a Mobee Sign account, like they have a PayPal account, Nash says. The consumer has to provide their phone number, so an SMS text message can be sent, so the consumer can confirm the purchase by typing in a PIN number, Nash says. The purchase shows up on the consumer’s monthly phone bill, and MobeeSign makes its money by taking a 3 percent transaction fee, Nash says.
The team is focusing on the Middle East and North Africa because they know that part of the world. Mobee Sign’s founders—two MBA students and a Microsoft mobile engineer—are from Morocco, Jordan, and Greece. “We have the cultural understanding as well as technical understanding,” Nash says.
—Emergent Detection. The obesity epidemic has spread to an estimated two-thirds of all Americans, and one UW team thinks it has found a new way to track people’s progress in their battle against the bulge. The idea is to detect certain proteins in urine that will tell you real-time information about your metabolic rate. So if you exercised one day, and had ice cream on the couch the other day, you could tell the difference in how much energy your body was actually burning each day, says Joel Gjuka, the founder and chief operating officer.
A base unit to do this test would cost about $125, and Emergent Detection hopes to make its money by selling individual test strips that cost 20 cents to produce and sell for 50 cents retail, Gjuka says. This test will not have to pass through the FDA regulatory process, Gjuka says.
The company has a prototype device, and it could be ready to bring to the market by the end of 2010 or early 2011, Gjuka says. He’s working on honing the pitch to consumers. “Do you really want to lose weight, or do you want to lose fat?” Gjuka says.
—Febris. This team from Washington State University has a faster, cheaper idea for detecting the difference between a viral and bacterial infection. This technology, from the University of Idaho, looks in a biological sample for Mx protein signals which can show how the body’s immune system responds differently to these different foreign invaders. This tool isn’t sensitive enough to tell the difference between H1N1 flu and Yellow fever, but it can provide an answer in five minutes, for $15, says Jason Burt, one of the founders. That matters because it could be the difference between a doctor quickly being able to prescribe an anti-viral treatment, or an antibiotic, to the right patient.
But instead of going through the long, expensive path of creating a human diagnostic test, Febris is looking first to the veterinary market. Vets could run this test quickly on dogs or cats to see if they are good candidates for vaccines, or whether they need some other treatment first, says Gaylene Anderson, a licensing associate at the University of Idaho’s tech transfer office. The idea can be extended to spot infection in other animals, like cattle and horses, she says.
