Lincoln startup Archives - Serious Startups

Nobl’s New Name Highlights the Company’s Attitude

“Healthcare reform” is kind of a dirty word these days. Love or hate the new changes in the law, it’s safe to say, we’re all pretty saturated with “healthcare reform” talk.

With that in mind, Lincoln, Nebraska-based SynersScan Technologies is moving away from association with healthcare reform by announcing a new name that describes its purpose: Nobl.

“A lot of people get a sour taste in their mouth when hearing the term ‘healthcare reform.’ because all they see is what makes headlines in the news,” Nobl CEO Brett Byman said in a statement. “They don’t see the effort being made to improve quality of care, promote transparency, and ensure the safety of patients all over the country. We see this effort as incredibly noble, and that is why we are so passionate about the industry as a whole.”

For their part, Nobl has spent the last year developing software that will increase patient satisfaction in hospitals. They’ve rigorously tested the software with the very people who will be using it–nurses.

“We understand how frustrating is is for nurses to be forced to use software that was built by people who have never stepped foot in a hospital before,” Byman said.

With that frustration in mind, the company tested and iterated the software, using nurses instead of hospital administrators as the customers.

Along with a rebrand, new offices, and a new software, Nobl also closed a $200k angel round at the end of 2013. Like other great startups everywhere else, they are going into 2014 ready to solve problems that the Valley just may not realize exists.

Applications now open.

Startups In The Fastlane: NMotion Startup SynerScan

While EMR (electronic medical records) are nothing new, and innovation continues to change the doctor’s daily life, there hasn’t been nearly as much innovation centered around the nurses. Specifically, nurses that are making rounds at any hospital or treatment facility.

Nurse rounds are still often documented using a clipboard, pen, and paper. If nurses need to enter something into an EMR, they often do it at the nurse’s station, transcribing it from that pen and paper.

It takes so long that Bryan Health in Lincoln, Nebraska sought the help of a Lincoln startup called SynersScan to help solve that problem. Typically it’s the other way around. The startup comes up with an idea and then tries to sell it to the user. Now there are users built in, in the case of Bryan Health, with more users waiting in the wings.

SynerScan, which is currently accelerating at Lincoln’s NMotion accelerator, is creating a digital platform to manage nurses rounds.

Synerscan is the latest startup in the “Fastlane” interview feature that talks with a startup currently in an accelerator program. Check out our interview below.

What is the name of your startup
SynerScan Technologies, or simply SynerScan.

What problem are you solving
What we’ve done is develop a software solution that enhances the benefits of hourly nursing rounds in hospitals. This process is currently documented on a physical sheet of paper, causing a couple problems. 1) That sheet of paper is typically thrown away, providing little to no feedback to management, and 2) Backlogging and accountability of nursing staff has become an issue as a result. What we’ve done is digitize the entire process, uncovering a number of value adds in the process. For example, we can now provide visual cues for any staff member to know when a round is due, real-time operational insight for management, and revolutionary communication to friends and family.

The best part about our solution is that we began with market validation. We are currently partnered with Bryan Health in Lincoln, who actually came to us to solve this very problem. What most companies do is spend months developing a solution only to find out that nobody actually wants to use it. We had a top 50 cardiovascular hospital come to us and say “here is our problem, who is able to solve it for us?”. That validation out of the gate has had a huge impact on our traction and chances of success moving forward.

The ultimate goal in changing the process of nursing rounds is to increase patient satisfaction in hospitals. Hourly rounding has been proven to increase patient satisfaction, decrease falls, and provide greater quality of care as a result. A hospital’s patient satisfaction score is what determines the amount of reimbursement a hospital receives from Medicare and Medicaid. These scores also determine the salary and benefits of a hospital’s executive staff. For these reasons alone, incentives are very high for a hospital to increase patient satisfaction. Our solution provides just that.

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Why now?
A lot of these incentives have come about as a result of recent healthcare reform. Hospitals will be compared to one another relative to patient satisfaction, infection rates, and many other metrics. Hospitals will be driven by quality, service, and costs in order to compete. Government sanctioned funds will be given or taken dependent on where the hospital ranks in regards to these metrics. For this reason, it will become imperative that hospitals implement tools to maintain a competitive advantage in the industry.

