Kansas City Startup Trellie Makes A Splash At NY’s Fashion Week

Trellie, KC startup, wearable technology, New York Fashion Week

The Trellie device (pictured here) was featured at New York Fashion Week. (photo: trellie.com)

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and while New Yorkh is growing as a hub of technology, it’s all about fashion throughout Manhattan and the surrounding areas. Tens of thousands of designers (the fashion type), stylists, and others in the fashion industry make a pilgrimage to New York to show off the latest trends for the spring season.

One of the companies making the trek out to New York this year was Kansas City startup Trellie. This tech startup makes a fashion accessory that attaches to a woman’s purse and lights up to alert the owner when a call is coming in or they’ve missed a call. Because women keep their phones in their purses, they can miss calls because they can’t hear the phone ring or feel it vibrate. This device gives them a subtle way to know when there is  a call coming.

The Kansas City Business Journal reports that a New York Daily News writer called the startup “wearable productivity meets fashion.”

Heidi Lehmann a Trellie advisor added, “Many retailers are creating floor space now for such products apparently. We were the only brand called out in such a manner during the panel discussion.”

It’s been a great month for Trellie, the startup closed a $900,000 seed round last month and with this showcasing at Fashion Week they were also featured in the nationally syndicated Parade Magazine.

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Kansas City’s Think Big Accelerator Holding Demo Day August 28th

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The multi-faceted startup support organization, Think Big Partners in Kansas City is preparing for demo day for their accelerator program companies and other midwestern startups from across the Silicon Prairie area. ThinkBig is graduating their second cohort, but this is their first demo day.

This week, ThinkBig Parters is hosting a two day “PitchKamp,” which will be taught by the ThinkBig Partners and help prepare the teams pitching on the 28th for demo day in front of investors and media.

Here are the ThinkBig Accelerator startups pitching at demo day.

  • Fully:  Fully is a kiosk-based mobile phone charging station that provides digital out-of-home targeted advertising to the consumer.
  • Kahootz: Kahootz is a consumer-focused online calendar platform that provides users with easier ways to combine, share and manage all obligations and profiles on one easy-to-maintain social-based platform.
  • Keyzio: Keyzio is a consumer-driven marketplace that connects people and helps them find, buy and sell real estate.
  • Phone2Action: Phone2Action makes a digital take action advocacy platform to power organizations and individuals to make change happen.
  • WeeJay:  Weejay is a rewards-based social jukebox for bars, restaurants, and other businesses.

Here are the other regional startups pitching as part of the demo day festivities.

  • Katasi:  Katasi provides an effective technological solution to the growing epidemic of texting while driving through partnerships with telecom providers.
  • Moblico:  Moblico’s mobile engagement platform uniquely combines cloud based backend services for app developers with content, communication and loyalty management tools for application marketers.
  • PlanetReuse/InvenQuery:  PlanetReuse is a consulting and brokering company focused on matching reclaimed building material with designers, builders and owners. InvenQuery provides technology to help retailers of unique merchandise handle inventory, point-of-sale and ecommerce. 

“As a venture investor, there are increasingly more quality, early-stage investment opportunities that are emerging from the Midwest,” said Pat Doherty, Managing Member of St. Louis-based Saturday Capital.  “I look forward to working more with groups like Think Big Partners, who have helped identify and support growing and innovative companies that are attractive investment opportunities.”

If you’re in the area and want to attend demo day you can register here.

Blake Miller, the Managing Director of ThinkBig Accelerator is speaking at Everywhere Else Cincinnati, September 30th. A few discounted tickets and discounted startup village booths are still available here.

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Kansas Startup: Lead Horse Technology Launches MedLoom Patient Safety Tool Interview

A Junction City Kansas startup called Lead Horse Technology has introduced a new patient safety tool that provides critical safety information to doctors providing patient care. Adverse reactions to medication can be life threatening in any setting, but especially in a hospital setting where doctors and nurses are charged with the care of several patients at one time. While the move to paperless charting is welcomed by all, it can actually open up risk factors such as adverse reactions to medication at an alarming rate.

Medloom, the tool created by Lead Horse Technology, is designed to be an add on for electronic health information systems and provides important medical patient safety information to doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists and anyone else who comes in contact with the patient and their electronic medical record (EMR).

