Five tenant/clients of two of our member incubators in the Rochester were honored by Digital Rochester in the 2012 GREAT Awards. 

Honored at RIT's Venture Creations incubator and its NYSERDA-sponsored Clean Energy Incubator were:

• OptiCool, a developer of energy-efficient data-center cooling technology, assisted by the NYSERDA Clean Energy Incubator and with its first commercial installation on the RIT campus;
• Vnomics, developer of a sensor-based system to increase fuel efficiency on large trucks, with 4,000 installed systems at 20 customers, also assisted by the NYSERDA Clean Energy Incubator.
• Strong Arm Technologies, a student-initiated venture assisted by Venture Creations and previously covered on this site as winner of multiple business-plan competitions. 

Honored at High Tech Rochester's Lennox Tech Enterprise Center were:

• Bitnetix, a provider of voice and data solutions that recently moved to the TEC;
• Koning Corporation, an advanced medical-imaging company resident at the TEC. 

For more information, see DR's summary or coverage in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.

Synergy among incubator tenants is the focus of an article on our member The Technology Farm in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. The story notes that the Technology Farm's new associates program is seeking to widen the circle of entrepreneurs who know each other beyond those already resident in the building. Based on experience at The Technology Farm, entrepreneurs who regularly cross paths with each other can end up buying from each other, helping each other solve problems, and jointly developing business.

Sited across the street from the Cornell/New York Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, The Technology Farm is also known as the Cornell Agriculture & Food Technology Park. For more info, see the article here. An announcement of The Technology Farm's associates program is currently on its home page. 

Craftistas, a subscription service for do-it-yourself craft kits, took top prize at Demo Day for the Syracuse Student Sandbox, a multi-college student incubator serving Central New York and collocated at our supporting member The Tech Garden in Syracuse. Founder Camille Malkiewicz is a graduate of the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. SU is a key member of the multi-college consortium behind the Student Sandbox.

For more information on Craftistas and all the competitors, see news releases from the Syracuse University iSchool and from CenterState CEO, the Tech Garden's parent organization. For student incubators affiliated with our members see this list.

Entrepreneurial scientists with connections to two of our member incubators were among the 14 top innovators nationwide who are highlighted in a recent special report in Chemical & Engineering News entitled "What Researchers Who Want to Be Entrepreneurs Need to Know." The magazine's profiles of physical scientists who turned entrepreneurial with help from on-campus incubators included:

• Matthew DeLisa, the faculty member at Cornell who is the inventor behind Glycobia, the first tenant at our member the McGovern Family Center for Venture Development in the Life Sciences (Glycobia's entry to the Cornell incubator covered previously here); and
• Glenn Prestwich, now at University of Utah, and a co-founder while formerly at Stony Brook University of Clear Solutions Biotech, which became part of the Collaborative Group, whose corporate successors within acquirer BASF are to this day the anchor tenant at our supporting member the Long Island High Technology Incubator at Stony Brook. Clear Solutions co-founder Jim Hayward remains an active serial entrepreneur whose latest company at LIHTI is Applied DNA Sciences. 

Both profiles and the entire series are very much worth reading. Congratulations to all!