The US healthcare system is at a critical point in increasing quality of care for patients. Hospitals will no longer receive reimbursement based on a “pay-for-reporting” model, where they were simply required to post patient satisfaction scores. Every hospital in the country will now be reimbursed on a “pay-for-performance” model, where the quality of those scores will determine each hospital’s reimbursement rate.

Who are your competition?
There are a number of companies recognizing the potential of increasing patient satisfaction in hospitals. What’s great is that there is no one single way of doing so. What’s frustrating is that there are a lot of unknown and unavoidable factors that affect a patients perspective of their care. First impressions, last impressions, and unforeseen occurrences can drastically alter a patients perception of their care.

Although companies like Scan Am and Walsh Integrated have similar solutions in the healthcare space, we have a few tricks up our sleeve that help differentiate us as serious players in the industry.

What’s your secret sauce?
What really sets us apart from our competition is the communication platform we have engineered to provide friends and family with relative insight on the condition of their loved one. With our solution, we are able to push nursing round information to a family members smartphone, tablet, or PC. If you have to be at work or home with the kids, no longer do you have to wonder about the kind of care your significant other is getting. The feedback we’ve received on this aspect of our solution alone has been outstanding. Since our launch at Bryan Health, we have helped family members from San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and everywhere in-between see the quality of care their loved ones were receiving, all in real-time. Imagine you had a child or spouse in the hospital and the importance of a tool like this because quite clear.

Where are you/were you based before NMotion?
Born and raised right here in Lincoln.

Why NMotion?
There are some really cool and innovative things happening in Lincoln right now. Most people are oblivious to this fact. We are still highly referred to as a flyover state and this simply isn’t the case. Our entire founding team is comprised of University of Nebraska – Lincoln alumni, and one of our primary goals is to change the perception people have about Lincoln and the potential that remains untapped here. Jumping on the opportunity to be a part of Lincoln’s first accelerator program was a no brainer.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned since the NMotion session has started.
Before NMotion, our team was progressing at a steady rate. We were making informed decisions, building relationships, and learning everything as we went. What we realized very quickly after starting NMotion is that we weren’t moving fast enough. We were doing too much strategizing and needed to simply begin executing. We are now moving faster, breaking things, learning quickly, and repeating.

Where can people find out more?

Check out our website at SynerScan.com

Email us at info@synerscan.com

SAHM Turns Digital Scrapbooking Hobby Into Lincoln Startup GottaPixel

Stacy Carlson isn’t your everyday startup founder. She’s not a caffeinated-up hackathon junkie, or a gamer chick turned business developer extraordinaire. She’s a stay-at-home mom from Lincoln, Nebraska, who turned her digital scrapbooking hobby into a startup that now has a team of 21 designers, and 13 employees.

Silicon Prairie News reports that Carlson was never one for paper scrapbooking (me neither). But when her daughter started getting older she wanted to find a way to preserve those hundreds of digital pics that every parent has of their kid. She got back into computers and immediately picked up digital scrapbooking as a hobby.

When Carlson started gottapixel in 2005, it was a place where digital scrapbookers like herself could share layouts with online friends. The layouts that were publicly available weren’t nearly as good as what the user base at gottapixel were uploading to the site.

“When my cousin Brenda, and I started in 2005, it was a hobby. We started with just a few members, a gallery, and a desire to create a digi home that was reliable, friendly, and fun. 7 years later, we have over 25,000 members in our forum, 7,000 active products and over 275,000 layouts in our gallery…but even though the site has gotten bigger, the family feel is still there!” Carlson told scrapstacks.com

GottaPixel has become one of the most respected and trusted sites among people who do online scrapbooking. Some of the designers who make digital scrapbooking layouts for gottapixel have their own websites and galleries, and Carlson told SPN that the best designers make more than $1000 per month for their work.

Now that her kids are in schoo,l and the company is running on all four cylinders, Carlson is active in the startup community via Startup Lincoln, AwesomeCamp, and Ladies Who Launch.

Are you a digital scrapbooker? Try it out at gottapixel.com

Startups In The Fastlane: NMotion Startup Cinnamon Social

The Cinnamon Social team, accelerating at the NMotion startup accelerator in Lincoln, Nebraska, has discovered that having a social media strategy isn’t enough. Beyond that, they’ve even found that just pure aggregation isn’t enough either. Companies need to find what people are having conversations about, and then have a way to engage those conversationalists.

Cinnamon Social is doing that with their product called Cinnamon Post, which is built on technology they call voice intelligence or VI.

