Nashville Post Techie 2017

SUMMER 2017

BEYOND HEALTH TECH

An alternative approach to backing good ideas

CULTURAL MOVEMENT

Shannon Terry on his next big venture

without a manual

SMARTER

CITY

M e t r o ’ s p us h t o use — a n d s h a re — d ata l i k e ly w i l l c h a n g e how Nashville looks, m o v es a n d g r o w s

IoT education programs prepare for launch

shared

education Inside the city’s booming user group community

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You need IT

Protected.

Secured.

Funded.

We have the IT factor. nashville

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birmingham

austin

memphis

wallerlaw.com

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S: 8”

T E N N ESSEE H E FO AT T

R E F RO N T O F H E A L T H C ARE

S: 9.875”

care in the nation. UnitedHealth Group is honored to be part of that by providing high-quality care to more than one million Tennesseans, and equipping doctors and nurses with data and insights that can help prevent and treat illness. More than 3,000 of us live and work in Tennessee, serving our communities every day. Tennessee doesn’t shy away from tough health care challenges, and neither do we.

UnitedHealthGroup.com/TN

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T: 10.875”

Tennessee is one of the most innovative and modern states for health

OPEN

CONTENTS

29

USEFUL IN MANY WAYs

City’s user groups ecosystem continues growth

39 living lab

Metro’s Robyn Mace turns Music City into smart city

60

CUTTINGEDGE COOL

University researchers deploy technology in pioneering efforts

ERIC ENGLAND

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summer 2017 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

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See what we’ve got cooking in Nashville THIS FALL. Tickets and info available at MUSICCITYFOODWINE.COM

SEPTEMBER 15–17, 2017

Featuring Hugh Acheson Jimmy Bannos Jimmy Bannos Jr. John Besh Matt Bolus Maneet Chauhan Drew Curren Cassidee Dabney Susan Feniger Joseph Lenn Tim Love Marcus Samuelsson Alon Shaya Jonathan Waxman Levon Wallace Tandy Wilson Andrew Zimmern and many more!

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OPEN

CONTENTS

62

passion play

Shannon Terry eyes entertainment news seekers with PopCulture.com

DEPARTMENTS

09 YOU SHOULD KNOW Eric Elmquist fosters local life science culture

18 DATA bank

The tech sector numbers

20 GEEKING OUT

Past Most Powerful Women honorees talk app, gadget faves

10 tHE JOURNEY

24 PROGRESS NEEDED VU panel talks women in STEM

Health care companies tackle cybersecurity regulations

14 smart eyewear

Aaron Salow’s XOEye software is ‘new normal’ for clients

15 DATA LIQUIDITY

Ed Cantwell elevates status of Center for Medical Interoperability

16 THREE QUESTIONS Phil Shmerling on attracting tech capital

4 techie

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59 EARLY EVIDENCE Health care decision support

50 NOT BY ACCIDENT

66 DRIVING MANUFACTURING Knoxville could play key role in

cyber attack hits

Splitsecnd eyes growth after pivot, partnership with German giant

features

FBI agent talks cybercrime

12 THE RULES

48 INTERDISCIPLINARY FIRE DRILL What to do when the inevitable

52 BLOCKCHAIN’S PROMISE, HURDLES

Outlinging the progress, regulatory issues involving emerging platform

26 TALKING TO THE SUITS

54 HIGH-SPEED CHASE

36 [NOT] BY THE BOOKS

56 BRAVE NEW WORLD Human-robot collaboration expert

How to communicate tech value to the C-suite VU, FHS students to learn about IoT without proven educational materials

47 PRIVACY IS DYNAMIC

summer 2017 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Public, private sectors must work in tandem with regs

Nashville drives toward ultrafast internet future

talks automation, AI

58 GET SMART

Off-the-shelf technology returns senior care to the home

software entity starts quickly

next-generation vehicle production

68 A PERFECT FIT Mbody prepped to disrupt the

bra-making industry

69 3D DOUBLE VISION Cheekwood, NovaCopy partner

on restoration plans

close

70 READING CORNER The blockchain standards race 72 THE BIG QUESTION Can we add one more priority to

our tech to-do list?

ERIC ENGLAND

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sPonsored ProFIle

Digital strategy, design, development, and management solutions for the healthcare industry

For more than 10 years, PointClear Solutions has put its technology experience and expertise to work for healthcare providers, payers, medical device manufacturers, and HIT manufacturers vendors worldwide.

From our offices in Nashville, New York, Atlanta, and Birmingham, we create apps and enterprise solutions that help our clients: Speed innovation Expand market share Drive revenue

How can we help you innovate?

www.pointclearsolutions.com

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ComPany ProFIle PointClear Solutions is a leading digital health consulting company that provides enterprise software and mobile and web-based application strategy, design, development, and management services for clients worldwide, including industry powerhouses like McKesson / Change Healthcare, Walgreens, Philips, Nuance, and the CDC.

HealtH It ConsultIng leader PoIntClear solutIons exPands loCal FootPrInt PointClear Solutions, a digital health consulting company that has been a part of the Nashville business community for more than a decade, has officially opened its Nashville Innovation and Development Center.

The new, 12,000-square-foot space in Brentwood Commons III provides the company room to grow and better support its clients, says CEO David Karabinos.

“We’ve expanded our presence in Nashville because of the quality and quantity of tech talent, and the large concentration of healthcare and healthcare IT companies – many of which we’re already working with,” he says. “Our Innovation and Development Center is a place where our talented UI/UX designers, developers, and digital strategists will collaborate daily to create leadingedge solutions to the critical challenges facing healthcare.”

The technology partner of choice for industry powerhouses McKesson/ Change Healthcare, Philips, Nuance, and the CDC, PointClear Solutions also has offices in Atlanta, New York, and Birmingham.

“Healthcare is changing at warp speed – driving patients, providers, payers, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies to demand technology solutions that improve access, understanding, efficiency and outcomes,” Karabinos says. “At PointClear, we are ready to meet these demands, and to help the

companies we serve achieve their clinical, operational, and financial goals. We’ve been doing this for more than a decade and have a long track record of success.”

Karabinos points to the company’s work with Walgreens’ Take Care Health, which engaged PointClear Solutions to expand its web-based patient portal to operate in a mobile environment.

“Our team began by conducting research around the company’s existing patient portal – to better understand how the technology was being used and how it could be improved. Using these findings as our guide, we created a mobile application that supports integrated eligibility verification; real-time appointment scheduling in the EMR; connection to Walgreens’ prescription fulfillment system; and secure messaging. It’s been tremendously successful,” he says.

“It’s tempting to approach technology with a ‘one and done’ mindset, or to partner with an offshore company that promises cheap, easy answers,” Karabinos adds. “But in today’s highly competitive, increasingly complex healthcare space, businesses need a partner that can not only do the building, but also provide thoughtful – and critical – guidance on subjects like digital transformation; UI / UX design; and technology security, interoperability, and scalability. It’s our expertise in these areas that leads nearly 80% of our clients to work with us again and again.”

Website pointclearsolutions.com Phone (470) 223-4370 locations 1000 Health Park Drive, Suite 470 Brentwood, TN 37027 New York, NY Atlanta, GA Birmingham, AL

sPeCIalt I es strategy solutions · Mobile and web application strategy · Product strategy and road mapping · Healthcare privacy and security guidance · Regulatory and standards advice · Technology strategy uI / ux design solutions · User research · Usability testing · Mobile and web interaction design · Clinical workflow analysis and design · User story elicitation and mapping · Visual design development solutions · Android, iOS and web app development · Cloud BaaS · Front end development · Integration and deployment management solutions · Production support · Release management · Development support · Customer implementations/onboarding

5/10/17 2:46 PM

OPEN

EDITOR’S LETTER

editorial

ENDURING ENERGY

We need to send a big thank you to our advisory board members for this issue. Their counsel and guidance were immensely helpful to us as we sorted through a pile of promising story ideas.

C huck Bryant TechFed Nashville Alex C urtis Nashville Technology Council Ann H oward Centresource Steve Proctor Edgenet Paul Shoemaker Dozen Software Nicole Tremblett HCA C orey Todaro Hashed Health John W ark Nashville Software School

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Nashville thrives on its entrepreneurial spirit, on its ability to turn smart ideas into exciting ventures, often through collaboration and the power of a simple “What can I do for you?” The city’s tech leaders have shown the power of that attitude in recent years, spawning and nurturing promising companies while rallying around the need to grow their collective workforce. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard tech execs lament the loss of a key employee but immediately add that they were glad that person moved to another local company. It’s no longer surprising but it is still inspiring.

Also inspiring are the people and institutions working hard to further broaden the definition of technology in Nashville. And the work of our cover subject Robyn Mace and her colleagues to have Metro government better use its data has the potential to change many things for the better.

We hope you enjoy this issue as well as our ongoing online coverage of the region’s tech community and other key industries. Don’t subscribe yet? Less than $100 per year gets you the business, political and sports coverage you need, delivered to your inbox.

Next up in our quarterly magazine stories is Boom, our annual deep dive into Nashville’s real estate and development sectors. We’re pretty sure you have some ideas, insights and opinions about all those cranes, apartment buildings and hotels. Send them our way to give us a little more inspiration...

Geert De Lombaerde, Editor gdelombaerde@nashvillepost.com

Editor Geert De Lombaerde Managing Editor William Williams Contributing Editor Nancy Floyd Contributing Writers David Boclair, Linda Bryant, Peter Chawaga, Stephen Elliott, Cillea Houghton, Caroline Leland

art

Art Director Christie Passarello STAFF Photographers Eric England, Daniel Meigs Contributing Photographer Jen McDonald

production

Production COORDINATOR Matt Bach Graphic Designers Katy Barrett-Alley, Amy Gomoljak, Abbie Leali, Liz Loewenstein, Melanie Mays

publishing

PUBLISHER Jamie McPherson bUSINESS DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANT Jennifer Trsinar ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Maggie Bond, Rachel Dean, Nicole Graham, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Marisa McWilliams, Hilary Parsons, Mike Smith, Stevan Steinhart, Keith Wright Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Account Managers Gary Minnis, Olivia Moye, Annie Smith

marketing

EVENTS DIRECTOR Lynsie Shackelford PROMOTIONS MANAGER Josephine Wood sponsorship specialist Heather Cantrell Mullins

circulation

Subscription Manager Gary Minnis Circulation manager Casey Sanders

SouthComm Chief Executive Officer Chris Ferrell Chief Financial Officer Bob Mahoney Chief Operating Officer Blair Johnson Executive Vice President Mark Bartel Vice President of Production Operations Curt Pordes Vice President of Content/ Communication Patrick Rains Director of Human Resources Becky Turner Creative Director Heather Pierce 210 12th A ve. S., Suite 100 Nashvi lle, T N 37203 www .nashvi llepo st .com Nashville Post is published quarterly by SouthComm.

Advertising deadline for the next issue is Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2017. For advertising and subscription information, call 615-844-9307.

Copyright © 2017 SouthComm, LLC.

summer 2017 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

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PARTNER letter

N

ashville has known many identities over the years – the Athens of the South, the Healthcare Industry Capital and, of course, Music City. As the stories on the following pages show, we might soon need another moniker to reflect Nashville’s growing prominence as a technology center.

Nashville’s tech landscape is varied and vibrant and offers a wide array of solutions, including SaaS, communications, product content management, payment processing and financial technology, event technology, ecommerce, electronic marketing, social media, mobile applications and healthcare information technology, to name just a few. As more companies relocate to Middle Tennessee, tech companies emerge to support them. Nashville’s technology sector also benefits from a growing number of startup accelerators and incubators that provide assistance to new and emerging companies.

Waller has also expanded and adapted to better serve technology companies. We added a well-known team of patent and IP attorneys with experience ranging from wireless devices and semiconductors to medical devices and aerospace applications. We’re active with organizations like The Entrepreneur Center, Jumpstart Foundry and the Tennessee Center for Family Business, and we developed the Waller Fast Track program to provide new and emerging companies with premium services at budget-conscious, fixed costs.

Technology has arrived in Nashville, and it’s here to stay. The catchy nickname will come later. Right now, there’s work to do.

Matt Burnstein

Chairman Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, LLP

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SPONSORED PROFILE

We're a nonprofit.

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COMPANY PROFILE TechBridge is a nonprofit that provides technology and data strategy solutions that build capacity of nonprofits to yield better results and to form communitybased collaboration that drives measurable and sustainable change.

Website techbridge.org Twitter @iamtechbridge

DELIVERING TECHNOLOGY THAT DRIVES COMMUNITY CHANGE Technology solutions that help nonprofits do more good.

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they need to serve more people and do more good.

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We invite you to learn how you can join our sponsorship community and make a meaningful impact.

5/10/17 2:47 PM

YOU SHOULD KNOW

OPEN

w

On his LinkedIn page, Eric Elmquist describes himself as the Kevin Bacon of Nashville life sciences. Now he’s looking to add a little more Mark Cuban to the mix.

Named executive director of BioTN Foundation late last year, Elmquist and organization founder Sam Lynch went public this spring with plans to raise $1 million, a large portion of which will go toward building a local business incubator for life sciences startups.

Elmquist doesn’t have a firm location in mind yet for his incubator and says it could go either in Williamson County or close to Nashville’s core. But he knows the facility will need both plenty of wet lab space — often a daunting budget item for life sciences entrepreneurs just getting going — and programming and other support services along the lines of what downtown’s Nashville Entrepreneur Center has in its arsenal.

Adding business incubation to BioTN’s oeuvre, Elmquist says, is a natural addition to its focus on workforce development. He says there is a gap between promising life sciences intellectual property being produced by Vanderbilt University as well as other area research institutions and the entrepreneurs, advisors and investors needed to turn them into successful businesses.

“I think there are people here who would invest in those companies if the ideas were validated,” he says.

Elmquist, a former scientist at Lynch’s BioMimetic Therapeutics, has had a hand in a number of local life sciences projects and in 2012 co-founded Pendant Biosciences, a drug coating startup recently accepted into a Toronto innovations lab run by Johnson & Johnson. He also was an advisor to OakPoint Real Estate, the local firm that bought the former Cool Springs Life Sciences Center — now Innovation Park — developed by Lynch.

Despite — or maybe because of — Middle Tennessee’s massive health care provider sector, life sciences companies haven’t flourished here. Elmquist sees a chance to change that narrative but knows it on’t be a rocket ride.

“If it was easy, everybody would be doing it,” he says.

“Rallying a community takes time but this can be very complementary to the health care sector that’s already here.”

YOU SHOULD KNOW Eric Elmquist B i o TN Foundation

ERIC ENGLAND

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OPEN

THE JOURNEY

THE JOURNEY Scott Augenbaum

Federal Bureau of Investigation

When Scott Augenbaum became a special agent with the FBI in the mid-1990s, he worked bank robberies, fugitive cases and other crimes commonly associated with the federal law enforcement agency. But as an early adopter of the internet, he became “the computer guy� in the office. As cybercrime grew in sophistication and prominence, that helped Augenbaum rise through the ranks, first to Washington and then to Nashville. He now works in a public-facing education role, teaching organizations and individuals how to avoid ransomware and other cybercrime.

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THE JOURNEY

I started with the FBI in 1988 right out of community college. I was goalless and clueless. I didn’t do very well in college, and I didn’t have an IT background at all.

I was raised by a single parent in New York City, and my mom was looking at this local civil servants newspaper. She came to me and said, “Hey look, the FBI is hiring file clerks” — it was like $5.60 an hour — “and it looks like a good op-

was — I think it was 1997 — I got a telephone call from a small internet service provider in upstate New York that wanted to talk about stolen property being sold over these things called bulletin boards, so I went there and met with this gentleman.

And all I remember was it made me go out and buy a home computer, so in 1997 I went to Gateway and I spent $2,500 on a blazing fast 133 MHz processor with a 40-megabyte hard drive, and I was off to the races.

Windows 95 came along and it made things very easy. It was very plug-andplay. That’s how I really got into computers, and by default I became the internet guy in the office, which really wasn’t the cool, fun, sexy job to have.

We were working bank robberies, fugi-

open

doing was going out and identifying who were our largest potential targets in town that if the bad guys got into it would cause us harm. So I started meeting with different companies and building up the relationships just to get to know the right people in the right industries.

And then all of a sudden, the Target breach in 2013 and 2014 is really what changed everything. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing since then.

If you would ask me to define my job today: I teach people and organizations how not to be the victim of a cybercrime incident. It kind of grew organically and, as a result of that, we’re sharing information with the private sector to try to prevent them from becoming a victim.

We’re able to now collaborate with some of the best and brightest in the private

‘ T h e T a r g e T b r e a c h i n 2 0 1 3 a n d 2 0 1 4 i s r e a l ly whaT changed everyThing. The phone hasn’T s T o p p e d r i n g i n g s i n c e T h e n .’ portunity, and they have a pension and they have health insurance benefits.”

I got the job. I was 20 years old and I remember going out and buying two pairs of slacks, four dress shirts and two ties. I went back to college at night and I got promoted within the FBI to start doing more accounting and financial work, and I started working on an MBA in finance and information technology.

Then an opportunity opens up in 1994 to become a special agent with the FBI, and I wind up in Quantico, Virginia, and I was sent to Syracuse, New York.

So I get to Syracuse and I’m 27 years old, and if you would have asked me what my job was in 1995, I would say it was very easy to describe: There were bad people doing bad things to good people, and my job was to work with state and local law enforcement officers and put bad guys in jail. I worked a lot of white-collar crime, I worked bank robberies, I worked fugitive cases. I worked anything that came through the door.

I really think the turning point for me

tives, drug cases, and there I was tracking down 18-year-olds. I was the only guy in the office who had a home computer back in the day.

So I’m involved and then cybercrime really — in 1998, 1999 — starts to take a sinister turn because people are using credit cards online. There was an old famous bank robber by the name of Willie Sutton. When Willie was arrested, they asked him why did he rob banks and he said, “That’s where the money is.” And now the money went onto the internet.

In 2002, the FBI forms a cyber division at FBI HQ to address this new emerging threat of cybercrime, and in 2003 I took a promotion to FBI HQ to become a supervisor of the cyber division, where I got a taste of things at the national perspective. In 2006, I was promoted to become a supervisory special agent with the FBI Memphis division based in Nashville to start our first cybercrime squad locally in Nashville.

At that time, the phone wasn’t ringing to report cybercrime, so what I ended up

sector so we can share intelligence and we can work together on solutions to these problems and keep people safe.

I’ve dealt with a lot of very large breaches in my day. It’s still very, very painful for me to have to deal with small companies, retirees, nonprofit organizations that become victimized.

But if I can provide education to them, it really helps the community.

In the old days, a success for me was putting someone in jail. Today, my success stories happen when somebody calls me up after I did a presentation and they say they implemented twofactor authentication on their platforms.

If you would’ve told me when I became an FBI agent in 1995 that my job satisfaction would be so much more by going out and speaking than arresting bad guys, I would’ve said, “You’re crazy, that’s not what I want to do.”

I’m eligible to retire at the end of the year. I would love to start a nonprofit that teaches people how not to be the victim of a cybercrime incident.

OUR GOAL IS PROTECTING YOURS

Risk Assurance & Advisory Services Network & Cyber Security Internal Audit IT Audit SOC Engagements Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance HIPAA & HITRUST Compliance Business/Data Analytics

Contact Gina Pruitt (615) 782-4207

gpruitt@kraftcpas.com

kraftcpas.com

daniel meigs

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OPEN

THE RULES

THE RULES Dan Dodson

Fortified Health Security

In the past decade, the health care industry has rapidly digitized, with the implementation of electronic medical records nearing 100 percent across most phases of care.

This has naturally led to more emphasis on the protection of electronic personal health information and an increased focus on the enforcement of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act rules and regulations.

Within the HIPAA compliance world, one of the most buzzed-about topics is cybersecurity, says Dan Dodson, pr�������� of Franklin-based Fortified Health Security. The HIPAA Security Rule is a set of regulations designed to protect the privacy, integrity and availability of an individual’s sensitive health information held (or even just transmitted) by health care companies and those with whom they do business. Like other government regulations, cybersecurity rules and standards are written to provide open for interpretation, which can cause confusion.

But what isn’t open for interpretation: Health care companies must maintain certain administrative, technical and physical safeguards in order to prevent the use or disclosure — whether intentional or not — of protected health information. By completing yearly risk analyses, Dodson says health care organizations can craft corrective action plans, which can lead to risk management programs that address deficiencies and increase overall security over time.

Under HIPAA, health care organizations and their patient health information that are hit by a cyber breach must notify affected individuals, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and, sometimes, the media.

“The regulation recognizes that health care companies range from the smallest provider to the largest, multi-state health plan,” Dodson says. “Therefore, the HIPAA Security Rule is designed to scale and hold health care organizations to a standard based on organizations of similar size and scope. Flexibility and scalability of the rule is intended to allow covered entities to analyze their own needs and implement solutions appropriate for their own environment.”

Costs for a HIPAA violation can range from $100 to $50,000 per patient record. So, Dodson says, it is important that health care organizations either build a sufficient level of security expertise within their ranks or look to outside experts such as his team for guidance in navigating these sometimes-convoluted rules.

