Entrepreneurship : Innovation + Job News

Peer-to-peer ridesharing service Lyft launched in Baltimore this month.

Users download the Lyft app on their iPhone or Android device and select their pickup location. They request an available driver and get a "lyft" where they need to go. After the ride is finished, users rate drivers on the app and give them a donation. The donations are collected through the app itself, and drivers keep about 80 percent of their take.

Co-founded by Logan Green and John Zimmer in San Francisco last year, Lyft is an offshoot of Zimride, a digital ridesharing community that came to be in 2007. 
 
Lyft was founded in San Francisco and currently operates in a total of 16 cities. An influx of $60 million in Series C funding in May, led by Andreessen Horowitz, has allowed Lyft to scale. Lyft's Boston operation launched in May and marked the first East Coast location for the business; D.C. was the second East Coast city and launched in August.  
 
Drivers must be at least 23 years old and drive a car with a model year of 2000 or newer. They must pass various screening interviews, criminal background checks and DMV checks, and their vehicle must past inspection. Lyft also carries heftly liability insurance on its drivers--$1 million per occurrence. These factors should make users feel secure in requesting a ride from a pink-mustachioed car.
 
Sean Mandell, a top-tier driver for Lyft in San Francisco, has been giving riders "lyfts" for eight months. "It has been a great experience and has provided great stories, new friends and great networking," Mandell says. "[Lyft] has revolutionized transportation needs in San Francisco."
 
Writer: Alyson Jacob

A version of this story first appeared in sister publication Elevation DC 

So far 10 tech companies have committed to joining the Emerging Technology Center's new Highlandtown office when it makes the move from Canton Oct. 25. 

The city-run tech incubator will relocate to the King Cork and Seal Building, at 101 North Haven St. 

ETC has also signed up two new companies in its virtual-affiliate program, which accounts for about one-third of the 86 companies in its portfolio. Companies in the virtual program do not have offices but can use ETC facilities at the new Highlandtown site or its other office @ JHU Eastern in Charles Village. ETC president Deborah Tillett declined to name the two companies since the paperwork is still in progress. She says she expects the number of clients in the virtual program to grow. 

Tillett said that some of the companies in the ETC Canton are graduating and thus will not be transitioning to the new ETC Highlandtown. The ETC Highlandtown is laid out with dedicated offices for 11 companies, for which 10 offices are already committed. "We filled the offices quickly. We're quite happy," she says.

The Baltimore Development Corp. oversees the ETC, which houses startup and early-stage companies. The new ETC will occupy less square footage in Highlandtown than it did in Canton, though Tillett says the new location has more usable work space.
 
The ETC Highlandtown will occupy 20,000 square feet of the 70,000-square foot King Cork and Seal Building. In Canton, the ETC occupied 45,000 square feet in the Can Company, but only 30,000 square feet was usable for offices. The remaining 15,000 square feet was shared common space.
 
“We paid for it but we could not monetize it,” she says, referring to common space like lobby, halls and stairways. "We need to be thinking efficiency and the Highlandtown building has a more efficient layout and use of square feet."
 
The ETC moved into the Can Company 15 years ago as the neighborhood was transitioning from primarily industrial to a popular residential and retail neighborhood.
 
“Our leaving the space leaves [the Can Company] room for expansion,” she says.
 
Tillett called Highlandtown an “up and coming” neighborhood with “a lot going on.”  It is a state-designated Arts and Entertainment District, near Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, and on the route of the future east-west Red Line light rail.
 
ETC Highlandtown’s 10 tenants are the following: 
• 6^th Street, an online retail marketing program;
• ADASHI Systems, an emergency response management program;
• American Business Forms & Envelopes, which makes software for printed business forms;
• EventRebels, which provides conference and trade show software;
• Foodem, a B2B wholesale food marketer that is hiring;
• NewsUp, an organized news delivery service;
• Pieran Health Technologies, which sells custom health software;
• Same Grain, which develops social discovery technology;
• Adecio, a digital marketing firm; and,
• New Sapience, a language comprehension software maker.
 
Source: Deborah Tillett, Emerging Technology Centers
Writer: Barbara Pash
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Canton online food ordering company OrderUp is adding more franchises to its current 14 as the company prepares to take a bigger bite of the $188 billion quick-service food industry. The company will be spending an initial $1.5 million to $2 million this year to support that initiative, says CEO Chris Jeffery.

The company is currently working with new franchise owners to launch in several new markets over the next few months. Jeffery says franchise units generally have a population of about 100,000, and include 200 to 400 restaurants.

