Cleveland : Innovation + Job News

A pizza-fueled team of 20-somethings has propelled a small Cleveland technology company to swift success in the competitive world of online restaurant takeout ordering.

Onosys was established in 2005 by three Case Western Reserve University students -- Stan Garber, Oleg Fridman and Alex Yakubovich -- when Rascal House Pizza, a local campus restaurant, asked them to develop an online ordering solution for the eatery.

Researching the restaurant industry, they found it woefully lacking in high-tech online ordering systems. Believing they had found an under-served niche, they developed their own system. Their goal, according to their website, was that it must be "user-friendly, flexible in its functionality, scalable, have a great user interface and be backed by committed and friendly customer support."

With the explosion of online ordering for everything from books to snow tires, their timing couldn't have been better. They networked and established a board, which lead to important guidance, as well as funding from a local angel investor. The company name, ONOSYS, stands for Online Ordering Systems.

Today, with more than 75 national chains as clients, Onosys is a major player in the restaurant online and mobile ordering industry. Clients include Panera Bread, Honeybaked Ham, Papa John's, Houlihan's, Beef O'Brady's and Frisch's Big Boy. "We're really big on pizza restaurants," Garber notes. "We have more pizza chains than any of the competition, and pizza is a regular part of our staff's diet."
 
He attributes the company's successful growth to three things. "We have an easy pricing model, charging a flat monthly rate per restaurant location rather than a percentage of each individual transaction," he explains. "Second, we're constantly investing in refining our technology. We also have youth. We're all in our 20s, and our age demographic does the most online restaurant ordering. That means we're our customers' clients, which gives us important insights."

Garber believes Onosys also has a competitive edge in data aggregation and social media.

"Restaurants don't collect a lot of data on their customers," he explains. "We capture a host of data, which our clients can access through our customer relations management tool. Our new big thing this year," he adds, "is being able to give our restaurants live ROI data on social media promotions they run."

Onosys currently has 12 employees and plans to hire more by year's end.

Source: Stan Garber, Onosys
Writer: Lynne Meyer

Last October, Cleveland's ViewRay unveiled a research radiation therapy system to the medical device community. Now comes word that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted ViewRay clearance for its radiotherapy treatment planning and delivery software, a key element of the radiation therapy system.

This is a critical step toward FDA approval of the system, according to Gregory M. Ayers, M.D. and Ph.D., president and CEO of ViewRay. "It's exciting to see such progress with a product we believe will offer an advancement in radiation therapy," he says.

Combining MRI and radiotherapy delivery, the system provides a continuous MRI during radiation treatment. This helps doctors to see exactly where the radiation is going and to deliver precise treatment.

A recent $20 million Series C financing will help ViewRay in the final stages of development for commercial distribution. For now, the ViewRay system is only used in non-human settings.

A team of physicians and researchers leads the privately held medical device company. ViewRay is currently in growth mode and building its staff in quality assurance, software engineering, clinical science and sales.


Source: Gregory M. Ayers, ViewRay
Writer: Diane DiPiero

This story originally appeared in Fresh Water Cleveland.

Founded in the 1960s as a machine tool distributorship, Pressco Technology Inc. has come a long way.

"In the mid-80s we were contracted by Crown Cork & Seal to develop machine vision for one of their end-making plants. Today, we are a high-speed, online vision- and sensor-based company for high-speed manufacturers in the U.S. and abroad," says Fritz Awig; VP engineering and operations.

Pressco supplies turnkey high-speed vision inspection systems to the food and beverage industry, aluminum extrusion manufacturing, and the postal sorting sector. By continuously investing in new technologies, the Cleveland company is well positioned to provide vision-inspection equipment as well as intelligent process-control products.

"Pressco's main product is a modular platform of electronics and software to which we can attach a variety of sensors, whether they're vision-based, camera-based, with analog or digital sensors that read various information about the manufacture of a product," Awig says. "Our Intellispec [vision platform] system gathers that information, analyzes that information, makes 'accept' and 'reject' decisions, provides process-control information and feeds it into the high-speed plant network for collecting manufacturing and defect data."