ERIC ENGLAND

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SPONSORED PROFILE

COMPANY PROFILE

Implementations

Applications

Integrations Strategy

“V12 Network provides a total management solution for our team. The ability to track the information needed to operate our business and customize it to model our process made an immediate impact.”

- John Supra, VP

Care Coordination Institute

615.800.6768

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VIRSYS12 BRIDGES TECHNOLOGY AND NEED Firm supports clients transforming the business of healthcare The business of healthcare continues to evolve. And Virsys12 is collaborating with clients and healthcare leaders to implement best in class technology for unifying care around the patient, and tracking the journey across the entire continuum of care.

With Virsys12’s focus on healthcare IT innovation, the award-winning Salesforce® Gold Consulting Partner is breaking new ground in how integrated cloud technology is being used to help organizations operate faster and more efficiently, close the gaps in care, and increase engagement across the healthcare continuum—from providers to payers to patients, and everyone in between.

Virsys12’s CEO and Founder Tammy Hawes notes that the transition from volume-based to value-based care is significantly affecting the way healthcare organizations do business.

For most healthcare organizations, transitioning to new payment models represents a significant cultural change. Proactive planning and management are essential, but the right technology will make it possible.

One of the biggest challenges is the wide range of stakeholders and variables involved in this new eco-system, many with differing priorities and objectives. All must work together seamlessly to deliver higher quality care for patients at a lower cost. This is one of the key reasons Virsys12’s clients are moving to Salesforce solutions. As

an all-encompassing “patient success platform,” it eliminates the silos between the many disparate players who are now working seamlessly together to improve outcomes.

According to Scott Hultstrand, Manager of the Quality and Data Integrity Team at Care Coordination Institute, Virsys12’s contribution has been instrumental in their work to help transform Greenville, South Carolina’s MyHealth First Network (MyHFN) to a value-based model.

Together, they have been able to think through their healthcare technology strategy and, more importantly, translate technology into application and ultimately, to patient care.

The combination of the Salesforce Platform, Virsys12’s V12 Network app, and Virsys12’s ongoing consulting work has made a huge impact at MyHFN, Hultstrand emphasizes, and providers and patients alike are feeling the benefits. Physicians are getting the information they need in a timely manner and staying more engaged with important quality measures, resulting in patients getting the attention, care and sense of connection they need to take control of their health.

“Many have been skeptical the transition from volume-based to valuebased care will really happen,” reflects Hawes. “Our clients are showing that not only can it be done, it is already making a difference in people’s lives.”

Virsys12 is an award-winning, certified Salesforce® Gold Consulting Partner focused on healthcare innovation nationwide. With success providing transformative technology solutions for large, small, public and private enterprises, the individually certified team maintains top customer satisfaction ratings and excels in lean business process. We solve your hardest problems by making the complex simple, guaranteeing our work for implementation, integrations, applications and technology strategy.

Virsys12 Four CityPark 278 Franklin Road, Suite 350 Brentwood, TN 37027 Website Virsys12.com Twitter @virsys12 LinkedIn linkedin.com/company/virsys12 Founded 2011

SPECIALTIES Implementations Customized, quick, and on-budget.

Our work is guaranteed with expert training and support.

Integrations Breaking down data silos and compliantly bringing data into Salesforce and out to where you need, including claims and clinical EHR data.

Applications Make processes easier, faster, and more efficient. Deploying our proprietary apps, 3rd party apps from the Appexchange®, or custom-built apps to fit your needs.

Strategy Collaborative high-level, long-range planning for tomorrow’s technology.

CONTACT Email: solutions@virsys12.com Phone: 615.800.6768

5/10/17 2:48 PM

OPEN

TOUCHING BASE

SMART EYEWEAR Aaron Salow sees XOEye software become ‘new normal’ for clients

by William Williams

XOEye has enjoyed significant progress in a mere 12 months.

In 2016, the Nashville-based smart glasses software company targeting the construction and HVAC industries landed nine customer accounts, including “large deployments” in Seattle, New York City and Greensboro, North Carolina, according to Aaron Salow, company co-founder and CEO. “We’ve been laser-focused on building the customer support teams to [handle] the rollouts and have added five new employees in those areas alone since May 2016,” says Salow, whose company’s products (think Google Glass with a pragmatic use) allow veteran technicians to upload content to train green techs, as well as providing verification to customers of the service product.

“We have 18 new rollouts planned before July 1 of this year and plan on growing our sales team significantly over the next nine months,” he adds.

Salow, who used his blue-collar family’s work experience to develop the wearable technology, says customer satisfaction has been noteworthy.

According to leadership of client Lee Co., the platform pays for itself, he explains, noting the company has seen a $20 return per $1 invested (per 100 technicians).

Lee Co., via the software’s telepresence, has saved $500 per month per technician on, for example, travel and labor costs. In addition, techs are gen-

Touching Base_Aaron NP_06-17_76.indd 14Salow.indd 14

erating an average of $2,500 in new business per person per month by being more responsive and transparent.

Salow (pronounced SAY-low) says XOEye clients are seeing spikes in new contracts and service calls.

“Internal efficiencies gained by using the telepresence capabilities via triage support allows them to get to customers faster [than otherwise] and to get their technicians on to their next call, which decreases their cost of sales and leads to increased profits,” he says.

“One customer said it best: ‘If someone in their industry hasn’t started thinking about using this technology, they are already behind.’”

One of many companies working to expand the use of wearable technology for industrial, military and health care uses, XOEye has kept its focus on HVAC and field tech workers since its inception in 2013.

“We remain disciplined in field service and, even more specifically, in the mechanical, electrical and plumbing markets,” Salow says. “It is a $3.6 billion market in the U.S. alone, and is an island we want to conquer first.”

Salow says clients feel the XOEye software is “like any new tool” in a tool box.

“Once they’ve used it a few times, they wonder how they did their job without it,” he says. “It’s the new normal in their space, similar to law enforcement body cameras, and drones and action cameras in sports and adventure.”

5/11/17 11:55 11:52 AM

TOUCHING BASE

data LIQUIdItY

Ed Cantwell is elevating the status of Center for Medical Interoperability

by William Williams

In October 2016, the Nashville-based Center for Medical Interoperability promoted Ed Cantwell to CEO. Though not a bold move — Cantwell previously had served as executive director since the center’s 2015 founding — the promotion yielded quick results.

“The last year delivered compelling strategy evidence that the [center’s] vision — accelerating the seamless exchange of information to improve health care — is right on the mark,” Cantwell says.

Specifically, the center deals in data liquidity: when patient information

Touching Base_Ed Cantwell.indd NP_06-17_76.indd 15 15

moves freely and securely from the point of care (a hospital bed, a doctor’s office, a home, etc.) to its destination (a clinical decision-making app, an electronic health record, an analytics engine, a clinical trial repository, a public health registry, etc.).

Cantwell says demand for data liquidity is growing, with the center well equipped to handle it.

“Interoperability of the technologies used in patient care enables this data liquidity, without which it is more difficult to meet our goals of providing person-centered care for individuals and managing the health of populations,” he

says. “All parts of the ecosystem, including the government, recognize this.”

Cantwell points to the center’s 2017 opening in oneC1TY as a milestone.

“We have the ability to convene the ecosystem while housing a medical interoperability lab, transformation learning center for clinicians and collaboration space for project partners,” he says.

“Across 2017, we will execute on all three technical campaigns within our portfolio and more visibly promote our member health systems’ efforts to advance interoperability to other industry stakeholders, including the government.”

On that theme, Cantwell says the center’s first “technical deliverable” will occur this year, with expansion of membership across nonprofit, investorowned, federal and public institutions.

Of course, work remains.

After launching the three aforementioned campaigns — Trusted Infrastructure and Medical Devices, Con-

OPEN

nect Everything and Next Generation Platform Architecture — the center must continue to advance them.

“Vendor engagement … has been strong, with many stepping up to lead their respective areas,” Cantwell says.

“It is becoming clear to the ecosystem that the health systems intend to drive this effort and back it with procurement policy. In its lab, the center is now actively connecting medical devices to enterprise systems to demonstrate interoperability principles.”

Cantwell credits Dr. Mike Schatzlein, the center’s board chair, noting, “He provides mentorship to me, serves as a key spokesperson for the Center, and helps galvanize both Nashville and the broader industry in support of our mission.

“One of my main goals as the new CEO was to continue to strengthen the board and to project its resolve as we engage the ecosystem,” Cantwell adds. “I believe we have accomplished that goal.”

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OPEN

THree questions

THreE questions phil shmerling i n crowd capital

Phil Shmerling worked at Morgan Keegan and Choice Food Group before launching InCrowd Capital, an online fundraising platform, in 2012. Among his Nashville-based group’s recent investments is the participation in the $1.3 million seed round for fellow local entity GameWisp, which offers a software platform for entertainers in the video game industry.

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three questions

Shmerling joined the Nashville Post to discuss one of the more pressing issues in Nashville’s technology and entrepreneurship world: How to build early-stage tech companies when local investors are so focused on health care startups. The success of the health care ecosystem here over the past four decades, he argues, is a big reason why the city is now such a draw for young entrepreneurs. And those ideas and talents, he adds, mean it is only a matter of time before Nashville produces big wins beyond health care, setting the stage for a virtuous cycle.

In the meantime, though, local players such as InCrowd will need to carry the flag. Here are some of Shmerling’s thoughts on how that will and should look.

What can local tech entrepreneurs do to attract the Nashville capital that for years has gone to health care?

People invest in what they know.

There have been some health carefocused funds that have attempted to invest outside of health care, but they always go back to what they understand, which is health care. We are not going to see health care money move to non-health care startups. The question should therefore be, “Where do local tech entrepreneurs attract new sources of capital?” and not, “How do we try to convince people to invest outside of their comfort zones?”

It starts with smart-money investors in other industries who are willing to place early bets on non-health care companies. My theory is that, once we get a success, those early investors will reinvest their gains into new startups and the entrepreneurs who get large payouts from their exit will come to the investment market writing checks. That is how you grow a capital ecosystem

ERIC ENGLAND

Three Questions.indd 17

outside of health care. That takes time, though, and it starts with early adopters willing to take risks.

With InCrowd, we are trying to be proactive and find those people and draw them into the investment community. With a network of more than 50 investors and with 80 percent of our investments in non-health care companies, I think we have proven that there are people out there who want to invest outside of health care.

Until the ecosystem is more robust, however, those local tech entrepreneurs need to focus on finding successful individuals in their industry on their own. Or they need to get their early funding from customers – i.e. sales.

From the other side of the coin: Are local entrepreneurs generating enough good tech ideas that deserve funding?

Using VC parlance, the question really is, are there enough “venture-backable” companies in Nashville?

I clearly think the answer is yes, or I would not have started InCrowd. However, if you ask a coastal VC, you will likely get a different answer. The reason is because I use a different definition of “venture-backable” than coastal VCs.

OPEN

InCrowd has changed that definition by [in part] targeting companies with profit-centric business models as well as companies that create defensibility by building large, loyal customer bases. There is a much larger number of companies that meet our definition of venture-backable, but those companies are not likely good fits for coastal VCs. Using this new definition, I think there are more than enough good ideas to fund in our ecosystem. Using a coastal VC’s definition of venture-backable companies? They are here, just not in large-enough numbers to get coastal VCs interested; they have plenty of companies in their own back yards that better support their investment models.

Where do Nashville tech companies go for investment once they move beyond those smaller, earlystage rounds? What will it take to have more of that money come from Nashville?

One place they can go is InCrowd, of course. That is one reason I formed InCrowd, which invests across all industries in the technology space. Outside of InCrowd, GrowthX, a California and now Nashville-based

‘ I f w e u se t he sa m e d e f ini t ion o f a ven t u r e - b a c k a b le c o m pan y T H A T t he c oas t al inves t o r s u se , w e w ill f ail .’

VCs in California, New York, Boston, etc., see thousands of prospective investments each year within their cities alone. Of those, maybe 100 or so are venture-backable based on their definition. When you only have a couple hundred prospective investments across the entire Southeast, is it worth a VC’s time to come to 15 cities across the Southeast to find the 10 or so companies that are venture-backable? The VCs are better off just waiting for those 10 companies to come to them.

One mistake that many people around Nashville are making is that they are trying to attract coastal VCs to a market that does not provide enough good investment options, as a coastal VC would define them. We have to create our own unique capital ecosystem that changes the definition of a “venture-backable” company. There is a highly limited number of companies in the Southeast that have the growth-first, profitabilitysecond mindset that is interesting to coastal investors.

If we try to create a capital environment that fosters those types of investments, using the same definition of a venture-backable company that the coastal investors use, we will fail.

early-stage investment fund, has planted a flag here to make investments in startup tech companies.

Initially, the early-stage capital is going to have to come from local resources, of which we need much more than just two. With InCrowd and GrowthX, we now have a good start on the early players that are necessary to grow the community, but more resources would be helpful. We will need those early players to see good results through exits before outside capital comes to Nashville. The more of those resources there are, the better the chances that an exit comes.

Once we see an exit, the future capital resources will come from the entrepreneurs and the employees of exited companies that receive large payouts, the investors in those groups who earned a large return on their investment and who will reinvest their gains into new companies, and the new market entrants that inevitably want to follow the success of early players in our market.

Based on my definition of venture-backable, I am not even talking about a nine- or 10-figure exit, which sounds daunting. A $20 million or $50 million exit could be big enough to get more resources flowing across the city, let alone a $100 million-plus exit.

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OPEN

DATA BANK

LOTS OF GROWTH, BUT NOT WITHOUT GAPS Nashville’s national emergence has produced a number of big wins for the tech sector. It’s hard to imagine notable names such as Lyft and Google Fiber being here otherwise. The growth spurt has created some interesting dynamics. Here are some snapshots showing the progress as well as some statistics that could be better.

Restraining factor?

$110,700

Nashville might be scoring well on various rankings but Tennessee as a whole ranks just 25th in tech’s share of the overall workforce and 32nd in average wages paid to tech workers.

2.7%

2016 job growth est.

$93,200

2016 average wage

NC

3.3%

$94,900

The value of I o T

Manufacturing 16%

San Jose

San Francisco

Internet of things technologies are expected to add $1.9 trillion in value to the economy by 2020. Four sectors are seen accounting for at least 10 percent of that huge number. All are key to Middle Tennessee’s economy.

portland

denver

dallas

austin

raleigh

atlanta

nashville

indianapolis

birmingham

chattanooga

memphis

Nashville added 1,700 tech jobs from 2013 through the end of 2015, ranking it 20th in the country. But our 6.7 percent compound annual growth rate ranked 13th. Here are the cities that grew faster still over that time frame.

Source: Brookings Institution analysis of Moody’s Analytics data

$99,600

$83,800

Regional work to do

Austin.................... 16.1% Charlotte.. ............... 14.5% Indianapolis............. 13.9% San Francisco........... 12.9% San Jose................. 12.1% Jacksonville.. ............ 11.9% Phoenix.................. 11.5% Madison................. 11.0% Dallas. . ..................... 9.0% Pittsburgh................. 9.0% Provo....................... 8.7% Sacramento............... 7.7%

$217,300

Might higher wages goose local tech sector growth? Nashville’s tech firms pay 15 percent less than their peers in Atlanta and some 25 percent less than those in Portland.

Compounding growth

Health care 16% Insurance 11%

mo

2.7%

$69,300

aL

-0.7%

a gap to close Nashville also needs work regarding being an attractive place for women in tech. Here’s how Music City compares against the national average and top-ranked Washington, D.C., in a recent study.

Tech jobs filled by women

ky

Gender pay gap

U.S. average

15.2% $53,158

26.2%

10%

Nashville

20.4% $35,983

29.2%

1%

Washington, D.C.

4-year job growth

|

Data Bank.indd 18

ar

1.1%

-1.9%

$63,200

tn

-0.8% $69,300

ms

5.2% $56,416 41.0% 17% Source: SmartAsset analysis of Census Bureau data

18 techie

3.0%

$86,900

Source: Gartner

$80,200

Income post- housing costs

GA

$82,400

Banking/securities 10%

Source: CompTIA

5.9%

$93,200

Source: CompTIA

summer 2017 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

5/11/17 11:54 AM

INDEX

A-I

Ellen Lehman 21

Kristen Johns 52

Emdeon 52

Kristina Montague 68

247Sports 63

Eric Elmquist 9

Local Motors 66

Aaron Salow 14

EvidenceCare 59

Lydia Jones 47

Aileen Katcher 22

Federal Bureau of Investigation 10

Lynn Lesher 68

Alyssa Hasty 24 Amy Leopard 48

Fortified Health Security 12 Franklin High School 36

Mark Adkins 68 Martha Ivester 55

Franz Baudenbacher 37

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 36

Gautam Biswas 39

Mbody 68

Giles Ward 53

Megan Barry 41

Girl Geek Dinner 21, 29, 32, 34

Meharry Medical College 60

Google Fiber 54

Mel Taylor 50

Bonnie Miller 24

Google Women Tech Makers 29

Bradley Arant Boult Cummings 48

Hashed Health 53

Middle Tennessee State University Office of Research 61

Amy Andrade 60 AT&T 54 Beth Hoeg 20 BioMimetic Therapeutics 9 BioTN Foundation 9 Bob Murphy 42

Brent Greene 36 Brian Fengler 59 Brian Moyer 54 Brock Smethills 46 Bryan Dods 66 BTC Media 70 Center for Medical Interoperability 15

HoneyCo 58 Howard Bright 59 InCrowd Capital 16 Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation 66 Institute for Local Self-Reliance 55

Cheekwood 69

J-M

Chris Harris 61

Jacqueline Keidel 66

Christopher Mitchell 55

Janet Miller 21

Colliers International 21

Jeff Porter 61

Comcast 54

Jim Jamieson 59

ComicBook.com 63

Joe Wehby 60

Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee 21

John Griffey 42

MoBeGo 60 Mollie Decktor 68

N-S Nashville Entrepreneur Center 9, 29

RPM Transportation Consultants 42 Sam Lynch 9 Sam Savage 64 SAP 51 Shannon Terry 63 Scott Augenbaum 10 Splitsecnd 50 Sterling Ranch Development Co. 46 Steve Proctor 54 Susan Wente 24

T-Z Tech Ladies 29, 32 Ted Hasselbring 60 TEDxNashville 56 The JumpFund 68 Trinisys 20 Van Tucker 68

Nashville Software School 29

Vanderbilt Initiative for Smart Cities Operations and Research 39

Nashville Technology Council 54

Vanderbilt University 9, 24, 36, 39, 46, 50, 56, 60, 68

Nashville Women Programmers 29

Vanderbilt University Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization 61

Nicholas Zeppos 46 Nicole Joseph 24 NovaCopy 69 NueCura Partners 59 Paige Boshell 48

Vanderbilt University Medical Center 24, 50, 61 VU Department of Special Education 60 Waller 33, 52

Jordan Stivers 48

Peabody College of Education and Human Development 24, 60

Julie Adams 56

Pete Harris 70

JumpStart Foundry 50

Phil Shmerling 16 PopCulture.com 63

Women in Technology of Tennessee 29, 32

Deb Miller 59

Katcher Strategic Communications 22

Rachel Swaby 24

Xenofon Koutsoukos 36

Don Lazas 59

Keith Durbin 41

Rivals.com 63

XOEye 14

Ed Cantwell 15

Kimberly Bryant 24

Robyn Mace 39, 41, 47

Zachary Watson 58

Corey Todaro 53 Dan Dodson 12 Dave Allen 37 David Owens 68

John Wark 29

OPEN

Wansoo Im 60 Womanista.com 63 WomenGetIT 29, 32, 34

Edgenet 54

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TECH @ WORK

Geekin g out

I am an “app junkie” and love many of the apps on my iPhone. It is hard to name just one, but if I had to choose, it would be Audible, which is for listening to books. I use this app during workouts, in the car, during air travel, and it in invaluable for me to stay up on all the great books I want to read but don’t have the time to sit down and read. I recently traveled to Europe and plowed through several of my backlog of books on the plane.

Some of our past Most Powerful Women on their favorite apps and gadgets

ur Most Powerful Women program is taking a break this year, but we wanted to feature some of our past honorees in this issue. So we asked them a simple question: “What’s a piece of technology you started using relatively recently but already can’t imagine going without?” From apps to websites, here are their answers.

O

The Amazon Prime Now App! The ability to shop and have gifts, clothes or food delivered in short order is a huge time saver. I no longer have to find time to run to the store when I need something at the last-minute — whatever I need is at my fingertips…and my front door or office within just a few hours. > Beth Hoeg Trinisys

My favorite technology that I can’t live without is my Audible app. I was always a big books on tape person and now I love just popping them on my phone and listen when I’m exercising, driving, doing laundry, etc.

