Turning air into water

Sounds impossible right? Wrong. The Namib desert beetle has done it for centuries simply by turning its back to the wind. The insect’s wings are covered with nanoscale bumps that allow it to snatch water from air. (Don’t ask me how, that’s above my pay grade but it has something to do with fostering condensation.)  The obvious irony is that this beetle has survived for ages in the desert while 1.4 billion people on this planet have no access to safe clean water.

NBD Nano co-founder Miguel Galbez said his company — formed by a small team out of MIT and the University of Illinois, Chicago — is taking a page out of that creature’s play book. “We developed coatings in the lab that mimic the beetle’s back — we don’t require a pre-existing body of water [like other water extraction technologies] only air.” Potential uses range from self-filling water bottles, countertop units for drinking water to creating water for power plants — 80 percent of which use steam plants in some capacity.

Bridging-the-hospital-rehab gap

Careport Health CEO Lissy Hu

Anyone who’s been hospitalized or knows someone who has, knows how hard it is to find appropriate rehab or post-hospital care. Eight out of 10 patients need additional care after discharge and hospital personnel scramble to arrange it.

That’s the thorny problem Careport Health is attacking. The tools hospitals now use to do this are whiteboards, fax machines, and lists of facilities. Does the rehab center take your insurance, meet your needs, and if so, do they have a bed? It can take up to 20 hours to place one patient — and that can cost $2,000,” said Careport co-founder Lissy Hu, a former Harvard med student.

Mass General Hospital is the first live pilot along with 30 of its affiliated rehab facilities. And, John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is mentoring this project.

Reinventing the spring. Yes, the spring

NDB Nano CEO Miguel Galbez

The spring was invented a couple of centuries years ago and changed little in that time. It’s simple and incredibly useful. Springs, said MIT professor of mechanical engineering Sanjay Sarma, “are everywhere — in shock absorbers and in pens… their coil stores energy.”

Now a small group of MIT students claim they have reinvented the spring using bent carbon fiber to pack more energy into a package that’s 10 times smaller than a traditional spring. Their company, UrbanHero, is using that design to build “super human sport exoskeletons” that will enable their users to run faster and jump far higher than he or she could unassisted. “We’re turning the urban landscape into a playground,” said CEO Arron Acosta. One of his co-founders demonstrated that by launching from a spring-platform to a platform about 5 feet tall. It was impressive.

The technology could also be applicable in the automotive and aerospace industries.

Pinpointing the right prescription

BetterFit CEO Julia Winn

One of the problems with modern medicine is that it’s often hard to figure out when a prescription may be hurting more than it’s helping.  BetterFit Technologies is building an application that pairs a big data back-end with a user-friendly mobile application that lets the system query the patient — posing two questions daily — to see how they’re doing with their meds. The back-end system takes that patient’s data and queries them based on that. Their responses feed back into the database.

“This is not a questionnaire but a conversation, with questions based on your profile,” she said.

Health Access Rhode Island is aboard as the first pilot site.

Easing the road to parenthood

Ovuline is also using a combination of small, personal data (about the subject), and big data (from a wide cohort of subjects in the same situation) to help couples conceive children. The system relies on the woman wearing a tracking bracelet to collect key indicators around the clock which feeds back into what CEO Paris Wallace calls Ovuline’s “baby cloud.”If an indicator is out of whack, she is pinged immediately. The more data collected the more valuable that asset is for prospective mothers.

“Pregnant women typically see their OB-GYN 12 times in a pregnancy, but a complication can happen in hours,” so early warning is critical, Wallace said. So far the Ovuline has helped 1,100 couples conceive, he said.

Wallace hopes to work with 400 fertility clinics to help 400,000 couples have children. The company has advisors from Boston IVR, Stanford Medical Center and Mass General Hospital.

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This exec, who was stopped coming into the country at Boston’s Logan Airport because of an inconsistency of his title on a document,  was able to get one message out to a colleague before the chains went on. The tech community network was tapped, a “war room” was assembled where 5 people called lawyers and politicians, said Reed Sturtevant, an entrepreneur and investor recounted the tale at TechStars Boston Demo Day on Wednesday.  ”After a lot of work from these people, after two nights in jail, this founder was released and is back at work,” said Sturtevant, obviously emotional about the experience.

