Seven innovative companies receive IQ Awards

BOULDER – Seven companies received awards at the Boulder County Business Report’s 13th annual IQ Awards held Wednesday, Oct. 3, at the Boulder Theater.

In a new format this year, winners were chosen by a panel of judges after finalists made short pitches at the event. The audience had the honor of selecting the Innovation of the Year. In the past, winners had been selected by judges prior to the event.

The audience chose MobileDay Inc. and its mobile app that makes connecting to conference calls easy as the Innovation of the Year. (See story, 3B.)

Sporian Microsystems Inc., Crocs Inc., Tagwhat Inc., Vertiba Inc., Center for ReSource Conservation and LeaseRunner Ltd. each won in their respective category.

The panel of judges that selected finalists were Paul Jerde, University of Colorado; Jerry W. Lewis, Upstream Communications LLC; Tim Bour, Innovation Center of the Rockies; Alex Sammoury, Longmont Entrepreneurial Network; and Susan Graf, former president of the Boulder Chamber.

Graf, Sammoury and Bour judged the event live and selected the six category winners.

Event sponsors included Bolder Staffing Inc., the Boulder Economic Council, Forethought.net, Ehrhardt Keefe Steiner & Hottman PC, Connect First Inc., Freeman Myre Inc., Wells Fargo Bank, Amgen Inc., Colt Print Services Inc., Flatirons Bank, Photo Craft Imaging and Mad360.

Here are snapshots of winners and finalists:

Business Services

Winner

Vertiba Inc.: The Boulder-based company provides project management, business process design and development services to help clients customize Salesforce.com to their needs. Salesforce.com is a cloud-based platform for customer relationship management and custom development. It also helps clients migrate from Microsoft Exchange and other legacy applications to Google Apps for Business such as Gmail, calendar, documents and online storage.

Finalists

Connect First: The Boulder-based company’s Cloud Routing product enables clients to manage spikes in call traffic through the use of multiple destinations, while improving business continuity and load balancing by using the flexible deployment and expansion options that only a SaaS offering can deliver.

Gorilla Logic Inc.: The Boulder-based company provides custom application development services on the ground and in the cloud. Gorilla Logic’s innovative work with emerging development platforms led to the creation of two open-source tools for automated testing: MonkeyTalk, for iPhone/iPad/Android applications, and formerly called FoneMonkey, and FlexMonkey fir flex applications.

Hardware

Winner

Sporian Microsystems Inc.: The Lafayette-based company makes a suite of sensors that withstands ultra-high temperatures and corrosive environments. These pressure sensors are used to increase fuel efficiency in gas turbine engines. Energy-generation companies likely will be the first to adopt them.

Finalists

Spectra Logic Corp.: The Boulder-based company created Certified Media with CarbideClean, which was developed to protect the lifespan of tapes for data storage. It uses a carbide head to pre-clean media prior to shipment to customers. It removes microscopic debris from the surface of new or green media and improves the reliability, availability and longevity of the drives and media.

Stratom Inc.: The Boulder-based company has created the Adaptive Specialty system that provides robotic tools for military and municipal first responders dealing with improvised explosive devices, homemade bombs and hazardous materials. Each robotic tool has mounts that can be used with different robotic platforms. The tools can wrap and cut wire, penetrate light-cased containers and disable devices.

Mobile Apps

Winner

Tagwhat Inc.: The Boulder-based company has created a mobile app that runs on iOS and Android, and uses the GPS capabilities of a device to determine where users are. The app then brings up web-based content to tell users more about their location. Tagwhat can be thought of as a mobile tour guide, one that is always updating itself with the latest information from the web. The material Tagwhat retrieves includes text, video and pictures. Businesses and organizations that use the app can link Facebook and Twitter pages to their channels.

Finalists

MobileDay Inc.: The Boulder-based company has created a mobile app that serves as an “easy” button for conference calls. The app provides one-touch entry into any conference call on any service, whether you are a host of the call or a guest. It is available for free on iPhone and Android smartphones. (Innovation of the Year winner.)

Techtionary: The Boulder-based company has created a mobile app that serves as a study and training tool for iPad and iPhone users. iFlipTips focuses on providing users with a variety of tools to create flashcards that increase learning speed and help retain and recall more information in less time. It can be used to create multimedia presentations and personal corporate libraries.

Natural/Green/Outdoor

Winner

Crocs Inc.: The Niwot-based shoemaker has produced a line of color-changing shoes called Chameleons. The shoes are made with Crocs’ Croslite material with photochromic technology. When exposed to ultra-violet light, the shoes change from being translucent to a vibrant color.

Finalists

Cheribundi Inc: The Boulder-based company has created a sport drink made from tart Montmorency cherries. The company claims Cheribundi juice helps athletes’ muscles recover more quickly. The juice is believed to help sufferers of gout and people who have problems sleeping.

EcoSmart Homes: The Boulder-based company has created Future Fit Your Home, a service in which staff goes into homes, assesses energy and comfort problems, and proposes solutions that can include air sealing, insulating, replacing heating and cooling systems, providing new windows, and installing solar electric and thermal systems. The innovation is the special software EcoSmart co-developed that provides financial metrics lenders can trust.

Nonprofits

Winner

Center for ReSource Conservation: The Boulder-based nonprofit created the Garden-In-A-Box program, which provides low-cost, preplanned xeric gardens to residents. It offers people a chance to save water, beautify their homes and save money. The gardens are designed by expert landscapers, and are sold at less than half the price compared with big-box stores. The Boulder-based nonprofit created the Garden-In-A-Box program, which provides low-cost, preplanned xeric gardens to residents. It offers people a chance to save water, beautify their homes and save money. The gardens are designed by expert landscapers, and are sold at less than half the price compared with big-box stores.

Finalists

Attention Homes: The Boulder-based nonprofit runs a youth shelter. It created a fundraiser, Inaugural Sleep Out for Homeless Youth, which will have community leaders “sleep out” on the lawn to get a real glimpse of life as a homeless youth, exposing themselves to weather elements, dangers and other uncertainties that come from living on the streets.

Sister Carmen Community Center: The Lafayette-based nonprofit received Family Resource Center status that will allow the organization to collaborate with other nonprofits, private organizations and government entities to enhance an individual and a family’s capacity to become economically stable. (This nonprofit organization withdrew its nomination after it was selected as a finalist.)

Software

Winner

LeaseRunner Ltd.: The Louisville-based company created a web software application called LeaseRunner that integrates digital applications, tenant screening, e-signature leases and electronic rent collection into one paperless process for the real estate industry. It merges data from applications into lease documents and other processes, saving data-entry time and reducing error.

Finalists

Amadeus Consulting Inc.: The Boulder-based company designed a cloud-based software application called Brief-Lynx that allows users to create, package and optimize documents efficiently while also giving the documents a professional, polished look. It simplifies creation of cross-document hyperlinks, incorporates multimedia files and improves security. Its primary market is the legal profession.

Confio Corp.: The Boulder-based company produces Ignite, which is used by database administrators and developers to monitor and analyze performance of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and databases on both physical and VMware virtual servers. Its AlarmVM is used by administrators to proactively manage a rapidly growing VMware installation.

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