Entrepreneurship : Innovation + Job News

This holiday season, commercial building owners in the Philadelphia area will be receiving a gift that they would love to return. This January, PECO is set to announce its first rate hike in 14 years. This expiration of the rate caps is likely to mean big increases for commercial buildings, where utilities are often the biggest expenditure. But one Glenside company wants to replace this lump of coal with energy savings, connecting cutting edge technology with complex building systems.

In 2009, long-time business owner and entrepreneur Tony DePaul created Wireless Energy Solutions (WES) as a marketing and distribution agency for Bulogics, the Philadelphia-based energy monitoring technology firm. Bulogics has created smart plugs that monitor energy usage for each device and transmit that information wirelessly. Partnering with Bulogics, DePaul's team has created an internet-enabled network allowing business owners to control energy usage and monitor devices from an iPhone or laptop off-site and from any computer in the building. This solution has helped commercial buildings across the region reduce usage before the rate caps expire.

"There are three major areas impacted: HVAC, lighting, and parasitic power," says DePaul. "By keeping your building the appropriate climate, managing the parasitic power and the lighting, it comes up to anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of the energy bill each year. And depending on where the power companies are, some offer rebates for these devices. And we do all the applications. These things pay for themselves in a very short period of time."

WES promises a 100 percent return on investment within three years through savings and rebates. In Pennsylvania, while rates may be going up, PECO offers a 21-cent-per-square-foot rebate, helping building owners avoid the rate-cap woes.

"There is nothing else like this on the market," says DePaul. "The alternative is dumb, low-tech devices. Or you can use this, a wireless capability that is highly intelligent, programmable and reports and monitors the site completely."

Source: Tony DePaul, Wireless Energy Solutions
Writer: John Steele

Every year, foundations for breast cancer awareness tout the importance of getting a mammogram for early detection and prevention of this deadly disease. But for women in other parts of the world who may not have easy access to health care, a treatment requiring expensive x-ray equipment may not be practical. As a breast cancer survivor herself, Drexel University Associate Professor Dr. Wan Shih has watched women from her home continent of Asia suffer from late detection and low survival rates with great interest. She and her team now believe they have a better way.

Citing shortcomings and false-positives of mammogram technology, Dr. Shih and her team created a tissue scanner able to detect cancerous tissue outside of the clinician's office. The scanner detects hardened or dense tissue that may be cancerous, even in women under 40 who may have denser breasts. Earlier this month, Drexel's portable breast cancer scanner project took a big step toward commercialization, signing a licensing agreement with Philadelphia-based UE LifeSciences.

"In India or China, mammography is for diagnostics, not for screening," says Dr. Shih. "So when women are brought to do mammography, they have already found a lump and, by that time, it may be too late."

The project was selected as one of the inaugural projects for the University City Science Center's QED program, a proof-of-concept development grant that helps academic researchers reach the marketplace. After receiving $200,000 from the QED Program and additional support from the Wallace H. Coulter Translational Research Program at Drexel, the device caught the attention of UE LifeSciences, a company dedicated to increasing early detection of breast cancer.

"This product uses no radiation, it is inexpensive and can be brought to women in developing countries," says Dr. Shih. "Traditionally women feel for breast lumps but this product is more sensitive than human hands. Our goal is to get more women in for testing sooner."

Source: Dr. Wan Shih, Drexel University
Writer: John Steele

Monetate has what many in the web marketing industry would call a good problem. With rapid expansion of the young company's website optimization tools and new private financing from First Round Capital, Monetate has too much going on for its small, limber staff to handle. So the company is doing a big hiring push, looking to fill 20 positions before the end of the year. The company is now offering $500 or a new iPad to anyone who refers a successful job seeker to Monetate.

"Our need for these new positions is driven by a lot more demand in the marketplace," says Monetate VP of Marketing Blair Lyon. "We have had a tremendous amount of growth in just the last six months. Now with this new funding, it all coincides really well. As we expand the product, we want to be able to add a lot of new features our clients are asking for."

