Fortune Small Business Friday May 5, 2000
fsb.com
The FSB 25
Our third annual survey of companies with breakthrough products, services, and technologies.
This year, as you might imagine, our idea champs are technology innovators who have commercialized a service or product that promises to make an explosive impact on its industry niche. To find these mavericks, we surveyed hundreds of business incubators, research labs, venture capitalists, and universities. It's not surprising that two-thirds of the winners are e-pioneers flush with cash from VCs. Although most are startups, many have already secured strategic partners to catapult their companies into the marketplace. They range from a fledgling Website that lets cybersurfers design their own mutual fund to an online B2B e-procurement site. Most of the companies are nestled in entrepreneurial hot zones such as Silicon Valley, Boston's Route 128, and New York City's Silicon Alley. But a few have cropped up in other pockets, such as the Maryland and Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. The innovators that aren't involved in the Internet have developed breakthroughs in other sectors ranging from DNA testing to factory automation. These tinkerers have varied backgrounds: an Alaskan masonry contractor (go figure), Stanford graduates (where else?), and a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission (what would you expect?). Their tales of true grit are inspirational. Meet all of them on the following pages......
Chromatics Color Sciences
Testing for Jaundice
Motherly concern prompted Darby McFarlene, 55, a former Ford model and color-technology specialist, to spend years developing a testing device for babies who have jaundice. That's the condition that results when a person's liver cannot process recycled blood cells. (Her daughter, Scarlett, was born prematurely with severe jaundice.) McFarlene's new monitor, the Tlc Bili-Test, renders obsolete the painful blood test that has had 60% of the nation's newborns squealing in hospital nurseries for decades.
McFarlene's handheld device, which looks like a small camcorder, is non-invasive and pain-free. It uses photo-electric-diode color-science technology that even Star Trek's Bones would-appreciate. Here's how: The device flashes a light on the skin and performs color measurement to gauge the level of bili-rubin -- an insoluble pigment in the blood that is a byproduct of jaundice -- reflected in the yellowish hue of the skin.
Approved by the Food and Drug Administration and launched in June, the new monitor costs about $3,000. But it allows technicians to color-scan patients and get test results in minutes for a fraction of the cost of a blood test. Some 100 hospitals, including New York City's Mt. Sinai Medical Center, have purchased the BiliTest.
How does this make McFarlene feel? Well positioned, considering the market for the product is about $80 million and her New York company, Chromatics Color Sciences , has secured a distribution agreement with Datex-Ohmeda (http://www.datex-ohmeda.com), the leading U.S. incubator manufacturer. But she's not sitting on her laurels. She continues to work with scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (http://www.rpi.edu) and Stanford University (http://www.stanford.edu) to develop more applications for the technology. |
