Category Archives: Announcement of Companies

Introducing PHRQL, the app that helps diabetes patients better manage their care

Posted on August 22, 2011 by becca| Leave a comment

This belongs to a series of posts profiling the startups in our 7th Cycle. Past companies covered include MakerCraft, ComVibe, Krowder.com and VitalClip.

(The PHRQL team from left to right: Jeevan Pendli, Hank Werronen, Paul Sandburg)

PHRQL, or Personal Health Recording for Quality of Life (pronounced “freckle”), is a smart phone and social networking application that superempowers individuals with diabetes to better manage their care. The app will help those with diabetes:

  • Keep track of their health (diet, exercise) and vitals (blood-glucose level)
  • Stay on track with personalized insights, recommendations, and built-in game mechanics
  • Stay connected with their personal care network

Why is this important? As CEO Hank Werronen explains, this app will help the 25 million people living in the U.S. with diabetes (and 400 million in the world)  “be more compliant with good care management…reduce the risks of complications from diabetes and help bend down the cost curve.” A cost curve that is quite steep–$200 billion a year and counting.

Hank came up with the idea for PHRQL when he was the COO of healthcare giant, Humana. One of the company’s concerns was how to manage the costs for chronic diseases. It was obvious that the top-down solutions employed by insurance companies and the government were ineffective and inefficient.

Hank began working on a bottom-up approach by sponsoring a project at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. Two of the Tepper School of Business MBAs who were drawn to this project because of personal ties to individuals with diabetes, ended up joining Hank’s team full-time: Paul Sandburg (as President) and Jeevan Pendli (as Chief Development Officer).

PHRQL is focused on testing their product on young adults in transitionary phases, a time when they can lose their support network and get in trouble with the disease. If you are interested in becoming a beta tester for the company you can contact them through their facebook page (facebook.com/PHRQL).

Meet Hank Werronen, CEO of PHRQL from AlphaLab on Vimeo.

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Meet the team behind VitalClip, an iPhone accessory that helps you measure and understand your health

Posted on August 8, 2011 by becca| 3 Comments

This is part of a series of posts profiling the startups in our 7th Cycle. Past companies covered include MakerCraft, ComVibe, and Krowder.com.

The VitalClip team from left to right (James Patula, Steven Radney, Mark Musolino, Elliot Williams)

The Idea

VitalClip is creating an iPhone accessory that makes measuring your health easy and meaningful. Their small device plugs into your iPhone and uses its sensors in conjunction with the iPhone’s to measure your vitals. By combining this information with your personal health history and other environmental factors, VitalClip will spit out a snapshot of your well-being that is easy to understand.

As the popularity of things such as the Quantified Self Movement continue to rise so do the popularity of health and fitness monitors, but, as Steven Radney explains, many “activity monitors only give you information about activity and you have to extract meaning from that yourself.” VitalClip will differentiate themselves by extracting the meaning for you, making it easier than ever to understand and regulate your health.

The Team

CEO Steven Radney, a vet in the medical device field, is joined by James Patula, the team’s software architect, Elliot Williams, an interaction designer/services designer/cognitive scientist, and Mark Musolino, a scientist who is tasked with translating all the biometric sensor data into meaningful and easily digestible information.

VitalClip will be looking for alpha users and “alpha hackers” at the end of September. So if you’re a health and fitness nut, be sure to follow their progress on twitter.

Meet Steven Radney, CEO of VitalClip from AlphaLab on Vimeo.

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Introducing Krowder.com, the crowdsourcing delivery platform

Posted on July 21, 2011 by becca| 4 Comments

In the spirit of transparency and the anti-stealth movement, we’re introducing you to a new AlphaLab company each week. In the past weeks you’ve met MakerCraft and CommunityVibe. This week it’s Krowder.com’s turn, a platform that aims to solve a major problem faced by many urbanites without a car.

Krowder.com’s Co-Founders, Masami Shibatani (top) and Logan Powell

Ever come across something on CraigsList that you ultimately had to pass it up because you had no convenient way to transport it to your home?

Krowder.com aims to solve this problem experienced by so many urbanites who don’t have access to a car or truck. The web platform uses crowdsourcing to facilitate the delivery of local items using amateur talent and idle time–or, in other words–anyone with a pickup truck who has some time on their hands and is looking to make a buck.

In short, Krowder aims to

  • enable people to sell things they normally wouldn’t be able to sell
  • help people buy things they wouldn’t have been able to get (because they’re busy, lazy, or just don’t have access to a vehicle)
  • capitalize on the economies of crowdsourcing

Logan Powell, the team’s Pittsburgh-based Co-Founder and head of Design and Marketing applied to AlphaLab after hearing about the program though his colleges at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. He has come here to build out the platform, gain traction, and prove out Krowder’s business model.

The team expands many timezones and aside from Logan includes Tokyo-based Co-Founder Masami Shibatani, a developer in St. Petersburg and a business development team from MIT based out of California.

To learn more about krowder visit krowder.com, follow @krowderPGH on twitter or keep up with their blog.

 

Meet Logan Powell, Co-Founder of Krowder.com from AlphaLab on Vimeo.

