Date: Feb 10, 2012 Source: bizjournals (
click here to go to the source)
It was another round of coffee-fueled networking on the South Side and the informal unveiling of the latest class of startups to take up residence in AlphaLab.
The six startups have been in the accelerator for the past five weeks, and it's a pretty diverse group with everything from gaming, to disease diagnostics, to an insurance rate comparison tool.
They will be furiously working on prototypes, gathering beta testers and securing customers from now until Demo Day, which will likely happen sometime in May, but we'll give you more about that when it gets closer.
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For regular readers of Steel City Innovation, some of these companies should sound familiar:
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ActivAided Orthotics, who we first met back in October at an elevator pitch competition, has developed a flexible back brace designed to help people with back problems self correct their posture thereby treating back pain. Company CEO Kelly Collier is running with the idea that was developed as part of a project for one of her biomedical engineering courses at Carnegie Mellon University. So far, she has about seven beta testers and is working on a partnership with clinicians at UPMC.
Bracketz, who first popped up at an Innovation Happens event, is developing an online marketing platform modeled on the familiar March Madness brackets. The idea is that marketers can better engage an audience with the online head-to-head competition. The founding team is a husband and wife duo, he has a background in online marketing and she has been taking entrepreneur classes at CMU's Tepper School of Business. They have been developing the platform for about a year and launched the first test campaign in October with a men's fashion company from New York City, said CEO Cynthia Knapic. Now they are focused on securing more customers and launching pilot campaigns.
HeadRight Games is a game development studio focused on creating what are called "casual games" — think Angry Birds, Bejeweled or Farmville. HeadRight's focusing on games for PC, Mac, web and mobile devices. All engineering is done in-house with art and music outsourced. Executive Producer Matt Rodgers, who has been in the game design business for eight years, said he intends to generate revenue through game sales and in-game transactions. He is aiming to debut the first game, which he describes as a hidden object puzzle adventure, by Demo Day.
InsuranceZebra is developing an online tool to easily compare car insurance rates. Founder Adam Lyons says he is looking to do for car insurance what Expedia did for travel and offer an unbiased tool to help consumers compare prices. Though insurance companies say they will compare prices, Lyons said he intends to give consumers a better view of the price landscape by using rate data gathered by state governments. He expects to generate revenue for the site through advertising.
RoommateFit hit our radar screen last year and has developed a tool for university housing organizations to use to match potential roommates. Initially, founder Justin Mares was working on pilots with a pair of Ohio universities and now he has five more in the works. Results of those pilots are also starting to come in, and Mares said Ohio University saw its reported roommate conflicts decrease more than 50 percent. He is waiting for retention numbers to come in. His focus now is sales and gaining traction. He also expects to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with his finance degree in May.
Tropical Health Systems, which is in the midst of changing its name to Accel Diagnostics, is developing a screening tool that doctors can use to easily and more quickly detect certain diseases and illnesses. CEO Alberto Gandini, a research scientist at CMU, worked to develop the technology at the university's biomedical engineering department. The credit card-sized device pricks the finger and then reads the protein in the blood offering the doctor quick insight into what may be wrong instead of drawing blood and waiting days for lab results. The company is working on beta prototypes to test the technology and to develop a manufacturing process.
