NeoTech Incubator Welcomes Fledglings

Howard County's NeoTech Incubator held its grand opening last month, celebrating with the announcement of two more start-up technology companies as tenants.

“We wish it was there a year ago, providing the environment to grow” said new tenant Rajiv Jain of a2z, Inc., which develops web site software for trade shows.

The incubator is run by the county's Economic Development Authority and is funded by county, state and private money. It offers small technology companies low-cost rent, administrative services, fiber optic wired offices and consulting support to help their businesses grow.

Jain's company already has eight employees, four of whom will work at the incubator in the renovated AlliedSignal building on Bendix Road in Columbia. It has signed about a dozen clients, including the U.S. Department of Commerce and several trade associations.

With the company's a2zShow software, “Each trade show has its own web site” that allows participants or exhibitors to take a quick tour of the show, see a virtual booth for every exhibitor, register for the conference or hotel, or sign up to be an exhibitor, explained Jain. For a tour of the company's software on its web site, go to http://www.a2zInc.net.

“It's a full blown turnkey solution” for conferences and trade shows, said Jain, who has a background in information technology and association web design. “Each exhibitor has a storefront that they go to manage and monitor.

“It's a huge market,” added Jain.

In February, there had been a preliminary announcement of the fourth incubator tenant, Dot.21 Real-Time Systems, Inc., which makes a software product that supports data communication between embedded devices, like microprocessors.

Dot.21, like the incubator's first tenant, Syntonics Corp., which is making super-accurate timing devices for spacecraft, is a “technology transfer” from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in North Laurel. It is part of APL's effort to come up with commercial uses of technology originally developed for the military or the government. Dot.21 will pay APL licensing fees and royalties when the software is actually sold commercially after another six months of product development, said Dot.21 vice president Paul Bade.

Bade, an APL employee since 1982, has worked for 10 years on this product, described as “multiprocessing middleware.” He agreed that what the software does is difficult to explain to someone outside the IT field.

The business of Medisolv, Inc., the incubator's second tenant, is a little easier to understand. The company is making interactive web solutions for the medical field, according to Medisolv CEO Zahid Butt, a gastroenterologist who has stopped practicing medicine to develop his web company.

“We're encouraged by the initial reception,” based on a presentation he made to the Maryland Society of Health Information Systems Management, said Butt. “They think we're on the right track.”

Most hospital and health care organizations “have a static web site,” and their internal intranet sites that share information within the organization are not very interactive.

Butt hopes to provide health care providers with a single web platform “that reaches all their constituencies” and is customized to their organization. Such a site, for instance, would allow patients to set up an appointment or allow relatives to send a gift to a hospitalized loved one. It would also allow doctors to look up patient information that is password protected and securely delivered.

“We're very confident that we'll have a live client in the next two months,” said Butt.

The NeoTech opening featured a luncheon for 150 county officials and business leaders hosted by Ajilon Services, a Towson-based information technology company with 15,000 employees.

Ajilon senior vice president Dennis Eppley noted that Ajilon was once a small start-up three decades ago. “We really enjoy helping small companies,” said Eppley. “They run into tremendous obstacles along the way.” They often don't have the management, the finances or the technology to take them to the next level.

“Statistics show that when companies enter an incubator, they start with three employees and leave with 10,” said Eppley, and their annual revenue growth is about $230,000 a year. “Eighty-seven percent stay in business and stay in the business community and hopefully give something back.”