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Meet ComVibe: the app enhancing the rental experience

Posted on July 11, 2011 by becca| 4 Comments

In the spirit of transparency and the anti-stealth movement, this cycle we wanted to try something different. Instead of keeping our newest companies “under wraps” for a month or two until Open Coffee Club (on July 22nd), we’re going to introduce you to a new AlphaLab company each week. Last week we introduced you to MakerCraft who’s making a customized jewelry design app. This week you’ll meet CommunityVibe.


The CommunityVibe team from left to right: Wesley Kim, Kariithi Kilemi, Vishal Agrawal (Not pictured: Harsimran Brar)

CommunityVibe’s primary product, the ComVibe web portal, came into existence after the core team members recognized the “limited online options for tenant management, and the disconnect that existed between tenant satisfaction and property manager services.”

After conducting extensive market research with 10 property managers in and outside the Pittsburgh region, the team built the first iteration of their product that they got five local property managers to test. After feedback from their alpha product, they were able to launch ComVibe last year: a software as a service application that helps property better manage and communicate with their tenants, market their properties and build a community around their properties.

With a working product and a paying customer, the team came to AlphaLab to polish up their sales cycle and enforce their value proposition, because, as Kariithi says, “at the end of the day, if we’re not creating value, we cannot charge for it.”

The CommunityVibe team includes Founder and CEO, Kariithi Kilemi, Wesley Kim who focuses on backend development, Vishal Agrawal working on user interface and the user-testing process, and Harsimran Brar who’s heading up product management.

Learn more about the ComVibe web portal by visiting ComVibe.com or following them on twitter.

Meet Kariithi Kilemi, Founder & CEO of CommunityVibe from AlphaLab on Vimeo.

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Meet the folks behind MakerCraft, the customized jewelry design app

Posted on June 30, 2011 by becca| 5 Comments

In the spirit of transparency and the anti-stealth movement, this cycle we wanted to try something different. Instead of keeping our newest companies “under wraps” for a month or two until Open Coffee Club (which will be July 22nd btw), we’re going to introduce you to a new AlphaLab company each week. First up we have MakerCraft.

The MakerCraft team from left to right (Justin Endler, Corissa McClay, Dan Dwire, Nicholas McClay)

MakerCraft is building an app where users can design customized jewelry that can be shipped to them pre-made or–in the spirit of DIY–as a kit they can put together themselves.

The idea for the company came out of a personal pain Co-Founder and CEO, Corissa McClay, experienced when she was designing her own jewelry: “I was frustrated with the idea that when I was making jewelry I had to actually use my materials to figure out if a design was good enough.”

Luckily Corissa had an understanding husband who was also a seasoned programmer that could build a program for her. But after thinking about it, the couple realized if Corissa was having this much trouble with the issue, she probably wasn’t alone.

With only a month before AlphaLab’s application cycle would be closed, the husband and wife team got all their stuff together and applied to AlphaLab. The program’s hands-on mentoring and creative co-working space really appealed to Corissa and AlphaLab had always been “on their radar” from being involved in Pittsburgh’s startup and gaming community.

Once they got accepted to AlphaLab’s Summer/Fall 2011 program, Co-Founders Corissa (CEO) and Nicholas McClay (Platform Architect) signed on Justin Endler to work on their API and web development, and Dan Dwire to work on mobile design and development.

The team is taking an agile approach to development. As Corissa explains, “It just makes sense…why build something no one wants to use?” To ensure the team doesn’t waste time building features that will just collect dust, Corissa has been holding focus groups where she talks to groups of women about their habits surrounding jewelry and crafting, as well as familiarity and comfortability with technology. After these sessions, the participants get to make and take home a piece of jewelry both as a thank you and as a way for MakerCraft to discover their target market’s price points. Before they leave, each person is asked what they would be willing to pay for what they just made if they designed it using MakerCraft’s app.

You can stay current with MakerCraft’s progress through their blog, twitter account and facebook page or sign up to be a beta tester to help them hone their app (and make some awesome jewelry in the process).

Meet Corissa McClay, CEO & Co-Founder of MakerCraft from AlphaLab on Vimeo.

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Networking at AlphaLab + Announcement of Second Group of AlphaLab Companies

Posted on February 17, 2009 by AlphaLab| Leave a comment

Yesterday we hosted our fourth Open Coffee Club meeting – a group organized by Aaron Tainter and Alan Veeck of Meakem Becker Venture Capital.  Alan speaks to the goals of Open Coffee Club in this post on his blog, Pittsburgh Ventures.  The turnout was great, as can be seen in the picture.  We had a nice mix of entrepreneurs (seasoned, new, and wannabes), investors, and service providers all mingling with each other.  One of the attendees texted me, “good networking” after the event and I would agree: I saw a lot of familiar faces but many new faces and had an opportunity to speak with many of the attendees.  Justin Kownacki – self-proclaimed social media explorer – discussed his experience at the event in this post on his blog, Cafe Witness.

In conjunction with the Open Coffee Club event, we announced our second group of AlphaLab companies.  You can read more about the new AlphaLab companies here. We are excited to work with the six companies and look forward to a busy twenty weeks!

If you’d like to find out about the next Open Coffee Club in Pittsburgh, join the Open Coffee Club group on Facebook.

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