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The
MCED Bulletin
Maine Center for Enterprise
Development June/July
2005
Greetings!
This bulletin is published by the Maine
Center for Enterprise Development
(MCED), southern Maine’s
business incubator for emerging technology. Please share this newsletter with your colleagues.
-- John Ferland, President of the MCED
Contents:
- Our
client companies win awards & raise over $300,000
- Another Successful Series
of Lunch & Learn Workshops for Entrepreneurs
- New domain name for our
website & email addresses!
- Getting involved in our
programs
MCED
Clients Win Awards & Raise Over $300,000
Seven
firms that we work with received awards – financial and otherwise – during
the last several months. Here is an overview.
Identity
Cops Inc.
won the
award for “Best New Technology of the Year” in Maine
at a ceremony held by the Maine
Software Developers’ Association (MESDA), which represents the state’s
information technology industry. Their unique PrivacyProBot
technology proactively searches hundreds of electronic databases notifying
the subscribing individual of potential vulnerabilities and providing
options to fix the problem. “Between our [three] MTI awards and now
this recognition by MESDA, there is no doubt the technology and business
communities believe we have something important here. We are excited
about what is to come – the sky’s the limit” said the president of ID Cops,
Rebecca Weinstein.
Lynn Bromley, VP
of Business Development, accepted the award on behalf of ID Cops, stating
that “the growth of small business in Maine
is essential, and companies like ours, inventing significant new
technologies and building businesses within our state, demonstrate that Maine is on the
cutting edge. We are going to do amazing things with our company,
right here at home.”
CrossRate
Technology received an MTI Development Award for $159k in the
latest round to develop an integrated GPS/Loran receiver. Though not
yet matched, the award has allowed CrossRate to
broaden its engineering team and jump start its engineering
development. Joining the CrossRate team as
a Hardware Architect is Narendra Bansal. He has extensive experience in the entire
design process and has worked for Lucent Technology and AMCC in both
development and engineering management roles. CrossRate
has also expanded its footprint and is setting up a design lab in the MCED
business incubator.
Frontier
Energy, an MCED affiliate, is developing renewable alternatives for
heating oil and diesel fuel. They have partnered with the River Valley
Technology Center of Rumford and Enerkem, Inc. in
a project to create biodiesel fuel products.
Their project, Maine
Biodiesel LP, recently received an MTI
development award of $77K. The MTI funding will help overcome process
hurdles during design and product characterization.
BioAnalyte was awarded an MTI seed grant
in July to develop software that will help scientists find ways to use
scientific data to discover information about cancer, contamination and
infection. The project extends software developed in conjunction with the US
Food and Drug Administration to areas of broader interest in the health
community. BioAnalyte was a tenant at the Center
in 2002-2004, and is now one of several successful graduates of our
incubator program in the Portland
area. They develop cross-platform vendor neutral software for biomarker
information retrieval and analysis.
Do All
Dump has joined the Center as an affiliated firm. The student-run
company was the winner of the University
of Southern Maine
(USM) Student Business Plan Competition earlier this spring for their
product, a manual dump trailer with a patent pending dumping mechanism.
Aimed initially at the lawn and garden industry, the new technology will
allow for easy hauling and dumping at a fraction of the cost of hydraulic
pumps. The award was announced at a meeting of the USM Corporate Partners,
a group of over 350 business people, from more than 150 companies, who
believe that a responsive public university plays a key role in building
and sustaining a vibrant community. The prize is $10,000 and $15,000 in
donated professional services from Portland-area businesses.
The company prinicipals
are Barbara Silke, Justin Almy
and Jay Castarella. The company is being
developed in partnership with Charles and Gloria Nye.
The Fulbright Academy of Science
& Technology, another MCED affiliate, was awarded a
$35,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop a "Memory
Board." As with an internet bulletin board, a Memory Board accepts
postings from people around the world, but the primary focus is to gather
personal memories and recollections. The Academy's board is being created
for the 60th Anniversary of the Fulbright Exchange Program and will focus
on how the program influenced the development of science, engineering and
industry.