Monetate is set to release an update to its flagship software in early 2011 and hopes to make it easier for self-service clients to run their own campaigns. They are also experimenting with not only updating text and ecommerce offerings but also helping website owners test other features like video or images or copy to see if they make a difference. As soon as they can get a staff back to full strength, Monetate hopes to continue expansion in 2011.

"The hiring is centered around being able to aggressively add a lot of new features that our clients are asking for," says Lyon. "But also being able to expand our service and support capabilities, so that we can continue to help these customers through this change of being able to easily test and target and personalize their site."

Source: Blair Lyon, Monetate
Writer: John Steele

These days, most businesses fit into one of two categories--brick-and-mortar businesses and online cyber shops. And from the look of Pure Fare's 21st Street location, the Rittenhouse neighborhood is soon in for another sustainable cafe. But partners Kriti and Kunal Sehgal and  have something far more innovative in mind.

With PureFare.com, the Pure Fare team hopes to help customers monitor their eating habits and keep track of local food. The My Fare program would allow customers who live and work in the neighborhood to use a swipe card, keeping track of meals at Pure Fare. PureFare.com then offers detailed nutritional information for all purchases. Customers can also enter food items from other places into this online food log, helping Pure Fare's health nut customers have a more intuitive view to encourage healthy eating.

"Our goal right now is to cater to the breakfast and lunch crowd," says Pure Fare co-managing partner Kunal Sehgal. "It is a place where you can come to get a sandwich or a cup of coffee but we also offer these other features."

The owners say they have plans to make the building more sustainable as well, using low-impact lighting and composting in the kitchen. But the web tools are what set them apart. Sehgal says they even held up the opening until early 2011 to make sure they got the website just right.

"We are working on the design of the space but also making sure that everything we do is supported by the website," says Sehgal. By very effortlessly tracking what you are eating, we can track your (body mass index), health metrics and we are able to engage the user in a way that has never been done by a fast-casual brand."

Source: Kunal Sehgal, Pure Fare
Writer: John Steele

You may imagine successful technology entrepreneurs helping build innovative platforms, selling the company and then sipping a drink on a sunny beach somewhere. Not Fred Allegrezza. After selling AnySource Media--the video software firm he and his partners sold to Divx in 2008--Allegrezza returns with Telikin, the Linux-based PC platform he created to battle the big guns at Apple and Microsoft and make personal computing easier for users 55 and older.

Telikin combines today's most popular features--email, internet access, games, photo sharing, social media--and combines them into a more intuitive, touch-screen design. On November 26, the Telikin hit stores, showing up in eight Philadelphia Clear Wireless locations just in time for Black Friday.

"Telikin is right in this mix between people who are frustrated with Windows computers and all the problems and Apple might be a solution but it is still a lot more expensive" says Allegrezza. "We are not the computer you use if you want to design a house or manage your accounting systems. But it does come with preloaded applications, they all work and they all play nice together."

Telikin was born three years ago, when Allegrezza's mother entered an assisted-living facility. He created a modified Mac computer that would auto-answer Skype calls and manage pictures more easily so that she could stay in touch with her family. The name Telikin comes from the combination of telecommunications and kin, or family. But what started as a device for seniors has become something Allegrezza believes can really challenge America's PC giants.

"What we found, as we were working with customers looking for their senior parents, many were saying 'I want one of these for myself,' says Allegrezza. "It had a broader appeal than we had anticipated so we added in word processing and printing to make it a full-blown computer that even power users can enjoy."

Source: Fred Allegrezza, Telikin
Writer: John Steele

In 2009, Tampa, Fla., experienced the worst drought in its history, causing quite a stir in the city's water department. From January to March, water enforcement officials had issued six citations a day for improper water usage. The situation became so dire that the city issued a ban on sprinkler systems, until the drought was under control.

King of Prussia sprinkler firm UgMo Technologies is helping Florida business and home owners protect against drought without throwing the baby out with the lawn water. They created ProHome, a wireless soil sensor that detects when soil has been adequately saturated and automatically shuts the water off, saving customers an average of 53 percent on water bills. Along with Florida, the company has sales teams in drought-plagued areas in Texas, California, Florida and Georgia. This week, Ben Franklin Technology Partners announced $500,000 in investment to help UgMo expand ProHome to larger, more commercial projects across the country.