To date, the company has shipped more than 5,000 turnkey systems to more than 60 countries. About 60 percent of its production is shipped overseas. The company employs between 140 and 150 people, with 10 jobs to be added this year.

Based on an adaptable, modular design, the platform's central processor can manage up to eight high-speed cameras spread across multiple lanes. Each inspection module is designed to withstand the rugged environment of a manufacturing facility. The lighting and optical components provide maximum performance for the desired inspection, and additional modules can be purchased as inspection needs grow and change.

Family-owned since 1966, Pressco has grown between 10 and 14 percent annually over the last six years. 

"As Don (Corcoran, the company's president) likes to say, 'No matter how good or bad the economy is, people are still going to eat and drink,'" says Awig.

Source: Fritz Awig, Pressco Technology Inc.
Writer: Patrick G. Mahoney

The enterprising use of social media by two of its students helped serve as a catalyst for Cleveland's Virginia Marti College of Art & Design to become a major player in the social media education scene in Northeast Ohio.

Valerie Mayen attended fashion design classes at the College in 2008. She subsequently created a line of clothing and accessories that she named Yellowcake and began promoting her work on the Internet and with social media. The buzz helped bring her to the attention of the producers of Lifetime TV's "Project Runway," and she was a contestant on the eighth season of the hit show in 2010.

Mike Kubinski received a graphic design degree from VMCAD in 2007. He also started his business -- C.L.E. Clothing Company, promoting positive messages about Cleveland -- online, and used social media to build it.

Both Mayen and Kubinski won Arts Entrepreneur and Innovation Awards from the Council of Smaller Enterprises in 2010.

In October, Michael DeAloia, Cleveland's unofficial "Tech Czar" and one of the founders of the city's Social Media Lab (SML), contacted Geof Pelaia, VMCAD's director of marketing. DeAloia was looking for a new home for the Lab, which had originally been hosted at Cuyahoga Community College.

"Michael wanted to collaborate with us to develop educational social media programming," recalls Pelaia. Aware of the positive results that two of VMCAD's students had achieved through social media, Pelaia felt that partnering with the Lab would be a good fit for the College.

VMCAD began offering weekday evening classes and Saturday seminars as part of its continuing education curriculum. They're taught by DeAloia and an array of social media and marketing professionals in the region.

"We adjust course content to respond to emerging trends, so we're staying on the cutting edge of social media," Pelaia explains. "We're accommodating our students, working professionals and budding entrepreneurs by equipping them with social media knowledge. We feel that the social media education we're doing is actually economic development."

Source: Geof Pelaia, Virginia Marti College of Art & Design and Valerie Mayen, Yellowcake
Writer: Lynne Meyer

Winners of a new entrepreneurial contest will have the opportunity to develop a novel idea or product that embodies the innovative spirit described in President Obama's State of the Union address. Cleveland's recently launched Manufacturing Mart has announced a competition called "The Export Experiment," a new-product competition designed to grow business for American component manufacturers.

To be eligible, a product must be manufacturable in the United States and designed for a niche market in a foreign country. In addition, it must solve a scalable problem and be patent-pending or patented.

The cost to enter the competition is $25, and the deadline is April 30, 2011. See additional details here.

A commercialization grant worth $5,000 will be awarded to the top three winners. The grant can be used for a number of development services outlined by the Manufacturing Mart. One free year of exhibition space at the Manufacturing Mart, a landing page on the mart's website and two press releases are also part of the awards package.

The Manufacturing Mart opened its doors at The Galleria on December 1 of last year. Currently, the mart occupies 3,500 square feet of exhibiting space for manufacturing resources; another 6,000 square feet are scheduled to open later this year. The mart caters to engineers, inventors and business professionals who want to locate innovative manufacturing options in Greater Cleveland.


