Tag Archives: William Jordan

*University of Waterloo (Canada) and three of its nano startup companies

All three of these University of Waterloo (UW) startups could be said to feature windows in one fashion or another but it is a bit of a stretch to describe their products as ‘window-oriented’ since these entrepreneurs have big plans.

The first company I’m mentioning is Lumotune, a company whose homepage features NanoShutters and this tagline, “Smarter Glass for a Smarter World”. A Dec. 10, 2013 article by Terry Pender for GuelphMercury.com provides a description of this product which is controlled by a smartphone application,

The product is made of two thin sheets of clear plastic. In between the sheets is the nanotechnology the trio started developing as a school project. The optics of the glass can easily be changed from clear to opaque using a laptop, tablet or smartphone.

The NanoShutters adhere to a window and are connected to a control box with tiny wires. The control box can be plugged into a laptop or controlled wirelessly with tablets and smartphones.

The control box is the most important part of the NanoShutters; the founders have applied for a patent to protect their ownership of it.

“That is basically the core technology,” Esfahani said. “It is futuristic to be able to control what passes through your window with your phone.”

Esfahani, Safaee and Siddiqi [Lumotune founders: Matin Esfahani, Hooman Safaee and Shafi Siddiqi] started all this as a project for their undergrad studies in 2011. They developed the technology, showcased it in March, won a lot of awards, incorporated Lumotune in April, and then collected their degrees from UW.

NanoShutters, the first commercial product to come out of Lumotune, is now in testing with a group of residential, commercial and institutional customers. The founders are using the testing to smooth out kinks and challenges in the technology and develop relationships with customers.

Safaee estimates the market for NanoShutters will be worth about $4 billion a year by 2016.

But the company was founded with much bigger ideas in mind. Instead of using their invention to make windows more or less transparent, they want the product to be used for digital displays that can be put on any surface with no visible technology.

I was not able to find any more details about how nanotechnology enables this window or, more accurately, glass ‘frosting’ experience (perhaps there’s some information in the installation guide mentioned later in this post) but the inventors do offer this video demonstrating their product,

Here’s more from the company’s homepage,

Windows drain energy and reduce privacy. NanoShutters can be fully automated to turn your window opaque or transparent according to the weather and your schedule. They can help lower heating and cooling costs by up to 20%, while always enabling privacy when you need it.

If you’re comfortable putting up a poster and setting up a toaster, you can install NanoShutters yourself. It takes less than 30 minutes. See how easy it is.

You can also get installation from a local NanoShutters Certified Professional.

I did click to find out if there’s a NanoShutter professional nearby but it appears there aren’t any entries yet so this may be an opportunity for entrepreneurial types.

The next two University of Waterloo startups are here courtesy of a Dec. 10, 2013 news item on DigitalJournal.com,

Harsh winter conditions may be easier for Canadians to manage with new products invented by two University of Waterloo graduates.

“Frost is a major problem for individuals and businesses daily. Not only is it inconvenient but it has an impact on safety and can even hinder economic activity,” said Abhinay Kondamreddy, a nanotechnology engineering graduate who developed Neverfrost along with three classmates.

For contractors who drop salt on parking lots and sidewalks, as well as the municipalities or owners who pay for it, there’s never been a way to measure how much salt is actually dispensed. Smart Scale, an automated salt logging and tracking system designed specifically for the winter maintenance industry is changing that.

The Dec. 10, 2013 University of Waterloo news release, which originated the news item, provides more detail about both Neverfrost and Smart Scale (Note: Links have been removed),

Neverfrost is an environmentally-friendly technology that prevents frost, fog, and ice formation. The innovation is the foundation for a new startup, also called Neverfrost.

By spraying Neverfrost on a windshield at night, drivers can avoid scraping and defrosting it on cold winter mornings, and clear the windshield simply by running the wipers. The Neverfrost technology prevents snow from freezing to the glass as well as fog and frost. Neverfrost expects to begin taking pre-orders for the spray with a Kickstarter campaign in March.Future plans for Neverfrost include incorporating it directly into washer fluids.

Frost and ice create challenges for aircrafts, air conditioning, commercial refrigerators, power lines, and agriculture – creating future opportunities for the Neverfrost technology.

Kondamreddy is one of two entrepreneurs who continue to further their technologies and startups thanks to a $60,000 Scientists and Engineers in Business fellowship. The fellowship is a University of Waterloo program supported by the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario for promising entrepreneurs who want to commercialize their innovations and start high-tech businesses.