OrderUp has identified thousands of units around the country that meet what Jeffery calls, “benchmarks for growth.” With OrderUp’s digital franchise model, the initial franchise fee is $32,500.

Many franchisees buy multiple units. Jeffery cites Norfolk, Va., as an example of a franchisee that bought two units that cover the city’s downtown area.

OrderUp facilitates local online meal orders for delivery or pick-up. OrderUp runs the Baltimore market, where residents can order from 65 restaurants, including the Cross Street Kabob House, Grilled Cheese & Co. and Ultimate Pizza. The company is starting to expand into Baltimore County.

Chris Jeffery and Jason Kwicien cofounded OrderUp in 2009, when they saw the growing consumer demand for an online food delivery service that aggregated the menus of a fragmented restaurant industry.  In December 2012, OrderUp adopted a new business model to establish its own national online food delivery brand selling franchise units to entrepreneurs in local markets across the country.

“OrderUp is the liaison between the restaurant and the consumer,” Jeffery says.

In addition to expanding its franchise reach, OrderUp this year is updating its technology platform and providing franchisees with training and support in using social media tools.

Jeffery says OrderUp has doubled revenue in 2013, with 36 months of straight growth.

OrderUp is privately financed. The company has 28 employees, of whom 16 work from its Canton headquarters. The company is looking to hire three staffers in digital marketing and support.
 
Source: Chris Jeffery, OrderUp
Writer: Barbara Pash

Baltimore’s Intelect Corp. was founded by Rohit H. Patel in 1995 to serve the systems needs of the transportation industry.
It began with a few customers, primarily in public transportation and with several leading integrators and manufacturers. Some of the earliest projects included writing specifications for complex communications systems, as well as contracts to perform low and high voltage systems upgrades.

As Intelect grew, the list of projects grew to include engineering, implementation, information technology consulting and intelligent transportation systems. In 1998, it created a division to meet the needs of technologically advanced systems in consulting.
 
The Canton firm now employs 80.

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and Fortune magazine recently selected Intelect as one of its 2013 Inner City 100, a list of the fastest-growing inner city companies in the U.S. Intelect was No. 93 on the list. The Inner City 100 program recognizes successful inner city companies and their CEOs as role models for entrepreneurship, innovative business practices and job creation in America’s urban communities.

Entrepreneurs Lauryn Sargent and Scott Thompson have launched Origin Stories, a free weekly online publication dedicated to the histories of "the superheroes of business." And the D.C. business partners are looking for business success stories in Greater Baltimore.

Origin Stories highlights stories about a company's founding days and is featuring companies from around the country, says Thompson, who grew up in Rockville. Thompson says he will be speaking to organizations in Baltimore in the next month.

Each issue of Origin Stories is delivered via email and is designed to give entrepreneurs a mental boost when they need it most.

Baltimore biotech firm Ocular Proteomics LLC is seeking its first round of financing within the next six months, for $3 million to $4 million in venture capital. While a closing date for the round has not been determined, the decision follows a $1.2 million federal grant the biotechnology startup recently won to begin clinical trials on macular degeneration diagnosis and treatment. The startup last month moved from Towson to UMB BioPark for larger laboratory facilities.

The venture capital financing will be used for clinical trials, marketing and new hires, according to director of business development Joshua Hines.

The $1.2 million grant comes from the National Eye Institute and National Institutes of Health, and runs for  two years, from May 2013 to May 2015. Next year, the company will apply to renew the grant and, if successful, would receive $1.5 million per year for up to five years.

The $1.2 million grant enables Ocular to start clinical trials for ophthalmic diagnosis based on the company’s discovery of biochemical markers in the vitreous of the human eye. The trials will be held at three locations -- Baltimore, Chicago and Cleveland – and will involve 200 patients with macular degeneration.

Dr. Bert M. Glaser, Ocular’s chief scientific Institutes of Health officer, founded the company in 2009. Dr. Glaser heads the National Retina Institute, of which Ocular is a spinoff.
 
Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness among adults. An estimated 15 million Americans have macular degeneration, of whom 2.5 million have the advanced form that threatens their eyesight. If not treated, the disease inevitably leads to blindness.
 
There is no cure for macular degeneration but there is an injectible medication that stops the progression of the disease in about one-third of the patients on whom it is used. However, a patient must wait six months to a year before knowing if the medication is effective. Based on the biomarkers, the company’s focus is to determine if the patient will respond to the medication before then.
 
The privately-financed Ocular has two full-time employees. It is looking to hire two laboratory technicians within the year, and is also seeking up to three college students who are interested in unpaid internships doing eye research.
 
Source: Joshua Hines, Ocular Proteomics LLC
Writer: Barbara Pash

Friends & Farms last month launched two pickup sites in Baltimore, in Roland Park and Little Italy. The Columbia-based alternative food provider is starting with 30 customers at the new locations but expects to increase that number and to add additional pickup sites in the future.
 
“We knew there was a community in the city for us,”  says director of marketing Regina McCarthy, who conducted a marketing campaign with an emphasis on social media before the Baltimore launch.
 
“We picked those sites because they are central and north of downtown,” says McCarthy,  “and also because we are working with people who understand what we're doing.”
 
The Baltimore pickup sites are at the Gilman School, at 5407 Roland Ave. and 210 South Central Ave, at Stratford University.

Friends & Farms sells weekly baskets of fresh, locally-grown produce and other items year-round. Customers pick up their baskets at designated sites on designated days. Since its founding last year, the company has grown from three sites to seven and from 30 customers to over 250. Sites are located in Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Howard counties besides Baltimore. It's one of several companies that are delivering farm-fresh produce and meat. 
 
McCarthy says that co-founders Philip Gottwals and Tim Hosking not only wanted to offer an alternative food system to consumers but to give farmers financial security. Before the growing season, company staffers meet with about 70 local farmers to plan crops for the baskets. The company also works with local bakeries, creameries, meat processors, fishermen and people who make honey and preserves.
 
Weekly baskets vary in size: one-person at $40 per week, two-person at $51 per week and four-person at $76 per week. A vegetarian basket runs $55 per week. New this year are gluten-free and dairy-free options.
 
Each basket contains enough food for one week, including  fresh produce,  two proteins (fish, poultry, meat or vegetarian),  bread and dairy. Food selection varies with the seasons. The company sends customers a weekly newsletter with recipes and updates on the farmers, and sponsors a yearly tour of the farms.

Friends & Farms has a staff of nine, and may be hiring additional staffers this fall.

 
Source: Regina McCarthy, Friends &Farms
Writer: Barbara Pash
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Edgewebhosting Inc. is opening its third data center in Phoenix, Arizona, in August. To accommodate expected growth, the managed cloud hosting service expanded its corporate headquarters in downtown’s Baltimore's SunTrust Bank Building last month and is hiring nine, all in IT, to its current 41 employees. 
 
A $5 million loan from M&T Bank financed the Phoenix data center, CEO Vlad Friedman says. The company already has two data centers on the East Coast. The first opened in 2005 in a building near Baltimore’s Lexington Market; the second in 2010 in Ashburn, Va.
 
The company’s data center in Phoenix is intended to offer more options and more security for current customers and to attract future customers. “Our service hosts important web sites for companies that need to remain secure, online 24/7, backed up and safe from hackers,” says Friedman.
 
Customers will have the option of choosing their primary location for web hosting and a secondary location.
 
“Customers can choose between two completely separate geographic areas and different time zones,” says Friedman. “We want to attract more enterprise customers to host their information in Baltimore by leveraging the strategy of going West.”
 
Edgewebhosting offers hosting on the cloud and, since cloud hosting isn’t suitable for every client, a combination of cloud and other technologies. The company’s fee is based on a combination of resources and managed services, and is fixed with the customer beforehand.
 
“The services are the same. The only thing that changes is the scale,” says Friedman of fees that range from $300 to $100,000 per month.
 
Customers include health insurers Aetna and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the Heritage Foundation, the Humane Society of the U.S.,Oxford English Dictionary, Columbia University and local advertising and marketing agencies.
 
Founded in 1998, the privately-financed company was originally located in Owings Mills, in Baltimore County. In 2005, it moved to the city because it needed a site that had the electricity and internet connectivity to handle thousands of servers.
 
Friedman says the company is on track to earn $13 million to $14 million in revenue for 2013. For the last six years, revenue has doubled every 36 months, and revenue from cloud hosting has grown 100 percent every six months for the past year.
 
The Baltimore data center expanded by 50 percent last year to handle customer demand. Edgewebhosting itself doubled its staff in the past 18 months, to its current 41, and has openings for an additional nine positions, for database administrators, server administrators and software developers. 
 
Source: Vlad Friedman, Edgwebhosting Inc.
Writer: Barbara Pash

Hunt Valley software developer Revelytix this month is selling its first product to process and manage massive amounts of data, known in the field as big data. Since last year, Revelytix has been transitioning into the big data space, and the release of Loom Dataset Management for Hadoop is the culmination of that process.
 
