How Collagen Helps with Joint Pain

43 million Americans are affected by joint pain. That's almost 16% of the population. Much of this pain is due to the result of aging and as a result, many adults are looking for ways to deal with joint pain.

Dr. Allan Kramer, PhD was born and raised on a farm in Northwest Iowa where he earned his degree in chemistry and math then attended Kansas State University where he earned his degree in Organic Chemistry. Dr. Kramer. He spent most of his life developing animal vaccines. His work also allowed for the success of the company in producing swine vaccines for the agricultural sector.  Additionally, there were projects related to Chondroitin Sulfate and hormone isolation, both of which allowed him to form Sioux Biochemical and SBEDGE a bovine collagen manufacturer.

Dr. Kramer explains that the majority of joint pain is the result of injuries or aging. Join pain affects our ability to be mobile, to walk and move around and affects the cartilage in our joints. Cartilage is a web that is formed in the joint and is flexible and durable. As time goes by, we put a lot of stress on our joints which reduces the amount of cartilage which in turn creates friction and thus pain. Arthritis is another factor that affects our joints and is an immune reaction where your body is fighting against itself by attacking your joints and the cartilage in your joints. Loss of cartilage is the main reason for pain.

Every joint has two collagen layers. The one that both movable parts are covered with collagen and that collagen is where that interaction takes place also the fact that there's a lubricant in there. By replacing collagen, it can improve the joint’s function and ability to move and reduce pain.

Collagen needs to be stimulated. We do have the method to repair the collagen, but they need to be stimulated by another product and what we are using today is we're looking at bovine collagen. It does trigger an immune response. It starts in the gut and the gut then tells us to go to the joints and it starts the mechanism of remaking the collagen that is being lost. There are cells there that have to be stimulated. Again, we do have the method to repair the collagen, but it has to be told that it should repair it and make more.

Hear the Entire Podcast Below:

Solar Array Batteries Use a Network To Talk With The Grid!

As more and more companies look to solar energy for power many new challenges come along that need a solution for it to all work. In this case The Rock River Lumber and Grain Company had installed solar panels to help reduce energy costs. After installing their solar panels, they decided to a battery array to both store energy as well as sell power back to the utility grid but in order to do that it needed to securely connect with the utilities network.

How Twin State Got Involved

Enter Twin State Technical Services company located in Davenport, Iowa. Rock River Lumber and Grain were already a client of Twin State Technical Services providing IT and networking services. They explain the situation and Jake Thompson, a network engineer works with them to solve a series of challenges and ultimately create a network that gets them access to the internet so they can send power out over the utility grid.

 Jake Explains that the company installed the solar panel in Prophetstown, Illinois where they are headquartered. The project was one of the largest of its in Whiteside County at the time.

 They have a grain facility out in Sterling that operates as a rail terminal where they offload all their grain. They put the solar system in to offset their energy costs and get some energy for themselves. About two years after the installation Moxie and recommended installing a battery backup array we can install on your site. The solar panels can charge those batteries during operation. When the grid needs power, it can pull that energy off the batteries in a stored format pushing it out to all the local residences, businesses, to the grid.

 In order to do that, someone has to come into the network and say, hey, I want that power, and that you do that over the Internet to communicate what is needed and what is available and to track all the actions.

Challenges

The challenge s included the size of the property, which was very large, multiple buildings all around an active rail yard. The solar array was at one end, the battery was in the middle, and they had to be connected somehow to the DMark, which is where we send our Internet out to the world. The way we did that, we had to mount devices called Point to point. It basically is a wireless connection between where we want to send data to the solar panels or to the battery backups. You just mount this radio antenna up as high as you can so there's no interference, and you point it as close as you can.

We worked with one of the solar panels to look at that data, and then we had to run another point to point to the other end of the property to look at the batteries. When we can see the data the n we can get it out to the internet.

We had some firewall changes and policies that we had to put in place so that we could have security on it. No outside world could get into it, only the organization that wants to control those batteries and those were put in place as well.

Jake Thompson is a Network Engineer for Twin State Technical Services : Twin State Technical Services

Focus on Customer’s Needs & Problems and How It Helped Sells Yard Sign Stakes

Our podcast on Delighting Your Customers and how focusing on Customer’s Needs & Problems Helps Sells Yard Sign Stakes is an inspiration discussion about growing a business and surviving the COVID pandemic and supply chain disruptions.

Jon Gainer is the President and owner of Stake World a manufacturer of lawn sign stakes. Most of us would think, what difference could there be in a wire frame that you stick in the ground to hold a sign up. But Jon saw that his customers had needs and problems and how by making products that make them successful helped not only to grow is business but develop long term relationships and many repeat customers.

The podcast talks about how designs and materials were researched and developed because many of his original customers had problems and needed solutions. We also talk about not giving in to using foreign suppliers to try and keep manufacturing costs down and how by sticking to your guns helps retain current customers and win over new customers.

Many Thanks To: Jon Gainer, President and Owner: StakeWorld - https://www.stakeworld.com/

Monetizing TIF

The podcast Monetizing Tax Incremental Financing for Municipalities and Developers not only explains how TIF can be used as a tool to fund and encourage redevelopment in cities but also how it can help with unexpected costs not originally identified in the development agreement the city can use TIFF as a tool to reimburse back the developer some of those additional costs.

What's New

What untamed equity is doing is to come in and monetize those future increment cash flows that we know are coming in as a reimbursement back to the developer. And generally, those are in the form of the reimbursement of property taxes that are paid by the developer. And then we look at the net present value cash flow stream and offer a lump sum loan amount based on a marginal of that net present value cash flow stream.

What Monetizing TIF Loans is really doing is adding that additional value to those payments by offering those payments to be reimbursed to the developer up front so we can fund that gap equity. It turns out to be gap equity that comes into the project because at the end of the day, we all want to get that project finished. But there are ways to obviously fund that upfront that we provide rather than having the city do it.

Many Thanks to: Emily Blaylock, President of Untamed Equity

Solving a Supply Chain Problem for Casting

Even before the challenges brough on by supply chain disruptions, Dean and Andrew Sonquist of Plas-Tech Tooling have been working with companies who are converting cast parts and components into machined ones. The current supply chain disruption is more far reaching and causing serious problems for a significant number of manufacturers across the country. Dean explains that they have had several companies recently contact them to see if it was feasible to convert several cast parts into machined parts to fill some orders.

What The Podcast Covers

The podcast explains how the process works and more importantly what factors make the process financially beneficial to a company. There are several considerations one has to look at before making the jump to machined parts over cast parts. Aesthetics, weight, and costs are primary reasons to go or not go with conversions.

What to Ask - How to Work with Your Production Maching Source

The program also explains the type of questions you need to be asking a production machining company to see if the process is the right move as well as the importance of good communications between companies so that the goals, requirements, and concerns are all covered before production begins. The process is fairly quick to set up and some prototypes can be created with a few days which means the conversion can be done relatively quickly. Some buyers are taking the opportunity to make modifications to the parts because changing a machined part is more cost effective than changing the mold for a cast part.

Many Thanks to Dean and Andrew Sonquist | Plas-Tech Tooling | www.plastechtooling.com