Entrepreneurial

IdeaPaint co-founder Jeff Avallon insisted his product has a real “wow factor” and that was supported by our experts, who felt the coating that turns any surface into a dry-erase whiteboard had great consumer upside.

The original concept for IdeaPaint was hatched nearly a decade ago by Avallon’s Babson College classmate John Goscha, who grew frustrated with the limitations of writing on large sheets of paper taped to walls in his dormitory (see original story here). Five years later, after a lengthy testing period and more than a few flops, a sellable product emerged and IdeaPaint was launched in 2008.

“It didn’t take us five years to develop a working product; it took us five years to develop a safe product,” said Avallon, who came onboard with co-founder Morgen Newman in 2006, shortly after Goscha – who has since left the company – had been told by a paint test lab his concept was impossible.

“We weren’t the only people to think of this idea, we were just the only people to commercialize it and make it marketable,” confessed Avallon, who added it had to compare with the “gold standard” of dry-erase surfaces, which is the porcelain-on-steel- whiteboards that are prevalent in most universities. “There are lots of complaints about whiteboards out there and we wanted to fix all those.”

Avallon said the Boston-area startup initially received four rounds of angel financing of roughly $1 million that came primarily from family, friends, professors and classmates.

Jon Weiner envisions a day when he can quickly build a new hospital utilizing American best practices and state-of-the-art technology anywhere in the world. While our experts were excited by Weiner’s healthcare concept they were mixed on his ability to ultimately pull it off.

Weiner co-founded the New York-based startup OR International LLC (www.orintl.com) with the goal of exporting a higher-quality American brand of healthcare throughout the world, with a primary focus on improving patient treatment (see original story here). In just six years ORI has opened specialty hospitals in the UK, Africa and Cyprus.

“Our first hospital in the UK has the highest patient satisfaction rates of any hospital in England,” said Weiner, whose company operates five specialty hospitals in the UK, one in Cyprus as a partnership with the American Heart Institute and last January opened the doors on a new $100-million facility in Botswana, Africa.

What would happen if your laptop was lost, stolen or accidentally dropped in a pool? Would you be able to easily retrieve all the megabytes of precious content housed in its memory banks?

These are the questions that drove Seattle software developer Kory Gill to leave an almost 20-year career at Microsoft and start his own online data-storage company. For years, Gill has sought a Web-based storage solution that would safeguard his priceless family photos, home movies and other important digital data, but never found a single solution that addressed all his specific needs.

“If these are irreplaceable files, you need to have the same type of insurance for your data as you would of any other asset, like your home or car,” said Gill, who often shared his frustrations with friend and fellow Microsoft programmer Marius Nita.