emerging technology : Innovation + Job News

A local mobile marketing startup bubbled up to the semifinals this month in a contest-like request by PepsiCo for promising new media communications technology tools.

MixMobi ended up losing its fizz as the field was narrowed from 40 to 20 companies, but founder Lisa Foote says their platform is gaining traction at home and elsewhere.

MixMobi has developed a light, versatile platform that lets retailers, restaurants, and other businesses create and send simple offers and promotions to customers' cell phones.

Unlike other mobile marketing platforms, MixMobi's promotions work on any phone with a web browser. They're delivered via tweets, short links, or, most recently, QR bar codes.

The company's technology is being used to run the QR code promotions in the July and August issues of Minneapolis/St. Paul magazine. It's also the engine that powers the location-based advertising on the DriveAlternatives app, which we wrote about earlier this month.

"We're the engine that helps them, but we're very happy being in the background," says Foote.

Foote says it seems like the company is getting more traction. The interest in mobile coupons and promotions is on the rise. MixMobi solves a lot of problems for agencies, which are getting more and more requests to push promotions on multiple different mobile platforms.

Foote started the company in 2008 with her husband, Brad Roberts, and chief technology officer Kelly Heikkila. The company launched publicly in February and has already earned positive reviews from blogs and analysts, including Mashable.com and Juniper Research.

The next step for MixMobi may be augmented reality, the new technology that layers visuals, directional signals, and other information onto digital images of the real world. The company was in talks with a major augmented reality developer about laying MixMobi offers into its augmented reality worlds.

Source: Lisa Foote, MixMobi
Writer: Dan Haugen

A local catalog and e-commece veteran is signing up some big-name users for his new company's social commerce platform.

Jeffery Giesener is the founder/CEO of ShoppeSimple, a web app that lets retailers broadcast deals to customers via e-mail, web sites, and social media.

ShoppeSimple recently added PBS, Rite Aid, and four other clients to be announced in August. Merchants pay a commission for each sale generated by the platform. Consumers can sign up for free and anonymously to receive the deal alerts via RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Google or Yahoo homepages, or other channels.

The ability for consumers to sign up for alerts without handing over personal information is an important part of ShoppeSimple's design. As an employee at DoubleClick during the early 2000s, Giesener saw first-hand how not being careful about protecting consumer's privacy can lead to complications.

"I kind of said: how would I build a marketing channel, knowing what I know but respecting consumer privacy and delivering something that was never in place before?" says Giesener.

Since consumers choose what alerts they want to receive, and how and where they want to receive them, retailers are able to reach an audience that is already interested in their products.

ShoppeSimple has 10 employees. In addition to rolling out pages for new clients, the company is also working on raising capital to support its growth. It also plans to advertise to consumers in 2011.

Source: Jeffery Giesener, ShoppeSimple
Writer: Dan Haugen

One week after launching the state's new angel investor tax credit program, state officials had received 20 applications for certification as of Monday.

All businesses, investors, and angel funds must be certified before applying for a tax credit allocation. Officials have already received one application for credit allocation.

The statute says state officials can only release the names of businesses and investors that have been certified.

Six entities had been certified through Monday. They include:

    --OrthoCor Medical, Inc., a company that makes a device for treating knee pain

    --Investors Donald Schreifels, Sheri Aggarwal, and Charles Floyd

    --and the Twin Cities Angel II, LLC, fund

Spokeswoman Kirsten Morell said more applications are coming in every day.

Source: Kirsten Morell, Department of Employment and Economic Development
Writer: Dan Haugen

A revolving investment fund at the University of St. Thomas helped five promising Minnesota technology companies get through a tough year.

The William C. Norris Institute at St. Thomas' Opus College of Business invested $280,000 during its 2010 fiscal year, which ended June 30. That included an investment in an undisclosed cleantech startup that's still in stealth mode, as well as follow-up investments in four companies that were already in the program's portfolio:

    �Apinee, which makes an environmentally friendly wood treatment

    �Dejen Digital, a web portal that aims to streamline music and dance tryouts

    �Seeonic, which makes an RFID-equipped retail display to help track inventory

    �and Xollai, which is developing a system for landing unmanned aircraft

Norris Institute Director Mike Moore said it was a difficult year for everyone.

