Tag: Tech

Entrepreneur Week Celebrates NOLA’s Workforce and Culture

The 2023 New Orleans Entrepreneur Week was recently held in the Crescent City to celebrate the city’s focus on entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, and culture. According to this article from NOLA.com, the panel titled “Third Wave Industries and Climate Leadership,” highlighted just how New Orleans culture helps to draw in startups and clean energy.

The week-long series of workshops, speeches, panels, discussions, and live music that made up the 2023 New Orleans Entrepreneur Week drew in nearly 1,400 attendees, according to event organizers. One of the ways this year’s NOEW was different from previous years was that the event’s final three days included ticketed items such as concerts and entertainment offerings.

Producer Liz Maxwell of Idea Village, the small business accelerator program that created NOEW said, “NOEW has become a really important event for this community. It shows what is possible here in New Orleans and Louisiana and that we can create and innovate together.”

This year’s theme for NOEW was innovation and culture, which included speeches and sessions built around eight subthemes. These subthemes included: Climate tech, Culture tech, EATrepreneurs, Future of local business, Health innovation, Investing in innovation, Software as service engineers, and Startups for impact. In terms of guest speakers for the weeklong event, dozens of local and national speakers made it out to New Orleans, including keynoter Mary Landrieu, the former U.S. senator from Louisiana, and AOL founder Steve Case.

One of the talks for the New Orleans Entrepreneur Week focused on the fact that the Louisiana government’s climate policies were responsible for creating several economic development opportunities. This talk from the Louisiana Governor took place in Gallier Hall, where he announced that a key update will be coming to Louisiana’s renewable energy sector. This update is expected to offer a boost to those local companies that are racing to develop new types of carbon-capture technologies.

This update will come as a result of new federal regulations that are set to arrive later this spring, and it’s expected that these regulations from the federal government will give the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources the primary authority over wells needed to inject carbon underground, instead of this authority going to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. If this update is finalized later this year, the new rules that will be in place will essentially speed up the permitting process and as a result make carbon capture and sequestration a reality in Louisiana ahead of the next gubernatorial election.

The speaker was quoted as saying, “we have to embrace things like carbon capture and sequestration because we cannot be successful and the world cannot be successful if we keep just emitting it the way we have. The science is there. The safety is there. I know we have to demonstrate that, but carbon capture is going to be very important moving forward.”

The Louisiana Government’s Climate Action Plan focuses heavily on carbon capture as one of its key planks, as it seeks to reduce the state of Louisiana’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. In addition to this goal, the plan also calls for developing purely renewable energy sources such as wind power, solar power, and cleaner fuels like hydrogen.

One of the key takeaways from the presentation was that Louisiana has several economic development strengths that are aided by New Orleans attracting more startup companies and talent to the state of Louisiana. The Governor spoke about how this attraction of businesses could continue by saying that the state continues to “have more of these kinds of events.

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Tulane Students Awarded Top Inventing Prize

A team of Tulane University‘s biomedical engineering students have been awarded at an annual National Inventors Hall of Fame event, according to a Tulane press release.

The team, known as TrachTech, won the prestigious award at the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s annual Collegiate Inventors Competition, where they were one of five winners awarded with The Arrow Electronics People’s Choice Award and its accompanying $2000 prize.

A member of TrachTech, Stephen Hanh, a Tulane biomedical engineering student had said of their future plans, “our current plan is to continue advancing our prototype and testing to effectively prove its efficacy and begin looking for ways to introduce our product to the market.”

The team of biomedical engineering students making up TrachTech submitted their invention, a specialized device to clean intubation tubes without “the risk of extubation” in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. With ventilators in such high demand nationwide, the students recognized the vital need to ensure that these machines remain safe and clean.

As written in the submitted project description, “in at least 84% of intubation tubes, biofilm buildup occurs, restricting airflow and increasing the likelihood that patients will develop ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP).” Their device being “specifically designed to efficiently remove biofilms and debris from the tubes and maintain continued airflow from ventilators during the cleaning process.”

The TrachTech team had recently completed a cohort with the National Science Foundation‘s LSU I-Corps Sites program over a six week period in which they learned about the commercialization processes involved in the invention industry. The program had included seminars and lectures on topics pertaining to copywriting, obtaining patents, licencing, customer identification, market researching, and potential opportunities for startups.

Hanh looked forward to the future of TrachTech’s decorated invention be saying “our current plan is to continue advancing our prototype and testing to effectively prove its efficacy and begin looking for ways to introduce our product to the market.”

