TechArb

Welcome to TechArb

allenkim — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:27:54 +0000

2012 Spring Venture Showcase

allenkim — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:34:52 +0000

Save the Date: University of Michigan’s Student Venture Showcase

Friday, April 13^th 2012 | 5:00-7:30pm
TechArb | 500 E. Washington Street | (Lower level)
Ann Arbor, Michigan
(Dinner Provided)

After pivoting, prototyping and engaging potential customers, more than 50 University of Michigan student startups will pitch and demo their ideas to angel investors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and members of the local entrepreneurial community on Friday, April 13th. Several of these startups have received funding and some of the previous year’s startups have already been acquired.

We hope you can join us at this amazing event, where you will have the opportunity to learn about the newest student startups and meet the promising young entrepreneurs from the University of Michigan.

RSVP Here by March 16th

TechArb Highlight: DIIME, L3C

moseslee — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:39:21 +0000

TechArb in Pictures

moseslee — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:34:12 +0000

Teams getting grilled on their business model canvas during monthly board meetings.

New art at the TechArb. Thanks Lydia. We always want to be learning

Each month, we host a dinner for the students. Trying to cultivate community.

Chatting after one of our weekly all-hands meetings. In this picture, James and Rich from Menlo Innovations just finished talking about building amazing startup teams.

4 New Teams Enter TechArb

moseslee — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:56:47 +0000

We recently admitted four additional teams into TechArb. These teams will join the 19 others for the remainder of the team. Welcome!

Capillary Refill Simulator: Capillary refill is a simple test doctors can perform to obtain the hydration state of a patient. Many residents struggle with this test in real world situations because of the lack of opportunities to practice. Our team wants to build simulators and mobile apps to help better educate inexperienced doctors and give them the confidence they need to make accurate diagnoses.
A2B: A bicycle sharing solution involving both software and hardware.
The Beet Box: Our proposed product is a restaurant with a purpose – a healthy fast-food service that supports and rewards a healthy lifestyle.
YourCall: our web service enables fans and amateur broadcasters to announce and listen to play-by-play game calls world wide. Our reputation and ranking systems will enable listeners to select from different broadcast styles to hear announcers they enjoy most. We bring fan involvement to the next level while increasing the listening options in sports.

Meet with Entrepreneurship Practicum Class

moseslee — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:16:02 +0000

The Entrepreneurship Practicum (ENGR 411) seeks to be an innovative, action-based learning lab that brings students across disciplines at the University to work on entrepreneurial endeavors. Students form interdisciplinary around impact driven ideas and take steps to launch them through venture creation. By the end of this course, student teams submit a concept paper and make a detailed presentation on their work progress to a panel of industry experts and potential funders. The course heavily applies an anthropological design thinking framework and process. A lot of the teams in the class will end up in TechArb after the semester is over.

Below are the ideas we are working on this winter term:

American Made Online Emporium | Team: Nelson Cooper, Melinda Morang
Many consumers are looking for an easy way to purchase products from American/local businesses. Their motivations range from wanting to support local companies and restoring our economy to believing in the superior quality of American made goods. Likewise small businesses around the country are trying to increase their market share and visibility while keeping their overhead low. Currently there is no convenient way for these companies to find and market their goods to this audience. A web based store would facilitate these consumer/business interactions.

College Living | Team: Adam Wells, Alex Horak, Ian Grant II
We’re all college students in this class. We end each day here in our campus home – whether an apartment, house or dorm room. As an architecture major I take great pride in how I set up my home. From spacial organization to functionality, where I live greatly impacts how I live. My company is “College Living” – targeting us, the college consumers, College Living will be located on campus and provide space efficient, multi-functional and affordable furniture and lifestyle furnishings to make your four years – or more – comfortable and relaxed, just how you like it.

Ideal Sweeteners | Team: Jessica Gelov, Aaron Dalley, Pranay Lagadapati, Scott Shapiro
Ideal is a no calorie sweetener that is ninety-nine percent natural, has no aftertaste, contributes to health benefits, bakes, tastes, and has the texture of sugar. Ideal Sweetener’s quality and taste is unmatched by any other sweetener in the marketplace.

InSilico | Team: Calvin Gee, John Mizzi, David Yuschak, Jacob Steinerman, Jennifer Wang
My idea originally was to create a software platform that would better assist in the diagnosing and education of children affected by Autism. In the 5 years I’ve spent running a charity dedicated towards helping families affected by Autism, I’ve learned that there is a huge amount of financial burden placed on these families as well as a great disparity in terms of quality treatment options. However, in the past year, as my team and I have striven to develop said system we have noticed a greater need for adequate communication, consumer solutions, and quality information in health care overall. It is now our goal to create an “”ecosystem”” that meets these needs in the form of social networking, applications, and health industry partnerships. We still believe that the population affected by autism is still our primary focus and as such our customers will be the health professionals that treat these patients, as well as the families that take care of them. Eventually we will scale to meet more broad health care needs.