Developed by Raqib Omer, a Waterloo Engineering graduate, Smart Scale uses exclusive hardware wirelessly paired with GPS-enabled smart phones to track the location of a maintenance vehicle and amount of salt dispensed, and logs the information on a cloud-based system in real time. Since the cost of salt is based on size of load, property owners can be assured they’re getting what they paid for, as well as reducing risks that exist in the industry.

“With growing public concern on the environmental effects of salt, rising salt prices, and increasing fear of litigation due to slips and falls, as well as driving conditions, reliable and accurate information on salt application is becoming a necessity for maintenance contractors,” said Omer.

More than 20 winter maintenance contractors in Canada and the U.S., including Urban Meadows Property Maintenance Group in Ayr, Ontario, currently use Smart Scale.

Urban Meadows owner, William Jordan, met Omer in the early testing phase of Smart Scale and the startup phase of Omer’s company, Viaesys. As the first contractor to test Smart Scale, he quickly learned there were times his company was using too much salt.

“The accuracy rate wasn’t there at all,” said Jordan. “We’re now able to accurately monitor salt usage, prevent excessive material use, keep bullet-proof records of our work and job-cost a lot better. The real time tracking of salt has helped us use up to 30 per cent less salt.”

Smart Scale is now installed on all four of his company’s trucks which service 75 properties in Cambridge and Ayr, including parking lots for grocery stores and post offices.

Jordan, who is also chair of the snow and ice committee management sector for the horticultural trade association, Landscape Ontario, says he quickly jumped on board with Omer’s research and would like to see Smart Scale change the way salt is applied across Ontario. With no industry standards for salt application currently in place, Smart Scale could make this possible.

You can find Neverfrost and an opportunity to beta test the product here. I’ve not been able to find a website featuring Smart Scale but here’s Viaesys, a company founded by Raqib Omer, the person who developed the product. I was not able to find additional technical details for either Neverfrost or Smart Scale on either of the company websites.

* ‘Unviersity’ corrected to ‘University’  in posting header on Dec. 13, 2013. I uttered a very loud Drat! when I saw it.

When is a nano-enabled product not nano-enabled?

Dietram Scheufele over at nanopublic has highlighted some research that David Berube (author of Nanohype—book and blog and professor at the University of North Carolina) and colleagues have published in Nanotechnology Law & Business (research article is behind a paywall). From Dietram’s July 3, 2010 blog posting (I’m unable to link to the specific post, so please scroll to or hunt for the date) about Berube’s research into the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies’ (PEN) Consumer Products Inventory (CPI),

The article takes a critical look at the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) consumer product inventory. The inventory has been used widely as a gauge of the number and types of nano consumer products currently on the U.S. market.

… [the authors concluded]

“that the CPI is not wholly reliable, and does not have sufficient validity to justify its prominence as evidence for claims associated with the pervasiveness of nanotechnology on the U.S. and global markets. In addition, we caution researchers to approach the CPI with care and due consideration because using the CPI as a rhetorical flourish to amplify concerns about market intrusions seems unjustified.”

In other words, use the CPI with care. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to read Berube’s paper but I did go to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies website and looked at the criteria for inclusion in the CPI where PEN clearly states the inventory’s limitations,

Selection of products

Most products in this inventory satisfy three criteria:

1. They can be readily purchased by consumers, and

2. They are identified as nano-based by the manufacturer OR another source, and

3. The nano-based claims for the product appear reasonable.

In every instance, we have tried to identify specific products from specific producers. However, since nanotechnology has broad applications in a variety of fields, we have included a number of “generic” products that you can find in many places on the market such as computer processor chips. These are clearly labeled in the inventory. In some cases, companies offer several similar nanotechnology-based products and product lines. To reduce redundancy, we have just included a few samples in this inventory and hope that they will provide an initial baseline for understanding how nanotechnology is being commercialized.

There are probably some products in the inventory which producers allege are “nano,” but which may not be. We have made no attempt to verify manufacturer claims about the use of nanotechnology in these products, nor have we conducted any independent testing of the products. We have tried to avoid including products that clearly do not use nanotechnology, but some have undoubtedly slipped through.

Finally, some products are marked “Archive” to indicate that their availability can no longer be ascertained. When these products were added to the inventory we included live links, but since then the company may have discontinued the product, gone out of business, removed a self-identifying “nano” claim or simply changed their web address. In these instances we have attempted to locate a cached version of the product website using The Internet Archive.

