By GREGORY ZELLER // The “flip” came around 2014, after Ashley John Heather and his wife, Diana, welcomed their third child. Heather, a Brit who emigrated to the United States around 2000, had lived his entire U.S. life in New York City. But it was two years since he’d sold his successful e-commerce startup Dotbox to NYC holding company MDC Partners, about that long since he’d bought the house in the Hamptons, a few too…
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By GREGORY ZELLER // As a writer of mystery novels, Barry Libin understands the creative process. (His “The Mystery of the Milton Manuscript,” in fact, may be the vanguard of an entirely new genre: historical-poetry adventure). As a successful entrepreneur, he understands the touch-and-go world of business formation (he sold off a prior startup, Manhasset-based BML Pharmaceuticals, for a “significant” sum back in 2005). And as a trained periodontist, the graduate of Stony Brook University’s…
By GREGORY ZELLER // Shlocker has hit the mother lode. In the shared-bathroom-retail-Nirvana equivalent of beaming up to the mothership, Bridgehampton-based Tula Industries LLC – distributor of the world’s first waterproof safe for protecting personal shower products from mooching roommates – has struck a deal with Bed Bath & Beyond, with the Shlocker landing this week on the national chain’s shelves, actual and virtual. Shlocker is also the world’s only waterproof anti-mooching safe, and it…
By GREGORY ZELLER // In the Big Data era, simply having data isn’t enough – it’s what you do with it that counts. That’s the thinking behind SFL Scientific LLC, a 2015 startup that puts the intelligence in “business intelligence” by not only crunching numbers, but helping clients understand what the algorithms and other data-driven discoveries really mean – and how best to capitalize on them. Technically headquartered in Boston, but with the bulk of…
By GREGORY ZELLER // From the Never Too Young To Start file comes OYOclass.com, an innovative computer-programming platform that embraces project-based learning principles to help even the youngest students leapfrog into the future. Just ask the Long Island 9-year-old who earns paychecks modifying source code to create covers for “Minecraft” novels, or the nine Island middle-schoolers who this week are taking state AP Computer Science exams – usually reserved for high school juniors and seniors…
By GREGORY ZELLER // The lightbulb moment was clear. But the lightbulb? That was more happenstance. Entrepreneurial chef Alaila-Lee Lawrence can trace the branches of her Clovesz beverage line straight through her family tree: her grandfather, the Orlando restaurateur; her cousin, the Canadian caterer; her grandmother, the matriarch who migrated from Jamaica to England to the United States to find a better life for her family. The heart of her drinks – sorrel, a perennial…
By GREGORY ZELLER // A marathon business-development exercise with a global lineage will give Long Island entrepreneurs a commercialization crash course, with two feet on the accelerator. Hofstra University is scheduled to host Startup Weekend Long Island, a Friday-to-Sunday event uniting developers, designers and non-technical business types for 54 hours of product-pitching, business-forming and other commercialization essentials, with a healthy helping of mentorship and networking. The April 21-23 event is part of the Startup Weekend…