Intro.me | Team: Tierra Filhiol, Amie Hsu, Laura Willming, Pauline Knighton
Intro.me wants to give women and other underrepresented minorities a competitive advantage in high growth, high impact industries. Women, African Americans and internationally born professionals especially are underrepresented and underutilized both as entrepreneurs and corporate professionals. Intro.me aims to increase recruitment, promotion and retention opportunities by creating a networking platform that encourages personal meetings between these groups and industry power players. Users cleverly display experiences, complete tasks and earn meetings with industry frontrunners. With these tools, they increase their exposure both socially and professionally. We’re looking to start development right here in the tech industry, with a team of passionate, productive people ready to change the ratio. If that’s you, bring your computer, will-to-win and let’s work.

Legends Cards | Team: Jonathan Kaufman , Artur Fruman, Venkat Gunapati, Jason Okrasinkski
Legends Card is a product that allows students at college campuses to socially network with each other by means of e-commerce, while at the same time making campus life more affordable. Alongside with three business partners, Legends Card was launched in early October 2011, and since then we have already distributed 800+ cards and signed 40+ locations on University of Michigan campus, as well as expanded to two other Universities. We hope to expand to six different campuses by the end of this semester and have over 5000 cards distributed in total.

Low-Cost Multifuel Small Displacement Motorcycle | Team: David Ameche, Langechuan Liu
The proposed product is a low cost, modular, American-built motorcycle capable of filling light to medium duty roles, at low build, operating, repair and training cost, with many models designed on a common rail frame, including multifuel and alternative fuel capability. This addresses several needs in the current market, principally; a lack of available small-displacement-capable adult-sized framed bikes. This lightweight design allows for portability, and bridges the gap between bicycle and medium-displacement motorcycle. Commuters age 16-35, new riders, outdoors and performance enthusiasts, and the military.

M-Wrap | Team: Grace Y Hsia, Armin Shirazi, Timothy Emmitt
The M-Wrap began as a non-electric thermoregulatory blanket that generates and retains heat for preterm infants – we hope to explore implementing this idea in the developing world. However, it is necessary to become a viable, for-profit company with a recreational set of heat-generating products. This semester will explore the scaling and refining of the heat source. The team is currently exploring the idea of a thermal fuse as well as a way of softening the phase change’s resultant rigidity. But start-ups most often fail from lack of customer development rather than product development so we will simultaneously be continuing customer development. What we have learned so far are the types of considerations mailmen, package delivery, skiers, bikers, runners, and motorcyclists would keep in mind with a product. These have included the price, weight, ease of use & reusability, method of heat generation… they prefer materials over wiring, etc. Current products in the market include Columbia Omniheat Technology, Uniglo, Brookstone’s Cold Weather Gear, WarmX, and North Face among others. Omniheat was the reason Columbia’s profit increased by a double digit margin. Customer development has been helping us narrow down that most people would like to see warm, mobile, and affordable glove gear. We are continuing to look into socks, shoes, jackets, vests, and shirts.

ReceiptRaker | Team: Andrew Copp, Ryan Kaput, Myron Bishop,

ReceiptRaker is an app that accesses your financial records on your phone. Instead of taking a paper receipt at the time of transaction, the information saved to the cloud where it can be quickly pulled down to your SmartPhone. Printing receipts is a waste of resources and it is inefficient to manually reenter the data later. ReceiptRaker will save time and money by keeping the data in electronic form when it is created by a business and transferred to a customer. This type of app would be especially useful for employees of companies that need to collect receipts for expense reports as the whole process could be streamlined. The app could also create a stronger relationship between business and consumer and would provide valuable demographic information to businesses.

Spoilage Indicating Food Label | Team: Jordan Eckstein, Steve Colvin
Many people lose money on food that spoils in their refrigerator. This can often be attributed to a lack of knowledge about the “edible life” of various foods. To solve this problem, we are engineering a food label that attaches to a container and interacts with the chemicals of the food to indicate spoilage. Research has shown that the pH level of many foods is a strong indicator of spoilage and our label will gage this to give its consumer a sense of how much longer its containers contents will be edible.

Sustainable Construction Support Systems | Team: Marcus Jones, Pete Wangwongwiroj, Nicholas Brown

I would like to recycled materials and re-purpose this material to provide sustainable products to be used in today’s construction practices. These systems will replace the need to continuously cut trees down to provide lumber and will reuse preexisting materials, preventing more waste in our landfills.