Source: The Manufacturing Mart
Writer: Diane DiPiero

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This story originally appeared in Fresh Water Cleveland

A newly-launched initiative to create a more robust entrepreneurial American economy has tapped the expertise -- and name -- of Cleveland-based JumpStart.

JumpStart America, a new nonprofit organization also based in Cleveland, is one of 21 national partners announced last week with the launch of Startup America, a private sector answer to President Barak Obama's National Innovation Strategy.

JumpStart America is the only Ohio-based national partner and will draw on entrepreneurial approaches developed by JumpStart, a venture development organization that provides counsel and funding resources to promising new businesses in northeastern Ohio, says Cathy Belk, JumpStart's chief relationship officer. While the two organizations are separate entities, JumpStart America is expected to do nationally what JumpStart has done on a smaller scale, Belk says.

As northeast Ohio's coordinating body for the Ohio Third Frontier's Entrepreneurial Signature Program, JumpStart has invested $20 million in 52 companies, which in turn have raised more than $140 million in follow-on capital and created more than 800 jobs, JumpStart says. As part of that, JumpStart has brought together at least a dozen philanthropic and private industry funding partners, says Belk.

More recently, JumpStart has been sharing some its expertise and experience with organizations throughout the Midwest as part of its JumpStart Community Advisors initiative.

"That is kind of the model of what the JumpStart America work will be," says Belk.

Belk says JumpStart CEO Ray Leach is leading the team that will develop a governance structure for JumpStart America. The process is expected to take three to four months.

Formation of the group will not only benefit the nation but Ohio, Belk says, noting that "it puts (Ohio and northeast Ohio) on the national stage. One of the other great benefits is that national philanthropy will be aggregated in Ohio, and by virtue of Ohio being recognized as offering best practices in this particular area, I think this can be great for the sustainability of the Ohio (entrepreneurial) ecosystem we've been building."

Cincinnati-based accelerator The Brandery was named last week as a new partner in the TechStars Network -- another national partner in the Startup America initiative that operates accelerator programs in New York City, Boston, Seattle and Boulder, Colo.

Source: Cathy Belk, JumpStart
Writer: Gene Monteith

One-stop shopping.

That's what JumpStart is offering technology entrepreneurs in Northeast Ohio with its revved up Entrepreneurial Network, launched three months ago.

"We want entrepreneurs to have to go through only one door for us to help them be successful," explains Dennis Cocco, operating manager of JumpStart Entrepreneurial Network and director of the Great Lakes Innovation and Development Enterprise (GLIDE).

Funded by The Ohio Third Frontier, the Network is intended to be a single entry point for a continuum of resources for entrepreneurs in 21 counties in Northeast Ohio. It encompasses five incubators, four pre-seed and seed funds, a number of experienced business advisors and an online community of mentors and investors.

The Entrepreneurial Network replaces JumpStart's TechLift Advisors program, which ran for three years. That program consisted of a group of experienced entrepreneurs who mentored and supported entrepreneurial companies in very specific technologies.
 
"We still have many entrepreneurs working with technology based companies, but, with the Network, we're building on that initiative with many more points of collaboration throughout the region," he notes.

According to Cocco, the Network is a much broader program in two important areas -- collaboration and funding.

"We're now working more collaboratively with the Edison Center; the Edison incubators in Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron, Mansfield and Lorain; and other economic development entities."

These include local economic development directors and port authorities, Team NEO and the Small Business Development Corporation, begun by the federal government and supported by the Ohio Department of Development.

In terms of funding for entrepreneurs, the TechLift program was very focused on funds available only from JumpStart, Cocco says.

"With the new Entrepreneurial Network, we make entrepreneurs aware of other financial resources throughout the region and beyond, like federal grants, Small Business Administration loans and private and angel investors," he explains. "We want to help them land the venture capital they need."

The ultimate goal for the JumpStart Entrepreneurial Network is simple, according to Cocco. "No entrepreneur left behind."

