The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship is Building Alliances and Fulfilling Dreams

This summer the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship celebrated its having successfully assisted in the launch of 100 new technology ventures, resulting in new companies and jobs for Houston.

Notable examples of these new businesses include Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc., founded by Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley, University Professor, the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics at Rice, and Molecular Electronics Corp., started by Jim Tour, the Chao Professor of Chemistry.

But the Rice Alliance, a collaborative effort among the George R. Brown School of Engineering, the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, has assisted in the start-up of lesser-known ventures as well. These include Advanced Reality Inc., a software company started by two Rice undergraduates; FeelPretty.com, an online lingerie store founded by a Rice alumna; and NanoSpectra Biosciences, a nanotechnology biomedical company developed by a member of the Rice faculty.

”Through the collaboration and hard work of many in the technical, entrepreneurship and investor communities, the Rice Alliance has been pleased to serve as a catalyst in helping to launch many new technology ventures in the Houston area,” said Steve Currall, who is founding director of the Rice Alliance and the William and Stephanie Sick Professor of Entrepreneurship. Currall also is associate professor of management, psychology and statistics at the Jones School.

The mission of the Rice Alliance is to support technology commercialization and the creation of new technology-based ventures in Houston. In addition, the Rice Alliance provides entrepreneurial education and a network of resources to emerging companies. Since its inception in the fall of 1999, the Rice Alliance has provided resources and assistance to ventures that have raised more than
$25 million in seed funding.

The flagship Rice Alliance event is its Technology Innovation Forum, which is held four to six times per year. Presenters are chosen based upon business ideas submitted by Rice faculty, staff, students and alumni as well as by technology entrepreneurs from the Houston community. The audience is comprised of investors, mentors, advisers, entrepreneurs and service providers. Each presenter receives feedback and suggestions on their presentation, as well as the opportunity to seek out help from members of the audience. Every forum is kicked off by a keynote address from a successful entrepreneur or investor.

Jeff Hoye and Derek Ruths are two beneficiaries of Rice Alliance resources. Their company, Advanced Reality Inc., is a start-up software firm that makes existing and new applications collaborative, without the need for complex programming or expensive infrastructure. The company’s flagship product, Presence-AR, enables enterprises, commercial software vendors and service providers to enhance current and new applications with secure, real-time, cross-platform collaboration capabilities.

When Hoye and Ruths presented their Presence software system at a Rice Alliance forum in September 2000, they both were still undergraduates — Jeff a senior in computer science and Derek studying physics, computer science and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. They had partnered to create a software system that would add collaborative capabilities to advanced applications developed in prior research projects. The two Rice students developed the concept of a software platform that would make those applications and any other applications collaborative, exponentially reducing the development time needed to create new collaborative environments.

Members of the Rice Alliance, including Dan Watkins, a co-founder, walked the two young entrepreneurs through the process of protecting their intellectual property, creating a business plan and raising the capital needed to launch their new company. Today, Advanced Reality Inc. has raised $2.3 million for development and production. The company is headed by Chief Executive Officer Linda Spain, also a Rice graduate.

”The support and industry contacts provided by the Rice Alliance have helped us to successfully form a company that is now selling software products based on the research we conducted as undergraduates,” Ruths said. ”Rice Alliance provided a launching pad for taking our technology out of the lab and into commercial markets.”

”With the help of the Rice Alliance we’ve been able to build a strong management team made up of experienced executives with both software and start-up experience,” added Hoye. ”The Alliance’s network of contacts in the Houston technology market has been indispensable to jump-starting our company.”

Hoye and Ruths both are excited about the enthusiastic reception their products have received in commercial markets. Presence-AR has applications in many fields, including the energy, chemical, medical and financial industries. Their architecture is not bound to a particular hardware platform, operating system, application or user interface and provides a full range of collaborative features, eliminating the need to modify applications and the need for all users to employ the same application. Furthermore, it is the only collaborative platform that allows a session to continue even when the host signs off or is disconnected. For more information, visit their Web site at < www.advancedreality.com >.