Founder and CEO Michael Lang calls Hadoop a “data lake,” into which clients’ data is dumped. Created by Yahoo engineers in 2005, it is a free, open-source software platform that supports systems with thousands of nodes, in the jargon, of data. Yahoo, Facebook, eBay and IBM, among others, use Hadoop for data storage.
 
Loom Dataset, the new product, is intended to keep track of and manage a company’s data in Hadoop. Loom was launched as a beta product last February before putting it on the market.
 
“Whenever you have open-source software, there are always capabilities and feature gaps that many businesses want. We built software that runs with Hadoop and adds value,” says Lang. 
 
Lang founded Revelytix in 2007.  So far, its primary customer has been the U.S. Department of Defense. With the launch of Loom, however, the company is aiming for the commercial market although it will continue working for the federal defense department.
 
Loom is priced by size of the enterprise system. A “starter kit” for small enterprises using 20 Hadoop nodes costs $35,000 to $40,000; for larger enterprises using 1,000 nodes,  $500,000 to $1 million, according to Lang. Revelytix has partners that service Loom, including Spry, Knowledgent, Hortonworks, Global IDs Inc and HP Squared LLC.

“The ability to process big data is life or death for large enterprises,” says Lang.
 
Revelytix is a private company with a staff of 19. Lang expects to hire more staffers in the future depending on sales of Loom.
 
Source: Michael Lang, Revelytix
Writer: Barbara Pash

Adashi Systems LLC, a Canton emergency management software developer, is expanding its market to include the  federal government and is coming out with the latest version of its software platform for first responders within the next few months.
 
Brian Pollack, business development manager, says the company’s traditional customer has been local government. This year, the company is changing its sale focus to federal agencies, starting with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.
 
Pollack says Adashi has 1,500 customers at city and county levels in nearly every state in the country. In Maryland, they include Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Queen Anne’s County.
 
The majority of customers are fire departments or hazardous material teams within fire departments. It also has customers among police departments and US Marine bases that have their own fire departments.
 
Adashi offers four software products. Dispatch, the basic offering, provides navigation, routing and planning data. First Response offers navigation, planning data, hazard modeling and incident guidance. Command Post, the most comprehensive, combines the Dispatch and First Response products and provides a response management system linking commanders.
 
The fourth product, Navigation and Routing Option, has a GPS tracking system. It is included in Dispatch and optional with First Response and Command Post.
 
Pollack says the technology was developed at the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Edgewood and a company called OptiMetrics had a license to develop the software.
 
The privately funded Adashi is located in the incubator, Emerging Technology Center at Canton. Pollack does not know if it moving to the ETC’s new Highlandtown location in October.
 
Adashi is a finalist in the state’s 2013 incubator company of the year award, the winners to be announced next month. The company has a staff of 12, and has immediate openings for four positions for engineers and developers.
 
Source: Brian Pollock, Adashi Systems LLC
Writer: Barbara Pash

SmartLogic Solutions LLC is looking for a new home to accommodate its growing staff as the web and mobile application developer expects to double revenue by next year.

Currently located in the Emerging Technology Center at Canton, the eight-year-old web and mobile application developer intends to leave the incubator within the next six months for another location in the city. The ETC is moving to Highlandtown in the fall. 
 
President Yair Flicker has been scouting commercial buildings in Canton, Federal Hill and Fells Point for a 2,000-square-foot office.  “We need to find something quickly,” he says.
 
SmartLogic develops software for web and mobile products like iPhone and Android applications and brings in about $1.5 million in annual revenue. In one year, from the first quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013, revenue grew 34 percent, according to Flicker.

“If we’re not at $3 to $4 million in revenue by the end of 2014, I’d be disappointed.”
 
To that end, he has instituted several changes. SmartLogic recently hired a marketing director and a development director. The company is also hiring four more employees this year, primarily developers and programmers, to add to its staff of 11.
 
A new website is in the works, with a focus on attracting  small- and medium-sized businesses. Clients include Woofound and McDonogh School. During the course of a year, the company works on 12 to 15 projects.
 
Founded in 2005, the privately financed company moved into the incubator, Emerging Technology Center at Johns Hopkins Eastern in 2006. In 2011, it relocated to the Emerging Technology Center at Canton.
 
Source: Yair Flicker, SmartLogic Solutions LLC
Writer: Barbara Pash