Source: Dennis Cocco, JumpStart and GLIDE
Writer: Lynne Meyer

In 2004, the newly created JumpStart -- which had begun accepting applications from entrepreneurs seeking assistance in getting their ideas to market -- found itself deluged with requests. The organization saw an urgent need to develop a kind of database of services critical to a startup's success, and a need to connect the various principals.

Enter Cleveland-based IdeaCrossing.

IdeaCrossing describes itself as "an online resource available to all individuals and organizations with an interest in supporting and promoting entrepreneurial activity." The site identifies the kinds of assistance (mentoring, investment capital, and various service providers) entrepreneurs need in order to succeed.

The service also serves the angel and venture capital communities by vetting new investment opportunities. Angel investors typically invest between $5,000 and $50,000, individually, according to Tiffan Clark, vice president of IdeaCrossing.

"There are no sites like ours�that try to be more of an online ecosystem for entrepreneurs nationwide," says Clark. "The whole idea behind IdeaCrossing is that the resources you need to help to develop your business idea may not necessarily exist in your backyard."

The resource offers increased exposure to disparate assets throughout the region such as universities, economic development organizations, chambers of commerce, foundations, and various professional services. Users can tap into local, regional, and national resources.

Users create a "funding profile" that helps to identify the seed and venture capital they need. IdeaCrossing tracks the profile's performance and notifies the user (entrepreneur) when an investor has indicated an interest in their profile. Other profiles fill other needs. "If an entrepreneur is looking for a mentor they can go online and create a profile to find a mentor," says Clark. A kind of one-stop-shop for budding tycoons.

Best of all, the service is free.

Source: Tiffan Clark; Vice President, IdeaCrossing
Writer: Patrick G. Mahoney

When Holly Harlan first started talking to people about Entrepreneurs for Sustainability (E4S) ten years ago, "people looked at me like I had three eyes. But I said, 'I think they're going to get this and they're going to love it.'"

Today, Harlan notes that the E4S network has been growing by more than 20 percent every year since it was founded. "We've attracted nearly 10,000 people from all sectors," Harlan says. "We've helped over 50 companies create a strategic plan for sustainability."

The organization has also created a foundation on which Greater Cleveland can build a successful approach to sustainability.

"We've gotten much better known since Mayor Frank Jackson has stepped in and held sustainability summits the last two years," Harlan says.

E4S is a networking organization that unites professionals interested in sustainability for their businesses and their community, but its scope goes beyond that. "We're an economic development group that sees sustainability as way to create value in the world," Harlan says.

Harlan steps down from the post of president and founder of E4S this month to take on new projects. Mike Dungan, president and CEO of Bee Dance, a Cleveland business that repurposes materials classified as waste, will take over as interim president of E4S.

Harlan looks forward to visiting other cities and gauging their take on Cleveland's sustainability efforts. "We were one of the first business networks in the country focused on sustainability," she says. "The buzz is that Cleveland is known for innovative sustainability ideas, particularly in the area of local foods."

Source: Holly Harlan
Writer: Diane DiPiero

This story originally appeared in Fresh Water Cleveland.

Prfessor.com officially launched this year, beckoning anybody who knows something about a subject to create an online course for the benefit of others.

According to Jim Kukral, one of three owners of the Rocky River-based e-learning curriculum designer, "hundreds of thousands of visitors and students have experienced Prfessor." Topics currently on the site range from marketing to green living.

Now Prfessor is promoting the use of its online resource for businesses that want to educate staff without the expense and time-consuming nature of classroom-style training. Prfessor offers corporations, small businesses and nonprofits a variety of advanced interactive tools designed to encourage self-paced learning.

This style of training benefits both employer and employee, according to Kukral. 

"Prfessor.com helps you control your costs as you improve the quality of your staff and they, in turn, improve profits by doing their jobs better selling more products, providing better customer service and leading their teams effectively," he says. "Prfessor allows anyone, without tech skills, to go out and teach what they know."

Businesses and organizations can take advantage of Prfessor by signing up online to create unlimited courses, develop quizzes to gauge students' understanding of topics and make use of A/V, PowerPoint and graphics to stimulate the learning process.