On the opposite end of the business spectrum from Advanced Reality is FeelPretty.com, founded by Rice alumna Lisa Judson ’77. She submitted her business plan for FeelPretty.com to the Rice Alliance Steering Council in April of 2000 and was chosen to present at the first Business Plan Presentation Forum held May 6, 2000. The business plan forums are educational events designed to provide presenters with candid and constructive coaching on the components of a business plan. Judson brought her high-end, plus-size lingerie with her and was the highlight of the event.

Her company has become a successful dot-com venture, and she has just signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to display her collection in the PX System Online Mall, the only outside vendor of lingerie invited to do so. The Online Mall is available to all active military personnel, their dependants and retired military. Last year, it posted sales of $100 million.

Judson, who also serves as president of Feelpretty.com, previously worked extensively with start-up companies and rapidly growing businesses. While at Arthur Andersen & Co. from 1980 to ’87, she was one of the first audit managers to work in the Enterprise Group practice area assisting clients who were growing rapidly. She left Arthur Andersen to become chief financial officer of a start-up biotechnology company located in Houston and also served as chief financial officer of a drilling contractor. In addition, she has been a consultant to numerous small and medium-sized companies on financial and operational matters. Judson holds a bachelor of arts and an M.B.A. from Rice University.

”The Rice Alliance networking opportunities and the advice from members have really helped me develop my business,” Judson commented. ”It’s also great to see the Rice community taking a leadership role in assisting entrepreneurs.”

Judson still is a frequent attendee at Rice Alliance events. Check out her line of hard-to-find sizes and quality lingerie at < www.feelpretty.com >.

The innovative research of Jennifer West, associate professor in bioengineering and chemical engineering at Rice, has turned into another venture launched through the Rice Alliance called NanoSpectra Biosciences.

West first presented at a special Rice Alliance forum in November 2000, co-hosted with The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, that focused on life sciences. More recently she participated in the Alliance’s Nanotechnology Innovation Forum held March 1, presenting NanoSpectra Biosciences’ plans to use metal nanoshells as the basis for several new forms of medical therapies, including cancer treatment and wound care.

Her work involves the use of metal nanoshells, a novel class of nanoparticles with tunable optical properties, which can be designed to absorb light at particular wavelengths across the visible and infrared spectrum. For biomedical applications, nanoshells are designed to strongly absorb light in the near infrared, where tissue is relatively transparent, and convert this light to heat. Several medical applications are being developed based on this concept, including targeted heating for destruction of tumor cells and laser tissue welding.

”Rice Alliance events have facilitated the transfer of technology developed in my laboratories at Rice into the commercial sector,” West noted. ”Interactions with the Alliance have been invaluable to me in this process.” West also is investigating additional applications, including photothermally modulated drug delivery, rapid whole-blood immunoassays and optically controlled valves for microfluidics devices. Rice Alliance audiences should expect to hear more from her.

In addition to the Innovation Technology Forums and the Business Plan Presentation Forums, the Alliance also hosts joint events with various other organizations, such as the Southwest Business Plan Competition, which is co-sponsored by the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and held at Rice University each spring. This event has become one of the premier new venture business plan competitions in the nation. Teams from top MBA graduate programs around the United States take part in the annual competition at Rice each April. The event is one of only a handful of regional qualifiers for the international MOOT CORP Business Plan Competition. In addition, the winning teams receive cash prizes totaling $30,000.

Upcoming Rice Alliance events this fall include an entrepreneurial education workshop in conjunction with Rice’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology. To find out more about the Rice Alliance and its future events, check its Web site at < www.alliance.rice.edu >, and if you have a business idea that is just too good to ignore, contact the Rice Alliance at < alliance@rice.edu >.

— Trish Leggett is the program coordinator for the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship.