A team of UCSB graduate students has created an online marketplace where restaurants and fishermen can connect directly to buy sustainable, traceable seafood.
By Stephen Nellis / Friday, March 7th, 2014 / Columns, Technology / Comments Off on German entrepreneur tunes into hearing loops with Otojoy
A Santa Barbara entrepreneur is hoping to make life in public places a little easier for people with hearing loss. Otojoy installs hearing loops, which take audio signals from sound systems and then transmit them electromagnetically to be picked up by a special feature found in most hearing aids.
Gene Lucas, longtime executive vice chancellor of US Santa Barbara and a fixture on campus for more than three decades, will retire at the end of the year, the university said Dec. 10.
Goleta-based Inogen, a maker of portable oxygen concentrators founded by UC Santa Barbara students, has filed for an initial public offering to raise up to $86.2 million. While many successful companies have been spun out of UCSB by professors and doctoral students, Inogen would likely be the first company founded by an undergraduate team to go public. Inogen won the program’s very first business plan competition in 2001.
UC Santa Barbara said Dec. 5 that the U.S. Army has renewed its contract with the university’s Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, providing an additional $48 million over three years to support biology-related research.
The new funds extend a decade of unclassified research in areas such as biotechnology tools, futuristic materials, energy generation and storage, systems and synthetic biology and neuroscience.
Inogen was founded in 2001 by three UCSB students, one of whom had a grandmother who had recently been placed on oxygen therapy. The therapy required heavy, bulky oxygen tanks that could not be taken on airplanes and other places.
After winning the New Venture Competition business plan contest at UCSB, the team went on to develop a device that used electricity to concentrate oxygen from the air. The concentrators were lighter and less bulky, weighting between 4.8 and 7 pounds.