BY RANDY LANKFORD
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Dr. Cameron Powell, a San Antonio obstetrician, likes to joke about the only time he was ever propositioned in a church parking lot. When Trey Moore, a software developer, invited him to have coffee in 2004 Powell assumed it was to talk about a doctor for his wife.
But Moore wasn’t concerned with just one baby. He wanted to talk about thousands.
Referring to the cutting-edge mobile technology of the day, a PalmPilot, Moore asked, “If you could see any information on a device like this, that would transform the way you practice medicine for yourself and for your patients, what would it be?”
Powell had a ready answer.
“I’m never just sitting at the mom’s bedside while she’s in labor. I’m seeing patients, I’m scrubbing up, I’m in surgery, I could be in my office, I could be anywhere. And I generally rely on the nurse to relay to me the condition of the mother verbally; just describe what’s happening with the baby’s heart tracing and the mother’s contraction patterns. If I could see that waveform data on a device like that in real-time that would change everything.”
And it has.
Fast forward 18 months from that initial meeting and Powell and Moore were keynote speakers at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, explaining their new way in which doctors could monitor patients’ conditions from anywhere in the world.
Today, the company Moore and Powell founded, Airstrip Technologies, serves thousands of patients in hundreds of hospitals with its AppPoint software platform, securely sending patient information directly from hospital monitoring systems, bedside devices and electronic health records to a clinician’s mobile device.
Airstrip’s development platform enables the creation of device-neutral applications able to scale and adapt to an ever-changing world of mobile operating systems and hardware. FDA-cleared, CE-marked and allowing for compliance with HIPAA regulations, the AirStrip platform delivers live waveform and other relevant clinical data, not just to obstetricians, but to healthcare professionals in numerous fields such as cardiology, telemetry, home healthcare and geriatrics.
“The OB application is the proof of concept for the broader suite of what we do,” explains the company’s Chief Strategy Officer Bruce Brandes. “In fact, one in six babies born in the U.S. today is protected by AirStrip OB.”
Most of that meteoric growth has taken place since the introduction of Apple’s iPhone in 2009. “We had a handful of customers,” says Brandes, “but when the iPhone came out and opened up Apple’s Software Developer’s Toolkit, Trey saw that and shifted all the development from Windows to the iPhone. ‘This is the future of mobility,’ he said, ‘this device.’ That’s when we really started to scale in earnest.”
AirStrip has not only increased its size, according to Brandes, it’s also expanded its scope.
“We’re expanding the platform to include all the other elements of data a physician or team of physicians needs to see. Not only when they’re within the hospital but increasingly, as the reimbursement model of healthcare shifts from yesterday’s that’s based on an episode of care to today, where it’s based on clinical outcomes and ultimately to tomorrow, when it will be based on population health from chronic diseases, you’re going to see a shift in the use of our application.
“AirStrip will be of use not only in the hospital but across the entire continuum of care, so that we’re mobilizing data pre-hospital, before the patient ever arrives, in the ambulance for example, all the way through monitoring those patients who are at high risk in their homes so we can proactively intervene before an event happens that sends them to the hospital.”
Dr. Jane Atkerson, a San Antonio physician who has seen AirStrip work at the Baptist Health System, says she wouldn’t want to be without it. “I’ve been an AirStrip user since it started. The speed at which the screens upload, going seamlessly between data and tracings, is wonderful. I’ve made it part of my everyday care for my patients in labor.”
Brandes sees a day when mobile technology will render distance irrelevant in patient care.
“We’re riding the coattails of this mobility revolution. What we’re uniquely focused on doing is riding that revolution to specifically leverage mobility to address the challenges healthcare’s always faced that have never been able to solve because it took a transformational technology like mobility to change the way in which things work.
“We like to say our technology essentially eliminates all the traditional geographical boundaries that have historically restricted healthcare. You could have a cardiologist in New York City consulting on a patient in rural West Virginia. It could be someone in a remote area of Africa. And we’re seeing that today. Our clients are using this now.”
And it all started with a cup of coffee.

By L.A. LOREK, Founder of Silicon Hills News

During the 72-hour period that made up 3 Day Startup San Antonio, seven companies formed.
Some pivoted. Most did market research to validate their ideas. And few of the 40 participants in the program slept.
The weekend culminated with a pitch event Sunday evening in which the teams showed off all their work.
“Audius.co had the greatest pivot,” said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom , which hosted the event, and a mentor. They went from their original idea of synchronizing live streams for bands on smart phones to creating an app for church sermons back to a tweak on the original idea of creating a synchronized app for the people in the audience at concerts and other events to connect, Longo said.
Michael Girdley pitched the $2.99 app to a standing room only crowd at Geekdom Sunday night. The crowd seemed receptive to the idea. He even orchestrated a demonstration by asking the crowd to point the browsers on their smart phones to Audius.co. Then they dimmed the lights and some of Audius.co’s team members jumped around on stage with their mobile phones flashing lights.
“Their original idea didn’t have a good revenue model,” Longo said. “The second idea had a worst one. The third idea had a well laid out winning business model.”
ReInVintage also got kudos from Longo for having “the most bonded team.” Their idea for a marketplace of vintage clothes for buyers and sellers with a custom tailoring option did not waiver from the beginning. The team of nine members spent the weekend building out the site, creating a marketing plan, doing market research and fine-tuning their business plan.
Jackie Davis, a marketing analyst with Rackspace, led the team. During her pitch, she wore a powder blue vintage sleeveless sheath dress from the 1970s, which she bought on eBay for $4 and altered herself to fit.
She already runs a vintage clothing business out of her bedroom. She launched the venture a few years ago and it’s profitable. She buys the clothes from thrift stores and on eBay. One of her passions is to keep old clothes from ending up in landfills.
“Polyester never, ever biodegrades,” she said. “This business is good for people and it’s good for mother earth.”
Later, the ReInVintage team got an award for best dressed and for “besties” or being the most spirited and bonded team. They even set up a smoothie machine in their conference room and supplied the team with fruit smoothies throughout the weekend.
Pat Condon, a mentor for 3 Day Startup San Antonio and a co-founder of Rackspace, liked the ReInVintage team.
“I really like niche businesses that serve an under-served audience,” Condon said.
This is the fifth 3 Day Startup San Antonio Condon has participated in.
“I think it’s the best class we’ve had here,” Condon said “We’ve got a lot more broader representation from Trinity, St. Mary’s, UIW and UTSA. More diversity equals more success.”
Condon also liked Monk’s Toolbox, a mobile phone app for microbrewers to automate their back-end operations.

A few of the members of Monk’s Toolbox came from the brewing industry and knew the pain firsthand of microbrewers trying to handle everything from inventory to accounting.
“Something that replaces excel and spreadsheets for small business is a good idea,” Condon said.
The key to success for the teams during the weekend is to keep it simple, Longo said.
“If they can keep it simple, they can add stuff later,” he said. “The idea is to get to a minimum viable product that they can release.’’
The mentors helped save two teams from demise during the weekend because they started to get off track, Longo said. He declined to say which teams.
In the end, they all had polished presentations.
ArtPrint.me was a renegade team. It didn’t receive enough votes to make the final cut on Friday night. But some people decided to revive the idea and work on it during the weekend. In the end, they created a marketplace to allow consumers to buy prints of art at coffee shops.
“Spreading art throughout the world by turning every wall into a store,” said Lauren Anzaldua, a senior at the UTSA, who pitched her team’s concept.
TutorU grew out of David Riedel’s experience as a senior studying cyber security at UTSA. The site connects students with tutors around the clock.
“This is going to go somewhere,” said Daniel Dawson, a software engineering student at Trinity and a member of TutorU team.
The other teams included Airloom, a cloud-based site for storing precious family photos, videos and audio recordings and SocialRest, a portal for app developers to get code fixes from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The diversity of the people in attendance made the event special, said Alan Weinkrantz, who runs his own public relations firm and served as a mentor to the teams.
“I’ve met everyone from a doctor who has some business ideas to a guy who works in a Sprint store,” Weinkrantz said. “There’s a broad social economic perspective of people who are all turned on by the idea of being able to do something on their own.”
Events like 3 Day Startup San Antonio actually serve as a better catalyst for igniting the city’s tech and biotech startup community than formal institutions like StarTech and BioMedSA, Weinkrantz said.
“They serve a purpose for institutions but not the startup community,” he said. “This is the space that is doing innovation not the traditional institutions that are trying to lob on to a place like this.”
Luz Cristal Glangchai, who runs the 3 Day Startup San Antonio program, called the weekend “a lab for entrepreneurs.”
“It’s amazing what they have been able to accomplish in a weekend,” she said.

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