An incubator that isn't

When is an incubator not an incubator? When it's more of a community development project than a financially driven vehicle. Broadwing, as part of an alliance with a nonprofit organization, Compaq Computer, Lucent Technologies and Microsoft, last year launched what it's calling a high-bandwidth, wireless, WAN community in Cincinnati's Over the Rhine neighborhood.

Working with Main Street Ventures, a Cincinnati company that is calling itself a technology business accelerator, Broadwing's subsidiary Cincinnati Bell is serving as the network provider as well as the source of ongoing technical support to start-ups housed in one of several buildings. In addition, the company is offering some parts of an internal network for product testing and has created a wireless LAN to facilitate collaboration among the various start-ups in the project.

The idea is to not just encourage local start-ups but to provide an early proving ground for products that may make their way into the network. However, Cincinnati Bell also is cognizant of the fact that it can't direct product development.

“I would describe our strategy with MainStreet as pretty much hands-off,” says Michael Fry, Avaya Wireless product manager for Cincinnati Bell. “We've never been overhanded or tried to exert too much influence over what products come out of it.”

Unlike the traditional dot-com incubators, though, Main Street Ventures is designed as a nonprofit group with some support from the state of Ohio. Like incubators, Main Street will offer management guidance, point community members to assets such as legal advice and try to foster a collaborative environment for start-ups. However, Main Street will not take equity in any of the companies and won't require those in the community to show a profit.

For companies in the latter stages of development, regardless of their involvement in Main Street Ventures, Cincinnati Bell also has developed a program to act as a proving ground. The program, Zstart, falls under the company's ZoomTown DSL group and is specifically focused on broadband applications, says Kurt Frehner, director for sales, marketing and definition for Zstart.

“Typically an application or technology is 80% of the way developed at that point,” he says. “It's to a point that the next stage to prove its viability is deploying it out to 100 or 1000 users.”

Companies that get into the Zstart program also could be developing applications for internal use, he adds. “There are applications for end consumers, there are apps for our business customer and there are applications that help us better manage our network.”

On the customer end, entertainment is becoming the most dominant application.

Already, the company is offering on-demand access to CD-ROMs, multicast video and audio- and video-on-demand through a deal Intertainer. The company also is looking into a number of educational applications, according to Frehner. “It's not just education for a residential consumer. We… look to augment things like corporate training.”

Recipe

Company name: Main Street Ventures

Headquarters: Cincinnati, Ohio

Key Execs: Brad Wolfe and David Noonan

Founded: June 1999

Financial backers: Initial support from Deloitte & Touche and Taft, Stettinius & Hollister (Cincinnati Bell, Lucent, Microsoft and Compaq provide technology backing). Follow up financial support from the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, marchFIRST, the Fifth Third Bank and Oracle

Incubator focus: B2B

Number of incubated companies: 12

Number of IPO spin-offs: 0

Biggest success story: Three (Atomic Dog Publishing, Clarity and Planetfeedback) have graduated out of the program

Guiding philosophy: A not-for-profit Technology development facilitator whose goal is to accelerate technology development efforts in three areas: new economy companies, tri-state community and business development

What you look for in a company: “We are focused on B2B type of plays, but we have the whole gamut.” — Brad Wolfe