“They probably send less money home in total than if they did have the ability to control how the money was used and allocated once it arrived home.”

BABY CHIC

Courtesy of Allen Kim

By his or her first birthday, an infant can grow to about three times its original size. With this drastic change, many parents find themselves shelling out hundreds for new clothes, only to have to replace them in a matter of months.

It was this knowledge that motivated Engineering senior and MPowered member Allen Kim to create bebaroo.com—a sort of Netflix-style rental website for baby clothes — with University alum Luis Calderon. The website, still in its beta phase, allows parents to rent baby clothes at up to 80 percent off the full price garment and then exchange the clothes when their child outgrows them.

“I figured there’s got to be a smarter way for parents to clothe their kids,” Kim said.

Like Netflix users renting DVDs, Bebaroo customers choose a price plan based on the number of clothing items they want to be able to rent at once, anywhere from one to 23 items. The clothes are then delivered to their door free of charge. The parents return the clothes in a pre-paid box when they are ready for new ones. Price plans start at $15 a month and go up to $100 a month.

Moreover, the items parents can choose from aren’t the typical run-of-the-mill baby clothes. With brands ranging from Baby Gap and Juicy Couture to Burberry and Polo Ralph Lauren, and with over 3,000 different items to select from, Bebaroo customers can dress their children in clothing that could otherwise be too expensive for them.

Kim said an integral part of the business is ensuring cleanliness of the clothing, an issue he realizes is extremely important to parents. Bebaroo follows a cleaning regimen established by the National Diapers Association in which all rented garments are first washed with scent-free, die-free, all organic detergent, and then packaged in hermitically sealed bags.

While the company is currently in its pilot-stage, the website has already garnered 45,000 page hits and gained 5,000 customers who have been selected to join as a start-up customer base while Kim and his team continue to develop the business.

For his work on Bebaroo, Kim has been selected as a finalist in Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Entrepreneur of 2010” award in the College Entrepreneur category.

“I’m living up to my dream,” Kim said. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and this is something that I started for the first time and it’s going great and customers are liking it. It’s been an amazing, fantastic ride so far.”

MICROCONTROLLERS

Ambiq Micro, a startup company founded by University graduates and professors, has recently gained national attention for its work that could potentially usher in a new era in computing.

The company’s co-founders — Ross graduates Scott Hanson, David Landman and Philip O'Neil and Engineering professors Dennis Sylvester and David Blaauw — have developed what they call the world’s most energy-efficient microcontroller. They believe this new technology will completely transform the way users interact with computers in an everyday environment.

“Microcontrollers — or MCU’s — you can think of them as a scaled down version of the microprocessors you would find inside your laptops,” O'Neil said in a presentation about the new microcontrollers at Rice University. “MCUs are used in many different applications that we interact with on a daily basis, from our cell phones to our watches to our cars.