Cinnamon Post and the VI technology are able to analyze and identify the content that creates conversations. It can then assist users by adding the company or brand’s voice into that social conversation, closing the gap from pure aggregation.

We got a chance to talk with Cinnamon Post co-founder Holly Petersen in our latest Startups In The Fastlane interview. In this series we talk with startups that are currently going through a startup accelerator, giving our readers and community a true feel for acceleration. Check out our interview below.

What is the name of your startup?

The name of our company is Cinnamon Social, and our product is called Cinnamon Post.

What problem are you solving:

Over the last several years we’ve discovered that it’s not enough to help businesses strategize their social media efforts. You can have a GREAT strategy and not know how to use it or what content to post each day. Companies of all sizes struggle with this. Cinnamon Post is a software designed to solve this problem. We not only zero in on a companies industry-specific content, but we also analyze the content that creates the conversations with their followers so that we can produce more of the content that matters and that generates relationships and loyalties. From there, the software takes an additional step in that we put a companies posts/tweets etc. into their brand/company voice. We like to call it, voice intelligence (VI). VI is an additional and important step that our algorithm incorporates into the intelligent content that’s produced for our customers.

Why now?

Content is king, right? Content is awesome, but that’s only if you’re posting the right content – the kind of content that generates discussion. This translates into followers, shares and so forth and ultimately visibility for businesses. Social media is all about relationships and only extremely soft sells are welcome in social media, so businesses need to take a calculated approach and maintain consistency and the integrity of their brand when they venture out into social media. Companies are starting to realize finally that social media isn’t going anywhere and if they want to continue to compete, they need to get on the social media train and take is seriously.

Who is your competition?

Tools are starting to emerge now for content. Adobe has an enterprise level content tool and an accompanying analytic suite and so does RallyVerse, but this really isn’t what Cinnamon Social is interested in doing. We really want to focus on quality content and how it’s delivered (VI), keeping it simple and straight forward to use. Companies like BuzzSpice, which is in beta right now and a company called Content Gems more closely match what we’re trying to do.

What’s your secret sauce?

Our secret spice, as we like to call it is our voice intelligence. Coupled with our precision content, our algorithm can weigh what’s important to customers and what they find attractive, in essence. Based on this, the content suggestions get more intelligent and when you further dial that down to delivery in their branded voice – you’ve got some seriously tasty content!

Where are you/were you based before NMotion?

We are and have been based in Lincoln, NE.

Why NMotion?

We’ve been marinating on this tool for a while, the timing and how best to deliver it. Businesses need this tool now and the NMotion program is providing the rigorous accountability and tools that our team needs to deliver our solution in the leanest, quickest and most flexible approach possible.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned since the NMotion session has started?

Keep moving! Every day matters, especially in the in the world of technology.

Where can people find out more?

You can visit our website at cinnamonsocial.com and our various social media feeds at facebook.com/cinnamonsocial and @cinnamonsocial.

Valley Couple Moves To Nebraska To Launch Startup Bulu Box

We hear about startups moving from “everywhere else” to Silicon Valley to build scale and raise funds. Although we are huge advocates of the startup ecosystems across the country, regardless of how big or small, we know this happens all the time.

What we don’t hear of often, are entrepreneurs moving out of Silicon Valley to “everywhere else” to launch their startups. That’s exactly what husband and wife entrepreneurs Paul and Stephanie Jarrett have done.

The Jarrett’s startup, Bulu Box, is a subscription box of vitamins and supplements. The boxes are filled, put together and shipped from the Jarrett’s offices in beautiful Lincoln Nebraska, reports our friends at Silicon Prairie

Bulu Box recieved angel funding from Nebraska Angels. The Jarretts decided that with that commitment from Nebraska Angels and the much easier to manage costs of living, Lincoln was the place to launch.

So far Bulu Box has no direct competitors. Paul Jarrett told SPN that they know of a company doing muscle building boxes. There’s also health & wellness subscription box startup KlutchClub. As for just vitamins and supplements though it seems to be just Bulu Box.

Bulu Box also adds a social element to their subscription box model. The Bulu Box subscribers are part of a community. They can review the products in the box and talk with other users of the products.

Paul Jarrett told SPN that they are doing better than they forecasted in their business plan. They told SPN that their revenues were in the thousands after just one month of being in business and their subscriber number is higher than they thought it would be.

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