ATDC showcases high-tech optimism
The Advanced Technology Development Center’s Entrepreneurs Showcase, held today at Midtown’s Biltmore, wasn’t exactly a hot spot for bellyaching about the recession.
That’s because optimism rules at the annual event, where the Georgia Tech high-tech incubator “graduates” some of its babies, and showcases more of them to potential investors and business partners. The glass-is-half-full mentality is refreshing to an out-of-work journalist.
Of the 30 ATCD show-casers, the one’s that immediately grabbed my interest were (naturally) the handful that could enhance blogging, social networking and other communication enterprises. One that appears to be pretty far along is Evoca, which allows bloggers, business people, political activists — whomever — to create digital audio recordings via telephone and to post them on websites.
Then there’s Balaya, an earlier-stage Savannah-based company that has developed a tool, called Tick-It, designed to integrate social networks, e-mails, feeds and IM onto a ticker that scrolls along the bottom of the computer screen. CEO Bob Nunnally is a retired fighter pilot who worked after the military for futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, of “Future Shock” fame. He’s hoping that gave him a good eye for what the next big thing might be.
“[Nunnally and his fellow cofounders] thought there was a space where social media was going that we could slip into,” Nunnally said.
The other interesting area to me was the environment. Suniva, one of four company’s that graduate this year from ATDC, is producing photovoltaic cells for solar energy — and claims to have developed processes that will drive the cost for solar energy down and make the products more efficient.
None of this year’s showcasers quite so squarely fit the bill as green technology. But several will have environmental benefits if they’re successful. QOil Technologies VP Allen Vance stressed that his company, which operates out of ATDC lab on Fifth Street, has a “clean and green story.” QOil has developed a device, which it plans to market to buses and other fleet vehicles, that monitors the quality of motor oil as it goes through the system.
Using cell-phone technology, the device in the field tells QOil’s server when the vehicle needs an oil change or whether there’s an unknown mechanical problem. That saves money and can prevent breakdowns.
But QOil also might save petroleum because it would allow the fleet manager to put off an unnecessary oil change, which might have been scheduled otherwise whether the oil actually was dirty or not. The connection to saving energy may sound mundane, but it’s also kind of elegant that a business solution would go hand in hand with environmental efficiency.
When President Obama, Al Gore and, for that matter, Newt Gingrich talk about the transformative power that technology might have on our economy, they tend to evoke images of hydrogen-fueled cars and windmills. But small steps by “baby” companies could play a role as well.
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