March 11th, 2020 at 11:30 AM
McDonalds near Olmos Creek
San Antonio, Texas
Last night, I learned that the City of San
Antonio had set up a civtech incubator at a coworks downtown, a cool place with
1600 members called Geekworks. The city gave a grant of a quarter million
dollars and picked three companies to develop software for managing the city.
That’s civtech, civil technology. We got to meet the three teams and drink cold
soda and munch on dinner as we asked questions. I love to ask questions, and
snack on food I probably wouldn’t buy for myself, fresh fruits and vegetables
and such.
Polis has written mobile software to help people
navigate the San Antonio Riverwalk, a beautiful and yet bewildering route
through the city. I was lost for five minutes on the Riverwalk last night until
I saw the St. Mary’s Street bridge. Polis has a team of programmers who recently
earned degrees at Trinity University, and they’ve built a navigation app for
the walk. If I got lost, I'm sure tourists have as well. Lost tourist cut back on the dining and drinking, so that's bad.
The app must use Bluetooth to send and receive
data because cell phones don’t work well in the submerged park the follows the
river. I asked a question if text messages worked ok at river level, wondering
if that could be a communication medium. Even text messages fail too much to be
reliable I learned. It must be made to work because I would love to know the
names of all the different fountains and learn about deals as I pass a
restaurant with a cool deck. That's the plan when Polis goes live.
The team at solovaGo has a program that accesses
past data on criminal activity and puts it one the screen. A person walking
home alone can know where the hotspots await and avoid them. The app also sends
out a beacon to loved ones so they know if a friend is making good progress
through a tough section of the city. I gave them the name of Information
Builders, a business intelligence company that helped the City of Richmond
build an app that was said to predict crime hotspots using inputs such as
weather and past history. The programmer wrote down the information right away.
I really liked the Pawtify team, a pair that met
in programming school last year. The app lists all dogs and cats at the city
shelter and matches the pets with people who are looking for a breed or a
certain temperament. The two women both have pets they love very much, so I
asked, “Do your cats keep you company as you program?”
One answered, “Yes, but only when I program at
home. At work, I can’t bring my cats to my cubicle”. I said what seemed
obvious, “Well, I very much want your business to take off so you can program
with all three of your cats every day”. The partner lit up, “Are you one of the
mentors? We’ve been waiting to meet the mentors”. I wasn’t one of the official
mentors for Geekdom. I had just wandered into the event.
I decided to be witty, “Yes, I’m a mentor, I’m a
free-range mentor. You could even call me a Maverick mentor”. A man chimed in,
“Hey, that’s a brand. You have to copywrite that”. Actually, I can’t. Google
shows that a college in Minnesota has claimed the term. But I kept riffing on
the joke, “Can’t have a brand called Maverick Mentor. Maverick, a San Antonio
rancher, didn’t brand his cattle. That’s the origin of the word Maverick, don’t
you know”? Only in San Antonio would people know that fact and laugh. I drew
the man into conversation, and Pawtify went back to greeting people with
questions.
I enjoyed just reaching out to guests,
introducing myself and listening to what they were doing. I met a pair of
consultants who worked with the Air Force Innovations and Sustainability Team.
The Air Force works hard to stay ahead of problems and save money. So the two
were working on self-driving lawn mowers to keep the grass and brush down at
airstrips. One bird jumping out of the grass and landing in a jet engine
could bring down a multimillion dollar plane.
A woman named Daisy had designed an app, ClosetMelody, that let
users pick out clothing perfect for their body type and features. But she
needed funding. “I went to school in Upstate New York”, she shared after I
talked about my life in Saratoga Springs.”Wow”, I said, “I know the woman who
runs the venture capital club at RPI. Let me put you in touch”. I sent her the
professor’s contact information before I went to bed. “RPI will welcome you
home from San Antonio like a hero. I bet they’ll have a check on the desk as
soon as you get to Troy New York”. I like a little bull because it is Texas
after all.
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