Kukral foresees strong growth in Prfessor's future, thanks to ever-expanding use of the Internet for educational purposes. "The market for education online is growing by leaps and bounds," Kukral says. Prfessor is designed to encourage users to "empty your head onto the Web," he adds.

Source: Jim Kukral, Prfessor.com
Writer: Diane DiPiero

This story originally appeared in Fresh Water Cleveland.

SOURCE: Fresh Water Cleveland

In a laboratory at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine, Zhenghe John Wang and a team of researchers developed a panel of new human isogenic cell models, which look much like mutated cancer cells. Through these cell models, researchers can get a handle on how cancer takes shape in the human body.

"We actually created a technology where we can add tags into cancer cells so we can track them," says Wang, assistant professor of genetics at Case's School of Medicine. Not only can this technology help researchers to better understand how cancer cells evolve, it can also provide assistance with cancer treatment programs, Wang says.

Now this process has an even greater chance of affecting cancer treatments, as medical research company Horizon Discovery has obtained exclusive rights to the panel of new human isogenic cell models. This means that the British medical research company will be able to add this technology to its existing models, which are used to predict patient response to current and future drug treatments.

Horizon Discovery has licensed the new cell models for ten years and will pay Case an initial fee, with rights to royalties from future product sales.

"We really wanted to work with someone interested in this technology," Wang says, adding that the agreement with Horizon Discovery will allow for research on a grander scale. Meanwhile, Wang and his team will continue to advance use of human isogenic cell models at Case. "Hopefully, we can make a big impact on cancer research," he says.

Source: Case Western Reserve University
Writer: Diane DiPiero

A booster shot of venture capital will help OnShift Software flex its marketing muscle in 2011.

The Cleveland company announced this month it recently had secured $2.3 million, both from its Ohio investors -- Early Stage Partners, JumpStart Inc., North Coast Angel Fund, and Glengary LLC, -- and Draper Triangle Ventures, of Pittsburgh. Early Stage and Draper receive some of their investment dollars from the Ohio Capital Fund.

The money will be used for hiring across the board, but mostly for sales and marketing positions, CEO Mark Woodka says.

Response to OnShift's innovative staff management system has been so positive the company is convinced it needs to quickly increase the number of its representatives. OnShift had 26 customers in 2009. It will end 2010 with more than 200.

Likewise, the company began with three employees; this year it has 24 and next year, Woodka says, it will double that amount.

OnShift's system, whose key benefit is prevention of overtime costs, has been deployed mostly at long-term care facilities, such as skilled/assisted living nursing homes and retirement centers. Hospitals are a large potential source of expansion.

It's a "very green field" of a market, Woodka says, and "the need for what we do is going up over time."

Woodka credits early support from Ohio groups such as JumpStart for OnShift's fast rise.

Source: Mark Woodka, OnShift
Writer: Gabriella Jacobs

Avtron Industrial Automation, with roots in aerospace testing equipment, is flying a little closer to the ground these days. With some help from Ohio's Third Frontier, the company is developing encoders for use in wind turbines. The encoders sense position within 360 degrees.

Worldwide, Avtron has about 400 employees, 350 of which are in Cleveland. The remaining employees work in New Hampshire and Beijing. Spurred by the $1-million Third Frontier award, Kosnik says the company plans to add another 30 jobs by 2014.

The company makes drive systems, load banks, aerospace test equipment and incremental encoders for measuring speed and position in industrial control systems. Users of the encoders include heavy industry, the wind turbine industry, and offshore oil platforms. Overall, company sales have been strong, says Don Kosnik; Director R&D (Engineering), about doubling over the last three to five years.

Over one third of Avtron's staff are technical personnel with four-year degrees or higher. Most have backgrounds in electrical and mechanical engineering, electronics or computers. Many of its product design engineers come from Avtron's Field Engineering Department.

