Startups Display Posters at June NJEN Meeting
Startup founders at the New Jersey Entrepreneurial Network Gathering of Angels event this June had an opportunity to “speed date” with angels serving the New Jersey tech market. They also displayed posters about their startups to the angel community and others attending. The startup deemed best in show was able to pitch to the community during its luncheon meeting.
That startup was DocFlight (New York), an international telemedicine company connecting Chinese patients to top U.S. doctors, and represented at the event by cofounder and CEO Sally Wang. “It’s inspired by my journey to help my mother conquer cancer. She is fortunate enough that she got a great doctor in the U.S. [for] her breast cancer, but many patients in China are far less fortunate. The five-year survival [rate from] all cancers in China is 30 percent. In the U.S., it is more than double that. We want to do something about that vast difference by connecting Chinese patients to top U.S. doctors using technology in the most cost-effective way.” DocFlight is a member of the Health IT Connections iLab and is building out an international end-to-end telemedicine solution. “We have a machine learning automatic translation module and a telemedicine module that works internationally,” Wang said.
Karen Sullivan, who teaches mathematics at NJIT, brought a poster to the NJEN event that talked about the Radius Technology and Art Campus (Newark), which takes projects that combine technology and art — like wearable technology or electronic music — to schools and community organizations. The reason she is doing this is so “we get our hands on some small electronic things, we get our hands started to programming. Instead of just learning things we are doing it hands-on, bringing back the craft of engineering and coding.” Her plan is to locate her company at the NJIT Enterprise Development Center (Newark) and teach people to make and sell items at the intersection of technology and art.
Scott Blow, real-estate and economic development expert, was pitching Holistic Solar. Founded by physicist Zoltan Kiss, Holistic Solar has been in the solar-energy space for many years. “What he has developed is the newest technology in thin film solar manufacturing, which provides panels that are more efficient than the current panels on the market.” Now the company is raising money to purchase a manufacturing facility in Germany. Holistic Solar is proposing to buy that factory, which was originally built for $60 million, for $6 million to further “fire up our processes.”
HeadsUp7 (New Brunswick) founders Ashish Patel and Neil Shah, whom we’ve interviewed before, said that they were on the verge of releasing their iOS app, to be followed shortly by their Android app. HeadsUp7 is a mobile social media platform where people can create media in 360VR format and video, share it and monetize it. Right now, the founders allow 3D, but in the future they will be only accepting 360 VR on their platform, they told us. The startup uses machine learning and data science to give users an immersive experience. “We may do some business-to-business as well. Our platform can be used for corporate training, corporate stories as well. We are focusing on millennials because they are the ones creating content right now,” said Shah. He noted that their focus areas are news, fashion/cosmetics and entrepreneurship. “Many millennials are into entrepreneurship, and we would like to be the platform that they can use to support each other’s entrepreneurship endeavors,” he added.
StaffSmart (Garden City, N.Y.) cofounder Joseph Arlia presented a poster about the company, which had recently presented at a TechLaunch BullPen. StaffSmart has a B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) staffing solution for caterers, a category that has unique staffing needs in the marketplace. Arlia told NJTechWeekly.com that the startup had just completed product integration with Total Party Planner (Ashland, Va.), one of the largest catering software companies in the U.S. “We are now looking at working with some other payroll companies in terms of integration.” Arlia said.
