Innovation & Tech Today, Winter 2018

TECH ZONE: OHIO ■ MARIA PRUSAKOVA’S CRYPTOCURRENCY PERSPECTIVE ■ KRYPTON : THE STORY BEFORE SUPERMAN

MARK CUBAN MEANS BUSINESS

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FROM THE PUBLISHER

Charles Warner, Publisher/ Editor-in-Chief

“ While not always easy, growth is an essential part of life.

And our publication experienced an incredible year of growth throughout 2018.”

Growth.

If I had to give a theme to the year of 2018, it would be growth. While not always easy, growth is an essential part of life. And our publication experienced an incredible year of growth throughout 2018. This is best showcased by this year’s cover stars: Neil Patrick Harris, Gary Vaynerchuk, Olivia Munn, and Mark Cuban. Each feature demonstrated not only the growth that these influencers have had throughout their careers, but their incredible perspectives as well, from entertainment and STEM to business and entrepreneurship.

The Innovation & Tech Today family grew exponentially this year with the launch of our brand-new sister publications Cannabis & Tech Today and Residential Tech Today. Both launches were incredibly successful and provided an opportunity for us to celebrate innovation within massively growing industries, showing off the experience and prowess of our team from top to bottom. But, while I could speak about our new publications all day, I want to put the spotlight on our content-packed winter issue of Innovation & Tech Today, our beloved flagship that will make its debut at CES 2019.

Every year, CES brings 170,000 people to Las Vegas for a week of experiencing the incredible tech and forward-thinking innovators that are shaking up industries.

Once again, our publication will be available to all attendees and we will be there covering the best of the best in innovation.

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

The winter issue is a reflection of the growth our team has experienced throughout the year.

Our cover feature on Mark Cuban examines his impressive portfolio, with emphasis on his interest in the rapidly growing worlds of esports and voice technology, as well as his advice for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the inspiring stories you’ll see in the pages of this issue. Yahya Abdul-Manteen II opens up about portraying the villainous Black Manta in Aquaman. Maria Prusakova reveals her approach to inspiring women to embrace cryptocurrency. John Cena details his entrance into the Transformers film universe.

The super talented and very lovable John Cena makes an appearance to talk Transformers. Dr. Darryl Lee Baynes discloses his passion for combining entertainment and education. And, of course, we are happy to present our Innovator of the Year: Lisa DeLuca, IBM’s most prolific female inventor with hundreds of patents to her name.

As we reflect on the transitions a new year will bring us, I can’t help but imagine what I’ll be writing in this letter once 2019 wraps up. I imagine I will once again be reflecting on a year of innovation and expansion for our publication. And, as always, we remind our readers to keep learning, keep innovating, and, most importantly, keep growing.

All Things Connected.

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SINCE LAST ISSUE SOCIAL MEDIA SHOUTOUTS The fall issue of Innovation & Tech Today saw a number of in-depth features with some incredible people. Two of the most engaging were that of cover star Olivia Munn, discussing her interest in holistic medicine and her role in Predator, and Jason Latimer, exploring the intersections of science and magic. Both Munn and Latimer shared their excitement for the fall issue on social media to their many followers!

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Charles Warner cwarner@goipw.com

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Shane Brisson shane@goipw.com

A SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH This fall also saw the launch of our most recent spin-off publication, Residential Tech Today. Debuting at CEDIA 2018, the premiere issue of ResTech explored the latest in smart home tech, including the evolution to 8K and 10K televisions, some impressive speakers from Bowers & Wilkins, and a feature on the latest smart community in Colorado. Additionally, this debut issue would not have been complete without our cover star Rob Corddry discussing his own love for technology.

SPECIAL THANKS TO: Phoenix Herpetological Society, Alexandra Karpova, Danielle Calfo, Michelle Schwartz, Paige Borsos, Carly O’Brien, Heidi Marzke

MANAGING EDITOR

Dylan Rodgers

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AUTOMOTIVE EDITOR

Michael Coates

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VIDEO EDITOR

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Everin Draper Patricia Miller

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Ang Cui Matt Cobos Mike Washburn Robert Alexander Ted Griffith Zack Pensak

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FOUNDING EDITOR

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Charlie Hernandez Dave Van Niel

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

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contents

WINTER 2018

104 Mark Cuban:

The Proof

is in the Porfolio

By Alex Moersen Cover Photo: ABC/Patrick Ecclesine

Departments 12 By the Numbers 14 Event Wrap-Ups 16 Quick Bytes 20 Legislation 22 Wildlife Tech 24 Digital Publishing 134 Editor’s Choice 2018

136 Top 50 Most Innovative Products: Product Revolution 142 Events 143 Coming Next Issue 144 Lighter Side

26 Innovator Profile Building the Next Generation of Blockchain

28 Connected Car Behind the Scenes of the First Electric Jaguar 30 What Blockchain Offers Autonomous Vehicles 32 Autonomous Ambition from Australia & Stanford

34 Security Assessing the Risks to IoT Devices

40 Outdoor+Adventure Tech A Nomad’s Guide to Travel 44 Tulem: Mexico’s Hidden Gem 46 Top 50 Most Innovative Products: Gear Guide

50 Health Tech The Cutting Edge of Surgery Tech 54 I nnovations in Age Monitoring and Anti-Aging Technologies 56 Top 50 Most Innovative Products: Health

58 Gaming+Entertainment John Cena: Let’s Get Ready to Bumble(bee)!

62 Diving Deep with Black Manta 64 Wreck-It Ralph Enters the Void 66 Magnolia Pictures: Carefully Curated 68 Uncovering Krypton 70 T op 50 Most Innovative Products: Gaming+Entertainment

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

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contents

WINTER 2018

72 Tech Zone The Buckeye State’s Burgeoning Tech 74 Making IT Happen in Ohio 76 The Rise of Cuyahoga County 78 Virtual Roundtable with Case Western University 82 Cleveland’s Return to Economic Prominence 84 W hy Ohio’s Innovation Eyes Often Rest on TechGROWTH Ohio 86 S pringfield’s UAV Collaboration Would Delight the Wright Brothers 88 B usiness Retooling Spurs Ashland’s Digital & Economic Growth 90 H ow STEM is Fueling Licking County’s Strong Growth into the Future 92 Expanding Logistics, Expanding Space

94 Connected Life Sam Harris: Do You Mind?

98 Automating Agriculture 100 How Fybr is Turning the Key 102 T op 50 Most Innovative Products: Connected Life

104 Business Innovations 108 A New Frontier in Cannabis Reporting

110 Blockchain Today Bringing Women to the World of Cryptocurrency

112 STEM Today

Produced in Partnership with the USA Science & Engineering Festival

The Importance of Edutainment 114 Telling the Full Story 118 Bringing the Classroom to the Console 120 Thinking Inside the [Box]

122 Sustainability Today Produced in Partnership with Sustainable Brands

Incubating Innovations in Clean Energy 126 Suds Meet Sustainability

128 Innovator of the Year IBM’s Lisa DeLuca

132 Art & Tech The Amazing, Animated Spider-Man

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

Photo IBM/Vivi Zanatta

e NUMB RS

by the

A look at the metrics shaping the technology market — and our lives

Screen Time Stats

“Americans Demand New Form Of Media To Bridge Entertainment Gap While Looking From Laptop To Phone.” The satirical headline from The Onion, while humorous, highlights the real-world problem of screen addiction. Many people might find themselves using multiple screens, consuming multiple medias, at the same time, and the data shows how prolific screens have become in our day-to-day lives.

Most popular smartphone activities of second screen users while watching TV (in the United States, as of March 2017)

Most popular tablet activities of second screen users while watching TV

Source: Statista

72% 67% 66% 55% 53% 50%

Check social media, unrelated to video E-mail, unrelated to video Browse the internet, unrelated to video Catch up on news Look up info about/post something else Play games

(in the United States, as of March 2017)

Browse the internet, unrelated to video E-mail, unrelated to video Shop Check social media, unrelated to video

Percentage of internet users in the United States who use another device while watching TV or streaming digital video on TV

Play games

as of March 2017

Source: Statista

While streaming digital video on TV

While watching TV

81%

72%

Source: Statista

U.S Children’s average free-time hours per week, by activity type: 18.6 Screen-based play 14.6 Indoor screen-free play

Most popular devices used while watching TV and digital video streamed to TV according to internet users (in the United States, as of March 2017)

10.6 Outside play things with parent/adult 9.6 Doing (screen-free) play 5.3 Structured (organized sports/activities)

2.7 Homework 0

5

10

As of November 2017 // Source: Statista

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

15

20

64% 56% 54% 54% 51%

Smartphone While watching TV - 58% While streaming - 56%

Americans devote

Computer While watching TV - 46% While streaming - 38%

a day to screen time

Tablet While watching TV - 35% While streaming - 32%

10+hours

Source: CNN

Source: Statista

[ Event Wrap-Ups ]

Digital Book World

Rocky Mountain Audio Fest Featuring local companies and worldwide corporations alike showing off their high tech offerings, it’s no wonder that the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is known as the largest consumer audio and home entertainment event in the country. Speakers, record players, headphones, and amplifiers were each showcased, giving industry professionals and audiophiles alike the opportunity to experience every possible musical note. The event, which took place in the massive Denver Tech Center Marriott Hotel, even encouraged attendees to bring their own music and turn the volume up to 11.

Photos Adam Saldaña and Evan Kelley

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

One of the industry’s top events worldwide, Digital Book World united the digital publishing community to celebrate the growing format and its many thought leaders. Taking place at the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee, this year’s event presented awards for everything from “Independent Publisher of the Year” and “Educational Publisher of the Year” to “Best Mobile Application” and “Best Audio Book.” Featuring speakers such as Tandemvines Media Founder Denise Clifton, Novel Effect Co-Founders Matt and Melissa Hammersley, and Tellables Founder Amy Stapleton, the event put a much-deserved spotlight on various members of the world of publishing.

CEDIA With over 500 exhibitors and 20,000 professionals within the home tech industry, CEDIA was a total celebration of the innovations that are turning the home into a connected paradise. Showcasing the companies and products that will shape the future of home tech, CEDIA 2018 gave the ideal platform for industry leaders such as keynote speaker and 20th Century Fox Executive Vice President of Consumer Business Development and Strategic Partnerships John Penney. Additionally, CEDIA saw the launch of Innovation & Tech Today’s successful new spin-off publication Residential Tech Today, featuring actor Rob Corddry on the front cover.

Photos Adam Saldaña

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It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Burger!

The Wall Street Journal has recently found a job listing for the company searching for an operations executive to help helm a planned drone delivery takeoff. This looks to be a part of UberExpress, Uber’s drone delivery alternative to UberEats (now that’s branding!). In fact, according to Business Insider, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was quoted in May about the project, saying, “We need flying burgers.” Interestingly, that doesn’t even crack the top 10 weirdest quotes from CEOs this year.

iStockphoto.com/Chesky_W

Uber has undoubtedly shaken up the taxi industry, helping to make ridesharing the new norm when it comes to taking a quick trip while also providing people with a diverse array of cars to throw up in.

However, the multi-billion dollar company is looking beyond replacing taxicabs and giving consumers what they really want: greasy cheeseburgers delivered by AI aircraft.

Do Lizards Dream of Electric Bugs?

Dreams are still one of the most fascinating aspects of the human condition. After all, who hasn’t spent hours analyzing that dream where they show up late to their classes on the day of the big test naked and begin falling? And everybody’s taken extreme joy in watching their dog “dream running.” But let’s get to the real question on everyone’s mind: Do lizards dream?

According to researchers from the CNRS and Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University, it appears that, much like birds and humans (along with other mammals), lizards exhibit two sleep states, corroborating similar studies involving the Argentine tegu and bearded dragon. Does this mean that scientists will discover more similarities between the scaly reptiles and the human race? A lizard can dream. pexels.com/@shawnreza

Tesla: Impossible Don’t you hate it when your extremely expensive, technologically advanced car gets stolen? Yes, the one percent of us understand that can be a real pain. But what’s almost as bad as getting such a great piece of tech taken from you? Somebody posting a video of the vehicle being stolen on the world’s most popular video sharing website … which also acts as a guide on how to steal it.

In the recording posted to YouTube, the thieves utilize a tablet in order to get the passive signal of a Tesla’s key fob, which allowed them to easily enter the vehicle. The only flaw in their master plan? They couldn’t figure out how to unplug the vehicle, costing them several minutes of drivetime and ruining all dramatic flair.

Tesla photo: iStockphoto.com/typhoonski

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

While this may seem like a major flaw on Tesla’s part, the owner admittedly did not utilize such safety features as “PIN to drive” and left passive entry enabled. Regardless, one can only assume that Elon Musk will respond to the incident with a bizarre tweet that will cost the company billions of dollars.

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Worms Just Wanna Be Young What more can be said about worms? They’re slimy, they’re weird, and despite years or urban legends, they don’t grow into two separate beings when cut in half. (Bet you feel really sorry for mutilating all those innocent worms now, huh?) And, unless you’re impaling them to use for fish bait (you monster!), the common earthworm tends to have a lifespan of around six years. Until today, that is.

Researchers from Yale-NUS College led by Dr. Jan Gruber have recently created a pharmaceutical drug combination that can both delay the aging process and nearly double the lifespan of the Caenorhabditis elegans worm. Which is great news for all of you grieving your deceased pet Caenorhabditis elegans out there.

But while it’s great that these disgusting, monstrous creatures will live longer and look younger, what does this mean for us humans? Well, Dr. Gruber hopes that humans will benefit from this research with longer, healthier lives. Which we will need when we are inevitably overtaken by overpowered, nearly-immortal worms.

iStockphoto.com/kolesnikovserg

Old Macdonald Had a Bot From cashiers to receptionists, we’ve already seen our robotic companions begin to take over jobs. But, as you’re most likely already storing supplies and weapons for the impending robotic uprising, we assume you’re already aware. Well, in addition to the jobs we expect to be taken by machines in the future, such as taxi drivers, machine operators, and half-assed article writers, you might be able to add the American-asapple-pie occupation of farmer to that list.

Based out of Cincinnati, 80 Acres Farms is looking to utilize robotics and unique growing tactics to revolutionize the farming industry. The firm’s indoor farming methods and controlled environment, combined with robots to detect ripeness and disease, hope to increase profits and grow certain crops at any time of year. However, the farmer won’t be completely out of a job, as there will still be someone needed to input data on a smartphone. Just like our forefathers would have wanted. iStockphoto.com/Chiradech

Betcha Can’t Inject Just One! Whether it be the barbed wire tattoo you got in the 90s, the septum piercing you got at the mall after leaving your local Hot Topic, or the stretched-out ear gauges you got to shock and disappoint your grandparents, body modifications have become commonplace in our modern society. However, in this technological age, we have moved far past the simple times of analog body mods, as Swedish citizens have begun injecting microchips under their skin.

The procedure, which costs roughly $180, inserts an extremely tiny microchip under the skin, allowing users to access digital readers in order to open front doors and offices, as well as store information such as e-tickets and emergency contacts. The technology has been overwhelmingly popular, with Sweden’s leading chip company struggling to keep up with demand, which is disappointing, since my own freelance chip injecting company has yet to see one customer. iStockphoto.com/vetkit

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

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DEPARTMENTS / Legislation

Reviewing the Odds on Sports Gambling

By Anthony Elio

“I don’t think that gambling is the biggest part of sports, but I think it’s an important part of sports.” This was said in a radio interview by Vegas Stats and Information Network Host and Managing Editor Brent Musburger, who predicts a future where betting lines are flashed across the bottom of sports programs along with the scores.

Looking at the current state of the industry, the legendary broadcaster’s quote rings true.

2017 saw a record amount of $4.9 billion spent on sports gambling in the state of Nevada. This number, originally reported by the UNLV Center for Gambling Research, reflects an uptick of over 440 percent since 1984. With growing revenue and a clear incline in popularity, betting on sports is clearly getting too big for the desert city of Las Vegas. And, thanks to recent legislation, that statistic will not only spread across the U.S., but skyrocket in value.

In May of 2018, the road was paved for the future of sports betting in the United States.

While wagering on sports was previously exclusive to Nevada, the 6-3 ruling from the Supreme Court has opened the doors for New Jersey and beyond, with New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy placing the very first legal bet on

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

Thursday, June 14. And, thanks to the ruling, it is now entirely up to individual states to decide if they want legal sports betting or not.

At the time of this writing, there are currently six states that permit wagering on sporting events: Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia, with over half of the total U.S. making the steps towards legalization. The only state that seems completely unlikely to approach legal gambling is Utah, reflected by a strict state constitution which restricts everything from sports gambling to lottery tickets.

While it may take some time before sports betting truly hits the mainstream, there’s no denying that there could be numerous benefits to legalization. The economic capabilities are astonishing, with a 2017 Oxford University report detailing a potential $11.6 billion to $14.2 billion annual contribution to the United States Gross Domestic Product. Additionally, the report details how the market would gain 125-152,000 jobs, with an approximate average salary around $48,000.

Two companies that look to reap the benefits of the Supreme Court decision are FanDuel and

DraftKings, both notorious in the gambling conversation for their “daily fantasy sports” system, which has remained legal due to the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act designating fantasy sports as a game of skill rather than luck. Thanks to the bright future of legalized sports betting, the two companies look to expand their horizons, with the FanDuel Sportsbook and DraftKings Sportsbook apps recently launching in New Jersey, with hopes to expand to more legal territories in the future.

The next few years will be a fascinating time for the world of sports betting. The signs are there for considerable growth, between economic projection and major companies jumping on board. Depending on your location, wagering on the Super Bowl winner, which once required a plane ride and a trip to Caesar’s Palace, could be accessible from your smartphone. As Musburger told the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast, sports betting “has operated in the shadows for far too long, had been an extensive black market, and now at least it will come out into the open and be an accepted part of the American betting culture.

And that’s the way it should be.” ■

DEPARTMENTS / Wildlife Tech

Paw Prints How 3D-printed Prosthetics are Giving Injured Animals a Second Chance at Life.

By Patricia Miller 3D printing is one of the most versatile technological innovations of the century. Its utility goes beyond crafting helmets for your hamster or replicating a movie-quality Star Trek phaser for your Halloween costume. The tech is being applied to almost every field, from medicine to transportation, manufacturing to education. Now the ground-breaking process has found its way into veterinary medicine, helping rehabilitate animals that may have otherwise been euthanized. These unusual cases are likely to become more common as the technology becomes more widely available.

Sonic the Bionic kitten was just four months old when he was fitted for a 3D-printed prosthetic leg. A bone deformity left him with a severe limp that was likely to lead to further disfunction later in life. In many cases, a deformity as severe as Sonic’s would have few treatment options. Fortunately, the Denver Animal Shelter works closely with students from the Art Institute of Colorado to create 3D-printed prosthetics for patients in need.

The team started the process by analyzing Sonic’s movements to determine his natural gait.

The sprightly kitten was then fitted with a plastic prototype, which was continuously refined to create a comfortable, functional fit.

The final prosthetic was 3D printed from carbon fiber to create a durable, resilient structure that would stand up to Sonic’s active lifestyle.

Customization is vital for these cases, as further evidenced by the story of Hiss Majesty the lizard. The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago has been home to Hiss Majesty for more than sixteen years. When he lost his leg to cancer, 3D designers and veterinarians at the Aquarium joined forces to create a custom prosthetic. The team used lightweight silicone to give the aging lizard a flexible limb that wouldn’t impede his natural movements. Researchers used a similar approach when tackling the unique case of Mr. Stubbs, the tailless alligator.

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

Specialists at the Phoenix Herpetological Society work to create a custom 3D-printed appendage for Mr. Stubbs, the tailless alligator.

Images courtesy of Phoenix Herpetological Society

In 2013, authorities intercepted a semi-truck full of illegally-poached exotic animals. Among the rescued animals was Mr. Stubbs, an American alligator with a badly damaged tail.

The Phoenix Herpetological Society took Mr. Stubbs into their care and fitted him with a prosthetic appendage based on a cast from a similarly-sized alligator. However, each alligator’s tail is unique to the individual. As such, the clunky cast based on another alligator’s dimensions wasn’t much help to Mr. Stubbs.

Now, five years later, advanced 3D printing technology has enabled researchers to create a custom-fitted tail based on Mr. Stubbs’ exact body metrics.

3D printing isn’t just for appendages, as evidenced by the perplexing case of Seemore the sea turtle. The plucky turtle was happily swimming through the surf when she was struck by a boat propeller. Her injuries resulted in “bubble butt syndrome,” a life-threatening

condition that prevented her from diving underwater. A team of marine biologists at the Minnesota Aquarium fitted Seemore with weights to help her dive, but the weights had to be continually replaced as she shed her scutes (the plates on her shell). The replacement process was stressful and researchers understood they would have to come up with a better long-term solution for the 100-pound turtle. Undergraduate students from the University of Minnesota turned to 3D printing to create a resilient exoshell for Seemore.

Though they are still experimenting with the final prosthesis, their prototypes are showing remarkable promise.

The practice is still in its infancy, but as the tech becomes more widely available more practitioners may start to implement 3D-printed prosthetic programs, giving even more animals a second chance at living a full life. ■

DEPARTMENTS / Digital Publishing

Modernizing the Library Overdrive’s David Burleigh Discusses How His Platform Brings a Modern Flair to the Local Library

By Charles Warner proud of the fact that we work very closely with libraries and schools around the world.

We’ve only been in the digital space, only worked with libraries and schools, and it really has become a vision of creating a world enlightened by reading. And so it became very obvious to us and a really a nice touchstone for us to focus on reading as the primary goal. And by working with libraries and schools, it has certainly helped us accomplish that. And that helps us really focus our efforts on supporting these obviously vital institutions in our communities.

I&T Today: How do you feel about the growth of audiobooks?

When you imagine your local library, you likely think of a quiet building filled with stacks upon stacks of literature. However, companies such as Overdrive are bringing the local library into the 21st century. The innovative Overdrive application, available on smart devices, essentially digitizes the library experience, allowing users to rent ebooks and audiobooks from their local library. In this exclusive interview, Overdrive Director of Brand Marketing & Communications David Burleigh discusses the growth of audiobooks, the ongoing need for libraries, and how his company excels in sustainability and inspiring readers.

Innovation & Tech Today: Is Overdrive helping local libraries stay relevant in the era of Amazon?

David Burleigh: I think libraries have always been a vital part of the community, and even that’s evolved over the years where they’re

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

certainly known for providing access to books and now audiobooks. I know libraries are often the largest provider of DVD rentals for video.

And so they’ve always been in the middle of the community because they provide vital services for career development.

They provide access to the internet, which as obvious as it seems to us and to many of your readers, there’s still a large percentage of the population that does not have access. So they play that role. They also provide access to maker spaces such as 3D printers, recording studios, and vital community programs for kids. It’s amazing that libraries have evolved in the way that they have.

We are, in fact, a sponsor of a program for the American Library Association called “Libraries Transform” as sort of a double entendre in terms of how they have transformed themselves but then all the services that they provide play a role in transforming the individual. We are very

DB: The audiobooks really are the fastest growing format I think in large part because of Audible’s prominence and popularity. And the library has been an important source of audiobooks, which have been available on CDs for many, many years. A lot of people have known of the library, at least from the CD standpoint, as well as tapes way back when...

Because of its popularity, the publishers have figured out that it is worth the investment to create an audiobook not only for a best seller but also for other new titles, even the mid-list titles. The smaller publishers now have ways to produce their audiobooks. So it’s really a growing market.

I&T Today: Does sustainability play a role in the overall mission of Overdrive?

DB: We’re not killing trees to provide books.

That’s certainly a value and a benefit and it’s all for just the nature of improving and providing more access to reading and literacy programs in general. So we support libraries, which are beloved community institutions in schools, and the way we provide services to them is by creating a world enlightened by reading, which is our vision. ■ For the full interview, visit innotechtoday.com/ overdrive

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innovator profile

Building the Next Generation of Blockchain Co-Founder of Ethereum Charles Hoskinson reveals how he’s solving the blockchain scalability problem, challenging social constructions, and causing as much disruption as possible.

By Patricia Miller

Innovation. It’s a term with often vague connotations. New, groundbreaking, inventive, disruptive … but what does it really mean?

Perhaps to understand innovation, we should look at the truly innovative work of Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Invictus Innovations, Ethereum, and now IOHK. His contributions to the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain are revolutionizing diverse industries on a global scale, impacting everything from agriculture to banking. In this exclusive interview, Hoskinson discusses the next generation of cryptocurrency, his most frequently asked questions, and why disruptive technology could create a more democratic global community.

Innovation & Tech Today: What’s unique about the Cardano cryptocurrency IOHK created?

Charles Hoskinson: The crown jewel of our portfolio is Cardano. It is our attempt as a company to construct what we call a third generation blockchain. If you look at the history of cryptocurrency, the first generation was all about digital scarcity, and this question of whether this digitally scarce asset could achieve market value. That was Bitcoin. What Bitcoin did through proof of work and its blockchain, is it created a situation where the token is finite, which created incentives for people to actually treat these tokens as if they were worth real money. It took a few years for that to cognitively catch on, but after around 2013, Bitcoin reached about one billion dollars in market cap, and all this money started entering the space. A lot of entrepreneurs said, “This is here to stay.”

Whether this gets to a trillion or stays a billion,

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

it’s still big enough that we can do interesting things.

The problem is that Bitcoin itself really is blind, deaf, and dumb. It doesn’t actually have the ability to be programmed. With the second generation of cryptocurrency, namely Ethereum, we introduced the notion of smart contracts. This was all about saying, “Take the terms and conditions, and the story behind why you want to move value between two people, Alice and Bob, and code that all up in its own programming language, and put it on a blockchain so it’s immutable, it’s time-stamped, it’s auditable, and these things exist.”

Well, it turns out that was a pretty good idea, a lot of people liked it, and it caught the blockchain world by storm, but the problem is that model doesn’t work at scale. As we want to go from thousands to millions and eventually billions of uses in many different applications, the issue is that the technology we use for both Bitcoin and for Ethereum just does not scale to that level.

With Cardano, we’re taking it to the next level where we’re introducing liquid democracy and other mechanisms to try to have a treasury. In essence, we’re looking at scalability, interoperability, and sustainability. And we have a lot of different approaches that we’re trying to pull in, and if we put them together, we think we can create a system that could operate at a scale of billions of people. What makes our currency really unique, though, is that we’ve also involved the universities, and we’re also involved in a very different type of engineering.

For Cardano, we’ve chosen engineering

techniques, tools, and languages which are reserved normally for the aerospace industry and for the high assurance software industry, and we’re applying that towards blockchain technology. That’s what we’re trying to do: solve the scalability problem, solve the interoperability problem, solve the governance problem, and solve it with very rigorous methodologies like formal methods and peer review.

I&T Today: What are some of the questions you receive most often about blockchain while speaking at global events?

CH: We live in an era of irrational exuberance.

I’ve witnessed Bitcoin go from a dollar to $20,000. One of the biggest challenges in our space is this notion that just because someone has gotten rich, they think they’re smart. If you put money into something and you get 1,000 times return in a year with no work, you win the lottery. You’re lucky. You’re not smart. And unfortunately, there are a lot of entrepreneurs in my space who seem to feel that they’re smarter than they actually are, and the industry as a whole is a bit over-speculative.

