New Enterprise Forum

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Onsite ERT gives incident commanders a complete, real time view of a fire scene. The company estimates the addressable US market at $1.3B.

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Filed under: Ann Arbor, MI | Dennis Carmichael | ERT Systems | New Enterprise Forum

ERT Systems provides a portable and rapidly deployable system for tracking personnel and equipment at incident sites. In this elevator pitch, we learn the following from Dennis Carmichael, ERT's co-founder and president:

• The ERT tracking system uses RFID technology with hardened drop readers and small form factor tags that are placed in clothing and equipment.
• The company estimates that its addressable market is $1.3B and that it will achieve 10% market penetration in five years.
• The company has a $6 MM pipeline in sales and is in the process of signing up three resellers.
•  To help maintain a high growth rate, ERT is seeking one million dollars in additional equity funding. 

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Ruth and Gideon Eden demonstrated their commitment to BioLumix by investing their own money first. This commitment along with a compelling story and proven track record from a previous start up helped them convince angel investors to provide funding to bring BioLumix's products to market.

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Filed under: Ann Arbor, MI | BioLumix | Financing Innovation | Gideon Eden | New Enterprise Forum | Ruth Eden

For Ruth and Gideon Eden, BioLumix is their second startup. They began their careers as employees. As they found their jobs buffeted by corporate takeovers, they decided to launch their own businesses in industrial biology. The first business succeeded well helping them establish a track record in the venture community.

In this segment, we continue our Financing Innovation series by focusing on how they used angel investments to fund their current startup. Angel investors are individuals who typically contribute less than $1M to a company's capital. Highlights include:

• An important motivation for Gideon and Ruth was maintaining control of their company. Because angel investors put up less capital, they are willing to accept a smaller ownership stake.
• Angels also look for less risky investments than venture capitalists who can spread risk over a larger investment portfolio. As a result, angels are less likely to push a company take business risks that might lead to very high payoffs but also carry a significant chance of failure.
• In Gideon and Ruth's perception, angels value the following items when considering whether to invest: a compelling story, a good track record for the management team, commitment from the management team often signaled by the team investing their own money first.
• BioLumix has signaled to its investors that it expects to sell itself in five years to a larger company.

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Ruth Eden demonstrates BioLumix' device for microbiological testing in industrial products. She shows how the device, which will be coming to market in the next quarter, may be able to reduced testing costs by a factor of two to four.

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Filed under: Ann Arbor, MI | BioLumix | BioTech | Early Stage Innovation | New Enterprise Forum | Ruth Eden

We continue our series on BioLumix with Ruth Eden, BioLumix's co-founder, Ruth Eden, providing a demonstration of the device. The demonstration illustrates how BioLumix lowers the cost of microbiological testing in industrial products by a factor of 2 to 4 (from $20 a test to possiby $5 a test). A few highlights:

• Testing is accomplished by putting the material in a specialized vial that ranges in price between $2 to $3 depending on the test. Labor time is approximately 2 minutes, and no skill is required.
• The BioLumix software automatically produces the required reports.
• Traditional testing requires a trained microbiologist who grows cultures in petri dishes and then counts them.
• The traditional report must be produced by hand.

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9thX.com kicks off our Network Businesses series. Its technology allows digital content creators and distributors to create their own shops for buying and reselling that content. 9thX.com makes its money by taking a 5% cut each time digital content is sold through its system.

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Filed under: 9thXchange.com | Ann Arbor, MI | Digital Distribution | John Bonaccorso | Network Businesses | New Enterprise Forum

9thX.com kicks off our Network Businesses series. For our purposes, Network Businesses are those that exploit unique features of the Internet in their business model. Often these businesses have a unique information asset that they are able to charge for. Further, they then exploit the network to make that asset even more valuable. This model lies at the heart of major upheaval in many industries.

As explained by John Bonaccorso, 9thX.com's CEO, the 9thX.com allows people to buy and sell digital media. They are an "end-to-end" solution that allows content producers and distributors to sell their content and receive royalty payments each time the content is resold. Some highlights from this conversation:

• 9thX.com allows content producers to be paid directly for their work. Most niche content producers have too small a market for an advertising revenue model to work.
• 9thX.com spends no money on marketing. All marketing is done by word of mouth through the web site and distributors.
• 9thX.com makes its money by controlling the digital rights management system that makes royalty-based payments possible. Each time an asset is purchased or resold, 9thX.com gets 5%.
• 9thX.com's computing infrastructure is supplied by Amazon's EC2 and S3 services.