The following is a series by The Virginian-Pilot on local creative technology companies We Are Titans, ArcDNA, Cetan Corp., ParasitX, Grow Interactive and ipConfigure.

Small Tech: A look at 6 Hampton Roads companies

By Philip Walzer for The Virginian-Pilot posted November 6, 2011

We’re designing everything from a mobile ad for Google’s smartphone search app to a wireless sensor that can detect the alcohol content of fermenting beer.

Hampton Roads is no Silicon Valley. Even so, “I think the area is experiencing good growth in information technology,” said Tom Osha, president and CEO of Innovation Research Park @ ODU.

Economic factors both propel and hinder expansion. The concentration of military veterans is a plus. Yet the region’s better-than-average employment rate may be dulling the “entrepreneurial spirit,” said Tim Early, vice president of Technology Hampton Roads, which promotes technology initiatives.

The Virginian-Pilot is profiling six up-and-coming small tech companies based near Old Dominion University, in downtown Norfolk and in Chesapeake. But others elsewhere are gaining hits and attention.

Customer Magnetism, an Internet marketing agency off Lynnhaven Parkway in Virginia Beach, in September was ranked the nation’s second-best search-engine-optimization agency by Topseos.com. Osha also sees potential, particularly in biotech applications, in the city’s Princess Anne corridor.

To compete for workers, many companies provide far more than the standard perks. One covers all of their health care premiums. Another allows employees to switch to projects of their choosing every Friday.

Even so, some say it’s hard to attract top-of-the-line talent to Hampton Roads. Another challenge Osha sees: a shortage of graduates emerging from local colleges “in the disciplines that companies will need.”

Some companies are taking it upon themselves to expand the region’s technological core.

Next weekend, We Are Titans is organizing Start Norfolk, a 48-hour competition at the Innovation Research Park near ODU, which will award up to $20,000 in prizes to those with the most convincing blueprints for a new business or application.

Small Tech: We Are Titans offer West Coast values

By Philip Walzer for The Virginian-Pilot, posted November 6, 2011; pictured on left: Zach Miller, left, project and marketing director, and Brennan Dunn, CEO, of We Are Titans at their Norfolk offices on Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011. (Amanda Lucier | The Virginian-Pilot)

Don’t tell Brennan Dunn he runs a Web development company.

Sure, that’s what We Are Titans focused on after Dunn started it from his house in 2008. Now Dunn, the CEO, describes Titans’ mission in broader terms, befitting its wider scope: “We build solutions to people’s problems.”

Like the work it’s doing for the Shanghai office of TUV Rheinland, a German testing company, to devise a platform to report carbon emissions data to the United Nations. Or the prototype for a student directory, accessible on computer or smartphone, that it created for SchoolCNXT near Boston.

“Give us your idea,” Dunn, 27, said, “and we’ll incubate that idea with you, we’ll design it, and we’ll market it.”

Ninety-five percent of its clients, Dunn said, are from outside Hampton Roads, from China to San Francisco. Local customers include Dominion Enterprises in Norfolk, owned by Landmark Media Enterprises, which publishes The Virginian-Pilot.

Dunn reached back to his days studying Greek at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., for the company’s name. He had another motive: “I wanted to sound bigger than I was.”

Its growth has been near-titanic: The number of full-time employees jumped from one – just Dunn – to 11 since the summer of 2010. Revenues for this year have hit a record $1 million. Titans has introduced 30 products in the past year, said Zack Miller, 27, the project director.

Another example: Pivotal Labs, a San Francisco tech company that has worked with Twitter, used Titans last year to create YourGardenShow.com, a social network (think Facebook) for amateur gardeners.

Miller summed up Titans’ model for success as “West Coast values at East Coast prices.”

“They’re really smart guys,” said Michael E. Gruen, CEO of Paperlex in New York, which helps computerize and customize legal documents. “They seem to have collected a solid team of talent that you wouldn’t normally expect to find in a startup company.”

In August, Titans moved from Ghent to the third floor of a Granby Street building. Part of the appeal was more space – 4,500 square feet. Dunn also wanted to create “an epicenter of technology” downtown. At lunchtime Fridays, Titans invites IT workers at other companies to share ideas and provides pizza and beer to lure them.

The atmosphere at Titans is laid-back: Dunn had on jeans and a white polo shirt with the Titans logo; Miller wore shorts and was barefoot. Casual dress isn’t the only perk. On Fridays, “people can work on anything they want” unrelated to client projects, Dunn said.

Titans’ motives for sponsoring Start Norfolk, the initiative next weekend to encourage startup companies, aren’t purely altruistic, Dunn said: Some of those fledgling businesses could be future clients.

“If we can increase, by a little bit, the technical receptiveness of this area,” he said, “it helps our business goals.”

Small Tech: ArcDNA develops a big-time app

By Josh Brown for The Virginian-Pilot, posted November 6, 2011; pictured on right:  Old Dominion University students, from left, Darius Moore, Angel Henderson, Raqwon Perryman and Gregory Rogers started a software company called ArcDNA. They pose for a portrait on Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011. (Amanda Lucier | The Virginian-Pilot)

If anyone knows how difficult it is to juggle a full schedule of college classes, student clubs and a part-time job, it’s Angel Henderson.

The Old Dominion University graduate student splits his time between earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, participating in student groups and working his internship at NASA Langley Research Center.

Earlier this year, the 23-year-old added one more thing to his schedule: running a small company that developed a time-management application to help college students keep track of classes, assignments, jobs and extracurriculars.

Henderson is one of four ODU students who founded ArcDNA, which this past summer launched a free app for the iPhone called College TA. It has since been downloaded more than 1,500 times by students across the world. Read the rest of this entry »