Medloom provides pharmacovigilance (the ‘assessment and monitoring of the safety of drugs as used in the real world’) support to clinical decision-making. Unlike other “clinical decision support systems”, Medloom does not rely on published data but uses an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to create ‘at risk’ profiles from the FDA’s adverse event reporting system, then cross-references these profiles with individual patient records to scan for those patients who match. Patient identity is never compromised or even an issue, because Medloom only looks at the patient profile (meds, background conditions, age and gender) and never captures patient ID.

In an initial clinical validation trial Medloom correctly identified 80% of the patients who were at risk for not just adverse reactions to medication but life threatening adverse reactions to medication.

We got a chance to interview Dr. Ramona Leibnitz, one of the co-founders of Lead Horse Technology about this exciting new medical startup. Check out the interview below.

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Kansas City Startup: AgLocal Raises $1 Million Dollar Seed Round

We told you about Kansas City startup AgLocal back in April. This innovative startup is connecting meat lovers with real meat, direct from the farm, effectively cutting out the middle man which is commonly the grocery store.

Real true meat lovers want to make sure they have the highest quality cuts of meat without the worry of chemicals involved in processing or trickery used to make the cut weigh more with additives and such that are commonly found in meat packaged at national food chains.

While the vegans and vegetarians of the world may not like the idea behind the Fairway, KS based startup, farmers love it. According to the Kansas City Business Journal, AgLocal has already signed up over 100 farms to be part of it’s direct to consumer network.

Founder Naithan Jones is hoping to grow AgLocal organically (no pun intended) and sees a vision where anyone in the US can pick up their mobile phone and use an AgLocal app to get the best meat delivered to their door.


AgLocal has secured a $1 million dollar seed round led by local investors OpenAir Equity Partners.

Jones left the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundations Aspiring Entrepreneur FastTrac Program to undertake starting AgLocal.

Jones plans on using the money to add more engineers, build out it’s technology platform and increase partnerships with local farmers.

Linkage:

For more on AgLocal visit them here

Here’s an earlier story on AgLocal from Nibletz the voice of startups “everywhere else”

Here are more stories from “everywhere else”

Nibletz could really use your help with our mission, here check out this link.

Kansas Startup: FrontFlip’s Ken Miner Starts Team Kris For His Wife’s Fight Against Cancer

Back in April we reported on an innovative loyalty reward startup called FrontFlip. The Kansas startup, founded by Sean Beckner, takes a unique approach to rewards by offering virtual, mobile based “scratch cards”.

FrontFlip is currently available for both iOS and Android, and back in April they already had 725 merchants signed up.

While heavily entrenched in a national rollout for the Overland Park based FrontFlip, their director of national account Ken Miner got some terrible news on the home front. SiliconPraire reports that Ken’s wife Kris was diagnosed with Stage 4B Large Cell Lymphoma. It’s a very aggressive and intrusive form of cancer with a life expectancy of 1-3 years. Milner’s doctors advised a quick course of action including a bone marrow transplant.

Less than a month ago, on May 11th the Miner’s found out that out of 17 million people on the national bone marrow registry, not one of them was a match for Kris.

So while maintaining his full time position at FrontFlip, Ken decided to attack his wife’s Lymphoma the same way that an entrepreneur would attack and solve a problem by founding a startup.

Problem: Kris Miner needs a donor

Solution: Team Kris Miner

Almost immediately Ken dove into his contacts and first reached out to Joe Cox, the President of the Social Media Club of Kansas City.

Of the phone call, Ken told SiliconPraire:

“(Kris) wants to tell her story, to be able to help people. That’s ultimately what she wants. Now, I’m a little more selfish; I want to find a match to give her the best possible chance of living.”

Ken is hoping that he can get 1000 new registrants on to the registry. As of Thursday 103 people had already signed up for the registry. Ken set up a Facebook page and a custom landing page on the national registry site.  Friends, family and colleagues have already taken to Twitter with the hash tag #TeamKrisMiner

SiliconPrairie has posted these ways to help:

To register for program, Team Kris Miner has set up a custom link that tracks their goal to 1,000 sign-ups: join.marrow.org/krisminer. They’re also aiming to raise $25,000 for the organization. Ken said the monetary support is meaningful, as well, as it costs the National Marrow Donor Program around $100 per test conducted.

To learn more about Kris’ disease, the ways in which you can help and her hopeful treatment, visit kris-miner.com. You can also reach Ken by email, kminer@ken-miner.com.

Also, this isn’t the first time the tech community has seen an individual expecting for a bone marrow transplant drum up awareness on Twitter. In October, a friend of the founder of Photojojo turned to social media to encourage people to sign up for the bone marrow donation program. In January, a match was found.