Colorado Tech Weekly #81: Crystal Ball. Lego Block. Business Triangle?
I was trying to go for some sort of shape theme for my headline. I’m not sure I did it right. I’m not sure I did it right.I don’t know about you, but my living room is a mess with new Legos. It’s that weird “work week” between Christmas and New Years where you can’t get any momentum to get things accomplished but you don’t feel right bringing your new Sega Genesis emulator to work and just playing around all day either.
WellTok gets some local competition in health tech: Welltok seems to be the Colorado leader in healthcare tech in 2014. In 2015, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, wearables, security fears and better cloud services health tech will change a lot but will not grow in a huge way. This will allow smaller and newer companies to step in to the health tech industry.
Colorado’s information security industry doubles: Looking through my 2014 posts I mentioned over a dozen Colorado-based information security companies. I didn’t realize there were so many! The 2014 headlines about chain-store security breaches,state-sponsored industrial espionage, and NSA overreach is putting the focus on information security and these Colorado companies will benefit greatly.
“The next big thing” comes out of Galvanize: In 2014 Galvanize expanded to Boulder, Fort Collins and San Francisco. Its growth not only kept up with the pace of the growth of the startup community, it probably also helped to push the expansion of Colorado’s startup community. In 2015 the next big thing will come from Galvanize. I don’t know what it is, but it’ll be cool.
Christmas is in 3 days. That thought didn’t quite hit me until I just typed it. I should start wrapping presents. At least I have them all purchased.
Since this is the 2nd to last Monday of the year, I figured i would look back at my predictions I made for 2014. I give myself a generous 50% accuracy.
I predicted that Revolv and Rachio would be purchased. Revolv is now part of Nest. Rachio is still Rachio. I was half right.
I predicted that Dish Network would not be awarded the Worst Company to Work For award. They’re not even in the “top” 10. Good job Dish! Also I was right!
I predicted that smartphone innovation would plateau. I was right! But I thought there would be a cool game-changing audio UI. I was wrong.
I predicted that responsive web design would become the norm. It’s not the norm yet, but it’s slowly getting there. I was wrong.
I predicted that Fire OS would become the #3 most popular tablet OS. I generously give myself half credit because Amazon botched this one. They could have made this happen, but instead they focused on building a phone that focused on convincing users to buy more from Amazon. Damn you Bezos!
I don’t anticipate much news being made this week, so I should have plenty of time and room for predictions for 2015 in next week’s post. I wonder if I can make them all Colorado tech focused.
Sometimes I try to write headlines that summarize the 10 articles I feature. Most of the time, that’s really hard to do. This week is no different. Everything from video games to satellite surveillance, cloud computing to education and beyond. It’s amazing how many things technology touches and how much of that happens here in Colorado.
I just finished 2 courses at Regis. That doesn’t mean I stop learning now that class is over, I just get to choose what it is I learn. Trying to narrow it down is tough. Have a happy Monday!
12/17 – DeRailed – Meet Santa and the holy goat!
12/17 – DTC Ruby User Group – X-mas party!
Last week I said you should get inspired and go meet people. This week I get to follow my own advice! After all it doesn’t seem right for me to give advice and not follow it.
I had originally planned to attend the Apex Conference as a volunteer. I went last year as a wide-eyed newbie and was pretty impressed, but due to my own poor planning I won’t be going this year. Instead I will make up for it by going to RefactorU’s Web Development Career Fair in Boulder followed by logging into the Regis University’s ACM meeting. After that, I’ll be at Galvanize for the Denver New Tech meetup. Looking forward to seeing some of you in person!
I just finished listening to the latest episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Ruby Rogues. It’s a few Ruby programmers who spend most of their time talking about higher level concepts that ANY programmer of any language can appreciate. They had Kinsey Ann Durham, developer for Denver-based GoSpotCheck, as a guest and she talked about being a new developer and her path to that job. It’s inspiring to hear stories from developers like Kinsey. Give it a listen, get inspired and go to one of the events below!
For EVEN MOAR inspiration check out the stories of the CTA APEX awards and the TechStars “Where are they now” story.
Colorado Tech Weekly #73: Mad Geniuses, Ty Lawson and GO VOTE!
Tomorrow is Election Day! It should be a holiday, but for some weird reason it’s not. Make sure that you vote! Even better would be doing some research, and then voting.
Whether your interest is in startups, technology jobs or STEM education, you need to make sure your voice is heard at every level of government. GO VOTE!
11/5 – famo.us Denver/Boulder – Intro to famo.us!
In Colorado Tech Weekly 41, I joked about renaming this series Denver Tech Weekly. This week it could be called Boulder Tech Weekly! I’m really curious how Nest’s purchase of Revolv will play out. I finally post about Ello. I’m not sure about it, but I’m not sure why. And Longmont has a municipal broadband service? That’s cool!
Also MAKE SURE YOU GO VOTE!