"It was just survival. If a company matched its sales from the year before, or just lost a little bit, that was more than could be expected," Moore said.

The fund was created by the late Control Data Corp. founder and CEO William Norris in 1988 to support early-stage technology-based companies in Minnesota that address social needs as well as business opportunities. In 2001, the program became part of the St. Thomas business school, where students now help perform due diligence and other tasks related to running the fund.

Moore said this year he hopes to make first-time investments in four or five companies. Entrepreneurs can find guidelines and information about submitting business plans at http://www.stthomas.edu/norrisinstitute

Source: Mike Moore, William C. Norris Institute
Writer: Dan Haugen

Exos Medical Corp. introduced a high-tech alternative to plaster casts last year that can be re-conformed as injuries swell and subside.

The company hopes its new Arden Hills facility will allow it similar flexibility. And right now, sales are swelling.

CEO Fariborz Boor Boor described sales as "nothing short of phenomenal" for a new medical technology, which often have slow adoption curves. (A recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission listed revenue at less than $1 million.)

Meanwhile, Exos' products have been worn by some high-profile athletes, from NFL quarterbacks to Olympic skier Lindsay Vonn, and also noted on national tech blogs by Fast Company and BoingBoing.

"Actually, part of our growth challenge right now is meeting the demand, so we're taking steps to make sure we have product to sell," Boor Boor said.

Exos moved on April 1 from a 4,000-square-foot space in White Bear Lake to a 12,000-square-foot facility in Arden Hills, tripling its floor space. Meanwhile, it's grown from just five employees at the start of the year to more than 20 today. It expects to be at around 30 employees by the end of the year.

The company's technology is a lightweight foam and polymer product that can be molded and hardened into casts, braces, and splints. Unlike plaster casts, they're breathable, waterproof, and adjustable during the course of healing.

"Beyond that, the comfort level of our products is unprecedented," Boor Boor said. "That really was our focus, making sure we could make a product that was comfortable for the patient and easy for the practitioner to apply."

The cost is "a bit higher" than traditional casts, he said, but the price becomes competitive when you factor in that traditional casts often have to be replaced.

The company was created in Aug. 2007 as a spin-off from Boor Boor's previous endeavor, a med-tech incubator called Enova Medical Technologies.

Source: Fariborz Boor Boor, Exos Corporation
Writer: Dan Haugen

Bringing a new medical device to market is a complicated, highly regulated process, one that requires documentation at every turn.

Kristin Mortenson doesn't believe there's been a simple solution for most medical device companies to keep track of it all, until now.

Mortenson is co-founder of Acera Innovation, maker of a software-as-a-service application built specifically to help medical device companies manage workflow and collaboration around product development, regulatory compliance, and quality management.

"Our goal to lower their time, risk, and cost to bring their product to market," says Mortenson.

Most medical device companies are like the ones Mortenson has worked with the past 20 years: fewer than 100 employees and too small to be able to afford large enterprise software customized to their needs.

As a consultant, she looked for software that would help clients stay organized but couldn't find any good solutions. As a result, regulatory compliance became a time-consuming headache for many firms.

About a year and a half ago she met with a couple of software entrepreneurs, Myke Miller and Steve Swartz, and they formed Acera Innovation. The company signed up its first paying user about a year ago. It's in a "limited-release" mode right now with about a dozen customers, mostly in the Twin Cities.

Because it's a cloud-based service, companies don't need any specialized staff or hardware to run the program, just a computer with Internet access. This frees up companies to concentrate on the task at hand:

"Placing the energy and the time and the creativity on the device."

Acera Innovation is currently raising money and also preparing to release an updated version of the software in the fall.

Source: Kristin Mortenson, Acera Innovation
Writer: Dan Haugen

A south Minneapolis garage this week gave supporters a sneak peek at its new business, and a glimpse of what might be the future of the automobile.

ReGo Electric Conversions will open for business Aug. 19, but it hosted an open house on Monday for partners and curious neighbors to take a look. Its shop is located under the same solar-panel-covered roof as Mulroy's Body Shop, at 3920 Nicollet Ave. S. in the Kingfield neighborhood.

