We don’t cover hardware or med-tech stuff here too often, but this one is pretty neat. Kewl Innovations, a startup in Richardson, is working on a new device that keeps medicine at a regulated temperature but is still ultra-portable.

Give us the 30-second elevator pitch on your company

Managing diabetes is a tremendously cumbersome and frustrating practice. Amongst all the fluctuating variables that contribute to this frustration, there is one simple factor yet to be resolved. Injectable insulin, a staple drug for most diabetics, must be stored within a specific temperature range, or else its potency will rapidly degrade. In order to travel safely, people with diabetes are forced to lug around coolers, ice packs, and other ‘lunch box’ looking solutions which offer limited in capacity and consistency. 

Kewl Innovations, Inc.™ has developed a portable device that monitors and moderates the temperature of one’s personal insulin supply for 3-5 days on a single charge. Utilizing nanotechnology and advanced monitoring software, the device eliminates the need fir frozen gel-packs, and requires no effort from the user, other than a routine re-charge.

Tell us about the founders, who they are, backgrounds, and why they are passionate about your company

Kewl Innovations was founded by an engineer, sailboat captain, and insulin dependent diabetic. This makes Kewl a ‘for us – by us’ company, having sprung up from our founders personal need to create a more compatible insulin portability solution.

Do you have funding? How much?

Kewl has raised over $1,000,000 in funding from a Series A Angel round.

What are your startup’s goals for this year?

The first half of 2012 will be spent finalizing our market-ready product design. Subsequently we will be working diligently with the diabetes community to build resale partnerships, and encourage local pro-active diabetes management efforts.

The product is scheduled for release in the summer of 2012. At this time we hope to have successfully explained to our market how our solution fits into the pro-active diabetes management equation.

Learn more at www.kewlinnovations.com

Dallas entrepreneur Marshall Haas wants to paint your picture, 18th century style! The Startup Chile alum, and founder of Obsorb, recently launched a fun little side project called 18th.me.

At 18th.me, you can get your very own, hand-painted portrait of YOU inside some of history’s most famous paintings… all for just $139, what a steal!

Check it out and get yours at 18th.me.

Imagine a loved one is in intensive care and needs an immediate organ transplant. Unarguably, a time for serious concern. Now consider that many logistics and transportation companies track these items with an old spreadsheet system, or even on good old-fashioned paper. Now are you scared? That’s the kind of scenario that prompted Gerard Ibarra to find a better way. In July 2011, he and co-founder John Zurawski founded Newton Insight to bring more transparency to the tracking and logistics involved in specimen transport. This will enable care-givers (among others) to make better near-real-time decisions, should a change in delivery status prompt a change from the original, or latest, decision.

Ibarra and Zurawski met at UPS about 20 years ago. They tinkered with the idea of building a system that allowed consumers to shop for a car from the comfort of their home. They tested the waters a bit, and indeed received the market validation later, but ultimately decided to focus on what they were being paid to do. When Ibarra left UPS back in 2000, he joined a courier/logistics company, one that focused primarily on the transport of specimens. It was at this time that he noticed many others in the industry using somewhat archaic methods of tracking the specimens.

But the time for Newton Insight hadn’t yet come. In late 2007, John called Gerard to see if he wanted to start a software company. It was a chance to start something again, but this time it was to see it through to the end. The timing was great as Gerard just received his PhD from SMU and was starting to look for a career. Instead, John and Gerard joined forces and in 2008 co-founded Buildwave Technologies, a log management and analysis company. They sold it in the fall of 2009.

So fast forward to 2011, and Gerard and John decided it was Newton Insight’s time for the spotlight. Their solution is designed to provide supply chain and logistics transparency, but offer the service at a fraction of the costs charged by UPS and FedEx by utilizing cloud computing and mobile technology. And Newton Insight isn’t merely handling the logistics, but it’s also serving as a conduit between all parties affected by the order, transport, and testing of the specimen.

This means not only the lab, hospital, or blood bank as the primary tier, but also the doctors, lab technicians, and of course, couriers. All would be able to view the delivery status and chain-of-custody of the specimen. Another uncommon service Newton provides is a predictive alert system, which can send a notice if it appears that a specimen will be late on arrival, not merely if it already is late. This forewarning enables the user to make better decisions and adjust accordingly based on the late arrival status. Newton’s advisers like the business model so much, that Newton is branching out of specimen transport into broader logistics fields.