"This is a true green product that allows you to cut down on your water usage and provides real savings," says UgMo CFO Joe Cahill. "That is something you don't see much in the green tech market."

After launching in 2004, UgMo began developing ProTurf, a version of ProHome marketed to sports facilities and golf courses. After releasing ProTurf in 2009, UgMo was well along developing its second product, ProHome. The Ben Franklin investment will help UgMo launch a new commercial version of its technology. The company looks to expand drastically in the next year, hiring in every department and expanding into home and commercial markets.

"The next generation of UgMo will address larger irrigation systems; everything from office parks to municipalities and strip malls," says Cahill. "As we spend the next year developing this product, the investment will help us continue our growth."

Source: Joe Cahill, UgMo Technologies
Writer: John Steele

Leversense CEO Pete Nagy doesn't have a particular affinity for fluids like blood or urine. But after selling his fiber-optics business to a Fortune 100 company, Nagy was looking for his next project and found himself in the laboratories of Drexel University's Dr. Raj Mutharasan. Mutharasan was working on a testing technology that could remain sensitive in dirty, unprocessed materials. Nagy, a career tech entrepreneur, immediately saw the commercial applications and decided to seed fund Leversense, making blood and urine testing his mission.

"The sensitivity we have is pretty extraordinary," says Nagy. "Most products out on the market require a lot of steps, a lot of processes in order to get samples to testing. It is usually very expensive and requires you do it in a lab and not in a practical setting."

This week, the company announced a new Ben Franklin Technology Partners investment of $300,000 for continued development efforts, getting Leversense ready to approach a waiting market with its biosensor diagnostics. In the months spent testing the technology, Nagy has been telling everyone who will listen, drawing attention from markets he didn't expect. One market has been food testing. The average food sample is much more complex and much dirtier than the average human fluid sample so they are much harder to work with. Leversense maintains its sensitivity in milk, which Nagy hopes will give the product great potential in the food-testing market.

"One of the things that attracted me to the technology is how much commercial interest there was," says Nagy. "We have had people approach us about food testing and bio-processing, so we are pursuing those things now as well."

Source: Pete Nagy, Leversense
Writer: John Steele

In the early days of cell phones, text messages were for short, simple messages you had to deliver in an instant. Today, more people text than talk as the technology has become as ubiquitous as the phones themselves. And with a little help from Philadelphia mobile commerce company Xipwire, a text can send more than words, helping pay for meals, send gifts and even settle a restaurant check. This month, Xipwire will test these features at Old City's Zahav Restaurant and University City's Pod, changing the way you celebrate the holidays.

"All the restaurants know they have to stay ahead of the game and they just get it," says Xipwire co-founder Sibyl Lindsay. "It's so much more interactive than bringing a check to the table. When the server gets the text, they can see a profile pop up, it protects our Xipsters and our merchants, and the restaurants are really excited about it."

After premiering the technology last May at the Rittenhouse Row Spring Festival, Xipwire has been working to bring text-to-pay into restaurant locations. Xipwire creators hope new restaurant promotions will make the product more of a household name. Right now, new customers can try out the service in a restaurant setting by sending the following Twitter message "@xipwire can I have the @flyingkite XIPCODE for my free drink @StarrRestaurants Pod in University City." Creators hope this "gift" platform will change the way diners give and receive gift certificates around the holidays.

"This promotion highlights another thing that we are trying to do which is bring giftcards into the 21st century," says co-creator Sharif Alexandre. "I have giftcards in my desk right now that I haven't used because I never bring them with me. If Pod is charging me five dollars for a drink and I have a 25 dollar giftcard sitting in my account, it should know to take that first. And that is how Xipwire works."

Source: Sibyl Lindsay, Xipwire
Writer: John Steele

With social networking tools like online chat and photo sharing becoming more common, many employers have begun protecting against the use of these platforms at work. But the software developers at WizeHive in Bryn Mawr are working to bring these traditionally fun tools into the professional fold. Their online collaboration platform, utilizing many of these sharing tools, received a Ben Franklin Technology Partners investment earlier this month, which will help the company expand in the new year.