Sturtevant then introduced Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum who spoke of the need for real immigration reform, not just for the foreign-born PhDs, engineers, and blue-collar workers affected but also for the sake of law enforcement officials and for the business community that needs fresh ideas and talent at all levels.

Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum speaking at TechStars Boston Demo Day.

Noorani’s organization is trying to build consensus with constituencies that might surprise onlookers — law enforcement agencies and religious organizations. “Our theory is if you hold a Bible, wear a badge or own a business, you want a common-sense solution,” he said.

His organization has won support among southern Baptist churches in Missouri, from anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who wants police to “chase murderers, not landscapers and nannies,”  Noorani said.

This is a timely topic. Earlier in the day, at his first press conference since re-election,  President Barack Obama stressed the need for reform and said the public will is there for it now. The strong turnout of Latino voters has already encouraged some Republicans to reconsider their hardline stance about immigration, he said. (As a refresher,  Republican nominee Mitt Romney had been a pragmatist on immigration before taking a hard right., Romney suggested that illegal residents  ”self-deport” as part of the process of gaining legal status.)

In the past, Senator John McCain and former President George W. Bush, also supported immigration reform, evidence that this was not always a partisan issue. Now with so many votes at stake, the president thinks Republicans will be motivated to support change. “We need to seize the moment,” Obama said.

In addition, the president said:

“I am a believer that if you’ve got a PhD in physics, or computer science who wants to stay here, and start a business here, we shouldn’t make it harder for them to stay here, we should try to encourage him to contribute to this society. I think that the agricultural sector, obviously has very specific concerns about making sure that they’ve got a workforce that helps deliver food to our table. So there’re gonna be a bunch of components to it, but I think whatever process we have needs to make sure border security’s strong, needs to deal with employers effectively, needs to provide a pathway for the undocumented here, needs to deal with the DREAM Act kids.”

The Washington Post has the full transcript of the presidential press conference.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user DIAC Images

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Nearly everyone talks about putting more of their documents in the cloud. But not everyone feels secure doing it. That’s the target audience for DocTrackr’s new service, which lets users retain control of Word,  Excel, PDF or other documents even when they’ve been emailed to others or put into cloud storage.

“You can even destroy your digital documents,” DocTrackr CEO  Clement Cazalot  said Thursday at TechStars Boston Demo Day.  Cazalot, who leapt onstage as the theme from Mission Impossible played, said the company logged $150,000 in revenue last year (“more than Instagram.”) from clients including Bouygues, the giant French contractor  and SCNF, the company behind France’s high-speed railway. More than 80,000 customers are using the beta.

He calls DocTrackr, which works without any local software installed, “remote document management as a service.” The user can add readers to a given document to enable access, then see who has viewed it, what they did with it and how long they spent on it. Permissions to remote documents can also be revoked. At that point, if a recipient tries to view the document again, he will get a message that “the document you are attempting to access has been terminated.”

A salesman, for example, can send out a proposal and then see that 5 people opened it and viewed it 30 times, and spent 10 minutes on it.

DocTrackr is raising $1.1 million, half of which is already committed.The idea is not new. Indorse, a New York-based company, and Adobe  offer some of the these capabilities.   But DocTrackr has lined up some impressive customers — and partners. Box, which claims 10 million users of its business-focused cloud storage, named DocTrackr one of  its OneCloud partners for example. With Google Drive and raft of companies claiming to be “the Dropbox of the Enterprise” touting their stuff, the lure of cloud storage will only continue — and the demand for tools like DocTrackr will grow.

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The startup, once known as CityRyde, just signed Cisco and Hyatt Hotels to install its shared bike service in their locations, Zagster CEO Timothy Ericson told attendees of TechStars Boston Demo Day on Thursday. The company, which recently relocated from Philadelphia to Cambridge, Mass., already manages bikes at 56 locations nationwide and is consulting with Boulder, Colo., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Rio de Janeiro on biking programs.

Ericson sees Zagster as complementary rather than competitive with city bike sharing services like Boston’s Hubway which has been, by most accounts, a big success. (Alta Bicycle Share runs and maintains Hubway for Boston and several surrounding communities. Chicago and Chattanooga, Tennessee also signed with Alta.)

