A gentler way to start the day

If you woke up feeling groggy this morning and found yourself humming ''I Don't Like Mondays" on the way to work, a Rhode Island start-up may have a new technology that's a better solution than a grande cappuccino.

Axon Sleep Research Laboratories is developing a headband called SleepSmart that you'd wear overnight. Rather than waking you up at a precise time -- say, 6:30 a.m. -- the headband would monitor your brain waves using special sensors, and wake you up sometime in the half-hour leading up to 6:30 when you were in a light phase of sleep, which is preferable to being jolted out of deep sleep.

''Even if you're getting a limited amount of sleep," says Eric Shashoua, Axon's president, ''it can still make a significant improvement on your morning."

It may not shock you to learn that the original idea for SleepSmart came from a college student, Samee McDannel, who woke up one morning before a big exam feeling lethargic. Having recently taken a psychology course that taught her about the differences between the light, deep, and REM (rapid eye movement) cycles of sleep that occur throughout the night, McDannel wondered whether it would be possible to create an alarm clock that would wake her only from a light stage of sleep, giving her a fresher start on the day.

The company is run entirely by current college students and recent grads. McDannel is finishing her undergraduate degree at Bryant University; the rest of Axon's founders have links to Brown.

As Shashoua puts it, ''As students, we know about sleep deprivation." In December, he got his bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown.

The headband would work like a mini EEG monitor, using three built-in electrodes to tune in to your brain waves and wake you up toward the end of a light sleep stage. It would communicate wirelessly with a ''base station" on your bedside table, which you'd program with your latest desired wake-up time. (The trade-off for feeling as chipper as Katie Couric every morning is perhaps being awakened a bit before that time.) Axon is working with Herbst LaZar Bell, a product design firm with an office in Waltham, to make sure the headband is comfortable and the base station is easy to use.

Axon was one of three finalists in last year's business plan competition at Brown, and the company has brought in just over $300,000 in grants and private funding. Axon has also recruited seasoned entrepreneurs such as Jeff Stibel to its board. Stibel was a graduate student at Brown when he started Simpli.com, an Internet search company that United Online bought in 2000 for roughly $22 million, one year after it was founded. Stibel is now a general manager at California-based United, which runs NetZero and Juno, two Internet service providers.

Axon's founders are ''really hard-working," says Stibel. ''They reminded me a lot of the Simpli team. So I joined their board and invested." He adds, ''I'm about to have my first child, so I desperately need this product. I want the first one off the production line, then my wife gets number two."

Axon says it is putting the finishing touches on the first working prototype of the headband, which it hopes to start testing soon at a Rhode Island sleep clinic. A finished product could be available as soon as next year, with a price around $200.

To get into the market, the company is also trying to raise more money. Axon is in discussions with the Cherrystone Angels, a relatively new collective of individual investors based in Rhode Island. But as with any company that doesn't yet have information about how customers use -- and like -- its products, it will be tough for Axon to get a good deal right now from investors. The best scenario would be if the company had a few working prototypes that it could loan to prospective investors, the pitch being, ''Try this before you give us your money, and see if it changes the way you feel when you wake up."

Until that point, investors will remain a bit skeptical. ''There's absolute enthusiasm for the team," says Jerry Schaufeld, a founder of the Cherrystone group, ''but we're all agonizing about whether people will use it."

And even if the company can raise money, the marketing challenges will be extreme: How do you persuade prospective customers to shell out $200 for a device that they can't try while they're standing in a Brookstone or Sharper Image store? Would late-night informercials work? Axon might be wise to get its product into hotel chains, where large numbers of guests could ''test-drive" before they buy.

But if SleepSmart works, and if the company can figure out a way to get people to try it -- two big ifs -- then I'd suggest it may be time to short Starbucks' stock.

Seelig switches sides
After serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, Jonathan Seelig starts a new job this week as a managing director at Globespan Capital Partners. Entrepreneurs-in-residence typically help venture capitalists evaluate potential investments, and sometimes they eventually sign on as part of the founding team of a company, but they don't initiate investments on their own. And Seelig wanted to try his hand at that.

What surprises me is that Seelig, part of the founding team of Akamai Technologies, didn't join Polaris once he'd decided to switch from entrepreneur to VC, or Battery Ventures, the firm that funded Akamai along with Polaris.

''Polaris's ranks grew pretty rapidly during the boom years," says Seelig, who was an MBA student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he helped assemble the business plan for Akamai as part of the school's annual business plan competition. (He never finished the degree, leaving to launch the company.) ''There probably isn't enough room at the table for another partner." Seelig says that there are ''fewer than half a dozen firms around town who'd add a partner right now."

Globespan, on the other hand, ''offers me real partnership benefits, and being able to define the new directions that we look at," Seelig says. ''Real partnership benefits" is code for a significant share of the financial returns the firm generates, not just the one-half of 1 percent typically allocated to a junior partner.

Globespan manages $285 million, much of it from Japanese investors. The Boston office has invested in local companies such as Millennial Net, a wireless networking start-up, and m-Qube, which helps deliver content, coupons, and games to cellphones.

Seelig attended his first weekly partners meeting, where VCs typically review investment possibilities, last week. He says he's interested in exploring consumer Internet ideas, such as new advertising models and e-commerce opportunities, as well as businesses with an international angle.

''There are a lot of tech companies that are going to get built outside the US, and a lot of American companies that will start to have success attacking non-US markets," he says.

Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be reached at skirsner@verizon.net.