"When we started, the focus of the platform was around sharing: sharing documents, sharing tasks, managing projects, having online conversations," says CEO and Co-founder Mike Levinson. "As the product matured, it has become more about helping people automate business processes and about helping them make better, faster decisions whether they are sitting across the room from each other or across the world from each other."

This online collaboration has taken WizeHive beyond the workplace, partnering with universities on managing scholarship applicants and helping media companies like TechCrunch manage contests and competitions. With the Ben Franklin funding, Levinson and company hope to expand staff, increase sales and continue working together on working together.

"We have been very successful at building the sales channel and bringing the platform into different arenas," says Levinson. "What we are really trying to do now with the funding is expand that. The plan is to continue building out what we are doing, just doing a lot more of it in the new year."

Source: Mike Levinson, WizeHive
Writer: John Steele

When husband and wife team Beth and Rich Kahn renovated their home in 2003, they found a frog stuck in the concrete foundation. The frog died and it always stuck with the couple. After founding EZanga.com in 2003, the Middletown, Del.-based company was facing a similar situation: stuck in a tough spot in a crowded search engine market with no escape. But by 2005, eZanga had shifted gears, not only helping people find each other on the internet but helping clients reach customers on every available search engine at once to drive sales traffic. Today, that frog has become eZanga's mascot and has taken on a new life as the official spokes-amphibian for one of the region's most successful companies. What a difference a few years makes.

"We actually don't have a business plan for the company. We have a direction and goals but the problem with a business plan is that it locks you into certain things," says Kahn. "It's about keeping an eye on what is going on on the internet and changing to go with the times

With 657 percent revenue growth between 2005 and 2009 and an award-winning search marketing platform, eZanga has appeared on the national Deloitte Fast 500 and took home a Philadelphia 100 award this fall. As the company enters its eighth year, eZanga looks to release two new search platforms and eyes expansion in the new year. 

"The platforms we have been rolling out are in response to certain platforms we find on the web," says founder and CEO Rich Kahn. "We like these platforms but we find that they are not efficient so we sit down and rebuild them ourselves. By the beginning of next year, we will be rolling out these new platforms and hope to double or triple our growth."

Source: Rich Kahn, eZanga.com
Writer: John Steele

It's holiday time again and students at college campuses across the U.S. will be huddled around their local ride board looking for a convenient carpool to drive them over the river and through the woods. As former Drexel University business students, Andy Guy and Aksel Gungor were in that rabble once. But thanks to their new internet platform Ridaroo, a digital answer to the college bulletin board, university students may soon be able to bypass this holiday huddle and get on the road a little faster. 

"We built Ridaroo here at Drexel initially as an answer to the co-op office's ride board," says Guy. "But we quickly realized there was a wider market for a product like this at universities, corporations and a lot of other entities and when we started expanding our horizons, we realized there was an opportunity to make this a real business."

Using Facebook and Google Maps, Ridaroo allows students to connect, share routes and meet up out on the road. Guy and Gungor hope to expand accessibility with smartphones, optimizing the site for mobile phones. As they get the word out through Drexel and other universities, Guy and Gungor are examining other applications, working with businesses and government agencies to start carpool programs for workers. Businesses and universities pay a subscription fee and Guy and Gungor admit that they are still learning how to bring the service to a new location. But once the pilot program is complete, they are confident they will be hitching a ride at college and business campuses across the country.

"Our goal is to go out to the local universities and get somewhere in the range of a dozen schools," says Guy. "At that level, we would feel confident knowing we had proven ourselves in the market. Then it's time to really go after a nationwide effort."

Source: Andy Guy, Ridaroo
Writer: John Steele 

Any runner who has ever bought a bottled water with the fiver in their shoe can understand VitaBand, the new product from Philadelphia entrepreneurs at VitaProducts that allows athletes to carry the contents of their wallet right on their wrist. But in fact, the VitaBand started from a much scarier place.

One day in 2007, co-creator Jason Brown was on a 10k run when a car nearly clipped him, sending him diving onto the shoulder. He made it home safely but what if he hadn't? He hadn't left a note, no one knew where he was and he didn't have his wallet. How would medics locate his medical information? How would they contact his family?