A lot of people come to me and ask, “Oh, what’s the next Bitcoin?” Or, “What’s the next big project? And how do I get rich? And how do I invest? And how do I trade?” Those are all the wrong questions.

What they should be asking is what are the problems that we can solve and what experiences are necessary, what platforms are necessary, and what incentives are necessary for people to migrate from the old system to the new system? And some people do ask this, but

“A lot of people come to me and ask, ‘Oh, what’s the next Bitcoin?’ Or, ‘What’s the next big project? And how do I get rich?

And how do I invest? And how do I trade?’

Those are all the wrong questions.” unfortunately a lot of people are still caught up in the money.

Another group of people came to me and asked, “Well, why are these tokens worth anything at all?

It’s backed by nothing.” That’s a very common complaint. And the first question I always ask is, “Well, what is the U.S. dollar backed by?” And they say, “Well, that’s different. That’s the U.S. government.” And I say, “Well, yeah, that’s true, but the reality is that all of these things are social fictions. Money doesn’t exist. Governments don’t exist. Religions don’t exist. They’re just made up, and we made them up because we needed a way of coordinating with people.”

Humans are amazingly good at abstractions and fictions, so we invent these concepts like corporations, and governments, and religions, and money. And we invent these things because it allows us to coordinate on a truly enormous scale. People say, “Hey, you’re dying for God,” or, “You’re dying for the state,” or, “Hey, trust me because I have this money that the state backs.”

Suddenly, you can now trust and work with people that you’ve never met, who you know nothing about. You can trust and coordinate with them on the scale of millions of people.

That’s the other thing that people struggle with a lot in our space, is that what cryptocurrencies are effectively doing is forcing us to confront that things like money, things like voting, things like governments are basically just social constructions. That’s a very difficult concept because once you realize they’re social

constructions, then you realize that everything is a social construction. There’s no social grounding, so you’re just nihilistically floating through space Rick and Morty-style, and nothing seems to matter.

It’s also quite liberating because then you realize that you’re now an architect of these social fictions along with anybody else, and there’s nobody in the world who is as qualified as you or anybody else. All the rules you have are made by people who are no smarter than you. Basically, what we’ve done is said instead of having these trusted people in the backroom who will get to decide how you vote, how your money is going to work, how your government is going to work, how you trade with people, what’s a lawful contract, what’s not, you now get to decide that. And if you get enough people on board with that, it’s a global system, and it can be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And your government doesn’t really have to have a say in it. In some cases, the government will just simply adopt it because it’s a better idea than what they have.

So that’s incredibly liberating, and that’s a new experience, and it’s something that we’ve never really had the ability to embrace in human history. It’s always been decided for us. And now in the 21st century, we kind of get to have a much more democratic conversation about it.

I&T Today: Why is “cascading disruption” a positive term in your industry?

Hoskinson’s hectic tour schedule keeps him on the road more than 250 days a year. In the last five years, he has presented in more than fifty countries for thousands of crypto-curious entrepreneurs and investors.

CH: Cascading disruption is the concept that small changes scale up to having tremendous changes on a marketplace or an industry.

Basically, it’s almost like that first domino.

Imagine if you meticulously set up this big system, and you perturb it just a little bit, and then suddenly the system collapses and something else happens.

I’m greatly concerned about the fragility of the world financial system. If you look at the collapses we’ve had from the S&L crisis to the long-term capital crisis to the dotcom collapse to the MBS crisis in 2008, they just keep getting bigger. And the solution has been to consolidate, and make the too-big-to-fail larger. And I’m extremely worried that if we keep going down this road, we’re headed for a global depression that’s really going to cause a lot of pain and heartache. Not for the wealthy people because they always seem to find a way to do pretty well, but for the poor people, and for the middle class people. My hope is that we can circumvent these issues by reordering and restructuring the global financial marketplaces with a system that is more fair and more equitable for everybody. And also a system where there are no gatekeepers who can lord over and use their position as a gatekeeper to control us.

So that’s our mantra as a company, cascading disruption. We’ve seen it many, many times before. And we’re doing our best to try to be that first mover to do it again for our industry. ■ WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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CONNECTED CAR

Behind the Scenes of the First Electric Jaguar An Interview with Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart, Technical Design Director, Jaguar

Nick Dimbleby

Nick Dimbleby

David Shepherd

By Michael Coates, Automotive Editor

Jaguar’s foray into the electric vehicle world started almost casually. Tesla’s Model S sedan had recently hit the market – and hit it hard.

Traditional vehicle enthusiasts as well as environmentalists fell in love. Rumbles reverberated throughout the automotive world.

At Jaguar Land Rover, the Indian-owned classic British brands, several top executives huddled and decided they must take a new, electric direction. “Let’s do an electric car,” was the go statement Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart remembers as the start of the I-Pace. Ziebart said Jaguar’s Design Director Ian Callum did the initial sketches himself. It was a clean sheet of paper design, something Dr. Ziebart says was critical for the company’s approach to an allelectric car.

As Dr. Ziebart told Innovation & Tech Today in an exclusive interview, Callum handed off the sketches, which depicted a crossover that didn’t resemble a traditional car, yet held an

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unmistakable Jaguar look but with an uncharacteristic short nose. The design team built one model (rather than the usual several iterations). Management made a bold decision to move forward.

Four years later, the I-Pace electric crossover is now arriving at dealerships around the world, wowing journalists and building up a quick constituency embracing Tesla’s first serious competitor.

Dr. Ziebart occupies a unique position at Jaguar. His title is Technical Design Director for the I-Pace; previously he was JLR’s Director of Global Engineering. His resume includes extensive experience with BMW as well as suppliers Continental and Infineon and a stint with an electric car startup.

Rethinking the Car; Rethinking the Company That an established car company like JLR was

able to produce a solid, competitive EV is not that remarkable. That they were to go from sketch to production in four years is a revelation.

Dr. Ziebart shared some of the story behind what he called a corporate culture change at the storied automaker.

The small I-Pace team, when it was created, quickly moved to an off-site location to be more focused on its new product. The new location has one large room where things moved along faster than a normal project because of the size of the team and its sole focus. Ziebart said one key element of the new structure – and differentiator from the traditional corporate culture – was a new structure for problem solving. All the people involved were in the same room, so problems were solved more quickly and thoroughly. The team was arranged based on its different communication needs, a logic not typically found in corporate office structure.

CONNECTED CAR

David Shepherd

The 1968 Jaguar E-type (Left), once hailed as the “world’s most beautiful car” by Enzo Ferrari, is slated to go back into production come 2020, but this time with an electric twist.

“Resolution speed is a term in engineering,” Ziebart added. “It’s a critical measure of efficiency. With the I-Pace, it was two times normal,” he continued. It resulted in engineering efficiency that reduced waste and created a lean system based on easy and quick communication and decision-making from a tight-knit team.

This new pace is affecting the rest of the company, too, as many elements from the I-Pace development are becoming common practice within Jaguar, where there is now one level of management at a company producing 600,000 vehicles a year.

The Move to Electrification While not the first to make a move into mass market electrification or even the first major OEM to do so, Jaguar occupies a unique position. The company has leveraged its relatively small size to move quickly and beat larger and better-financed rivals like Mercedes, BMW, and VW’s Audi to market.

“Never in my life has there been this kind of excitement,” said Ziebart, a comment he underscored by noting he has been developing cars for 35 years. “Now we are a different [company].”

He also strongly believes that the new JLR structure born out of the I-Pace development process, tied with new electrified vehicles, will give room for smaller manufacturers like Jaguar to survive. This notion runs counter to much of the conventional wisdom of the industry, led by comments from the late FCA Chairman Sergio Marchionne, that consolidation was the only way for those smaller companies to survive.

Rewriting the Rules Something else quite significant came out of the I-Pace design process, Ziebart said. A new definition for the electric car.

Jaguar’s aesthetic principal, he explained, was that form follow function. So, in defining what a Jaguar electric car would look like, the team strived to meet two not-always-compatible goals – the I-Pace would have to be instantly

recognizable both as an electric car and as a Jaguar, a path not being pursued (at least so far) by luxury competitors Mercedes and Audi. The results are Jaguar styling cues – a rear end borrowed from the F-Pace, a grill and door handles familiar to fans of the British carline.

The electric cues are subtler. The traditional Jag grill is closed since there is no engine to be cooled, though it channels air through a scoop in the hood and up over the roof, enhancing aerodynamics. The nose of the I-Pace is truncated (because there’s no need for an engine up there—or a “frunk,” Ziebart adds), and the overall exterior footprint appears compact.

Once inside, that compact exterior opens to a larger-than-expected interior. It’s a full class (or two, Ziebart notes) size bigger than the exterior would indicate. Designers were presented with the engineering decision to place the 90 kilowatts of batteries in 432 pouch cells under the floorboard. That results in a slightly (150mm) higher ride height, which Ziebart’s designers turned into a crossover stance that straddles the territory between a sport sedan and the new category of crossover coupe.

The Eternal Battle Between Finance & Engineering Early on, the I-Pace faced a decision that would define the vehicle’s ultimate configuration as well as its position in the marketplace. Engineering proposed that the electric Jag should have two identical electric motors, one to drive each set of wheels. Finance, said Ziebart, insisted that this small company needed to be prudent with its first foray into the electric world and conserve cash by using a single, larger motor.

Engineering won, resulting in that spacious interior and, more importantly, a more balanced weight distribution (50/50 front/rear) leading to better directional stability, better handling, and an exceptional ride for the size of the car.

Ziebart adds that the vision delivered was a “radically optimized electric vehicle,” taking advantage of EV design.

Those two electric motors were developed inhouse by the small I-Pace team, boosting space utilization, lowering weight, and upping efficiency compared to off-the-shelf solutions that were their options. The weight savings translate directly to the I-Pace’s 200+ mile range on a single charge.

Pace to Market & Competing with Tesla Tata Motors – the Indian-based parent company of JLR – is a blessing, Ziebart tells us, because it means the company is owned by car enthusiasts. “They may be petrolheads,” he said, “not really convinced at first about electrification, but then they made the commitment.”

It’s not clear to Ziebart how fast electric cars would happen, but he sees the path forward. For Jaguar, all new cars from 2021 on will be electrified. Even before then, expect to see more electric models. “Electrification is good for the auto industry,” he said. Further, he believes that the coming proliferation of electric models will just expand the overall EV market. “There will be no losers,” he added firmly. The upper end/ most luxurious cars will be full electric because that market will accept the price premium and wants an “environmentally correct appearance.”

“It’s not about us replacing Tesla or competing with Audi,” Ziebart said. “Tesla needs this type of challenge.”

Feeding into JLR’s future technology development is its incubator in Portland, Oregon, a vital component of the company’s focus on growth in electrification. Another future path the company is exploring is a longterm partnership with Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company. Part of that is a commitment to supply 20,000 I-Paces to Waymo to be outfitted to become self-driving vehicles in Waymo’s fleet starting in 2020. This small (600,000 vehicles per year) car company has almost a century of automotive history, but appears firmly positioned for the challenges of the coming century. ■ WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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What Blockchain Offers Autonomous Vehicles:

Security, Safety, A Whole New Approach to Ownership

By Michael Coates

There’s no shortage of feats that blockchain is supposed to accomplish. Let’s add one more to the list – autonomous vehicles (AVs) – and dig a little deeper into how this arranged marriage might work.

First, we need to agree on the definition of blockchain. Blockchain built its reputation around monetary transactions because it allows people to set up their own secure financial system. Taking it a little broader than conventional wisdom, blockchain is described

by Bebo White, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong, as a “secure way of facilitating data transfer.” Some have described it as a secure electronic ledger.

A Startup’s Vision A Silicon Valley startup, HereYouGo, thinks blockchain is a great tool for autonomous vehicles. Konstantin Maslennikov, HereYouGo’s CEO and founder, is designing a program using blockchain to address issues of liability, financing, and job losses with shared autonomous vehicles. The concerns raised were that shared ownership would create liabilities and financing complications, and suddenly

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drivers would no longer be needed. Those vehicles aren’t here yet, but all indications show that they could be on the market by 2020, so it’s not too early to start planning.

HereYouGo’s software will be a mobile application with three different roles – passenger, owner, and car administrator. The role of administrator is a new job created that could offer a work transition for former drivers.

That person will oversee the car systems management, paying for fuel, car washes, and other services. The app will allow for fractional ownership of a vehicle, setting up online consensus decision-making as needed, and making proportional payments when the car is used. Passengers would use the app to book cars for transportation.

Built on Ether(eum) HereYouGo is built on Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchainbased distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract functionality. White said the smart contract aspect could be the key component for the AV system HereYouGo envisions. Ethereum would be a contact “disassociated from the legal

system,” but capable of being programed to not only set an AV ride, but could even tell the cars when they need to go in for service. Since this would be a non-centralized database at its core, any entity using it would not be relying on any server in someone else’s building. Of course, on top of this, White said the private structure offered by this kind of blockchain process adds a further layer of security and would keep transactions away from hackers, an ongoing concern as AVs add more connected software.

Such a system could go a long way to address trust issues that are currently one of the biggest question marks about AV deployment.

“This is why blockchain is good,” White said.

“It has no centralized store – or a need for one.”

As more and more devices are connected, blockchain may be needed more and more to ensure security in all data transactions. When it comes to AVs, security and safety go hand in hand.

“Blockchain is not the answer for everything,” White added, “although when dealing with certain issues, like data security, it’s the best tool.” ■

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Autonomous Ambition from Australia & Stanford Ride-Hailing AV Startup Zoox Aims to Put Cars on the Road by 2020

By Michael Coates Silicon Valley companies have two basic operating modes. The first, most common one is the perpetual hype machine. In the automotive space, Tesla is the best representative of the genre. Constant tweets and rampant speculation by fanboy followers and strident shortsellers feed an active microsystem orbiting around every action – or speculated action – of the company or its peripatetic CEO Elon Musk. Many other companies try to go down this road, hoping attention will equate to a spike in valuation – or attract more investment or employees.

The second type of Silicon Valley company is a mirror image of the first. These companies are described as operating in stealth mode, going out of their way to avoid mentions in media or Silicon Valley’s equivalent of gossip columns. Stealth companies typically have their capital needs set and are working to get their technology either to a functional state – or sometimes get it to a state where it is legally defensible when they shift to a more public phase.

Zoox is one of the latter companies that has just shifted out of stealth mode. It chose a world stage, the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco in September, to show off its autonomous vehicle technology.

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

The showcase was three Toyota Highlanders festooned with what looked like an exoskeleton of technology to turn them into self-driving cars.

No Overnight Success Like most tech companies, you wouldn’t describe Zoox as an overnight success. The company was founded by an Australian entrepreneur, Tim Kentley-Klay, and a wellconnected Stanford University engineer, Dr. Jesse Levinson, four years ago and now has more than 550 employees. It has managed to attract $800 million in private investment and plans a 2020 launch of an autonomous ridehailing service in San Francisco.

The look of that vehicle remains a closely guarded secret (investors willing to put $100 million into the company reportedly get a look at it). However, it has been described as lacking a steering wheel or brake pedal, seating four passengers with two rows facing each other, and bi-directional (i.e., capable of driving in either direction, with no real front or rear). Co-founder Levinson told the San Francisco Chronicle that his company’s car was “a new type of vehicle unlike anything anyone has experienced before.”

Details of the vehicle include: electric motors at each wheel, a battery big enough to power it

(Top) Zoox founders Tim Kentley-Klay and Dr. Jesse Levinson strike a pose in their AV workshop.

(Bottom) A Zoox autonomous vehicle draws attention from the crowd at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.

CONNECTED CAR

(Left) The Zoox fleet on display at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, California. (Right) Zoox AV’s are equipped with pedestrian detecting sensors.

They’ve taken the tech a step further by integrating an alarm which alerts pedestrians of the vehicle’s presence.

for a full day’s run, an alert system that will warn pedestrians of the vehicle’s presence, and sensors integrated into the vehicle. The car and the ride-hailing service software are being developed in-house at Zoox, as is the hardware and its integration. Some of the car’s foundational technology is based on that which Levinson created at Stanford with his team. No affiliations with any automotive or tech

companies have been announced, so the details of Zoox’s production plans are unclear.

Even lacking that, the now-somewhat public leaders of the company say they are confident they are ahead of some of their larger competitors like Google’s Waymo or even Tesla.

They have set out to do three major disruptive automotive tasks: build the best self-driving car, build a better electric car, and craft a more

efficient ride-hailing service. That puts them squarely in the crosshairs of three leading entities: Waymo, Tesla, and Uber. Those three are all well on the way on their own projects and are unlikely to be daunted by a startup like Zoox. In the meantime, we now know more about this mysterious startup and can start to track its progress. It will be an interesting ride, even if no one is in the driver’s seat. ■

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Assessing the Risks to IoT Devices

By Ang Cui, founder & CEO of Red Balloon Security

iStockphoto.com/Petmal

There’s no question that the Internet of Things is growing rapidly, and connected devices are finding their way into every conceivable nook and cranny of our daily lives, from the human body to home appliances, cars, office buildings, and more. Most major industries are also actively incorporating IoT into their supply chains, production processes, and facilities in the hopes of cutting costs and improving efficiency.

But what is less understood is just how vulnerable these devices actually are to attacks, and how these vulnerabilities can expose consumers and businesses to new threats which they may not have anticipated.

Device manufacturers continue to roll out new products with little built-in security, and

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

updating the software and firmware of a device once it is “out in the field” is not always easy.

Basic security mistakes like default passwords, remote device management, and unencrypted web connections, all of which are common among IoT devices, expose these products to serious threats, whether in the home or office.

Current Threats MALWARE

Malware attacks on IoT products continue to grow. Kaspersky Lab identified three times as much IoT malware in the first half of 2018 as they found in all of 2017, and there is no reason to believe the trend is slowing.

Currently, IoT malware has been mostly limited to botnets like Mirai and Reaper, which enslave devices in order to harness their

processing power for DDoS attacks, spam campaigns, and cryptocurrency mining.

Fortunately, botnet malware typically presents a low risk for the end-user, but there are two important caveats to this, particularly for businesses. First, a device’s functionality and performance could deteriorate if the malware interferes with its normal processes. Secondly, if the malware has a “downloader” component (which many do), it could install new malware later on that may not be so harmless.

REMOTE ACCESS The holy grail for an attacker is to gain administrative control of a device. This type of remote access allows them to spy on the user, steal information, or manipulate the device itself.

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more. Even when the manufacturer discloses its privacy policies, there are real questions about the short- and long-term implications of its data sharing practices – particularly when it comes to private health information, such as Google’s 2016 patents for cardiovascular health monitoring in smart bathroom devices.

iStockphoto.com/pick-uppath

iStockphoto.com/filistimlyanin

For several years, this type of attack has been ongoing against lower-end IoT devices like baby monitors, webcams, and IP cameras. However, these same tactics can also be used to compromise more important products – like a major home appliance, car, or embedded device in a manufacturing plant. The 2015 Jeep Cherokee hack is one example of the havoc an attacker could wreak with remote access.

be expected. This type of attack (sometimes referred to as “jackware” when it affects a physical system) would essentially “brick” the machine, rendering it useless. Given the enormous loss for victims, they would be even more inclined to pay a ransom.

Ransomware is already a big business for criminals. It is estimated to generate over $2 billion annually. The WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 offered a sneak preview of jackware attacks, as it infected more than 200,000 devices around the globe, including MRI scanners and blood-storage refrigerators in U.K. hospitals and police traffic cameras in Australia.

Emerging Threats ID THEFT

OTHER EXPLOITS Given the wide range of IoT products entering the market, there are any number of one-off hacks which can occur, by exploiting the bugs and security mistakes specific to a brand or type of device.

Since most devices are vulnerable, these attacks can vary widely. Examples run the gamut, including: bypassing a building’s access control system by spoofing an ID badge, turning a printer into a bugging device, remotely unlocking smart door locks, or even hijacking pacemakers to harm or kill patients.

DATA COLLECTION AND SHARING Misuse of private information by the device maker itself is another ongoing threat. This ranges from collecting user data without consent to improperly storing and transmitting customer data, accidental data exposures, and

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Identity theft is already highly profitable for cybercriminals, and it will undoubtedly transition to the IoT market. Since many of these devices collect, store, and share sensitive user information, any attacker who breaches this device could conceivably gain access to the same data. To make matters worse, if the device connects to another device, external service, or database (i.e., a smart bathroom scale with a mobile app, which in turn connects to a medical provider), the hacker could quickly escalate this attack into a much larger data breach. This is equally true for businesses – imagine an attacker gaining entry to a manufacturing execution system, which would offer a rich source of intelligence on production methods and practices.

“Device ID theft” is another potential threat.

By impersonating, or “spoofing,” a consumer appliance for example, an attacker could send the person fake text or email messages presumably from the device (like a water leak alert from a water heater). This could bait the user into clicking on a malicious link or sharing account credentials.

JACKWARE Ransomware attacks on big ticket items like cars and manufacturing equipment are also to

iStockphoto.com/glegorly

PERSISTENT INFECTION IoT devices tend to exist on the periphery of a network, which means they aren’t top of mind for consumers or IT managers when it comes to security. They also offer less visibility into their running processes than a PC. This makes it harder to detect a breach or malware.

For these reasons, hackers will increasingly exploit IoT devices in order to get a backdoor into a home or business. Once on a device, they can use it as a base camp to launch additional attacks on any other device sharing the network, as well as to hide out and maintain a long-term presence in the home or company. Case in point: hackers stole the high-roller database from a large casino after first hacking into its fish tank thermometer.

VENDOR BACKDOORS Device makers may also create hidden backdoors to troubleshoot problems or monitor the user’s activity and collect information.

Common backdoors include hardcoded passwords, remote management software, and debug mode.

Backdoors should be especially alarming for businesses. This level of access gives the manufacturer God-like control over the user.

They can use it to spy, steal data, make changes to the device, reduce its performance, or even sabotage it. The U.S. government has been particularly worried about the potential for Chinese backdoors in mobile devices and telecommunication systems. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently launched the Mobile Security R&D Program to find hidden vendor backdoors and “implants.”

TACKLING THE SECURITY PROBLEM So how do we solve the IoT security dilemma?

It’s most necessary for manufacturers to build strong security into these devices from the very start.

In the meantime, companies have been transitioning PC security solutions like antivirus and firewalls to the IoT market, but these have limitations. They may miss attacks that hide or

iStockphoto.com/undefined

change signatures, imitate a legitimate program, or exploit an unknown vulnerability (“zeroday”). They also need regular updates to remain effective, and may not work in resourceconstrained IoT environments, or be difficult to extend to devices out in the field.

iStockphoto.com/metamorworks

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One alternative is DNS security (or DNSSEC). This has been widely used on corporate networks, but applying it to IoT devices offers a new way to block them from malicious redirects, which would have prevented the Mirai botnet.

New technologies are also being developed that can immunize devices against malicious behavior. Instead of trying to catch every new malware strand or hacker tool that comes along (a la antivirus), these techniques simply force the device to do only what it is supposed to do.

In this way, even if a hacker gains remote access to a thermostat and orders it to raise the temperature to 110 degrees, the device would be unable to comply.

In the meantime, consumers and businesses need to take charge of their own security. Before buying an IoT device, ask a few basic questions: What is the device maker’s reputation? Does the company mention any security features or explain its privacy policies? Does the company offer ongoing software support? Users should also change any default passwords, check for an https web connection, and avoid devices with remote access software in place. Network managers should try to isolate IoT devices from the rest of the network, so a breached fish tank won’t unravel the business. ■

PRESENTED BY

A Nomad’s Guide to Travel World-renowned travel writer and bestselling author Matt Kepnes shares why technology may not always be the answer to your travel queries and how it may, in fact, make you complacent.

By Patricia Miller

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Taking part in an adventure doesn’t need to be expensive or difficult. Or at least that’s the message of prolific travel blogger Matthew Kepnes. Better known to his followers as Nomadic Matt, Kepnes operates the world’s most popular travel blog. His New York Times bestselling book How to Travel the World on $50 A Day, now in its third edition, continues to inspire and motivate would-be adventurers with the lure of affordable and approachable travel.

Innovation & Tech Today: How do you prepare for a trip to a place you have never been?

Matt Kepnes: I’m pretty old school in the sense that I still buy guidebooks. You can get a lot of good information from that. Now, of course, a lot of that information is a bit dated because of the print cycle with guide books, but they can give you a good overview of where you’re going and how to get around. You don’t need a computer to do anything, you just hold it in your hand and read.

(Opposite Page) Kepnes’ adventures take him to incredible destinations all over the globe, such as this stunning castle in the French countryside.

(Top Left) Kepnes prefers to explore unusual locales, like this street market in Madagascar. (Right) However, his travels often lead him to more familiar destinations, like this unassuming cafe in Europe.

Then I move to the Google searches: what to do, what to see, suggested itineraries, where to eat, how to save money. You get a general sense of, “What am I stepping into? How much money do I need? How do I get around? Where are some things to see? Where are some places to stay?” Then, I just tend to forget about it all until I land.

I think people overplan their trips; they forget that the beauty of travel is the serendipity that happens when you’re on the road. Don’t get lost in your planning. After the basic outline, I tend to not plan too much so that when I get there, if there’s cool stuff happening, I have time to go see it.

I&T Today: What are some frequent mistakes you see people make when planning for a trip?

MK: People tend to get lost trying to find a good deal or overplan. They spend hours and

hours to try to find the cheapest place. It’s quite possible, but, if you spend four hours to save $10, is that really worth it? Everyone likes a deal, but there is not a lot of variation between travel websites. If you see a deal then jump on it, but if there’s no deal then that 20th website isn’t going to make that flight suddenly $100 cheaper. There’s not that much variation among ticket prices.

Additionally, I think people just plan too much, and they become too ambitious. They think in their two-week trip they are going to see 20 countries in Europe. They’re going to try to see it all. They must under-plan. Make sure you have time to hang out and explore and do stuff.

I&T Today: Is there any one piece of tech that you feel you couldn’t live without while you’re on the road?

Matt: My phone, because my phone is like my camera, my email, my social media, my Google.

It’s everything on the go. It’s a great map tool. It makes it easy to get around. It makes it easier to research things, like if you’re lost or need to know where to eat, you can just pick up your phone and ask, “Where do I eat?” And it tells you.

I&T Today: Since your blog launched in 2008, how have you seen technological innovations alter the way people travel?

MK: I think it has made people a little complacent. Now it’s so easy to travel that it kind of takes some of the edge off it. I think people get so addicted to travel and technology – smart phones, computers, and WiFi – that it doesn’t make it hard anymore. When it’s not hard, it’s not challenging, and when it’s not challenging, you don’t push yourself out of your comfort zone. Then you don’t really grow and you don’t get a lot of the benefits of travel. If you’re just like, “Oh! I’m going to go here and there and call my Uber and then go the hotel,” where’s the fun in that?

WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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PRESENTED BY

(Top) Kepnes stares out at a lonely gorge in Africa’s remote wilderness. His backpack is often his only companion during long journeys abroad. (Center) Seaside destinations like Bermuda and the Virgin Islands are particularly alluring to the avid traveler.

(Bottom Right) Kepnes poses for a candid selfie near the Eiffel Tower in his favorite city: Paris, France.

I&T Today: How do you respond to people who say traveling abroad is too dangerous?

MK: More people die in the U.S. from gun violence than they do in most of the other parts of the world combined. On a raw statistical level, the U.S. is probably quite dangerous. Or just look at the fact that you can be robbed anywhere. Excluding war zones, no place is really more dangerous than anywhere else.

People tend to be fundamentally good. We think of the U.S. like, “This is a safe place and everywhere else is not.” That’s just a product of the media, not a product of reality.

I&T Today: What was one of your most memorable moments abroad?

MK: That’s a really hard thing to say because I’ve had so many meaningful moments overseas.

I would say one that sticks out is when I was

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hitchhiking in Iceland and this guy picked me up on the side of the road. He didn’t speak much English, so we basically communicated through pointing. He took me around and he would pull over and point to things I needed to take pictures of. This guy didn’t really speak English or know me but he picked me up on the side of the road and took me to where I needed to go and gave me a little sightseeing tour along the way.

I&T Today: You’ve authored five books and countless blog posts. What’s the most pervasive lesson you try to convey to your readers?

MK: That travel doesn’t need to be expensive or difficult. And that the hardest part is that first step out the door. It’s that first step. Everything after that is easy. Just book the flight and go. ■

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What Lies Beneath Mexico’s Hidden Gem, Tulum

By Kelsey Elgie Domier

LODGING After hours of diligent research, we found NEST Tulum, a breathtaking property with four separate structures, which include intimate jungle and garden rooms, tower rooms, and unique ocean-view lofts. Upon walking up the firelit path to the tower ocean-view loft, utterly speechless, we ascended the stairs to the most breathtaking room I’ve had the pleasure to occupy to this day. The amazing staff, meals, and recommendations for tour companies and adventures at NEST were world class.

Just 90 minutes south of Cancun lies the rustic, beachside town of Tulum, Mexico, an antidote to Cancun’s large, commercial resort haven for college students on Spring Break. It was one of the last cities built and inhabited by the Maya. These coastal ruins are some of the most well preserved sites ever found, sitting above a 12-meter cliff overlooking the Caribbean sea. What you will find now is a mellow, bohemian-chic stretch of intimate boutique hotels with private beaches that could easily become your new favorite (and relatively inexpensive) place to vacation.

As the sun sets into a grapefruit pink sky, walking along Tulum’s pristine white sand beaches is a surefire way to recharge and return home inspired. Perhaps the next evening you’ll bike alongside the jungle on the main beachside road, sprinkled by torchlit-gourmet restaurants with chandeliers hung from tree branches.

Venture a bit further and you’ll find more lively spots with cheap, delicious tacos and live music.

The intoxicating scent of copal incense, a Mayan herb used for healing purposes, wafts throughout this beachside stretch of town.

Tulum sits along the Yucatán Peninsula, which is one large, porous limestone shelf with no visible rivers. Instead, a network of underground caves have formed beneath the surface. The

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entrance to these crystal clear freshwater caves are called cenotes – which hold sacred significance to the ancient Mayan civilization. Some cenotes were their main water source, while others were used for sacrifice. Offerings were thrown into these pools as a portal to communicate with their gods and ancestors. There are well over 6,000 cenotes in the Riviera Maya.

Actually, in January 2018, just a stone’s throw from Tulum, two of these very cenotes, the Dos Ojos and Sac Atun cave systems, were discovered to be connected, forming the world’s largest underwater cave system (215 miles long). Not only does this flooded cave system hold an important massive freshwater reserve, but hundreds of Mayan archaeological sites have been discovered within its depths, including evidence of America’s first settlers, Mayan cultural artifacts, and the remains of long-extinct animals.

WHAT TO DO Our favorites were the Cenotes Tamkach-Ha, Choo-Ha, and Multum-Ha. These three incredible underground cenotes situated on the same property are lesser-known, removed from the main tourist paths, and hardly mentioned in most travel guidebooks. They are also within a ten-minute drive from the Mayan Ruins of Coba, which are 45 minutes from Tulum.

WHERE TO DINE Casa Banana Tulum | Sunset at Ziggy’s Beach Club + Restaurant | Sunday Nights w/ Live Music @ I Scream Bar BEFORE YOU GO Don’t leave for your trip without doing your research on Sargassum; approximately one month per year the white sand beaches are covered with seaweed, rendering them unswimmable.

Check that your hotel has good Wi-Fi for the area (NEST Tulum), and plan ahead for a shuttle service or rent a car. Be cautious of taxi drivers by getting quotes beforehand and knowing the currency conversion.

Make sure you bring a headlamp when you’re biking along the main road! Certain stretches can be dark. ■

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Gear Guide

PRESENTED BY

UE Boom 3 – Combining portability and intuitive design, the UE Boom 3 is the ideal speaker for any outdoor enthusiast.

Extremely durable, completely waterproof, and even showcasing the ability to float, the UE Boom 3 will keep rocking wherever your adventures take you.

1MORE Triple Driver BT In-Ear Headphones – With iOS optimization and three separate drivers, the 1MORE Triple Driver BT InEar Headphones perfectly blend innovative design with next-level sound.

Additionally, the combination of Fast Charge technology and seven hours of battery life ensure you can keep moving to the beat. $199

$129-$149

A-Champs ROXs 2 – The upgraded sequel to the original ROXs, the ROXs 2

by A-Champs gives users all the fun of gaming without the need for screen time.

With more physical activity and creativity required than your standard console, the ROXs 2 encourages kids and adults alike to rethink gaming. Price TBA

Hydrapak Expedition 8L – Every outdoor adventure enthusiast knows the importance of hydration.

The Hydrapak Expedition 8L is the ideal solution, providing easy packability, lightweight design, and impressive storage capacity. $60

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

Circuit Scribe Drone Builder Kit – Allowing you to assemble your drone, control it using the downloadable app, and even rebuild after a crash, the Circuit Scribe Drone Builder Kit lets you exercise your tinkering abilities and take to the skies. Complete with a 480p camera and built-in gyroscope, this drone kit allows for plenty of fun. $99

THIS FRIDGE OPENS A DOOR TO FREEDOM -ANDY BEST, FILMMAKER/PHOTOGRAPHER

“The Dometic CFX lets me stay out forever.”

Outdoor photographer Andy Best says his portfolio depends on his Dometic CFX. “You really have to be patient for what could be five minutes of good light and weather,” says Andy. “Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. I can be a hundred miles into the desert for a shot, but because I have the CFX, I can stay as long as I need.”

Andy’s cooler:

CFX40W

Check out the entire CFX line at: shop.dometic.com Visit us at Booth #36135-UL at Outdoor Retailer.

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Gear Guide Dometic PLB40 – Combining power and portability, the PLB40 by Dometic is the ideal travel companion for your outdoor adventures. Able to power a cooler such as the Dometic CFX over the course of a weekend, along with USB and 12V accessories, the PLB40 lets you bring the power to your camping trip. Price TBA

Boulder Denim Jeans – The ideal mixture of comfort and durability, the Boulder Denim Jeans won’t hold you back whether you’re going for an intense hike or a simple stroll around the city. With 360-degree Extreme Diagonal Stretch technology, these jeans move with you, keeping you free to adventure as you see fit. $109-$148

Fitterfirst Active Office Board – While standing desks are seen as a healthier option to sitting, standing all day isn’t necessarily the healthiest choice. Utilizing four foam legs to cushion the feet, knees, legs, and ankles, the Active Office Board will offer you the proper support you need for your standing desk. $100

Hyperice Vyper 2.0 – Popular with both basic fitness enthusiasts and professional athletes, the Hyperice Vyper 2.0 utilizes a mixture of vibration and pressure to improve your training regimen.

Designed for pain relief and muscle recovery alike, there’s a reason sports stars such as Lindsey Vonn and LeBron James use this intuitive fitness roller. $200

Yeti Panga 50 – Ideal for protecting your valuables in the elements, the Yeti Panga 50’s submersible design ensures that not a single drop of water will touch your belongings. Made durable to take whatever’s thrown at it, the Panga 50 will become one of your favorite adventure accessories. $299

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INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

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Health Tech Presented by

The Cutting Edge of Surgery Tech How Doctors Are Using Tech to Improve the Outcome of Surgeries

By Scott Jung On the popular television show Star Trek: Voyager, the health of the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager was constantly in jeopardy. Like all starships, a trained doctor was onboard to care for the well-being of the crew; however, Voyager’s resident physician wasn’t a human, nor an alien, but a computer hologram. This holographic doctor had the capability to not only diagnose an injury or illness, but also treat ailments and perform surgical procedures to save a crew member’s life or transform him or her into another alien race.

While we may not yet have Star Trek’s doctor to operate on us, technology is allowing surgery to advance beyond just a set of stainless steel tools and a talented physician. A skilled surgeon is still essential, but new surgical tools are allowing them to take their talents even further.

For patients, this could mean better outcomes with a faster and less painful recovery. Here’s a look at some notable technologies you may see the next time you go “under the knife.”

VR in the OR Before a surgeon even steps foot into an operating room, technology helps train them on the various incisions and maneuvers they’ll need to perform.

California-based Osso VR is using the immersive experiences that virtual reality (VR) can create to train surgeons on orthopedic surgical procedures. Using the Osso VR program, which is hardware-agnostic, users can freely look and move around a simulated operating theater with a VR headset and use handheld controllers to manipulate virtual tools and devices in the right sequence and “operate” on a patient with accurate and precise movements. The experience is not a video game though; the program grades your performance based on time, accuracy, and other metrics on which surgeons are typically evaluated. The company recently added multiple user support, allowing users to train as a team or participate as a coach or mentor.

In addition to providing higher-quality, interactive training, VR can also save on costs.

“The cost to live train a surgeon can be anywhere from $50,000 to $400,000,” says Osso VR’s CEO, Dr. Justin Barad. “Our technology cuts those costs and increases the training’s value beyond a one-time impact. It limits the need to ship expensive equipment and book flights, while removing the need for a surgeon to take time away from patients.”

By utilizing VR for medical training, more doctors and surgeons can be better educated and prepared, as well as train as often as they need on their own time before working on real patients. Surgical procedures will be safer and patients will also feel at ease knowing their doctor is competent and well-trained.

Getting a Better View X-rays were once the gold standard for noninvasively viewing the insides of a patient. While they’re still popular today, other imaging modalities, such as ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computer-aided tomography (CT), allow doctors to see anatomical features that are hidden in x-rays.

These modalities have revolutionized medicine: CT gives dimension to flat x-rays to help diagnose traumatic injury and monitor the progress of some forms of cancer, and MRI is commonly used for sports and movementrelated injuries and can even show active parts of the brain.

In the operating room, Microsoft’s HoloLens is being tested for many mixed-reality functions, from displaying a patient’s live vitals to identifying blood and bones underneath the skin.

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In the case of oncology, these modalities can reveal much about the structure of a potential tumor. However, tumors can be deceptive, often looking and feeling very similar to the healthy tissue around it.

(Left) Echopixel uses a patient’s CT, MRI, or ultrasound scans to generate a 3D image. The resulting hologram can be viewed on a special monitor with a pair of 3D glasses and manipulated with a stylus to better familiarize a surgeon with a patient’s unique anatomy. (Right) The iKnife’s electrified blade cuts gives off smoke as it cuts through tissue. The smoke is then analyzed to determine if the tissue is malignant or not.

One feature that differentiates healthy tissue from cancerous imposters is the oxygen content present in the tissue, and a new method called optoacoustic imaging can help reveal this.

Optoacoustic imaging involves directing bursts of laser light at a potential tumor. Each burst causes the tissue to heat up and expand slightly, causing a small mechanical wave to propagate through the surrounding tissue. These waves can be detected using an ultrasound transducer and converted to high-resolution images with green or red highlights indicating the oxygen concentration to help the oncologist determine what is cancerous.

Although all of these imaging modalities have their limits on what they can scan accurately, they can be combined or supplemented with other types of clinical scans to fill in the gaps, opening up a whole new realm of clinical applications.

Take for example Texas-based Seno Medical: they’re developing a technology that combines the optoacoustic imaging technology described above with conventional ultrasound imaging.

The resulting high-resolution image will be able to show the location, shape, and oxygen content of breast cancer tumors to help provide a clearer diagnosis and more effective treatment plan.

Another technology developed at Purdue University uses functional MRI to create images of the brain combined with electroencephalography (EEG), a commonly used method of recording brain signals. The result is a powerful method of monitoring

electrical brain signals while visualizing the parts of the brain that are actively triggering them. Such technology could give new insights into the progression and treatment of neurological diseases and traumatic brain injuries.

While most doctors view medical images on a regular computer monitor, advancements in computer-generated graphics, holography, and augmented/mixed reality are allowing them to view, manipulate, and even virtually fly through three-dimensional scans of a body part.

One company, California-based EchoPixel, uses a patient’s CT, MRI, or ultrasound scans to generate a 3D holographic image. The resulting hologram can be viewed on a special monitor with a pair of 3D glasses and manipulated with a stylus to better familiarize a surgeon with a patient’s unique anatomy for better surgery planning.

Several companies are foregoing the monitor altogether by integrating 3D images into Microsoft’s popular HoloLens headset. The augmented reality overlays and mixes virtual objects and images in the wearer’s view with the real world. In the operating room, HoloLens is being tested in many functions, from displaying a patient’s live vitals to identifying blood and bones underneath the skin, to even designing the layout of operating rooms themselves.

Smart Scalpels Scalpels and surgical knives are the workhorses of every operating room toolkit.

Though ultra-sharp and effective at cutting and

slicing, they’re not so great at differentiating between an extraneous bit of human tissue to be excised and a critical body part keeping the patient alive. This is vital, especially in cancer surgery, where the goal of the operation is to remove as much of the cancer from the body as possible while leaving healthy tissue intact.

Several companies have developed smart surgical tools that can rapidly analyze the composition of the tissue it touches to determine whether it is cancerous or healthy.

The iKnife, developed by the Imperial College London, consists of an electrosurgical knife connected to a device called a mass spectrometer. As the iKnife’s electrified blade cuts through tissue, smoke is given off and is channeled into the mass spectrometer, which analyzes the chemicals in the smoke to determine if it’s malignant.

Although it doesn’t cut, Mexican researcher David Oliva Uribe has developed a handheld tool that can warn the surgeon in less than half a second with visual or auditory notifications about the kind of tissue being touched. His “smart scalpel” accomplishes this by measuring the extremely small electrical currents that the scalpel’s tip generates when it makes contact with various kinds of tissue, a phenomenon known as the piezoelectric effect.

Robot, M.D. In our Summer 2018 issue, we mentioned the “da Vinci,” a surgical robot from Californiabased Intuitive Surgical that acts as replacement hands under the control of a human surgeon at a WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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Health Tech Presented by

The Cutting Edge of Surgery Tech

ergonomic and better resemble traditional surgical instruments, which could help the surgeon transfer skills developed during conventional surgery to the robotic system. The Senhance system also features an eye-controlled camera that produces 3D images to further enhance the surgeon’s point-of-view.

(Top) The Senhance system is currently being used to repair hernias, remove gallbladders, and treat other various urologic and gynecologic conditions. (Bottom) Using Osso VR, users can freely look and move around a simulated operating room with a VR headset and use handheld controllers to manipulate virtual tools and devices.

nearby terminal. But while the da Vinci is currently the most well-known robotic surgery system, it isn’t the only bionic player in the field.

Over the past several years, many companies have developed robotic surgery systems with high-tech features that make robotic surgery feel a little more natural to the human surgeon.

North Carolina-based TransEnterix has

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developed the “Senhance” system which is currently being used to repair hernias, remove gallbladders, and treat other various urologic and gynecologic conditions. Though it operates similarly to the da Vinci, the Senhance system features haptic feedback in the controls to let the surgeon “feel” when he or she comes in contact with other anatomical structures.

Additionally, the instrument controls are more

Tech behemoth Google is also dipping their toe into the robotic surgery space. They’ve partnered with medical giant Johnson & Johnson to start Verb Surgical, a company that will use robotic technology to pioneer what they term “Surgery 4.0.” Very little is known yet about Verb’s surgical robot, but according to the company, it will make use of the latest in robotics, instrumentation, imagery, and connectivity technology. Google-powered big data and machine learning will naturally also play a major role to help surgeons make better, more informed decisions in the middle of an operation.

The future of surgery will involve a close partnership with human doctors and medical innovation. While robots and medical technology can’t replace a human surgeon, they can help their human counterparts recognize their limitations and augment their skills. With the help of technology, surgeons can make better clinical decisions that can lead to a safer, more successful operation. ■

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Health Tech Presented by

Innovations in Age Monitoring and Anti-Aging Technologies As people age, naturally their bodies slow down, aches and pains arise, and other issues can come about. However, as medical technology has advanced, multiple treatments and plans have been developed to help quell the symptoms of aging. At Optimal Health MD, for instance, a number of treatments are available to make patients look and feel younger. Here, Dr. Ronald Klatz of Optimal Health MD details the innovations, science, and technology behind the treatments that bring patients closer to the Fountain of Youth.

Innovation & Tech Today: What sort of technology is available that can help track the aging process?

Dr. Ronald Klatz: The newly-developed AgeMeter is an easy-to-use, seamless software utilizing industry-leading research to measure estimated functional age versus chronological age. The AgeMeter is a self-contained software built on Apple’s leading iOS ecosystem. It includes an Apple iPad pre-loaded with the encrypted AgeMeter application, with video guides and text prompts to easily navigate through all biomarker tests.

I&T Today: What, then, can users do with this information?

RK: The AgeMeter biomarker metrics can be used for personalized assessments to track functional age changes and improvements and enable physicians and health counselors to design individualized, personalized health and wellness programs to optimize health and performance. The results can guide you toward a healthier, more productive, and more enjoyable life.

I&T Today: How can technology be used for age-old health issues?

RK: A very common issue for men is that with age, the blood vessels to the penis begin to break down or collapse. Also, arteries get filled with artery-clogging plaque. PowerWave is a new

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The PowerWave machine uses acoustic waves to open existing blood vessels and stimulate the growth of new vessels.

technology that uses acoustic waves to open existing blood vessels and stimulate the growth of new vessels, since proper blood flow is essential for erections. The increased blood flow from the acoustic pressure wave of PowerWave gives men a much stronger and more sustainable erection, as well as increased stimulation and sensitivity.

I&T Today: What are some other innovative treatments for erectile dysfunction?

RK: The PRP Shot is a revolutionary new procedure that treats erectile dysfunction using platelet-rich plasma (PRP). The PRP Shot uses natural, regenerative cells drawn from your bloodstream. The procedure is non-surgical and doesn’t carry the heart-related risks of traditional erectile dysfunction treatments.

These cells are refined to platelet-rich plasma, using highly-advanced centrifuges.

I&T Today: Are there similar technologies designed specifically for women?

RK: GWave is a scientifically proven, noninvasive new treatment designed to repair damaged blood vessels and increase blood flow to the vagina. Unlike other treatments that merely mask symptoms or are a temporary fix, GWave eliminates the root of the problems at the source by using safe and effective shockwave

therapy. In just a few quick sessions, with versions that are usable at home, patients report more blood flow, heightened sensitivity, and more intense pleasure.

I&T Today: What other new medical technologies can restore youthfulness and health?

RK: Intravenous or IV therapy is a new treatment where medicine is injected directly into the veins and often works more swiftly and successfully than medicine given through the stomach. In the past, a very limited amount of drugs could be administered intravenously, but in today’s healthcare world, the number has been greatly extended with applications for many additional disease treatments. Especially in cases of pneumonia and diphtheria, the rapid passage of the medicine through the body using intravenous therapy gives it an advantage over the much slower process of ingesting medication orally.

Halotherapy (also known as salt therapy) is the therapeutic use of natural salt in a simulated microclimate, like a salt room, where pulverized salt is blown into the room for occupants to passively breathe in. Salt acts like an expectorant, accelerating mucus clearance and improving lung function while killing harmful bacteria and soothing the respiratory system. ■

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Let’s Get Ready to Bumble(bee)!

By John Gaudiosi

The WWE Superstar still keeps one leg in the ring (for now), while focusing more on Hollywood blockbusters like Bumblebee.

WWE Superstar John Cena remains a professional wrestler, although he’s spending much more time these days on movie sets than inside the ring. The wrestler-turned-actor has gradually transitioned to the big screen, carving a path not unlike those of other former WWE stars like Dwayne Johnson and Dave Bautista.

Cena has tackled ensemble comedies like Trainwreck and Blockers, as well as the indie military action thriller The Wall. But Bumblebee marks the first big budget Hollywood spectacle that Cena has enlisted for, and Paramount Pictures has high hopes for this Christmas blockbuster, which is set to reboot the Transformers film franchise.

The 41-year-old actor talks about his own love

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of Transformers, real Volkswagen classics, and explains how his career inside the WWE ring has led to his Hollywood success.

Innovation & Tech Today: Can you share a favorite memory from your childhood playing with Transformers toys?

John Cena: I came from a household that at times was very fortunate and other times was very unfortunate. And I also had four brothers, so we were always fighting for toys. When Transformers came out, you got essentially two toys for one and it was the first of its kind where the toys were actually realistic. Optimus Prime looks like a semi-truck and then transforms into a cool robot. The toys looked fantastic in either form. We could sit and play trucks in the mud or

we could have an action figure fight with the same toy. So it was literally just the success of what the toy set out to be, and that was “more than meets the eye.” That’s why the phenomenon caught on. It was just so new and done so well, but it was really a concept that was ahead of its time and executed extremely well.

I&T Today: When you look at Transformers through today’s eyes, is there a particular favorite that you have?

JC: Well, I’m a lifelong good guy in my other gig. I have to gravitate towards Optimus Prime. I don’t think I can share any of the Decepticon values as far as my ego, so I’m pretty much an Optimus guy.

Photo: Jaimie Trueblood Photo: Will McCoy

Top photo, left to right: “B” Camera Operator Don Devine and John Cena behind the scenes on the set of Bumblebee, from Paramount Pictures.

This photo, left to right: John Cena as Agent Burns, Dropkick and Shatter in Bumblebee, from Paramount Pictures.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

I&T Today: Going into this Bumblebee film, what is it in particular that you find appealing about this Transformer?

pushed beyond his limits, you actually see him transform and become super Bumblebee and kick some serious ass.

JC: People gravitate towards Bumblebee for a myriad of reasons. He can’t speak. So there’s intrigue to why he can’t. There’s also intrigue to watch him communicate, and the reaction not only by the other Transformers, but with people and the environment around him. He’s a protector, yet he’s an underdog. He’s not specifically super large, so he’s this miniature compact badass that seems – I can’t believe I’m talking about a 14-foot robot – but it seems like he’s an underdog in every situation that he goes into and he does have this extra gear. He is a peacekeeper by all standards, but when he gets

I&T Today: What was it like for you to be around that retro Bug on set?

JC: I loved it. And don’t get me wrong, I truly enjoyed the concept of the Transformers franchise using concept cars from the General Motors archive to try to make these new robots and their futuristic look, but I generally think there’s an entire generation like me who grew up with these toys and were fascinated by their innovation. So now, being able to see them come to life in almost their original setting is cool – like a rusty old Volkswagen, which creates a smoother, softer appearance. The exterior of

the Volkswagen creates a little patina on Bumblebee; it’s pretty fascinating. This Transformer has become much more human and has much more depth, and I think that was the coolest thing about being around the Bug. [Director] Travis Knight was extremely careful in what vehicle he chose. I’m an automobile guy and the reason that the Bug has stood the test of time is because it’s a true performer. It’s not a great track car. If you really go back to when the car debuted in the 50s, it was economical transportation, but people fell in love with it in the 60s because it was a symbol of peace and togetherness. So the car is iconic, and I couldn’t think of a better car to be chosen to give a human element to Bumblebee.

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Left to right: John Ortiz as Dr. Powell and John Cena as Agent Burns in Bumblebee from Paramount Pictures.

Photo: Will McCoy

I&T Today: What are your thoughts on Volkswagen saying they’re going to discontinue the New Beetle after 2019?

JC: As a car guy, I think we’re moving away from driving cars ourselves, so the Bug today isn’t the Bug that we fell in love with. It’s almost like the reboot of that. If people want to gravitate toward the classic VW Bug, the great thing about them is, because they were economical transportation, they made a whole lot of them and parts are still readily available.

So it’s not like you’re going to be left out in the cold. If you want to drive a legitimate Beetle or a Volkswagen Bus or anything from that era, you definitely can get a hold of it. I think VW tried to recapture some of that peace and love phenomenon in the new design, but the stars didn’t align, so I think they’re making a good choice.

I&T Today: What was it like for you to step into this role of Agent Burns in Bumblebee?

JC: I really enjoyed it. After getting the script, I was fascinated with the way that they chose to reboot the franchise. I was fascinated with the fact that it was a prequel, so they got a little bit of liberty to deviate. But at the same time, they did a great job of not just ditching the tale that had been told, and truly being steadfast and trying to explain things from an origin standpoint. Details about my character are top secret, but it was really a decent challenge for

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me to step in and be able to do something like that. It’s something I haven’t done before.

I&T Today: How has your time in the WWE ring helped with this type of action-oriented movie versus a comedy like Blockers?

JC: What I’ve done in the WWE ring, no matter what the genre – it could be straight drama, it could be comedy, parody, huge-level action, minimal level action – always helps because if you break down what we do, we are storytellers. The character I play in Bumblebee is not an extension of who I am. I think the easiest way to transition from art form to art form is to begin with characters who are extensions of who you are. The awkward comedic presence in Trainwreck is kind of an extension of who I am.

The awkward dad in Blockers is kind of an extension of who I am. And the reason I was drawn to something like this, it’s the first time where it’s not, but because I spent a lifetime telling stories and I try to use my tools of storytelling in taking a little bit of a risk, I think that’s where my career in the WWE will always help me in any sort of storytelling art form outside the WWE. I&T Today: Do you have a favorite memory you can share from filming Bumblebee?

JC: It’s the rapport I had with Travis. I know that’s not very specific and there were certain explosions and effects that were really cool, but Travis is extremely gifted and not just as an

animator, but as a visionary. He had a very tough job in front of him. He reimagined this universe, and he saw it all in his head very specifically, and I think the biggest challenge for him was not to animate Bumblebee in a new form, or which Transformers to choose, or how to reset a 1980s rendition of this franchise. His biggest challenge was relating his vision to the people acting in the movie, and he made that seem easy. And he did it differently because my personality is different from Hailee [Steinfeld]’s, from everybody. He did it differently with every actor and actress and I saw it up close. I saw his interaction with me. I saw it from afar. He was extremely gifted and he is destined for great things, and that’s my best memory. You never saw him lose his cool.

He just stayed focused on his vision and I really am excited for people to see this movie.

