PHIL WHITE Star-Tribune correspondent | Posted: Friday, October 20, 2006 12:00 am
LARAMIE - The roar of snow sliding off the roof of the large canvas tent only momentarily disrupted government and industry dignitaries Saturday morning as they dedicated the Wyoming Technology Business Center, a high-tech business incubator on the University of Wyoming campus.
The 30,000-square-foot building northwest of the American Heritage Center is already "fully-occupied and up and running," said UW President Tom Buchanan, as he began the ceremonies in a tent just outside the abundantly-windowed center on a cold, blustery day.
Gov. Dave Freudenthal, U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas and U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin emphasized the cooperative effort that had hatched the project, planning for which began under former governor Jim Geringer and which was funded by federal and state funds along with a large donation from UW alumni Mick and Susie McMurry of Casper.
Mick McMurry said the facility is "something that has been drastically needed in Wyoming for a long time." The center "will help businesses in Wyoming who are hiring people, producing products and building a better world," he said. Following his remarks, Mick McMurry handed the final installment of the donation to Buchanan.
Freudenthal said the incubator is "the beginning of the recognition that if we can establish the communications link, Wyoming has many attributes that lend itself to companies that are essentially location-neutral as long as they have the capacity to communicate with the larger economy. If we can establish that as a core principle of how we are going to develop and diversify the economy of this state, it will make a remarkable contribution over the next 20 to 25 years. This is the beginning of that effort. I look forward to its expansion and many more like it in the state."
Buchanan credited UW research and economic development vice president Bill Gern with guiding the project to completion.
The building offers to its clients "quadruply-redundant Internet access, power, and environmental control," he said. "These Internet companies will never be without their access in this building."
Gern said the building is an outgrowth of the doubling of UW research during the past 10 years. The incubator will make use of the technology flow out of university research, which leads to 'the kind of innovation necessary for business spin-out," Gern said. The goal is to grow Wyoming businesses, using the resources made available by the college.
The building already has 10 "early-stage" companies making use of its office, laboratory and manufacturing facilities, according to Jon Benson, WTBC chief operating officer. The companies pay rent at about $10 per square foot, he said, and also receive input from advisory committees set up to provide business guidance to the companies.
In interviews, Benson and Gern said that once the incubator operation at UW is running smoothly, UW will develop an affiliate "distant incubation" program to provide one-on-one services and advice to technology companies out in the state. The incubator, Benson said, has video teleconferencing capabilities which will allow companies throughout the state to watch programs on their computers via the internet. The WTBC's broadband capability is presently at two gigabits per second, Gern said, but that is expandable as the need increases.
Gern said the UW facility incorporates "new incubator theory" which does not impose an arbitrary deadline for the young companies to leave the facility and move to the private sector. "The companies work closely with their advisory committees and the incubator manager and they set out benchmarks for these companies," he said. "When they hit those benchmarks, they leave the incubator and move out into the Wyoming economy. So it's not like they're here for three years and then out. That's not what we want to do. You're here until you're ready to function independently as a business and then you go."
Benson acknowledged that the project does not require companies to stay in Wyoming when they leave, but he said that moving a company means moving its people, which should lead to many of the companies staying close.
Gern noted that Thought Equity, one of the new companies in the WTBC, already employs people in several Wyoming communities who provide contract services to the operation in Laramie via the Internet. Derek Faith of Thought Equity said the company sells video clips to television networks, movie companies and advertising agencies. One of his company's contracts is with the National Collegiate Athletic Association to convert its films of championship events going back as far as the early 1900s to digital form and allow the NCAA to sell that video over the internet.
Thought Equity has 12 full-time employees in the WTBC and also employs 30 contract workers in Cheyenne, Casper and other Wyoming cities.
Another company expecting the WTBC facilities to foster growth is chapaCode LLC, founded by Bobby Chapa, a two-time state wrestling champion at Powell High School, and a fellow Powell product, Mike Hansen. The company provides custom database solutions to clients such as the Nevada Department of Education, the City of Laramie and the UW Education Department, Chapa said.
Firehole Technologies President Emmett Nelson said his company was founded by UW mechanical engineering professors and provides one of the only opportunities in the state for employment of mechanical engineers who earn a graduate degree at UW. The company develops software to perform failure analyses of composite materials which are used in space structures, for example.