Features
Take note: These are the innovative people, products, companies and groups you should be talking about around the dinner table or water cooler.
Inventors hold a special place in Americans’ hearts. From Benjamin Franklin (bifocal glasses) and Thomas Edison (electric light bulbs) to Steve Jobs (iPods) and Sara Blakely (Spanx), inventors of new products—as well as the products themselves—are revered and idolized. Since we live in one of the most tech-savvy and innovative cities in the country, it’s not surprising that Austin is home to a plethora of inventors who are creating revolutionary products every day. In the following pages, learn about 15 of the city’s most innovative people, products, companies and groups. They are taking the lead on everything from 3-D printing and invisibility cloaking to smart rifles and carbon capturing. Read on to be impressed and intrigued.
Inventor: Thomas Milner
As a young man, Thomas Milner never set out to invent anything. But there was someone who thought he’d be good at it. “I’ll never forget going over an assignment with my high school English teacher and her telling me, ‘I see you as an inventor in the future,’” he says. “I just wanted my work to be applied and relevant.” The professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Texas certainly has achieved his goal. Named the 2013 Inventor of the Year by UT, Milner owns 35 patents, most of which are in biomedical optics, a field that uses light either for surgery or diagnostics. One of his inventions, dynamic cooling, is the technology used in laser skin or hair removal. He’s also the mind behind optical coherence tomography, which he describes as “the optical analog to ultrasound” but with 10 times the resolution. The 54-year-old father of two kids has more patents in the pipeline, including combining imaging with laser surgery. Not bad for someone who never set out to be an inventor.
Company: Skyonic
Ten years ago, while watching Discovery Channel’s Mission to Mars, a simple family discussion about what happens to carbon dioxide released by astronauts in space inspired chemical engineer and Skyonic CEO Joe David Jones to invent his carbon-capture technology. Skymine, as it is called, takes CO2 released in factory flues and, through a chemical process known as “scrubbing,” mineralizes it into baking soda. (Yes, the same ingredient used to bake cookies.) Construction on the startup’s first full-size, commercial-scale carbon capture plant began last summer at Capitol Cement in San Antonio. It should be fully operational by the end of 2014. The company estimates that it can capture 83,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, thus helping to eliminate the gases that contribute to acid rain and holes in the ozone. For the record, you won’t find the baking soda product in grocery stores. Instead, Skyonic plans on selling it for industrial uses, such as glass manufacturing, paper whitening and animal feed. The company is also in discussions to bring future plants to China, Canada, Russia, the Middle East and South Africa. “Not everybody in a generation gets to invent—really discover is the right term—a process and actually get to take it to commercialization,” Jones says. “To be the guy to see it through, it’s really fantastic.”
Invention: Blackbird Bakery
Karen Morgan has taken the phrase “if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself” to heart. After she was diagnosed with Celiac disease in 2002, Morgan found “a dearth of high-quality gluten-free products on the market.” After five-plus years developing more than 100 gluten-free recipes—and a stint as pastry chef at a bed and breakfast in France, where her secretly gluten-free desserts received a standing ovation each night—she moved back to Austin in 2008 to open Blackbird Bakery, a small, custom gluten-free bake shop. But Morgan was still displeased with a very important baking ingredient: gluten-free flour blends. “Everybody has these mixes they say are ‘all purpose,’” she says. “But in the gluten-free community, there is no such thing as an all-purpose blend, because baking is so specific and scientific that you really need a special blend of different starches and flours for each section of baking and cooking.” Not only that, but most gluten-free flours also contain unsavory ingredients, such as GMO cornstarch, soy or nut products or xantham gum. So Morgan spent seven years perfecting six types of flour—bread and pizza, biscuit, donuts and fritters, pies and pasta, cake blend and cookie blend—using different ratios of sorghum, tapioca, glutinous rice flour and guar gum. “The reason I started Blackbird Bakery was to improve peoples’ lives,” she says. “And I realized that, in order to do so, I had to fill this gaping hole and provide a product that actually works.”
