The largest frontier of computer technology has always been the interactivity. When Apple introduced the mouse and GUI, it turned an esoteric business machine into a common home appliance. Now VR headsets are turning computers into fully immersive experiences. What’s next? If you ask Joe Ward, co-founder and CEO of IKIN, it’s holograms. 

IKIN is developing the first 3D smartphone with a limitless range of personal and business applications. In this edition of UpTech Report, Joe discusses the origins of this technology and the many places they’re taking it.

Tom Kieley, the co-founder and CEO of SourceDay, likes to call buyers the unsung heroes of an organization. Developing and selling a product is all well and good, “But if you can't deliver that product because of a supplier miss,” Tom says, “or because of a lead time issue, or just a lack of visibility—which is what everyone in the world is seeing today—it's worthless.” 

SourceDay aims to give those unsung heroes the tools they need to optimize their performance and make getting products out the door as smooth and efficient as possible.

As a child, Paolo Venneri began to notice a theme in his beloved science fiction: All space-faring civilizations relied on an ultimate power source. Growing up in Los Alamos, home to the famous national energy laboratory, Paolo was surrounded by scientists and engineers tackling this very issue. 

Eventually, Paolo would too, with his company, USNC-Tech, which develops safe nuclear power and propulsion for space exploration. Paolo’s ambition is to make the technology commercially available and used for permanent bases on the moon and beyond.

The days of going with your gut are long gone. Today, it’s all about the data—especially if you’re in marketing. But when it comes to live events, collecting data can be enormously challenging. How do you know how many people attended, what their experience was like, and what happened after they left? 

Terry Foster is attempting to answer those questions with his company, Limelight, which offers a platform to capture and track data from experiential campaigns and analyze the results.

Dennis R. Mortensen achieved what is for many a dream—the acquisition of his startup by a major company. But is the dream all it lives up to be? On this edition of Founders Journey, Dennis tells the story of starting x.ai, an automated scheduling tool, and what it was like selling the company to Bizzabo, which offers an event management platform. 

Dennis discusses what selling a company actually entails and what life looks like on the other side. And he should know—x.ai is the fourth company he sold.

Despite how deeply we’ve traveled into the digital era, employees at enterprise companies still find themselves devoting hours of their day, if not days of their week, poring over text documents looking for data and answers to questions. AI and machine learning technologies make automated solutions possible, but difficult to implement, often requiring a team of developers and data scientists. 

Ryan Welsh aims to make the solution much simpler with his company, Kyndi, which offers an AI-powered reading platform API, allowing companies to quickly and easily build applications to analyze documents and retrieve information.

The events industry is enormous, generating $1.5 trillion dollars annually. But like most of life, this thriving industry was tossed headfirst into the virtual world when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March of 2020. The need to continue holding events remained paramount. 

“Marketers understand that the greatest way to get and market to leads is through events,” says Jim Sharpe, the CEO of Aventri, a virtual and hybrid event management technology platform. 

Aventri is giving enterprise and mid market businesses an engaging live and on-demand event experience so that people can continue to connect in new ways.

Safety is a larger industry than most people realize, accounting for $56 billion annually. And most people don’t realize it’s also an enormous problem—each year, a staggering 2.9 million people die from workplace accidents. But safety training is still often performed in an antiquated way, with PowerPoint slides and videos. 

Mousa Yassin is bringing this industry into the modern era with Pixaera, a tech startup offering VR training simulations to give workers an immersive, engaging, and even entertaining way to learn the important safety standards that could save their lives and the lives of their coworkers.

Establishing a compelling brand is one of the most important challenges every company must face. We know that it’s much more than just whipping up a cool logo and starting an Instagram account—it takes a lot of planning and effort. And yet, there’s very little guidance on how it’s done. Ryo Kikuchi is offering help with his company ZeBrand. 

Based in New York City, ZeBrand is a platform that gives companies a process for crafting their story, developing their look, and delivering their brand, allowing emerging startups to define themselves quickly and get to market faster.

Even with modern forecasting, weather is unpredictable. We pack up our picnic baskets with the hopes that maybe this time our standard weather apps are right. But if you’re in an industry that performs any work outdoors, an unexpected change in weather can be more than a disappointment—it can be massively expensive. 

Both consumers and businesses alike may wish they had more granular forecasts, so they know not merely what the weather might be like in your city that day, but what the weather might be like at a specific pin dropped on a map, and for how long. Buck Lyons is giving people the answer with his company, Weatherflow Tempest, which offers a proprietary weather station and sophisticated weather data for point-specific forecasting.