Planting the seed

Good ideas will get you grant money

By Jess Kilby

Have you been hankering for an organic repellent to keep deer and small animals out of your garden? Wishing you could heat your home with biomass? Wondering when the day of spill-free oil changes for your truck will arrive?

Well, these technologies aren’t exactly on the market yet, but, thanks to a recent round of grants from the Maine Technology Institute, they’re one step closer to becoming a reality.

MTI, created by the Legislature in 1999, released more than $2.3 million in grant money to Maine businesses earlier this month, for 16 Seed Grants and eight Development Awards. The Seed Grants, generally in the ballpark of $10,000, are aimed at helping tech-sector companies bring promising ideas through the research-and-development phase. The bigger-ticket Development Awards, which can be as large as $500,000 each, are also for R&D. These awards have to be paid back if the venture is commercially successful, though, and the payback required can be up to two times the amount of the original award.

The winning Seed Grant projects were plucked from a pool of 47 applicants; the Development Award winners, from 22 hopefuls. Some of the winning proposals are a bit arcane, and will likely have little impact on the daily life of the average person. (Lubec’s RJ Peacock Canning Co. got a grant, for example, to “isolate and develop culture techniques for wild benthic diatoms.” Rough translation: They’re trying to grow a better fish food.) But others are actually quite intriguing, from the consumer perspective.

A Bangor company called Access Wellness Diagnostic Technologies, for instance, is working on a groundbreaking diagnostic device that will be able to “see” soft-tissue injuries, something that is currently impossible. The device, with the use of acoustics (also utilized by ultrasound machines), will be able to map trouble spots in patients’ muscular and nervous systems, similar to how an X-ray machine maps the skeletal system. Used in tandem with a therapy technique designed to release the pressure in these identified tension spots, Access Wellness’s work could offer immeasurable relief to accident victims, repetitive-strain sufferers, fibromyalgia patients, and others who are living with currently unidentifiable pain.

In a more commercial vein, Dynamic Design Development of Southwest Harbor is working on 3D software that will accelerate the design-to-manufacturing cycle for apparel and footwear. And Technology Systems, Inc. of Wiscasset is honing its LookSea technology, a marine navigation system for recreational boaters based on a more robust system the company developed for the US Navy. LookSea, which should be available to the public for about $3000 by this summer, incorporates two existing technologies to create a safer boating environment: digital photography, and a global database of digital, nautical maps. With a camera mounted on the craft, boaters can take a snapshot of the ocean in front of them. On a separate screen, a digital map of the area is superimposed on the photo, with objects such as buoys clearly marked. Users can also chart a pre-determined path that will be marked on the map. Company president Dave Patch says technology like this is particularly useful in foggy conditions, when things like buoys might not be visible in real life. “It’s called ‘Augmented Reality,’ ” he notes. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, Augmented Reality does have some potentially disconcerting military applications. Not to mention some spooky, Matrix-y overtones.)

That organic deer repellent, by the way, is being crafted by Portland’s Coast of Maine Organic Products, which already offers a line of organic fertilizers and compost-based soils. In Rumford, River Valley Growth Council is working on a biomass-fueled unit that would provide heat and electricity to a home for 75 percent of current costs. And Spill Free Oil Drainage Products, founded in 1996 by Bangor mechanic Claude Morin and his wife Priscilla, is readying for commercial production a self-contained system that pumps oil from the engine of any type of vehicle without spilling a drop.

But the tech lovefest doesn’t stop with the R&D grant money. Since 2001, MTI has also been participating in the federally-funded FAST (Federal and State Technology) program, which gives states money to help inventors create working, viable tech companies around their products. Participants attend workshops on manufacturing, pricing and costing, intellectual property and legal issues, marketing, accounting, and research and development.

“We learned how to produce and organize a production line, how to oversee it, and where to place our employees so they will be most productive,” says Spill Free’s Priscilla Morin. “That’s important, because one day we’ll have a facility of our own.”

Claude, in fact, is contemplating every creative person’s dream: quitting his job to work full-time on his inventions. “My head is almost splitting with ideas,” he says. “Everybody is good at something — I just have a way of looking at something and making it simple.”

So get off your collective asses, all you dreamers, and make that brilliant idea a reality. The deadline for the next round of seed grants is December 12.

Jess Kilby can be reached at jkilby@phx.com. “Technophilia” highlights the latest and greatest of the tech world and runs once a month.