Perhaps the biggest challenge Ibarra and Zurawski encounter in running the business is managing the cash burn. The sales cycle has turned out to take longer than expected. Many of the parties along this logistics chain-of-custody have old and established systems and processes and are part of large organizations. And, as many working in the corporate world know, it can be quite difficult to change the course of a ship in a short amount of time. There is a monthly service charge for their business depending on a variety of factors, like size, revenue, customer base, etc. In addition there is a fee for each transaction.

So now Newton Insight moves on to graduating from the Tech Wildcatters fall accelerator program. Based on advice on the TW mentors, Newton has expanded their target market, which shows the confidence they have in the market size, and the likelihood of being funded as they leave the program. They already have a courier as a paying beta customer, Jaguar Logistics. But Newton is still seeking a major lab, hospital, or blood bank as a beta tester. This will establish more market credibility in the logistics and transportation SaaS arena. It may seem a tough market. But I think the odds are stacked in Newton’s favor, considering the background experience they both have in logistics and supply chain. If they can establish key relationships, like they’ve done with the TW mentors throughout the program, their future looks very bright.

Be sure to check out Newton Insight as they give their final presentation of the TW program at “Pitch Day” next Tuesday. As of this writing, there are still spots available. You can register here. If you can’t make it in person, it will be live-streamed on the Tech Wildcatters site. It will also be on the Ustream homepage.

All online retailers know is it important to have a robust e-commerce platform that can collect vital customer information to be successful. Couple that with some sort of BI, and you’ve got some decent analysis tools to help you manage your store. But if your competitors have those same tools and sell the same products, how can you get an edge? And with all the available data on their database and floating around out there on the web, how can you manage it all and use it to your advantage?

Local Dallas startup Mineful aims to cut through the clutter and prove a rich interface that automates many of the menial tasks involved in customer analysis and retention. One of the major differences from others is it offers predictive analysis.  Whereas many tools offer hindsight analysis, Mineful looks at trends to predict the likelihood of a customer never returning to your store. You can create rule-based criteria which can trigger automated messages to be delivered to customers based on their probability of defection or some other behavior. It also has a self-learning feature which, based on measured success and past response rates from customers, can adapt on-the-fly to change subject lines or product offerings, for example.

Jaime Brugueras and Jose Rubio started the company in 2010. Jaime was a marketing consultant for major brands, but became unhappy witnessing all the meetings and analysis that resulted in inaction. Not surprising in large companies. He noticed all the inefficiencies in large companies between analytics and action, so he decided to do something about it and start his own company. His cousin Jose had been tearing down and rebuilding computers for a long time. He also was active in writing software, continually looking for ways to improve on what already existed.

Through his sister-in-law, who worked at Austin Ventures, Jaime became aware of the Tech Wildcatters seed accelerator program. He applied and was accepted into the fall program, a 12-week “bootcamp” that allowed Jose and him to meet and work with mentors to help them refine their strategy, as well as get advice on their elevator pitch for when they meet investors. Not only has Mineful been able to meet with mentors. But through their mentor’s networks, the team was able to meet with a gentleman named Dan Woodward. On the advice from Woodward and the TW mentors, they’ve adjusted their target customer from practically any company in any industry to only online retailers. This has helped them refine their product and value proposition to be more relevant to their market.

As the Mineful team graduates from the TW program, their biggest challenge will be raising funding. As we all know, it’s been a tough economy. Money isn’t flowing as freely as it once was. Jaime and Jose will need to continue growing their revenue stream and customer base, before investors will open their wallets. They are targeting small to medium-sized retailers and charge for their service based on the number of customers uploaded into the system. Currently more than 20 businesses are using Mineful to gain a competitive advantage and increase revenue per customer.

Be sure to check out Mineful as they give their final presentation of the TW program at “Pitch Day” next Tuesday. As of this writing, there are still spots available. You can register here. If you can’t make it in person, it will be live-streamed on the Tech Wildcatters site. It will also be on the Ustream homepage.

Give us the 30-second elevator pitch for GuideHop

GuideHop is essentially a peer to peer marketplace for tours and guided activities. Anyone with exceptional knowledge of a place or particular hobby can sign up as a guide and post their tours.

They are free to set their own price and cancelation policy, accept or decline bookings, and learn about customers through their profiles. We even give them to the tools to easily get the word out about their tours through Facebook and Twitter.

Customers browse through a range activities in their city to see which unexpected new experience will grab their interest. With photographs, videos, written descriptions, and reviews from other customers, they can get a clear sense of what they’ll be embarking on. Once they have an excursion picked out, all they have to do is request a time.

Payments are made quickly, easily, and securely online, so all that’s left to do is have a great time exploring with a nifty local guide.

