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Stanford Business Magazine Online

 

New Ventures

A showcase of products and services offered from new businesses recently launched by alumni and current students of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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Flinc
Need a long-distance ride on the autobahn? Or maybe just a lift to the store? Flinc, a German ride-sharing network, was cofounded by Klaus Dibbern, MBA '93.

Mini-carpools can form in minutes using a computer or smartphone. Flinc's algorithm matches riders and drivers in real time and calculates detours and price. Within four weeks of the company's launch in July 2011, Flinc claimed 25,000 registered users. Dibbern is CEO.

Social Finance
As student costs increase, Social Finance offers Stanford business school alumni the opportunity to invest in future alumni through a pooled fund that grants fixed-rate loans to current students. Founded in early 2011 by Mike Cagney, Ian Brady, and Daniel Macklin, all Sloan '11, and James Finnigan, MBA '11, the organization had secured almost $2 million in alumni funding by November. Besides filling a financial need, "SoFi's online community provides students with the opportunity to engage and interact with alumni vested in their success," Brady said.

Carbon Lighthouse
Brenden Millstein, MBA/MS Environment and Resources '10, and Raphael Rosen founded Carbon Lighthouse to help companies shrink their carbon footprint by using energy more intelligently. After clients learn to generate their own energy and make their existing facilities more efficient, Carbon Lighthouse helps them purchase carbon allowances in order to erase their total footprint. Millstein and Rosen were named 2011 Echoing Green fellows for their work. Of the nearly 3,000 social ventures that applied, Carbon Lighthouse was the only environmental startup so honored.

Customer Underground
Melanie Kansil, MBA '03, is CEO of the social website Customer Underground, which helps Australian consumers keep tabs on what's good and what's not in shops, restaurants, and professional services Down Under. Kansil cofounded the firm with her husband, Andrew Jones, MBA '03, and two friends. The site started by covering Sydney and environs, but intends to include the entire country plus overseas companies that ship to Australian customers.

Evoz
Equip two mobile devices with the Evoz app, and you can keep tabs on your little darling from a hotel room in Paris, your office, or the backyard, say company cofounders Avishai Shoham, MBA '08; Yasmin Lukat, MBA '06; and Ruwan Welaratna. The Evoz baby monitor features an algorithm that distinguishes crying from background noises as well as from coos and other less alarming baby sounds. When baby does cry, Evoz sends out an alert by text, email, or phone. Evoz began shipping in October 2011.

iSoccer
Former Stanford and professional soccer player Corey Woolfolk, MBA '11, is director of business development for iSoccer, an online training site that aims to improve the technical development of soccer players from age 4 through adulthood. The organization, which was founded by former members of the Stanford team, assesses players individually and targets their training to fit. So far, iSoccer has made more than a half-million assessments and reached players and coaches in 26 countries.

NeuroSapient
Tony Lazar's most recent startup, NeuroSapient, is partnering with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in developing a medical device that uses radar to monitor patients for traumatic brain injury. The device uses such low power that it is appropriate for relatively long-term use. NeuroSapient is developing sensors that will issue an alarm when bleeding in the brain is detected, thus freeing health care professionals from constant attendance. The company is the third health-related venture for Lazar, MBA '89.

NextDrop
Indian villagers who don't know when their next drop of water will arrive are getting help from a text message system that alerts them when the communal water tap is turned on. Developed by Ashish Jhina, MBA/MS Environment and Resources, Class of '12, and teammates from UC–Berkeley, NextDrop began a pilot project in Hubli, India, in 2010 and officially launched in September 2011. The organization has won several awards for its humanitarian efforts, as well as one from the 2011 Knight News Challenge, which sees the system as "replicable in any community as a way to distribute all types of community information."

PresenceLearning
Clay Whitehead, MBA '08, grew up with learning disabilities and ADHD, and his MBA classmate Jack Lynch witnessed the struggles of a cousin with autism spectrum disorder. In 2009, they came up with the idea of PresenceLearning, a web platform where speech-language pathologists offer online speech therapy to K–12 students through videoconferencing and online exercises. By the fall of 2011 PresenceLearning had delivered 20,000 speech therapy sessions and been signed up by dozens of public school districts.

Reach.ly
Andris Berzins, MBA '98, is cofounder and non-executive chairman of Reach.ly, a Latvia-based service for the travel industry that mines Twitter to find travelers who may be prospective hotel guests. Launched in August 2011, Reach.ly's service is global, covering 15,000 cities worldwide. It plans to branch out from hotels to include airlines and other travel-related companies as customers. Berzins is working on a generic tool to make better sense of social media by identifying trends and searching for patterns.

Spinifex Fans
Ceiling fans are considered the stalwart of green, domestic cooling in Australia, alone or even working with air conditioning, but their design often leaves something to be desired. James Hole, MBA '02, founded Sydney-based Spinifex Fans to provide interior designers, architects, and other design-minded people with a range of stylish fans and lighting fixtures. Spinifex ships throughout Asia and the South Pacific.

TransLattice
Cofounded by Frank Huerta, MBA '93, TransLattice offers geographically dispersed companies a computing platform that keeps data closest to the office that needs it or in the cloud, where it is available to all branches. The company claims that spreading data across an organization rather than storing it in a centralized data center will cut IT costs and reduce the effects of outages.

Wildfire Interactive
Cofounders Alain Chuard, MBA '07, and Victoria Ransom wanted to run a sweepstakes contest on Facebook for their first company, Access Travel, but couldn't find the right marketing software to do it. Chuard designed something called "Promotion Builder," and out of that idea came Wildfire Interactive, which offers the tools for an online, interactive marketing campaign that will spread like, well, wildfire across multiple social networks. Chuard and Ransom sold what is now Access Adventure Travel in 2010.