Success Stories
Students, faculty, and staff make success an inherent part of the entrepreneurship process at the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship.
View some of our recent alumni success stories by following a link below or scrolling down for all stories:
Fanster.com
Matthew Blake launches his venture, Fanster.com. Fanster.com’s mission is to provide the best local content for all sports in Phoenix. Fanster.com is the first local sports website of its kind with two daily online radio shows, community and recreational sports content, inside access to professional teams, an interview series with local sports personalities, and over 30 contributing writers and blogs.
Innovis Technologies
Safeguarding Food and Water from Microbial Contamination.
Innovis offers patented and proven molecular diagnostic techniques that will revolutionize the food and water testing industry. Innovis kits are unique in the diagnostic testing arena. The tests arefaster, with results in 10 minutes; able to detect and identify numerous pathogens in a single ananalysis; and portable, requiring minimal training to operate.
Innovis’ microbe-detection tests can be applied reliably to well and irrigation water, fresh produce, and meat products. The portability feature provides an ideal solution for remote water sources, farmlands, and busy assembly lines in meat processing plants.
LenSense
McGuire Entrepreneurship Team Beats the Pros
By University Communications
April 24, 2008
A team of University of Arizona student entrepreneurs more than held its own in a competition among the mobile phone industry’s leading innovators.
LenSense, a student-run company established through the UA’s McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship, was the only university team among the 12 finalists in Nokia’s “Mobile Rules!” Challenge – the world’s leading annual competition for business plans, applications and technology innovation in the business environment.
The cornerstone of LenSense is a compact, voltage-controlled, zoom lens module that would be integrated into cell phone cameras – directly addressing problems with camera phones currently on the market, including limited resolution and no optical zoom.
The startup venture’s vision is to supply a lens for one of every four cameras worldwide by 2013 through research and development and partnerships through cell phone manufacturers.
”We’ve centered around the premise that your best camera is the one you always have with you,” said Pouria Valley, a doctoral candidate in the UA College of Optical Sciences and a student in the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship in the Eller College of Management. They are advised by Jim Jindrick, mentor-in-residence at the McGuire Center.
Now in its second year, the goal of Nokia’s Mobile Rules! is to discover developers and entrepreneurs who are creating new services for the mobile lifestyle. The technology innovation track of the competition focused on exceptional external innovations, technologies, patents and ideas that haven’t been fully developed.
Approximately 100 companies, very few of which are university-based enterprises, presented their ideas for getting innovative new technologies in the hands of mobile device users.
As finalists, the LenSense team recently were able to personally present their business plan to Nokia executives in California.
The LenSense team – which includes Valley, who is the product and general manager; Jamie YuFang Huang, marketing manager; and Yan An, financial manager – came together as each of them planned to develop the business plan required of all students in the entrepreneurship program.
“At that time, Pouria was working by himself and needed someone to help him with the finance and marketing side,” An said. “We all thought this idea was the best fit for us.”
“Pouria always had passion for this technology,” Jindrick said. “Fortunately, Jamie and Yan were able to come and complete his team.”
The technology for LenSense’s first product proposal, ZoomSense 1.0, was invented and developed in the UA College of Optical Sciences in 2002.
“With small amounts of voltage we can change the focal length and therefore achieve optical zooming at a very compact size with no mechanical movements,” Valley said.
When applied to a cell phone camera, the technology allows the camera to achieve true optical zoom, improved picture quality and improved battery life, while maintaining the compact size to which cell phone consumers have grown accustomed. Currently, a typical camera phone uses only one lens with a fixed focal length.
According to Huang, the booming cell phone market was the ideal venue to implement and market the technology. At least 300 million cell phone cameras are manufactured each year.
While the Nokia competition has ended, the future is bright for LenSense and its team members. Huang and An will be graduate in May and relocate for professional opportunities. Valley, with Jindrick’s continued support, will continue developing a camera phone prototype and pursue venture funding for LenSense.
Optica Technologies
Sara Conrad and Daniel Berger recently received stock in the company they helped create, Optica Technologies. Optica grew out of UA faculty research in diagnosing shaken baby syndrome. The UA OTT brought the researchers and the two students together to take the product—a camera specially equipped to photograph the inside of the eye—to the marketplace. Conrad and Berger’s business plan won the top prize at the Ball State Enterprise Creation Competition and was recently featured in a New York Times article focusing on university-based technology transfer.
Stories that Soar!
Stories that Soar! is a literacy and performing arts program which merges the talents of professional adult performers and children's original stories to create innovative and insightful theatre productions for schools and community events.
It is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to empowering children to believe in themselves by giving voice to their original words and creative ideas.
Its programs appeal to a wide range of children, regardless of race, culture, gender, ability and socio-economic status. Stories that Soar! believes everyone has wonderful stories to tell; the organization is here to help those stories be heard in the most creative ways possible.
UGallery.com
Alex Farkas, Greg Rosborough, and Stephen Tanenbaum are the founders and managing partners of Ugallery.com. The three developed Ugallery.com to provide art enthusiasts access to affordable original artwork while offering young trained artists a platform to launch their careers.
Several years ago, while Alex was studying art in college, he noticed that his classmates were having trouble starting their art careers. Many of the talented students he knew were unable to find an outlet to sell their work upon graduation, and as a result, took jobs in completely unrelated fields.
When Alex, Greg, and Stephen met in business school, they shared an interest in supporting the art world. The three often discussed the difficult transition from art school to the art business, and the lack of reasonably priced original artwork. Ultimately, they discovered a solution to these problems; Ugallery.com helps art students begin their careers and offers patrons access to affordable original artwork.
For additional information, please contact us.
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