I’m pretty partial to my Fitbit, too. I am intrigued with how my steps vary every day. > Christie Wilson The Wilson Group Real Estate Services

20 TECHIE

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> Tammy Hawes Virsys12

My newest app is my Range Rover InControl app. I have all of the smart technology such as smart sensors and cameras for safe driving. One of the newest technologies is the ability to use my mobile phone to communicate with my car. In addition to locking my car, I can also turn it on and start the AC from my phone. The headlights don’t come on to draw attention and I even have a valet mode feature to lock my car computer display, protecting access to my address or any contact information. > Linda Rebrovick Morgan Samuels

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TECH @ WORK

I have not started using OneCallNow for work, but would like to do so. I use it for my sorority to communicate with members to inform them of meetings, locations, updates, events, etc. — all at the push of a button. I can send it as an email, a text or a voice message or all three and it will get to my 200 members in an instant. I hope to use it for my work, too.

JUMP is an organization with 200 members and we need a more efficient way to communicate. We are still sending meeting notices via U.S. mail and, unfortunately, we receive at least 10 pieces of mail back each quarter that meetings are held. This software will allow us to communicate with our membership personally and effectively anytime we want, as often as we want, for less.

Since I took up the drums upon my recent retirement, I love my Ludwig Metronome. Helps me keep it in the groove. > Paula Lovell Lovell Communications

Alexa. She runs my entire household down to every light switch and fixture, the thermostat, the TV and Stereo Systems. And she does what you ask her to do, MOST of the time.

She does backfire occasionally… We have the lights in my mom’s place at her retirement community wired to her, so occasionally all the lights in my house come on when my mom commands her to turn on her lights – 12 miles away!

My favorite piece of technology right now is ChildCareNashville.com. For generations, families have searched for places for their kids to be educated and safe while the parents are at work. Torturous games of phone tag ensued. Hours and hours and hours wasted in the quest for a safe, affordable, “nice” place for one’s precious child. So, at The Community Foundation, we built that place — and one which can be licensed for any community.

ChildCareNashville.com currently hosts one-stop information at about 266 local centers. Parents can search by the age of their child, their ZIP code, information about the curriculum provided and the cost, and, of course, the availability of a slot. If a parent likes what they see, they can click on a button and schedule a visit. Phone tag becomes a thing of the past. Parents can make informed choices without missing work. And as an added benefit, people looking for jobs in the child care industry can search ChildCareNashville.com for job openings.

Now why didn’t we think of that earlier?

> Janet Miller Colliers International – Nashville

> Ellen Lehman Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee

> Sharon Hurt JUMP

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OPEN

TECH @ WORK

It has to be my Fitbit. I am a longtime half marathon walker — have completed 10 Nashville Rock and Roll half marathons since 2006 —and one of my training buddies talked me into getting one last year during training last spring. I am hooked on it. I track my steps and distance daily and participate in challenges by others around the country. But I also use it for work. It’s synched to my phone for text, phone and calendar alerts. I can discreetly check notifications on my watch during meetings without looking at my phone. Especially helpful when I have a client in crisis mode. > AilEEN KAtchEr KaTCHER STRaTEgiC COmmuniCaTiOnS

My life revolves around lists. It’s how I like to organize the things I need to get done. I used paper lists for a long time until I discovered the Wunderlist app.

What makes this app valuable for me is that many users can share a list and email updates are sent when something on the list is completed. This redefines teamwork for my husband and me, and we get a lot done even on our busy days. It’s simple but very helpful. > rAchEl WErNEr BuilT TECHnOlOgiES and giRl gEEK dinnER

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5/11/17 1:04 1:03 PM

fall 2016

Healthier arteries

Ideas for three thoroughfares

Clifton’s coming boom An important North Nashville road rises

THE FRESH FACES OF DEVELOPMENT

Cover_Boom_GF.indd 1

NP_06-17_76.indd 23

PIONEER, ADVOCATE Mark DeutschMann on rebuilDing our corriDors, his greenway vision anD having More fun

Codes looks to keep up Beyond the core

Visions for Donelson, Ashland City, Lebanon

8/22/16 10:49 AM

The recent physical changes in Nashville’s landscape have been stunning — and there’s more to come.

But growth also continues to change the MSA’s outlying areas. Those factors have created new development questions to answer and challenges to meet. Boom will tackle these topics and more.

ad close: august 23 materials due: august 25 in market: september nashvillepost.com | 615.844.9272

5/10/17 2:50 PM

FEATURES

REPRESENT

• Alyssa Hasty, professor of molecular physiology and biophysics and associate dean for faculty development for basic sciences at VU’s School of Medicine • Rachel Swaby, journalist and author of “Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science — and the World.”

Here are some lightly edited excerpts from their conversation.

Kimberly Bryant

Keeping what’s important

Nicole Joseph

Vanderbilt hosts conversation about women in STEM by stephen elliotT

he proportion of women at the rank of full professor in American medical schools has not increased since 1980 and remains below that of men, according to a 2015 study cited by Vanderbilt University Provost and School of Medicine Professor Susan Wente.

“Why, despite advances, are women so dramatically underrepresented in STEM disciplines?” Wente asked in a pre-recorded video message at a recent VU School of Engineering panel discussion on the challenges facing women in STEM fields.

It’s a big question with many answers, some of which surfaced at the discussion that ensued.

The speakers that day were: • Kimberly Bryant, a Vanderbilt engineering alumna and the founder of the educational nonprofit Black Girls Code • Nicole Joseph, assistant professor of mathematics education at the Peabody College of Education and Human Development • Bonnie Miller, physician and associate dean for health sciences education and executive vice president of educational affairs at Vanderbilt University Medical Center

T

24 TECHIE

|

Bonnie Miller

Alyssa Hasty

Rachel Swaby

On finding a career path and staying on it

Bryant: It’s always surreal for me being back on campus, especially in the engineering buildings on campus, because the point that almost derailed me from seeking a STEM degree was in my undergrad years here at Vanderbilt.

At that time, there were not too many women, and one of the only reasons that I persisted was I just by happenstance ran into an upperclassman in my first few months being at Vandy who was also an electrical engineer and who became my role model and my mentor. If it had not been for meeting her as a freshman and saying, “OK, I can do this. I can model my path after her because if she can do it, I can,” I would’ve left. I would’ve been out of this place. It was a rough environment for a young woman and a young woman of color.

Joseph: I really thought about becoming an economist or an actuary, but once I had my daughter, I had this internal call to be a teacher.

I really enjoyed mathematics and what I really began to notice was that you’re always the only [female or minority] student in advanced mathematics. I was the only one. And it might feel good a little bit on the personal side, but the other side is there was a problem.

I just decided, “I’m going to be in this space.”

I took that challenge on and turned those experiences into a reservoir to be able to study as a doctoral student and eventually as faculty.

Swaby: For a long time, I accepted what other people thought to be the truth. I was a fact checker and I’d always be a fact checker, and I just couldn’t get out of it. I really internalized that for a lot of years. It was only until later I realized I have a lot more in me.

It was an important job, but I can do all these [other] things. It just took me getting into another space to see it. Just because somebody thinks I’m pigeonholed in this area or I can only do this thing doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t need to internalize other people’s perceptions of me — and I wish I’d learned that earlier.

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Women in STEM.indd 24

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REPRESENT

On returning to work after having a child

Miller: I really had trouble going back to work after that. There weren’t a lot of women ahead of me to coach me through that or warn me about how difficult that would be. Work-life balance is different for different people. One of the things we tell first-year medical students is, “Think about what’s really important to you and defines you and try to hold onto that, whether it’s playing piano or sports. Don’t give up everything.

It’s a series of little decisions that you make every day.”

On saying no and creating opportunities

Hasty: There are a lot of things to say no to. I encourage people to think about the service activities they do, to be intentional and focused about that and don’t just say yes to every service activity that comes along. I did not take my own advice early in my career, and I was on the radiation safety committee and the small animal care committee and a lot of little committees.

I finally realized that those things are not my passion.

My passion is education and mentoring people, so then I became a director of graduate studies and a mentor of graduate students and those became my areas of service, and I could feel more comfortable saying no to the other things.

But even now, I need to think, “Is there someone else who could really benefit from this thing?” If I said no, I could recommend this other person — it’s actually better for me, better for them and better for the organization.

Miller: Sometimes it’s nice to toot your own horn, but when you’re thinking about different awards that are available, different job opportunities or opportunities for advancement within an organization, are there women that we know that we can put forward for

Women in STEM.indd NP_06-17_76.indd 25 25

FEATURES

this kind of recognition? There’s plenty of opportunity to make other people look good.

WORKFORCE AND TECHNOLOGY finding the right blend of talent.

On networking

Hasty: Going to conferences, going to give a talk at another university — it’s hard to leave a six-monthold or a 2-year-old or an 18-yearold at home to travel too much, but you have to do some of it. And when you’re at the meeting, really take advantage of the opportunity to meet with people, to talk at poster sessions and after talks, to find some kind of connection.

Those people are going to be the reviewers of your papers, the reviewers of your grants, and there’s no doubt that having that personal connection with somebody makes them read your work differently.

Networking is the one thing that really snowballs in a positive way if you do even just a little bit at the beginning. You can’t underestimate the benefit of doing that, even if it’s hard, even if you’re introverted.

Bryant: Do the work and have a mindset of excellence but raise your head from the work. Because as women, we have a tendency to work very hard. We have this mindset of excellence and being a perfectionist, but that is not how you rise. That’s just not how it happens. You’ve got to network. So do your best work that you can but raise your head up and then go out and network.

On shared spaces

Joseph: I think we’re in a time now where it feels like girl power in the world. I think establishing these communities like Black Girls Code — there are so many wonderful organizations that are popping up; spaces that are sacred, spaces that are allowing women in STEM to not just share challenges but share the good stuff that they are doing and not apologizing for it but absolutely being proud of the work that we’re doing. Don’t secondguess yourself.

www.lbmc.com 5/11/17 12:04 11:57 PM AM

FEATURES

COMMUNICATE

HOW TO COMMUNICATE THE VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY TO THE C-SUITE

how to communicate by Zachvalue Gemignani the of technology to the c-suite by zach gemignani

New technologies (big data, arti cial intelligence, internet of things, virtual reality and blockchain) promise to transform your business in profound ways. Getting buy-in from your executive team can be hard. Where is the urgency to invest? How will the technology impact the business? There is a mountain of challenges that stand in the way of making these investments happen.

This is a short guide to help you navigate the challenge of getting your C-Suite to support your technology vision.

CONNECT TO BUSINESS GOALS

SELL TO INFLUENCER S SPEED TO IMPACT

GET PEOPLE BEHIND THE TECHNOLOG Y

SELL TO INFLUENCERS

t? en m r t es he inv o ot n t ? o re a rn ing tu mp ak e e r s co re m O is th thi e a F s C at sw oe h W w d ent I m o Do H est ? a gy inv de s it y i nolo Doe ? m k h is ec hin t? th t rd t di ? boa vative n’t this hin y s O O CE ill m nno CT y wa and et be at w look i t Wh e Wh ders to g m e h n g mak u ou to e n l b e a e be sult ill w this re w e l g il ?W essa CMO new m tomers lease? s e t r u Wha o our c ress t ng p take mpelli co in a

Like any good pitch, technology projects must also connect to emotional triggers, in this case, of the C-Suite.

Where to start 1. Find case studies. Show how other companies have implemented the technology and demonstrated tangible impact.

2. Watch the competition. Research what your competitors are doing with the new technology. How might doing nothing impact your competitive position?

3. Point to wins. Explain how your technology can deliver speci c “wins” for individual executives. How will it make them look good?

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Nothing sparks the C-Suite like a competitor’s press release about an investment in hot new technology. The auto industry is a timely example. Public pronouncements about investments in AI and autonomous vehicles are driving new investments and start-up acquisitions.

juice analytics

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COMMUNICATE

FEATURES

At Juice Analytics, we’ve seen many big data and data science projects that never made it to fruition. In most cases, the project focused on comprehensive collection of data and failed to identify the key business questions to be answered by the data. he s? tt IT por ion ng t g a tin sup er isti op ex xis to e g m ur ing oin ro ng ct f t o go c o a s i tr ct pa m ho pa dis s m si ?W i i i O is h re th lt CO ll th oes O wil ctu ? i I d ?

W w C w tru y ies Ho fras olog Ho iorit in chn pr te n y m le i ct op a e p im ht p it? y g og ri rt ol the po n up ch e te hav d s s n a e hi O ill t o w lop R e w D CH w le? dev Ho op to pe ace pl

CONNECT TO BUSINESS GOALS

Your project must link to your organization’s top priorities to be taken seriously.

Where to start 1. Know the priorities. Research what your leadership team has communicated to the board and investors.

2. Draw the connection. Identify which of these priorities can be positively impacted by your technology project.

3. Tell a story. Summarize how your technology will bring tangible value to these priorities.

GET PEOPLE BEHIND THE TECHNOLOGY

New technologies mean change — which will feel threatening for some people in your organization. To make sure your technology project gets sustained support, nurture advocates at all levels of the organization and know who might not be on your side.

MD Anderson, University of Texas’ cancer center, made a big bet on IBM’s Watson arti cial intelligence solution.

After spending $62 million and missing deadlines while delivering little measurable impact, the organization canceled the project.

Where to start 1. Find your advocates. Keep your supporters up to date on the progress of your project.

2. Share the glory. Your success will take a team. Make sure people in the organization know about all the people who contributed.

3. Identify those people who will be threatened by your technology. Determine what they need to understand that their role remains safe and important.

SPEED TO IMPACT

You’ll want to deliver tangible value quickly because today’s hot new thing can become tomorrow’s old news. Short attention spans and nancial pressure will increase scrutiny of your technology project over time.

Zach Gemignani is co-founder and CEO at Juice Analytics, creators of the Juicebox data visualization platform. Zach is author of “Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication.”

Where to start 1. Start small. Find problems that the technology can solve today on the road to larger goals.

2. Deliver early. Focus on prototypes or “minimum viable products” to prove out an early version of the solution.

3. Measure. Track the impact of your early wins to justify ongoing funding.

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PA R T N E R S

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Useful in many ways Nashville’s thriving ecosystem of user groups combines education, networking and room to grow collectively

by Caroline Leland

“All right, we’re going to try out an exercise to get to know each other. Count up the number of languages you know — programming languages as well as spoken languages — and if you know only one, come to the front of the room. The more you know, the further you should move to the back of the room. Let’s find out who knows the most!”

It’s a Thursday evening in April, and more than 100 people have gathered at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center to celebrate women in technology. After a few seconds of mild commotion, the woman with the microphone winds her way to the back of the room, beelining for a dark-haired young woman standing near the back wall. The young woman, a Vanderbilt undergraduate named Morgan Oh, softly speaks into the microphone that she knows C, C++ and Java — in addition to English, Spanish and Korean.

Concurrent with Nashville’s population growth is a marked increase in the number of tech companies in town — and a corresponding spike in the number of Nashvillians interested in technology.

But there’s more to the Nashville tech scene than the companies: A massive grassroots network of volunteer-run user groups has sprung up in the last few years. If you’re not in them, you might not know these groups exist — but once you’re in, chances are you’re attending lots of them.

Several groups are marketed toward women; the “Celebrating Women in Tech” event in April was hosted by Nashville’s chapter of Girl Geek Dinner in collaboration with Women in Technology of Tennessee, Nashville Women Programmers, WomenGetIT, Tech Ladies and Google

Women Tech Makers. But most user groups in town are centered on a tool or language rather than an identity: There’s NashJS (focused on the programming language JavaScript), Nashville UX (focused on “user experience”), Nashville Product (focused on product design, management and marketing), Nashville Podcasters and many more. Chuck Bryant, co-founder of the nonprofit Technologist Federation of Nashville, estimates that 10 years ago, Nashville probably saw only one or two annual grassroots-organized tech events, plus three or four software development

entrepreneurs and corporate employees, and experience levels can range from novice to expert.

“People are looking to level up their skills, whether something specific like a framework or tool, or soft skills like public speaking or leadership,” Bryant says. “I think there’s a pretty rich interest in learning and sharing, particularly in the tech space. People are not just willing to share but anxious to share.”

‘People are not just willing to share b u t a n x i o u s t o s h a r e .’

C h u c k B r ya n t , T e c h F e d

user groups that met regularly — compared to today’s 20 annual volunteer-run tech events and upwards of 50 active user groups.

Bryant launched TechFed in 2016 to help address some of the logistical challenges these groups face — though Bryant says that was the culmination of efforts reaching back to 2007.

TechFed promotes grassroots technology opportunities in part by offering services as a legal entity that can process donor checks for food and drinks at the meet-ups.

“TechFed enables the ability to handle cash sponsorships,” Bryant explains. “Sponsors couldn’t write a check to an individual volunteer organizing this kind of event.”

Local groups’ sizes range from 10 to more than 100, are usually educationally focused and always include time for networking. Most are free, though some of the more formal groups require membership fees. Most find a corporate sponsor to donate a monthly meeting space and some food and beer. Participants include freelancers,

Nashville Software School founder John Wark, who encourages all his students to join user groups, says the cultural openness makes Nashville unique.

“Because Nashville’s tech community is so community-oriented, our students are generally welcomed into these groups,” Wark says. “That’s something really special about Nashville. The tech communities on the West Coast and in Boston are not the same. Nashville’s tech community is almost uniquely welcoming of new talent.”

For a closer look at those welcomes, the Post crisscrossed Nashville in April to get a better sense of its user group community. The following pages offer a few postcards from our field trips and photos by staffer Daniel Meigs and others.

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Nashville PHP: ‘There’s no ego in this group’ It’s 6:30 p.m. and the kitchen at Built Technologies is full of about 15 T-shirted men holding craft beer bottles. Some are eating the Jersey Mike’s subs that Built provided for this gathering. The conversation ranges from work stories to shared laughs over a popular TV show.

Marcus Fulbright, a bearded 20-something, is here because Nashville Software School taught him the programming framework Ruby on Rails, but then he was hired to work with PHP — a completely separate language. He joined the PHP group to add to his on-the-job learning. What keeps him coming back is the community.

“I like meeting people who work in different fields, different technology environments and have different perspectives,” he says.

Standing nearby is Paul McNeely, who has attended the PHP group regularly for the past year. McNeely works remotely for a California-based company. “So there’s not a lot of interaction with other people,” he says. “I get my social factor here.”

The only woman in the room is Dee Wilcox, the night’s speaker. A senior developer at National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, Wilcox “started Googling” to find a tech-focused community as soon as she moved to Nashville. The PHP group turned out to be exactly what she was looking for.

“There’s no ego in this group,” she says. “We all want to write great code and love what we do. It’s a great reflection of Nashville as a whole.”

Wilcox says she prefers the technical focus of the PHP group over the women’s tech groups in Nashville, which tend to be more focused on developing soft skills.

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jen m c donald

NashJS: ‘All about how we can help each other’ About 60 people are gathered in a highceilinged presentation room at Emma, filling the rows of chairs in the middle of the room and the booths along the sides of the room.

Courey Elliott, the featured speaker, starts her presentation with a confession: “I didn’t even know this topic existed until I agreed to speak about it,” she says with a laugh. Intrigued when group organizer William Golden proposed the topic to her, she spent the past month researching it and promises to answer the group’s questions as best she can.

Golden says NashJS has the highest attendance of any tech meetup in town.

“Everyone is so willing to share what they know. That’s kind of weird compared to other industries,” he says. “The community that we’ve cultivated here is all about how we can help each other.”

The group’s popularity probably also has to do with the fact that “basically every developer uses JavaScript,” as Golden puts it. But the group has grown exponentially from the eight or nine folks who attended its first meetup five years ago. Now 60 to 90 people attend every month. About 60 percent of them are regulars.

“I had to choose my wedding day around NashJS,” Elliott admits, laughing.

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caroline Leland

Nashville UX / Code for Nashville: ‘A lightly structured conversation to breach professional silos’ At a joint mixer organized by Nashville UX and Code for Nashville, six tables are set up in neat rows in front of the projection screen. Half the room is left open for mingling and, for the first 45 minutes of the event, people introduce themselves and chat about work and the weather.

Nearly everyone is holding a beer.

Eventually, an organizer calls the 30 or so attendees over to the tables. People find their seats and a few crack open laptops. Jurnell Cockhren, who runs a data mining company called Sophicware, gives an energetic presentation on the importance and challenges of effectively disseminating public information.

“As a group, we need to figure out where the role of technology is in solving social issues,” he says. Then he asks attendees to work together at each table to solve an aspect of these challenges with design thinking — a systematic process of breaking down a problem into mappable solution steps.

About 12 people in the room are developers, and about seven are designers. Everyone turns to their table-mates — now teammates — and starts talking. At one table, four men are discussing the merits of Tableau, a program that’s like Excel for databases. One of the men, who says he works for the Tennessee Department of Health, starts telling the group about the efficiency barriers he sees posed by privacy laws.

Later, Code for Nashville organizer Nick Lorenson tells the Post his group continually seeks to integrate disparate elements of the Nashville tech industry, through events like this one.

“Developers and designers see each other on different sides of a fence — but they’re not,” he says. “[Today] we want to bring together developers, designers, data nerds, maybe journalists, and have a lightly structured conversation around a specific problem domain in order to breach professional silos.”