I&T Today: What’s it like working on your upcoming film, Project X-traction?

JC: We’re now filming in China and Scott Waugh is the director and I take advice daily from Scott and from Jackie Chan and I totally trust the process, especially because it’s a Chinese movie and in China the movies are made differently. They tend to hit plot points very fast. The movies are a super fast ride. The action is different. Everything is different, but I have total faith in Jackie. I have total faith in Scott. And once again, I’m just going to trust in the process. ■

Diving Deep with Black Manta Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Brings Black Manta to the Big Screen in Aquaman

Photo: Jasin Boland

By Alex Moersen

The Golden Age of comic book movies is upon us. While Marvel has been known for their lighthearted characters, DC, on the other hand, is weaving a more grounded tapestry, with heroes such as Aquaman reimagined for the 21st century. But of course, what is a hero without a villain? In his first solo film, Aquaman will be going toe-to-toe against one of his most infamous nemeses, Black Manta. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, of The Get Down and The Greatest Showman, will be portraying the notorious villain. We had the chance to speak with Abdul-Mateen about how he prepared for the role, his newfound love of comic books, and what sort of technology was incorporated into the production.

Innovation & Tech Today: How did you first get involved with this project and playing Black Manta?

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II: At the time I was doing a movie called The Greatest Showman. I was out here in New York, doing trapeze

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practice three times a week, getting ready for that project, and something comes in my box and it has dummy sides, which is basically a fake script. I thought that I’d just go for it and I auditioned. I knew that it was some type of big Warner Bros. project, but I didn’t know specifically what the role was. But, I kind of gleaned that it would be a good opportunity…

A couple weeks later I got a call saying [Director] James Wan wanted to meet me. I flew in, had a lunch meeting, and, I kid you not, about five minutes after the meeting, I’m in the car heading back to the airport and I get a call from my agent and my manager saying that I got the job. I couldn’t believe it. Usually, I’m so even keel when I get a job but this one was so surreal because the process was so straightforward. I did one audition. I sent in one tape. I had one lunch meeting. Five minutes later I’m getting a major role in a major DC universe picture. That was really, really, really exciting.

I&T Today: Did you grow up reading comic books? Were you familiar with Black Manta?

YAM: I didn’t know anything about him ... I mean, my sisters swear that I used to tie a bath towel around my neck and run around the house and say, “Super Bucket!” I don’t remember that, but enough of them say it to where I’m willing to believe it. My brother was into all of the comics and things like that, but I thought that comics were just a little too weird.

I wasn’t really about that. I played sports, but at the same time I was in the chess club and the debate club, but comics were just a little too far, you know?

So I didn’t, but I’m really excited to now be in the position to be jumping into this world. A lot of people, they kind of envy it a little bit because they say, “Man, I wish I could be finding these comics for the first time just like you are.” So, it’s really cool to go on this journey along with the fans and to ask them for their recommendations

Photo: Stewart Cooke

and to learn more about it. It’s nothing like I expected it would be.

I&T Today: How do you go about staying true to his established character throughout years of comics, while also adapting him for the big screen?

YAM: I think much of what was written in the comics, it adapts. It translates directly without me having to do much ... The suit is really the thing that everybody was saying, “How is it going to adapt? How is that going to translate?”

That came down to the designers. James Wan and Ironhead Studios made this over-the-top, really awesome, badass suit that just looks like it’s something from an alien world. When you see it in the movie, it looks like it belongs in Atlantis. When he shows up, it’s really something from another world. That’s a feat of design ingenuity.

As long as I think the character’s actions are rooted in something real – and that was my goal, to make everything he does rooted in something real – a lot of people can relate to it. It is a lot of fun to be doing that too, making people relate to a bad guy.

Photo: Jasin Boland

Photo: Jasin Boland

(Top Right) Yahya Abdul-Mateen II with Patrick Wilson, Director James Wan, Amber Heard, and Jason Momoa (Bottom Right) Director James Wan and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II on the set of Aquaman.

I&T Today: Were there any moments while you were filming that you really felt like you had superpowers?

YAM: It was one of the days I put on the suit for the first time. I put on the suit and it’s ultimately for a fight scene with Jason [Momoa] but even before the scene, I put it on and I could just feel the weight of this thing. And when I put on my helmet, I could see how everyone was looking at me from inside the suit. I could look into everyone’s eyes and I just felt indestructible.

Like I could run through a wall and just break s***, you know? Just being inside of that suit, you feel so powerful, indestructible. I think anytime I stepped inside of the Black Manta suit, it was one of those moments.

I&T Today: A big part of Black Manta’s story is that he’s a scientist who developed his own suit. I’m curious, are you a tech geek?

YAM: I’m very, very curious about different types of technology. I’m really excited about the future of virtual reality. There was one moment on set where I got to walk around the Black Manta submarine in virtual reality – so this was something that the director used before the set was built. An actor could put this on to learn

more about their setting and things like that.

One of the things that I want to do is, I want to facilitate something where fans can interact with virtual reality. Just to experience what it’s like to be inside of Black Manta’s suit. I think that would be really cool. You set up at the movies, you set up at comic conventions, or whatever. I think I have my little tech savvy parts of myself similar to that guy.

I&T Today: Now that you’ve gotten a taste for the comics world, is there one superhero or villain that you would love to portray on the big screen?

YAM: The Joker. I think he’s such a fun, scary opportunity. That’s something where I look at it and I say I have no idea what I would do with that.

That would definitely be a dream type of role, to bring something to that character. But there’s so many guys in line doing that. I think there’s two Jokers right now. But I don’t mind; I’d be one of the guys in line. I think that just shows that it’s such a good role and a good opportunity that I just want to get in and play, you know? ■ For the full interview, visit innotechtoday.com/ black-manta WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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Wreck-It Ralph Enters the Void Now you can interact with Disney’s CGI video game characters in virtual reality.

By John Gaudiosi Location-based virtual reality company The Void continues to partner with Lucasfilm’s ILMxLab to push multiplayer VR experiences further into “hyper reality.” Their latest collaboration – hot on the heels of the critically acclaimed Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire – is Wreck-It Ralph Breaks VR, which brings characters, games, and environments from the Walt Disney Animation Studios’ film franchise into a four-player cooperative VR experience that can be played at Disneyland, Disney World, and other location-based venues around the world.

Ralph is the first of five new VR experiences based on Disney properties, with a Marvel Universe VR experience announced for 2019.

Each of these collaborations is being developed in tandem with ILMxLab and Disney across studios in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City.

Curtis Hickman, CEO of The Void, said each of these projects is being designed with veterans from the worlds of Hollywood, visual effects, video games, and virtual reality. And, given the theme park attraction nature of these 20-30 minute experiences, they’re also being designed for repeat play.

“Ralph is a good example of that because obviously the world of Wreck-It Ralph has everything to do with games, and now the internet, so there’s a great potential for replayability and playing off of those themes within the Ralph VR experience,” Hickman said.

“So those are definitely things that we’re playing with from the Ralph experience, especially.”

Mark Miller, executive creative producer from ILMxLAB, said that Wreck-It Ralph’s world was created using video game technology and is completely computer-generated, which allowed the team to jump right in and use some of the assets from the Disney film.

“With a little bit of work, it gives us a chance to do something different for players to experience inside of this world,” Miller said. “In

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Secrets of the Empire, we were really concentrating on putting you in a Star Wars world, and that’s a very real concrete place that fans could really get into. And now we get this really fun chance of putting you in an animated environment that no one’s actually ever stepped into. And it’s a whole different feeling. The first time that we all stepped in it was amazing … Just being in that new environment that’s like nothing you’ve ever been in before.”

After spending time establishing a technology and workflow pipeline across companies for the first Star Wars VR experience, The Void, ILMxLab, and Disney have been able to hone in on what works best for each intellectual property.

“When we explore a VR experience, we start by looking at the themes and the wish fulfillment for that realm that we’re trying to take you to,” Hickman said. “With Ralph we looked at a lot of those different themes, especially around gaming, and we play off of those things in different ways for the Ralph experience. There were opportunities within The Void to do things that feel both competitive and cooperative by their nature.”

With a huge library of gaming references in the original Wreck-It Ralph film, spanning Pac-Man to Halo, jumping into this VR experience was a lot of retro fun for all involved.

After the success of Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, Void continued their collaboration with Disney to create Wreck-It Ralph Breaks VR, a cooperative VR experience for four players.

The “hyper-reality experience” will soon be available at Disneyland and Disney World.

“We certainly talked about a lot of old retro games and everybody who has come here from the games industry and from film and animation have their memories,” said Miller. “We did a lot of brainstorming and there was a lot of geeking out over the possibilities of what we could pull in from the games referenced in the first movie and the second.”

With Ralph currently wrecking the internet on big screens and VR inside The Void, there’s plenty of retro gaming fun to go around until the Marvel VR experience, which hasn’t been titled or detailed yet, is added to what Hickman calls the IMAX of VR – a location-based VR network that offers fans the opportunity to step into movie worlds from across Disney’s vast library and play alongside friends. ■

Carefully Curated How Magnolia Selects Allows Users to Embrace Their Unique Interests

By Everin Draper

When cable television first came to fruition in the late 1940s, there were many that waved it off as a fad. The onetime fad continues to be a dominant source of daily entertainment for millions of people but times are changing. While TV as we have known it may not be dead, it certainly has its hands full when competing with the new age wave of internet born competitors.

This has led to a growing trend of cutting the cable cord, a practice that has grown by 32.8 percent in 2018, according to eMarketer. Instead, users are opting for subscription-based streaming and video-on-demand (VOD) platforms.

According to Statista, these subscriptions are predicted to hit $10 billion by 2020.

“The entertainment industry is experiencing a paradigm shift in terms of technology and content, as well as changing consumer attitudes,” claimed Jeff Cuban, COO of Mark Cuban Companies Entertainment (including Magnolia Pictures). At the helm of this shift are the obvious streaming titans Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.

According to Cuban, “The acceptance and unbridled appetite for all-you-can-eat subscription services could no longer be ignored.”

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This mentality convinced Magnolia to develop their own VOD service, carving out a unique niche in the home entertainment space.

Since 2001, Magnolia Pictures has become famous in the indie realm for distributing engaging and unique content. Some of their releases include Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Man on Wire, I’m Still Here, Frank, World’s Greatest Dad, and 180° South. The studio has a wide breadth of genres to pull from, including comedy, action, documentary, drama, horror, and more. From this deep well of content, Magnolia has been able to build their very own subscription service, Magnolia Selects, for their fans.

“Magnolia is blessed with a deep library of compelling independent films across a wide variety of genres. Its ever-growing pipeline of new releases provides an ongoing pipeline for its subscription services for years to come,” Cuban explained. “While most independent entrants into the SVOD [subscription video on demand] marketplace are forced to license almost 100 percent of their offering, Magnolia’s base of content also allows it to be selective and opportunistic in what it licenses from others.”

With their large variety of content, Magnolia has developed multiple channels that users can opt into so that they can explore their own unique tastes. Unlike streaming services that have one flat rate for their platform, Magnolia provides low-cost channels that explore a variety of genres: “Monsters & Nightmares,” “Warriors & Gangsters,” “DOX,” and “LOL Flicks,” to name a few. And for those looking for a diverse experience, the Magnolia Selects SVOD channel contains content from all genres.

This variety is vital to staying ahead in the world of streaming, providing more choices for consumers. “Uniquely, a vast majority of each channel’s content is exclusive,” Cuban explained.

But he also understands that in the rapidly evolving world of entertainment, and with companies like Netflix investing billions into original content, it’s important to focus on quality to stay ahead. As Cuban explained, “Even with this edge over its competitors, Magnolia must continue to curate unique and compelling feature films that best reflect its brand to ensure its customers are happy and keep coming back for more.” ■

Uncovering Krypton The cast of SyFy’s Krypton discuss expanding the Superman mythology

By John Gaudiosi

While there are thousands upon thousands of DC comic books featuring Superman, the backstory of the Man of Steel remains untapped territory. So while Superman (also known by his birthname Kal-El) continues to fight for truth, justice, and the American way in Warner Bros.’ Justice League and standalone movies, the stories of his grandparents and the elders of his now-destroyed home planet are explored in the Syfy TV show Krypton.

The show, which debuted on March 21, 2018, was created by David S. Goyer, who has experience with both the DC and Marvel universes, having written the Blade movie trilogy, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and Man of Steel as well as its sequel Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

With his portrayal of Seg-El, grandfather to Superman, Cameron Cuffe gives an insight into the history of one of the most famous superheroes ever imagined.

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Krypton follows Kal-El’s grandfather Seg-El (played by Cameron Cuffe). The House of El is in turmoil, which serves as the dramatic backdrop for the guilds on the alien planet that are vying for power. There’s also another popular lineage from the mythology, the House of Zod. And connecting this backstory directly to Superman, there’s Adam Strange (played by Shaun Sipos), a human time

traveler who tells Seg-El about the imminent threat of Brainiac trying to prevent the birth of his future grandson, Kal-El. Cameron Welsh, an executive producer and writer on the series, has been given the freedom to chart new territory in one of the most recognizable superhero backstories. He was at San Diego Comic Con along with key cast members to talk about the show, which has a second season debuting in 2019.

“This job is a dream come true for me because I’m a huge Superman fan,” Welsh explained. “He’s always been my favorite character. I never in my wildest dreams could have expected to have this opportunity. To work on this show is a huge responsibility and I feel very honored to do it.”

Welsh acknowledges that there were 80 years of Superman before this series was born: “To have an opportunity to add my little piece to that mythology is amazing, but I also feel the weight of that responsibility and I take it seriously.” Because Krypton is set 200 years before the birth of Kal-El, Welsh had a pretty blank slate to mine.

bring a bustling Krypton to life on a Belfast, Ireland soundstage, which helped the actors get into character.

“The sets are magical because the world is around us and we’re stepping into that world, so our imaginations are immediately triggered,” said Ann Ogbomo, who plays Jayna-Zod, an original character created for this series. “I love the Rankless district. Jayna-Zod is meant to hate that district, but as an actor I just love being in there because the finest details down to little items on the floor are all deliberately placed.”

Ann Ogbomo plays Jayna-Zod, the very first female portrayal of General Zod in the DC Universe.

“With our show, we’re in the best of both worlds, where we have this divergent timeline, so we have a lot of freedom there,” Welsh added.

“We can go anywhere we like, but we also have all of that 80 years worth of mythology to cherry pick from and take the bits that we need and that we want to use, but also put our own spin on it.”

Cuffe acknowledges that Superman is one of the greatest characters of all time: “The DC universe is one of the greatest pieces of mythology of all time, so the fact that we get to play in this toy box while also telling a new story is the best; it’s an honor,” Cuffe said.

Sipos is also a believer in the power of comic book mythology. “It helps to guide our lives and

helps make sense of what we do here on Earth,” Sipos said. “People may look at comics and think it’s nicely colored artwork and it’s just stories, but really, they’re very powerful and they’re very rooted in mythology.”

Sipos believes the story of Superman has stood the test of time because he helps people simply because it’s the right thing to do. “He’s been put up as a shining example of what mankind can be even though he’s not a human – he’s a Kryptonian,” Sipos explained. “Plus he can fly, and every kid, and everybody, wants to fly.”

Fans got a glimpse of Krypton in Man of Steel, but this show delves much further back into the timeline. That allowed the set creators to

As the first-ever female General Zod, Ogbomo’s Jayna-Zod is tasked with defending Krypton at all costs, making sure all of those details in the city remain intact.

“This show is an opportunity to explore a character who is responsible for protecting an entire city,” Ogbomo added.

When she first got the part, she wanted to find out as much as she could about this original character in as much depth as possible, so she can bring that to the show, as well as to the larger comic book mythology. She also has been able to traverse two DC universes, having starred in the Wonder Woman and Justice League movies as Philippus.

“Krypton’s been great because it’s my own creation and the writers’ creation, so it’s actually easier than having something that is set or a character that everyone knows,” Ogbomo said.

“This new mythology is good because it means we can do whatever we like.” ■ WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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Dynamic Mounting Height Adjusting TV Mounts – These mounts allow Flat Panel TVs to be easily moved Up/Down/In/Out and Swivel Left/Right. Automated and manual versions work great over fireplaces, whiteboards, or anyplace too high. On-wall and recessed versions allow the TV to be as close to the wall as possible. The soundbar accessory allows the entire system to move together to get the perfect view. [Prices Vary]

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Nvidia Shield TV – The perfect hybrid between a gaming console and a streaming device, the Nvidia Shield allows you to binge some Netflix and have a Fortnite session all in one place.

Perfect for anyone looking for a budget-conscious entertainment bundle, the Nvidia Shield TV is truly the best of both worlds.

$199 (Gaming Edition)

DarbeeVision DVP-5000S HDMI Video Processor - With DARBEE Visual Presence 2.0 Image Processing and plug-and-play ease of use, the DarbeeVision DVP-5000S HDMI 1.4 (HD1080p/60) Video Processor showcases an incredible step in digital imaging. Customizable settings and beautiful depth and clarity for video and images make this release from DarbeeVision a must-have. $199

Royole FlexPai– Royole’s FlexPai is the world’s first commercial foldable smartphone and features Royole’s patented flexible display and sensor technologies. It is a groundbreaking combination of mobile phone and tablet in one sleek device. FlexPai can be used either folded or unfolded, delivering the portability of a smartphone plus the screen size of a high-definition tablet. And, no more broken screens.

Unfolded, FlexPai provides a 7.8” large, tablet-size, full color display that, once folded, easily fits into your pocket. Never sacrifice a large screen to enjoy portability again. $1,319 (128gb), $1,469 (256gb)

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The Ultimate LED Desk Lamp Charging Station The Lumicharge® LED desk lamp is a versatile addition to any work area, office, or bedroom, providing dimmable lighting in a sleek design with high functionality. The included universal phone charger and two extra USB ports are perfect for families and people with various devices to charge. This innovative LED desk lamp with modern features aids nighttime reading, studying, and general work with illuminating delight.

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The Buckeye State’s Burgeoning Tech

iStockphoto.com/Davel5957

Section Compiled by Robert Yehling

Ohio University/Amanda Damelio

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en years ago, like the rest of the country, Ohio faced an economic crisis. Not only did the state endure the housing and financial nearcollapses that marked The Great Recession, but also faced the meltdown of its mighty manufacturing industry – which helped build America. And native son LeBron James was headed off to Miami. Times could not have been more bleak.

Today, Ohio is like walking into a new world. The state’s innovative, forward-thinking re-blend of its economy, emphasizing tech, higher education, smart manufacturing, and government-private sector partnerships, has generated a strong resurgence. Not only that, but companies and workers from throughout the country and world are streaming into the Buckeye State, attracted by lowcost, high-quality living, the state’s many natural wonders, and ideal work environments.

The state has not only righted the ship, but become a shining example of how to lift a huge economy, seventh largest among states, from the ashes to the stars. After growing slowly but steadily the first half of the decade, it has roared to the forefront in the second half. If Ohio were a country, it would rank 21st economically. Per capita income continues to rise, but more importantly, so do the variety of jobs.

Job growth has accelerated statewide, now ahead of the national average. According to Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services, Central Ohio has 5.8 percent greater employment than in 2008. Next is Southwest Ohio, at 5.1 percent, Northeast Central Ohio (Cleveland, Cuyahoga County) with 4.2 percent and Southern Ohio at 4.0 percent. The significance? All of these areas suffered tremendous job loss when the manufacturing sector bottomed out. They’ve completely regenerated their economies with new layers of jobs and innovation.

Partnerships and collaborations are a critical piece of Ohio’s growth. Economic development coalitions have formed statewide. These vital partnerships of government, the private sector, and education are attracting new jobs and spurring growth from within. Such groups as the Cuyahoga County Department of Development, City of Cleveland Economic Development, City of Springfield Economic Development, GROW Licking County, and Ashland Area Economic Development have

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brought growth to their areas while always focusing on the future.

Other creative partnerships include the City of Springfield’s work with Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the U.S. government, DriveOHIO, and private industry to test and build a drone fleet that does everything from traffic monitoring to spraying fields and delivering packages. It is a unique opportunity in the place where the Wright Brothers developed our ability to fly – but that’s the point. Unique opportunities are springing up throughout Ohio from this approach.

Another big push has come in startup incubators, always an attractor of young talent. It began in 2006, when Ohio invested $1.6 billion in Ohio Third Frontier, the seed of today’s 25 operating incubators and accelerators statewide. On top of that, more companies are creating their own innovation labs.

Today, Ohio is home to 55 of the Fortune 1000 companies, with many others operating facilities statewide. Facebook is the most recent to add their name to the list, now building a huge complex in Licking County in central Ohio. According to JobsOhio, corporate operating costs for the many tech implants and transplants – including the highly touted startup incubator firm Plug ‘n Play – are 70 percent lower than California’s Silicon Valley.

Add to that more than 200 academic institutions now ramped up with IT and tech curricula and training programs, and the ground for developing and keeping new talent is fertile and strong. These same 200 institutions are re-training older bluecollar workers in 21st century skills, creating new optimism for them after a 30-year decline in manufacturing hit rock bottom early in this decade.

From smart manufacturers to distributors to tech companies, Ohio is attracting younger workers more likely to roll up their sleeves to adjust robotics or run an IT center than punch the clock at the plant. Still, like their predecessors, their hard work feeds families and economy – and they can guide their future course like no generation before.

“The employee is in the driver’s seat,” Ohio Carbon general manager B.J. Harvey said.

In this issue of Innovation & Tech Today, we explore the communities, partnerships, agencies and drivers of Ohio’s rise – and its place as a national leader in advancing the 21st century economy. ■

WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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Making IT Happen in Ohio

iStockphoto.com/gorodenkoff

By Ted Griffith, managing director of information technology at JobsOhio

Twelve years ago, Ohio invested $1.6 billion in Ohio Third Frontier, which laid the groundwork for entrepreneurs, startups, and incubators to launch. That investment is paying off. Today, there are some 25 incubators and accelerators throughout the state, fostering creative tech solutions across industries, while Ohio’s Fortune 500 firms often create their own innovation labs to spur advances.

growing workforce demands. Ohio also offers significantly lower operating costs to companies than many states – in fact, almost 70 percent lower than Silicon Valley. And by location, 60 percent of North America’s entire population is within a one-day’s drive or a short flight.

Additionally, 55 Fortune 1000 companies are headquartered there, meaning in-demand customers are close by.

200 public, private, military, and educational

But it’s not just the large firms and “unicorn” startups making strides. In data analytics, computer science, and cybersecurity, Ohio is moving to the forefront in not only developing technology talent, but also becoming home to the innovative companies making the most of that talent.

Cybersecurity has also taken a big leap forward recently. 45 academic institutions in Ohio have cybersecurity programs, including six designated as National Security Agency (NSA) Centers of Academic Excellence, and two others certified by the NSA in cyber operations.

talent here in Ohio. The cyber range is one of

Higher IT, Lower Costs

In addition to higher education’s cyber focus, the state formed the Ohio Cyber Collaboration Committee (OC3) in February 2017. Headed by the Ohio National Guard, the OC3 includes

It starts with higher education, where more and more of the state’s 200 institutions are introducing advanced IT programs to meet

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Tech Talent and Growth

organizations across the state that have joined together to prepare and defend against the onslaught of cyber threats. From hands-on hacking competitions to a new Ohio Cyber Range, where students and companies can test their skills and tools against malicious programs in a virtual safe space, OC3 presents multiple opportunities to collaborate and develop cyber just a few in the country.

Ohio has become a prime location for developing tech talent, while creating new companies and new IT services within existing firms. The state’s mix of smart IT grads, an ideal economic environment for startups, and a recent groundswell of technology innovation are encouraging more IT-focused companies to make their move to the state. ■

Nurturing Tech talent: Make Ohio home.

Hyland, an award-winning, global software company specializing in information management, has long invested in student outreach. By offering internships and summer camps to students of all ages, they’ve demonstrated firsthand how the best and brightest no longer need to head to a coast to find a thriving tech career. Because it’s all happening in Ohio.

JobsOhio.com/tech

Welcome to Ohio.

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Where Business Goes to Do Great:

Donn R. Nottage

The Rise of Cuyahoga County

Today, Cuyahoga County feels like the place to be: an increasingly young, vibrant, eclectic, and innovative cultural hothouse along Lake Erie. The Upper Midwest’s natural instinct toward community building has played a big part. Business, industry, innovation, technology, education, smart collaboration, and networking have created a dynamic that adapts rapidly to receive new enterprise while growing roots as deeply as the Industrial Age once did.

Much of it revolves around the area’s visible millennials. Cleveland and Cuyahoga County rank eighth in the nation in the growth rate of college-educated millennials (ages 25 to 34), as well as eighth in millennial workforce concentration. This is evidenced in downtown Cleveland, which had a 76 percent spike in occupancy rate among millennials between 2010 and 2012. The migration of millennials to the county has fed a recent spate of tech-centric and health-centric new businesses.

“Our main message is that Cuyahoga County is a great place to do business and to live,” Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish said. “We’ve seen large companies come into the county, a millennial workforce that comes in with their ideas, and we have new businesses and types of business forming.”

While the county’s population of 1.25 million is down by .5 percent from 2015, owing to the final shedding of old manufacturing jobs, the

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total number of employees in the county has grown to 592,000-plus – a 2.2 percent jump.

Likewise, median income has jumped by nearly three percent.

A big challenge for the county was to overcome the fifty-year decline in manufacturing, once the backbone of the region, now one of several key business cogs.

“There is significant opportunity for innovation and growth in this sector,” Budish explained.

“With our rich history in manufacturing, we continue to develop startups, innovators in manufacturing, leading to a growth in opportunity for both businesses and workers and to a growth in employment in this sector.”

Indeed, new smart manufacturers are setting up, while older companies successfully shift to the new economy and its needed technologies.

While the overall employment in manufacturing is down, the productivity of the sector is up due to increased productivity and automation.

This underpins an “all hands on deck” effort to generate an efficient manufacturing footprint with smart manufacturing build-ins and new operations; central positioning in the gig economy through incubators, innovation, and smart technology; rezoning of commercial real estate to create lofts and incubators; a renowned healthcare services ecosystem; a higher education system that teams with industry and business to train leaders and workers to build

the future; and a growing collaboration between STEM-educated students, their schools, and the businesses that will employ them.

“We’ve worked with our collaborative partners – the City of Cleveland Economic Development Department, The Greater Cleveland Partnership, Team NEO, Jobs Ohio, Case Western Reserve and others – to focus on innovation, and how we can always diversify what we have to offer,” Budish explained. “One of our biggest wins was Plug and Play deciding to locate an accelerator lab here, their first U.S. accelerator outside Silicon Valley, in our Global Health Innovation Center. Since we have such a big healthcare presence here, it was fitting that Plug and Play focus on healthcare tech.”

