So tell me, which Michigan city has a a startup offering in-car computers, another offering fuel cells you can buy as a power backup, another offering new chemistry for painting plastics with implications for everything from auto parts to medical devices, another offering super-secure USB drives and incredibly cool little Flash media players, a list of 50 other potential tech companies for incubation and a college with student body full of entrepreneurs, some of whom are running online businesses with revenue upwards of $1.5 million a year?
The answer is Flint. Yes, Flint. You know: hopeless post-industrial wasteland. "Pets or Meat." That place. Quick, somebody tell Forbes magazine.
My Great Lakes IT Report Spring Tech Tour 2009 visit to what used to be proudly called "Vehicle City" began with a sunrise visit to PPG Industries' Application and Process Development Center.
PPG tests paints and other coatings such as spray-on truck bed liners in three sprawling buildings totaling 70,000 square feet. Only about 15 researchers work full-time there, but site manager Clayton Crunden said other scientists from PPG's Pittsburgh and Cleveland reearch centers are frequent visitors.
Also walking me around the buildings -- featuring huge robotic painting chambers and gigantic tanks capable of dunking an entire auto body in paint -- was Connie Poulsen, the Troy-based global director of product management
for automotive OEM coatings for PPG.
Crunden and Poulsen said today's modern auto paint consists of five coats -- pretreat, electro-coat, primer, base coat and clear coat. All are tested at PPG, where they're also working on coatings that cure in ultraviolet light rather than heat. There's also an ongoing effort to reduce the toxic volatile organic compounds that are a byproduct of painting.
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From PPG, it was over to Kettering University, where Neil Sheridan, director of Kettering's new TechWorks Technology Accelerator told me about his program and some of its current (and would-be) clients.
Sheridan, along with Nell Taylor, business development manager at the Genesee Regional Chamber of Commerce and Marsha J. Lyttle, director of the Flint-based Region 6 fo the Michigan Small Business and Technology
Development Center, told me how the new Kettering center is aimed at creating entrepreneurs from the earliest stages.
"We're offering resources for people who want to grow their own company in the Flint area with a tech background, tapping into the chamber and the resources in the area," Sheridan said. "We currently have 50 companies on the
'suspect list' and we hope to have 20 companies affiliated with this facility."
The incubator, at the southeast corner of Kettering's C.S. Mott Engineering and Science Center, offers 6,500 square feet of office space. A new building a couple of blocks away will add 9,400 square feet of wet lab space.
Overall, Sheridan said, TechWorks is designed as a business accelerator rather than a true incubator because "some companies don't need an office here." He's hoping for as many as 80 "affiliate companies" by 2011.
Taylor noted that 300,000 tech workers and 7,000 tech businesses are within an hour's drive of Flint.
TechWorks is also seeking additional funding to expand its program of small grants and loans to startups by proof of concept and prototyping work.
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Next up was K.J. Berry, president and CTO of Global Energy Innovations.
Berry, a professor of mechanical engineering at Kettering, is close to market with fuel cell auxiliary power units generating two to five kilowatts, applicable to several markets, including large trucks, RV's, military, residential, marine, telecommunications and aerospace. These broad markets are possible because the fuel cells can run on many fuels, including diesel, propane, natural gas, methane, biofuels and hydrogen.
The GEI-X5 "High Temperature PEM" fuel cell APU, about the size of a small refrigerator, would turn diesel or other available fuels into electricity with a chemical reaction, producing water and heat as by-products. The major advantage of the GEI solution is that pure hydrogen is not required, so using the unit is not limited by the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure. Traditional low-temperature PEM fuel cells require nearly pure hydrogen.
The company was founded in April 2007 and got its first commercial development contract in December of that year. Now GEI is working with Ingersoll Rand for the development of a 2.5kW fuel cell APU to handle heating, cooling, and electricity for large semi trucks whose engines now must idle when the truckers are taking a break or sleeping.
The company's first two units are in the field, being tested by Ingersoll Rand in Minnesota for commercialization validation. The company is also in talks with global telecommunication cell phone tower providers for backup power requirements and looking to establish partnerships in global markets such as China and India.
Berry said the price of the fuel cells continue to fall. "In volumes of 8,000 to 10,000 units a year, we can get the price down to $8,000 for clean, silent, nonpolluting power," he said. And eventually, he said, he wants to break into
residential power and provide continuous back-up power in cases of natural disasters such as ice and snow storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Since natural gas is typically available even during electrical grid outages, the GEI back-up power solution will provide continuous power and heat even during most grid power failures.
Berry expects that as GEI scales to meet the growing need for fuel flexible distributed auxiliary power, this next generation fuel cell technology will provide 100 high-tech jobs for Flint and mid-Michigan.
