Innovation Tuesday

Smart pillow promises a sound night’s sleep.

Posted by on Dec 13, 2015 in Featured Stories, Innovation Tuesday | 0 comments

By Renee Moore, Staff Writer. Professionals with demanding jobs schedule around it. College students get very little of it. Busy moms with active families don’t have time for it. What’s the one thing every high performing person needs? Sleep. “If you understand that sleep is a scarce resource, says innovator and entrepreneur Zimin Hang, “then you understand the need for a product that optimizes the amount of time spent sleeping.” Hang is the c0-founder and CEO of Ultradia, a lifestyle technology company focused on developing Chrona, a sound-based smart pillow that tracks and optimizes sleep....

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Coming to a window near you

Posted by on Dec 5, 2015 in Featured Stories, Innovation Tuesday | 0 comments

By Renee Moore, staff writer. Transparent touch screen displays aren’t just for Iron Man or science fiction movies.  St. Louis company Taptl has created what it says is the world’s only stand-alone, lighting agnostic, touch screen, transparent LCD display. Whether it’s watching TV, working on a project, advertising in a retail space or creating interactive experiences in a commercial environment – the company says the possibilities for this transparent technology are endless. Clearly. “What makes our product unique isn’t really the fact that we’re selling a transparent LCD screen,” explains...

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An app to keep visitors in the know, wherever they go

Posted by on Nov 20, 2015 in Featured Stories, Innovation Tuesday | 0 comments

Over the past ten years, Ellen Prinzi’s career has taken her to several U.S. cities. Since her graduation from the University of Kentucky in 2006, Prinzi has held positions with Major League Baseball teams in San Francisco and New York, and from 2008-2010, in St. Louis, where she was coordinator of Baseball Operations for the St. Louis Cardinals. One could consider Prinzi to be a bit of an expert when it comes to learning a new town, and in the amount of effort it takes to find fun, interesting things to do that fit one’s lifestyle when in that town. Lessening that burden is the goal of Olio...

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Entrepreneur’s clothing line a good fit for Midwest

Posted by on Nov 13, 2015 in Featured Stories, Innovation Tuesday | 0 comments

At the age of 27, Jimmy Sansone describes himself as a lifetime entrepreneur, a guy who’s always taken pride in the clothes he’s worn, and an unabashed cheerleader for the Midwest. It’s only natural, he says, that those attributes have co-mingled to form the basis of his new company – The Normal Brand, which designs and produces a clothing line aimed at Midwestern consumers. Of his entrepreneurial bent, Sansone, the son of Jim Sansone, one of the principals of the large St. Louis real estate firm the Sansone Group, notes, “from a very young age I was encouraged by my parents to start...

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Startup uses attractive technology to fight blood clots

Posted by on Nov 6, 2015 in Featured Stories, Innovation Tuesday | 0 comments

Remember when you discovered the mystery of the magnet? Who among us, as a kid, wasn’t fascinated by the way you could use one magnet to move another across a table without the two ever touching? Or, perhaps you were the owner of a “Wooly Willy”, that toy that allowed you to position metal shavings onto a cartoon face by use of a magnetic “magic wand”. Magnets, of course, have a much higher purpose than just fun: they’re used in computer screens and credit cards, and among other disciplines, in chemistry and medicine. And it’s with a medical purpose in mind that a St. Louis startup has...

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Entrepreneur Leinedecker’s goal: shorter election lines

Posted by on Oct 28, 2015 in Featured Stories, Innovation Tuesday | 0 comments

It’s election day in thousands of cities, counties, school districts and other jurisdictions around the United States.  But for St. Louis entrepreneur Scott Leiendecker, today may as well be called Countdown Day. November 3 marks the symbolic one-year run up to next year’s Presidential election, when bigger-than-normal voter turnout will undoubtedly mean longer-than-usual lines at your neighborhood polling station.  Reducing those lines is the aim of Leiendecker’s company, KNOWiNK. He’ll spend the next year working to get his product, called the Poll Pad, into the hands of as...

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