“We actually have more interest from clients in cities that have bike sharing programs like Hubway [which have different use cases.] Bike sharing systems are all about very short trips that are one way. Ours are for longer trips, commuting, etc.” Ericson said.

Zagster provides and maintains the bikes, and manages their use, charging the owner of the facility $100 per bike per month– and claims 50 percent gross margins. Use of the bikes themselves will be free to the end user, who reserves it online and unlocks it with a mobile phone, he said.

“We see bikes as analogous to the pool or gym at these properties,” he said. The benefit to the customer is that Zagster maintains the bikes and storage area — eliminating the eyesore of bike racks which often become graveyards for broken, vandalized or abandoned bikes. Just as Zipcar  has become a much-sought amenity for urban professionals looking for places to live, he thinks Zagster will influence people looking for apartments or office space. “We think Zagster will be like Zipcar and become a factor in deciding where they live, work, and  visit,” he said.

Figuring in the total U.S. market of national apartment complexes, corporate or school campuses, and hotels/resorts, the total addressable market for shared bikes is $1.4 billion, he said. Zagster is seeking $650,000 in funding, with $350,000 of that committed.

Bike sharing is nothing new. Hubway has been around for more nearly a year in Boston, Somerville and other areas. Spinlister, a New York startup, helps people list and find bikes for rent. What looks different here,  is that businesses — the apartment and hotel chains — will foot the bill so their renters/guests ride for free.

That is an interesting model.

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The term “big data” refers to the huge volume of information generated by sensors, machines, social networks — as well as PCs and servers. There is so much of it, and it’s generated so fast, that the volume outstrips the ability of traditional database and analytics tools to process.

There may have only been two big data pitches at Demo Day, but both companies presenting at The Wilbur Theater on Thursday are attacking big problems.

Mortar Data brings Hadoop to mere mortals

Mortar Data CEO K Young touted the ability of his company’s service to put big data within the reach of companies that don’t have a ton of Hadoop expertise — that would be most companies —  and of programmers that know Python. And that’s just the beginning: “We’re within reach of making Hadoop work with any language,” Young told attendees.

As GigaOM’s Derrick Harris  reported early last month:

Rather than requiring users to write complicated MapReduce jobs, Mortar Data lets them run Hadoop jobs using a custom-built combination of Python and the SQL-like Pig language. In that regard, Mortar Data is more akin to the Infochimps Platform, which offers its own Wukong tool for creating Hadoop jobs with Ruby scripts.

“The big Hadoop players are excited to work with us since Hadoop is beyond the reach of many customers,” Young told the crowd.

The company has some early customers including Intent Media, an advertising technology company. And potential users include energy companies which could use it to predict utility loads based on weather forecast data.

Bison sifts financial data for alternative investors

Bison Alternative claims it will take all that messy financial reporting and other information about venture capital, private equity and hedge funds that make up the alternative investment universe and prioritize them for the endowments and foundations that are looking to invest in them.

Bison CEO Michael Nugent, who used to research and invest in such funds, said the process is painful. ”I spent all my time sifting through documents. That market operates on a Rolodex and spreadsheet mode. It’s never heard of structured data and is ripe for disruption,” he said.

Foundations and endowments traditionally hired people to pore through these documents in search of good invesmtents, but budget cutting has thinned their ranks and the sheer amount of information on potential  investments has soared. Bison can boil down all that information and put it in a useful consumer-friendly format for its customers, he said.

Bison (the acronym stands for Boston Illiquid Securities Offering Network) will charge $4,000 a month for its software as a service and sees the target market being 6,000 investment firms. The company just brought on Jeff Parker, former CEO and chairman of Thomson Financial, as an investor and board member.

Bison is looking to raise $1.5 million, $500,000 of which is committed.

Why so little big data?

Since Boston is home to a ton of database startups, it seemed odd that only two of companies presenting had a big data focus. Most of the rest– Psykosoft, Shopsy, Übersense, Pact, Libboo.com, Laveem,and Simply Good Technologies, Zagster– are pure-play consumer startups. (The other, docTrackr, is a business application for tracking and securing business documents no matter where they are sent or stored.)

On the other hand, that big data/consumer mix reflects the ratio of consumer startups to big data startups in the world at large, said Demo Day attendee and angel investor John Landry.

(For more on TechStars Demo Day check out this roundup in BostonInno.)

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