Healthcare has long been a strong suit in Cuyahoga County. It’s even stronger now. The Cleveland Clinic enjoys a strong global reputation, but it’s not alone; University Hospital has been at the forefront of healthcare innovation. Right in their backyard is a titan of deep research and innovation, Case Western Reserve University, which has the advantage of partnering with two prestigious institutions. In 2016-2017, Case Western received more than $377 million in research grants, a testament to the volume and level of work coming from there. “The combined strength of these institutions creates a real density of opportunity for innovation,” Budish said. ■

LOOK A LITTLE CLOSER — YOU’LL BE SURPRISED. This isn’t Broadway, it’s Cleveland’s thriving Theatre District — Playhouse Square. With nine beautifully restored historic entertainment venues, it’s the second largest performance arts district in the country, perfect for entertaining clients or for a special date night out.

You really do get more in our Midwest.

City of

ECONOMIC

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Running Point on Innovation & Technology:

Virtual Roundtable with Case Western Reserve University Think of Case Western Reserve University as an idea that hits you from all directions – all of them good. Then those ideas grow to change the world in some way. The world-renowned center of learning, research, and innovation is to Ohio what a spine is to the human body.

Particularly in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, but CWRU’s impact is felt worldwide. It feeds our knowledge of the latest trends and practices in innovation and technology, while educating thousands of future lawyers, executives, and innovation and tech specialists, and providing research used worldwide.

In order to dive into CWRU’s many facets, we created a virtual roundtable with five administrators: Bob Sopko, director of CWRU LaunchNet; Sue Rivera, vice president for research and technology management; Grant Goodrich, director of the Great Lakes Energy Institute; Nick Barendt, executive director of the Institute for Smart, Secure and Connected Systems (ISSACS); and Drew Poppleton, interim director, Post-Graduate Planning & Experiential Education.

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Innovation & Tech Today: What are the differences in the needs and career focuses of undergrad and grad students now versus 10 years ago?

I&T Today: Let’s dive into a few programs for a minute. How are you advancing sustainability and alternative energy education?

Bob Sopko: The rapid change of technology, world-market competition, and collaboration demands our students, companies, and organizations be well-versed across a spectrum of ever-changing equipment and ways to work together. Having a 50,000-square-foot innovation space contributes to that collaboration.

Grant Goodrich: There are a few ways in which we actively work with companies. First, companies can directly fund the research or educational opportunity they need here on campus. Siemens Corp. recently established a Digital Grid Laboratory and curriculum, through which CWRU will train future electrical, controls, and systems engineers using Siemens software to operate the digital electrical grid of the future.

I&T Today: In what ways are you working with your 270+ new industry partners on priorities for today? For instance, blockchain?

BS: Speaking to blockchain, there is a large initiative that brought in world leaders to Cleveland for this growing technology, Blockland Cleveland. At CWRU, we seek to understand how to put blockchain into practice to enhance areas we are already focused on, including the Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, and medical innovation.

A second way is through collaborative government-funded research. Two energy researchers at CWRU have planning grants from the National Science Foundation to develop Industry-University Collaborative Research Centers, one in industrial energy efficiency, the other in energy-materials data analytics. We work with small companies and entrepreneurs through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, through which many federal

Ohio Carbon Industries: The Leader in American-Made Carbon Brushes One of the many successful manufacturers that call Ashland, Ohio home.

Nationally ranked 2017 #7 Micropolitan 2018 #10 Economic-Growth Potential

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venture clinic and access to competitions, capital, strategic partners, and mentors.

I&T Today: From where you sit, where are the next areas of innovation to be researched? And brought online both academically and economically?

agencies can support research for small businesses that need assistance to grow their products and companies.

Finally, we aggressively work to stay on the forefront of developments in the energy field. Our Great Lakes Energy Institute works to synthesize that information and share it with our faculty and university leaders to help inform direction and areas of future research and scholarship.

I&T Today: Tell us about ISAACS. Nick Barendt: The Institute for Smart, Secure and Connected Systems (ISSACS) is focused on fostering collaborations on the Internet of Things (IoT) across the university and with our partners in industry, nonprofit groups, and economic development organizations. IoT is really the convergence of devices, communications, and data and analytics – the digital convergence. Clearly, technology alone is insufficient to address society’s most complicated problems, so we are taking a “TechPlus” strategy. ISSACS is fostering convergent, collaborative research, translation and education in health, manufacturing and infrastructure/ smart cities. ISSACS is part of the IoT Collaborative (IOTC), with Cleveland State University. The IOTC is working with our local economic development partners to align regional efforts in connected devices.

I&T Today: Then there is the Sears think[box], which has received good coverage recently. How is it feeding the tech and innovation needs of Ohio?

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BS: Cleveland, as a community, has the advantage of going through adversity and learning how to work together. We continue to help each other. The State of Ohio provided Sears think[box] $1 million toward the $35-million, 50,000-square-foot innovation center because we already were accessible to the public.

Everyone is welcome to use the space, and there is no charge. We encourage local high schools, community colleges, and universities to bring their students for a tour and to use our facility. Ten percent of the visitors to Sears think[box] are from the outside community; 15 percent are from our neighbor, the Cleveland Institute of Art; 40 percent are engineering students and the balance are from different disciplines at Case Western Reserve University.

I&T Today: Today, students and young workers can create a business and run it from their devices. How do you weave together old and new models to make sure they combine 21st century practices with solid business core values and foundations?

BS: In addition to supplying the physical tools, we provide a location to encourage the accidental collision and growth of ideas. Having inventors hang out with artists, English and Nursing majors – along with business mentors, investors, students, and community members – amounts to a diverse mix of encouraged chaos, which, over time, has the ability to produce amazing results. We want people to play, invent, and have fun. If a business comes out of it, we can assist guiding through market validation, providing a no-charge intellectual property

Sue Rivera: We are very focused right now on looking at digital innovation of all types: blockchain, Internet of Things, AI, quantum computing, augmented reality, etc. We think CWRU – and Cleveland – can lead in these areas. We have what it takes to use technology to solve important problems and benefit society. Our efforts in these areas will not only develop the next generation of thinkers, they will fuel the region’s economic engine.

I&T Today: How has the focus on STEM and STEAM impacted the way you educate and help grad students locate ideal career or entrepreneurial opportunities?

Drew Poppleton: This is a fitting final question because the initiatives and investments in innovation mentioned throughout this roundtable reflect CWRU’s approach to educating and preparing our students for the future. Not one is focused on building technical expertise alone, as important as that is; rather, each also emphasizes some element of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, leadership, and impact, if not all.

The greatest opportunities for advancement and change – whether in our own community, industry, or the world at large – demand people with diverse skillsets and mindsets working together in pursuit of a common goal. That’s why think[box] is open to the public; why ISSACS isn’t housed in a single department; why our new data science major is heavily connected to industry; why LaunchNet’s Venture teams routinely combine students from several different majors; and why every CWRU student completes a senior capstone project.

In the end, all of this intentional crossfertilization benefits students in significant ways. As a result, our students are highly sought after by employers for leadership development programs, elite consulting teams, and other opportunities where they start out higher than the individual contributor role so typical of entry-level positions. ■

CUYAHOGA COUNTY IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Innovation Collaboration Growth

Cuyahoga County Together We Thrive

www.cuyahogacounty.us

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Cleveland’s Return to Economic Prominence

The City of Cleveland’s return to cultural, business, and economic prominence stands as one of the brightest municipal stories in a decade full of them. The fact it happened while the City’s longstanding backbone that helped build this nation, manufacturing and industry, suffered from the turn to automation only adds to the impressiveness of the feat.

“We’ve taken a combination of different partnerships and collaborations, worked with our neighborhoods, and turned around our commercial real estate vacancies in some creative ways,” said David Ebersole, Director of Economic Development for the City of Cleveland. “We’ve been attracting large businesses, but we’ve also become a go-to place for entrepreneurs, with a big push in small businesses and incubator set-ups.”

Some might say the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and LeBron James’ ascension to NBA superstardom – and his return to the city in 2014 – fueled Cleveland’s rise from a hard bottom during the Great Recession. Those two marquee cultural icons certainly helped, but so did a concerted effort between the City, Cuyahoga County, Jobs Ohio, the establishment of a Plug and Play Tech Center locally, smart development of brownfields, and the re-zoning of old factories and empty commercial buildings into mixed-use shops and lofts.

“We had to create an environment where younger people would find career positions and stay in Cleveland, or move here,” Ebersole said.

“Through Plug and Play and our big push into

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small businesses and incubators, we’ve found ways for individuals to get started, to take their ideas and find their own world, their own place to contribute.”

As a native, Ebersole has seen the good and bad in Cleveland. He was educated at Carnegie Mellon, then received his Juris Doctorate from Case Western Reserve, also a major player in the area’s resurgence. He rose through the ranks in Economic Development, becoming the full director in late 2017.

The level of innovative thinking and action behind Cleveland’s decade-long rise stretches across different programs and different sociological layers. So many things have happened that the events almost look random.

Incubators start up. Commercial real estate is rezoned. Workforce development expands to draw more older workers, factory workers, into the digital age. Businesses move in; others start on the spot. The Economic Development Department website’s URL – rethinkcleveland. org – says plenty. So does the slogan: “Built By Industry, Inspired By Innovation.” It presents no less than two dozen active initiatives, ranging from urban agriculture to tech training, startup and incubator support to rebuilding pure 21st century manufacturing capability.

“We’ve grown into a one-stop shop for businesses that want to relocate here or grow further here,” Ebersole said. “We want anybody interested in being successful to benefit from the programs and collaborations we have, because we all grow when a business succeeds.”

When you sew the mosaic together, a picture emerges of a city that hosts world-class medical facilities, is home to eight Fortune 1000 companies while reshaping itself, being supportive to young digital era workers in the “gigeconomy,” retraining and valuing the men and women who lost long-time factory jobs, and more: • Cleveland’s world-class health tech corridor continues to build off the renowned Cleveland Clinic. Combined with a variety of university hospitals, research centers and clinics, “you’re seeing a lot of innovation coming out of our medical facilities, which is drawing people from around the world,” Ebersole said.

• The City has taken hundreds of thousands of dead commercial real estate buildings and old factories, converted and rezoned them as mixeduse, and turned around a gaping vacancy issue.

Through incubators and collaborative groups like Plug and Play, which matches startups with large corporations and clients, many entrepreneurs now occupy the space. “It’s more modern and more open for entrepreneurs,” Ebersole said. “What we’re also able to do is put retail incubator space and small business space in the more impoverished parts of our community, which uplifts them and creates important jobs.”

• Cleveland’s Neighborhood Retail Assistance Program has attracted people young and old, adding diversity and demographic range to formerly declining neighborhoods, thanks to the Industrial-Commercial Land Bank. ■

Innovation starts at Case Western Reserve University

A I -enabled robots. Industrial IoT sensors. Plasma-assisted fuel injectors.

We’ve been showcasing student startups like these and many more at CES since 2014.

It’s all a part of our ecosystem of innovation— at the heart of which is Sears think[box].

The 50,000-square-foot innovator’s paradise covers every step of an entrepreneur’s journey from top-of-the-line prototyping equipment to business plan and legal support, and even opportunities to pitch their products on the world’s biggest innovation stage.

Visit our 12 booths at CES this year (Eureka Park 51541 - 51552) and learn more about Sears think[box] and our ecosystem of innovation at thinkbox.case.edu.

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TechGROWTH and Ohio University: Powering an Innovation Ecosystem in Appalachian Ohio

A decade ago, something happened in the Buckeye State: the Ohio Third Frontier began awarding funding grants. One of those went to a startup, TechGROWTH Ohio, to increase revenue growth and capital investments in techbased businesses within a 20-county area of southeastern Ohio, anchored by Ohio University (OU).

Today, TechGROWTH Ohio, founded as part of Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, and its thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem help feed a red-hot state. “The impact TechGROWTH Ohio has made on the region and state is significant and growing,” Ohio University President M. Duane Nellis said. “By leveraging multiple funding sources, including state capital, with the resources, partnerships, and talent of Ohio University, the Voinovich School’s been able to make real progress in activating statewide public-private partnerships in economic development.”

Between 2016 and 2017, the volume of postings on emerging technology sectors such as Internet of Things, smart cities, unmanned aerial vehicles, AI, blockchain, augmented reality, and virtual reality jumped by 50 percent.

“Southeast Ohio really needed an entity to help expand investment in technology innovation and companies in our area. We needed to focus on bringing three things to tech-based startups – services, capital, and talent. That’s what we’re all about, every day,” Executive Director Lynn Gellermann said.

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TechGROWTH Ohio connects clients to growth grants, pre-seed investments, access to angel investors for follow-on capital, and venture capital. They also infuse tech companies with services and support from expertise in sales, marketing, inventory production, and management, to providing mentorship on how to run and grow a businesses from an esteemed team of Executives-in-Residence.

“They are the real strength of our model,” Gellermann said. “We bring in experienced, seasoned pros from different sectors and parts of the state and country to help startups and offer insight in their particular sector. In southeast Ohio, we provide a lot of coaching, mentoring and team-building support.”

According to Gellermann, a secret to TechGROWTH Ohio’s success is the sprawling partnership it anchors. “We were a catalyst for Ohio University to create their Center for Entrepreneurship with its founding partners, the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs and the College of Business,” Gellerman explained. “It now provides both a major and certificate in entrepreneurship. Ohio University also had a leadership role in starting the I-Corps@Ohio program, which works with virtually all higher education and research institutions in the state to help commercialize their research. From this also came the Ohio Innovation Fund.”

Unpacking this ecosystem, the OU Center for Entrepreneurship was named Outstanding Emerging Program in 2015 by the U.S. Association of Small Businesses and

Entrepreneurship. More than 2,000 entrepreneurs have engaged with TechGROWTH Ohio, with 547 receiving operational assistance and 92 companies receiving financial support.

Ohio Third Frontier has awarded more than $1.6 billion in grants. The Ohio Innovation Fund, an early-stage venture fund focused on best-ofthe-best startups across the state, has closed a dozen deals since opening in 2016. All combined, OU has generated nearly $2.5 billion in economic development since 2012 through programs and activities housed at its Voinovich School.

Gellermann has enjoyed a sweet reward: watching these ideas come to life. He points to Global Cooling, manufacturer of Stirling Ultracold, as an example of TechGROWTH Ohio’s ability to assist and drive any tech niche.

“They needed to learn how to make their products and get them to market, to put a manufacturing process in place,” he recalled.

“They had to build and develop a workforce from scratch. They had to put into place supply chain, distribution, inventory management and a company culture to be successful.”

A decade later, Global Cooling has offices in Athens, Columbus and outside Lexington, KY, and has jumped from ten to more than 100 employees. It enjoys “a growth trajectory reflective of a company that has created considerable enterprise value,” Gellermann said.

“If you look at these hurdles, you think, ‘No way.

The odds are stacked.’ Given what we know today, would we make that leap?’” He paused, then chuckled. “Probably. This is a high-risk operation at times.” ■

WHY DID AWS, AEP OHIO, BLECKMANN, FACEBOOK, & SAMUEL STRAPPING INVEST IN LICKING COUNTY? LOCATION. WORKFORCE. INFRASTRUCTURE. To learn more about Licking County’s advantages and how we can simplify your site selection process, contact Nathan Strum at 740.345.9757 ext. 3, or nstrum@growlickingcounty.org

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REGION Located just 25 minutes east of Columbus, Licking County, Ohio is a day’s drive from 60% of the U.S. population and 50% of the Canadian population with access to more than 1 million regional workers.

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City of Springfield’s UAV Collaboration Would Delight the Wright Brothers

It makes perfect sense. Why not launch the most advanced Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or drone development operation, in the place where Wilbur and Orville Wright ignited our aviation industry?

The City of Springfield thought exactly that, which is why it is teaming with the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the State of Ohio, DriveOhio, the Dayton Development Coalition, and local and national manufacturers and suppliers to help bring drone aviation online regionally and nationally.

“We believe it’s the most advanced collaboration of its kind,” said Tom Franzen, Assistant City Manager and Director of Economic Development for the City of Springfield. “The UAV ecosystem, as we like to call it, is something that involves industry, private enterprise, and government working closely together, something that can serve Springfield well into the future.”

That Springfield and nearby Dayton, a halfhour drive, would serve as the hub of the initiative seems obvious enough. After all, the Wright Brothers turned their invention of the airplane into the start of a robust aerospace presence in the area. Today, that industry employs 110,000 people in a 14-county area surrounding Dayton and Springfield, according to the Dayton Region Manufacturers Association. Since drones represent the newest mass wave of aircraft, and the sky’s the limit on their future commercial and law enforcement value, the area seemed ideal.

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It became more ideal when the partnerships formed, according to Breck Woodard, VP Aerospace Systems for the Dayton Development Coalition.

“We have 1,200 manufacturing and supply chain operations that are and can be doing UAV work in the area,” Woodard said. “With the Air Force Research Labs in partnership with the State of Ohio, we’re working on both military and civilian applications. As the FAA sorts out flight paths so UAVs can have a regular presence in the sky to do commercial tasks, such as delivering goods, we want to be able to reach out to companies across the country and world to do their R&D, production, marketing, and shipping.

“We feel we have the best ecosystem for UAVs in the country, partly because of partnerships based on close proximity. We just don’t see any other place that can do what we do, or have this collaboration of businesses, municipal governments, the state and the Air Force,” he added.

UAVs are already in use in the area through transportation monitoring, under the auspices of the Ohio Department of Transportation and DriveOhio. They fly out of the SpringfieldBeckley Municipal Airport, which is ramping up to be a major drone flight center as it develops the Ground Based Detect & Avoid System, the necessary cog before the FAA can fully open airspace.

“Right now, we’re using twelve UAVs for data collection, traffic monitoring, mapping, bridge and road inspections,” said Fred Judson, Director of the Ohio UAV Center for DriveOhio, which is strongly focused on smart mobility initiatives.

“We will be expanding the fleet, but it’s just one of many uses we can have for drones in the state and country.”

The collaboration of Springfield, Dayton, the Air Force, and Ohio agencies offers up an incredible opportunity for younger workers and innovators: a chance to enter the ground floor of the 21st century’s prime aviation player. “We’re definitely capitalizing on the research provided by the various Ohio universities, and letting the students know that UAVs will amount to a great stay-at-home career choice,” Franzen said.

The City of Springfield is an ideal centerpiece.

It is one of Ohio’s shining stars, ranking second in the nation by SiteSelection for new or expanded economic development projects in small cities in 2017. From 2012 to 2017, nearly 10,000 new jobs were created in a city of just under 60,000 – an incredible number.

Furthermore, every dollar invested in Greater Springfield returned $3,153 in capital investment in local businesses – another ROI any city would covet. The city’s SpringfieldClark Career Technology Center, Global Impact STEM Academy, and CareerConnectED internship program infuse that growth by educating and training a workforce perfectly suited to today’s demands – right up to powering the nation’s biggest UAV manufacturing and commercial corridor.

“One of the things you like to do with economic development is work with something that can take us twenty, thirty years down the line,” Franzen said. “With our involvement in the UAV Ecosystem, we’ve plugged into that kind of a long-term economic opportunity here.” ■

“TechGROWTH has created an entrepreneurial venture community right here in Southeastern Ohio. It’s been enormously valuable, because you want successes like Stirling Ultracold to happen again and again. That’s the goal — it’s not to grow one great company, it’s to create an environment that grows companies as a matter of course,” Neill Lane, CEO, Stirling Ultracold

AT OHIO UNIVERSITY,

WE’RE BUILT FOR GROWTH One of the many TechGROWTH Ohio success stories, Stirling Ultracold grew out of the Ohio University’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. CEO Neill Lane built a company that manufactures and sells the world’s most energy efficient ultra-cold freezers, employing 100, with 70 of these employees in southeastern Ohio.

TechGROWTH, as part of Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, has provided more than 2,000 technology entrepreneurs and companies in southeastern Ohio with access to business assistance and sources of capital. It’s just one example of how Ohio University builds communities – and companies – by supporting technology commercialization, accelerating businesses, and educating the business leaders of tomorrow.

$485M

in economic activity generated by client companies

$4.8M

In seed, angel and services capital raised

$52M

Public private partnership with Ohio Third Frontier, Ohio University and private investors

$6.7M

Invested in early stage portfolio companies

T H E CEN TER F OR

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Funded by the Ohio Third Frontier Entrepreneurial Services Provider program and Ohio University, part of the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs at Ohio University.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT TECHGROWTHOHIO.COM

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Business Retooling Spurs Ashland’s Digital & Economic Growth Ashland Business Park

Every time Kathy Goon discusses economic opportunity in the city of Ashland, she grows effusive: “We’ve put together a strong growth plan moving forward, between our public and private structure, our collaboration with Ashland University and Jobs Ohio, and our commitment to help entrepreneurs.”

Goon, the Executive Director of Ashland Area Economic Development, a.k.a Grow Ashland, also stated: “This is a beautiful place to live, and it’s also a great place to work, to start something new and to innovate.”

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million by year’s end. As for the area’s overall capital infusion, it has similarly skyrocketed from $7.45 million in 2015 to $311.1 million in 2017, with 80 percent of area businesses reporting growth in the past two years.

Ashland’s efforts have been noticed nationally as well. Since 2014, the city has ranked among the country’s Top 100 Micropolitans (under 50,000 population), hitting a high mark of No. 7 in 2017.

They also won the 2018 Ohio Economic Development Association Award for the Grow Ashland marketing campaign, a brainchild of Goon.

Her words are well-put. With a population base that has grown by 15 percent since 2000, and trended younger (45 percent are under age 35, according to the U.S. Census Bureau), it’s been incumbent on officials to sprout a supportive work environment for them. That they have, with digital tech firms, craft breweries, smart manufacturing operations, and business expansions opening up.

How did they do it? For one thing, they repurposed farmland and commercial real estate. “One of the biggest things the City of Ashland did was create the Ashland Business Park,” Goon said. “The city purchased a prior 250-acre dairy farm that is now home to over 20 manufacturers and distributors that employee more than 700 people.”

A single statistic points to Ashland’s fortunes this decade. In 2013, when Ohio’s economy was still coming up for air, the city decided to invest more to draw entrepreneurs. Only $600,000 in new business deals were signed that year, Goon said. For 2018, that number is north of $80 million, and could hit $100

To support the positive trends with Ashland industry and population growth, Grow Ashland spearheaded the downtown’s Revitalization District in 2017. The initiative allows restaurant entrepreneurs to access liquor licenses at a low, fixed price instead of searching for one on the open market. ■

INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

Among the area businesses that have seen the best and worst of Ohio’s economy in the past 100 years is Ohio Carbon Industries, which moved to Ashland in the late 1980s. According to General Manager B.J. Harvey, the company has quadrupled revenue in the last ten years, and forecasts a further 10 to 20 percent annual growth through 2023. Their secret is a microcosm of the winning formula for both Ohio and Ashland: modernizing their business practices and finding new clientele by aligning with the ideal technology to shoot into the future. They did it with technology expansion, such as utilizing 3D printing and automated presses.

“Suddenly, we were able to expand from 20-piece orders to million-piece orders,” Harvey said. “We’ve been targeting transit authorities, their needs for grounding brushes and assemblies. We have a lot of OEM customers for carbon brushes. We couldn’t possibly produce the large quantities required with our standard machine shop, so we switched to automated presses.” Ohio Carbon’s leap, like Ashland’s, began with a decision in 2013 to purchase another manufacturer and fold its assets into the Ashland operation. Since then, the company has tripled employment, creating opportunities that are appealing to young workers. In Harvey’s view, “You have to remember, these days, with the low unemployment rate, the employee is in the driver’s seat.”

Ohio Carbon's BigRep One 3D printer

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How STEM is Fueling Licking County’s Strong Growth into the Future

When you’re a somewhat rural county that needs to hook up to the digital economy, what are the best ways to go about it? Not only has Ohio’s Licking County found an answer in a stronger STEM focus, but it now comprises an ecosystem that is setting the table for generations of growth, innovation, and opportunities.

“We’re doing great work in the area of STEM education, working with the schools, colleges, and our businesses to promote greater job opportunities and collaboration,” said Nathan Strum, Executive Director of GROW Licking County.

“We’re directly connecting industry leaders with educational partners, growing quite a bit, and now we’ve formed a community from this.”

Licking County is a jewel in Central Ohio, located minutes from Columbus. A generation ago, it was a farming county with some manufacturing and services, but now, it’s becoming a mighty cog in Ohio’s decade-long rise as a major tech and digital player. Companies such as Amazon, Covestro, Ariel Corporation, Apeks Supercritical, and The Boeing Company have landed in this haven of infrastructure, workforce, transportation, financial incentives, and pro-business, pro-education, procollaboration environment. Facebook has also jumped in, building a new operations center there. In all, 50 of the Fortune 5000 companies have a presence in Licking County, which is

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commutable for one million regional workers – many of them trained or re-trained for the specialized jobs at hand.

“These organizations come in and are very impressed by the workforce and the services we can provide economically,” Strum said. “We had to make a few changes to grow more economically in Licking County, we did, and now we’re dynamic participants, growing fast – and our workers can go home to low mortgage payments and beautiful natural surroundings.”

Licking County is working with The Works: Ohio Center for Art, History & Technology and STEM Works East Central Ohio, which has constructed a rich STEM ecosystem involving all 21 public and private primary and secondary schools, four universities, and two technical schools. Not to mention area businesses, beginning with the group’s two dozen corporate partners. Buoyed by events like STEMfest @ The Works, STEM Over Lunch, and Kids Tech University, the program has created an early relationship between students and the area businesses in which they might land their careers.

With citizen retention a huge priority in any rural county, Licking County is addressing it with this high emphasis on STEM. At the recent STEMfest @ The Works, presenters included Denison University

Chemistry and Biochemistry, EVO Design, Packaging Corp. of America, Newark City Engineers, Central Ohio Technical College, Boeing, Anomatic Corp., and Owens Corning.

Brought together, there’s a rich mixture of academia, municipal services, both smart and old-school manufacturing, IT, and tech. They worked with students in design-based problem solving, with challenges students would likely face as employed scientists and engineers.

“We’re working six counties wide, always expanding our ecosystem to involve more students, more businesses, and strengthen our collaboration with schools and the community,” said Meghan Federer, Director of STEM Education at The Works. “STEM learning opportunities are more and more aligned with what our students will be doing in their careers, and we’d like them to have their careers here. By learning what specific STEM skills a career path requires – and hearing it from a company or manufacturer, whether at an event or a field trip and tour – our students can be inspired and strategic at the same time.”

With Licking County officials, from Strum on down, emphasizing STEM-driven initiatives for students and younger workers, it’s clear how the future looks in the county: young, vibrant, and strong – and very digital. ■

1251 WEST BLEE ROAD• SPRINGFIELD, OH 45502 The Springeld-Beckley Municipal Airport is located on County Route 794, 4 miles south of the City of Springeld.

Come see why the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the State of Ohio created a one-of-a-kind partnership for UAS ight.

This property is the unique combination of a business park and Springeld-Beckley Municipal Airport (a general aviation airport with militarygrade amenities serving commercial and military needs).

With two large crossing runways of 9,000’ and 5,500’ respectively, this 1,800 acre property allows for exibility in operations, creativity in conception and timeliness in implementation.

Ohio and AFRL are cooperatively developing and fielding a Ground Based Detect and Avoid system in Southwest Ohio.