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daniel meigs

Nashville Product: ‘It has helped me own what I know as a woman in technology’ Carol Oot is at the Nashville Product meetup for the first time.

“Not because I didn’t know about it, but because there are so many other ones!” she says. “Nashville is going crazy like that.”

This is one of three tech-focused events Oot plans to attend this week.

Standing next to her is Mandy Arola, whom Oot met at the Tech Ladies event the night before. Arola also attends women’s groups Girl Geek Dinner and WomenGetIT. Oot has visited several groups, but the one she attends most frequently is Women in Technology of Tennessee — despite its $100 annual membership fee.

“Because there are so many options, are they going to price themselves out of relevance?” Oot wonders. Most of the meetups, Nashville Product included, are free to attend.

The speaker this night is a representative from Shipt, a mobile-app-based grocery delivery service. He talks about the

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process of managing the Shipt product from its inception in 2014 to its current success in 38 cities “and counting.”

“How has your product evolved over time?” someone in the audience wants to know.

“What improvements or expansions are you prioritizing at this point?” someone else asks. “And can you talk more about your system for flagging bugs in the product?”

Nashville Product co-founder and co-organizer Tomiko Peirano says this group is “part of the greater conversation around product” in Nashville. Peirano seeks to provide the community with the tools and vocabulary necessary for effectively communicating with company leadership and potential or current product investors. But for Peirano, the group’s benefits are also personal.

“It has helped me own what I know as a woman in technology,” she says.

“Running a meetup like this cements the things I value and the things I know.”

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Nash BI and Nash sql: NashBI and NashSQL are both Microsoft Data platform user groups, the former focused on reporting and analytics, the latter on the database side of things.

These groups — NashBI has more than 600 members, NashSQL almost 200 — split up to facilitate more individualized discussion of their specialities but join forces to put on a free training conference every January. NashSQL meets for lunch and a presentation every month at Microsoft’s oneC1TY offices while NashBI gatherings take place in the evening and alternate between Microsoft’s digs and The Journey Team’s offices in Franklin.

daniel meigs

power move Mick Pletcher, system center configuration manager at law firm Waller, in mid2013 co-founded the Nashville PowerShell User Group looking to educate those working with the software that controls and automates server administration tasks and other processes. The group has grown steadily to about 250 people even though Pletcher has faced many of the same challenges as some of his peers. Finding a regular location was difficult early on — engineering firm Smith Seckman Reid eventually stepped up and Microsoft recently opened up its oneC1TY office — and growing attendance has been tough, leading Pletcher to recently move to a bi-monthly schedule.

And while leading the group’s logistics “does get to be too much sometimes,” Pletcher says he’s expecting that will become less of an issue now that he has been certified as a Microsoft MVP. That opens up a large network of experts who can step in as speakers.

In addition to running the local PowerShell group, Pletcher also has his sights on a more regional goal. He’s working to put on a full-day PowerShell conference early next year and already has secured support from Microsoft and PluralSight, among others, as well as his employer. Modeling his work after similar gatherings in other Southeastern cities, Pletcher is hoping he’ll have to cap his guest list at 125.

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jen m c donald

Women groups: ‘That tech component without being entrenched’ At the boisterous “Celebrating Women in Tech” event, an organizer introduces the Post to 27-year-old Rafif Alsaleh, who says she’s been attending events hosted by a group called WomenGetIT for over a year. Alsaleh is a quality assurance automation engineer at L-3 ForceX, which produces intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance software.

“WomenGetIT is about finding more women like you, hearing their struggles as well as the opportunities they face, and being able to share your struggles as well as help other people,” says Alsaleh, who arrived in Nashville as a refugee from Iraq. She says she now makes it a personal priority to introduce other Nashville-area refugees to the tech industry.

WomenGetIT co-founder Beth McCart says the group’s mission is to bring more women into tech. WomenGetIT hosts six events per year to facilitate organic peer mentoring relationships through round-

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table discussions on topics like “how to get started in tech” or “what it’s like as a mom in IT.” The group launched with 75 members in November 2015 and now has grown to 400 — almost entirely through word-of-mouth promotion.

Marley Bankston, a senior app developer at L&R Printing, says she heard about the Celebrating Women in Tech event through a group called Girl Geek Dinner, which Bankston has been attending since its launch in 2014.

“It’s very inclusive and welcoming,” she says. “Girl Geek Dinner is my social life.”

Girl Geek Dinner co-founder and co-organizer Kristin McKinney says events like its quarterly “Code and Pinot” nights provide a safe space and a support system for women wanting to learn about software development.

“People really like having that tech component without being entrenched,” McKinney says. “You’re not just a coder.

You’re a person.”

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Wanted: Diversity

daniel meigs

Mirroring the demographics of the national tech sector, women and people of color were vastly underrepresented in all the non-women-focused Nashville meetups we attended. At the 60-person meet-up hosted by NashJS, 11 women and three people of color were present.

The 25-person Nashville Product meetup was attended by six women and three people of color. There were five women and six people of color at the 30-person UX / Code for Nashville meetup.

The Nashville PHP speaker was female, but her entire audience was white and male. Most organizers say they haven’t yet developed any kind of recruitment strategy for their groups. And while several groups exist for women, Nashville has yet to launch a group specifically for people of color. It’s certainly not a challenge unique to Nashville, but it’s clear Music City still has plenty of room to grow in this regard.

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EDUCATE

[Not] by the book

VU, Franklin High students to learn about IoT without well-established material

by Stephen elliott

s the Internet of Things and other harbingers of an ever-more-connected future drag us headlong toward a world in which we don’t drive our own cars, everything we buy is automatically delivered to our homes and many of us work jobs that didn’t exist 10 years ago, a new challenge arises: how to train the workforce that will take those new jobs.

This fall, both Vanderbilt University and Franklin High School will explore that challenge with two separate programs. The VU School of Engineering is offering a new professional master’s degree in cyber-physical systems beginning in August, while FHS becomes the first in the country to bring the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s summer robotics and autonomous vehicle program to a high school classroom.

The VU master’s program will bring together professors from various disciplines, including computer science, engineering and medicine.

A

“There’s clearly a need for an interdisciplinary degree. Cyber-physical systems is by definition an interdisciplinary area,” says Xenofon Koutsoukos, Vanderbilt faculty director of the new program and a professor of computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering.

It’s a 12-month professional degree, designed for both undergraduates preparing to enter the developing field and workers already in manufacturing, robotics and other fields who need to bolster their cyberphysical systems chops. As many as 20 students will be enrolled in the inaugural class this fall.

At Franklin High, computer science teacher Brent Greene will convert the four-week MIT curriculum into a year-long class for students interested in programming, engineering and robotics. By the end of the year, Greene expects most of the students to have programmed a small autonomous car to navigate an on-campus course.

“You’re going to see several groups of kids off doing what looks like their own thing. They’re going to be running between a table with what looks like a toy car with a whole bunch of pieces laying around it,” Greene says, attempting to describe a typical day in the class, which remains in the planning phases. “They’re going to be carrying laptops back and forth. It’s going to be loud, because it’s going to be 20 kids in there all talking at one time, trying to talk to each other. It’s going to look like organized chaos.”

daniel meigs

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ting-edge technological fields, a constant challenge is the lack of authoritative educational materials.

“For some of these advanced courses, we don’t have textbooks, because they just can’t be up to date,” says Franz Baudenbacher, VU associate professor of biomedical engineering and physics.

The technology changes too rapidly to write down instructional material on paper. Koutsoukos adds that the updates are so swift that his undergraduate students will see two or three different operating systems during their four years at the school.

Professors teach students how to program devices that didn’t exist when the professors were themselves in school.

It’s for that very reason organizers of the Franklin High program are focused more on foundational skills than specific technical ones.

“Kids that are interested in fields like this are probably going to work

‘Cyber-physiCal systems is by d e f i n i t i o n a n i n t e r d i s C i p l i n a r y a r e a .’

X e n o f o n K o u t s o u K o s , V a n d e r b i lt p r o f e s s o r

While partnerships with area auto manufacturers and other companies are in the works, organizers see the FHS program less as a pipeline to the workforce and more as a way for students to explore different passions.

“Kids can say they want to do computer science all they want, but if they don’t have an opportunity to experience something like this, they really don’t know,” says Dave Allen, executive director for college, career and technical education for Williamson County Schools. “They need the opportunity to play, to tinker, to explore, to innovate, to create, to make sure that that’s really what they want to do for the next 40 years of their life.”

For teachers of courses on autonomous vehicles and other cut-

in jobs that might not even exist today,” Allen says. “We have to get away from training kids for a specific career, for a specific skill, and instead teach them the skills to adapt and change and problem-solve and work in teams.”

Those young people won’t shy away from the more technical aspects of autonomous vehicle programming, though.

In fact, organizers of both the VU and FHS programs highlight the cross-section of skills needed both to teach and take the planned courses.

At Vanderbilt, for instance, students with strong computer science backgrounds might elect to take biomedical engineering courses in order to learn the inner

FEATURES

workings of IoT medical devices, which Baudenbacher assures will soon be the norm.

And with all the health care companies in Nashville, students tempted by the glamor of autonomous vehicles could quickly learn that much of the local cyber-physical systems action requires a knowledge of biology, medical devices and medicine in general.

“You can imagine you have monitors for ECG, heart rate or oxygen saturation in a hospital. People don’t want those to stand alone anymore,” Baudenbacher says, pointing to the rise of connected medical devices. “You want this data to be secure. You want the devices to have unique IDs. There is a tremendous amount of technology that goes into making sure that these devices are used in that specific bubble.”

And to do all that, you need working knowledge in engineering, programming and biology. For autonomous vehicles, throw in some knowledge about robotics and the vehicles themselves. That variety of skills means many different students can potentially enroll, according to Williamson County’s Allen.

In a program capped at 40 Franklin High students, some will have already participated in MIT training while others will have virtually no computer science background at all — and that’s OK. “We don’t just want computer science kids in this class,” Allen says.

“We want your future electrical engineers, your future mechanical engineers, kids who just like building things. We need all of those environments to come in together.

“If kids can come to this class without a computer science background but with a strong physics or engineering or problem-solving skills — the greater diversity you get on the team, the higher level of commitment and higher level of response and expertise we think we’re going to find,” he continues.

“It’s a really different kind of learning environment.”

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COVER

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COVER

Metro’s Robyn Mace is helping lead efforts to turn Music City into a smart city

by stephen elliott

ERIC ENGLAND

Cover Story.indd 39

FEATURES

It seems like an easy choice.

A car crash in downtown Nashville results in major injuries. Each passing second nudges downward the patient’s chances of survival. So an emergency dispatcher should send the closest ambulance, right?

It might result in the best outcome for that particular patient in that particular incident, but data scientists, city officials and emergency responders are learning that a small response delay here might translate into broader benefits down the line. For dispatchers, it will feel counterintuitive: Send the second- or third-closest ambulance to this scene and save lives later.

In a city like Nashville, where first responders must keep watch on both a dense center and more sparsely populated outlying districts, an ambulance sent only to the next-closest incident will quickly become sucked in by downtown’s gravitational force. Pick up a patient in Goodlettsville and take her to a hospital. It’s very likely that hospital will be in Nashville’s urban core — Vanderbilt, Saint Thomas, Nashville General. Then, almost inevitably, that ambulance’s next call will be somewhere else in the densely populated area in or close to downtown.

“More accidents are happening in the downtown area than in the outlying areas,” says Gautam Biswas, a Vanderbilt University professor of computer science, computer engineering and engineering management and the lead organizer of the Vanderbilt Initiative for Smart Cities Operations and Research, or VISOR. “So once a vehicle from outside comes in to the downtown area, it ends up responding to calls in the downtown area.” continued on page 41

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spoNsoreD profile

CompaNy profile The Nashville Technology Council exists to be a catalyst for the growth and influence of Middle Tennessee’s technology industry.

NTC’s vision is to establish Nashville as the nation’s creative tech destination by connecting, uniting, developing, and promoting our community.

500+ attendees of the Middle Tennessee & surrounding technology communities

40 workshop/ speaker sessions

presented by experts from various industries and backgrounds

Addresses topics ranging from Big Data & Predictive Analytics to Delivery Insights & Professional Development

keynote

Tom Davenport

www.theanalyticssummit.com

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Nashville Technology Council 500 Interstate Blvd. S, Suite 200, Nashville, TN 37210

NTC Develops Nashville TeCh TaleNT Launching Community Hub & Hosting 5th Annual Analytics Summit The history of the Nashville Technology Council dates back to 1999 when a group of business leaders came together to address the need in Nashville for better paying tech jobs and improved capital investment in technology start-ups. From its inception, the mission of the NTC was to be a catalyst for the growth and influence of Middle Tennessee’s tech industry.

Today, the NTC supports the local technology industry and its 380+ member companies, by coordinating local technology workforce development, connecting professionals to cultivate a collaborative community, uniting around policies that nurture expansion and attract both talent and businesses, and promoting Middle Tennessee as the nation’s creative tech destination.

One of the most successful examples of the NTC’s work is the growing BI & Analytics peer group which connects professionals around effectively leveraging big data and analytics. With the peer group’s guidance, the NTC produces the Nashville Analytics Summit. 2017’s Analytics Summit will be held August 8-9 at the Omni Hotel in Downtown Nash-

ville and is expected to see 500+ attendees from hundreds of organizations across Middle Tennessee and surrounding technology communities. The program includes 40 workshop & speaker sessions presented by experts on topics ranging from big data & predictive analytics to delivery insights & professional development. This year’s keynote speaker is Tom Davenport, distinguished professor, leading author, and pioneer of the concept of “competing on analytics.”

This spring, the NTC opened Tech Hill Commons: a new public gathering place for Nashville’s diverse community of tech leaders, business builders, user groups, students and tech educators. The 9500 sq foot tech venue houses the NTC’s new HQ, two executive board rooms, 150-person event space, and a tech learning center. The NTC invites Middle Tennessee’s tech community to take advantage of Tech Hill Commons - an ideal space for launch events, off-site team retreats, usergroup meetups, professional development, and student techenrichment.

Website https://technologycouncil.com Twitter @NashTechCouncil facebook facebook.com/NashvilleTechCouncil linkedin linkedin.com/company/nashvilletechnology-council linkedin.com/groups/51917 Number of employees 8 Number of Company members 380 founded 1999

speCialTies Tech hill Commons: A hub where Nashville’s tech community comes together. Located at 500 Interstate Blvd. S., the beautiful new space offers two executive board rooms and a 150 person event space. Room rentals available.

TechHillCommons.com Community programming: The NTC hosts 125+ community events a year, on topics including: professional development, tech education, BI & analytics, tech marketing, business development, cyber security, health tech, public policy and more.

CoNTaCT Phone: 615.873.1284 Email: info@technologycouncil.com

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COVER

That ambulance coming downtown from Goodlettsville should perhaps be sent back out to the county’s northern neighborhoods rather than responding to the most imminent incident downtown. A 30-second response delay downtown could cut a subsequent response time in an outlying area by several minutes or more — enough to potentially save lives.

Emergency dispatchers understand the problem, too, but Biswas, who studies the city’s emergency response incident reports as part of the VISOR program, can offer concrete data and automated algorithms that show where an ambulance should be and when it should be there.

“I’m not saying you’ll remove the human from the loop,” he says. “These automated algorithms will work, but you’ll still have a human that makes the decision. In some cases, you can automate the process. But in many cases, you’re building decision-support systems to help humans make better decisions.”

‘The data a government o w n s i s r e a l ly t h e p u b l i c ’ s d a t a .’

Keith Durbin, Metro

NEW EXPECTATIONS Biswas’ research is part of a larger effort at Vanderbilt — and an even larger initiative in Metro Nashville government — to turn Music City into a truly smart city. By pointing data science and other private-sector technological innovations at the public sector’s daily workings, city officials believe they can introduce efficiencies across the board — to emergency response operations, transit, housing and more.

The first step, says Robyn Mace, who joined Metro as chief data officer last year, is to make more of the city’s data — from domesticated hen permits to building permits and police incident statistics — freely available on its portal at data. nashville.gov. After that, the city’s data coordinators and department staffers must acquire data fluency in order to be able to take advantage of the new tools and vast troves of information.

Beyond that, Mace’s plan calls for Nashville’s citizenry to learn how to use the city’s data tools.

Keith Durbin, Metro’s chief information officer since 2009 and a longtime driver of the open

data initiative, says putting government data online is a natural evolution.

“The data a government owns is really the public’s data,” he said during a recent smart cities panel discussion hosted by Vanderbilt. “So we should not be requiring special forms or requests to access that data. Rather, we should be putting it out proactively on an open data platform.”

The larger open data and smart cities initiative is an outgrowth of changing expectations as a result of Netflix, Uber and other new on-demand cultural and economic mainstays. Around the globe (see page 44), cities have joined companies and consumers in recognizing the ability for aggregated information to drive better decisions.

But not surprisingly, the speed of municipal progress hasn’t matched that of the private sector.

“Because of shifts in technology, in what people are demanding, there’s been a general perception that government doesn’t really serve a purpose or generate a lot of value,” Mace says.

“Governments are realizing we have to get better at communicating what our value is but also communicating what we do to our citizens. The evolution of society, the increased level of customer interaction [with services like Amazon and Netflix], that’s really driving what people are expecting from their government.”

Metro’s smart city push got a nudge forward from an early failure. When the U.S. Department of Transportation did not select Metro’s application to the Smart City Challenge last year, Mayor Megan Barry decided to proceed with some of the work anyway.

“The Smart City Challenge sparked an important conversation about how to better integrate technology and data into our transportation system,” Barry said at the time. “While I’m disappointed Nashville was not selected as a finalist, the hard work we and our partners put in to prepare for this challenge generated real momentum for exploring how we use data and technology to build a more connected Nashville.”

Enter Mace, who came to Metro after a long career in public sector analytics. The Memphis native earned undergraduate and graduate business degrees from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania before turning to government-related work. She was a planner with a New Jersey police department while working on her doctorate in criminal justice, which she later taught at Michigan State University for more than a decade. During that time, she also consulted with NATO, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and other groups.

“I started to realize that there was a whole

world of government that I hadn’t thought about that needed access to business school tools and decision making,” she says. “Because not only was it government money, but it was people’s outcomes.”

FROM POLICE TO PARKING Though Mace has worked in criminal justice and with police departments for much of her career, she is quick to point out that the Metro Nashville Police Department is separate from her office and already has its own robust crime analysis unit looking at the types of data she hopes to bring to other Metro offices.

But she does cite MNPD as one prominent example of the potential for big data to improve city services.

A report published last year by local criminal justice activists indicated the police department stopped and searched black and Hispanic Nashvillians more frequently than their white counterparts, even though police were more likely to uncover evidence of unlawful activity during stops of white drivers. (Metro Police Chief Steve Anderson has refuted the report’s conclusions, calling it “morally disingenuous.”)

The differing views of the report’s outcomes notwithstanding, Mace believes equipping police officers with more robust data could reduce or eliminate implicit racial biases — whether hypothetical or actual.

“If the data doesn’t support what our contention is about the dynamics of how crime is distributed in an urban — or any — environment, it has the potential to change the way we enforce,” Mace says.

Under the VISOR umbrella, VU researchers also are looking at police data to identify patterns and assist patrolling officers.

While officers may have an inclination that certain trends exist, “the data can find these kind of patterns that you would know intuitively but don’t have the precise knowledge of,” Biswas says. “With time, we should be able to do it more or less online as the data comes in— by looking at how it’s changing from the norm and interpreting what the implications are.”

Mace says Vanderbilt’s VISOR program “has been really instrumental” in moving Nashville’s smart cities work forward. Its analytical capabilities sometimes surpass Metro’s, and the expertise of VISOR’s professors and students keeps Nashville on the cutting edge of smart cities research.

Vanderbilt also a clear self-interest in helping the city. A smarter and more efficiently run Nashville will benefit the university, nestled as it is in

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one of its densest nodes. For instance, if Nashville’s public transit system were made more efficient, VISOR’s Biswas predicts fewer VU faculty, staff and students would need to drive to campus every day, thus reducing the need for on-campus parking.

“Vanderbilt real estate is really prime property,” he says. “Why should we have so much space occupied by garages?”

Smart-city progress could kick off a virtuous circle: Some of the land now occupied by parking lots and garages could be converted to parks or student housing, further reducing the need for commuter parking.

“Those are long-term plans that need a very close partnership between the city and Vanderbilt,” Biswas says.

THINKING AHEAD Don’t start holding your breath, though, in anticipation of cities tearing down all parking garages in sight and building affordable housing and green spaces in their place. Everyone involved in these plans agrees results such as those will take a lot of time. But baby steps are being taken: Bob Murphy, president of Nashville-based RPM Transportation Consultants, says that some developers — considering the possibility of a future with fewer cars — have begun building garages so they could later be repurposed for other uses, including residential.

“We’re having to think about how we design buildings and the area around buildings in a whole different way,” he said during the panel discussion at Vanderbilt, which also covered the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on urban environments.