Besides being awarded The People’s Choice Award from Arrow Electronics, TrachTech has also entered a technology competition sponsored by Tulane University. Tulane’s Novel Tech Challenge awards prizes of monetary value as well as notoriety for the best submitted ideas that improve education, health, environment, and urban infrastructure through the utilization of technology.

This challenge from the university is a collaboration between the School of Science and Engineering, the Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and the Office of Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Development. The challenge is also funded with generous support from the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, allowing for Challenge winners to receive over $20,000 in prizes alongside additional financing from potential investors.

In its seventh year, the Challenge has been a notorious starting point from many new startup companies from Tulane University, allowing and enabling students to move their ideas out of the walls of the university and into the commercial realm. Recent startups taking advantage of this opportunity are the bioimaging company, Instapath as well as the regenerative medicine companies, BioAesthetics and D&P BioInnovations.

Co-director of the Novel Tech Challenge, Greg Stein told Tulane press of the annual event, “The Novel Tech Challenge provides students a chance to take an idea out of their heads and turn it into something real where they can show and explain it and convince potential investors to finance them or join their team.”

So, alongside their recent accomplishments at the LSU I-Corps Sites Program and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, TrachTech’s members: Morgan Bohrer, Stephen Hahn, Michael L’Ecuyer, Alex Verne and faculty advisor Mark Mondrinos set their inventive sights on future awards, acclaim, and above all a process of ventilator utilization that is save, clean, and effective.

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Acadiana’s Silicon Bayou Gains New Tech Firm

Over the past decade, Acadiana’s tech industry, Silicon Bayou, has caught the eye of many interested parties nationwide as “Acadiana’s Silicon Valley” has became only more prevalent and successful with time. As detailed by an Advocate article, the educational technology company, SchoolMint Inc, will move its headquarters and other U.S. operations from California to Acadiana.

SchoolMint Inc, which has previously acquired a Lafayette-based company in 2019, will asl o consolidate their offices in New York and Miami, as CEO Bryan MacDonald and Governor John Bel Edwards announced in Lafayette. The firm develops enrollment, application and behavioral management software for schools. The firm develops enrollment, application and behavioral management software for schools.

This monumental deal already has roots in Acadiana, as the history of this Lafayette success story traces back to a sophomore at Carencro High School in 2004, Casey Bienvenu. Bienvenu’s company was eventually purchased and ended up being known as Smart Choice Technologies when it was bought by School Mint in 2019.

Total, the moving of offices and the company will involve a $515,000 investment in new office spaces, and it will create 178 new direct jobs in Lafayette, with an average salary of more than $74,000 plus benefits, according to the governor’s office.

The success of the move to Silicon Bayou was rightly applauded by the governor in the announcement. “From Lafayette to Baton Rouge and New Orleans and across north Louisiana’s I-20 Cyber Corridor, Louisiana is leading the way with cutting-edge tech firms creating quality jobs for our digital future,” he declared.

Taxpayers will help out with $1 million for the company’s relocation assistance, and a healthy tax credit for development of software products, among other benefits. These are seen as valuable, especially for smaller companies, but MacDonald put an emphasis on other avenues the state and community can take to contribute to growth in the technology-based economy.

Once such avenue is to keep the “pipeline of talent” full of students from universities who can provide the educated workforce that such a tech company requires. What is seen by some to be underrated in the previous announcements is the state’s award-winning program, Fast Start, which is used to recruit qualified people to work in relocated businesses, be they blue-collar jobs in a factory or white-collar positions in a software firm.

While leaders across Louisiana applaud SchoolMint as a new, well quasi-new, star in the local Acadiana technology scene, Louisiana as a whole cannot guarantee success in any national, much less international market for digital products or services. Though, SchoolMint is seen as a massive contributor of new talents as well as old to Louisiana’s tech scene, and talent is what our state will need to be more competitive in the 21st century.

“Acadiana’s Silicon Valley” has only grown in prosperity and size over the past decades, and with the addition of SchoolMint, it’s hoped that these successes will inspire lawmakers to invest more in community colleges and universities that make Louisiana more talent-competitive.

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Louisiana Universities Awarded Grants for 3D Printing

Looking towards the future are five universities in Louisiana that have been awarded a collective $20 million federal grant to build a sustainable research and education program in Louisiana in addition to designing complex alloys and polymers for 3D printing, as detailed in an Associated Press release this summer.

The award establishes the Louisiana Material Design Alliance (LAMDA), a board of scientists and engineers at five Louisiana universities and will have a big focus on 3D printing – Louisiana Tech, University of Louisiana Lafayette, Southern University A&M, Tulane University and LSU. The Louisiana Board of Regents is administering this grant.