Located at the Springeld-Beckley Municipal Airport, this system will: •

Include 200 square miles of Ohio airspace to enable ights of small UAS beyond visual line of sight.

•

The GBDAA system will enable AFRL researchers, its partners, and commercial entities to conduct UAS ights in support of R&D, operator training, or commercial activities. In the Springeld-Dayton Region, we’re all about collaboration, innovation and hard work.

Ohio is home to: •

Over 1,200 aerospace manufacturer and supply chain sources

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Strong partnerships among the Air Force, Industry and Academia

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World-class UAS training and education

Let the Springeld-Dayton Region and the State of Ohio help your company take ight!

Phone: 937.324.7303

www.springfieldohio.gov

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Expanding Logistics, Expanding Space

How does providing transportation and logistics services land you a student center at the hometown university with your name affixed to it? Something to do with the degree of service and commitment – one which Chuck Bills has long laid down as CEO of Ohio Logistics, one of the nation’s fastest growing logistics organizations.

“In our business we create value,” Bills said when he and his wife, Dee Dee, gifted the Center for Student Life and College of Business at Findlay University. “Most of our customers don’t have time to think outside the box, so we do it for them. We create value and help those businesses grow.”

Now named the “Bills Family Conference Room” in the Creative Learning Center, it provides a space for students, staff, faculty, and community members to exchange ideas – and exchange is a very familiar word to anyone running logistics. “Early in my career I had the chance to work on the College of Business Advisory Board,” Bills told the campus online newspaper, the Findlay Newsroom. “It gave me the chance to meet other people, network and develop an understanding of how organizations were doing business.”

At the heart of this is a business emblematic of Ohio’s key position in how goods get from manufacturer to us.

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Ohio Logistics’ expansion during its 30-year history has been impressive. The company headquarters in a state from which truckers can reach two-thirds of the U.S. population and 60 percent of its companies in a single day. Ohio Logistics has grown from a single 40,000-square-foot warehouse to over 6 million square feet, spread across 22 state-of-the-art facilities in six states. It makes the company, headquartered in Findlay, one of the largest privately-held logistics firms in the eastern U.S. “We take great pride in supporting our customers’ needs, whether it be expanding an existing warehouse or opening a new location,” Bills said. “Growth is something we’ve never shied away from. It’s an exciting time to be in business.”

In 2018, the company has welcomed three new ground-up facilities, in the Ohio cities of Bellevue, Bowling Green, and Findlay. The 200,000-square-foot Bowling Green operation opened within the Wood Bridge Business Park, which is filling with a variety of major firms, including GKN Manufacturing, an automotive supplier. It opened for business in early summer.

The Bellevue operation, which just opened in October and is also 200,000 square feet, includes six railroad and 17 semi-trailer docks, along with one overhead ground-level door.

Another operation, in Fostoria, builds upon the

area’s historical past with railroads, running along the three lines that intersect in the old “Iron Triangle,” where railroads served a natural gas boom. Among the clients for which it provides storage and transportation are Mitsubishi Chemical Performance Polymers and U.S. Gypsum Building Materials. A German steel company will also be involved after the railroad access is fully completed. Finally, the company built a 150,000-square-foot warehouse to lease to a business client. It was scheduled to open in December.

As 2019 rolls around, Ohio Logistics will continue its southern and western expansion by adding facilities in two new states, Tennessee and Illinois. The company currently operates in Ohio, New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Mississippi.

The technology used to carry out the daily logistics operation is equally impressive. Ohio Logistics works primarily with two vendors, Argos Software with its solution suite and Abecas Insight Software with its mobile, webbased solution. The result is a highly intelligent warehouse management system that quickens agility and flexibility, supporting many virtual customer warehouses. It supports bar code, RFID, and voice technology for maximum automation in warehouse facilities, as well as offering real-time visibility to customer inventory. ■

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Do You Mind?

Sam Harris discusses the importance of mindfulness in our relationships with artificial intelligence – and each other.

By Dylan Rodgers & Patricia Miller

Sam Harris, author of numerous bestselling books and host of the Waking Up podcast, is no stranger to deep or difficult topics. In fact, he built an advertiser-free podcasting model in order to discuss ideas openly, without fear of losing sponsors. Often focusing his energy on exploring consciousness, ethics, and artificial intelligence, he recently ventured into a new type of conversation with the launch of the Waking Up Course app, a series of guided meditations and lessons focused on mindfulness.

Appropriately, our conversation about technology-enhanced dialogue, ethics, and artificial intelligence has an undercurrent of mindfulness.

Innovation & Tech Today: You’ve built a career on having deep and difficult conversations, whether that be via your books or your podcast. Social media is another way to have a public conversation, but while it’s useful for getting your message

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out, it’s often a driver of hyperbole and outrage. What do you think a healthier social media would look like?

with how people engage these media, and it is somewhat analogous to road rage, which is this paradoxical fact about the human mind.

Sam Harris: Well, I think in virtually every case anonymity is a bad idea. I understand the need for it in certain cases, like with whistle blowers or dissidents who would have their lives threatened if it were known who they were, but generally speaking, I think anonymity is almost entirely a toxic influence on our public conversation. So the fact that on Twitter and YouTube you really don’t know who anyone is, I think largely accounts for how vile the comments can be.

In the case of road rage, if you put someone in a car and just have them interact with other people in cars, they are often plunged into states of mind and into patterns of reactivity that would never be available to them if they were walking around on the street.

And I’ve noticed, for instance, if you select in Twitter that you just want to hear from people who have verified email addresses, that cuts down immensely on the craziness that I see coming back at me. So that’s one very easy lever to pull and if all the platforms did it, I think it would improve the conversation immensely.

Beyond that, we have a psychological problem

It’s like the level of outrage, the kinds of things they’ll say and even do while in the imaginary safety of their car, it becomes its own form of mental illness, and there’s something about being behind the keyboard on social media that selects for a similar level of overreaction where they lose sight of the fact that they’re dealing with other human beings who are actually going to read the products of their typing. So it allows the inner maniac to come out in a way that simply wouldn’t come out in conversation with other people, certainly not face-to-face conversations.

Deasy Simanjuntak / Orange Photography

connected life

Harris frequently hosts live podcasts, book clubs, and tours which attract thousands of avid fans, often resulting in sold out venues. His new app Waking Up utilizes guided meditation and a series of lessons to instill mindfulness habits into the everyday lives of its users.

So we have to learn to notice what this deeply unnatural circumstance is pulling out of us and I think we need to remind ourselves that there’s a person on the other side of the thing on which you’re typing and they’re about to read it when you hit send. Making that more vivid does change people’s behavior.

I&T Today: In other words, we need to be mindful of others. How do you think mindfulness connects to ethics?

SH: Well, traditionally in a Buddhist context, the connection is very direct. I think it does go in both directions empirically, it seems, which is to say that living ethically is viewed as a real support for one’s meditation practice. If you’re spending your days lying, cheating, stealing, and killing, you don’t have the kind of life that allows for equanimity and any kind of profound focus.

And so you just need to simplify your life and your relationships and ethics is what does that.

Treating people well naturally causes them to

treat you well, and your practice in that context can draw further energy from your desire to just be a better person in relationships.

What’s the whole point of learning to meditate and be happier? Well, it’s not merely this selfish pursuit; it is a way of dealing with all of the limitations on your well being you discover in relationship to others. It’s an antidote to your pettiness and enviousness and just mediocrity in relationships, even in relationships with the people you claim to love.

So the desire to be a better person is intrinsically an ethical and pro-social one, but then there’s also the fact that the kinds of insights one has in meditation do feed back into one’s behavior in the world in that you become more sensitive to your actual motives in situations and you can become less committed to motives that are antisocial.

You can erode your attachment to yourself through meditation. All of the conventional

selfish motives that would get expressed in the world – your grandiosity, your egocentricity, your arrogance, your grasping at pleasure, and your fear of what’s unpleasant – all of that stuff can get relaxed as well, and that becomes a very durable basis for improving one’s ethics.

I&T Today: Speaking of mindfulness, humans often don’t take a mindful approach to disruptive technologies. We tend to release a technology, realize the issues it’s created, and then figure out how to clean up the mess later. A great example of that, I think, is how speed limits were invented 30 years after cars became popular. Similarly, AI is a huge leap forward, but it can spread worldwide instantly. Is it too powerful of a tool to popularize now and regulate later?

SH: Well, as it gets more and more powerful, I think the regulation has to be in step with the growth and its power. Superhuman intelligence can’t be regulated after the fact. We have to get the cadence of our having conversation about WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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Harris guides a conversation around mindfulness and ethics during a live recording of the Waking Up Podcast in Washington, DC.

the possible downside of what we’re doing to more closely track the curve of innovation and after the fact just doesn’t work when your technology is more powerful than you are.

So at some point we have to get that right. We don’t yet have superhuman AI or even human AI, but what we do have are these narrow AI projects that get regulated or reacted to long after they’re launched, and that’s at some point going to have to flip.

I&T Today: But since AI is in its infancy, as you said, what do you think the AIs that are available today could do if they go unchecked?

SH: Well, I’m not worried about what’s available today spontaneously becoming more powerful than we understand or anticipated. I think we, the people who are doing the work, will one day bring us general intelligence. I think we’re almost certainly aware that they’re doing this work, and it won’t be a matter of some narrow AI suddenly becoming general in its capacity…

I think what has to happen is that the people, the groups that are doing the work that could conceivably bring us general intelligence, they need to have some clear landmarks along their development pathway that would cause them to stop and reflect on where all this is going.

Like what capacity could a computer

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demonstrate in the lab at Google that would force, and should force, Google to call a meeting with everyone else who is doing this work, all their competitors, and in a moment of transparency say, “Okay, this is what we just achieved. We need to think about the implications and what can go wrong if we flip this switch.”

And I don’t know, frankly, if that’s top of mind for anyone to do at this point. I think what we more likely have is an arms race where people are just trying to advance the technology as quickly as possible before anyone else advances it more quickly than they do, and that’s obviously not incentivizing any kind of truly cautious path forward.

and celebrated, and I think we really do want AI to solve these problems for us. Self driving cars is perhaps the most obvious example, and that’s just a fact that people are bad at driving cars.

We’ve been bad ever since we started driving cars. We’ve looked like we’re going to be bad forever and the moment robots are better than we are, we should be letting the robots drive, and that’s just because it should be intolerable to us that, year after year in the United States, tens of thousand of people are dying despite the fact that we’re making our best efforts not to kill one another while driving.

I&T Today: People often conjure up doomsday scenarios when thinking about AI, but it’s already doing some good. What are some of the most important challenges you think we should be using AI to solve?

There are many cases of that sort of thing. I think if you look at the prevalence of medical errors, people get the wrong drugs in hospitals because of doctor or nursing errors. Anyway we can use automation or AI to prevent the predictable errors of the inattention of apes like ourselves, that’s just something we should do and we shouldn’t be sentimental about replacing that human labor with automation because real lives hang in the balance. It’s just something like a hundred thousand people die every year from hospital errors. Any way in which AI could solve for that is something we want. ■

SH: Well, I think there are some isolated cases which have been much talked about

For the full interview, visit innotechtoday.com/samharris-interview.

People at this point just don’t see any real need to worry about caution because we seem so far away from any of these potentially scary breakthroughs, but we really have no idea how long it will take us to make breakthroughs that fundamentally change the game.

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Automating Agriculture iStockphoto.com/saverio blasi

By Robert Alexander

Arguably, the most vital science known to civilization is that of agriculture. Even at its most primitive stages, society could not exist without a source of food for those in it. Likewise, cultures with the most accessibility to food historically tend to be the most prosperous.

Given this plight, farming has always been a key area for the focus of scientific advancement, from Roman aqueducts to horse-driven plows.

The high-tech 21st century is no exception, and moreover poses an unparalleled need for agricultural innovation. With a global population of 7.5 billion people and rising, the farming industry must modernize not only to provide sustenance on such a scale, but also to do so economically. Opportunely, various means of improving the farming system are on the rise, most conforming to a field typically referred to as automated agriculture. Automated agriculture encompasses a hybrid of computer automation, robotics, and the traditional agrarian lifestyle, with the aspiration of increasing food availability while decreasing the cost of production.

The exact origins of automated agriculture are debatable, as some remotely controlled farming

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systems, such as automatic sprinklers, have been utilized for generations. The notion of automated agriculture as a standalone enterprise nonetheless began when manufacturing legend John Deere publicly released its AutoTrac tractor guidance system in 2002, the first commercially available GPS setup of its kind.

This rudimentary system allowed for the automated planting and harvesting of fields based on predefined coordinate paths, though still required some manual command from a driver, and was scarcely as precise as desired. In spite of its imperfections, the AutoTrac was a massive success and would go on to refine its ability to operate a tractor with little to no human control. Through the AutoTrac, Deere had begun popularizing the craft of precision agriculture (or precision ag), a term first coined to encompass the fusion of information technology and agriculture. In the years following, precision ag would grow exponentially, establishing new methods to automate duties that were previously burdensome and time consuming.

Mechanization would eventually become commonplace for irrigation, soil analysis,

application of nutrients (known as Variable Rate Farming), yield assessment, and countless other tasks critical to farm management. Although the rapid realization of farming mechanization was unquestionably game changing, full-fledged automation had yet to be reached – that is, until the introduction of smart technology. Devices such as iPhones and tablets would finally give farmers a means of operating advanced systems in a convenient, all-in-one format that would at last give birth to true automated agriculture.

The scope of automated agriculture has since gone far beyond its inception of using smart technology to optimize machinery. Rather, it’s now seeking to turn machinery itself into smart technology. At the forefront of this mission is the ongoing development of what is possibly automated agriculture’s most ambitious project yet: the autonomous tractor. A member of the up-and-coming family of autonomous vehicles, these tractors could further revolutionize the trade by removing the need for manual tractor operation in its entirety. The usual big names such as John Deere and Case IH are particularly invested in this idea, delivering promises in recent years that fully autonomous tractors are

Advanced IoT farming equipment is changing the way farmers tend their crops. Automated tractors with remote navigation systems allow horticulturalists to tend their fields with minimal effort and maximal results.

on the near horizon. However, despite much promotion, there remains no sign of industry leaders releasing robotic tractors any time soon.

This of course does not imply that autonomous tractors are completely out of reach, in large part due to the budding agricultural company Smart Ag and their flagship product AutoCart.

Debuted at the 2018 Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa, AutoCart intends to deliver the first fully functioning autonomous tractor technology to the consumer market. AutoCart is not a tractor in itself, but rather a system to modify preexisting equipment for complete automation. The mean unit price is set at $37,500, and those who placed the first available pre-orders in late 2018 should expect to receive theirs by the spring of 2019. As idealistic as the autonomous tractor may be, the concept has yet to face the ultimate test of what leverage it currently has to offer to the average farmer, leaving the future of the driverless tractor currently unclear.

Traditional farms, while having been responsible for devising automated agriculture, are not alone in enjoying the rewards of such innovations: in an ironic turn of events,

automated agriculture would become responsible for enabling the rapid growth of indoor farming. Indoor farming, as its name implies, involves agricultural production in an indoor, and often urban, environment. As farmlands far and wide reaped the benefits of precision agriculture, and eventually automated agriculture, these same technologies were being modified to raise crops in closets, garages, and warehouses. Predictably, the early days of modern indoor farming were often focused on the marijuana trade; however, it was not long before its larger potential for agricultural advancement was realized. Indoor farms are now producing food at quantities that may have them competing with conventional farms in the near future. Furthermore, the employment of automation gives indoor farming an indispensible advantage in that every component of the process can be automated, some of which, including light exposure and climate, are fundamentally uncontrollable in an outdoor setting. With such prospects for growth and sustainability, regardless of evolving outdoor equipment such as autonomous tractors, the automated future of agriculture

could very well be enclosed in walls rather than sprawling across plains.

Farming is an ancient industry, one that has undergone innumerable changes for millennia, always in the interest in allowing for food to become more abundant and affordable. These adaptations and innovations are undeniably always tied to the steady progression of humankind and how it chooses to organize itself. Much like how breakthroughs during the industrial revolution allowed for the development of the plow, it seems that the computer era has found its analogue in automated agriculture. Farms are becoming more efficient thanks to automated technologies like robotics and GPS, enabling substantial quantities of crops to be produced at unprecedentedly decreased costs and labor.

Amidst these current renovations are the looming future of automated agriculture: the inevitability of autonomous tractors and largescale indoor farms. While the total supply of food on Earth remains relatively limited, the debut of automated agriculture indicates a great deal of both advancement and hope in the future of food production. â– WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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How Fybr is Turning the Key

By Anthony Elio

iStockphoto.com/matejmo

Providing modern data and algorithms to provide solutions for everything from smart city transportation and lighting to agricultural and energy management, Fybr has created a platform for our connected world. We spoke with CEO Bob Glatz and Chief Engineering Officer Bret Beringer about the solutions provided by the company, how they deal with cybersecurity threats, and interesting ways the platform can be utilized.

Innovation & Tech Today: Tell me about one of the turnkey solutions provided by the Fybr platform.

Bob Glatz: Well, parking is certainly the most mature turnkey solution that we’ve developed.

We have a world-class parking sensor, we have the end-to-end IoT network, and we have data analytics, so we can provide a city with custom analysis of big data. We also provide the apps that give turn-by-turn directions to an available parking place and directed enforcement.

We’re in discussion with manufacturers about uploading available parking information into cars so that drivers can see the information on their heads-up display. They can also see augmented reality information, where we can display a sign, using the vehicle’s heads-up display, that shows there are three parking spaces if you turn right, two if you turn left, and none if you go straight, which can help the guidance process significantly.

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Being a complete end-of-day solution, it allows us the unique opportunity to be able to manage that security all the way through. So, we basically have a secured master set of keys that never gets exposed.

I&T Today: What type of sector, perhaps in the sustainability realm, can benefit the most from Fybr?

I&T Today: How does Fybr keep up with the current state of cybersecurity?

BG: We’ve debated that internally. We’re doing pilot projects right now with organizations that consume significant amounts of energy. These companies want to better understand the energy they use in real time so that they can more effectively manage process inputs. The information exists within and around the plant, but management has no easy and/or economical way to collect, report, and analyze it.

Bret Beringer: One of the things that we’re doing is AES-128 encryption on all the data that goes through our system. And so, we’re basically using a DES-approved encryption algorithm, and one of the most important things with that is the security of the keys themselves.

And so, we can connect valves, meters, and/or sensors to a FybrLynk, and literally extract information from the process in real time. With real-time visibility into energy flows, management can make critical adjustments that save energy costs and improves processes.

INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

(Top) Bret Beringer, (Bottom) Bob Glatz

We also extract real-time, block-by-block air quality data for cities that allows residents to plan a run or their walk to the office on a route with the best air quality at any given time. As we’ve captured this data, we’ve been surprised by the impact that construction and traffic congestion actually has on air quality. ■

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BenjiLock – Eliminating the fear of misplacing your keys, BenjiLock is an innovative take on the padlock that can be opened with nothing more than a fingerprint. With a Shark Tank investment from former Innovation & Tech Today cover star Kevin O’Leary, BenjiLock is a product you should definitely keep an eye on. Price TBA

Mobvoi TicWatch Pro – Utilizing specialized Layered Display technology, the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro provides users with the best of both worlds. Choose between Smart Mode for Google Play app capability or Essential Mode to check dates and times as well as simple health statistics while conserving the device’s battery life. $249

MyCharge UnPlugged 10K – While smartphones can do an incredible amount of activities, saving battery isn’t always standard. Able to increase the battery life of a Qienabled phone on the go, the MyCharge UnPlugged 10K portable charger can use up to 10 watts of power, meeting the “fast charging” standard for Samsung and Apple. $69

Gryphon Mesh Security Router – With all the time children and adults spend online, it’s more vital than ever to keep information safe and avoid harmful content. Featuring content filtering, safe search, and malware and intrusion defense, the Gryphon Mesh Security Router will keep the whole family safe from online dangers. $219

ChargeHub X5 Elite – Compatible with mobile devices, gaming systems, and laptops alike, the ChargeHub X5 Elite can quickly charge up to six devices at once, including wireless. Whether you keep it in your boardroom or your bedroom, this innovative device will get your battery life back to 100 percent. $79

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The Proof is in the Portfolio Exploring Mark Cuban’s Impressive and Diverse Portfolio, and How He Built It

By Alex Moersen

Photo ABC/Patrick Ecclesine

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“An entrepreneur who is a learner, is capable of selling, and has a product or service that has a unique and defensible proposition. The best ones make me wonder why I didn’t think of it.” This is what Mark Cuban looks for in a company before he invests. It would be wise to take note from Shark Tank’s most prolific investor, whose portfolio is as dense as it is diverse. Following a discussion with Cuban about the world of investing, we take a look at some of the industries he’s invested in, as well as his formula for success as he looks toward the future.

Merging the Worlds of Sports and Technology Esports is on the rise and Cuban is one of the many investors paying attention. While the owner of the Dallas Mavericks has yet to become an owner of an esports team, he still has investments related to the growing sport. Cuban reportedly invested $7 million into the startup Unikrn, a cryptocurrencybased esports betting platform. “I think it is very important to put aside the United

States,” he told Innovation & Tech Today.

“Gambling is legal in more than 100 countries. As esports grow, Unikrn will grow even faster.”

However, Cuban might be even more bullish on sports betting than he lets on.

When the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), allowing individual states to legalize sports gambling, Cuban expressed excitement. “It doubled the value of the professional sports franchises in a second,” he told ESPN. “It will increase interest, it will add to what happens in our arena and in stadiums. It will increase the viewership for our biggest customers online and on TV. It helps traditional television because it’s much lower latency, whereas online, because of cachet, it’s much higher latency.”

This positive insight on sports betting would inform his investment in Unikrn.

Said company brings another exciting intersection to the conversation: sports and cryptocurrency. Prior to the 2018-2019 season start, Cuban announced that fans

Photo ABC/Bob D’Amico

Pictured left to right: Shark Tank Hosts Lori Greiner, Mark Cuban, Daymond John, Barbara Corcoran, Robert Herjavec, and Kevin O’Leary.

would be able to purchase tickets to Dallas Mavericks games with cryptocurrency, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum. Investments and decisions like these have earned Cuban the title of “one of sports’ most technologically savvy and forward-thinking owners,” according to Sports Illustrated.

The Vitality of Voice Voice activation, integration, and convenience. With the likes of Amazon and Google continuously moving in these directions, nearly all consumer electronics are working to incorporate these aspects into their products. Artificial intelligence is nearly always at the forefront of the tech world and 2018 has seen a number of innovations in a variety of spaces.

Cuban shared with Innovation & Tech Today which up-and-coming technologies he was most excited about: “AI, robotics, nanotechnology, personalized medicine, and the combinations of all the above.

GPUs and miniaturization have enabled new levels of analysis that are changing the game every day.” At the same time, he WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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expressed the absolute vitality of voice technology. “Voice activation will change consumer electronics … I think any consumer electronic that is not voice or sensor activated will die off over time.”

This thinking would inform his investment in the likes of Amazon, which itself is fully invested in voice technology and integrating its devices. But, his investment in the tech giant doesn’t mean he ignores the smaller companies. In fact, according to Cuban, his strategy at the Consumer Electronics Show involves paying close attention to the startups: “I walk around the outside aisles looking at the small companies from around the world. The ones that just have a table usually offer the most interesting tech.”

Entertaining the Future However prolific Cuban has become, he has always stayed somewhat connected to his entrepreneurial roots. He first came on the map when he sold Broadcast.com, his first venture in partnership with Todd Wagner, to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999. Since then, Cuban has continued to work in visual media and with Wagner.

Following the sale of Broadcast.com, Cuban bought Landmark Theatres, a chain of 58 movie theaters across the U.S. With Wagner, he also founded 2929 Entertainment, a media company that provides vertically integrated production and distribution for films and video. On top of that, Cuban was also the cofounder of AXS TV, the first high-definition satellite television network.

Earlier this year Cuban himself claimed that the Netflix stock was one of his biggest holdings, right beside Amazon. Both companies obviously are playing a major role in the future of entertainment, streaming, and how people experience TV and movies. He currently owns the film distribution company Magnolia Pictures, which has distributed a number of popular indie films and documentaries.

Advice for Up-and-Comers As an entrepreneurial and investment veteran, Cuban has seen many sides of many industries. He himself has experienced many successes and has witnessed many failures. As an experienced investor, he knows when a product has actual promise, versus when it’s just over-hyped: “The more they talk about PR buzz and who their investors are, the greater chance they are covering up for a lessthan-stellar product.”

Photo ABC/Patrick Ecclesine

On the investing side, he explained some of the most common mistakes he sees. “They overvalue current financials and undervalue where the company can go,” he explained to Innovation & Tech Today. “That’s the biggest difference between the other Sharks and me. I try to see the future. They look at the past.”

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It’s this forward-thinking mindset that has allowed Cuban to garner so much success, and it likely informs his consistent interest in the tech space. When it comes to blooming entrepreneurs, Cuban advises, “Know your business and industry better than anyone else and realize that you have to always be learning, selling, grinding, and helping. These create the foundation of every good business.” However, at the end of the day, Cuban claimed that there was just one common (and fairly simple) thread that linked all successful startups: “They love solving problems and making people’s lives better in some way.” Perhaps that sums up Cuban’s formula for success: a bit of forward-thinking, a dash of knowledge, a pinch of altruism, and, of course, the perseverance and fervor to put it all together. ■

iStockphoto.com/gremlin

A New Frontier in Cannabis Reporting How one woman’s vision is bringing data-driven solutions to a global market.

By Patricia Miller The legal cannabis industry is rapidly expanding across the U.S. In fact, it generated more than $8 billion in 2017 and is expected to surpass $23 billion by 2025, according to a 2018 industry report. This is critical information for investors, operators, and policymakers involved in the sector. Further, it’s information that is only available thanks to the rigorous studies conducted and compiled by New Frontier Data (NFD), an independent, technology-driven analytics company.

In part, NFD owes its success to its forwardthinking founder and CEO Giadha Aguirre de Carcer. She created NFD to provide unbiased, vetted, actionable intelligence to those operating, researching, or investing in the cannabis industry. Her leadership and vision have propelled her company into a global powerhouse, and their work will only increase in relevance as more markets enter the legal cannabis space. We had the opportunity to speak with de Carcer at the Cannabis World Congress & Business Exposition, where she revealed what’s next for the ground-breaking company.

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Innovation & Tech Today: How does New Frontier Data use technology to elevate the discussion around cannabis?

Giadha Aguirre de Carcer: We provide data analytics and high-level, actionable intelligence.

In order to do that, we had to create a massive technological infrastructure. The data in the industry remains fragmented and disjointed due to regulation, and now that we cover not only the United States but the globe, we needed to adapt and technology is the solution for that.

Information flow and the speed of information flow will be critical to continue to see a more cohesive evolution of the industry in North America, where it started, but also across other regions such as Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and even Africa.

I&T Today: What are some unique challenges cannabis companies are facing in regard to raising capital?

