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Therma-HEXX makes heat exchange systems that are installed under pavement, enabling everyone from pool owners to those leasing old mill buildings to save thousands of dollars in energy costs.
Conforme has created a smartphone app that will make it easier for painters and contractors to deal with the paperwork involved in new lead paint regulations.
Sensible Spreader Technologies uses GPS technology on snowplows so they will spread an expensive alternative to rock salt near sensitive watersheds and on vulnerable bridges.
One, or maybe all, of these niche startups - a bit high-tech, a tint of green - could be a part of the entrepreneurial key to start the stalled engine of the state's economy.
After all, when all is said and done, there will be some 15,000 new business filings in 2012, about 500 more than last year. Who knows which one could ignite the spark that fires things up?
Here's hoping some of them will, because at this point it doesn't look like any other sector will give the economy the spark it needs to be firing on all cylinders.
The Granite's State's economy, more so than the rest of the nation these days, is mired in un
certainty, and the so-called 'New Hampshire Advantage' is "withering away," in the words of economist Dennis Delay of the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies.
The state initially sank when most of the rest of the nation plummeted headlong into Great Recession. New Hampshire's unemployment rate was among the lowest in the nation, its housing and foreclosure crisis not quite as severe. But now the state's economy can't seem to get moving again, and the rest of the country is catching up.
That doesn't mean that New Hampshire isn't looking pretty good, relatively speaking.
Public Service of New Hampshire just released its annual economic report, reminding everyone how well the state ranks compared to the rest of the nation when it comes to such benchmarks as tax climate (sixth), standard of living (first), college-educated citizens (ninth), income level (ninth) and manufacturing employment compared to population (10th).
But it's not so much a matter of where the state ranks right now, but how fast its economy is improving.
For instance, while the unemployment rate has been...