The company will convert gas-electric hybrid vehicles into plug-in hybrids, which contain an extra battery that can be charged off an ordinary electrical outlet.

Co-founder Shayna Berkowitz says a few years ago she was looking for someone to convert her Toyota RAV4 to an all-electric vehicle. When she couldn't find any shops in town that could do the job, she thought there might be an opportunity.

Gas-to-hybrid-or-electric vehicle conversions are an expensive proposition, more than $40,000 per vehicle. The market for them doesn't exist today, but Berkowitz believes it will someday, and that ReGo will be ready when it arrives. Meanwhile, Berkowitz and her business partner, Alex Danovitch, believe there's enough work to keep them busy converting hybrids to plug-in hybrids.

The company has 11 employees. Over the past two years they've developed a process for winterizing and installing existing battery technology into gas-electric hybrid vehicles. The extra battery allows a hybrid car to travel at higher
speeds and longer distances on battery power alone, which can help save money and reduce emissions. The conversion process takes about 24 hours and costs around $5,000. One of ReGo's first customers is the city of Minneapolis, which is paying to convert one of its Priuses to a plug-in hybrid for Mayor R.T. Rybak.

Berkowitz points to the war in Iraq, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the growing issues of global warming and air pollution as reasons why ReGo couldn't be starting up at better time.

"People have really made a commitment to hybrid vehicles, which have been the best option available for people who want to move toward a more sustainable transportation sector," says Berkowitz. "We're in a place now to be able to offer people a next step with those hybrids."

Source: Shayna Berkowitz, ReGo Electric Conversions
Writer: Dan Haugen

Minnesota economic development officials expect to be able to launch the state's new angel investor tax credit program sometime next week.

The Department of Employment and Economic Development this week was completing and testing back-office systems for the program, says coordinator Jeff Nelson. If all goes as planned, the department expects to post applications on a new web page the week of July 19, two weeks before the deadline set by the Legislature.

The 25 percent tax credit is designed to incentivize up to $48 million per year in investments in emerging and high-tech startups in the state. The Legislature set aside $11 million for 2010 and $12 million annually for 2011 through 2014.

The money will be awarded through a two-step, first-come-first-served process. First, investors and companies need to be certified to ensure they qualify for the tax credit. Next, the investor may apply for the tax credit allocation.

Among the criteria for companies to qualify: They must be less than 10 years old and have fewer than 25 employees. Their headquarters and more than half their payroll and employees must be in Minnesota, and all employees must make at least $18.55 per hour. Qualifying companies also need to be using or researching proprietary technology in a high-technology field.

Nelson says that based on the volume of questions and requests his office has had, they very well might be swamped in the next few weeks, but it's impossible to say for sure.

"We've had a lot of interest from all parties, but we have no experience in this, so it's kind of hard to tell," says Nelson.

We'll see next week, maybe.

Source: Jeff Nelson, Department of Employment and Economic Development
Writer: Dan Haugen

A local company that tests software for quality assurance says business is picking up. Could it be a sign the tech economy is preparing for growth?

"Maybe," says Todd Hauschildt, CEO of SWAT Solutions in Plymouth. "We're starting to see a lot of interest in what we do. Quality is getting more and more important as companies are preparing for growth."

SWAT Solutions makes sure software products--everything from iPhone apps to medical devices--work the way they're supposed to before its clients take them to market.

"We make sure it was built and runs as it was designed," says Hauschildt.

Most of its clients are in the Twin Cities, and it's ramping up for what it expects to be a very busy third and fourth quarter. The company had six new job positions posted on its website this week, and planned more new hires before the end of summer.

Hauschildt was hired as CEO earlier this year after resigning from a position at Thomson Reuters.

"I'd been in big companies all my career and I've got too many friends who say, dude, you've got to try this," he says. "I really do like it. It's a different type of work, different type of problems, but it's fun and it's sort of re-energized me."

He said another factor in SWAT's recent pickup is likely a "reshoring" trend by companies that had offshored their quality assurance to other countries.

Source: Todd Hauschildt, Swat Technologies
Writer: Dan Haugen

All that hopey, changey stuff? It's actually working out quite nicely for GovDelivery.