Tell us about the founders, who they are, backgrounds, and why they are passionate about your company

We’re a group of travelers, adventure-seekers, techies,Jackalope lovers, and one Pro Footballer, who are trying to open the door to alternatives from the mundane ways we are expected to explore a new place.

Ryan Schmitz – Co-Founder / CEO – A mountain biker, traveler, and business owner whose entrepreneurial spirit and thirst for adventure are hardly distinguishable.

Darren Woodson – Co-Founder -Three-time Super Bowl champion and five-time Pro Bowl selection. Darren joined ESPN as an NFL analyst in 2005. He appears on NFL Live and SportsCenter, as well as other ESPN platforms throughout the year.

Jeremy Roberts – Co-Founder / CMO – Our Talent Acquisition, Human Resources, and Marketing expert single-handedly guides us through the unforgiving seas of social media and user acquisition to reel in the world’s coolest guides.

T. Grove – CTO – As elusive as the mythical jackalope, T. Grove prefers to fly under the radar. A part of the computer underground scene for years, Mr. Grove has been played a major part in building and creating some of the coolest new technologies and websites for Fortune 500 companies.

Clay Teller – Lead Designer – Clay is responsible for the overall look and feel of Guidehop. He can typically be found at 4am in an Austin coffee shop wearing a t-shirt with a jackalope on it.

Aaron Bell – Aaron is Austin’s Top Hop (Community Manager). He is an expert on Austin’s outdoor offerings and is willing to give you the keys to his city.

Do you have funding? How much?

We are entirely self-funded so far.

What are your startup’s goals for this year?

As word spreads about the site, more guides bring their unique interests and activities to the public, and more customers realize just how easy it is to fill their spare time with new adventures. We expect bookings to increase steadily.

GuideHop.com

With the holiday season quickly approaching (although some would argue it’s already here), work will begin to share attention with seasonal planning and family. Activity tends to slow in offices, people start taking vacations, and so on. But a local North Texas entrepreneur has found himself a rather timely opportunity and is taking advantage of the season to start a brand new business.

Tory Smith has worked in a number of verticals, including banking, online dating, and most recently, online travel. One recent Christmas, Smith discovered how valuable “match-making” can be when applied to a seasonal and niche market. Case in point: He was hanging his Christmas lights on his house, and after getting frustrated during his effort, thought how much he’d rather pay someone to hang them than do it himself. As part of being a homeowner, he tended to work with plenty of contractors that come to the house to do the various things that need done or fixed around the house, like roofers, landscapers, pest control, etc.

But what happens with these traditionally warm weather workers when the cool season comes around? Smith discovered through conversations with them that many of them hung Christmas lights. Also noticing that nearly every house in the neighborhood got into the holiday spirit by putting up Christmas lights, Smith identified an opportunity.

Smith happened to be learning web design and online marketing at the time, and set about creating a lead generation site called DFW Lights matching Christmas light installers with homeowners, and taking a cut of the action. The company is now in it’s 6th year, and last season, during the 3 months surrounding Christmas, total revenues surpassed a quarter of a million dollars. And this is during the economically challenged times we call a down economy.

After attempting to clone the commission-based model in other large Texas markets such as Houston and San Antonio, he ran into challenges where some of his subcontractors were less than ethical; he caught contractors not reporting their work, and was not able to police their activity. So instead of giving up on the commission model, he decided to mimic an existing “pay-per-lead” model akin to Service Magic. This year in time for the holidays he launched Christmas Light Leads (CLL), the first online lead generation company 100% dedicated to the holiday lighting industry. Using a combination of over 25 local holiday lighting websites mixed in with SEO, SEM, and social media strategies, he captures information from homeowners and businesses seeking holiday lighting estimates and, based on zip code, routes them directly to the holiday lighting company in the area. Smith say what sets CLL apart from other lead generation services is how it doesn’t blast the leads to an unrealistic number of contractors, but rather, only sends the leads to the number of contractors the customer requests. “We realize many contractors have been burned by so called ‘lead generation services’. We’ve created a fair model where if a homeowners only wants two estimates in the 75225 zip code, then we only distribute that lead to 2 contractors in that area.” Smith continues, “If a company only wants to receive commercial leads, then they would not be sent a residential lead.” Smith doesn’t allow just anybody with a truck and ladder to subscribe to his service, he requires a minimum of 1 year of experience and proof of liability insurance.

As an experienced product manager, Smith already had a background in writing technical requirements, constructing wireframes, and drafting comps. He hired graphic design out of Singapore, data entry from the Philippines and a gifted development team out of Russia. In less than three months, his lean, global team launched the first online lead generation company dedicated to holiday lighting. Smith says, “I get my fix on being quick and nimble – I dream of some cool functionality for a niche, that in some way, makes life easier. I throw together the requirements and in a matter of days it’s built. Internet project broker services like Elance enable this to happen. This was not possible a decade ago.”