GC: Transparency. There are still those, especially in the mature financial space, who question what the plant’s future will really be

and the socioeconomic impact of the plant. We have a very narrow pool of investment sources and the more we adopt sophisticated reporting practices and embrace the need for transparency in all things in our businesses, then we are more likely to continue to attract those mature investors that will help us continue to operate in this wonderful space.

I&T Today: What’s next for New Frontier Data?

GC: Global expansion. We are going to begin by establishing ourselves in Europe – we are covering all countries legalizing across the European Union. Followed very closely by our presence in Latin America, we’ll soon be in Panama as of February 2019. We also went to Sydney and Hong Kong this October, where we are beginning to have mature discussions around, not only cannabis and CBD production, but hemp’s advanced industrial applications, with some serious stakeholders across the region. So again, global expansion. ■ For the full interview, check out the winter issue of Cannabis & Tech Today.

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blockchaintoday

Bringing Women to the World of Cryptocurrency

By Patricia Miller

Cryptocurrency is often viewed as a man’s world.

Only eight percent of crypto investors are women and fewer than seven percent of people working in the space are female. Maria Prusakova hopes to change that trend and encourage more women to invest, to learn, and to take part in the world of crypto-finance.

A former Olympic snowboarder turned crypto advisor, Prusakova has never shirked from a challenge.

She went straight from snowboarding at an Olympic level to studying law and finance. Her time working in wealth management for some of Switzerland’s most elite private banks opened her eyes to the value of cryptocurrency, particularly for large cash transfers. It was then that Prusakova started her work in PR for blockchain and crypto startups. The experience helped her co-found the first all-female founded advisory firm in the space, Crypto PR Lab and Advisory. We spoke with Prusakova to discover how she’s working to make crypto an equal opportunity industry.

Innovation & Tech Today: How are you working to bring more women into the cryptocurrency space?

Maria Prusakova: Cryptocurrency, it all started male and white. These were all the miners, the cyber banks, the Silk Road people who started crypto, and they were all basically cryptographers and blockchain developers.

Initially, in this industry, the women were not that advanced with coding and cryptography, especially 10 years ago. So all the men who started the crypto movements, such as Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Satoshi Nakamoto, or Roger Ver, tended to hire men and enroll more men in this community. Given that men started it, they continued it.

Another reason is that fewer women invest in crypto, given that they are perceived by society as more risk averse. Women might invest in bonds or put money in their savings accounts, but they’re not that interested in taking big risks, while men invest in equities, in derivatives, auctions, and more high-risk products.

Because cryptocurrencies are exceptionally volatile and

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“ The more educational initiative you have, the more the general public will get involved, and more women and girls will get interested in participating in the cryptocurrency industry.”

blockchaintoday

Co-Founders of Crypto PR Lab Maria Prusakova (Left) and Alexandra Karpova (Right) share the honor of launching the world’s first female-founded cryptoadvisory firm. The duo frequently speak at cryptocurrency events, offering advice and consultations to some of the industry’s biggest players.

risky, women tend to invest less. Another reason is that the developers, the coders, and the IT people are mostly men.

So, how do we solve this problem, and how do we engage more women to work in crypto?

There is an organization, Code.org, which encourages people to learn computer science and promotes computer science in high schools; there are a lot of women involved. Girls Who Code is another community which encourages women to learn computer science.

There is also a community called Crypto Queens. There are almost 3,000 people in this community on Telegram and on Facebook.

They try to unite women and make them more interested in supporting each other, being part of the community, and getting interested in cryptocurrencies.

One of the solutions is to build those femalefocused communities and also encourage people to talk more about successful women in crypto. Very often when you read about successful crypto people, the interviews are with men. Why don’t they find women founders of startups? Even if they’re not in leadership roles, but product management or marketing, interview them, write articles about them. Once you put more women out there in the press, then other women will read about them and say,

“Oh, there’s an interview with a woman. She could learn cryptocurrencies. She’s now an investor. She made five times her return. That’s amazing. She can do it, I can do it.”

So you need to build more role models. You should write about them, create more exposure about women working in crypto. There should be more workshops to educate the population on crypto, and also master degrees in blockchain. For instance, Colorado had a senate bill recently which encouraged colleges to insert blockchain into the curriculum. The more educational initiative you have, the more the general public will get involved, and more women and girls will get interested in participating in the cryptocurrency industry.

I&T Today: What advice would you offer women who are looking to get involved in the industry?

MP: I would give three pieces of advice. First of all, you shouldn’t be scared. If there are only men and you think it’s not a place for you, don’t be scared of it. Still go for it, get interested, educate yourself, and read about blockchain.

Second of all, you need to join the Telegram communities of women in crypto and blockchain in general. And third of all, you need to find your strongest skills, your expertise, and apply this expertise to the blockchain.

Regarding the first point, reading about crypto: go on Cointelegraph, BTCManager, and CoinDesk. Read as much as you can. Just Google things. “What is blockchain?” “What are smart contracts?” “How to invest in crypto.” “What’s the difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin?”

Watch tutorials, read about it, and get really interested and enthusiastic. Also, get your friends so you can learn together.

Then, second of all, there are so many communities on Telegram which are especially dedicated to women. They can range from 100 members to communities of 3,000 members where women help other women and talk about blockchain, place job opportunities, and post interesting articles.

Then, the third point: what is your expertise?

Is it marketing, business development, finance, or maybe you’re a lawyer just like me? How can you apply it to blockchain? If you’re a people person, become a community manager for a blockchain company. If you like finances, there are so many crypto funds these days and they all look for people who are interested in sourcing good startups. There are also crypto traders, which is a really popular profession if you’re into finance. Or, if you’re a lawyer, you can be one of the first people to get into this niche industry as a blockchain lawyer. ■

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The Importance of Edutainment

Dr. Darryl Lee Baynes discusses the vitality of making education enticing for the next generation

By Anthony Elio

Innovation & Tech Today: Tell me a bit about Interactive Science Programs.

Dr. Darryl Lee Baynes: ISP is a division of the Minority Aviation Education Association, which is an organization my wife and I started in 1992 to get more kids interested in aviation and aviation-related careers. Then we expanded it.

We expanded not just aviation, but we expanded to all the sciences. So we changed the name to Interactive Science Programs, which is more descriptive.

I&T Today: While you’ve been successful in your career at combining education and entertainment, “edutainment” isn’t always successful. Why do you believe that is?

DLB: For one, it’s how it’s put together. I don’t dumb things down for the kids. The content is just as strong as any other presentation, it’s just that I explain it a little different. And I meet the kids where they are. So a cryogenics program I do for elementary is different than a cryogenics program I do for middle school, which is different than a cryogenics program we do for high school, which is different than one I do for college. The slides might be the same, or I’ll skip some and focus on something different, depending on the grades, but the presentation is different because the expectations of what they should know should be different. I can use

Baynes is known for his thrilling “edutainment” presentations, where he combines theatricality with science to keep students young and old on the edge of their seats.

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the same slides because they explain the same thing.

I&T Today: If you were to encounter a student who was really struggling to get into STEM education, what advice would you give them?

DLB: I’d talk to them about what they do every day. For example, everybody has ice cubes in their house. But if you go to a wedding, and you see an ice sculpture, the ice is crystal clear.

Well, how did they make crystal clear ice? When

George Tolbert

To Dr. Darryl Lee Baynes, education is much more than just repeating information from a book. It’s about telling a story. This is best seen in his live performances, which will commonly flow between interesting stories, facts, and even live (and often explosive) scientific experiments.

President and Founder of Interactive Science Programs (ISP), Dr. Baynes has spread his focus to numerous events, such as the USA Science & Engineering Festival. We had the opportunity to discuss the future of STEM education with Dr. Baynes in this exclusive interview.

PRODUCED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

“ I think it’s a mistake to chase test results …

Teach your kids how to think,

George Tolbert

and they can answer any question on any test.”

you make ice it’s never crystal clear. So what I do is, we’ll buy ice cube trays. We’ll give ice cube trays to the kids, that way everybody has the exact same one. And I tell them that in order to make ice cubes that are crystal clear, you boil the water and let it cool down. Then I tell them to take it home, make some ice cubes, put them in a Ziploc, and bring them back in. So they’re going to take it home, they’ll make the ice cubes at night, and we’ll let it stay a whole day. Then we’ll count how many of what they started with came out crystal clear. Notice, I didn’t tell them how many times to boil the water and let it cool down. That way, we’re going to get variability.

Some will boil it once or twice. Some will not boil it at all. Some, the really invested ones, will boil it ten, fifteen times.

So then, when you get your results, you make a graph. How many times did you boil? How many things did you see? See if you can get a

correlation that you get more clear the more you boil. That is a simple, simple experiment that takes observation, that takes time. And then you can make mathematical data out of it when you’re done.

I think it’s a mistake to chase test results.

There are school districts who pre-test their kids, who practice-test their kids, so they can do well on this one test. It’s ridiculous. Teach your kids how to think, and they can answer any question on any test.

I&T Today: That’s a really important lesson to teach, especially for this next generation.

DLB: One of the things I like doing is working with charter schools because charter schools are a little bit more independent. They can do whatever they want. So they don’t have to follow the state-mandated, “you have to teach this way, you have to teach that way.” You know what I

mean? One of the things that I’m noticing is that schools, especially when it comes to science and math, because they don’t have as many science and math teachers that know what they’re doing, they tell them to teach a certain way. They’re taking the creativity out of being a teacher. The teachers are not being teachers. They’re being robots. And if you don’t like the way you’re teaching your kids, there’s nothing you can do about it, because it has to be taught this way because that’s what the school district says.

I&T Today: What do you most want people to take away from your presentations?

DLB: That science can be fun and it can be taught in a fun way. If teachers can teach in a fun way, then there’s less prevalence of teachers getting burned out. ■ Dr. Darryl Lee Baynes can be contacted for school presentations at interactivescienceprograms.org WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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Telling the Full Story The Impact of Digital Badge Credentialing on Student Opportunity

By Dylan Rodgers Achievement badges are everywhere. If you’re not familiar with this term, just watch your son or daughter (or the person in front of you at the checkout) while they play a game on their smartphones.

Give it a few minutes and you’re likely to see their faces light up with genuine excitement after being awarded a “Tasty Explosion” in Candy Crush or the “Survivor Specialist” achievement in Fortnite.

Badges aren’t awarded arbitrarily; they’re earned. The “Seriously 4.0” achievement in Gears of War 4 requires players to complete a ridiculously long set of tasks – including beating the game on “Insane” difficulty, earning all 141 unique in-game ribbons, etc. But despite the time and dedication required for a seemingly arbitrary digital congratulations, many people are more than willing to try.

It’s this ability to inspire people to put in the time, develop the skills, and, in essence, to learn that encouraged educators to start using achievement badges for learning. But this is probably not news to you, as digital badges have been used in education as early as 2007. That story has already been told.

There is, however, a new chapter, and it’s about how achievement badges are bridging the gap between K-12 students, colleges, and businesses to unlock opportunities for kids who may not otherwise see them.

Building Bridges Between Students and Their Futures Let’s be honest, the U.S. is in an education crisis. While there are far too many challenges facing our school systems today to discuss in this article, two of the biggest that are relevant here are student engagement and college and career readiness.

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Young scientists at Aurora Public Schools in Aurora, Colorado earn digital badges for building skills in careerrelevant fields.

In K-12, student engagement is the holy grail of learning. When students are engaged, they’re more likely to learn, to retain information, and to be motivated, among other benefits. But engaging students in the learning process requires teachers to have high technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge, as well as the ability to convey why the subject is important.

At the college level, just 32 percent of students at four-year colleges earn their bachelor’s degree within six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And only 40 percent of those who do graduate, according to a 2018 study by Bloomberg Next, have the soft skills they need to be successful in the business world.

Aurora Public Schools (APS) in Aurora, CO may have an answer to these two challenges, and it comes in the form of their digital badge credentialing program.

With the guidance of the Director of College and Career Success Dr. Dackri Davis, the Digital Badge Teaching Partner Amanda Fuller, and Education Trainer Noah Geisel, APS has built an academic highway for preparing students for the world and placing them at participating colleges and jobs.

How did they do it? “You have to have a clear vision,” explained Fuller. “The first thing that you need to do is figure out, ‘Why am I doing this? What am I doing this for?’ Rico Munn, who’s the superintendent of our district, once

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Students at Aurora Public Schools earn digital badges for their active engagement in career-building activities. STEM-based learning programs encourage students to consider career paths they may never have explored otherwise.

said when presenting about badges that every time you think about how cool or innovative it is, stop. Stop at that point and think about how it can impact and change lives.”

name,” continued Voigt. “These badges are owned by the individual who earned them, and can be organized in whatever manner works best for the end-user.”

With this in mind, APS started with their desired outcomes. The goals were to better engage and motivate students, get them college and career ready, and create more opportunities for students after graduation. They then compiled a list of core skills colleges and employers consider to be critical to success.

Then they designed a digital badging program around those skills.

But this is only if the employer recognizes the value of the badges students are earning.

APS chose badges for two reasons. The first is digital badges are known to increase student engagement, motivation, and persistence.

Beyond that, badges help tie what’s being learned to real skills that students recognize are relevant to their lives.

The second reason APS chose to use badges is that they give teachers and students the ability to tell a different story. In most schools, a student’s story generally only consists of transcripts with summative grades and SAT or ACT scores.

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Taking Digital Badges Beyond the Classroom Digital badges are nothing new to education, but this next crucial element to APS’s program is where they separate from the rest of the pack.

APS recognized the need for colleges and employers to buy into their badges as legitimate academic credentials, so they actively courted organizations around the country to endorse the program.

After four years, the list of endorsers spans a wide variety of industries – including law, healthcare, the arts, engineering, automotive repair, and more. Plus, these organizations don’t just endorse the badge program, they play an active role in the mentorship of APS students.

“The transcript as it’s used today is very outdated,” explained Lesley Voigt, associate director at Digital Credentials Institute. “It simply lists a course name and the grade; and must be requested and sometimes paid for to obtain.

By earning “Summit Badges,” or badges at the top of a particular category that require mastery of multiple sub-achievements to unlock, students receive “Career Exploration” experiences with colleges and employers. They get a chance to see what life is like at that organization, meet key decision makers, and may even score an internship.

“Badges allow the employer to actually see the skills that were learned versus a generic class

“The opportunities for career exposure are among the most impactful pieces of this

INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | WINTER 2018

program,” explained Noah Geisel, who helped with design and continues to help with implementation. “One of our first high schoolers to earn a Summit Badge got to go to Universal Mind, a Denver-based UX/UI shop. It was so cool to watch as his mind was blown by this whole career field of User Experience that he had never heard of. A lot of his teachers might not know about UX/UI, but here he was, learning about how it’s a high growth area that pays well to boot.

“At one point,” Geisel continued, “he noticed a book on someone’s desk and our endorsing partner told the young man that he could have the book if he promised to read it. Years from now, this will be one of the things he remembers from his time as an APS student and none of us will be surprised if he goes on to apply for a job at Universal Mind one day … and when he does, he’ll already have a foot in the door because of this experience which is itself only because of his skills for which he earned a digital badge credential.”

APS’s program is just one example of how digital badge credentialing can expand opportunities for students of all ages and backgrounds, allowing them to explore new passions and prepare themselves for careers they might not have previously considered. And that is what education is all about. ■ To learn more about APS Digital Badge Credentialing, visit badge.aurorak12.org.

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Bringing the Classroom to the Console

By Mike Washburn Let’s face it, video games are not going anywhere. But instead of turning away from them, many educators have come to embrace games as another tool they can deploy to engage students and create learning opportunities. The games teachers have typically used in school, though, are increasingly being shunned by students who see through the disguise – these “edu-games” are boring and tend to not have the same quality standards as more commercially available releases.

Students want the same experience with their games at school that they have at home. Thankfully, some educators are catching on and starting to work with real, commercially available games; the ones their students play at home. Here are some amazing games that can be played at home and have great learning opportunities built right in. These games may not typically be played in schools, but the learning opportunities are there regardless.

Want to get your child to do more reading? Try Minecraft!

Minecraft is the most common commercially available game used in schools. In fact, there is an entirely separate branch of Minecraft dedicated to education: “Minecraft: Education Edition.” For years, teachers have used Minecraft to teach. Well before “Minecraft: Education Edition” was released, teachers were using Minecraft to teach an incredible number of topics, including science, geography, music, social studies, and even foreign languages such as Spanish. What is not talked about as much though, outside of a small handful of expert educators using Minecraft, is the learning opportunities surrounding literacy and reading. When students are playing Minecraft and attempting to build something, they are doing research, reading schematics, and following detailed, step-by-step instructions. Current research has shown that students as young as six, when working in Minecraft on complex structures and learning how to construct them, are reading material that is at a significantly higher grade level with little to no trouble, and then translating that reading into their project in the game.

Have a child interested in history? Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is the game for you!

There are a number of educators who will tell you that their career choice was heavily influenced by Civilization as a teen. Every generation of Civilization has a corresponding generation of educators who will tell you how the game instilled in them a passion for learning, and in particular a passion for history. In Civilization, you control a nation from the Stone Age through modern times, charting a path of exploration and scientific discovery while navigating the common tension points humanity has faced along the way such as religion, closed borders, and even weapons proliferation. Along the way, players learn about the great wonders of the world, amazing geographical landmarks, military units and their history and usage, and the traits that made some of history’s greatest leaders great. In addition to the literacy opportunities in Civilization, players will also take deep dives into a number of, what educators call, “21st Century Skills,” such as problem solving, critical thinking, and adaptability.

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Want to teach your child about life, career paths, and personal responsibility? Play a round of The Sims!

It really is amazing how children as young as four or five have played The Sims and just get it. Whether it be on a PC, console, or, more recently, on an iPad, kids have been able to navigate its UI, control its characters, and understand what they are doing with little to no intervention. In The Sims you control a person – a “Sim” – and every aspect of their life. When they eat, sleep, read, and work are all under your control. Players control the job they take and even, generally, how they perform in the role, based on how you control their learning and research. While playing The Sims you have to maintain a number of levels related their well-being such as sleep, hunger, and hygiene. If nothing, The Sims reminds you how complicated life is. Not only that though, The Sims is a fantastic lesson in civics along with reinforcing more of those 21st Century Skills.

Want your child to understand what it means to play and work as a team? Play World of Warcraft and join a guild!

While geared toward older children (13+), there are few better gamesbased learning experiences related to teamwork, cooperation, problem solving, and attention to detail as those found while playing at the top levels in an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game). The most famous of this genre, World of Warcraft, has been seen listed on resumes of former top-performing guild leaders (guilds are communities within the game who work together towards shared goals) seeking to demonstrate their leadership abilities. For some, the effort and time expended in order to be successful in World of Warcraft is akin to a full-time job. What isn’t talked about often when it comes to World of Warcraft and education is the level of reading, comprehension, and communication skills required in order to be successful in the game. While in a top-level dungeon or raid, the amount of visual and audio data that needs to be processed, evaluated, and acted upon, sometimes in a matter of seconds, is staggering.

It is an unmatched learning experience in the processing of information.

Do you have a child with a knack for competitive games?

Don’t stifle it, embrace it with Fortnite! Be passionate about their passions, it may earn them a ticket to college one day!

Think there are no possible learning opportunities in the world’s most talked about game? Think again. Fortnite is part of a genre of games that is taking over hearts of gamers everywhere, called Battle Royale. In Battle Royale games, you compete with other players, sometimes as many as 100, in an ever-decreasing field of play, until there is only one player remaining.

While the learning opportunities in the game directly are similar to some of the others already mentioned, in particular when it comes to those everimportant 21st Century Skills, the real value of playing games such as Fortnite is tapping into the ecosystem of related opportunities. Esports (playing video games competitively) is a massive industry which is growing exponentially. Within that industry there are hundreds of amazing and exciting careers emerging such as: play-by-play announcers, streamers, video and audio producers, team coaches, and all the careers you may think about when it comes to running an esports team, including graphic and web designers. In the not-too-distant future, you will see scholarships being awarded by top universities looking to form their own esports teams. ■ WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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Thinking Inside the [Box]

Eric Hanson

Russell Lee

Case Western Reserve University’s Sears think[box] is more than a makerspace – it’s the epicenter of an entire ecosystem of innovation

Case Western Reserve University’s innovation and entrepreneurship center, the Larry Sears and Sally Zlotnick Sears think[box], is a place to bring ideas to life. From a vaccine carrier to a concrete 3D printer, a portable pulse oximeter for field use to plasma fuel injection systems to make airplane engines more fuel efficient – and everything in between – Sears think[box] provides budding innovators with all the tools they need.

Sears think[box] occupies all seven floors of the Richey Mixon Building on the university’s campus in Cleveland, Ohio, and follows the innovation process from ideation to incubation, providing visitors free and open access to top-ofthe-line prototyping and fabricating equipment, startup support, legal assistance, incubator space, and simply places to meet, brainstorm, and get to know like-minded people.

“We wanted a space where students from the Cleveland Institute of Art would mingle with our engineering and science students, along with law and management students, and community members, because that’s a real-world team,” says Ian Charnas, Sears think[box] director of innovation and technology.

As such, the first floor will be a community space to teach innovation processes and house

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outreach programs. The second floor is dedicated to collaboration and idea generation.

The third floor is home to collections of high-end prototyping tools such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and printed circuit board routers for embedded electronics. The fourth floor offers access to complete woodworking and metalworking shops including waterjet cutting and welding studios. On the fifth floor, project space is provided for student groups and senior projects, such as the Society of Automotive Engineers’ student design team’s competitive offroad vehicle, and the CWRUbotix team’s NASA mining robot.

For projects that harbor commercial potential, the sixth floor houses offices of the law school’s IP Venture Clinic, which provides free, professional advice on intellectual property protection; CWRU LaunchNET, which provides resources for business plan development, fundraising, and other business mentorship; and the university’s Technology Transfer Office, which helps commercialize research breakthroughs. And the seventh floor provides incubator space for burgeoning startups to have office space, support, and mentorship.

Sears think[box] provides support for projects throughout the entire innovation process.

Charnas notes that more than 100 ventures have been developed using the resources of think[box] and CWRU LaunchNet. These ventures have spurred dozens of jobs and patent applications, and have successfully raised more than $12 million of external funding for their startups.

It’s no wonder the Sears think[box] model has built a reputation for successfully encouraging and cultivating innovation. The innovation center has received enthusiastic support from entities such as the Burton D. Morgan Foundation and the Veale Foundation. And the center’s staff receives near-constant requests for consultation and has already worked with more than 200 institutions to develop their own innovation systems, from top-tier research universities to two-year colleges to high schools and Fortune 500 companies – everywhere from Nevada to Akron, India to New Zealand.

“We are trailblazers and many see us as the gold standard on how to set up ecosystems around innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Malcolm Cooke, Sears think[box] executive director. “That’s great feedback to know we have created something really special here.” ■

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Incubating Innovations in Clean Energy Produced in partnership with

How Wells Fargo Foundation and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are fueling tech startups and clean energy with their award-winning incubator Produced in partnership with

By Patricia Miller Set in the idyllic foothills of Golden, Colorado, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has been developing sustainable energy solutions since 1977. The facility itself is a vision of efficiency and innovation, carefully designed to use minimal resources for maximum benefit. Engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists from every discipline scurry between offices and laboratories, refining and perfecting the clean energy technologies of the future.

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It was NREL’s advanced facilities that inspired the birth of Innovation & Tech Today. When Editor-in-Chief Charles Warner toured the facilities nearly a decade ago, he was inspired to share the technological innovations shaping the future. Now, five years after this publication was launched, NREL is continuing to bring groundbreaking technology to the world.

In 2014, NREL paired with Wells Fargo Foundation to create the Innovation Incubator (IN2), a program designed to facilitate sustainable development in the commercial building sector. There is a tremendous need for advancements in clean energy technologies, as building operations are responsible for more than 40 percent of all energy consumption in the U.S. In 2018, the program received Global Green’s Award for Innovation and Sustainability Efforts by embodying both company’s objectives – to build lasting relationships, provide expert guidance, and help work toward a larger environmental mission.

Wells Fargo has a substantial commercial building footprint, with facilities covering more than 90 million square feet across the nation.

They have a vested interest in lowering energy

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costs for these facilities, but their commitment to the program goes beyond furthering their bottom line. Trish Cozart, project manager for the IN2 program, elaborated on what Wells Fargo Foundation brings to the partnership: “They have access to capital. They have investment knowledge and access, and they have a very, very strong commitment to sustainability.”

The Incubator’s main goal is to help clean energy startups make their technologies available for commercial application. Cozart explains, “We can take companies into the Incubator, give them $250,000 worth of technical assistance, and incubate them through the process so they can make strides to get closer to market. That $250,000 is worth far more than any cash infusion because they get access to world-class facilities, they can tap into the minds of brilliant researchers, and they get access to NREL’s network.”

IN2 is an invitation-only program, relying on channel partners to send company referrals.

Applicants are chosen based on technology gaps which will have a large impact on energy and which have been largely ignored by investment communities. These early stage companies are typically in one of three development stages: Tier I (bench scale), Tier II (prototype stage), or Tier III (pre-commercial). Participation in the program often provides enough support to progress a company to the next tier or prepare for commercialization of their product.

The program is now in its fourth round, with five new startups having joined the Incubator in September 2018. Some of the technologies to come out of the Incubator are already being beta

tested at Wells Fargo facilities, such as Whisker Lab’s peel-and-stick energy metering system.

The company’s technology reduces the time and cost for submetering. Their work with NREL helped them evaluate the trade-offs between accuracy and low cost of installation.

Cozart shared how the company was able to test their product: “Whisker Labs went into a Wells Fargo bank branch, where they tested both the cost efficiency as well as the accuracy of the results that came out of a very simple peel-and-stick metering system.” Cozart continued, “In comparison, if you had an electrician come and install the full system, it would cost a lot more, but you might get slightly more accurate data, compared to this very simple installation. They were able to compare

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(Opposite Page) IN2 Program Manager Trish Cozart. (Above) An engineer from Powerflex systems, an IN2 portfolio company, installs an adaptive electric vehicle charging port capable of reducing operating costs by more than 40 percent.

the cost of both of those installations and then take back the results and build a report to show what happened. Actually, from that beta demonstration they were able to adjust their market strategy. They’ve been acquired by Earth Networks now and even spun out as a standalone company.”

Once accepted to the program, the company and researchers at NREL determine a specific problem the company has to overcome in order to move forward with commercialization.

Then they conduct projects over 6 to 18 months to determine energy savings for their markets and create new strategies for achieving their goals. The process already has several proven success stories.

NETenergy, a thermal energy storage company, is another startup that made it to market thanks to IN2’s guidance. COO of NETenergy Mike Pintar detailed the value his company derived from IN2: “The program provided us with expert resources that would have been very difficult for us to acquire on our own. First, to try to convince leading air conditioning resources to come work with a startup would have been difficult. Second, due to their reputation and their status as more of an independent third party, the work they’ve done has been very well received by industry partners. Combined, that’s been very helpful for us in our commercialization strategy and working with industry partners to bring our technology to market.”

