U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-22) recently visited our member the Orange County Business Accelerator, where he met with tenants Array Optronix and E-Guardian Systems as well as with senior leadership of the Orange County Industrial Development Authority, the incubator's initiator. Full coverage along with photographs can be found in a blog post by Accelerator director Michael DiTullo.

graFighters, an online gaming startup founded by Syracuse University students through the Student Sandbox initiative at our supporting member The Tech Garden, has been advanced to full-time status at the incubator. The company's founders also teamed with SU faculty member Anthony Rotolo to create a second startup named enormo.us, a "storytelling company" that helps businesses communicate in the new-media environment.

For more information, please see the news release from The Tech Garden. According to the release, graFighters is the second graduate of the Student Sandbox (a collaborative of six area colleges funded by the Kauffman Foundation) to graduate to full-time status at The Tech Garden. The first was Brand-Yourself.com, which has grown to a staff of seven plus a dozen interns. For a list of student incubators affiliated with our member incubators, please see the table here.

Breonics, Inc.,  a biomedical research firm that joined our supporting member the Harriman Business Center Incubator as a new tenant in January, was awarded a $2.9 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease (NIDDK) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Breonics is developing technology designed to maintain a human organ in a metabolically active state outside the body, and believes the technology holds the potential to more than double the number of cadaveric kidneys available for transplant each year.

This is the second major NIH award received by Breonics in the past year. The new award came from the BRDG-SPAN RC3 Pilot Program funded under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), commonly known as the federal economic-stimulus act. The company's previous award came from the National Institute for Immunology, Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to develop a technology to protect kidney grafts from rejection.

For more information, please see the news release issued by Empire State Development Corporation (also attached as a pdf), which is the state's economic development agency and the corporate parent of the Harriman Research and Technology Development Corporation. HRTDC is redeveloping the state office complex at the Harriman Campus, as part of a program to position the Capital Region as a technology leader. Building 7A of the Harriman Campus is in use partly as the Harriman Business Center Incubator.

Thanks to our partners and friends at Upstate Venture Connect, all BIA/NYS member incubators that have active websites — everywhere across NYS, not just upstate — are now identified with the tag bianys on CrunchBase, the directory wiki hosted by the widely read national blog TechCrunch. Every entry includes at least a placeholder description, and some of our members are in the process of expanding or editing their entries. The CrunchBase wiki is freely editable by anyone subject to moderation delays. These listings should dramatically improve the visibility of our member incubators to the communities nationwide that rely on TechCrunch for the latest news on entrepreneurship and innovation. We appreciate the helping hand from Upstate Venture Connect!

A dozen student-initiated business concepts that were mentored this summer through the Student Sandbox program at our supporting member The Tech Garden recently "demoed" their business plans in a mock venture presentation, according to coverage in the Post-Standard newspaper. The winner, Black Orchyd, received a $1,000 start-up grant. For a full list see the Tech Garden's news release.

Demo Day was the capstone to the Student Sandbox program, which is a collaborative of the Tech Garden and six Central New York colleges. For more information on the connection between student incubators and our member incubators, please see this list.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the widely read national trade journal that covers academia, highlighted the 160 Varick Street incubator operated by our supporting member NYU-Poly in a lengthy feature (subscription only but short teaser available here). The article describes the role of the incubation program in helping Prof. Richard Gross launch a company to make biodegradable plastics and other products, based on discoveries made at his NYU-Poly laboratory.

Energy Materials Corp., a client of the NYSERDA-sponsored iCLEAN incubator, was one of three winners of a $1,500 cash prize for best investment presentation at the New Energy New York Symposium. According to a NYSERDA press release, 9 of the 20 companies presenting at the symposium were tenant/clients of the NYSERDA-sponsored clean-energy incubators that overlap with our base of member incubators. Congratulations to the winners and to all the presenters!

Apex Offshore Wind, a national developer of wind-energy facilities, has selected our supporting member the SUNY Fredonia Technology Incubator in Dunkirk for a new regional office.

Apex, which has another NYS office in Poughkeepsie, has completed more than $1 billion in wind-power projects nationally, including the 20 MW Steel Winds project on the site of the former Bethlehem Steel mill in Lackawanna. The company cited the incubator's proximity to Dunkirk harbor on wind-friendly Lake Erie as a strategic advantage.

Apex will be the 10th tenant and key strategic anchor of the incubator. For more information, please see the university's news release here or attached as a pdf.

Separately, the Dunkirk Observer website covered the graduation of three non-profit and social-venture tenants incubated under the university's HUD-sponsored Dunkirk-Fredonia Partnerships and Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

The three organizations are moving across the street to the handsomely renovated and privately owned Chadwick Bay Lofts.