Campus Corner
Duke is up next in our recurring Campus Corner feature. Matt Nash, the Managing Director for Social Entrepreneurship at the Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, conducted a Q&A with the student founders of Oryza, a startup that teaches you how to intentionally miss a free throw yet somehow get your own rebound and then make an unlikely floater to send the game to overtime. (Too soon, UNC fans?)
Sorry [checks notes]—Oryza actually uses sensors to measure soil moisture and then tells farmers via an app when to flood and drain their paddies and how much fertilizer to apply. The primary goals are to increase yields while reducing pollution both from fertilizers and emissions. Given than 3.5 billion people eat rice as a daily staple, it’s a big problem—and opportunity—indeed. The team of college sophomores is made up of Shrey Majmudar (Business Lead), Amjad Syedibrahim (Tech Lead), Nitin Subramanian (Partnerships Lead), and Maggie Pan (Product Lead). They won Duke's Hult Prize Challenge last semester and have advanced to the Hult Prize's international finals. Read the full Duke Campus Corner Q&A here, and you can also revisit past entries from UNC and NC State.
Innovation Summit
Being innovative is hard. Taking the next step to get that innovation out to the door and into the world—especially as your company gets larger—might be just as hard. The Durham-based PlazaBridge Group, an innovation-focused consulting group, is hosting a full-day summit on Wednesday, Feb. 26, in RTP to help address those very issues. Tickets for the 2020 Product Innovation Summit are $239 through Feb. 18. Speakers will include Paige Mullis, the innovation expert at textile company Glen Raven; Terence Mills, the CEO of AI.io; and SAS Systems Architect Michael Thomas. Here are “Speaker Series” stories from PlazaBridge about Paige and Terence. Meanwhile you can find our own preview story on the event here.
Twitter-ific
Twitter can be a time-sucking cesspool of humanity, but every now and then it’s pretty awesome. You might recall our story from last April on Sani, the Indian formalwear fashion startup led by sisters Niki and Ritika Shamdasan. Well yesterday, New York Times business reporter Sapna Maheshwari posted that the unicorn fashion startup Rent The Runway was testing Indian formalwear, specifically three Sani designs. That led Sana Amanat, a Marvel exec, to volunteer her desire to invest in “any entrepreneurs out there who wanna start a South Asian American fashion company.” Next, Hollywood star Mindy Kaling Tweeted, “Oooooh I love this development.”
I saw Mindy’s Tweet and alerted Niki, who hadn’t yet seen the thread (but surely would have heard about it soon enough). Niki promptly Tweeted at Sana, who said that she’d love to chat, so Niki slid into her DMs. We hope this leads to something exciting for Sani. And if it happens to result an investment, we hereby waive our usual finder’s fee.
Scaling Up
Anthony Rotoli, the newish CEO of Chapel Hill’s Terra Dotta, says that the company plans to expand its workforce this year by about 30 percent—that’s some 20-30 new employees—to further fuel its growth. Terra Dotta offers cloud solutions and apps to help universities automate and streamline their travel and international study programs. The startup also recently made Scot Wingo’s latest Tweener list. TechWire and TBJ have more.
Tech Tracker
Do you want to know where Junior, Rover or Grandpa has roamed off to? Raleigh’s WISER Systems, which provides real-time asset tracking, just might have the answer. WISER’s new Find-ly product line are small wearables that provide real-time location data with “inches-level precision,” which sounds equally awesome and terrifying. One early market that WISER has already developed is the assisted living and elder-care industry, which wants the devices for use cases such as sending an alert if a patient in a memory care unit wanders off. TechWire has more details.
Entrepreneur Corps
Gov. Cooper’s Entrepreneurship Council has selected its inaugural 36-member class of the Entrepreneur Corps, which officially launched yesterday. The program received 109 applications from students at 27 universities and community colleges from across the state. The students will work for the next 45 days on projects designed to make state government more efficient and effective through technology, then share their final results with Gov. Cooper in April.
Hail To The Chief
Showing that it’s possible to choose a new president without a months-long grind of caucuses and primaries, Cary's Epic Games has named former Nike exec Adam Sussman to the post. Adam was the chief digital officer at Nike, and now he plans to Just Do It for the maker of Fortnite.
Tech Legends
Joan Siefert Rose, the former head of CED and current CEO of LaunchBio, has been named a “Tech Legend” by WRAL TechWire. Bravo! You should read TechWire’s Q&A with Joan here.
Future Tech Legend Brooks Bell, meanwhile, also graces TechWire’s digital pages to share two important pieces of news: 1) A “groundbreaking blood test” has determined that there’s a 95 percent chance that not only is her Stage 3 colon cancer gone, but that it won’t return; 2) She’s hosting what might be the first-ever Colonoscopy Gala on Feb. 28 at CAM Raleigh to raise money for the Colorectal Cancer Alliance. You can register or donate here.
Extra Bit
Early-bird pricing for the CED Venture Connect summit (March 17-19) ends at midnight tomorrow. We'll be there!
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