By Zack Anchors

Staff Writer



Zach Conover, Chief Executive Officer of CrossRate Technologies,
believes that in three years his small start-up tech company with three
full-time employees will transform into a $30 million dollar business
manufacturing a groundbreaking new technology.



His company is not based in Silicone Valley or among the hordes of
start-ups surrounding Boston, but is situated in a small section of a
building on the Southern Maine Community College Campus in South
Portland, in a “technology incubator” established by the state.
Conover, challenging the common claim that Maine’s economy is stagnant
and falling behind the rest of the country in innovation, says that a
host of emerging companies have the potential to spur a domino effect
of growth in Maine’s technology sector.



“I really think we’re creating a start-up market,” he said during an
interview at his office last week “Silicone Valley and Boston didn’t
happen over night–Maine doesn’t need to have a Google to be successful.”



CrossRate, which was just awarded a nearly $400,000 grant from the
Maine Technology Institute (MTI), is developing a device that will make
even the most sophisticated GPS systems now available outdated.



“GPS is a great system, but it’s not foolproof–if you go to downtown
Portland, it won’t work in places,” Conover said. “For the average
user–not a problem, not a big deal. But for the critical user–we’re
talking commercial maritime, aviation, people who are tracking
hazardous materials, the military, first responders–these are customer
bases where it’s a big deal if it’s off one percent of the time.”



What CrossRate will actually manufacture are components and receivers
that integrate GPS technology with a much older navigation system
called Loran. While Loran and GPS are each individually somewhat
unreliable, when CrossRate melds the two systems together they will get
a device that is more than 99.9 percent accurate.



“So in the long term, we’ll be making the boxes–you’ll see a CrossRate
receiver,” said Conover. “We haven’t started the manufacturing process
yet–we’re still in the R&D phase. This award we just received from
the state–that funds the final leg of the development and puts us into
minor production of beta tests as well as some primary market research.”



Conover, who grew up on the island of Isleboro in Penobscot Bay,
started CrossRate in 2004 with two other Mainers who were boyhood
friends of his. The company originated from a business plan competition
during the final year of Conover’s MBA program at Drexel University in
Philadelphia. CrossRate started out with the help of a business
incubator at Drexel, but Conover soon decided to move the business to
Maine.



“We looked at all of northern New England–Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
Rhode Island, Maine,” Conover said. “What we decided is that we liked
the way the business climate in Maine is going. You hear a lot of
negative press–especially during the political season we’re in–that
says the business climate in Maine is not good. While that’s debatable,
I think the state has done a lot to really kind of seed companies.”



Conover said that through programs like the Maine Patent Program, the
Maine Technology Institute, the Small Enterprise Growth Fund, and
various business incubators, Maine is taking strides at nurturing
economic development, particularly in the field of technology.



“You’ve got a lot of early stage government efforts towards helping
start-up companies... Maine is definitely pushing the edge with some of
the stuff we’re doing here,” he said. “We also didn’t want to get
sucked into the Boston market and become just another start-up company.



This most recent award from MTI is not the first boost that CrossRate
has received from the state. They received a similar grant in 2005 and
have also been awarded two smaller seed grants.



“The second one was interesting because it allowed us to hire a law
school intern,” Conover said. “We had a lot of intellectual property
issues that we wanted to resolve, so we got a third year law student at
USM and worked part time for us.”

While it might seem that CrossRate’s technology will only have an
effect on the most serious users of GPS, Conover points out that such
systems are already used by nearly everyone in some way.



“Everybody in the U.S. is affected by GPS everyday,” Conover said. “GPS
is used for precise timing applications–the power grid, financial
transactions, the internet, cell phones–all of these are examples of
systems that if you dig back into the engineering they’re dependant on
precise time–we’re talking precise time down to within a hundred
nonseconds... Whether it’s CrossRate or some other company, at some
point this [GPS and Loran technology] will be the de facto standard.
You won’t be buying just a GPS unit, you’ll be buying an integrated
unit–I see a five to ten year horizon for that to happen.”



Because of our societies strong reliance on GPS, Conover sees potential
danger in the system’s flaws, pointing out that disabling GPS is a
potential terrorist tactic.

“Nobody really knows what would happen if you turn off GPS for an
extended period of time. But it will affect everybody on some level,”
he said. “We used to never focus on the jamming aspects of it... but
those two terrorist suspects arrested in Georgia back in April that
were later connected to the Canadian suspects...--they were plotting to
take down the GPS system to disrupt military and commercial
communications.”



As CrossRate edges closer to the manufacturing phase of their
development, Conover is working to build connections and harness the
expertise the company will need.



“We’re pulling together a consortium–it looks like we’re going to be
working with the University of Maine, US Coast Guard Academy and some
other companies,” said Conover. “Our goal is to leverage the best
talent in the world.”



Next week, CrossRate, along with the rest of the Maine Center for
Enterprise Development, will move to the USM Campus (see story for more
information on the move.)



“We’re hoping that by the end of 2007 we’ll have a product in the
market,” Conover said, adding, “I shouldn’t say we’re hoping–we will
have a product in the market before the end of 2007. That’s more
proactive.”