Betaspring adds program for ‘maker-fellows’

GUIDING LIGHT: Amir Ata Ghofrani, the co-founder and CEO of Quitbit, shows off his company’s “intelligent lighter” at an Oct. 3 Betaspring open house. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
GUIDING LIGHT: Amir Ata Ghofrani, the co-founder and CEO of Quitbit, shows off his company’s “intelligent lighter” at an Oct. 3 Betaspring open house. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

Following an elevator-pitch lineup of smart-app, Web-platform and mobile-messenger developers, whose intangible products live in lines of code, Amir Ata Ghofrani, the co-founder and CEO of Quitbit, took center-stage at the Oct. 3 open house at Betaspring’s Providence headquarters.
In his left hand, he held up a rough square of 3-D printed plastic and cannibalized parts.
“This is the world’s first intelligent lighter,” he said.
Quitbit, founded in February by three Brown University alumni, is developing an Internet-enabled cigarette lighter that tracks smoking habits and guides users through the process of quitting. Quitbit is among 11 startups taken under Betaspring’s wing for the seventh session of the startup accelerator’s intensive 12-week program.
Ghofrani and Takuji Nakano, Quitbit co-founder and chief technology officer, met while earning their master’s degrees in innovation management and entrepreneurship from Brown University, and came up with the idea for Quitbit while smoking a cigarette.
“We were trying to quit, and I remember saying, ‘I don’t know how much I smoke,’ ” said Ghofrani. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
The pair recruited Fred Roeber, another Brown graduate, to develop the software that would allow users to customize a personal smoking-reduction program, while Nakano developed the physical prototype of the Quitbit lighter.
Now, halfway through Betaspring’s intensive 12-week program, Quitbit is preparing for the first pilot run of its refined prototype in the local community.
Quitbit is the latest successor in Betaspring’s long history of physical product and technology companies, and has benefited from the accelerator’s recent expansion of its “phystech” track, including a new workspace with an assortment of prototyping tools.
“We’ve always been very passionate about physical product and tech companies,” said Melissa Withers, Betaspring’s chief of staff. In 2009, polymer science and engineering company NuLabel Technologies Inc. became Betaspring’s first phystech startup, pioneering a patented adhesive that eliminates the need for nonstick label liners and wet glues in product packaging.
On Oct. 3, Betaspring announced another expansion of its physical product and technology track with the addition of a maker-in-residence and a program for maker fellows.
Wayne Losey, Betaspring’s inaugural maker-in-residence, is the creative director at Dynamo Development Labs, a Providence concept studio that has designed the ModiBot brand of customizable, 3-D printed toys.
“The maker community is all about self-driven, personal passions and solving complex problems,” said Losey at Betaspring’s open house. “What makers can learn from the startup community is how to create value.”
Losey will mentor Betaspring’s three inaugural maker fellows – Maeve Jopson and Cynthia Poon, co-founders of toy-design studio Increment, and Tyler Benster, who won the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition student track for his manufacturing crowd-sourcing website Azavy.
“This is all part of our ongoing work to be able to work with physical-product companies,” said Withers. “It’s sort of an evolution of our ability to build capacity and bring in-house special resources to physical tech companies.”
This new capacity includes the ability to create cheap, early prototypes of new products in-house, saving time and money and accelerating the process of bringing a product to market.
To continue building on its phystech track and providing experienced mentors for physical-product startups, Betaspring has partnered with Make Media, the voice of the maker movement, which recently opened its East Coast office in the Founders League startup space, a joint venture of Betaspring, Brown University, the University of Rhode Island and the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. •

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