TODS Cafe | Team: Nicole Prince, Chloe Prince, Oscar Vasquez, Rodrigo Valencia

Our idea is TODS Cafe. The problem we are solving is a lack of caffeinated and nutritional beverage to start our day. We routinely drink both coffee and Carnation instant breakfast (nutritional chocolate milk mix drink) and love Freshens smoothies but realized there isn’t an equivalent nutritional coffee. The beverage we want to create will be healthy, nutritional, inexpensive, environmentally friendly and delicious. As much as we love our gourmet coffees at $5-8 per cup costs can surely add up for a college student. As busy student-athletes we are always looking for ways to keep us healthy and energized and have found very little products that fulfill this need.

YouTrivia | Team: Shamik Ganguly, Scott Suh

Online trivia platform that allows anyone to create and share media rich trivia games

Meet the TechArb Portfolio Companies

moseslee — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:30:28 +0000

Descriptions of TechArb Portfolio Companies (from Session Seven)

Software Portfolio:

EasLang | Website | Email: A web service that provides automated personalized instruction and tutoring to language learners.

Fetchnotes | Website | Email: A note-taking application that helps get your to do’s, ideas, grocery lists and anything you need to remember out of your brain and into your workflow.

MyFinSite | Website | Email: Connects individuals and small businesses seeking to take control of their financial situation with sophisticated, vetted financial advisors. Company is creating a web-based platform that connects these user groups and promotes the development of long-lasting relationships. The platform will include the functionality to ask personal, complex questions and receive tailored, intelligent responses. Over time, users will form relationships with advisors they trust and form a long-term relationship, benefiting both parties.

iHeartArt | Email: A web platform that provides greater access to art work in digital format.

SecureHealing | Website | Email: A cloud-based healthcare privacy auditing software for patient and employee privacy protection and breach notification that compiles and analyzes the audit logs created by numerous software applications used in healthcare facilities. This software provides investigative and auditing capability for HIPAA/HITECH compliance, enabling healthcare providers to quickly and accurately monitor for breaches that include illegal access of personal health information.

Snap Social Sports | Website | Email: A sports social networking website and application that allows people to locate and participate in sporting pickup games ranging from basketball, touch football, and softball to partner games such as golf, tennis, and squash.

Fantasy Fitness League | Website | Email: Web and mobile platform that allows dieters to maintain motivation and accountability in their weight loss goals

This Fits | Website | Email: An improved search experience based on dimensions to help users find furniture or appliances to fit a particular space.

Thrively | Website | Email: A web app to improve the processes of employee feedback and self-development for small organizations.

YouTrivia | Website | Email: Online trivia platform that allows anyone to create and share media rich trivia games

Healthcare Portfolio

Brio Device, LLC | Website | Email: Introducing airway management instruments for emergency medical personnel to improve the efficacy and safety of opening patient airways in emergency situations.

Centricyle | Website | Email: A social venture working to change the dynamic of diagnostic capability in rural India through the implementation of an affordable, sustainable, manual centrifuge made almost entirely out of bicycle parts.

DIIME | Website | Email: Working to improve infant and maternal health disparities in the developing world through the design and development of appropriate, high-quality, low-cost, healthcare technologies

MWrap | Website | Email: Aims to provide warmth during recreation in the developed world and to further the goal of providing warmth to preterm infants born in developing nations.

SynapTech | Website | Email: High-tech consulting and IP company specializing in design, fabrication, and development of moveable microelectrode arrays for neural interfaces to restore vision, movement, and treat neurological disorders.

CleanTech Portfolio

EVStation | Website | Email: Working on addressing “range anxiety” experienced by electric vehicle owners by using an on-line platform to increase access to charging stations for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicle owners.

Torch Hybrid Marine Systems | Website | Email: Making recreational boating cleaner, more accessible, and more sustainable by developing hybrid electric marine propulsion systems for the recreational boating market in order to ensure that future generations will be able to enjoy boating as much as they do today.

Other Portfolio:

Educatrium | Website | Email: A prep school in China teaching English, standardized tests, and college application consulting. The company is also partnering with various linguistics and e-learning technologies to enhance its teaching and learning experiences.

Giveh Footwear | Email: Giveh shoes are traditional footwear that have been worn by Middle Easterners for over 1,000 years. Giveh Footwear aims to adapt this product and bring it to western markets. We plan on employing Afghani women from shelters to fabricate the footwear and for us to distribute it via small boutiques and an internet website here in the U.S. We are a for-profit organization that aims to better the lives of Afghani women and provide a superiorly crafted eco-friendly shoe to the middle- to high-end customers in a $13.3B eco-fashion market segment.