Bright Idea
Plimp, a Plane-Blimp Hybrid, Is Looking to Disrupt the Drone Market
Seattle brothers James and Joel Egan are adding a new airship to the drone market, and it could be available as soon as next year.
What if you could bring together in a drone-like vehicle the best features of an airplane, a helicopter and a blimp? Identical twin brothers James and Joel Egan have been asking themselves that question for years. Not finding anyone else addressing it, they decided to do it themselves and created the Plimp. The name, like…
Seattle Startup Turns Your Smartphone into a Camera with Cinema-quality Lenses
Moment is capitalizing on the rise of mobile photography, and now has millions of dollars in sales.
Moments story is straightforward. There was this massive cultural movement happening around the smartphone, says Marc Barros. Everyone was using it as their camera, but no one had said, Hey, thats a camera. Lets make a family of accessories around it. So, in 2013, Barros, who previously created the Go-Pro rival known as Contour, launched…
Bright Idea: This New Headphone Device Dissolves Earwax
Earwax is hardly a sexy topic. But brothers Aadil and Sahil Diwan see in it an alluring business opportunity.
Earwax is hardly a sexy topic. But brothers Aadil and Sahil Diwan see in it an alluring business opportunity. Theyve launched SafKan, a Seattle company they hope will be to earwax what Sonicare is to dental plaque. Aadil Diwan is one of more than 230,000 Americans whose impacted earwax requires monthly visits to the doctors…
Bright Idea: Building Morale with Tenacity
Call-center workers learn to love their jobs.
Many of the 300,000 people in the United States who work at call centers are not happy campers. People are yelled at [by customers] and treated like cattle [by employers], says Ron Davis, so turnover is high. Davis is cofounder and CEO of Tenacity (gotenacity.com), a company that uses the latest in machine learning technology…
Bright Idea: Taking Center Stage
An intelligent credit card links an employees spending directly to the company budget.
Buy dinner or supplies and put it on the company card. This employee convenience can also be a vexation for company budgets as casual expenses mount. A Bellevue startup, Center (centercard.com), thinks it has the right solution, and the track record of its founders suggests it might. The CenterCard puts the computing power and interactivity…
Bright Idea: What’s the Good Word?
Textio helps businesses choose language that produces results.
In 2014, linguistics Ph.D. Kieran Snyder, who had spent much of her career on quantitative approaches to language, was talking to Jensen Harris, a former user-experience exec at Microsoft, when the two arrived at the same conclusion. We had this idea that maybe predictive technologies natural language processing, machine learning, things I had been doing…
Bright Idea: Rock Stars
UW researchers take a whack at kidney stone disease.
Kidney stones can be extremely painful. Larger stones can get stuck, potentially leading to loss of the kidney, sepsis and even death. So in 700,000 procedures a year, kidney stones are shattered with sound waves or laser beams into smaller pieces that can naturally be flushed from the system. But pieces left behind often grow…
Bright Idea: Mechanics Making House Calls
Wrench wants to take the hassle out of car repair.
Need a quick oil change? Maybe a complete tune-up? A year-old startup called Wrench dispatches a certified mechanic to your home or workplace and eliminates the hassle and cost of having to drop off your car at the car dealer or repair shop. Were 30 percent cheaper than a dealership and on par with an…
Bright Idea: Labor Saver
Forget email. Shyft Technologies makes shift swapping easy.
New legislation requiring Seattle businesses with 500 or more employees to schedule workers hourly shifts two weeks in advance will be a boon to some, but it could complicate the lives of many workers and employers. Seattle startup Shyft Technologies has created a free smartphone app that simplifies the tangled dance of schedule shuffling by…
Bright Idea: Learning Made Easy
Skilljar defies the status quo in the training systems market.
When San Jose-based MapR Technologies launched a free on-demand training and certification program in 2015 to teach developers, analysts and administrators how to use Hadoop software technology, tens of thousands of trainees signed up, crashing the companys learning management system. By transferring its users to Skilljar, a cloud-based learning platform, MapR relaunched the training program…
Bright Idea: Switch Doctor Gets Smart about Home Lighting
Deako Inc. makes smart lighting easier for builders and homebuyers.
About three years ago, Derek Richardson and his wife bought a second home a dark cabin, says Richardson. He began searching for an affordable smart lighting system but couldnt find anything he liked. It was $30,000 or $40,000 for a professionally installed home system, he explains, or it was do-it-yourself systems that were difficult to…
Bright Idea: Planetary Power’s Battery Boost
Cell towers in remote locations use diesel generators; a Redmond firm has a greener concept.
Sometimes, bright ideas seem to fall from the sky, like Newtons apple. More often, as in the case of HyGen, they are the product of careful analysis. The team at Planetary Power Inc. in Redmond came up with the idea for HyGen because we were looking for what was the next big, world-changing problem to…
Bright Idea: Space Exploration with Flexe Inc.
Need a warehouse in Omaha for eight weeks? Flexes online marketplace will find it for you.
Amazon has poured tens of billions of dollars into building close to 100 highly automated ware-houses around the country to cut costs and reduce delivery times. That reality has put competitors in a quandary. How can they match Amazons capabilities without spending the same kind of money to build a similar network? Seattle-based Flexe (flexe.com)…