To take steps toward those long-term goals, VISOR managers are working alongside Metro on possible improvements to the public transit system, including tracking and predicting bus routes in real time to make commuting by public transit more efficient. Additionally, the group is looking at configuring so-called smart garages, which can track vacant spaces, adjust pricing levels and independently communicate with potential parkers.

Mace and Metro also are considering how to use urban telemetry — a sort of sensing network — to track the city’s buses and other vehicles, as well as traffic flows. Such a network could give residents and visitors better conditional information with which to make travel decisions. For example, a family heading downtown for a concert at Bridgestone Arena could quickly find out if there is — and will be — sufficient parking or if some form of public transit would be a better travel option.

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‘ g o v e r n m e n t r e a l ly i s n ’ t a b o u t t r y i n g to get you for these stupid little traffic violations. We’re about giving y o u t h e b e s t s e r v i c e t h a t w e c a n .’

Robyn Mace, Metro

“Being able to look at that info to make that trip in a real-time way is one of the things our smart city is going to have to do,” Mace says. “A pretty big driver of what younger people are looking for in public transit options — and also tourists and locals who don’t want to fight the traffic — is real-time options on our smartphones.”

But creating a network that tracks all pedestrian and vehicular traffic citywide creates a whole new set of problems: How does Metro protect privacy while at the same time collecting troves of data about anyone who passes through?

To answer that question, Mace works with Metro’s Chief Information Security Officer John Griffey and others in the mayor’s administration to develop privacy protocols.

“A lot of people have these dystopic images of the future where we as citizens are just wandering around giving up our data to everyone who’s grabbing it,” she says. “We want Metro to be open and free of unnecessary surveillance, so we are actively engaging in what is the best protection for citizens.”

That means anonymizing and aggregating data, she adds.

The work with Metro has the added benefit of turning the city into a “test pit” of real-life problems for Vanderbilt’s undergraduate and graduate students, Biswas says. Sometimes, though, it takes a little social engineering.

“How do you incentivize a change in behavior?

If you go around and ask, hardly anyone wants to give up their car,” he says. “There are many interesting problems that you couldn’t solve before because of the magnitude of the problem or its complexities, which now we have algorithms — mostly using artificial intelligence — where we can churn out a lot of these [solutions].”

TAKING THE NEXT STEPS Over the long term, Mace wants to see Metro digitally literate and fluent — meaning 30 percent of

the workforce has visualization, data manipulation and analysis skills — by 2027. Well before that, she will spend the rest of this spring and the summer directing the addition of batches of backlogged data assets to the online portal.

Before Metro’s emergency response or transit systems are revolutionized, Nashvillians can or will be able to use the open data portal to see city employees’ salaries or — a hot topic these days — which homes in their neighborhood have short-term rental permits.

“The approach we’ve taken has really been based on the needs of Nashville,” Metro CIO Durbin said during the VU panel earlier this year.

“We are not interested in shiny technology for shiny technology’s sake.”

Metro has already completed one major optimization project — low on glamor but high on practicality. Last year, Metro Public Works synchronized the timing of 550 traffic signals on 18 major pikes and roadways, a project that promised only subtle changes in motorists’ daily commutes but reduced delays citywide when viewed through the lens of cumulative data (at least according to announcements at the time).

Mace offers up another example of the sort of nuts-and-bolts improvement city governments can make with the help of big data. It centered on a single parking space in New York City.

Data scientist Ben Wellington was looking at Big Apple parking ticket data and noticed one particular fire hydrant was the site of far more tickets per year than any other place in the city.

When he went to check it out, he noticed the spot was poorly marked. After being contacted, city officials repainted the area and tickets there dropped off a cliff.

“By clearing up a situation like that, he was able to reinforce that government really isn’t about trying to get you for these stupid little traffic violations,” Mace says. “We’re about giving you the best service that we can.”

summer 2017 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

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Be a Part of the 2017 Induction Ceremony!

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A smarter world

Emerging ideas and approaches from across the globe

Gartner analysts late last year predicted that, by 2019, half of all people living in cities of 1 million people or more will benefit from smart-city programs.

Some of those benefits, they wrote, will come from the passive sharing of data via various partnerships. But they added that, as “hyperconnectivity picks up pace […], citizens will become more aware of the value of their ‘life data’ and will be willing to proactively exchange it for ‘in the moment’ value.”

Cities around the country and world are pushing hard to better collect and use data and improve their services. Here’s a snapshot of just a few of those efforts.

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chicago

b r o o k ly n

Chicago officials last summer began installing a network of 500 sensor devices to collect data on air quality, traffic patterns and other measures. The goal is to leverage the open data from the so-called Array of Things via partnerships with educational institutions and other partners and improve the quality of government and urban planning. The last of the sensors, which are being funded by the National Science Foundation and Argonne National Laboratory, will be installed next year.

The Urban-X accelerator recently moved into a new space in Brooklyn, where its leaders are taking applications for their third cohort of companies. The program, backed by auto maker Mini and Irish venture capital firm SOSV, seeks startups focused on hardware and software making various aspects of cities run better. Businesses working their way through the program this spring are developing dashboards for real estate development and connected public furniture.

arrayofthings.github.io

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s e at t l e Among the smart-city projects Seattle leaders have developed over the years is RainWatch, which converts precipitation data from a radar station into rainfall estimates that are calibrated with rain gauge measurements to predict accumulation totals up to 48 hours into the future. As a result, officials can get a better sense of where flooding could occur. m.seattle.gov/rainwatch.htm

columbus The U.S. Department of Transportation last summer named Columbus the winner of its $40 million Smart City Challenge. (The award was supplemented by $10 million from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc.) City officials plan to focus primarily on two projects: Electric self-driving shuttles linking a new bus rapid transit center and a retail district and better transportation options for a neighborhood with an infant mortality rate four times that of the national average. www.columbus.gov

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singapore Singapore leaders in 2014 rolled out an ambitious plan to become the world’s first “Smart Nation,” bringing together artificial intelligence technologies and masses of data to revamp transportation, payment, health care and other features. The system is being anchored around thousands of sensors that track traffic, air quality and crowd density, among other things.

Later this year, the government plans to launch Virtual Singapore, a hub that digitally recreates the city-state and will allow all agencies to visualize data and simulate planning and policy scenarios.

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The amount of information Glasgow collects can be personalized by residents and tourists through an open dashboard. Widgets deliver real-time information on weather, travel times, community events and more — including an overall happiness indicator — and can be arranged as users see fit. futurecity.glasgow.gov.uk

In Copenhagen, city leaders have partnered with three companies to create a public test area for internet of things technologies and other smart-city solutions.

The Street Lab project, which covers a small area near the offices of the city’s CPH Solutions Lab hub for trying out new ideas, is testing novel ways to facilitate parking and waste management as well as to monitor air quality and noise. cphsolutionslab.dk/

www.smartnation.sg www.citylab.com, search ‘Singapore’

glasgow c o p e n h a ge n

G u aya q u i l , Ecuador

singapore ecuador A team that includes Nashville-based TransCore was chosen early this year to install its TransSuite software to improve the coordination of traffic management systems in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The project includes a pilot implementation of an RFID-based bus priority system, with TransCore will in the next phase to coordinate the integration of other controllers, closed-circuit TV and Bluetooth readers to enable better travel time calculations. bit.ly/smartguayaquil

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From the ground up A new city being built in the shadow of the Rockies is giving Vanderbilt researchers the chance to research new home technologies

The development of Sterling Ranch, a sprawling master-planned community southwest of Denver, was an unprecedented opportunity to incorporate smart home and smart city features in what is predicted to be a community of 45,000 people, 12,000 residential units and 2 million square feet of commercial and retail space.

When the first residents of the community move in — which could happen as soon as this August — they’ll be welcomed by homes able to track and automate water, electricity and gas use in real time, among other innovations included by the developers. The enormous undertaking has been underway for a decade and will continue for years to come, but in the last two years,

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Vanderbilt University students and professors have joined the effort, using the development as a test lab and training ground for engineering and education.

(The development will eventually include as many as seven schools.)

It’s one of several Vanderbilt transinstitutional programs that are part of a $50 million initiative introduced in 2014

by Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos as a way to combine research resources across multiple schools and departments.

Brock Smethills, chief technology officer of Sterling Ranch Development Co., graduated just four years ago with a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt’s engineering school. He says he called up a professor there and told him, “We’re designing a wastewater system, a road

network, a fiber optic network, in-home technologies — all these engineering efforts that we are undertaking — and it would make a lot of sense for your undergraduates to get involved with that.”

Vanderbilt leaders eventually approved the project and a number of education and engineering professors and students have been to Colorado to study and work on the homes and community plans. Smethills says Vanderbilt has applied for a National Science Foundation grant that could lead to the next phase of involvement between the university and Sterling Ranch. Such funding could allow VU researchers to collect and analyze energy usage data from Sterling Ranch homes, possibly leading to money- and resource-saving changes to the way future homes are designed and built.

“This will be anywhere from 100 to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 units that can opt in to share that information. It will be the largest sample size in the country that we can find,” Smethills says. “It’s very valuable information.” > Stephen Elliott

PROVIDED BY Sterling Ranch Development Company

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SECURITY

Privacy is dynamic: Best practices for smart strategy Companies need to lead in protection, government should create flexible frameworks

by Lydia Jones and Robyn Mace

echnology has transformed expectations of privacy in the 21st century. Strategic thinking for effective, productive and profitable data collection and data use is now, more than ever, critical for business success in the private, public and nonprofit sectors.

Public- and private-sector leaders, elected officials and citizen consumers have compelling, and sometimes competing, interests to deliberately and systematically address how to best manage regulatory, operational and social obligations to protect individual identities as well as the privacy of the individuals they represent. Simultaneously, society must also grapple with how to appropriately regulate markets and protect users in complicated and sometimes politically or economically volatile circumstances.

Considering big data and privacy in terms of data collection and use, privacy regulations and data disclosures provide a solid framework to contemplate the conveniences, efficiencies and costs that influence privacy concerns in various contexts. These three counter-intuitive insights can help shape strategic thinking on data and privacy:

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• Data collection and use are context specific. Obligations and levels of protection vary depending on the collector and circumstances.

For example, an individual choosing to share genetic data with a doctor, public health department and private commercial testing entity should expect quite different legal duties regarding privacy protection from each. Doctors are bound by patient confidentiality, professional and legal regulations, standards and practices. Public health departments are similarly bound — and further restricted by government data processing and storage rules. Private companies without explicit regulatory requirements are bound by their terms of service and privacy policies and informed by industry regulation, including those enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.

While the genetic data remains the same in these examples, the privacy obligations do not; instead, those obligations are dynamic and vary according to context.

• Privacy regulations reasonably should include data sharing. If properly structured, regulations can

foster innovation, engagement and individual protections. The possibilities of continuous sensing through the internet of things (e.g., Wi-Fi or wire-connected devices) necessitate that consumers and manufacturers be aware, informed and responsible about the personally sensitive data smart devices capture.

Chicago’s Array of Things, an urban sensor network designed to capture environmental and infrastructure data, is being engineered (and anonymized) to allow city officials, technology developers, citizens and researchers access to data to generate energy efficiency, traffic improvements, air and water quality improvements and better city planning. And German officials recently ordered parents to destroy or disable a toy that allowed access to the internet through speech recognition software and control of the toy through an application. Its Bluetooth device had no password protection or other controls to prevent remote monitoring of conversations.

• Data disclosures — whether to citizens, consumers or business partners — are integral for maximizing the value of an organization’s data. Available and transparent privacy policies enable informed decision-making about the disclosure of data based on the value of services, risk tolerance and institutional commitment to best practices. Easy-to-understand disclosures should be a part of every strategic plan to maximize the value of data. Yahoo, for example, publicly disclosed a policy of scanning, and possibly sharing, emails between subscribers but faced class-action litigation over whether non-Yahoo Mail subscribers were on notice of, and therefore consented, to this policy as well.

In other words, disclosures to nonYahoo Mail subscribers were just as important as disclosures to Yahoo’s actual customer subscribers.

Privacy, like technology, is not static; it is dynamic. And it contin-

ues to evolve as imagination, technology and services proliferate and expand boundaries of established convention and law. Companies must take the lead to develop and clearly communicate appropriate and sufficient protections around products and services to ensure the safety, privacy and trust of their consumers.

Similarly, governments must create flexible regulatory frameworks that facilitate consumer protections while enabling businesses to develop new products and services.

Agencies must also fulfill their data-related obligations and disclosures in transparent and engaging ways that build (or restore) trust, confidence and legitimacy.

Finally, consumers — especially parents — must take time to understand the implications and impacts of terms of service, particularly for “free” services — and be willing to say no to products and services with policies that do not respect their values.

Looking forward, IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, sensor technology and other innovative developments present almost innumerable opportunities for companies to address and alleviate consumer concerns around data sharing. There’s never been a better time to think explicitly and systematically about privacy. Privacy is inherently dynamic and strategic best practices should be as well.

Robyn Mace is the chief data officer for Metro Nashville Government. Lydia Jones is a data monetization strategist, the founder of the Data Monetization Workshop and an adjunct professor of law at Vanderbilt and Boston University law schools.

Since the submission of this guest column, Jones has joined Gartner Inc. as an analyst. Nothing in this column should be considered an expression of opinion by or a statement of Metro or Gartner.

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‘ Y o u c a n u s u a l ly f i g u r e out whether your team h a s a w e a k p l a y e r .’

Amy Leopard, Bradley

An interdisciplinary fire drill For many businesses, a cyber attack is all but inevitable.

What do you do when it hits? by stephen elliotT

t’s not “if,” but “when.”

Businesses, individuals and other computer users (read: everyone) should expect to one day be victimized by a cyber attack.

“If somebody is determined enough, there’s no secret system that’s 100 percent safe,” says Amy Leopard, a partner in Bradley Arant Boult Cummings’ Nashville office and co-leader of the firm’s cybersecurity and privacy practice group. “The actors you’re dealing with are incredibly sophisticated.”

Bradley started its practice group three years ago, and it now includes 17 lawyers from multiple offices and practice groups. It’s also led by partner Paige Boshell in the firm’s Birmingham main office and includes attorney Jordan Stivers in Nashville. Leopard, Boshell and Stivers recently joined the Post to discuss cybersecurity.

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One thing clear from that conversation: It’s perhaps equally as important to be prepared for the fallout from a cyber breach as it is to actually defend yourself from attacks.

“The first step is, you’ve got to stop it,” says Boshell. “We usually get called soon enough by our clients that they’re just discovering that something happened.”

A cyber breach can cause chaos within a business, according to the lawyers, who deal with them in one form or another about once a week.

“You’re running on different tracks all at the same time,” Boshell says. “You’ve got a group of people trying to stop it, a group of people trying to assess what happened factually, a group of people trying to assess the legal implications.

You’ve got marketing/PR and internal HR people trying to come up with a coherent message.”

Leopard, who compares these situations to a “fire drill scenario,” says she tries to get businesses to practice incident response before a breach occurs. By practicing, she says, “you can usually figure out whether your team has a weak player, whether people work together well. You

can’t have people eating each other.”

One of the challenges in responding to cyber breaches is the diversity of expertise needed.

“You can’t just call a banking lawyer for a bank breach,” Boshell says. You might also need a litigator, an employment lawyer and an attorney with experience in government regulation.

“As law firms have gotten called more and more, their awareness has increased about what an interdisciplinary response it has to be.”

After notifying clients affected by a data breach, some organizations set up credit monitoring and other protection regimes for the affected individuals, either out of a legal obligation or a commitment to the clients. The industry standard is to provide that service for about two years, says Ben Flatgard, who led cybersecurity policy in the Obama National Security Council and moved to Nashville after the inauguration of Donald Trump in January.

But the need to provide protection after the fact and prepare an adequate response to a breach can be rendered moot by taking some basic precautionary measures.

“Once the incident happens, it’s kind of too late,” Flatgard says. “Companies can say they take security seriously, but until they put in place some pretty basic protections, it’s not going to get better.”

Recent high-profile data breaches — including at Yahoo and Anthem and during the 2016 presidential election — have caused businesses and individuals to pay attention to cybersecurity, but not everyone is on the same page.

“People are either extremely sophisticated or extremely ignorant, and there’s not a whole lot of middle ground,” Leopard says.

That’s a sentiment echoed by Flatgard, who has consulted for companies since his move to Nashville and is working on breach response education programs.

“It’s still astonishing how poorly a lot of companies end up managing security incidents,” he says. “The companies who don’t get out in front of the incident and communicate clearly and effectively are the ones who end up suffering the greatest impact.”

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SECURITY

Learn to code in Nashville.

We’ll teach you web development and help you find a job.

Mel Taylor Splitsecnd

NOT BY ACCIDENT Startup Splitsecnd primed for growth after pivot, partnership with German company

by Cillea HougHton

theironyard.com/nashville or call us: 615.953.0089

hen Splitsecnd President and CEO Mel Taylor and her team approached the head of the trauma unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center on various occasions in December 2014, they asked one question: “What information, if we can get it to you, can help save a life?”

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It was a defining moment for the Nashville-based company, which has since evolved into a global enterprise with a seemingly simple device that offers anything but simplistic results.

Originally, Splitsecnd (the company stylizes as “splitsecnd”) started in 2010 as a conceptual app by then-Vanderbilt University undergraduates William Green and Chris Thompson. In 2014, Splitsecnd acquired the rights to the app and patents, with Taylor re-founding the company as it is known today via JumpStart Foundry. At that point, Taylor quickly realized it would best flourish as a stand-alone and fully self-functioning device.

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That pivot is complete. Now Splitsecnd is an auto crash detection and notification device that plugs into a vehicle’s 12-Volt cigarette lighter oulet and notifies first responders and emergency contacts when there has been an accident — in addition to being able to handle several other crucial tasks.

The device works automatically in a vehicular accident, immediately connecting with a 24-hour call center and capturing all the vital information from the crash — including speed, what direction the car was moving, force of impact and medical information that alerts first responders as to what trauma level condition, if any, the person is experiencing. Also functioning as a cell phone, the device can operate for four hours outside the vehicle.

Taylor and Splitsecnd officials have hit on some of the city’s major industries — such as health care, transportation and tourism — to create worldwide availability.

Before gaining certification from the Federal Communications Commission, the Global Certification Forum and the European Economic Area (among others), the team engaged in a “huge amount” of research to decipher what features needed to be included in the device, working with several engineers to build the product.

“And we’ve pushed the boundaries that whole time,” Taylor says. “So our absolute mantra that we come back to every day is ‘safety and simplicity.’ Everything we do is based around that.”

The company recently partnered with Orange, a French cellular carrier that utilizes a global SIM that allows Splitsecnd to roam on a strong signal regardless of wireless carrier or country.

But its main international partner is Germany-based SAP, which discovered Splitsecnd during its yearly accelerator program in which startup companies showcase ideas to global players. Splitsecnd was accepted into the multinational software corporation’s insurance and mobility categories, one of the first times a company has accomplished such a feat with SAP, which bills itself as offering regional offices in 130 countries and 345,000 customers in 180 countries.

SAP (systems, applications and products in data processing) is in the process of setting up in vehicles wireless connectivity that would allow consumers to pre-book and pay for parking spots and gas pumps, with Splitsecnd providing that connectivity. All of these factors feed into the mission of technologically driven smart cities, Taylor says.

“So what we’re moving toward is this whole smart city and this flow of critical data in a way that the consumer does not have to ever worry about what to integrate with. So SAP is very much on the road map of where we’re headed,” Taylor says of the partnership.

In addition to global collaborators, new legislation in Europe and Japan is going to cause an increase in Splitsecnd’s production. A new law set to be enacted

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in Europe in January 2018 states that all new vehicles must have some form of auto crash detection notification. Additionally, Japan has banned the use of the on-board diagnostics II port in any aftermarket vehicles. Located under the steering wheel and controlling many car functions, the OBD has been subject to hacking over the past few years through its wireless connection. Since it operates completely separate from the OBD-II port, Splitsecnd is unable to be hacked.

“It is going to cause exponential growth for Splitsecnd,” Taylor explains of the new worldwide legislation. “Europe has become a huge opportunity for us.

Japan is going to be a very obvious market. There’s clearly demand as we’re finding out right now. We know we are the only fully compliant device on the aftermarket (the market for spare parts, accessories, and components, especially for motor vehicles).

“And we are currently going through certification and have no doubt that we will be getting that in the very near future,” she adds.

A change in how the product is sold represents a major shift in Splitsecnd’s future. Initially, the company sold directly to consumers but has since transitioned into selling to businesses and government companies, in large response to the upcoming legislative changes.

“The biggest challenge is how do we bring that to the aftermarket,” Taylor says of pain points for companies and government entities. “And that’s where Splitsecnd solves the problem. We recognize that we can bring this to consumers much quicker if we are working with a B-to-B-to-C environment,” she explains. “Once we have all of this data, there’s a huge amount we can do to benefit cities with regard to governments or municipalities.”

In joining SAP’s worldwide network, splitsecnd’s own platform will grow exponentially with corporate clients, many with millions of members.