Invention: Bronko Box
Three years ago, Brooke and Bo Cox would’ve never guessed where they’d be today. At that time, they were both in the music industry: Bo was a singer-songwriter and Brooke a booker and talent buyer. But when a drunk driver killed Bo’s bassist and guitar player, the Coxes were forever changed. “After the accident, Bo and I both leaned on our degrees and took ‘real’ jobs, corporate-world jobs,” says Brooke. It was there that they noticed the heavy-duty polyethylene plastic boxes used in commercial moving and wondered why the same boxes weren’t used residentially. And so Bronko Box was born. Instead of foraging for flimsy cardboard boxes when moving, ultra-strong Bronko boxes, which arrive with handles and moving wheels, can be rented for one to three weeks at a time, then returned to the company for reuse. “The standard cardboard box gets two and a half uses,” says Bo. “The Bronko box, at the low estimate, gets 400 uses. So we’re talking about saving a lot of trees and keeping a lot out of the landfill.” And starting at $30 for a week rental, the price is right, too. “We’re at least 50 percent cheaper than buying new boxes and having to put them together,” says Brooke. “We want to revolutionize the way not only Austinites, but Texans, are packing and moving.”
Invention: TrackingPoint
Imagine a rifle so accurate the least-experienced shooter could hit a bull’s-eye 1,000 yards away. That gun exists, and it’s made right here in Austin by TrackingPoint, a company founded by entrepreneur and high-speed Internet pioneer John McHale. Inspired to develop a “smart rifle” after missing a shot on a hunting trip in Africa, McHale enlisted the help of electrical and mechanical engineers, industrial designers and mobile application makers to design precision-guided firearms with “fighter jet technology,” which is basically a track-and-tag system that allows the shooter to lock the scope onto a target. The result is a gun with so much precision it gives an unskilled shooter a higher first-shot success probability than a trained military sharpshooter. But there’s more: The rifles also come equipped with streaming video. “There are pretty giant implications there,” says company spokesman Oren Schauble. “Such as soldiers having scopes that are able to communicate.” (Both police forces and military organizations have expressed interest in the product.) The firearms, of which there are currently four models, don’t come cheap, selling for between $22,500 and $27,500. But since its introduction last spring, business has been booming: At press time, there was already a nine-month waiting list.
Inventor: Andrea Alú
The idea of becoming invisible is one that society has fantasized about for years through mythology and science fiction. But Italian-born UT Associate Professor Andrea Alú has been working since 2005 to make invisibility cloaking a reality. “Scattering constellation is based on the principle that you see an object by gathering with your sensors the wave that is scattered around by the object,” he explains. “So our idea is to cover this object in metamaterials that scatter in opposite ways that, by interference, cancels the wave of the object.” Alú and his team work mostly with electromagnetic waves, such as radio frequencies, radio waves and optical waves, and their findings have been of particular interest to improving wireless and radio frequency communications by presenting the possibility of building invisible antenna, which can be placed very closely to other antenna without interrupting each other’s communication. This could also be a huge advancement for biomedical technology by drastically improving measurements when optical microscope tips are cloaked to examine a cell in a very near field. Alú also holds several patents on his ideas to use metamaterial cloaks to improve invisible sensors and solar energy concentration and harvesting. But don’t expect any kind of Harry Potter–inspired invisibility cloaks. “We are not working on making humans invisible because this is actually not possible, even with our theory,” says Alú. “But for electromagnetic waves, there are many things that you can do. I think it’s very beneficial to society.”
Invention: TeVido BioDevices
Invented in the 1980s, 3-D printing has only recently taken off, with people using the technology to make jewelry, guns and food. Now, a local startup is printing skin—more specifically, tissue for reconstructive breast surgery. TeVido BioDevices, formed in 2011, is the brainchild of former Dell and IBM executive Laura Bosworth and Thomas Boland, the director of University of Texas–El Paso’s Biomedical Engineering School and the inventor of the 3-D skin-making process. Originally, the duo set out to develop the technology for wound healing, but realized after speaking with doctors at Brackenridge that breast cancer survivors were their market. “I’m shocked by how many women have a story about something bad that happened with their reconstruction,” says Bosworth. “But of the billion dollars a year spent on breast cancer research in the U.S., I cannot find that any of it is going to improving the procedure.” TeVido’s technology would take a small amount of skin and fat cells from a woman, culture the cells to make a graft, then build a small mound of tissue through the 3-D layer-building process. Currently in the testing and prototype stage, Bosworth and Boland hope to have human trials by 2016.