I imagine that despite PEN’s clearly statements some folks have referenced it carelessly hence the concern about using it as hype from Berube and his colleagues.

The bit about manufacturers removing the ‘nano’ claim hit home since I did some research into washers that use nanosilver. A friend was disturbed by a recent article about them and I remembered that the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) had made a special designation for these types of washers. As it turns out, I got it 1/2 right. From the December 4, 2006 article by Susan Morissey in Chemical and Engineering News,

Silver—claimed to be nanoparticles—employed to kill bacteria in washing machines will now be regulated as a pesticide, EPA announced late last month. Currently, washers that generate silver ions are classified as devices and are not required to be registered with EPA.

The products at issue are Samsung washing machines that are advertised as using silver ions to kill 99.9% of odor-causing bacteria. This technology, called SilverCare, generates ions by applying current to two silver plates housed next to the machine’s tub. The ions are then directed into the tub during the wash cycle.

“EPA has determined that the Samsung silver ion-generating washing machine is subject to registration requirements under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide & Rodenticide Act,” according to an EPA statement. The agency decided to change the classification of the washer because it releases silver ions into the laundry “for the purpose of killing microbial pests,” the statement explains.

For its part, Samsung has pledged to comply with the change of policy. “Samsung has and will continue to work with EPA and state regulators regarding regulation of the silver washing machine,” the company says.

Several groups concerned about the environmental impact of nanoparticles of silver had asked EPA to reevaluate the way products containing such materials are regulated. For example, environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted in a letter to EPA that there are currently more than 40 products on the market in addition to Samsung’s washing machine that have made or implied claims of using nanoparticles of silver to kill bacteria.

NRDC praised EPA for taking what it called a “step in the right direction” by reclassifying nanosilver generated in a washer as a pesticide. The group also said this revised policy should lead to EPA reassessing other products that use nanoparticles of silver for their biocidal qualities.

A pesticide is not exactly a special designation but it certainly is unique as applied to clothes washers. The EPA announcement was made around the US Thanksgiving period (late November) according to a December 6, 2006 article by Scott E. Rickert in Industry Week. From Rickert’s article,

First, let’s backtrack and get the facts behind the headline. The trigger for the EPA decision was a Samsung washing machine. The “SilverWash” contains silver nanoparticles and claims that it helps to kill bacteria in clothes by releasing silver ions into the water during the wash.

Various U.S water authorities became concerned that discharged nanosilver might accumulate in the water system, particularly in wastewater treatment plants where beneficial bacteria are used to purify water of its toxins. This opinion means that nanosilver could be viewed as an environmental pesticide, requiring the product to be registered and tested under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. In the words of EPA spokesperson Jennifer Wood, “The release of silver ions in the washing machines is a pesticide, because it is a substance released into the laundry for the purpose of killing pests.”

So what does this really mean to nano-industry? Specifically, we’re not sure yet. It will take several months for the final rules to be detailed in the Federal Register. But some of the early responses have me scratching my head.

One company has removed any reference to nanosilver from their marketing information for antimicrobial devices. Apparently, in the short run, that excludes them from any ruling. As Jim Jones, director of the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, said, “Unless you’re making a claim to kill a pest, you’re not a pesticide.”

This is not a simple ‘good guy vs. bad guy’ situation. Defining nanotechnology, nanoparticles, nanomaterials, etc. is a work in progress which makes attempts to regulate products and production in this area an even earlier work in progress. This situation is not confined to the US or to Canada. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be confined to any one country, which makes the situation applicable globally.

There is work being done and changes instituted, for example, the EPA has announced (from the PEN website),

At an April 29 presentation to the Pesticide Programs Dialogue Committee in Washington, D.C. EPA’s William Jordan announced a new working definition of nanomaterials as “an ingredient that contains particles that have been intentionally produced to have at least one dimension that measures between approximately 1 and 100 nanometers.” In addition EPA is preparing a Federal Register Announcement due out in June which announces a new interpretation of FIFRA/regulations and proposes a new policy stating that the presence of a nanoscale material in a pesticide product is reportable under FIFRA section 6(a)(2) and applies to already registered products as well as products pending registration.

As well, statements from the NanoBusiness Alliance suggest (in a previous posting on this blog) that there is some support within the business community for thoughtful regulation. As to what thoughtful means in this context, I think that’s something we, as a a society, need to work out.