The fast-growing St. Paul company helps government agencies manage digital communications, everything from e-mail newsletters to social media feeds.

President Obama signed an Open Government Initiative shortly after taking office that calls on federal agencies to be more participatory and transparent in the way they do business. The order has resulted in a spike in demand for the kind of services that GovDelivery provides.

Meanwhile, many state and local governments are facing budget cuts and looking for ways to communicate more efficiently with their constituents.

"There's a lot going on in the public sector market," says GovDelivery founder/CEO Scott Burns. "There's a lot of pressure to communicate what's going on and a lot of pressure to be more efficient and more effective."

GovDelivery recently advertised 14 new positions to keep up with growing demand for its services, which are used to send out more than 10 million messages a day. The company has about 75 employees.

The company was founded in 1999 with an emphasis on local government. It launched a beta version of its e-mail subscription service for the city of St. Paul in 2000. If you've ever signed-up to receive snow emergency alerts in St. Paul, then you've used a GovDelivery service.

The company's clients now include the FBI, the National Guard and U.S. Health & Human Services, which used GovDelivery to get the word out about H1N1 flu.

"We're getting out information on H1N1. We're getting out information on cyber crime. We're getting out information on your local park hours," says Burns. "This is stuff that needs to get into people's hands and that makes their lives better."

Source: Scott Burns, GovDelivery
Writer: Dan Haugen

A Minneapolis digital communications firm is grabbing attention--and bystanders--with a new interactive billboard in Times Square.

Space150 recently became the agency of record for Forever21, the trendy youth fashion chain. Its first project: creating a giant high-tech display for the retailer's flagship store in New York's Times Square.

In most places, a 61-foot-tall video screen would be enough to turn heads, but not in Times Square. Over the past decade the center has been overtaken by increasingly enormous screens to the point that it now looks like a sports bar for giants. Space150 decided to go different instead of bigger.

"We looked at it and said this is almost like a giant computer screen, versus a television screen where you just have the one-way interaction," says space150 founder/CEO Billy Jurewicz.

The firm created a series of interactive "episodes" that rotate across the screen. One displays recent tweets that include the phrases "love" and "Forever21." Another is "Forever Runway," an ongoing loop of user-generated videos showing fans walking from one side of the screen to the other.
 
The real eye-catcher, though, is a bit called "getting picked up by a model." A super-high-definition camera mounted on the billboard displays a real-time stream of the people standing below. A superimposed model enters the screen, then reaches out and plucks a person's image from the live video feed. The model might kiss the person, or put them in a shopping bag, or flick them away.

"This is sensational. It's a live image of the crowd. People just start mobbing like they're watching the World Cup or something," says Jurewicz. "If you see it, you're going to say that's something you want to do as a tourist in New York, to go get picked up by a model at Times Square."

Jurewicz founded space150 in March 2000. The company recently celebrated its tenth anniversary in the midst of an expansion. The firm has grown to about 140 employees from about 90 at the start of the year. It's hired about 20 in the past three weeks alone.

Source: Billy Jurewicz, space150
Writer: Dan Haugen

The U.S. EPA announced in the fall that it will re-evaluate its regulation of the pesticide atrazine after studies linked low exposure to the chemical with reproductive problems.

It was fortunate timing for a pair of recent University of Minnesota graduates, who a few months earlier started developing a filter to remove atrazine from drinking water.

Their company, NewWater, got another boost last week when it was named a semifinalist in both the Minnesota Cup and Cleantech Open entrepreneur contests.

The technology is based on research by two U of M professors, microbiologist Mike Sadowsky and biochemist Larry Wackett. NewWater co-founders Alex Johansson and Joe Mullenbach met the researchers last spring through an entrepreneurship class at the Carlson School of Management.

Since then, Johansson and Mullenbach have been trying to turn the professors' basic research into a product for municipal water treatment plants to remove more atrazine than is possible with current filters. They're currently developing a prototype and working on a licensing arrangement with the university.

Atrazine is one of the most widely used pesticides on the planet. Current limits on atrazine in drinking water are based on the cancer risk, but recent studies suggest lower levels of the chemical, levels that are currently allowed in drinking water, may cause birth defects, low birth weights and menstrual problems.