Group: Austin Technology Incubator
In 1989, the late George Kozmetsky founded the Austin Technology Incubator as a means of accelerating Austin’s tech economy. “He was one of a handful of people to turn Austin into a tech mecca,” explains Isaac Barchas, director of ATI for the past seven years. Now, 25 years later, ATI has given guidance and support to 200-plus companies and helped them raise more than $1 billion in investor capital. ATI works with software companies and specialized programs in medical science, wireless telecommunications and clean energy technologies. Most of the companies they support are both economically and environmentally beneficial, such as a set of filters that clean (and allow for recycling) frack water, or a new type of asphalt free of harmful kerosene and a screen that protects wildlife from underwater noise caused by oil drilling. Though ATI is a program of the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, Barchas says, “The goal from the beginning was to support the tech community in Austin in general.”
Invention: DJI Phantom
Colin Guinn was working at a marketing firm for custom-home builders when he noticed a missing link in the realm of architectural photography. “We’d have a photographer hanging out the back of a helicopter with a camera—the whole thing seemed ridiculous to me,” he says. Figuring there had to be a better way, Guinn investigated other options. “I had seen some people around the world building their own helicopters to carry cameras,” he says, “but it’s a four-to-six month process to get this Frankenstein rig to hold a camera and fly.” Guinn reached out to China-based company DJI, which creates autopilot systems for remote control helicopters, and stepped in to run the American line of a high-performance, unmanned aerial system called Phantom—basically, a drone with photographic and video capabilities. The original Phantom could run for 8 to 12 minutes on batteries and was designed to mount a high-definition action video camera, such as the GoPro. But the new Phantom 2, released in October, comes with a built-in camera and can fly for a full 25 minutes on a lithium polymer battery. The device is linked to a standard remote control, as well as a smartphone app, that shows what the camera sees in real time from 1,000 feet away. Guinn wants to continue making the systems more capable by increasing fly time and designing them to be lighter weight, lower cost and user friendly. “We want to make aerial photography accessible for anyone who wants to put a camera in the air,” he says.
Invention: Briggo Coffee Haus
Charles Studor was an integrated chip design leader at Motorola for more than 25 years before he retired and found himself in Honduras doing charitable work. While there, he discovered and fell in love with the coffee culture and the people who grew the beans. Studor decided to create the Briggo Coffee Haus in order to merge high-quality, direct-trade coffee with both the smartphone experience and the coffeehouse experience of picking up your customized cup. “Cloud communication, technology and robotics had advanced far enough where he could visualize this wonderful cup of coffee that could be produced in an automated way and controlled by the customer,” says Kevin Nater, Briggo’s president and CEO. Here’s how it works: Customers order a coffee from their smartphones, then use their travel time as the wait time. When they arrive at the Briggo Coffee Haus, they enter a code to retrieve their protected cup from behind a window. Right now, only one 50-square-foot Briggo Haus exists—you can find it at the Flawn Academic Center on the University of Texas campus—but the company was recently approved to operate the machines at the Austin-Bergstrom Airport. Next, the Briggo team hopes to spread into other airports, universities and hospitals.
Invention: Lynx A Camera
If the tape measure becomes a relic of technology’s past, blame Lynx Laboratories. The 3-D imaging software company developed the mind inside the Lynx A Camera, a mobile tablet-like device that can capture the shape, scale and color of an object, which can then be rendered as a 3-D model on the device’s screen within minutes. As easy to operate as a point-and-shoot but with the processing power of 10 iPads, the camera exponentially cuts down on the time it takes to measure surfaces and space, something architects, visual effects designers and industrial engineers will appreciate. “Think of it as the difference between oil painting and taking a Polaroid,” says 25-year-old co-founder Chris Slaughter. The Lynx A also has a motion capture feature that can record movement—a nifty option for video game makers. The company, which was founded 18 months ago, sells the camera for $2,000 to $3,000, and has already attracted the attention of Bill Gates and President Obama. Look for Lynx’s 3-D imaging technology to start showing up in major consumer devices and industrial automation later this year.
