Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Eureka Instruments – Water Quality Instrumentation

Austin is an environmentally conscious city which gives substantial attention to water quality in the area due to assets such as the Edwards Aquifer and Barton Springs.

I met Stuart Garner earlier this week at an Entrepreneur training CTAN holds at the MCC building. (The training gives entrepreneurs some insight into how angels fund deals and the session also covers the Emerging Technology Fund program.) Stuart runs a successful startup making water quality testing instruments, called Eureka Instruments. Eureka designs and markets water-quality instruments called multiprobes. Multiprobes measure such parameters as temperature, pH, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and water level. Biologists use the devices to measure the quality of water impacted by the effects of urbanization or a contaminant spill.

The water quality market has been growing steadily for 30 years at about a 15% per annum rate and is about a $60M market place. It’s great to see innovation applied to protecting the environment.

Best regards,
Hall T.

Monday, October 8, 2007

Minggl—Social Networking of Social Networking Sites

If you’re an avid social networking user you know the drill. Login to Facebook and review your profile. Login to MySpace and check your favorites. And so on and so forth. Each social networking site has its own login and password requirements. But what if you could login just once and all your sites are now accessible? That’s what Minggl does for you.

It can update photos and videos from anywhere across the web and consolidate friends lists and organize them better.

The entrepreneur behind the scenes is Dewey Gaedcke who according to his LinkedIn profile holds the survival record (5 days without water) in Kilauea Volcano national park in Hawaii. Dewey talks about how Minggl gives the user the ability to bring all of one’s content, whether if by YouTube, Flickr, MySpace or any other site, and consolidate it into a package that can be placed by the user in a position on the web and even change the access priority on the content so the user controls what others can see.

Best regards,
Hall T.