SMIT's co-founders, Sita and Sam featured on FoxBusiness - Sept 10, 2008

We were contacted by a woman at Fox Business about the possibility of having our company featured on their website as a new, innovative start-up. There were 2 stories and a video that were featured on their website.

Here are links to the 2 stories:

- Donna Fuscaldo's story
- Christina Scotti's story

Here is the video that was featured:

Summer interns

It looks we'll have a few interns working for us through the summer to get further along on our design for manufacture version of GROW.

They are:
Boston University, Justin Chin, engineering & design
Brown University, Nick Stoker, engineering & design
New York University, Younghyun Chung, electronics & programming

We are excited for them to be working with us throughout the summer. They will be working with us from June 2nd - August 1st, 2008.

Teresita Cochran on City Year Panel - May 5th, 2008

A good friend of mine who is on the New York - City Year Board asked me to be on a panel discussing what I have done since my AmeriCorps service (2001-2003), so I sat on a panel to talk about SMIT and GROW. At the end of my talk, I mentioned that we are looking for a new CEO who might be able to help us raise our first round of venture capital. One of the other panelists gave me his card as a possible CEO! (His name is David Caplan, he was CEO of Evan Piccone for many years)

SMIT panel on "cube" in Greensburg, KS

We were contacted by a team of graduate students from Kansas State University a couple months ago working on a project to rebuild Greensburg, KS, a small town which was decimated by a tornado last May (2007), as a "green" town. They wanted to use a sample of GROW on the outside of one of their model buildings to show how alternative power could be used in the rebuilding of the town.

See their website, and images of our panel on their cube:

Greensburg Cubed

Slideshow of Green Haus cube with GROW:

AI2V with Sharon on her birthday!

We were able to get a quick meeting with our AI2V coach, Sharon Ballard, on her birthday! She happened to have an overnight stay in NYC on her way back from Europe and before she went out west.

We got her a nice little piece of cake with a candle on it during our coaching session! Fun! It was great to be able to share her day with her, and it gave Sam and Ben a chance to meet her and speak with her face-to-face.

We went over our 3 business models with her and discussed which direction we felt would be best for us to head. We also updated her about our talks with Think Energy, a company interested in working with us in some capacity.

Here's a short slideshow of our dinner:

GROW to be purchased by MoMA for their permanent collection

We received a message from Patricia Juncosa, curatorial assistant to Paola Antonelli, at the beginning of April, and she asked if we would be agreeable to having our prototype installed in the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit be purchased by the MoMA. We of course said "yes!"

What that means is that instead of taking it down and bringing it back to our studio, we will help the deinstallation team take our piece down and then pack it away for whenever they might want to reinstall the piece in the museum. We are very very excited about the fact that it might be up at the museum again in the future!

Down to Earth : Sustainable Design, March 28-30, 2008 : Boston, MA

I was asked to be on a panel about Sustainable Design at the Down to Earth conference in Boston:





I gave a 20 minute presentation about SMIT and GROW and brought our 4' x 8' panel to display. Sam and I drove it up from Brooklyn on March 28th for the conference on the 29th. (This panel has gotten to travel a lot in the past few weeks!)







After the presentation, quite a few people asked questions about GROW and about how it could be used on small and large scales.



I then sat on a group panel discussion with Ursula Tischner (founder of eConcept/Agency for Sustainable Design in Cologne, Germany), Michael Singer (Artist/Designer - Wilmington, VT/Delray Beach, FL), Bryan Glascock (Director, Environment Dept, City pf Boston) and moderator Terry Swack (Founder/CEO - Clean Culture). The bulk of the discussion focused around the future and importance of Sustainable Design





After the panel, an engineering student from Boston University, Justin Chin, came up to talk with us for a bit and helped us disassemble our GROW panel. He lives in NYC and might work for us over the summer as an engineering intern.

Sam drove back to NYC that night with the GROW prototype.