Invention: The Freeloader
It was on a European vacation with his then-4-year-old daughter when firefighter Erick Jansen first wondered why someone hadn’t come up with a child carrier that was lightweight and easy to transport. Two years later, this time hiking with his daughter, he had an a-ha moment: “After carrying her in a piggyback ride for a good mile, I thought, A fold-down seat and a backpack would be great,” Jansen says. Thus, the Freeloader was born. Jansen partnered with fellow firefighter Nathan Jones in designing a carrier that weighs 5.4 pounds—about 2 pounds lighter than most framed child carriers—and has almost double the carrying capacity of up to 80 pounds. It also easily fits on the floorboard of a car. After raising $30,000 through Indiegogo, the two dads began selling their product last spring. Business really took off, however, after an appearance on Shark Tank in October netted them a $200,000 investment. As of November, the duo had sold 300 Freeloaders at $279 each. In 2014, they plan on adding to the line a less expensive model and an adventurer carrier that comes with more pockets and accessories.
Group: City of Austin Innovation Office
This year, the City of Austin is jumping on the innovation bandwagon with the creation of an Innovation Office. To be run by a Chief Innovation Officer, the new department’s purpose is to connect people who have ideas with facilitators who can turn those ideas into reality. This is not just within the government, says Public Works Director Howard Lazarus, who along with City Manager Marc Ott is spearheading the search for the city’s newest employee. (At press time, the field had been narrowed down to three candidates.) How will private residents or business owners benefit from the office? This is where the city council’s open government initiative comes into play. The effort by the city for more transparency includes the recently launched open portal site data.austintexas.gov. Containing city data that anyone can access, the site can connect people throughout the community with information that can help them develop tools that everyone can use, such as a new ride-sharing app for cyclists or an app that provides restaurant health inspection reports on the review site Yelp. “We all have ideas that we’d love to be able to advance,” Lazarus says. “This will be a tremendous resource to not have those ideas die on the vine.” *After press time, the City of Austin announced they hired Kerry O'Connor as the new Chief Innovation Officer.
Group: Titan Robotics at Manor New Tech
After attending the world championships at the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition in St. Louis last year, students from the Titan Robotics team at Manor New Technology High School are gearing up for another big spring. While Titan Robotics meets once a week in preseason, they meet a whopping six days a week to complete their robot for the competition. The worldwide challenge teams high school students with experienced mentors to build a robot programmed to complete certain tasks—such as variants of basketball, frisbee and soccer—and then play in a three-on-three game with five others. The challenge and game type is first announced at a kickoff event this month. The team then has six weeks to design their robot, model it on a computer, build a prototype and complete the finished product using materials including aluminum, steel, plastics and wood. Controllers, processors, sensors and actuators are also used in some of the robots. “Companies around the world use these technologies to power everything from assembly lines to production machinery to shipping systems,” says lead technical mentor Jeffrey Erickson. “But, ultimately, it’s the design principles and technology development that we are hoping the students will further appreciate—and may inspire them to careers developing the next generation of cool stuff that makes our lives better.”
Invention: Pristine
One could call Kyle Samani, founder and CEO of health-tech company Pristine at just 23, a bit of a prodigy. He began computer programming when he was just 10 years old, had a stint with studying finance in college but soon found himself back in technology—specifically healthcare IT. “I spent the last three years developing, selling and implementing electronic health records in hospitals,” he says, “so I’ve really seen the whole life cycle of software development, sales and deployment in hospitals.” When he discovered Google Glass earlier this year, he immediately saw how beneficial the hands-free computer could be to the world of medicine, so he quit his job and started Pristine to provide healthcare-specific software and support for Google Glass. Unlike regular Google Glass software, Pristine software is completely secure and HIPAA compliant. It is also voice-based to create a completely hands-free experience. “The primary uses are teaching and training,” says Samani. “First-person video is the best teaching tool ever.” With surgeons constantly learning new procedures and being introduced to new devices, Pristine is also a valuable tool for continuing surgical education. Pristine products are currently being piloted in live surgeries and ICUs at UC Irvine Medical Center.
