You're inside your comfortable, well-lit home when a storm starts brewing. The storm escalates and before you know it, the lights are out. The usual move is to grab the nearest candle and fire. For the well-prepared, perhaps a flashlight or generator are at the ready. All of the temporary remedies have their drawbacks, which is where the innovators at Electrikus Inc. come in.
The Bethlehem company is developing a line of smart battery backup systems for residential power outages. Its first product is called Illumaguard, a patented energy-wise battery backup for home lighting. It is inconspicuous and intelligent in the way it discharges and re-charges and enables a household lamp to light up automatically at the onset of a power outage, operating for eight hours on a full charge.
The idea was hatched almost as simply as it was conceived. Co-founders Bill Crompton, a longtime corporate marketing pro, and Jeff Shakespeare, who cut his teeth at Bell Labs, filled a notebook with potential businesses and narrowed them down to about six of the best ideas. Shakespeare had ridden the entrepreneurial wave before with a fiber optics venture and another that involved a new kind of glucose monitor. But this time around, there was an even better idea: Fund a relatively straightforward consumer product with some intellectual property twists themselves. That would protect them against copycats and eliminate the need to rely on venture capital.
Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania loved the duo's business plan and gave them some funding to develop financials in 2009. More recently, Ben Franklin gave the company $38,000 to build the first 200 units of Illumaguard and find buyers. If successful, Electrikus will be in line for more funding to develop more energy saving/energy management products. Electrikus plans on selling mostly online on its website and hopes to have dozens of Illumaguards operating in time for Winter 2010-11 storms.