The 2008 Innovision Awards dinner was held at the Palmetto Expo Center last night and the following awards were presented:
2008 Hall of Fame Award for Innovation in Education
Furman University Classics Department
Dr. Christopher Blackwell, a professor in Furman University’s Classics department, helped make three ancient manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad available digitally for students and scholars to study online. These manuscripts, bound books with pages made of sheepskin, date from A.D. 950, are so highly restricted that fewer than 20 scholars have been able to study them over the past 150 years. We’ve digitized the three manuscripts, and developed an online application where users can view online the original pages on which specific references appear.
Technology Application Award
Innegrity, LLC and Sealed Air Corporation
Innegrity, LLC, is a four-year-old Upstate company whose main product is a high-modulus, thermoplastic fiber, Innegra S, originally designed to replace fiberglass in composites, ropes and ballistics. Recently, however, the fiber exceeded expectations when tested in ballistics applications such as body armor, particularly when combined with existing high-strength fibers such as Kevlar. Because the production cost of Innegra S is a fraction of that of Kevlar and similar materials, replacing armor made solely from those materials with a hybrid that includes Innegra S would allow the same protection to individuals at a lower cost in both military and civilian applications. Because purchasing hard and soft armor has historically been so expensive, there are still a large number of military vehicles, for example, that go unarmored.
Sealed Air Corporation is a global manufacturer of fresh food and protective packaging with a technology and innovation organization located in Duncan, South Carolina. After several years of research in the area of radio frequency identification, that organization developed an application of a custom-designed radio-frequency identification tag as a means to monitoring temperature in the shipping containers in which foods and other sensitive materials were transported.
2008 Technology Development Award
Zipit Wireless, Inc
ZipIt Wireless introduced the Zipit Wireless Messenger 2 (Z2) in late 2007. Developed in June of 2007, Zipit Wireless’ Z2 marked the company’s second breakthrough product launch with a variety of new features and technical enhancements. The company’s profile within the electronics industry has risen dramatically following the much-heralded launch of the Z2 and the company’s highly successful viral marketing campaign. The patented Z2 is a unique, all-in-one Wi-Fi messaging device that leverages Wi-Fi technology to enable heavy messaging teens and pre-teens to stay connected with their friends without the hassles of being tied to the family computer or incurring high messaging bills on a cell phone.
2008 Innovation in Education Award
Furman University Dept. of Chemistry
The students of Furman University’s Chemistry department have created a high-quality e-textbook with its Bio-organic Wiki Textbook project. As a result in the change to the sequence of organic chemistry courses, a new teaching track was developed in which no textbook existed. Using a free wiki engine, a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit content using any browser, we created a platform through which students could write, referee and modify an e-textbook, with as little faculty input as possible. More than 100 students collaborated to successfully complete this e-textbook for the organic chemistry course.
2008 Community Service Award
Enallage Communications
Enallage Communications, based in Easley, provides documentation, illustration and other technical services to Upstate clients. In 2007, Enallage developed a software application, the PRIDE Information Manager, for an Upstate non-profit to help streamline its functions. The program was implemented by the organization Providing Resources in Developmental Education, or PRIDE. PRIDE sends out monthly developmental milestone cards to more than 3,000 families across the Upstate, in both English and Spanish, to help families catch missed academic milestones in their children and to encourage them to take early action.
2008 Small Enterprise Award
CreatiVasc
CreatiVasc Medical is a Greenville company that provides innovative, easy-to-use and intuitive vascular technologies for solving the universal problem of connecting patients to kidney dialysis machines. Founded in 2004, CreatiVasc has a five member board including Dr. David L. Cull, MD, a nationally recognized surgeon and Chief Research Editor for the Greenville Hospital System. The challenge with connecting patients to dialysis machines includes finding arteries and veins that traditionally are located using tactile skills to feel vibrations of blood flowing through arteries or veins.