"Had I been hit, I wouldn't have been found for days," Brown says. "Being the type of guy I am, I got home and started to look around for products that might be used for identification purposes for athletes and found that this might be a good business opportunity."

Company co-founder David Waxman looked beyond the bracelet, which is not unlike existing medical ID bands. Along with bringing a point-of-sale payment option to the VitaBand, allowing users to swipe their wrist to pay for that bottle of water, he began licensing the technology to manufacturers of everything runners use: cell phone cases, exercise gear and other proprietary partners. Waxman and Brown hope this bifurcated strategy will give the Vita technology life as both a product and a platform. After completing a first angel investment round last year, the company has received a second round of investment and looks to launch its pilot product, the original VitaBand, in January.

"When we came up with the concept, we wondered how to make this into a mass market product without a $200 million marketing budget," says Waxman. "We looked at the Intel Inside model or the Dolby Digital model, creating a bracelet to jumpstart the market for the licensing component of our business so we can focus on the payment and medical records and let our partners do the heavy lifting getting the products out in the marketplace."

Source: Jason Brown, VitaProducts
Writer: John Steele

One of the hardest parts of a veterinarian's job is dealing with scared or skittish animals. Oftentimes, your four-legged friend knows they are going to the doctor and they don't like it. But Wayne veterinarian Dr. Holly Connolly has discovered a way to virtually eliminate these fears and the bad behavior that comes at the traditional vet's office. She took her practice on the road.

Earlier this month, Connolly started Are We Home Vet?  a mobile veterinary office run out of the back of a truck, offering all the same services of a traditional veterinary office, but without the hassles of leaving home.

"Pets are so much happier at home and we are able to catch them before their anxiety level gets so high," says Connolly. "By the time you get them in the car and make that 20-minute trip, they are already worked up so those animals that were a handful at the traditional office are completely different animals in the mobile setting."

The truck is fully equipped with an x-ray machine, a full-service lab, a laser for laser surgery and an exam table. Connolly says that, in the brief time she has been doing it, many of her regular clients have already taken advantage of the service. But perhaps more successful in attracting clients has been the truck itself. Connolly says she receives calls on a daily basis from people who have seen her out and about on her way to her next pet project.

"We will be driving around and you are basically driving a big billboard," says Connolly. "We have literally gotten calls while we are on the road. So the mobile unit has been a draw in and of itself!"

Source: Holly Connolly, Are We Home Vet?
Writer: John Steele

In Philadelphia in late November, keeping cool has never been a problem. That is, unless you run the Philadelphia Marathon. The annual race, which took place on Sunday, Nov. 21, attracted a field of over 11,000 runners, all battling for the finish line. When they got there, runners were greeted by the folks at Arctic Ease, a Phoenixville company specializing in cryotherapy wraps and pads proven to reduce swelling and stay cool for hours. The wraps require no time in the freezer and can be attached for more mobility.

A veteran of the health care industry and avid athlete, CEO Carol Forden founded Arctic Ease in 2009 after creating a chemical compound in her garage. Designed to remove heat from injured tissue, Arctic Ease keeps affected areas at a safe 60 degrees, reducing swelling and pain.

"If you are a weekend warrior and you overdo it or you are a runner in a marathon, on Monday, it is going to be a little tough to move around," says Forden. "What this product does is removes that swelling so you don't have that pain on Monday."

Along with offering wraps to runners at the finish line, Arctic Ease added a product sample to each marathoner's registration info and sponsored a massage tent. The company has appeared at marathons across the country and, after hiring four top-level positions in October 2009, is looking to expand into new markets in 2011. Along with expansion into other sports, Forden says the product may soon help osteoarthritis sufferers return mobility to creaky joints. 

"If you have ever twisted an ankle and wound up in the ER, you know that until they reduce the swelling, they can't do much," says Forden. "If you have nerve damage or a sprained ankle, they will tell you to come back three weeks later and they want you icing that whole time. Arctic Ease makes this process a little easier."

Source: Carol Forden, Arctic Ease
Writer: John Steele