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FiReStarters 2010
What is the FiReStarters program?
For the fourth year in a row, Strategic News Service (SNS) is selecting 12 businesses - top startups or businesses with new startup technology - for world promotion, based on nominations by trusted strategic investment SNS Members. We believe that these FiReStarter businesses, which are integrated into the FiRe program, are on the cusp of making great strides in improving our world. They are businesses we believe you should know about.
How does the process work?
SNS Members have access to and knowledge of key world-changing new businesses, or businesses with new technologies, that deserve recognition. We therefore invite a select number of SNS Member investment firms to nominate businesses they know that fit into this high-caliber category. From these nominations, we perform reviews and select 12 finalists to feature at the FiRe conference. These are businesses we hope to follow for a very long time.
In addition to promoting these businesses before, during, and after FiRe, we follow up with each FiReStarter to learn how and in what ways their business has changed as a result of their participation at FiRe.
If you would like your company to be considered as a FiReStarter nominee in 2010, or if you have any questions, please contact Sharon Anderson-Morris, Director of SNS Programs, at sam@stratnews.com.
View our 2010 FiReStarters at FiRe
Hosted by Stephen Evans, Presenter, Business Daily, BBC World Service (click image to watch)
2010 FiReStarter Companies
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 Beautifull Inc. is a food retailer that provides tasty, healthy, and convenient prepared food that is fresh, natural, and whole. Its mission is to make the best prepared, fresh food in the world and make it available to as many people as possible.
Founder Eric Greenberg started the company after he lost over 70 pounds from changing the way he ate, and realized that food matters: great ingredients and preparation deliver health and incredible taste. The company is inspired to make the best food you can eat, leading with taste to deliver health and happiness. Its food makes what you should eat into what you want to eat. Eating Beautifull food is like having a private chef who is a nutrition expert. The food is clean, with total ingredient transparency: it is free of processed ingredients, chemical additives, refined sugars, refined oils, steroids, and hormones. At Beautifull, customers can eat-in, take-out, stock-up, or have the food catered.
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 Gist helps you build stronger professional relationships by bringing together information from across the
Web for all of your contacts and their companies, giving you the right information at the right moment. Gist
does all the work for you, assembling a dynamic collection of all your contacts and their companies from your
email inbox, your social networks, or even your CRM system, automatically building and updating their profiles
as new content is published - by them or about them.
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 Impact Radius links performance advertising to TV, radio, print, and online distribution channels, delivering to advertisers and media partners opportunities for growth and profit. By providing the tools and technology to negotiate and manage relationships directly on a single multi-channel platform, Impact Radius is changing how performance deals are transacted across all media channels. With its "clear box" philosophy, Impact Radius is championing a new direction for performance advertising by increasing transparency in relationships and improving decision-making for media partners, advertisers, and agencies.
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 Mobisante Inc., a privately held company, is building the world's first cellphone-based, low-cost, easy-to-use, portable Ultrasound imaging systems which can be used by non-experts to practice better medicine. These systems are based on technology developed by a top university research lab and partially funded by Microsoft Research. The basic systems, which are expected to be extremely affordable, will open up the market of primary care physicians, physician extenders, field workers in telemedicine settings, veterinarians, and cost-sensitive medical institutions in rural and emerging markets. Mobisante has the potential to disrupt established players that sell significantly more expensive devices through direct sales with high margins and overheads.
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 NeuroRepair Inc., in cooperation with researchers at the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine, has developed what is likely the world's most advanced technology for repair of neurological damage, an endeavor heretofore generally thought hopeless. NeuroRepair has a highly effective, non-invasive procedure that stimulates a massive proliferation, migration, and differentiation of new neural cells that can replace those lost to stroke, injury, or disease. NeuroRepair is the sole owner of this intellectual property and has several pending patent applications. The company has no outside shareholders or investors and no debt. Its research has been privately funded by the founder.