Avtron Aerospace, Inc., Avtron Loadbank, Inc., and Avtron Industrial Automation, Inc. are part of Avtron Holdings, LLC. Their customers include 95 percent of the Fortune 500 and nearly every major airline in the world. The company has been in business since 1953. In 2007, Avtron was acquired by Morgenthaler Partners, LLC, a private equity company with assets under management of approximately $3 billion.

Source: Don Kosnik; Director R&D, Engineering
Writer: Patrick G. Mahoney

Within the past month, RSB Spine LLC of Cleveland has announced a 229-percent quarterly sales jump over the same period of 2009, gotten news of $1.5 million of new investment in the company and even showed up in the unlikeliest of places -- ABC's "Dancing With the Stars."

For the company, formed in 2001 by Cleveland-based John Redmond and a friend, California spinal surgeon Dr. Robert S. Bray, these are heady days.

Its latest product line, InterPlate, was launched in 2006 after gaining FDA approval. The InterPlate line, with four separate products to date, has quickly gained advantage over competing lines.

"It's a crowded market out there," says Redmond, the firm's CEO. "The advantage that InterPlate offers over the rest of field is that it's really an evolutionary product, which is why you're seeing the growth. The main idea is that it's modular, which means that it allows surgeons a lot of different choices in the materials used in the implant and choices in how they implant the device."

Surgeons use the implants to fuse vertebrae in the lumbar and cervical areas of the spine. Made of titanium and special graft material, it also offers quicker fusion rates, meaning the patient will heal faster.

InterPlate's popularity with spinal surgeons led to a 2009 partnership with Massachusetts-based Paradigm BioDevices, which became the exclusive distributor of the InterPlate line and has boosted sales at such an incredible rate, Redmond says.

Publicity hasn't hurt, either. The latest -- InterPlate's supporting role on ABC's hit dance contest -- came because of eventual winner Jennifer Grey's relationship with Bray. Bray has performed more than 7,500 spinal surgeries over his years in practice � and one of his patients was Grey, who underwent spinal fusion surgery just months before the show started.

"On two or three occasions, they showed an x-ray of the spinal fusion she had done in her neck," says Redmond, "and there was our implant. It was a pretty good advertisement."

Source: John Redmond, RSB Spine
Writer: Dave Malaska

Carving $1.5 million for IT out of a $10-million budget is par for the course among for-profit companies, Adam Roth says. For non-profits, where administrative costs are closely monitored, it's a red flag.

That's why so many non-profits have struggled to keep up with leading-edge technology that could help them better manage internal affairs, board business and programs, he says. And it's why Roth created StreamLink Software, a Cleveland firm that has developed two products to help non-profits.

Since StreamLink's first product launch in July of 2008 -- a solution called BoardMax -- the company has attracted more than 100 customers, including Ronald McDonald House, the Boys and Girls Club of Cleveland, and the American Heart Association.

Roth, the company's CEO and former chief operating officer for Cleveland's West Side Ecumenical Ministry, began exploring the software landscape in 2006 after being frustrated by a lack of good, economical software programs for non-profits. At the same time, the development of web-based software was growing, giving entities a way to avoid the high infrastructure costs of internal IT programs.

Thus, BoardMax -- a web-based product designed to increase board engagement and organizational compliance with regulations and standards.

"Our tool really helps internal management manage the organization as well as helping board members connect with the organization," he says.

AmpliFund, released earlier this year, "focuses on the whole grant cycle," Roth says. "Everything from trying to understand what opportunities are out there, to creating and personalizing those opportunities for each organization, building a plan, a solicitation strategy around each opportunity, tracking and managing an organization-wide plan that can allow you to create projections throughout the year."

After a program is implemented, the software becomes a management tool to capture data related to performance and expenditure of funds.

Along the way, StreamLink has had help from North Coast Angel Fund ($200,000), the Lorain County Community College Innovation Fund ($100,000) and $400,000 in private investments.

Roth says the company employed two a year ago; today, it employs eight and plans to grow.

Source: Adam Roth, StreamLink
Writer: Gene Monteith