“If we’re able to have them get it out to the network as quickly as they can, it makes a big difference,” Taylor says. “The impact on Splitsecnd is that we’re going to just experience global growth much quicker than was originally anticipated, which is a very good problem to have.”

In fact, Splitsecnd is already planning for the future of connected cars with built-in technology, adapting the product so that it never becomes obsolete. Taylor says that Splitsecnd’s “complex” platform will still be able to connect to built-in systems.

“We would end up being the platform that is able to almost be device-agnostic,” she says. “Anything that can provide me that data on the vehicle can come through the Splitsecnd platform.

“On top of that, we’re evolving with SAP, which is going to be very much platform-driven as well,” Taylor adds. “We’re going to make sure that we’re relevant for a very long time.”

WITT provides a forum to empower women and girls in technology through education, outreach, mentoring, and networking.

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FEATURES

BLOCKCHAIN

Blockchain’s promise and hurdles Attorney outlines progress, regulatory issues around emerging platform

efore joining the intellectual property practice group at Waller, Kristen Johns was general counsel for a life sciences startup and part of the legal team at the former Emdeon. Those experiences and her work on cybersecurity and data privacy have transitioned nicely into her being an emerging expert in blockchain or distributed ledger technology.

Here, Johns answers a few of the Post’s questions about the adoption of blockchain in health care — which, she notes, lags the finance and supply chain sectors — and where things might go in the coming years.

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Is blockchain the solution for all the challenges in health data management?

Blockchain should be considered one of numerous options. Recognizing the burgeoning interest of blockchain technology in health care, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology and the Office of the National Coordinator sponsored a competition soliciting white papers about potential uses in the summer of 2016. Of the 72 papers submitted, 15 winners presented ideas including a “Health Information Exchange of One” (from Adrian Gropper) to a decentralized record management system called “MedRec” (from MIT). Uses with commercial applicability already exist in connection with clinical trial management and claims processing.

Because so much hype surrounds the blockchain discussion, some groups seek a blockchain-based solution without a thoughtful analysis of the existing problem.

Similarly, some have eschewed blockchain technology without fully understanding the technology and its potential. Learning the fundamentals of the technology, including the nuances of this distributed ledger, is essential. Blockchain technology is not a panacea. Some problems can be resolved by using existing technologies, such as a centralized database or multiple databases with subscription capability.

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Which industry players are already moving in the direction of blockchain adoption?

Many health care institutions, especially payers such

Kristen Johns

as Cigna and Aetna, have blockchain initiatives. Companies such as Gem have been blazing a trail in collaborations and blockchain education. Numerous start-ups are building applications with specific focus, such as health research and clinical trials. For example, PokItDok, a Savannah startup, has built its own clearinghouse and records certain transactions on a blockchain platform. In some cases, a blockchain solution can complement existing infrastructure.

What regulatory issues are impeding the move from conversation to action?

From a legal perspective, there is not one gating issue or regulation that precludes the widespread adoption of blockchain technology in health care. The current, but admittedly inadequate, answer to a legal question is, “It depends.” This is because further analysis of existing federal and state laws is necessary to define potential or existing barriers to implementation and adoption.

Parts of HIPAA, for example, are based on a structure where one entity has been granted permission to have custody or control over personal health information for a specific purpose. Because blockchain is a decentralized platform, the inherent hierarchy of control and access is eliminated. Initial uses of distributed ledger technology have avoided navigating these complex regulatory issues.

The current environment is one of legislative uncertainty. The 21st Century Cures Act was enacted in December and provides a statutory definition of “information blocking.” Eliminating some of the silos that exist in today’s health care system is one of the great promises of blockchain technology. The combination of these legislative efforts and the potential of blockchain technology are some necessary steps for more widespread and rapid adoption.

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BLOCKCHAIN

FEATURES

‘The noTion of fasT follower is a fallacy in a paradigm shifT’

Shout out to all the real tech innovators in Nashville!

by coREy TodARo And gilES wARd

In general terrms, a blockchain is a shared, distributed and secure ledger.

A simple definition but one in which the significance of each word is crucial — if any piece goes missing, it isn’t a blockchain. Blockchain allows a network of transactional parties to share a common ledger, but rather than a single copy, every transactional party has its own copy of the entire ledger.

The breakthrough is twofold: A blockchain allows all copies of that ledger to be in sync and in consensus at all times — there is no need for transacting parties to reconcile their own copies of the ledger and the security that comes from the fact that once something hits the ledger it cannot be changed.

In health care, blockchain addresses the bureaucratic transactional inefficiency that adds tremendous cost and burden to the system but does nothing to improve the point of care. A matter as simple as picking up a prescription masks an often incredibly complex sequence of events: A prescription is called, faxed or hand-delivered to a pharmacy, which then does eligibility, prior-authorization or network coverage checks before looking at formulary, step therapy requirements and preferred drug offerings. Patient assistance programs, rebates, and deductible and copay checks all factor in and don’t yet consider if your pharmacy even has the drug you need in stock or if it can be ordered.

All of these administrative tasks are kicked off by that prescription cascade, often in isolation — the findings from one check are not necessarily passed on to the next. This can cause delays, questions, phone calls and even costs that could be avoided if that prescription simply followed a set of rules down a single transaction path.

To reframe the context slightly, think of the patient as the ultimate ledger in health care — every “transaction” goes through the patient. Every prod, poke, pill, scan, session, visit, consult,

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Corey Todaro

test, insurance card, copay, deductible and admission goes through you, the patient. Why can our records not do the same? Blockchain brings the thread of trust and identity that could securely tie together all those siloed encounters and data sets.

As we sit in Music City — the epicenter of health care purchasing power — and look at a skyline dominated by the kings of provider-side health care, we must consider the impact and implications of blockchain. Nashville has an opportunity here; the notion of fast follower is a fallacy in a paradigm shift.

The path to widespread adoption of blockchain architecture must come through Nashville and there is no reason that we can’t embrace the work that is already being done and ensure that it finds a home. The first and second annual global conferences on blockchain in health care (Distributed:Health) have taken and will take place here. If we unite around this technology now, there is no reason for us to consider that year three’s conference might be anywhere else.

Corey Todaro is COO and Giles Ward is the executive director of the Blockchain Consortium at Hashed Health, a collaborative health care innovation firm dedicated to realizing the potential of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. www.hashedhealth.com

Take control of your product content.

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5/11/17 1:05 1:04 PM

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FIBER

High-speed chase

Nashville drives toward an ultrafast internet future — despite potholes

by Linda Bryant

any Nashvillians, especially business and civic leaders, were overjoyed when Google Fiber announced in 2015 plans to expand into Nashville.

Fueling that excitement: the hope of ultrafast internet speed — as much as 100 times faster than traditional broadband and, for example, enough to download an HD movie in 40 seconds. Many in the city’s entrepreneurial class immediately embraced Google Fiber, expecting the quality and speed of its connectivity to dramatically impact their productivity, creativity and technical sophistication.

But the reality of the Google Fiber rollout has been markedly different than the lofty expectations that accompanied it. Indeed, it’s been a sobering experience for those who dreamed of Nashville becoming an elite hightech hub known for its lightning-fast internet access and speed and its ability to attract top technology sector.

Rather, the rollout has been considerably slower — and much more disappointing and legally complicated — than anyone anticipated. And, until very recently, many thought Google Fiber, which is part of the Access division

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of Mountain View, California-based Alphabet Inc., was close to exiting the Nashville market altogether.

Now, more than two years after announcing its entrance into Nashville, Google Fiber is signaling that it is ready to move forward, albeit at a gingerly pace.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the future of ultrafast internet in Nashville is certain, and some tech sector leaders remain displeased about that.

Others appear content knowing Nashville is probably not going be considered an elite city regarding fiber speed anytime soon.

Too late to ‘upset the apple cart’?

You can count Steve Proctor among those who are frustrated with the slow rollout and by lawsuits from telecom giants AT&T and Comcast that challenge Google Fiber’s One Touch Make Ready program.

Proctor, who is CEO of Nashville-based software as a service provider Edgenet, believes the actions of AT&T and Comcast are thwarting free competition in the Nashville market.

“I’m happy to upset this apple cart,” Proctor says. “I don’t think people understand what’s happening. The lack of accessibility [to ultrafast fiber networks] is a big issue. Faster internet makes things easier, which in turn makes us more productive and information more accessible. It makes Nashville more credible.

“It simply does not speak well for innovation in this city or Nashville’s reputation with technology that we’re sitting by while a monopoly protects its own,” Proctor adds.

“Who are Comcast and AT&T to pick Nashville as their battleground?” Proctor asks. “It inhibits innova-

tion, and we are a state that needs innovation badly. Our education and income are not in the top half.

You need the innovation because the whole basis of capitalism is that competition makes the service better.”

Brian Moyer, CEO of the Nashville Technology Council, takes a more neutral stance. He says the city enjoys improved internet connectivity compared to three years ago and that competition has been spurred by Google Fiber’s local presence.

While Moyer concedes that Nashville’s broadband and fiber optic speeds aren’t considered among the nation’s upper tier, he says they are respectable nonetheless.

“We have more gigabits than most communities in the country.

Most places only have about two providers,” Moyer says.

“People tend to think of this whole issue in black-and-white terms; you either support Google Fiber or you don’t,” Moyer adds.

“The issue is way more complicated than that. The thought of Google Fiber happening quickly here was probably unrealistic to begin with.”

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FIBER

Access OK, but not the best As stakeholders in Nashville waited for the gifts of a speedy fiber network, other cities in the region such as Chattanooga and Huntsville (and even Clarksville) radically improved their fiber offerings.

Christopher Mitchell, a national expert who tracks and analyzes community broadband systems nationwide, says Nashville can do better.

But Mitchell, who is the director of community broadband networks at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, also acknowledges that the city is in decent shape regarding quality and speed of connectivity.

“You aren’t ever going to have poor access in Nashville. At the worst, you’re going to have mediocre or average service,” Mitchell says. “Even the mention of Google Fiber coming in caused AT&T and Comcast to up their game.

“Legal games are part of the problem in Nashville,” Mitchell adds. “What’s really frustrating is that normally it would be difficult to build a network in a city as large as Nashville. But when you are also facing AT&T or Comcast holding

things up, getting things done becomes really hard.”

Mitchell highly commends Chattanooga, which has branded itself as “Gig City” and now has one of the least expensive high-speed internet services in the United States.

The city is one of the only in the world with internet speeds as fast as one gigabit per second — about 50 times faster than the U.S. average.

To achieve this, Chattanooga’s municipally owned electricity company, EPB, built a citywide fiber network that requires companies such as Google Fiber or AT&T to lease pole space directly from the utility.

“Chattanooga has the most successful [municipally-owned, fiberbased internet system] of its kind in the country,” Mitchell says. “Nashville may or may not [be able] to do what Chattanooga did, but it’s an option available to any city in Tennessee with a municipal electric utility.

“It’s important to know [Nashville has] options, especially now that Google is not building these networks at the pace that was expected,” Mitchell adds. “If businesses feel they can’t get the connectivity they need from AT&T and Comcast, hoping Google Fiber solves the problem is probably not the most promising route. Finding an innovative partnership or doing something themselves [with a public utility] is an option.”

The most likely scenario — though not necessarily the one Mitchell believes is the best for customers — is that Nashville will continue its uneven march into ultrafast internet service as AT&T, Comcast and Google Fiber continue to duke it out.

In other words, although it’s theoretically possible, it’s not likely that Nashville can replicate the highspeed nirvana Chattanooga has created. And Mitchell believes Nashville is worse off because of it.

“If I was in business and considering moving to Tennessee, there’s no way I’d go to Nashville,” Mitchell says, adding he would choose Chat-

tanooga, Clarksville or even Tullahoma, because of the quality and speed of those cities’ internet service.

Google Fiber speaks In recent months, hopes haven’t been high for the future of Google Fiber in Nashville. The lack of optimism isn’t just because of still-unresolved legal battles; indeed, several national news reports have indicated the technology giant is set to curb expansion efforts in other cities.

But don’t count Google Fiber out, yet.

In April, just when many seemed ready to give up on the company altogether, officials sent to Nashville Electric Service a signal that indicates they are ready to move forward with pole installations.

“Google Fiber has given us indication that they plan to utilize the One Touch Make Ready process beginning mid-May,” says Holden Sheriff, an NES spokesperson. “[They said] that they have approximately 100 poles that will be ready to utilize the One Touch Make Ready process at that time.”

Martha Ivester, city manager of Google Fiber Nashville, says the company is still committed to Nashville.

“We’re continuing to make progress thanks to the innovative construction and deployment methods we are using in Nashville, including One Touch Make Ready,” Ivester says. “We plan to connect the first single-family homes, along with more condos and apartment buildings, later this year.

“We started Google Fiber to connect more people to superfast and abundant internet — here in Nashville and across the United States,” Ivestor continues. “Two years ago, people in Nashville had no gig options available. Now there are three.

We believe that access to high-speed broadband will drive more innovation in Nashville. Demand for fiber continues to grow, and we continue to push the boundaries of technology to [deliver] superfast internet.”

Google Fiber facts and timeline 2015

After announcing its debut in Nashville, Google Fiber officials determined that running fiber cables underground is an unworkable option since the city sits on a massive bed of limestone rock.

2016

Google Fiber then focused on fiber installation on telephone poles, pushing for an ordinance known as One Touch Make Ready. The legislation, which passed Metro Council with broad support, expedites the fiber installation process by allowing companies looking to attach to utility poles to move competitors’ equipment.

Late 2016

One Touch Make Ready was a big win for Google Fiber. But immediately after it became law, AT&T and Comcast, Google Fiber’s main competitors, filed lawsuits to block the ordinance. The telecom giants argued that Metro lacks the authority to regulate poles owned by Nashville Electric Service and that the new law violates existing contracts with the local power provider.

April 2017

Officials with Google Fiber, which is available in only 20 Nashville buildings, signal to NES they plan to move ahead with more installations.

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AUTOMATE

Dr. Julie Adams

Brave new world

Human-robot collaboration expert talks automation and artificial intelligence in the modern economy

r. Julie Adams, a former Vanderbilt University professor and an expert on artificial intelligence, robotics and human-machine teaming, spoke at TEDxNashville in March on the topic of “Robots and Humans — When It’s Best They Work Together.”

Adams, now at Oregon State University, is not the only one thinking about these issues. Elon Musk (perhaps most vocally), Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking have all called for more oversight of the development of new artificial intelligence technologies for fear that the technology could someday break free of the constraints implemented by its human creators.

When we caught up with Adams after the TEDxNashville event, she said that even though some of the criticism of artificial intelligence is fueled by “overzealousness,” there is valid cause for concern — as there is with any new technology.

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Adams spoke with the Post’s Stephen Elliott, touching on the future of the economy, humanrobot collaboration and regulatory roadblocks in the field of artificial intelligence.

What industries are ripe for more human-robot collaboration?

A large number of applications have the potential to be positively impacted by robotic technology that can collaborate with humans. I mentioned a few such applications in my talk, but examples include industrial manufacturing that does not rely on stationary, caged robot manipulators and any organization that requires coordination with humans for the delivery of goods, such as fulfillment centers.

Further, the automation of agriculture is also an area that is on the cusp of benefiting from cooperative robots; however, such systems need to have low barriers on entry, [equally] on cost, maintainability and usability. Similar comments can be made for robots that can assist with health care.

These are just a few of the possible applications. The 2016 U.S. Robotics Roadmap provides significantly more examples.

Why are people concerned about the growing prominence of robots and artificial intelligence?

One reason people are concerned is because of their perceptions of robotic and artificial intelligence technology based on the Hollywood representations and the tendency of those representations to sensationalize the technology.

Having said that, there is cause to be concerned.

Unbridled development of the technology can potentially result in technology that may be able to outthink, outwit and outperform humans.

The technology may not have ethics or morals representative of humans, in which case it may not be tied to the types of threats and consequences that curb human behavior.

Should people be concerned about growth in the artificial intelligence field?

Yes, there is reason to be concerned about the safety of any new technology, but there is also a bit of overzealousness in the warnings stated by various individuals about such technologies.

The technologies have significantly improved over the last 10 years, and it is very possible that continued improvements will occur on more rapid time scales.

At the same time, there are organizations in place, irrespective of your opinion, that are intentionally, or unintentionally, curbing the technology. Unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) are an excellent example. The FAA regulations on drones basically made it so difficult to fly a vehicle that very few people were doing so legally until the rules were simplified in 2016, which made the technology more accessible. The changes to the FAA regulations in August 2016 made it easier for consumers as hobbyists to fly but still have not removed all the constraints on those who wish to fly for business or research purposes.

Similar concerns have arisen with prior technologies — automobiles for example. But over time, not only have the necessary rules and regulations regarding the use of automobiles been solidified, they have also become accepted by society.

As a researcher, I hate to see restrictions put on robotic technology, but I expect that there will be rules and regulations placed on this technology that will curb the concern.

What sort of jobs will disappear as we rely more on robots?

Jobs that require manual labor — for example, farming, janitorial work, long-haul truck drivers — will likely disappear or be transformed.

In other areas, robots will not take away jobs, but they will transform the existing jobs. For example, in health care, robots may handle portions of the jobs nurses and nursing assistants now do, such as checking vital signs, changing bedding and helping patients with therapy and bathing, while freeing the humans to focus on other aspects of patient care.

It is not unusual for new technologies to eliminate or transform existing jobs while creating new jobs. When automobiles replaced horse-drawn carriages, blacksmiths and wagon

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building and maintenance jobs were virtually eliminated and replaced by jobs manufacturing, maintaining and selling automobiles as well as the development and maintenance of the necessary infrastructure to support automobiles.

What kind of jobs could replace them?

Many jobs will be transformed, in that the humans will need to learn some advanced skills in order to monitor and interact with the robots and be more productive. A CNN video interviewing Detroit autoworkers does a very nice job of explaining how robots have transformed the jobs of some of the interviewees. When I first was watching the video, quite frankly, I expected the interviewees to be negative about the introduction of automation and robots into the automobile industry. Their statements were quite the opposite.

There will also be jobs such as robot system development, sales positions, maintenance, etc.

In many respects, the types of jobs that will be created are loosely similar to some of the jobs that were created by the development of the automobile industry.

Further, there will be necessary infrastructure that has to be developed and maintained in order for robots to be effective in the daily interactions with their human teammates. This infrastructure will not be roads or sidewalks but will be other types of infrastructure, such as communication networks, power charging stations, etc.

What kind of roadblocks could get in the way of expanded human-robot collaboration?

Just as FAA regulations tied the hands of those developing unmanned aerial vehicles and continue to hinder the development of advanced technologies for UAVs — such as autonomous flight and flying multiple vehicles simultaneously — over-regulation has the potential to very much influence the manner in which robots are deployed. Other countries have fewer regulations and are leapfrogging over the United States in their development, testing and deployment of these technologies.

There are also a number of technical questions that still have to be solved in order for robots to be effective partners. There are domains in

FEATURES

which robots can be effective collaborators today, such as those that have a well-defined environment and do not change rapidly. Other domains, such as first response to natural disasters, continue to be problematic for the technology to adapt to and deploy quickly enough to be useful or to have the robustness to avoid failure to handle such complex environments.

There are also ethical and social norms that robots have to be able to understand and adhere [to] or they will not be acceptable collaborative partners. Robots need to be able to perceive situations and understand how to act appropriately within the social and ethical contexts, norms and rules. Robots are making headway in this area, but long-term usage on a daily basis will require significant advances in this area.

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5/11/17 12:30 12:23 PM

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AT HOME

Zachary Watson HoneyCo

get smart

Off-the-shelf technology brings senior care back to the home by stephen elliotT

t’s a familiar dilemma for anyone who has cared for an aging parent.

Hire expensive in-home caregivers or move the parent to a nursing facility. Or do neither and worry through the night that the loved one living alone has taken a spill or fallen ill.

Each choice is as unappealing as the next.

But a Nashville startup is pioneering a way to address such concerns:

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in-home technology that tracks residents in order to inform offsite caregivers (be they professionals or family) of unusual activity. For example, a resident wakes up in the middle of the night, falls on the way to the bathroom and never returns to bed.

Technology offered by HoneyCo — including motion sensors and other connected devices — can sense the problem and text alert a caregiver.

HoneyCo and its CEO, Zachary Watson, have set up shop in a single-family home in Sylvan Park, with software development handled in the back and technology demonstration in the front. The company raised more than $1 million last year and is currently in the middle of preseries A seed extension.

Watson says he first drew inspiration for the home technology from a surprising place — San Quentin State Prison, where he volunteered teaching math courses to inmates while a student seeking an M.B.A. degree at Stanford.

“There are social systems in which one can be caught that exacerbate the problem. That system made these people’s lives worse,” he says.

After completing business school, he began investing in the senior care industry, and, “it was kind of the same system in place, where once a patient is a part of this cycle, the activ-

ity and the wellness of a resident in an assisted living facility declined more rapidly than those who aren’t in a facility.”

The product has moved past the beta stage and Watson says the company will begin marketing more widely this summer.

“There’s a dramatic underutilization of technology in elder care,” says Watson, who moved to Nashville from New York last year.

