Five Companies Picked To Slug it Out for Ann Arbor SPARK Incubator Space

Five companies ranging in focus from fueling to family planning will have a chance to compete for $50,000 in business acceleration services and a one-year incubator lease at SPARK East in Ypsilanti, MI, on June 4. Business incubator Ann Arbor SPARK, which first announced the competition at the end of April, listed the finalists today. Each of the following companies will have three minutes to make their case before a panel of “noted funding and business experts.”

  • Urobiologics, based in Livonia, MI, has a product called the UroGender Test Kit aimed at couples that would like to know the gender of their children early in a pregnancy. The company claims a 95 percent success rate in detecting a fetus’s gender, based on the mother’s urine sample, between five weeks and 15 weeks after conception.
  • Mobile Sign Language Systems, a University of Michigan startup, is developing smart phone software that translates spoken English into real-time sign language.
  • Eco-Fueling is developing a way for diesel engines to run on a mix of renewable ethanol and diesel, aimed at the six million diesel trucks currently on the road that use no renewable fuel.
  • Own, based at the TechArb incubator in Ann Arbor, MI, will present its combined Web and hardware point of sale (POS) system for coffeehouses. Own says its product replaces cash registers or software POS systems.
  • Aeradigm will present an air conditioning appliance for data centers that it says fits in the same racks with servers, cooling adjacent equipment and reducing overall energy load by harvesting waste heat for power.

Author: Howard Lovy

Howard Lovy is a veteran journalist who has focused primarily on technology, science and innovation during the past decade. In 2001, he helped launch Small Times Magazine, a nanotech publication based in Ann Arbor, MI, where he built the freelance team and worked closely with writers to set the tone and style for an emerging sector that had never before been covered from a business perspective. Lovy's work at Small Times, and on one of the first nanotechnology-themed blogs, helped him earn a reputation for making complex subjects understandable, interesting, and even entertaining for a broad audience. It also earned him the 2004 Prize in Communication from the Foresight Institute, a nanotech think tank. In his freelance work, Lovy covers nanotechnology in addition to technological innovation in Michigan with an emphasis on efforts to survive and retool in the state's post-automotive age. Lovy's work has appeared in many publications, including Wired News, Salon.com, the Wall Street Journal, The Detroit News, The Scientist, the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report, Michigan Messenger, and the Ann Arbor Chronicle.