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Practicality, along with true grit and charm, was the mother of invention for Loretta Martinez, a Moriarty cowgirl turned tech entrepreneur.

Loretta started Nickel Brand Software several years ago based on a hunch there was a better way than by hand to record and manage New Mexico's nearly 29,000 registered livestock brands among the hundreds and thousands of brands in other states and countries. Nickel Brand's software and service has international utility and markets.

Along the trail of building her software company, Loretta leveraged several excellent regional technology business development resources, including Sandia National Laboratories' Small Business Assistance Program, the University of New Mexico's Anderson Schools of Management's technology program, WESST Corp., and the Regional Development Corporation's Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program (SATOP).

For the urban tenderfoot, brand management is something marketing types do to Wheaties or Pepsi, making sure consumers recognize and are attracted to a product's logo and features. However, the ancient practice of livestock branding, now more than 4,000 years old, is a foreign if not somewhat paganish ritual to the city-slicker, best recalled from dusty John Wayne movies of cattle drives and horse thieves.

A rancher's ownership symbol, or brand, is crafted into long handled branding irons by a blacksmith. The brands have their own graffiti-like symmetry and a quirky yet simple language: Rocker J Bar, Rafter S, Circle H, Lazy B. Symbols so stout and strong that often the entire ranch might be named after the brand, like the B Square Ranch near Farmington made famous by one of our former governors, Tom Bolack.

The irons are placed into camp fires at roundup, heated to glowing, and used to sear the symbols onto the backside hip of a rancher's animal to aid identification and deter cattle or horse rustling. Think of brands as the VIN and license plate for the four-legged. Branding is not a sport for the faint hearted with all the chaotic smoke and dust and bellowing.

Loretta knows livestock brands.

One of her assignments when she worked at the brand management department of the New Mexico Livestock Board was to hand stencil the thousands of registered livestock brands into a brand book. The job took her several months to complete.

The brand book is thumbed through manually in time-honored tradition by livestock inspectors, page to page, to determine livestock ownership and control in the process of tracking and selling herds. Finding the brands in the books proved to be a tedious process, as one might imagine.

Loretta sought to automate this process of brand entry and retrieval, allowing inspectors to sketch a brand into a PDA to match it against brands in electronic databases.

While it was easy to conceptualize a solution, programming the software that would perform the necessary steps to recognize a rancher's brand proved to be a much more complicated feat.

She connected early on with the Small Business Assistance Program (SBAP) at Sandia National Laboratories in her search for solutions. This unique and innovative program, in partnership with the Regional Development Corporation, UNM and Wesst Corp., provided her technical assistance, business planning, and financing guidance. A Sandia software expert working through the RDC, John Browning, volunteered for and accomplished the tricky task.

Sandia's SBAP, and now the similar and just-announced program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, provides qualified New Mexico businesses access to the world class scientific and engineering talents at the labs to help solve technical challenges brought by companies like Nickel Brand Software. These programs and the others mentioned are among of the most effective economic development tools in New Mexico for directly connecting small business dreams with solutions, helping hundreds of businesses each year.

Indeed, with help from these partners, Nickel Brand and Loretta Martinez have made their lasting mark, bringing state-of-the-art technology to one of the last vestiges of the Wild West.