HoneyCo’s technology, he adds, “does the worrying about the resident for the user.”

It can take a level of stress off the adult child located across the country, or even across town, the company’s CEO says: “If there’s something that comes up in the home that’s concerning, then we’ll push a text message to them. It helps families take care of one another even if they may be remote.”

HoneyCo is more like an insurance agency than a tech start-up: The company wants you to purchase the product but never have to use it.

“We’re trying to drive our user engagement to zero, whereas everyone else is, for the most part, trying to get you to engage more,” Watson says, “because that means a) everyone is safe, and b) we’re freeing up mental bandwidth for people who are otherwise concerned or checking in or swinging by when they don’t necessarily have to.”

daniel meigs

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ADVISE

Jim Jamieson EvidenceCare

Early evidence

Health care decision support software venture off to a quick start

by Geert DE Lombaerde

aced with a tricky question and without all the info he wanted to have, Brian Fengler turned to the web for some help and guidance. We’ve all done it.

The twist versus our mostly random trivia searches: Fengler, an emergency room doctor, was treating a woman 36 weeks into her pregnancy and dealing with a pulmonary embolism.

He spent precious time digging for answers without success. And while the decision he eventually made turned out fine for both mother and fetus, the episode gnawed at him — as both a clinician and an entrepreneur.

What if, Fengler thought, ER doctors and nurses could have at their fingertips vetted medical information and treatment recommen-

F

dations that would guide them to make better decisions specific to the symptoms patients were presenting? It was 2012 and Fengler was managing partner of Physicians Urgent Care.

But he saw the potential.

When Jim Jamieson was told of the idea, he was equally enthused.

“I saw this could be a huge game changer,” says Jamieson, who spent more than a decade in the revenue cycle management space in addition to having international sales experience.

“It really could change the quality of care where it matters most.”

Fast forward to last summer. After some small-scale testing, EvidenceCare publicly launched its service. Less than a year later, 2,000 providers are using its tools, the EvidenceCare team has closed on another $2 million in funding — pushing its total to $3.6 million — and a scalable enterprise version of its product is almost ready for a summer rollout.

All of that growth has come with a full-time team of a dozen people — with a few more nurses coming on board soon — that thrives on efficiency and focus.

“We’re not a bunch of college kids with a good idea,” says Jamieson, now the company’s COO. “We’re all experienced and we knew what we needed to do to get off to a good start.”

Jamieson’s background in the military — he’s a former Marine who specialized in logistics support as a Pentagon contractor during the second Gulf War in the early 2000s — drives the company’s lean-and-mean model. Each week, Fengler, Jamieson, Chief Experience Officer Deb Miller and Chief Technology Officer Howard Bright huddle to make sure they’re still on track and focused on the necessary priorities. The main rule hasn’t changed since the company’s founding.

“If it’s not revenue-generating, we’re not going to do it,” Jamieson says.

Plenty more revenue sources are out there. Fengler, Jamieson and Miller see huge opportunities for EvidenceCare in health care segments beyond emergency medicine and beyond U.S. borders. With regulators increasingly stressing quality measures — and penalizing errors via lower reimbursement rates — the EvidenceCare team has begun adding protocols to help eliminate hospital-acquired infections.

Beyond that, future targets include the obstetrics and gastrointestinal spaces — the latter being of particular interest to board member and lead investor Don Lazas, who runs NueCura Partners and is a partner at Associates in Gastroenterology and Associated Endoscopy on the campus of TriStar Summit Medical Center.

EvidenceCare already is global due to word of mouth and individuals using its web-based version. But taking advantage of the global market on a wider scale and partnering with large vendors will take a bigger piggy bank.

Until now, EvidenceCare has raised money in smaller chunks — the money raised so far has come in three rounds — mostly from angel investors and physicians using its product.

To take the next step, Fengler recently brought on Chicago-based Auctus Group to lead a $5 million raise that is expected to close this fall and provide fuel for the next big steps forward.

“We will always be capital-conscious,” Jamieson says. “But we’re going to have to spend some money to do this right.”

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Cuttingedge cool Local universities deploy technology in far-reaching research efforts by william williams

igher education research is often anything but sexy.

When laypeople hear “research,” many visualize nononsense academicians engaged in what might be perceived by the uninitiated as mind-numbingly complex or boring work.

But at Nashville-area universities, some advanced — some might even contend “cool” — research is being done, particularly via the use of technology.

For example, two Vanderbilt University professors have co-designed an iPad application that will benefit students who have challenging behaviors — by helping them with self-modification — in K–12 school districts in both Nashville and Iowa.

Dr. Ted Hasselbring and Dr. Joe Wehby, special education researchers at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development, are collaborating with University of Iowa Professor Allison Bruhn to develop what is billed as a first-of-its-kind app, called MoBeGo (Monitoring Behavior on the Go).

When complete, the app will collect data to determine a student’s responsiveness to behavioral inter-

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vention and help teachers decide what further interventions would be needed.

“We want this program to help teachers decide when to make behavior changes,” says Wehby, associate professor and chair of the VU Department of Special Education. “If a child doesn’t respond well to a program, we want this app to help generate effective solutions for teachers.”

The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences funded the three-year, approximately $1.2 million study.

In contrast, much of the research at area universities is neither particularly complicated nor federally funded. It is, however, noteworthy.

During the past 12 months or so, Meharry Medical College’s Dr. Wansoo Im spearheaded several community mapping projects using data geolocation technology that was developed under the “interoperability principle,” enabling it to be used without heavy investment in technical knowledge.

The first project took place in September 2016 as part of a “safe routes to school” effort at Metro’s Eakin and J.E Moss elementary schools.

Students, parents and volunteers mapped the conditions of sidewalks and crosswalks using a smartphone app.

In March 2017, students from Creswell Middle School used the smartphone app to identify and eradicate mosquito breeding sites to control the potential spread of the Zika virus in North Nashville.

“Community mapping, by nature, is about educating, engaging and empowering community members by using location-based mobile mapping technology,” says Im, who oversees Meharry’s National Community Mapping Institute (which operates via MMC’s Health Disparities Research Center).

“So far, the institute has been maintaining various geographic information systems databases and mobile data collection technology to enable this,” he says.

Meharry is fully involved in technology research elements that go beyond monitoring mosquitos.

Amy M. Andrade, Meharry senior advisor to the president on technology and innovation and assistant vice president of research, says the MMC Data Science Center has completed the first phase of ingesting clinical electronic health records information, both dental and medical, along with medical billing and scheduling information, with a second phase nearing completion.

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R&D

“Data science is the key to unlocking data from its ‘silos’ and allowing the data to tell its story,” Andrade says. “By allowing the data to tell its story, associations from within the different data sets will provide the basis by which new, never- thought-of-before questions will be asked and answered.”

Andrade says the DSC is “an institutional asset” that will provide a platform for Meharry to lead in big data analysis, precision health, computation health sciences and population health with the long-term aim of addressing health equity.

“The goal of the data ecosystem is to find the valuable, actionable insights from the raw data,” she says. “The focus is to think prescriptively using data science along with predictive analytics to be able to make predictions about future events.”

ent, Porter replies, “Our conventional idea of invention as a ‘eureka’ or ‘ah-ha’ moment is not inaccurate: The moments when the inventor first conceives the idea and [then] constructs a working prototype or perfects a new process are quite real.”

However, he adds, the incidence of invention is not always marked by the landing of a patent.

Invention is more often manifest as a better and novel way of doing something or making something — rather than developing a new process or thing, he says.

“These improvements are most often shared with the sponsor of the research, a private firm or a federal agency, as the expected outcome of a research project,” Porter says. “And through the sponsor, [the improvements] find their way into real-world application.”

‘ V U M C researchers see techn o l o g y as a nuts - an d - b o lts p art o f the p r o cess .’

Dr. Chris Harris, VU Center for Technology Transfer a n d C o m m e r c i a l i z at i o n

Jeff Porter, director of the Middle Tennessee State University Office of Research, says faculty members at the university are “researching across most fields of cutting-edge technology” and in the creation and application of these technologies as well.

“MTSU faculty typically carry out 200 research projects each year, all seeking monetary support from private and public sponsors to help solve specific problems,” Porter says. “Some research projects last several months; other, five or more years. More than half of our sponsored research projects each year involve improvement of or discovery of technology.”

Porter says some cutting-edge efforts MTSU faculty recently finished or are working on currently and will soon conclude include optical sensors for the detection of select biomolecules; a wheel-mounted electric motor (a so-called switched-reluctance motor) for automobiles; and a computer code for data encryption.

“These are just a few, and diverse, topics and projects that can, or are in the process of, leading to a new product,” he notes.

When asked how often MTSU researchers invent things that could, in theory, result in a pat-

Porter says most of the MTSU research conducted is considered conventional — that is, research intended to answer fundamental questions about man-made or natural systems or materials rather than to devise a single technological solution to a problem.

“Yet, we do have a number of patents on items and processes, and at MTSU we created an environment that is supportive of such innovation and creativity,” he says.

As to tech-oriented research MTSU faculty are working on currently but have a ways to go before being fully realized, Porter lists the following: • A computer code to model and visualize complex molecular behavior in HIV; • Genetic engineering for increased food fish production; • Machine learning algorithms for precision agriculture; and • Disease-fighting compounds derived from plants.

Dr. Chris Harris, director of licensing for the Vanderbilt University Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization, says it would be a challenge to quantify how much Vanderbilt University Medical Center research involves technology.

“As one may guess, a substantial percentage of VUMC’s research funding is related to clinical trials investigations, which we would not usually categorize as involving technology (specifically, testing new devices, diagnostics and other types of therapeutics are generally technologies developed by third parties),” he says.

“However, through internal resources and federal and non-federal grants and contracts, VUMC deploys close to $200 million each year in support of highly technology-based research,” Harris adds.

Harris says the VU Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization receives about 180 new invention disclosures each year from Vanderbilt University and VUMC employees. Of those, close to 40 percent originate from VUMC, he says.

“So it is fair to say that in any given year about 60 to 80 new inventions are disclosed from VUMC,” he says. “Because there is a substantial level of collaboration with Vanderbilt University colleagues, many inventions have a mix of inventors from both institutions. And these are often some of the most powerful technical advances we see.”

Harris says VUMC is engaged in several pioneering technology efforts.

For example, Dr. Susan Eagle in the VUMC Department of Anesthesiology has developed a method for assessing patient blood volume status related to patient hydration and detect congestive heart failure. The technology recently was licensed and is being developed into a medical product that could be on the market in a few years. Also, Eagle and her collaborators are developing a non-invasive alternative for more consumer-based markets.

In addition, Harris says, Dr. James Crowe and the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center are developing novel human antibodies for use in the detection, treatment and vaccination against emerging infectious diseases like Zika, chikungunya and Ebola.

Also, Dr. Eric Skaar, director of the VUMC Division of Molecular Pathogenes, is working on various ways to screen and treat microbial infections, specifically antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Harris says different researchers may have different motivations related to their use of technology. However — and as with those doing similar work at Nashville’s institutions of higher learning — all thrive upon the endeavor.

“Generally, VUMC researchers see technology as a nuts-and-bolts part of the process,” Harris says, “with new invention creation a somewhat serendipitous occurrence resulting from their research.”

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PASSION

Passion Play

Entrepreneur Shannon Terry believes entertainment news seekers will embrace PopCulture.com

by DaviD boclair

t is right there in the middle of all the algorithms, the venture capital and the IPOs. It is the one thing that Shannon Terry is convinced lies at the heart of every successful internet enterprise.

“Passion,” he says.

It is not complicated. In an age when people can learn about anything with just a few keystrokes on their personal computers or a voice command spoken into their personal phones, Terry is banking on the notion that they really want to find out all there is to know regarding those things about which they care most. Not only that but people want to hear from others who share that devotion and that there is no limit to the amount of information they are willing or able to consume.

With that as his guiding philosophy, Terry already has made hundreds of millions of dollars from Rivals. com and 247Sports, while creating enduring partnerships. Now he has gone back to that same notion as the foundation for what he is convinced will be his most successful venture to date.

Get ready for PopCulture.com, a website modeled after some of the local entrepreneur’s greatest successes, refined by the evolution of some of his other offerings and poised to take advantage of the most sizable internet audience that exists in this country.

“There are 248 million Americans that consume content digitally over the Internet in a given month,” Terry says. “The largest category is entertainment, [with] 240 million, which is nearly 97 percent of those users.

So there’s a huge, huge opportunity in entertainment.

“We think we have a great opportunity in this category, and we think we have an ‘in’ in how to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market,” he adds.

To say that Terry already has a foot in the door is an understatement.

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FEaTUrES

Through the creation and development during the last three or four years of two other properties, ComicBook.com and Womanista.com, Terry and his staff already have mined this area, albeit somewhat accidentally based on the narrow focus of those properties. It simply took a little time for the big picture to become clear.

ComicBook.com launched to take advantage of the growing trend of movie and television franchises based on characters created by Marvel Comics, D.C. Comics and the like. Those productions came with built-in audiences and expanded those existing fan bases. The site quickly became what Terry calls “the largest and a very lucrative player” in the market. Before long, Pop Culture Now was developed and added to take the site beyond its superhero base — but was not overwhelmingly embraced by the core users.

Womanista was launched as a lifestyle brand meant to engage and encourage women. Over time, celebrity news items were easily the most popular on the site, and the approach was altered to satisfy that user desire. Eventually 95 percent of its content was focused on that area.

PopCulture.com is a rebranding, a combining of Pop Culture Now and Womanista into a single entity that takes advantage of the overwhelming interest in celebrity/entertainment news minus the demographic limitations that existed with the previous sites. ComicBook.com will be the anchor tenant for the site.

“We’re not really doing anything different. We’re just formalizing the brand,” Terry says. “We just knew we needed a broader, general entertainment brand.

“We have 20 years of publishing experience. So we’re not going at this half-baked. We’re going to go higher, build and develop display and video content at this ultra-professional level. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past three years.”

Terry and his team have been building an audience.

He estimates that PopCulture.com will launch with more than 15 million users, courtesy of ComicBook.com and Womanista. Roughly seven million, nearly all of them women (a coveted audience), come from the latter.

For perspective, consider that Terry launched 247Sports in August 2010 and sold it for an undisclosed sum to CBS Sports a little more than five years later in a transaction that was immediately beneficial to both sides. CBSSports.com rose to its highest point in comScore digital rankings for sports (third) a month after that deal closed.

Terry, of course, made a lot of money in that deal, just as he did when he sold his first sports creation, Rivals.com, to Yahoo for nearly $100 million in July 2007, roughly seven years after its launch.

PopCulture.com will start with roughly the same number of users that 247Sports has at present and will benefit from the engagement of 24 million users of social platforms. Given that number represents about

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8.3 percent of those 240 million who consume entertainment news digitally, the growth potential is — to say the least — significant.

“We want to own the phrase. We’re going to own the term. And we’re going to own ‘pop culture,’” Terry said.

“That’s where that passion lies and we want to attack that passion at a franchise level.”

A workable approach It is important to note that — initially, at least — Terry will have no part in the day-to-day operations of PopCulture.com. Under terms of the 247Sports sale, he is still an employee of CBS Sports and is limited as to what he can do with other properties. He makes clear that he has been up front with CBS about his work with

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Those factors have created new development questions to answer and challenges to meet. Boom will tackle these topics and more.

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In this issue, we will share stories about leaders, from leaders and for leaders. The magazine also will include our popular In Charge list and spotlight our CEO of the Year.

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writers do with the college and professional teams that inspire such loyalty.

However, there are two main differences — when compared to sports — that work in their favor.

First, while sports franchises are constants, entertainment trends come and go. This website can — and will — adjust to whatever franchises rise and fall from year to year or decade to decade in movies, television, music, etc. The estimate is that it will focus on 30, give or take a dozen, “franchises, characters, celebrities” that appeal to millennials at any given moment.

“The coverage scope lines up similar to sports,” Terry says. “There’s all kinds of coverage opportunities that can drive a business 365 days a year. People that are going to debate how the “Game of Thrones” or what-

‘Advertisers Are stArting to get smArter w i t h t h e i r m o n e y, t h e y ’ r e s tA r t i n g t o m i g r A t e t h o s e A d b u y s t o p r e m i u m b r A n d s .’ s a m s a v a g e , p o p c u lt u r e . c o m

PopCulture.com and how it came about. All parties, he says, are comfortable with how things will proceed until he has satisfied his contractual obligations.

Terry, therefore, will serve as an advisor while his business partner, Sam Savage, will be the CEO. The pair dismisses such particulars as all but inconsequential.

Their confidence rests on factors beyond any individual’s vision or decision-making, which they say minimize the chances that this effort will be anything other than an astounding success.

For example, the recent disruption in the ad market has created a shift away from the model created when social and search sites were the driving forces. Terry and Savage estimate that, for the next decade at least, advertisers will focus on premium publishers.

“Advertisers are starting to get smarter with their money,” Savage says. “They’re starting to migrate those ad buys to premium brands and quit divvying out money to the arbitrage or fake news sites. All of those sites are falling to the wayside.”

Then there is the fact that they have an approach that they know works.

PopCulture.com will operate in much the same way that Rivals and 247Sports did — and still do. That is to say, it will feed fans’ passion for their favorite franchises. It will do so with coverage of “The Walking Dead,” “The Fast and the Furious,” “Game of Thrones” and the like with the same depth and expertise that sports

ever [show] season should have ended — that’s the people we target. Not the people who may or may not watch an episode or two.

“It’s the people who are going to sit over in an office somewhere and just rip this new movie to shreds because it didn’t live up to the three previous franchise versions of whatever it is. We want those type of people.”

A second, and perhaps more important, difference is the possibility — in fact the likelihood — of crossover appeal for multiple entertainment franchises. It goes back to the estimated 240 million Americans each month who look for entertainment news online. Just less than half that number consumes sports content, and the passion of those users is divided among the teams in any particular professional sports league or college athletics conference.

“The difference is, if I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan I’m not a Philadelphia Eagles fan,” Terry says. “If I’m a “Fast and Furious” fan I may also watch “The Walking Dead.”

“Whatever the entertainment lexicon of the day is, we’re going to cover it and we’re going to cover it at the franchise, celebrity and character level,” he adds. “We want to target that 16-to-45-year-old millennial cord cutter that is equally passionate about his or her franchises as we were about our sports teams when we grew up.”

Add to all of that a bit of good luck and the optimism surrounding this offering is easy to understand.

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PASSION

Terry and Savage did not have to negotiate with anyone to purchase the domain name PopCulture.com. It was available the moment they looked into it and conveyed their mission in a clear, concise fashion, particularly for today’s younger generation.

They only wish they had thought of it sooner.

“It was so simple that we almost bought something else,” Terry says. “We just never felt good about the other one. We walked in one day and we were like, ‘What in the heck were we about to do? This is the one.’

“We got some bad advice from some key people,” he adds. “But when we cleared the noise, what a home run.”

Offering an escape with negated risk The fact that this is a rebranding rather than a start-up limits some of the initial risk and negates a lot of the growing pains that typically accompany such undertakings.

PopCulture.com starts with a staff of 54 fulltime employees and another 22 part-timers, nearly all of them based in Brentwood. The ex-

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pectation is that the size of the staff could double within two years.

“It’s an escape,” Terry says. “Some people want to escape from the reality of their day.

They escape through social media, through entertainment, through sports. They escape through their passions. There are more people, statistically, passionate about entertainment than about sports teams.”

As it turns out, that notion of passion in these pursuits cuts both ways.

Not all of Terry’s ventures have been as successful as 247Sports or ComicBook.com. Some of that is because market factors limited the opportunities. Some of it is because he was not the right person to lead the charge in a particular area.

A recent conversation with one of his lead investors made that clear to him.

“I think I’ve steered in a couple directions where I was fringing on things that I cared about and then I wasn’t giving the full me,” Terry says. “I’m incredibly passionate about this and I’m incredibly passionate about our operational model.

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“It’s just good that I like this type of content in this genre.”

Even if he is right and PopCulture.com turns out to be his most successful venture to date, Terry is clear that he does not intend to drop the mic, so to speak, and walk off stage.

There are still going to be 248 million Americans a month getting online trying to feed their passions and Shannon Terry wants to help them do it. He sees opportunity at the intersection of their passions and his — and the challenge of staking his claim at those spots holds as much appeal to him as it ever has.

“I am drawn to competition,” Terry says. “So for me, personally, this is an incredibly difficult thing. It’s a long-shot to launch a media business and get it to the point where it’s a business and making money and has a chance to be a household brand. That is an enormous undertaking.

“I know this: I’m not going to lose. And I know this is going to be a success and we’re going to do what we have to do to make it one. So at the end of the day, we’ll count those chips.”

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3D

Driving the future of manufacturing Knoxville is poised to play a key role in next-generation vehicle production

by Peter Chawaga

ar from Silicon Valley’s hotbed of digital disruption, an East Tennessee city has become the seemingly unlikely home for technological firsts in auto manufacturing.