If the EPA lowers the threshold for how much atrazine it allows in drinking water, Mullenbach believes NewWater will have a potential $3 million market for their filter product, which uses bacteria enzymes as the active ingredient instead of carbon.

"We provide a lower-cost solution that is capable of treating to much more stringent drinking water standards," Mullenbach said.

NewWater won a seed grant in January from the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota. It's also applied for federal Small Business Innovation Research grants.

Source: Joe Mullenbach
Writer: Dan Haugen

A group of ProUroCare Medical investors have upped their anti, loaning the Eden Prairie medical device startup an additional $885,000.

The company is seeking approval from federal regulators to begin selling an imaging product it believes will help doctors detect and document abnormalities that could be related to prostate cancer.

ProUroCare's device is inserted into a patient's rectum and applied against the prostate gland. It can then map how the tissue responds to pressure. Abnormal tissue tends to be denser and less elastic and shows up differently on the electronic image generated by the device.

The new financing, which comes from "a small group of existing investors closely aligned with the company," will be used to pay off debt, as well as boost manufacturing and marketing activities, expand the company's intellectual property portfolio and create a scientific advisory board, the company said. It brings the total amount the company has raised since 2007 to more than $9.3 million.

"We are very pleased by the support that we continue to receive from investors for the ProUroScan prostate imaging system and the market opportunities that exist for this technology," CEO Rick Carlson said in a statement.

The device is not yet for sale in the United States. The company applied for approval to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in November. The Star Tribune reported then that the company's next challenge would be convincing Medicare and private insurers that the scans result in improved medical care.

Source: ProUroCare Medical
Writer: Dan Haugen

Minnetonka-based medical device maker Anulex disclosed last week that it's raised about $18.3 million in new venture capital.

The company makes a product that lets doctors repair spinal tissue that's punctured during herniated-disc surgeries. Xclose has been on the market since 2007, but there's still little clinical data about its effectiveness, which makes collecting reimbursements from insurers more difficult.

David Noel, vice president of finance and chief financial officer for Anulex, said the funding will allow the company to continue a two-year clinical study it started in 2009, as well as further commercialization and product development efforts.

About 10 percent of herniated disks require a surgery called a diskectomy that involves removing the part of the disc that's coming in contact with nerves. The soft, outer layer of the disc typically isn't sewn up after the procedure because it's difficult to reach.

"It's been very, very difficult to get down there and suture that defect. Our product allows the surgeon to go in there and in approximate and bring that tissue together," Noel said. "We believe that if you're able to do that you're going to have a better result, and that's what our clinical study is intended to prove."

The 750 patients enrolled in the study will have a one-year follow-up in August and a more intensive two-year check-in next year. The company hopes the results will assist in with both marketing and establishing an insurance reimbursement code.

Source: David Noel, Anulex
Writer: Dan Haugen

Minnesota researchers may have a brighter future thanks to a new cross-border compact.

The BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota signed an agreement last month giving members improved access to the Canadian Light Source synchrotron facility at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada.

The synchrotron is a giant X-ray microscope that lets scientists see what's going on inside cells at the atomic-particle level. The device works by accelerating electrons around a football-field-sized racetrack, then focusing them into a light beam brighter than the sun and sending it through the material being studied.

Only a handful of synchrotrons exist around the world because they are so expensive to build. Canada completed its $174-million national synchrotron facility in 2004.

Canadian researchers have always had preferential pricing and access to the synchrotron, but under the new agreement with the BioBusiness Alliance, "they're in effect treating us as through we're Canadians," said Dale Wahlstrom, CEO of the BioBusiness Alliance.

Wahlstrom said many university and larger companies already use synchrotrons for research, but many other companies aren't aware of the potential applications. The BioBusiness Alliance's next step is educating Minnesotans about the technology.

"It's very broadly applicable," Wahlstrom said, citing the life sciences, computer industry and materials sciences as a few areas where the light source could be used.

The hope is that giving Minnesota researchers better access to the facility will speed up the time it takes to develop products and get them to market, said Wahlstrom.

Source: Dale Wahlstrom, CEO, BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota
Writer: Dan Haugen