Smith is an avid fan of modern day marketing evangelists such as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Gary Vaynerchuk. After fervently reading Godin’s The Bootstrapper’s Bible, Smith convinced himself he could launch a successful B2B business attracting companies from across the country. Digging into savings and using credit cards, Smith embarked on his first national B2B business. Just a few weeks old, Smith has already garnered support from top holiday lighting franchise Christmas Décor, which has endorsed the CLL program for all 260 of their franchisees.

Smith considers himself a digital marketing entrepreneur and his dream is to build an online lead generation model that is free for all service industries. “Many blue collar contractors and local small businesses are about 10 years behind the times. I want to educate them on effective lead generation and provide a free service to attract quality clients based on good, honest service.” He pitched his idea to the Dallas accelerator program Tech Wildcatters who selected Smith as a finalist. But after careful consideration, knowing his second child was to be born during the middle of the program, Smith withdrew his application at the final hour.

Stay tuned for this latest idea come springtime. I’ve already heard a lot about it and it seems ripe with potential in making the lead generation business more efficient. Smith plans on re-submitting the pitch to the Tech Wildcatters program early next year.

One of the more interesting teams to come out of the most recent Startup Weekend Dallas created Most Epic Day. Their site and future iPhone app is designed to provide REM (reminders, entertainment, and motivation) to bring out the best in you at critical points in the day when you otherwise might struggle. Always tough getting out of bed, staying motivated during the day, or staying on a diet…they encourage you to take the MED approach and let them ‘dial you in.’  

The team made an impact during Startup Weekend when mid-presentation they used their call scheduling feature to cause the nearly 100 cell phones of audience members to buzz, beep and honk at the same moment with an incoming call from JJ, the Most Epic Day gopher mascot, delivering a well-timed inspirational message.

MED sends out “Natural Mood Enhancement”messages called ‘Boosts’ to user’s cell phones. Part of their strategy is to partner with companies like Anheuser-Busch and Weight Watchers under a white-label model called Boost Daily.  Boost Daily allows retail brands to improve retention and relevance in a consumer’s life through not-so-easily-ignored delivery methods.

Headed by Jared Green, Most Epic Day also boasts a pedigree of other respected players in the Dallas startup scene. Green himself runs Green Tree Equity, and is a mentor for Tech Wildcatters. James Jennings, who originally pitched the idea at the opening night of Startup Weekend, is CoFounder of NextPression, which develops smartphone apps based on lifestyle products. Gabriella Draney is Cofounder and Managing Partner of Tech Wildcatters. Daniel Knoodle is Cofounder and Chief Technology Director at Proxomo, and Jason Leblanc, a resident of CoHabitat and Founder of Rentology.com, augments the team with his design talent.

For the wordsmiths among us, who hasn’t stumbled across a word they’ve seen before but never knew what it meant? Or just can’t remember the meaning of the word because it’s been so long since using it? I’ve experienced it countless times, and have always resorted to Wikipedia, Dictionary.com or Merriam-Webster.com. Maybe you’re an aspiring writer who’s continually looking for the perfect word to complete your masterpiece. Well, you’re in luck. A new product from Agile Tortoise, aims to be your linguistic sidekick.

Greg Pierce originally founded Agile Tortoise in Dallas in 2006 as a consulting firm. And in his navigation around the web, he noted something missing from the typical word reference destinations — a clean user experience that was actually engaging and encouraged more interaction. So Pierce created a mobile app called Terminology. It’s available on the App Store for the iPhone and iPad. To accomodate web users and those not on the iOS platform, Pierce created term.ly. The goal was to make something with a Web 2.0 look-and-feel that people would want to return to time and again. Term.ly will auto-detect on mobile devices, so users on other mobile platforms like Android will be able to use the service just fine. Both Terminology and term.ly support sharing terms and phrases through your favorite social networks, like Twitter and Facebook.

In the future, there are plans to integrate term.ly into users’ websites and blogs to make sharing easier. Agile Tortoise is not seeking funding at the moment, as it prefers to go the route of organic growth, while the company focuses on niche apps and products. Some of Agile Tortoise’s latest creations are BoxFinder, which allows you to browse letterboxes (treasure hunts involving cracking codes and following clues to find a prize), and Tweeku, a tool that offers thesaurus lookups and lets authors store draft tweets for sending out the perfect tweet at a later time.

Here’s a sneak peek at Terminology in action.