than drug studies.

"What differentiates us is our flexibility, because medical device trials are really different than pharmaceutical trials," says CEO Mark Jones.

Fortress' customers include a few dozen medical device companies in the Twin Cities, from industry giants like Medtronic to emerging startup companies.

Typically, a company conducting a clinical trial will hire a call center to screen prospective patients. The call center then relays information back to the research company, which then contacts the patient's doctor or hospital about enrollment.

Fortress is up for an award for helping design a web-based software program that lets call center screeners report information directly to the doctors or hospitals.

"The benefits are that it increases the speed at which patients can potentially get enrolled into the study," minimizing the risk of patients changing their minds or being lost in the shuffle, explains Jones.

Fortress was founded in 1997 and has nine employees. The Society for Clinical Data Management will announce the innovation award winner at its annual conference in Minneapolis on October 17-20.

Source: Mark Jones, Fortress Medical Systems
Writer: Dan Haugen

A local mobile app developer's profile is rising like, well, a weather balloon.

Sevnthsin has doubled in size over the past two years to 14 employees today. The company's mobile site is on display this week as the Mobile Site of the Day for Wednesday, Sept. 22, on the Favorite Website Awards, a site where marketers and developers go for ideas and inspiration.

And last week it landed on the front page of the Pioneer Press for attaching a cooler full of cameras and mobile devices to a weather balloon and sending it into the upper atmosphere. "We are doing this out of curiosity, as a way to test the limits of mobile-phone technology," Sevnthsin owner Jamey Erickson told reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata.

Sevnthsin was originally the name of Erickson's band, which never took off. But his web-building business did. During college he started doing web work for various local bands. As those contacts generated more work, he eventually started a full-time company in June 2006.

Erickson's company still does work for local musicians, including Doomtree and Rhymesayers Entertainment, but his clients now also include the likes of Target, Caribou Coffee, and Toyota.

"We basically help clients build a conversation with a twentysomething audience," says Erickson. It's a younger, tech-savvy audience that expects more two-way communication.

Sevnthsin has grown through the recession, and Erickson believes it's because the economy is encouraging companies to experiment with new technologies that cost less than mass media.

"People are trying to innovate and come up with new solutions as the world is rapidly changing around us"--from both a technological and an economic standpoint, says Erickson. "We see people willing to experiment with these new technologies, and experiment with them more seriously."

Sevnthsin plans to launch another weather balloon on Friday, Sept. 24.

Source: Jamey Erickson, Sevnthsin
Writer: Dan Haugen