Today on Bytemarks Café, at the first Hawaii Annual Code Challenge, the State asked the tech community to help make government better. We’ll talk to some of the prize-winning teams about their projects and how their applications help citizens better interact with government.

We’ll find out what challenges face tech startups looking to grow their market. With entrepreneurial and accelerator initiatives in full swing what choices do companies have after they graduate?

We’ll catch up with the latest cohort of explorers in Hi-SEAS or Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. This Mars simulation involves a yearlong stay in the Big Island habitat. We’ll find out how the crew dealt with the long duration mission.

Today on Bytemarks Café, we’ve heard educators modify STEM to STEAM to include science, technology engineering ART & math. We’ll find out how several science organizations incorporate an artist in residence and what that brings to the program.

We’ll dive into the world of creepy crawly bugs and animals, especially the ones with venom. We’ll learn from researcher and author Christie Wilcox how venoms work as a defense mechanism and how these biochemical toxins are created in the first place.

Today on Bytemarks Cafe, we’ll delve deep into space and follow up on a topic that is near and dear to our hearts: exoplanets. New discoveries of planets orbiting other stars are frequent, so two experts from the Institute for Astronomy will help us understand why they matter.

We’ll get an update on the second launch of Project Imua from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility. The project is a collaboration among four community colleges to build a payload with data collecting experiments and their launch date is set for Aug 16th.

We’ll learn about the IT modernization project taking place at the Hawaii State government. We’ve invited both the Chief Information Officers of the State and the University of Hawaii to tell us about the benefits and the challenges to IT transformation.

We’ll find out what plans were made at the recent International Coral Reef Symposium. We’ve invited two of Hawaii’s preeminent coral researchers to detail what can be done to protect this important marine ecosystem?

Today on Bytemarks Cafe, we’ll talk with a fresh new crop of the latest Blue Startup cohort. These new companies get accelerated with mentoring and a small startup investment. What else will it take to nurture them, and build Hawaii’s ‘Startup Paradise’?