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FiReStarters Part 2

A view of Southern California's beautiful coastline from the Terranea Resort. Photo courtesy of Gabriel Frank.

Hosted by Stephen Evans, Presenter, Business Daily, BBC World Service:

Gist

Brings together all of your contacts, assesses your interaction history and organizes contacts that way to determine which people and companies are most important to you. Gist then goes out to the web and imports news and profile information about your contacts and presents it to you in your inbox.

“It’s contact plus content delivered in context,” said McCann.

Trifecta GIS

Infrastructure is constantly deteriorating and requires constant maintenance. “We believe that about 30% of the money going into infrastructure maintenance is wasted,” says Clark Easter.

Trifecta is taking advantage of the geospatial platform to make a video-game like interface to deliver huge amounts of information about infrastructure maintenance needs within their laptop or cellphone browser. They have newly implemented the first real-time EPA automatic sensory network to sense

A test city in Australia last year saved 1 million last year through collaboration on projects. The US could save 4 billion/ year by coordinating construction projects and avoiding duplicate projects. “I jokingly call it online dating for construction,” Easter says.

Tesla

Moved from trying to show that a premium electric car was possible to producing the car, getting them on the road. Audi’s electric car is 2-3 years down the road with less range, less capacity.

Hybrids are a bridge technology, therefore not progressive enough.

X1

“We’re no longer in the information age. We’re now in the information overload age,” says John Waller.

The average knowledge worker spends about 25% of their time looking for information. X1 is developing a search-based system for finding all documents, information, etc in one location, preview the information and

Zirus

Anti-viral company. Vaccines work well for viruses that don’t change much. Anti-viral drugs block the virus in some way, but don’t work very well for very long because of viral replication.

Zirus has developed the Gene Trap that identifies the cells the virus uses to take over our body and blocks the proteins in the cell that the virus needs to reproduce. This could potentially allow us to produce and stockpile remedies for smallpox, cancers, ebola, etc. They have already developed two medications– one for flu and one for the common cold.