The project is aiming to introduce new technologies and materials to boost a range of manufacturing industries, with federal support from the National Science Foundation, or NSF, as 3D printing technology holds the potential to reinvent the manufacturing industry, but currently available materials do not meet the needs for structural safety and integrity.

To solve this, Louisiana University scientists, engineers, and other collaborators will be discovering and testing the composition, processing, microstructure, performance, and structural integrity of materials that can be used in advanced 3D printing.

“This game-changing work is at the frontiers of science, engineering and education. We are committed to connecting our research discoveries to industry, so they can have real-world impacts,” said Michael Khonsari, the Dow Chemical Endowed Chair in Rotating Machinery in the LSU Department of Mechanical Engineering, who is the project director for the newly established LAMDA and 3D printing initiative.

The overall project aims to forge new collaborations among LAMDA institutions and establish new partnerships with federal agencies and industries to build a sustainable research and education program in Louisiana as well as development of a skilled and diverse STEM workforce which includes 3D printing. It includes summer training programs for community college faculty to provide them with educational tools to incorporate in their own classrooms, a conference series and other outreach activities.

“This is a great win for Louisiana and the economy that will provide a much-needed boost to the manufacturing industry in our state and across the U.S. We are thankful for the National Science Foundation’s support of the research expertise at LSU and throughout Louisiana,” said LSU Interim President Tom Galligan.

“The manufacturing industry plays a critical role in both state and national economies, and 3D printing will help take it to the next level,” said Sen. John Kennedy, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said. “This funding will help educate university students and better equip Louisiana’s workforce.”

“We are delighted that NSF has recognized the immense value of the collaborative work of researchers across Louisiana institutions, public and private, around cutting-edge manufacturing,” said Commissioner of Higher Education Kim Hunter Reed. “The project’s dual emphasis on research and education ensures the broadest possible reach of the work.”

The grant will pay 14 new faculty members to work in the 3D printing program at the five universities, LSU said in a news release.

In addition to their research, the faculty will develop new courses and student-led research projects to increase Louisiana’s STEM workforce.

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Apple Recognizes UL Lafayette Student

A press release by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette outlines that 2020 student Joesph Kokenge has caught the eye of tech giant, Apple.  Kokenge noted that he continually gave his high school computer science assignments considerably more attention than other subjects, by his own admission. In the article, Kokenge remarks, ““I found myself wanting to do more computer science homework, and trying to find ways to get around doing social studies, science and math homework. So, I told myself, ‘You know what, I enjoy doing this so much I should probably pursue this in college.”

The UL Lafayette senior is 21 years old and majoring in computer science, with a specific concentration in big data and cloud computing, and according to acclaimed technology titan Apple, Inc, he evidently made the right choice. The technology company has named Kokenge alongside 350 students from 41 countries as winners of its “Swift Student Challenge,” which is held in conjunction with the Apple 2020 Worldwide Developers conference.

The program requires its tens of thousands of student participants who enter to develop a virtual environment on Apple’s Swift Playground App, which teaches its users how to code, the process of creating instructions for computers using programming languages.

Kokenge created the “Secure Hashing Algorithm Crash Course,” which is a virtual playground that is focused on cybersecurity. The concept of Hashing involves using algorithms to convert passwords into a “hash,” or a string of characters helping to keep passwords secure.

Apple’s playground app offers another feature for an additional security measure, says Kokenge, “it basically walks someone through how to go from just having a password that’s hashed, to what’s called ‘salting the password.’”

He explained, “You basically add few random letters at the end, and that makes the password a lot harder to crack.”

The Swift Student Challenge isn’t the first time Kokenge’s prowess and technological acumen has earned national attention, as at just the age of 18, he was featured in a Wall Street Journal article about entrepreneurial teenagers making big bucks by repairing iPhones. Kokenge, who watched YouTube videos in order to learn the process, charged anywhere from $50 to $200 to repair cracked phone screens.

Additionally, he developed several applications that have since been published by Apple’s official App Store, their digital distribution platform. One app enables people to submit prayer requests and get matched with another person with whom they will pray for 24 hours.

His latest app, which was only published this summer, is called “Dinner Decider;” it enables a group of people to generate a data-driven, anonymous consensus as to where the majority wants to dine, solving the frequent supper-time stresser.

“People are often reluctant to share their preferences verbally, so the app is designed to provide a way around that,” he explained.

Kokenge, who anticipates graduating in Spring 2021, plans to work for a small computer company to “get experience and learn,” then would like to move on to a larger one such as “Apple, Google, or Microsoft.”

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