TECHdotMN: News about Minnesota Startups

By Kenzie Zimmer, Twin Cities Business

“Mynul Khan was fresh out of St. Cloud State in 2004 when Fujitsu handed him a big assignment: develop a better tool to manage the Japan-based company’s IT outsourcing: “Even a large Fortune [Global] 500 tech company has trouble finding and managing people,” says Khan, who worked with Fujitsu’s office near Dallas. “They were going through multiple tiers [of an organization] to get to the local guys to deliver service.”

Khan put together a basic website called TechnicianMarketplace.com, hired local contractors, and “[Fujitsu] started to see the cost savings, time savings, and direct control of the service delivery,” he says. He ran Technician Marketplace for two years, eventually broadening it beyond Fujitsu and growing it to 10 employees and almost $3 million in revenue. But that got him thinking even bigger.”

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Via News Release

“Minneapolis, MN— 5.20.13 — Today Clear.md announced that it has been selected as a finalist for “Startup of the Year” at the Doctors 2.0 conference scheduled for June 7, 8 in Paris, France.

“A global perspective has defined our strategy since day-one. We are honored to be recognized by Doctors 2.0 in Europe as a US-company with an international identity, and we look forward to representing the Twin Cities digital health community at the conference in Paris this June,” said John Brownlee, CEO and co-founder of Clear.md.”

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Twin Cities HealthIT startup Activation Life is fundraising a million dollar equity round according to a recent disclosure filed with the SEC.

The company is pursuing a “Digital Mobile Music System with Studio-Grade Resonate Frequency head phones,” to administer patients with tones that enter through the ears and vibrate throughout the body’s skeletal and vestibular system.  According the website, this involves both iOS and Android mobile applications.

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By Bill Wasik, Wired

“In our houses, cars, and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives.

On a 5-acre plot in Great Falls, Virginia, less than a mile’s stroll through ex­urban scrub from the wide Potomac River, Alex Hawkinson has breathed life into a lifeless object. He has given his house, a sprawling six-bedroom Tudor, what you might describe as a nervous system: a network linking together the home’s very sinews, its walls and ceilings and windows and doors. He has made these parts move, let them coalesce as a bodily whole, by giving them a way to talk among themselves. Open a telnet session in the house’s digital hub and you can actually spy on his chattering stuff, hear what it says when no one’s listening.”

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Last month, Adventium Labs announced the expansion of mobile gaming division Andamio Games to “Pursue the creation of  collaborative, mobile device games that comply with educational standards and take full advantage of the capabilities in mobile computing.”

Now they are taking their pursuits to Kickstarter with iNeuron, a mobile game that teaches high school neuroscience in a multi-player mobile environment.

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Via News Release

“MINNEAPOLIS, May 10, 2013 — Preventice, Inc., a leading developer of mHealth solutions, announced today the commercial availability of its BodyGuardian Remote Patient Monitoring System (BodyGuardian RMS). Preventice received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in August 2012, enabling the mobile health solutions company to market BodyGuardian for use in detecting and monitoring non-lethal cardiac arrhythmias for ambulatory patients.

Developed in collaboration with Mayo Clinic, the BodyGuardian System uses sophisticated algorithms to support remote monitoring for individuals with cardiac arrhythmias. The BodyGuardian System allows physicians to monitor key biometrics outside of the clinical setting, while patients go about their daily lives.”

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At least 24 Minnesota tech ventures raised in excess of $28 million dollars in the first quarter of 2013, according to information collected and analyzed from Jan 1 through March 31, 2013.

The data includes on the record activity compiled from multiple sources and actual numbers are estimated to be 20%+ higher according to investors who are not inclined to disclose their investment activity publicly. While imperfect, it’s a solid proxy of current local funding activity and trends — considered a worse case scenario.

As a comparison — in Q1 2012, 24 companies raised $58.6m, heavily skewed by one anomalous $52.5m deal; a more balanced comparison would be that 23 companies raised $6.1m in Q1 2013. The largest deal of Q1 was UpdateLogic ($10.9m), followed by Cachet ($7.9m) and Conservis ($1.46m).

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It became quite clear right away that Minneapolis startup Spark Devices had found a winner with their Spark Core Kickstarter campaign.

The Core “Wi-Fi for everything” kit has since crossed $200k in funding commitments from some 2,400+ backers, and still has 23 days remaining. Today, the company announced some big collaborations designed to maximize the potential applications of Core:

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Beta Byte is a series underwritten by Bust Out Solutions for that early stage tech found somewhere between idea and traction. Equally exciting as it is raw. Are you in this phase?

What is the name of the company and/or product?

The name of our company is RoundTable.

What problem does this solve?

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