Archive for February, 2012

Augmate’s Unique New York State Eco-system

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Augmate is headquartered in New York and for good reason. There is a plethora of business incubators, accelerators, shared workspaces, and there are early stage: seed, angel, and venture capital investors. Silicon Alley is in high gear and producing some of the best tech start-up companies like: foursquare, tumblr, turntable.fm, kickstarter, TechCrunch, Art.sy, KickApps, Etsy, Yipit, Birchbox, OkCupid, MakerBot, ZocDoc, AppNexus, GroupMe, the list goes on…

There is a great tech education system in New York and Cornell plans to build a 2.1-million-square-foot science campus here. Columbia’s User Interface Lab has produced incredible research in the area of digital eyewear. NYIT (Institute of Technology) does the beta testing for the Kopin / Motorola Golden-I system. There is Hunter College, SUNY, City College, NYU, and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. On top of this, the University of Rochester has the best research optics lab in the world.

There are Tech Meetups, hacker events, and ARNY (Augmented Reality New York). The ARNY founders also organize ARE (Augmented Reality Event), the first global conference dedicated to advancing the business of augmented reality. And when I look around the state, I see Vuzix (digital eyewear veteran) in Rochester, Kitware (computer vision pioneer) in Clifton Park, and eMagin (#1 maker of AR Glasses LED’s) in Hopewell Junction.

We already know that, geographically speaking, New York is the advertising and finance capital of the world, could it soon be the same for technology?  It is no wonder why Augmate has setup shop in New York, making it our home.

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2012
02/13
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Are You Experienced?

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It seems that the jobs report dominates the national agenda lately from the presidential address to the campaign trail. The unemployment rate declined to 8.3 percent this past week yet it still seems gloomy for many Americans (12.8M people are out of work). While some people explore entrepreneurship, it is not for everyone.

There are many variables to this issue. There is a crumbling infrastructure that is in need of repair but no tax revenue to pay for it and the economy has to pick-up before companies start to hire en mass again. Many jobs have gone over seas and innovation requires the workforce to consider retraining in new fields.

What if there was a good way to do on the job training for the non-experienced. Consider the Augmate solution, “just in time instruction in a users field of view related to the task at hand.”

I am not saying the Augmate solution can instruct a passenger how to land a plane or teach a good samaritan how to perform an emergency tracheotomy, however, it could show someone how to properly mix cement or operate simple road repair equipment. I speculate that there are 100s of job processes and instructions that could be loaded into the Augmate system.

Augmate has joined the Startup America Partnership, it is a good organization with a worthy cause to get Americans working again. New & small businesses create 80% of the jobs in America. http://www.s.co/

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

2012
02/05
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