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 NivaSonix, LLC is planning the global introduction of its next generation non-invasive ultrasound technology
that addresses several major health issues related to excess body fat. The NivaSonix portable ultrasound
system provides a patient tailored, non-invasive, non-surgical solution for the reduction of fat and wrinkles
in a wide range of anatomical sites. The company has developed breakthrough and transformative ultrasound
technology protected by a strong I.P. portfolio. The NivaSonix ULLISYS® product is designed
to deliver enhanced clinical results and patient safety not currently available using existing therapies and
techniques. Evaluation of the NivaSonix device with both human and animal tissue and fat has demonstrated
excellent results. The NivaSonix product platform may also be used for a variety of aesthetic plastic surgery,
cosmetic, and dermatology applications, with the ability to rapidly expand into additional therapeutic markets.
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 Power Assure develops and delivers business automation software that reduces energy use and carbon emissions
in commercial, corporate, and government data centers. The company's hosted software platform intelligently monitors
and manages data center server capacity in real time, maintaining required service levels at optimum efficiency and
lowest total cost.
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 Tesla Motors is the automotive producer of the world's only highway-capable electric vehicle. With Tesla's breakthrough technology, the Tesla Roadster accelerates faster than nearly any other supercar and is twice as energy-efficient as a hybrid. The Roadster's Powertrain technology, developed in under three years, is unlike any other in the automotive industry.
Based in Silicon Valley, California, Tesla has seven stores in the U.S. and three stores in Europe, with stores coming soon in Canada, Australia, and Asia. Tesla has nearly 1,000 cars on the road, in 44 states and 25 countries. The Tesla Roadster is quickly becoming the choice among discerning drivers who demand performance with a clean conscience.
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Trifecta Global Infrastructure Solutions Ltd., an Irish company with offices in New Zealand and the U.S.,
has developed a browser-based, geospatial process engine specifically designed to model and optimize the workflows
for the management of public infrastructure, including road, water, and property assets. Trifecta's process engine
has been specifically designed from the ground up to be truly geospatial, and uniquely includes time as a fully
integrated fourth dimension. Furthermore, Trifecta has just unveiled the ability in its infrastructure platform to
quickly plug networked environmental sensors of any kind into any x, y, z coordinate.
With Trifecta's fully scalable platform, all sorts of real-world concerns associated with infrastructure
assets can now be monitored in real time: from landfill leakage, bridge failure, road surface freezing,
public water contamination, vapor intrusion from leaking fuel tanks, and over-pumping of aquifers to violations
of air or water permits. Even complex groundwater and air plume contamination can be modeled in real time in the
Trifecta platform, using the same geostatistical interpolation methodologies the EPA uses. All historical sensor
data is stored and can be visually "played back," establishing a much broader foundation for evidence-based outcomes
work for the whole environmental discipline. Trifecta's platform also offers to infrastructure managers advanced project
management and budget tracking capabilities, and it gives engineers the vital visual context they need for projects by
seamlessly integrating the most advanced georeferenced imagery - Lidar, oblique aerial photography, and high-resolution,
360-degree "DriveView." All of this rich functionality can be accessed from Trifecta via a Web browser under a Software
as a Service model.
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Individuals and organizations are crippled with too much content, too many interfaces, and too much information. Knowledge workers are increasingly demanding the ease of use, while enterprises continue to struggle with scalability and security. Users are increasingly forced to access data and information in an ever-growing number of data repositories, whether it be on the desktop, in IT-managed content, or in the Cloud. The problem is further complicated by the needs of mobile users and the increasing demand that this information be available via the Web.
X1 is developing a unified, search-based application that allows users to Unify, Find, Preview, and Take Action on any information, regardless of where it resides. As a productivity tool, X1 meaningfully improves people's and organizations' performance by making them more productive, saving meaningful amounts of time and money by solving the findability problem and reducing the need to re-create content and the costly errors made by having to make decisions without complete information.
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Zirus' mission is to provide keys to conquer viruses. Zirus provides a unique and extensive platform of host targets and an efficient process for finding additional targets and drugs to treat viruses for which there are no effective vaccines. These host targets collectively provide the foundation to develop completely novel antiviral agents to treat virtually any commercially relevant virus, pandemic virus, neglected disease virus, or bioterrorist-designed virus.
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