More at www.geifuelcells.com.
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Next was a company I've been following for years at visits to the International Consumer Electronics Show -- Azentek, the company developing in-car computers, which has hit the market with a high-tech rear-view mirror with built-in GPS and backup mirror.
President and CEO Johnny G. Cooper said Azentek has seen "a really great response to SmartMirror," with more than 9,000 units delivered since Christmas. Buyers were in the consumer market, everything from RVs to regular
passenger cars. The company has just started focusing on fleet and commercial applications.
As for Azentek's long-awaited in-dash computers, Cooper said, "we've made some changes to our technology making sure everything is totally perfect and we're looking at a Q4 launch to get this thing going."
There will be two models at launch -- the Calypso, which fits in a standard automotive radio enclousure and features a 7-inch flip-out screen, and the Atlas CPC 1200, which fits into a large radio enclosure, the kind that typically today includes a navigation unit.
The computers will feature full functionality, including Internet access when near a wireless hotspot, and voice e-mail. They'll start with 500 gigabytes of hard drive space. Both will cost $2,799.
"We see growth in our business around the $40 million area thi syear, which would be substantial growth," Cooper said. The company is also up to 20 employees.
The company will also be hiring new staff with an electrical engineering background within the next 60 days.
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My next visitor was veteran entrepreneur Lars G. Beholz, president of Beholztech, which has developed a proprietary chemistry to make non paintable plastics like polyethlene paintable.
The process -- which turns the plastic from hydrophobic to hydrophilic, so water will sheet over it -- also has applications in medical devices, such as tiny blood test chips.
"We started out to make unpaintable things paintable," Beholz said. "Now we consider ourselves an environmentally sustainable green chemistry company."
Beholz says the company achieves its advances by "mix(ing) commodity chemicals in very elegant ways."
Beholz said the company has one term sheet signed with one small company, with seven to 10 potential clients.
The company's "secret sauce," Beholz said, "is a harmless polymer used in cosmetics, just used in a new way." He discovered it in the mid-1990s, when he worked as a researcher for a water treatment company, then as a researcher for a plastics company.
The company has three patents and a bunch of other intellectual property, Beholz said, as well as funding from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. He's considering both licensing the technology and
creating machinery to make the chemicals involved.
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Brian Thurman, CTO and president of USB Systems, then proceeded to blow me completely away with advanced technology. (Neil Sheridan too, I think.) USB Systems grew out of a wireless broadband company he founded in 2001 when clients asked him to look into Flash memory. (The broadband company
still exists, at ccslinknet.com.)
Eventually, USB Systems rolled out a truly secure thumb drive -- a drive that is virtually indestructable, with excellent crush resistance, but engineered self-destruction built in should illegal access attempts be made. (In the case of USB Systems, small bits of magnesium are embedded into the drive. They're ignited, destroying the data and the circuitry, if a password is failed too many times. The drive is also designed so that the memory is broken if the drive's case is opened.
USB has also created a drive that features a complete Web browsing system that leaves absolutely zero footprints on the PC being used. And the company has also introduced BioDrive, a Flash drive with biometric fingerprint
identification capability. (It can even doublecheck that the finger belongs to a living person, so none of that gruesome cutting-off-the-finger-of-your-target stuff will work.)
As if that wasn't enough, Thurman and his four partners have also developed a series of Flash players that run all of their software. The small, medium and large screen devices are available at www.usbsystems.com.
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I wrapped up my visit to Flint with a meeting with the Kettering Entrepreneurial Society, a student group at the university of current and would-be business owners.
I met Scott Skelton, a Belleville senior in mechanical engineering, who has two Web businesses -- HighPerformanceOutlet.com for high-performance auto parts, and BookDealFinder.com, a search engine for college textbooks.
Also at the lunch: James Cooper, a Rochester Hills senior in electrical engineering, working on a vending machine concept for taverns; Caymon Love, a senior in industrial engineering who is client project manager at TechWorks, helping Sheridan sort through those 50 potential companies; Kristina Kamensky, a recent graduate in mechanical engineering, special projects manager at TechWorks; Matt Gaidica and Brad Birdsall, whose PrimeStudios offers Web and graphic design and Web application work (see www.primestudiosllc.com); Marc D. Alexander, president and CEO of Youth of Tomorrow, which offers youth career exploration experiences; and entrepreneurial adviser Homayun Navaz, a professor of mechanical engineering, founder of the new chemical engineering degree at Kettering and its new aeronautical engineering minor. Navaz is in the process of starting a business called Coolificient, which will offer manufacturers of commercial coolers software and equipment to make their coolers far more energy efficient.
All in all a great morning and early afternoon. And now it's on to the final stop of the spring tour, our state's capital, Lansing, and its burgeoning tech scene.
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