State Official Tours Erie Incubator

Out of the Grey Coffee blends custom coffee. Innovated offers psychiatric counseling via videoconference. AcousticSheep makes headphone headbands to wear while sleeping.

These were three of the businesses featured when state Community and Economic Development Secretary Dennis Davin toured Gannon University's Erie Technology Incubator on Monday.

These companies and the jobs they create are the kind Gov. Tom Wolf hopes to encourage in Pennsylvania, Davin said.

The Erie visit marked another stop on Davin's Jobs that Pay tour, meant to demonstrate the governor's commitment to entrepreneurs and technology investments.

ETI Executive Director Jeffrey Parnell said he would have been happy to show Davin all 18 businesses housed at ETI.

"We were excited to have Secretary Davin here," he said. "It's certainly a show of Governor Wolf's administration's support for entrepreneurship here in northwest PA."

The first stop on the tour was the office of Code Kit PRO, the most recent winner of Gannon's $10,000 Technology Accelerator Award.

Code Kit PRO makes child-sized platform resuscitation organizers for emergency medical care. The kits are manufactured in Meadville.

"It makes it much faster and easier to work on the child," sales manager and retired paramedic John Maloney said. "Time is of the essence. You don't get many of those types of calls. It helps to have everything organized, and right there."

Other stops on the ETI tour included Conduit Technology, a Web-based software company that plans to bring at least 20 jobs to Erie and Medical Opinion Center, a Web-based service that allows customers to get medical opinions from professionals across the country without leaving their homes.

Parnell liked what he heard from Davin.

"What we heard today from Secretary Davin was certainly a very strong commitment to fund technology businesses and technology kinds of investments in PA, and that's what excites us, because that's what we're very much about," Parnell said.