Specifically, Phoenix-based motor vehicle manufacturing company Local Motors has chosen Knoxville as a site for a “microfactory” that will help create vehicles that utilize innovative technology, from self-driving capabilities to 3Dprinted components.

Founded in 2007, the company has introduced an unconventional production model that enables the vehicles to be made in a highly targeted way — and it views Knoxville as a suitable market for its efforts.

“Local Motors’ goal is to change the way vehicles are manufactured and sold,” says company spokesperson Jacqueline Keidel. “Small batches of locally produced vehicles allow us to customize vehicles to best suit the needs of a specific market.”

The automaker makes niche vehicles designed by a “co-creation community” of far-flung contributors and builds them across a network of microfactory sites that includes — in addition to Phoenix and Knoxville — Berlin, Las Vegas and National Harbor, Maryland. This year, Local Motors’ Knoxville microfactory will produce the Olli, a self-driving, electric, eight-person shuttle that can be scheduled for pick-up and drop-off through a smart phone.

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Previously, the site manufactured a component of Local Motors’ Strati, the world’s first 3D-printed car, though that project has been put on hold by the automaker.

“Local Motors hopes to revolutionize transportation by integrating the most advanced vehicle technologies into our products,” Keidel says. “From self-driving to cognitive to sustainable, we will offer a wide portfolio of vehicles that best suit the needs of the markets where they are manufactured, making transportation smarter, safer and more enjoyable.”

Knoxville’s microfactory is outfitted with the 3D-printing capabilities necessary to produce small-batch components without traditional machinery. It also has materials-testing technology and direct digital manufacturing software, two forward-thinking components that are part of Local Motors’ distinctive process.

“Vehicles are designed and tested using advanced manufacturing software,” Keidel says.

“We can find problems and solutions using the software, rather than needing physical prototypes to do so.”

Though Knoxville does not have a long history as a center for non-traditional technology — the city is perhaps best known for a top-notch zoo, the

high-profile University of Tennessee Volunteers football program and quick access to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park — its place in the future of manufacturing was recently secured.

When then-President Barack Obama visited the city in early 2015, he laid out a vision for the region to become a leader in technological production as part of the federal Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI). Through the program, which is headquartered in Knoxville, the area has established a composites institute at the University of Tennessee and a national laboratory in Oak Ridge. The goals for IACMI include lowered material costs, lessened environmental impact and increased domestic production capacity.

“Companies such as Local Motors and Leisure Pools, and a composites supply chain in close proximity to industry and research, enable faster innovation and shared learning,” says Bryan Dods, CEO of IACMI. The area’s manufacturing progress makes it appealing to Local Motors, as does its automobile-specific potential. As Tennessee’s third-largest city (with an estimated population of about 870,000), Knoxville also carries some political clout statewide.

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“Knoxville shows a lot of promise for vehicle demand,” Keidel says. “The location gives us access to well-educated individuals due to the presence of the university, and [the city] is an up-and-coming hub for technology.”

By attracting companies like Local Motors, IACMI takes credit for more than $140 million in capital investment and 442 new manufacturing jobs enjoyed by Tennessee in 2016, per its annual report.

“Local Motors’ East Tennessee microfactory is an excellent example of innovation enabled through the IACMI partnership and its 150-plus members,” Dods says. “Local Motors is participating in several IACMI projects with IACMI members in the composites supply chain.”

For instance, IACMI and Local Motors have partnered to investigate how large-scale 3D printing and composite materials can be applied to vehicle production to reduce the design-to-manufacturing cycle time by 50 percent. It’s a project that could keep Knoxville on the cutting edge and help Local Motors discover manufacturing benefits that traditional companies cannot match.

“3D printing vehicles offers the world a way to reduce waste by using materials that are reusable and recyclable,” Keidel said. “This also

‘[Knoxville provides] access to w e l l- e d u c at e d i n d i v i d u a l s d u e t o … t h e u n i v e r s i t y, a n d [ t h e c i t y ] i s a n u p - a n d - c o m i n g h u b f o r t e c h n o l o g y .’

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offers more customization options without investing heavy amounts of capital to retool an entire factory. 3D printing as a manufacturing technique eliminates the need for an assembly line and long vehicle development times.”

While vehicle design offers a captivating case study in the potential of 3D printing on a large scale, the fact that this technology and these partnerships are being established in Knoxville could make the region a manufacturing leader well into the future and across any number of industries.

As the production landscape evolves more quickly than ever, it’s a good position for the city to be in.

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3D

A perfect fit Mbody prepped to disrupt the bra-making industry

by Linda Bryant

ounders of early-stage tech startups often face undefined territory, largely characterized by the need for money, validation and effective relationships with strategic partners.

Folks involved in such young businesses hope the technology behind the solutions or services being addressed is at the vanguard and capable of transforming concepts into reality.

Nashville-based entrepreneur Mollie Decktor, CEO and creator of Mbody (the company stylizes as “mbody”), is smack dab in the middle of this startup scenario.

Decktor and Mbody co-founder Mark Adkins are unquestionably hustling to raise the money to create Mbody’s first prototype.

One thing’s for sure: the company’s proposed product — a customized T-shirt bra with an underwire made with the aid of cutting-edge body scanning technology and 3-D knitting machines — is an attention grabber.

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Here’s Mbody’s central premise: The company will create personalized bras to fit the sizes and shapes of buyers, eliminating their need to search through a sea of conventional — and often ill-fitting — standard-sized brassieres.

Furthermore, the bras will be produced with high-tech 3-D knitting machines, which don’t require the traditional cutting, sewing and assembling techniques used in traditional bra manufacturing.

In other words, standard bra sizes, which Decktor argues are insufficient, will no longer be needed.

Stressing her lifelong struggles with finding a comfortable bra, Decktor says ill-fitting bras are a close-to-universal problem for women — one that has gone without comfortable solutions throughout the history of brassieres (noteworthy, considering they are depicted as dating to 1,400 B.C. in the Minoan civilization).

“This is a very complex problem once you start digging into it,” Decktor says. “The more I talk to people, the more I realize that there are [very few women] who fit the proportions that bras are based upon. Everyone else — even if they are just a little bit off the mark — has issues.”

Decktor and Adkins, who met while they were both pursing M.B.A. degrees at the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management, are banking on cutting-edge technology to make mbody bras a reality.

“3-D knitting machine technology has [gotten] to the point where you can use computeraided design to create downloadable files and then (have the 3-D knitting machine) make the garments,” Adkins says.

“The biggest challenge for us is that the technology is still in an early stage,” he adds. “People

aren’t using this technology dynamically or ‘on the fly’ for whole garment knitting. But that’s where we’re going.”

Decktor and Adkins are working with textile engineers to advance the capacity of 3-D knitting machines. Likewise, they are consulting with experts in the scanning machine industry and connecting with several other business mentors to aid in their entrepreneurial journey.

Their mentors include Nashville-based Lynn Lesher, a pattern maker and seamstress who has worked with Decktor since she first pitched the idea as a graduate student; Vanderbilt professor David Owens, who is considered a thought leader in product development and innovation; and Nashville Fashion Alliance CEO Van Tucker.

Another strong advocate is Kristina Montague, managing partner at The JumpFund, a Chattanooga-based venture fund that invests in female-led ventures.

Decktor, 33, met Montague while participating in Chattanooga’s Gig Tank Accelerator program last year.

At this point, Montague is watching mbody’s development as a supporter rather than as an investor.

“Mbody is a pre-MVP (minimum viable product), so it’s too early for us to invest,” she says.

“But we’re watching her, for sure.

“Mollie is tackling a challenging problem,” Montague adds. “She stands out as someone who can run a business as well as attack a unique market space that’s ready for disruption.

Montague has some experience working with technology-driven startups in the garment sector. The JumpFund was an early investor in Feetz, customizable footwear that also uses 3-D technology.

Arguably one of Chattanooga’s most successful startups, Feetz grew fast and in 2016 relocated to Silicon Valley because of investor demand and talent recruitment challenges.

Can Mbody mimic Feetz’s quick rise? Perhaps. In fact, mbody reached a key milestone in mid-April by raising almost $16,000 using the Nashville-based iFundWomen crowd-sourcing platform. The money will be used to produce and perfect the first mbody prototype.

“Just about any woman you’d approach with this problem would likely say, ‘Sign me up immediately.’ ” Montague says. “It’s just great that Mollie has no problem talking about this difficult issue that so many women face. Just being able to talk about the subject is probably her first hurdle [already overcome].”

summer 2017 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

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3D

FeatUreS

The future of health is made possible by great partners.

3D Double vision Cheekwood partners with NovaCopy on restoration plans

by Geert De LombaerDe

he promise of 3D printing is being realized on a large scale in prominent sectors such as manufacturing and health care in the form of specialized auto parts and precisely customized prosthetics. But one big Nashville name is looking to put the technology to use in a rather different environment.

When the Cheekwood Mansion reopens in June after extensive renovations, it will showcase numerous pieces of furniture and other items in their historic places, aided by photographs taken in the

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1930s shortly after the house was completed. One of those items is an elaborately carved terra cotta urn relocated to its original spot on a permanently affixed pedestal in the mansion’s loggia rather than its porte-cochere.

However, the urn used to have a partner that was lost at some point over the past eight decades.

Early this year, as the urn underwent an extensive conservation treatment, Cheekwood staffers partnered with local office equipment and 3D printing company NovaCopy to record numerous virtual, 3D images of the urn. The goal is to replicate the existing item and complete the mansion’s loggia 1930s lineup.

When the time and opportunity comes along — Cheekwood’s leaders in April unveiled they have raised more than $20 million and have their sights set on another $10 million — the set of scans will be ready for NovaCopy and others in the Nashville tech community to lay the foundation for the longlost urn and fill another piece of the Cheekwood puzzle.

Keynote Speaker GREG GLASSMAN Founder & Chairman CrossFit

HEALTH:FURTHER FESTIVAL AUG 22 - AUG 25 2017 NASHVILLE, TN HEALTHFURTHER.COM

PROVIDED BY CHEEKWOOD

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READING CORNER

THE notable race for blockchain standards

by Pete Harris

n the worlds of information technology and financial services, standards are a fundamental consideration in the creation of practically every new product. Choosing the industry-accepted standards to adhere to — and sometimes setting new standards — can have a profound impact on whether a new offering will be widely accepted. It also can determine how fast and inexpensively such a product can be built and delivered.

For those purchasing technology, adherence to standards can also have significant influence in making choices. Prevailing wisdom suggests that products built to standards can be more readily integrated with other systems, can be easier to manage and operate, and can be replaced with an alternative more easily.

Potential replacement with an alternative is a key factor for many because it provides leverage with the vendors of products. If a vendor offers poor service, or hikes its prices, then swapping one vendor for another is easier when competing products adhere to standards.

Vendor lock-in, as it’s termed, is minimized.

Despite the benefits inherent in standards, there are some downside considerations for standards on both sides of the equation: users and vendors. Vendors need to stay competitive to enjoy customer loyalty, but standards-based technology is often developed as a general-purpose solution to several

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requirements. That means that performance can be lacking in products that are molded by standards, compared to innovative proprietary solutions that break the mold.

Standards that are developed through an industry consensus can take a long time to solidify, which leads to interim quasi-standard offerings being developed, which are often proprietary, in order to provide at least a workable solution.

These are sometimes not compatible with the final version, requiring frequent updates that can annoy or alienate users. Complying with standards can be a painful experience as those standards are being developed, even if the benefits are significant in the end.

Conversely, a standard that is set by a major vendor or a consortium — so-called “de facto standards” — might provide a good solution at the outset, but there is no guarantee that it will gain widespread acceptance. And interoperability with other standards might not be straightforward.

Such a route still might represent a practical path forward, especially if the vendor makes its standards specifications public and licenses them for free or on generally agreeable terms.

Runners in the race • Chain — Founded in 2014, the San Franciscobased vendor transformed over several years from being an early Bitcoin API developer to launching a full blockchain platform focused on financial services applications. Along the way, it has picked up some high-profile customers and partners — including Citi, First Data, Nasdaq, State Street and Visa — and has created its Chain Core platform, which is available as an open source developer edition.

Chain Core is based on the chain protocol, which has been designed for financial assets, featuring security, privacy and scalability. In the chain protocol, every transaction is a smart contract built with standard syntax and operators.

It also specifies the unspent transaction output (UTXO) data model and a simplified byzantine fault-tolerant consensus model. Selective disclosure of data is supported and all nodes participate in block validation.

The pitch for Chain Core is that with a group of financial services heavyweights backing it, potentially building applications for their own customers to use, the platform stands a decent chance of becoming a widely used de facto standard.

• Hyperledger Project — Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the Hyperledger Project’s opensource focus provides strong credentials for it to be considered as a standards-setting offering. It has adopted an “umbrella” approach — a term used by the project’s executive director, Brian Behlendorf — to work on a number of developments, including its Fabric, to which IBM and Digital Asset Holdings have been major early contributors; Sawtooth Lake, originally developed by Intel; and R3’s Corda platform. Further developments under the umbrella are expected, including the contribution of Axoni’s AxCore development.

Says Behlendorf: “The most valuable role the Hyperledger Project can play is to serve as a trusted source of innovative, quality-driven, opensource software for the development community, creating modular, open-source components and platforms, all focused on distributed ledger and smart-contract technologies.”

While Hyperledger is not a standard, per se, it would like to see its project produce code sets for inclusion in many products, or act as a widelydeployed platform for applications, much like the Linux operating system has become.

Observers point to the heavy influence of IBM on the project. Big Blue made an initial contribution of 44,000 lines of code, and it has multiple members on the project’s governing board and technical steering committee. Anecdotal evidence also points to IBM customer presentations being heavily focused on Hyperledger, leaving the impression that Hyperledger developments are IBM products that enjoy widespread industry support from the circa 110 current project members.

Meanwhile, Digital Asset has announced plans to open-source its digital asset modeling language for smart contracts, though it has not yet given any details on whether this will be done via the Hyperledger Project.

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READING CORNER

• The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — The IEEE is a large, global organization well known for its 802.x standards creation around data transmission and security in distributed networks such as Ethernet. Like other standards bodies, it is not yet very active in the blockchain space, though it is clearly watching developments and engaging its membership through publications and events. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that some of the major networking vendors might look to work with the IEEE to standardize any blockchain-related work they are undertaking.

• International Organization for Standardization — Another established standards body, the ISO consists of member standards-setting bodies from 161 countries. It creates standards across many industries. In financial services, its standards for country and currency codes are relevant, while in computing, its seven-layer open systems interconnection model is a widely-adopted communications standard.

In a recent move, the ISO appointed Standards Australia to lead a new blockchain technology committee comprising representatives from 35 countries, including Canada, Estonia, France, Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.

While Australia has indeed seen significant blockchain development focus, with the Australian Securities Exchange planning to use the technology for its new clearing system, the ISO standards process is a long and formal one. Hence, the ISO’s impact on the blockchain space is unlikely to be seen for several years.

• International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication — Recognizing an important early application for blockchain, the European chapter of this organization, which focuses on post-trade operations in the securities markets, has recently taken an interest in the technology.

Earlier this year, the group published information on 10 blockchain benchmarks: resilience, scalability, security (trust, identification, authentication), latency, data (structure, audit, privacy, general data protection regulation), governance, legal (jurisdiction, dispute resolution), regulatory, software (version control, code, external interfaces, development, bug fixes) and network.

The ISITC Blockchain Working Group co-chair, Gary Wright, has said, “Introduction of measurable standards based on both technology and operational requirements will help in bringing transparency to this emerging technology.”

• JPMorgan Chase/Quorum Project — While standards setting is not a known goal of this project, announced publicly by JPMorgan Chase at last

year’s Sibos banking conference, it could become a factor in the blockchain standards discussion.

Quorum is a modified form of Ethereum that supports both public and private blockchains, the latter including selective publishing of data to only nodes that have agreed access to it, while having all nodes participate in block verification.

JPMorgan recently open-sourced Quorum, a move that could prove popular among potential value-added vendors and other financial institutions. The bank has some history in kick-starting successful open-source projects. It was the prime mover in 2003 in the development of the advanced message queuing protocol, which has since been adopted and supported by a number of major vendors, and in 2014 became an ISO standard.

• R3 — R3 is a technology developer and investor, headed by David Rutter, with a focus in crypto technologies and financial trading applications.

Rutter worked at the brokerage firm ICAP, and he no doubt put that experience to good use when creating a digital-ledger focused consortium that currently has about 80 banks and other financial institutions in its ranks.

One activity that R3 is engaged in is the development of Corda, a distributed ledger that has been designed for the financial markets, drawing on requirements input from its consortium members. A key requirement is that privacy of data is accessible only by authorized nodes. Notably, despite applying for a patent on the overall Corda design, R3 recently submitted the codebase to the open source Hyperledger Project. The company also kicked off a partner program to create Corda-based financial applications. Trade processing vendor Calypso Technology was the first to join.

While consortium members are not obligated to deploy Corda, R3 hopes that they will in order to reap the benefits of their design input. Meanwhile, the partner program should deliver readymade applications for market participants that want to buy rather than build.

• World Wide Web Consortium — The international standards body for web development covers website technologies, application-to-application web services and XML data processing. Recently, it has shown an interest in web-based payments encryption key management and identity, holding workshops with key blockchain vendors to discuss where standards could be useful.

In the starting blocks A number of other vendors have also built and released blockchain platforms, though they have yet to suggest that they are looking to position them as de facto standards or submit

them to industry standards bodies. Vendors include AlphaPoint, Axoni, Coin Sciences, Gem, Guardtime, Manifold Technology, Paxos, SETL and Symbiont.

Related to the development of blockchain standards are a number of other financial industry initiatives that are exploring how blockchain-based systems might fit in with their own standards endeavors. The FIX Trading Community, which controls the widely-used FIX protocol for trade execution, is looking at how its messaging capabilities might be used to support blockchain interoperability. Meanwhile, the Enterprise Data Management Council is studying blockchain’s impact on its financial industry business ontology data modeling framework.

Expect the FIX and EDM Council to make some formal statements on blockchain and standards in the future. Also expect to see action from SWIFT — the bank-owned messaging network for post-trade securities processing and payments. For SWIFT, blockchain technology represents both enormous opportunities and threats, and the organization is already involved in making sure it is well-positioned for a blockchain future. Setting some standards would be a good way for it to stay in a central role in the financial services space as it decentralizes.

This article originally appeared in Distributed, the first publication dedicated to blockchain technology. The magazine is a property of Nashvillebased BTC Media. For more information, visit Distributed.com.

Pete Harris is a principal at Austin, Texas-based Lighthouse Partners, a business and technology consulting firm providing business acceleration services related to transformative enterprise technologies, with specific focuses on go-to-market and growth strategies involving partnerships, thought leadership creation and events. Harris’s current primary focus is on blockchain, distributed ledger and smart contract technology.

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THE BIG QUESTION

Can we add one more priority to our tech to-do list? he narrative around Middle Tennessee’s technology community has long concentrated on the same few issues.

Can the region that birthed HCA build an IT community not so focused on health care? Will growing companies find the workers they need here? And even then, is there an investor base that will fund those ventures before they are asked or feel compelled to move away?

There are reasons to be encouraged on all of those fronts. Look at the hiring pace at product content software provider Edgenet — our cover subject last year — and the promising traction Built Technologies’ construction lending automation product is getting. Their leaders and a cadre of other smart entrepreneurs with little or no connection to health care are making big strides.

The talent needle also seems to be moving in the right direction. The MSA’s tech job growth has been impressive and consistent, helped by Music

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City’s seemingly enduring ability to draw young professionals. And, as our story on the boom in local user groups shows, many of those new arrivals are connecting in very productive ways.

The funding picture appears more robust, too. A high-profile case in point is Digital Reasoning Systems, which has secured tens of millions in capital from some of the biggest names in finance (as well as HCA) without compromising its local growth. On top of that, more angel capital pools are coalescing and promising ideas beyond health IT are finding willing investors: Video game content venture GameWisp ($1.3 million) and data visualization play Initial State ($2 million) are among those that have closed funding rounds recently. On top of that, companies such as LPS Integration and Zycron have sold for tidy sums so far in 2017. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll soon see that long-wished-for scenario that has founders (not in health care) con-

sistently reinvesting exit proceeds into the next round of local startups (not in health care).

So the job isn’t quite done but it’s fair to say there’s solid progress.

Which brings us back to health tech.

A Brookings Institution report published last year placed Nashville’s health IT sector in a group with Boston, Atlanta and Dallas — not bad company, right? — that draws its strength not from a single segment such as software or clinical expertise. Yet players in all of those local subspecialties, from transaction processing to systems integration to electronic health records, would be well served by focusing some of their energy on another ecosystem growing roots here.

By any measure, it’s early days for blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that promises to overhaul swaths of finance, health care and a number of other key sectors. But keep an eye on fast-growing locals Hashed Health and BTC Media, which are emerging as key hubs of expertise and bringing money and thought leadership to Nashville.

As a region, we’ve proven over the past decade and change that we can diversify — and it’s been unequivocally positive for our economy.

With blockchain’s emergence, it sure looks like it’s time to do it again.

summer 2017 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

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