The resources to which Pintar refers are often difficult for startups to obtain. In their beginning stages, many tech companies succumb to “the valley of death.” Cozart explains, “The first valley of death they encounter is called the technology valley of death. In that stage, they’re really starting with R&D or a concept. They’re trying to build a prototype but the financial resources or investment aren’t really there yet. To get them through that, they need expertise, they need equipment, and that’s a tough thing to afford. The IN2 program stands in the gap of that technology valley of death and builds a bridge across it.”

While developing their thermal energy storage technology, NETenergy found itself in a valley of death, trying to make their vision a reality but lacking the resources to realize their ambitions.

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(Left) An engineer from Whisker Labs tests their electrical network sensing and software platform at NREL’s facilities. (Bottom left) Wells Fargo’s Vice President of Clean Technology and Innovation Ramsay Huntley.

Clean energy solutions, like NETenergy’s thermal energy storage, can play a key role in the next paradigm of the electric grid. These new technologies won’t just impact the commercial market, they have implications for local communities as well.

They knew their creation could help commercial buildings control costs and balance energy supply and demand, but needed help to take the tech to market. They began applying to a series of competitions, like the Clean Energy Trust Competition, which ultimately led to their recommendation for the IN2 program.

They received their first round of funding and started working with engineers at NREL to refine the technology while working to build interest from leading industry partners and OEMs. NETenergy showed such progress that the IN2 program gave the company a second round of funding to ensure their innovations are adequately developed for commercialization.

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Ramsay Huntley, Wells Fargo’s Vice President of Clean Technology and Innovation, detailed how the Incubator is bringing tech solutions to local markets: “This lab is really focused on how to take technology from a bench in a lab to a commercialization state. What we believe in so much when it comes to working with the lab is rapidly scaling and commercializing these technologies. It’s one of the reasons we’re involved from the perspective of commercializing the technology on a Wells Fargo facility, where it makes sense. That way, it helps accelerate the company through that valley of death, gets them out the other side, and opens up the opportunity for them to receive investment capital, which then can scale them up and bring that technology out to local communities even faster than it might otherwise.”

Huntley offered this example: “One I’m particularly interested in is a channel partner called Next Energy. They’re an incubator in Detroit with a particular focus on bringing

electric transportation technology to low- and moderate-income communities. So we provided a grant to them to work with a group in Silicon Valley on how they might bring technology that’s working today in Silicon Valley into a place like Detroit, with a low- or moderateincome community, and commercialize that technology in a way that’s supportive of the needs of a wide variety of different communities.”

The program is working exceptionally well to shorten the development cycles for new technologies. IN2 companies have already raised more than $83 million from external sources after participation in the program.

Pintar said of the experience, “They have a great team of experts in the air conditioning industry who have helped us to do the research and development and come up with a design to integrate our technology effectively.” Expert advice, connections, support, and technological enhancement all work in tandem to create a dreamscape for startups. Cozart summarized the program succinctly in stating, “For a cleantech startup, the IN2 program is like doubling down on your future and winning. On paper it may look like $250,000, but in reality, it’s a priceless opportunity.” ■

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Suds Meet Sustainability Produced in partnership with

Innovation & Tech Today spoke to Katie Wallace, assistant director of sustainability, and Chris Keogan, senior plant engineer, of New Belgium Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, Colorado to learn how cutting-edge technologies allow them to produce new and innovative products. And, with craft beer heavily dependent on agriculture, we discuss how sustainable practices help drive their company.

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Innovation & Tech Today: How was New Belgium founded with the ideas of sustainable brewing in mind?

Katie Wallace: One of our founders was a social worker and the other was an electrical engineer.

Jeff, the electrical engineer, thought the greatest success is to make something as efficient as possible with the fewest resources. From the time they were in the basement there were a lot of technologies that helped to save energy and water resources. For one example, on the initial brew kettle he had a trash can that captured the steam over the top. Inside of that was a copper coil that had incoming water passing through it and cutting water for the next batch, so it took less energy to boil in the mash tank. This just speaks to the philosophy that New Belgium was founded upon.

Chris Keogan: He had some really cool innovations in that home. Like he had windows that were on actuators and he had shade systems. He also had passive solar as well, which was both heating water and taking energy to the home. He was controlling his usage and he had a net zero home back in 2009. That’s what Katie is saying; he started small but got pretty complicated pretty quickly. We’ve taken that model and brought it to the next level.

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By Zack Pensak

I&T Today: How do Jeff’s personal sustainability principles play a part in both the brewing process and the construction of the entire built structure of New Belgium?

just grow and process the plant. So we are actually quite efficient. And I believe we are one of the only craft breweries that has done that indepth of a water footprint study.

people ask, “What about the methane gas

CK: The fundamental maxim I use is that if you can measure it, you can control it. It’s indicative of the process that we have in the brewery repeated hundreds of times: achieving small things over and over that at the end of the day produces beer. I use a program called ArchestrA to monitor data inputs and outputs.

So if I look at this as a loop that controls temperature, then on my flow meter I’m able to see how much water I used steeping yesterday and how much I have used so far today. So by taking small bits of data, you aggregate information and are pushed into good decision making. Jeff said he wanted this place to be as energy efficient as possible. But I think you will always get your highest energy efficiency when you have your lowest possible loss.

CK: What we’re trying to do is to be as energy efficient and water efficient as possible by being miserable about the amount of beer we lose.

cattle farmer because you’re offsetting the

I&T Today: Do you feel that software like this and different programs that allow you to track data in the system play a large part in your ability to be as efficient as possible?

number of greenhouse gas emissions associated.

I&T Today: What do you consider to be good figures for efficient resource usage?

CK: A good number would be around .98 gallons of water per liter of beer and some really good breweries are less than .92. But that doesn’t take into account all of the water for the life of the raw materials.

KW: We consume an average of 24 gallons of water over the lifetime of a bottle of Fat Tire.

But 98 percent of that is on the barley field to

KW: One thing Chris and his team are doing is looking at all of the systems and saying, “If we build it from the ground up, what would that programming look like?” Right now it seems like what we’re getting towards is a nice mixture of manual attention to detail and animation.

produced by cows?” Greenhouse gas studies that we did a few years ago came back and said the best thing to do with the grain is send it to a greenhouse gas impact of farming virgin ingredients for feed, which can have a high In a perfect world, we don’t have cows eating grain. But in this world we’re offsetting virgin feed that’s being grown.

I&T Today: Does your newer brewery in Asheville, NC have similar sustainability principles as the brewery in Fort Collins?

KW: Definitely. Everything that we learned and excelled at here we implemented in

CK: I think there’s a massive correlation between most automated and most efficient in all cases. It is really, really hard to be super efficient in manual systems. It costs money to automate it, it costs money to have automatic valves, but there are particular studies that say if a certain valve gets moved by hand “X” amount of times, it’s worth automating.

Asheville. Our founders really cared about

I&T Today: How do you dispose of the waste produced by the brewing process?

to implement a number of stormwater

KW: The vast majority of the waste is spent on grain. In Fort Collins we go through about three semi loads of spent grain every 24 hours of brewing. Then we sell it to a cattle farmer. Now,

helped repair the creek, filter the water, and put

urban revitalization and developing on land that’s already been developed in order to bring it back to life. Asheville was a pretty extreme site.

It was a designated “Brownfield” by the EPA. There was an illegal dump and stream underground with old tires and waste running into the river. So we worked with a local group management best practices and bioswales which it back into the river. All in all, we have succeeded with both of our breweries in terms of land revitalization. ■ WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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INNOVATOR of the

YEAR

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Lisa DeLuca

Lisa Seacat DeLuca is on her way to becoming the most prolific inventor in IBM’s history, all before the age of 40.

By Patricia Miller For many inventors, patenting even one original idea is the dream of a lifetime. For Lisa Seacat DeLuca and her 400 patented creations, innovation has become almost routine. Between caring for her four small children, acting as IBM’s Director of Offering Management, and working as IBM’s Distinguished Engineer for Watson Internet of Things, DeLuca has filed over 600 patent applications. Her creativity and ingenuity have culminated in what is, to date, her most enduring accomplishment: her designation as the most prolific female inventor in IBM’s history.

really understand how building normally works and what the anomalies are. That might be one area that a team might get together to brainstorm around, just around IoT in buildings and the use of AI, and then we’ll talk about all the problems that we’re running into with our offering. Then those problems are the opportunity for innovation; we come up with the answer and determine what might be patentable around there.

DeLuca was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2017 after winning numerous awards for topperformance in her field. Whether she was being named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business or earning her title as Working Mother Magazine’s Working Mother of the Year, DeLuca has continued to push the boundaries of accomplishment. We spoke with DeLuca to learn how she makes innovation a daily component of her children’s lives, how she creates, and what inventions she’s working on next.

LD: I can talk about those that have recently been issued. In fact, they have one that just issued on October 16th. It’s called Internet Search Result Intention, and I really like this one because it came out of a solution that I was working on within our Watson Commerce division. The solution was called “Cognitive Search” and the whole idea behind it was that voice and voice interface is changing the way that we’re interacting with our devices and with search engines. Whereas before you might use keyword searches, now you can use your voice.

And by using your voice you typically, instead of using those keywords, you can say a whole sentence like, “Please help me compare an iPhone XR to the new Google Pixel 3.” And if you do that, we can tell based on the words and the comparison between the two products that you’re likely in a research mode. You’re trying to learn more about both the products and the features, whereas if it was just that keyword, you don’t really know what the searcher is looking for.

Innovation & Tech Today: When you’re inventing, what does your creative process look like?

Lisa DeLuca: Inventing is actually not my day job; it’s like a nights and weekends job. But, it has also turned into a mindset where no matter what I’m doing, even if I’m not thinking about coming up with new ideas, I’ll recognize when something might be patentable and it just becomes an opportunity for me to develop inventions outside of whatever it is that I’m working on at the time.

Right now, I’m bringing an IoT solution to market around IoT sensors and using AI to

So the whole idea behind the patent was to understand what that intention was. By understanding it, you can give out information and a confidence score back to the web developer so they can decide how to serve up

IBM/Vivi Zanatta

I&T Today: Can you tell us about some of the inventions you’ve been working on that are currently in development for IBM?

the content. It might be YouTube videos to explain as opposed to the actual products.

I&T Today: How does cognitive computing benefit the average consumer?

LD: At IBM, we call AI augmented intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. I really like that definition because it’s really honing in on what’s good today with AI, and that’s a lot of training on a specific industry, using machine learning to get really good at what it is that particular subset of technology is doing. So when we talk about cognitive computing and adding cognitive computing to the way things work, it’s really just making the jobs of whoever is in that space a little bit easier.

With my IoT building insights example, we’re targeting facilities managers. We’re not by any means replacing their jobs, but instead we’re pulling up some of those insights so they can make those data-driven decisions and have that available in real time in front of them through AI. WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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IBM/Vivi Zanatta

I&T Today: What role do you feel crowdfunding platforms play in the development of new technologies?

LD: I’ve done a couple Kickstarter campaigns.

I love crowdfunding. I think it just opens up the doors for so many people to share their ideas in a way that we never would’ve known how to do before. For me, I had always wanted to write a children’s book. I’d also always wanted to start my own business. So when I found out about Kickstarter, I started researching all the types of projects that were on there, and at the same time I’m researching what it’s like to write and publish your own book, and it’s really expensive.

So I’m like, “Why not raise the money ahead of time through a Kickstarter campaign just to see if there’s interest in it?” It’s almost supply and demand; see how people are going to react to your idea and then together, you bring it to market. You’ve got these people that are really your champions for success. They want to see you bring whatever it is you want to market. I think it’s a really powerful thing. I can’t say enough good things about crowdfunding.

I&T Today: Do you have any one invention that you feel should’ve received a patent, but didn’t?

LD: I can’t believe no one’s ever asked me that.

I don’t know. I would have to go and look and

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see which have not gone through. I’ve filed over 600 patents and, to date, I have over 400 that have been granted. So, I haven’t really been following the ones that haven’t gotten through the process. Maybe that’s part of being prolific, I don’t get upset if one doesn’t make it through.

I&T Today: How did you overcome IBM’s 100 Patent Plateau?

LD: Every four patents makes a plateau within IBM, sometimes it’s less. So I had always set my goal on 100; it just seemed like a good goal to have. I reached out to other IBM-ers and to our IP law department to see how many people had done it. It was only about 14 people when I asked, but this is in the history of the whole company. So I thought that was a really cool milestone to set for myself.

Then when it happened, I kind of expected it to be well-known that I reached my 100th plateau, but since it’s an internal process, no one was really keeping track of the 100. I reached out and said, “Hey, have any other females ever gotten to 100?” And they did some research and got back to me, and sure enough, I was the first one. It was just a really cool feeling to set a goal for myself and have it come through. It feels weird to talk about, like I’m bragging. I hope more women do it. I’m encouraging more women to get up there and challenge me.

I&T Today: How do you bring STEM and awareness of innovation into the lives of your kids?

LD: I think that’s why I really wanted to do the kids book. My first one was called, A Robot Story: Learn to Count to Ten in Binary. It’s all about twin boy robots, and their mom teaches them how to count to 10 in binary. That one I wrote with my kids and tried to get them excited about technology at an early age.

Then I also backed a lot of Kickstarter projects. Speaking of crowdfunding, the Cubetto is really cool. It’s just this little robot that you can program to move straight, left, or right. It makes it very simple for young kids to learn programming.

So, playing those kinds of games with them and just trying to make technology fun, because I don’t want to push it on them. They can’t read yet, so I can’t go too deep into the technology, but at the same time I want them to feel passionate about what I do, too. I use inventing a lot throughout our lives, like, “Oh, you invented something.” It’s a verb that’s become a term they use in their day-to-day. “Mom, look what I invented today.” It’s a really fun way for them to think that they came up with something new, or to start thinking in that mindset, that they hadn’t seen it anywhere before, so it must be an invention. ■

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The Amazing, Animated Spider-Man

By Alex Moersen

All photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

Sony Pictures Animator Josh Beveridge breaks down the responsibility of animating one of the most beloved comic book characters of all time.

Josh Beveridge is no stranger to the world of animation. He’s worked at Sony Pictures Animation for 14 years, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in computer animation from Ringling College. Growing up with a love of comic books and even drawing Spider-Man, the opportunity to work on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was “a total childhood dream come true,” according to the animator. Here, Beveridge details the biggest challenges they faced while animating Spider-Verse, how he collaborates with voice actors, and his favorite scene from the movie.

Innovation & Tech Today: The artwork for this movie seems so unique. What inspired the animation style?

Josh Beveridge: I was given the mission statement to make the most awesome animation that’s ever been made. And, at the same time, I was also told, “Oh, by the way, do everything you’ve ever wanted to do in one

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film, even though it’s never been here before.”

So it was a little like, “Careful what you wish for,” because it was such an amazing challenge and it’s so many things all at once. It’s a really generous movie, and there are so many things that we had to figure out to pull it off.

But everyone rolled up their sleeves and did an amazing job, because we all stacked hands and really love this idea, this aesthetic, this world we’re going to live in. It was a really special moment. We worked and developed, tested, and did other little things for a good year before we felt like we were really onto something … It was a really big learning lesson for me too, that when you’re that nervous about whether or not it’s going to work, in art, you’re probably onto something.

I&T Today: Were there any unique animation challenges that came with this film that you hadn’t experienced with other films you’ve worked on?

JB: Absolutely. We’ve never animated on twos before [Editor’s Note: Animating on twos is when a drawing is shown on screen for two frames]. It’s not exclusively the first movie to do that in CG, but I definitely think it changed our workflow a lot. The biggest thing was getting that to work not only in animation, but then getting that to work for other departments like cloth. There are whole other teams after us that make really beautiful simulations on top of the animation that rely on real-world physics, so we had to work so clean that it would look how we wanted it to look and give them all the information that they needed to do their job. That was building all kinds of little checks, and things like that were a massive hurdle. It took a lot of collaboration between every department in the studio.

Line work was another one. We knew, in order for it to feel like a comic book, there would have to be an element of hand-drawn

lines for the characters. I think that’s one of those things that feels really bespoke. That’s a term we’ve been using a lot. The movie feels like bespoke CG, and that’s because so much of it is really hand-crafted, and line work was a big part of that.

before we even took our first step, pushed our boundaries on absolutely every choice we made.

I&T Today: When you’re animating the characters, do you try and incorporate the voice and mannerisms of the actors?

It’s a world with real stakes, with real drama, with real consequences for action. It’s not, in our animated world, where sometimes I’m going to get hit on the head and it’s just for gags and it’s silly and doesn’t matter. When somebody gets hit, it matters.

I&T Today: Spider-Man might be one of the most beloved comic book characters of all time. Did that responsibility to portray him correctly affect the way you approached this movie?

JB: Oh yes, so much. You research the roles they’ve played and interviews those actors have done, and you try to get into the bones of how those people move when talking.

The more you lean into the honest scenes, the drama, playing those with absolute clarity, the animation rules you just sprinkle in for effect, for design, and to support the scene.

Folks like Mahershala [Ali] and Brian Tyree were such an honor to animate to those voices, and they were great examples of “less is more” performance. It’s stronger with simple, clear clarity. They could just do a little eye dart and the whole tone of the scene would change.

I&T Today: Did you have a favorite scene to animate?

JB: Absolutely. I think his mantra is true. With great power, came great responsibility. We knew that this was going to be a massive project to take on, and we knew that was also a huge responsibility. People care, and we all cared, and a lot of eyes were on this, which is both a rewarding and challenging process. I think that forced us to dig deep and make everything better like it’s never going to be as good as we want it to be, and, knowing that from day one,

I think as much as we were in a really traumatic, graphic, bold action movie, many performances are really grounded by the weight of the voice acting, and that became pretty important for how we would act a character out.

JB: I feel like I walk on the tightrope between two things. If I’m doing my job right, they all feel like that. But then, you also get trained to only see the problems too. So I’m constantly like, “We should have done that.”

But, you know what? My favorite scene is one I can’t talk about. I can’t talk about it without it being a big spoiler… ■ WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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Wearable: Garmin Vívosmart 4 Sleek and Stylish Design // Innovative Sleep Monitoring // Stress Tracking Throughout the Day

Clear Audio Concept – The ideal combination of simple yet highly intuitive design and top-grade sound, the Clear Audio Concept turntable lets you get the most out of your vinyl records. With customizable color and wood options, you can match this sleek record player with the rest of your entertainment center. Starting at

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Altec Lansing Xpedition 8 – Waterproof, dustproof, and utilizing dual 8” woofers, the Altec Lansing Xpedition 8 is tough, loud, and stylish. Bluetooth/NFC pairing with 24 hours of battery life means you’ve got plenty of time and flexibility to blast your favorite tunes. $399

Filegear One Plus – Able to generate more space on your smartphone or computer, the Filergear One Plus helps to consolidate your files into one convenient place. Cloudbased and compact, the One Plus is the ideal organizational tool for modern times. $249

JumpSmart – A power bank, LED flashlight, and vehicular jump starter compatible with a V8 rolled into one, the JumpSmart definitely deserves a spot in your glovebox. Ideal for emergency situations, JumpSmart will ease your worries. $119

Waterfield Air Porter – Designed with travel in mind, the Waterfield Air Porter is the ideal mixture of fashion and function. With a laptop compartment, waterproof zipper, and a flap that adjusts to its fullness, the Air Porter is ready to hit the road. $359

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Sonos Amp – Supercharging the volume of everything from your favorite streaming shows to your music discography, the Sonos Amp is the ideal amplifier for any audiophile. With 125 watts per channel, the Sonos Amp adds an extra punch to your current speaker system, allowing you to enjoy every crisp sound. Sleek in design and powered by the Sonos app, this amplifier is the missing piece in your entertainment center. $599

Moto Z3 – The very first of its kind, the Moto Z3 smartphone can be upgraded to the 5G network with attachments known as “Moto mods.” With available mods to turn the Z3 into a functional photo printer, gaming console, and projector, this is one truly versatile smartphone.

$480 Soundcore Infini Mini – Packing high-quality sound into a compact package, the Soundcore Infini Mini is the ultimate sound bar for your entertainment setup. Utilizing bass port and dual full-range drivers, this sound bar provides deep, powerful sound to your television, turning your home theater into the ideal blockbuster viewing experience. $80

Duplo Steam Train – With app control Audio Technica Direct-Drive Professional Turntable – A perfect blend of classic technology and modern flair, the Audio Technica Direct-Drive Professional Turntable is not your father’s record player. Able to connect to PCs and Macs, this innovative turntable lets you to create audio files from your vinyl records, allowing you to take your favorite classic records on the go. $299

capabilities and plenty of customization possibilities, the Duplo Steam Train is ideal for the curious young toddler. Utilizing five differently colored bricks, young children can experiment by controlling their Steam Train to move backward and forward, adjust the lights, sound the horn, and even stop to refuel. $59

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Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga – Designed with a clever 360-degree hinge, the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga is a flexible laptop for the modern worker. Showcasing a high-quality HDR display and a ThinkPad pen for creative capabilities, this computer definitely deserves a spot in your laptop bag.

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Matador Beast 28 – With a rugged design that is ready for travel, the Matador Beast28 is ready to hit the road.

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RIVA Concert – An innovative smart speaker with built-in Alexa and stereophonic sound, the RIVA Concert is the next evolution in smart speakers. Portable, well-designed, and full of features, this smart speaker is ideal for jamming out in your smart home. $179

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Events

Missing your technology fix between issues of Innovation & Tech Today? We don’t blame you. Luckily, it’s not hard to find a gathering of innovative people in a city near you. Have an event you’d like us to include? Email submit@innotechtoday.com

JANUARY

8-11 CES

Las Vegas, NV

15-17 The 2019 Alexa Conference

17 Green Sports Alliance

Chattanooga, TN

ASU Sports & Sustainability Symposium Tempe, Arizona

22 RE-WORK Women in AI

30-31 Women in Technology International Summit Series

San Francisco, CA

@ ITEXPO, Fort Lauderdale, FL

FEBRUARY MARCH 12 CIO Power Africa Summit 2019 Johannesburg, South Africa

18-20 Super Niche 2019 Nashville, TN

APRIL 23-26 DENT 2019 Santa Fe, NM

25-26 Blockchain Expo Global London, U.K.

You can’t be everywhere and we understand that. If you feel like you’re missing out, stay tuned to our website and social channels for premier event coverage.

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coming next issue

Spring 2019 CES Wrap-Up Once again, our team will be covering all the best reveals at CES 2019, checking out the tech projects, innovative inventions, and dynamic personalities that will be present at the event. Make sure to read our comprehensive wrap-up of the event in our upcoming spring issue and follow our social media accounts to stay up-to-date with all of the videos, interviews, and photos we will be sharing from the event.

Tech Zone: Georgia For this spring’s Tech Zone, we will be taking a look at the Peach State itself, Georgia. The last time we covered a southern state was last summer’s look at Louisiana’s growing tech area, and we could not be more excited to take another trip back to that area.

Our spring feature will show you why the businesses, innovators, and inventions of the Georgia area will make it the southern version of Silicon Valley.

Blockchain Innovations The past year has definitely been an interesting one for blockchain, going from a fairly obscure form of currency to a household name. A lot can happen in a year, and Innovation & Tech Today wants to take a look at how that growth will affect blockchain consumers as well as the future of the platform.

Our spring issue will feature interviews with blockchain professionals, a look at the industry as a whole, and tips for future investors.

Product Revolution Just because the holidays will be over doesn’t mean there aren’t more incredible gadgets on their way!

With everything we will see at CES, there will be no shortage of tech that we can showcase. Whether it’s smartphones, robotics, outdoor gear, or health products, we will keep you updated on the technology that belongs on your shopping list in 2019. iStockphoto.com/raveler1116

WINTER 2018 | INNOVATION & TECH TODAY

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The Lighter Side

How Not to Use Technology

By Matt Cobos

iStockphoto.com/mactrunk

We didn’t have anything with nudity down there, so I just watched MTV because there was some chick in a bikini on. That was more than enough for a curious 15-year-old boy. I was so into it that I didn’t hear someone coming down the stairs. Then, all of the sudden, my dad pops in. There we were, staring at each other in silence, only one of us with pants on. He broke the silence. “You want Chipotle?” “No,” I replied. He went back upstairs and I wanted my 15-year-old life to end. The truth is, I did want Chipotle. I was starving. But I didn’t deserve Chipotle. At least that’s how I felt. I never used my Xbox for cover again. It was just too risky.

We all know the great impact that technology has made on our everyday lives. Being 33 years old, I’ve seen a lot of these changes happen in my lifetime. My favorite of which being when tech brought entertainment to pooping. It’s my favorite! I love it so much I’ll just sit on the toilet with my laptop and/or cell phone ‘til my legs are sore. I’m only actually pooping for the first 5-10 minutes, but I’m having so much fun that I choose to continue sitting there. It’s the highlight of my workday! Hashtag praise up!

But as great as technology is, it’s been a very bumpy road to learn how to use it properly.

I learned real quick not to f*** with technology when I played Oregon Trail for the first time in 2nd grade. Computer Lab was a new class where we would learn how to use computers, mostly by playing games. It was f*****g awesome. At least that’s what I said when I was in 2nd grade. I eagerly started my game, named my characters after myself and my family, then hit the trail. It

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was a blast for about five minutes. Then I watched as my family members died one by one.

There I was, a seven-year-old, watching myself die from dysentery. Instead of leaving excited about computers, I left wondering what the meaning of life is. Just a seven-year-old nihilist wandering the halls in his Batman backpack. I cut back on the Oregon Trail after that. It was too heavy.

When I was in high school, technology turned into an escape. I would sit in my basement all day playing Xbox on a s****y TV we had. It was f*****g awesome. At least that’s what I said when I was in second grade. Unless they were doing laundry, my parents would leave us alone if we were down there. They were just happy that we weren’t out smoking weed yet (we were).

Because they left us alone down there, I knew I could use it for cover. One day I told my parents I was going to play Xbox in the basement, but I had other plans. I wanted to explore my body.

Being 33 now, you’d think I’d know better how to deal with technology, but I continue to let it get me. Just this year, I saw a joke on Facebook that made me wonder if sexy Harry Potter fanfiction was a real thing and, unfortunately for me, it is. I looked it up on my work computer and had to go do something else, but I left the web browser open. While I was gone, a coworker saw it and showed it to people.

Nobody said anything for months. Finally, one of them said that they saw it, and now when anybody asks me about it, it just sounds like I’m scrambling to make up a bad lie so they don’t think I’m into it. Even now, writing this, it’s like, “Why are you even bringing it up? If it bothers you that much, it’s probably true.” FOR THE LAST TIME, I’M NOT INTO HARRY POTTER EROTIC FANFICTION AND MY SCREEN NAME ISN’T HarrysBigCrookedWand420!

As technology continues to develop, I know I’m going to keep making these dumb, embarrassing mistakes that have plagued me from the beginning. It’s just my nature. I’m sure I’ll be getting caught with my pants down by the robot overlords in no time.

My legs are getting sore, so I’m going to get off the toilet. Thanks for reading. ■ Matt Cobos is a Denver-based standup comedian who has performed at events such as the High Plains Music Festival.

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