In addition to the Memory Board, the Fulbright Academy
is also organizing a conference in Berlin
for Fulbright scholars and other international leaders in science and
technology. Eric Howard, the
Academy's executive director, obtained a $20,000 donation from the
German-US Commission to underwrite the meeting. Information about the
conference is available on the Academy's website.
New Hope Products
Company has produced the first Desperate Housewives board
game, which was slated to hit store shelves on or about July 15th.
Desperate Housewives is this season's most successful new television series
and airs on Sundays at 9 pm on ABC. New Hope Products is a Biddeford, Maine product development company and an affiliate firm at the Center. They are
collaborating with the MCED and the University of Southern
Maine School of Business on
an internet-based businesses called iCubis, which targets the inventor marketplace.
NHPC is owned and operated by P. Joseph
Shumaker, Jr. (Joe) and his wife, Mary. The company has operated in Maine since 1997.
Lunch & Learn Workshops for Entrepreneurs
In June, the Maine Center for Enterprise
Development completed another successful series of Lunch & Learn
Workshops for Entrepreneurs, Sponsored
by: Norway Savings Bank. Staff and representatives from
over 165 separate companies attended one or more of the programs during the
2004-05 series.
In addition to thanking Norway Savings
Bank, we would like to recognize the following local professionals who
shared their knowledge and expertise to the participants.
- Rita Heimes, Esq., technology law center, University of
Maine School of Law
- Tony Perkins, Esq.,
Bernstein Shur Sawyer & Nelson
- George Gilfoil, MIT Club of Maine
- Valarie Lamont, Ph.D., Center
for Entrepreneurship, University
of Southern Maine School of Business
- David Gulak,
Maine Technology Institute
- Alison Harris of Harris
Media Services
- John Karp, operations
support manager, Enercom Technologies
- Patrick Martin,
technology transfer and commercialization project manager with the Maine
Manufacturers Extension Partnership.
- Meriby Sweet, Technology Center
Director for the Maine
Small Business
Technology & Development
Center Program
- Karen
West Morgan of C & P Management Services
If you would like to suggest a topic for the 2005-06 series or
make a presentation
yourself, please contact
John Ferland the President of the MCED.
MCED incorporates acronym in new domain name
The Maine
Center for Enterprise Development now uses the
domain name of mced.biz. The old address(www.ceemaine.org) will automatically
forward to our new web address of www.mced.biz. The website will
be updated by this fall.
Please
note that the email addresses for our staff have also changed, and our
Project Coordinator, previously Sandra Hotchkiss, has taken back her maiden
name of Stone.
JFerland@mced.biz for John Ferland, President
SStone@mced.biz
for Sandra Stone, Project coordinator
Get Involved in MCED Programs
We are here to help technology business start-ups be more
productive and profitable, and connect you to needed financial and
professional resources
BUSINESS START-UPS: The purpose of
business incubation is to increase the success rate of start-up companies.
National research studies have found that about 75% of new businesses fail
during the first 5 years. On the other hand, nearly 90% of companies that
experience incubation succeed over that same time frame.
The Maine Center for Enterprise
Development provides mentoring, technical assistance, and assistance with
early stage capital. Our on-site clients benefit from more intensive
attention and additional advantages - including having work space outside
of the owner's home and daily opportunities to network with other emerging
business entrepreneurs.
Our
job is to help new and young firms commercialize technologies by
systematically assisting businesses with intellectual property and business
plan needs, R&D activities, early stage
financing and product commercialization.
For
information on renting space or becoming an affiliated firm, please contact
John Ferland, MCED President at JFerland@mced.biz
or call him at 207- 767-4306 x102.
BUSINESS COMMUNITY
LEADERS & PROFESSIONALS: We are also beginning to form an advisory
council of community business leaders and professionals to help mentor our
clients and advocate for our incubator. Please contact Sandra Stone,
Project Coordinator at SStone@MCED.biz or 767-4302 x 100 if you
would like to get involved.
· Links
to MCED graduates & clients · Links
to MCED Sponsors
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