Early in 2007, Stefan Gromoll, a PhD student at SUNY Stony Brook, and Professor Kenneth Lanzetta, of Stony Brook’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, founded a company called Scientific Media. Their idea? To make content creation via cell phone text messaging as easy as it is on the Internet. Protected by a provisional patent, the Scientific Media System replicates the organizational structure of the Internet by using text-message keywords that correspond to Internet domain names. The goal is to create an “SMS internet.”

In February, Gromoll began working with Stony Brook SBDC Business Advisor Bernie Ryba to put together a business plan. Then things started to happen. In May, Gromoll was a co-winner of the annual Stony Brook student entrepreneurial competition, yielding a $15,000 prize. Then, when he presented his business idea to the Long Island Angel Investor Network, requesting $375,000, he received investment offers from several angel investors. At the same time, Scientific Media was awarded a $100,000 Phase I SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation. Says Gromoll, “Scientific Media is on the path to success, thanks in part to the business expertise provided by Bernie Ryba and the SBDC.”