Meaningful Gestures: Corrales Company Puts VAF Grant to Work

Belinda Snyder

Belinda Snyder, Program Manager, LANL Technology Transfer Division

Ideum, a Corrales-based company founded in 1999, needed help updating its successful gesture-based software and preparing it for international release. In 2011, it was awarded one of three $100,000 grants that Los Alamos National Security gives tech-based innovators every year through its Venture Acceleration Fund to develop commercial uses for innovative technology and get them to market as quickly as possible.

Ideum first released GestureWorks in the summer of 2009 as a free, unfinished (or “alpha”) version of its software, which analyzes and simulates human gestures for the kinds of touch-activated tables that are increasingly used in interactive educational exhibits. Later that year, Ideum issued an improved version as a commercial product that educators could use to design compelling “touch-table” demonstrations of scientific concepts. Continue reading

Microloans

Very small loans made to borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history. Microloans are designed not only to support entrepreneurship but also in many cases to empower women or underserved individuals and uplift entire communities by extension.

Trade Missions

Trade missions are international trips by government officials and business people that are organized by agencies of national or provincial governments for the purpose of exploring international business opportunities.

Lean Concepts

Services designed to streamline the processes of your facilities and supply chain to help you lower your expenses and downtime while increasing productivity.

Market Intelligence

Market intelligence is the information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics.

Networking

Business networking is a socioeconomic activity by which groups of like-minded businesspeople recognize, create or act upon business opportunities. A business network is a type of social network whose reason for existing is business activity.

Franchise

A franchise is a business model that involves one business owner licensing trademarks and methods to an independent entrepreneur. Sometimes, franchises are referred to as chains.

Mentor

A mentor is a person with experience in business who can help an entrepreneur hone her or his abilities and advise him or her on navigating new challenges. Mentors can be a boon to an entrepreneur, whether they provide pointers on business strategy, bolster networking efforts, or act as confidantes.

Natural Selection: Evolution is Essential to Business Survival

Renata Golden

Renata Golden, CEO, Golden Ink, Inc.

Businesses, like people, need to grow to stay relevant — even if the owner wonders where she’ll find the hours to devote to something that already consumes every hour she’s not sleeping.

Golden Ink reached that pivotal moment in 2012, when I had to decide whether to build it or to prune and risk killing it.  The 100-hour workweeks had become unsustainable, but I was loath to stifle the natural expansion of a business I’d worked so hard to build and hoped one day to sell.

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Re-Lending

The dispersal of funds from a primary lender by a secondary lender.