The Florida High Tech Corridor is highlighting entrepreneurs in the region that are developing innovative technologies with the potential to revolutionize the industry.  These “Faces of Technology” interviews appear on the Faces of Technology YouTube channel, where viewers can watch these dynamic individuals tell their own stories.  Each of these 16 professionals discusses how they are using technology to facilitate the growth and development of creativity in the region.

“These Faces of Technology profiles showcase the extraordinarily diverse high tech sectors in the region through the eyes of industry experts,” said Randy Berridge, president of the Florida High Tech Corridor Council.  “They stand as testaments to the Corridor’s potential to significantly impact entire industries, if not the world.  We are so proud that they call Florida’s High Tech Corridor home, and we salute their passion and commitment.”

The Florida High Tech Corridor Council (FHTCC) is an economic development initiative of the University of Central Florida (UCF), the University of South Florida (USF) and the University of Florida (UF) whose mission is to grow high tech industry and innovation through research, workforce and marketing partnerships. A partnership involving more than 20 local and regional economic development organizations (EDOs) and 14 community colleges, the Council is co-chaired by the presidents of UCF, USF and UF. The Council includes the presidents of two of the community colleges, the president of Florida Institute of Technology and representatives of high tech industry.

ROBRADY design is a multi-disciplined product design and development studio that offers its multinational client base—including General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Dell Computers, Parker Hannifin, AT&T, Merial and Volvo Penta—progressive industrial design, mechanical design and engineering, graphics /packaging / GUI / web and eCommerce design, market research, brand and retail development, complete rapid prototyping and production program management. ROBRADY design stresses comprehensive speed-to-market product solutions by collaborating to identify the greatest areas of opportunity and producing innovative designs to deliver profitable product solutions. ROBRADY delivers design, production and capital solutions to their clients in support of their research to reality philosophy.

The Rescue Wizard is a gas-powered, man-portable winch capable of pulling loads as heavy as 12,000 lbs. (5,443.108kg). Designed for simple operation under the hardest circumstances, the winch can be used where destroyed roads and tight fits make heavy machinery and vehicles unfeasible and when electric power is unreliable, impractical (e.g. in or near water) or even nonexistent. As such, the winch is ideal for emergency rescue workers, forestry personnel, road crews and the military. With the Rescue Wizard, ROBRADY has surpassed the concept profile, leveraging mechanical and industrial design expertise to realize Morrison’s vision for a life-saving device with great commercial appeal. Aside from obvious rescue applications, the Rescue Wizard could be indispensable for road crews, the forestry service, the military and outdoorsmen as well.

The International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA®) competition is a celebration of the year’s most inventive and creative product and product concept designs. Of the entries submitted, the judges recognize Finalist, Bronze, Silver and Gold Awards. This year the competition received the most entries since it began 30 years ago. Out of 407 finalists, 38 were honored with the Gold award; while 64 received the Silver award and 88 won the Bronze award. IDSA has partnered with the Henry Ford in Dearborn and all finalists from this year will go into the permanent collection of the museum.

Andy Morrison of Naples, Florida founded Wizard Machines in 2008. Morrison has had the idea for the Rescue Wizard for the past 25 years. Over the years, with every disaster, Mr. Morrison thought about that ideal machine but the technology did not exist to achieve the needs he envisioned for a reliable machine that was light and durable in nature. Finally, in 2008 he became aware of a new rope that had all of the attributes of steel cable, but with 10% of the weight.  At about the same time there was a devastating earthquake in Sichuan, China that collapsed as many as 600,000 structures in a matter of seconds.  Those two events motivated him to begin a search for a firm that shared his vision.  That culminated in his collaboration with ROBRADY Design, of Sarasota, Florida, and the founding of Wizard Machines. Morrison has invested the last two years and substantial personal funds to bring the dream for the Rescue Wizard to reality.

ROBRADY is well known for their design prowess in the electric scooter and super bike world, but this is their first foray into the electric bicycle market. Fritz Maffry of the Dynamo Group, who is currently reviewing the db0 3.0 for North American distribution, sees the bike as a breakthrough, with the “same caliber of design DNA as products from Apple or Sony”. Maffry has been reviewing the bike and commented that “a crowd gathered when we were on our test drives” and feels that ROBRADY and DK City succeeded in elevating the design game in electric bicycle market. The Dynamo Group, which specializes in commercializing breakthrough light electric products, is keeping an eye out for future collaborations of ROBRADY and DK City – as Maffry states: “Can’t wait to see what they have coming next”.

ROBRADY has several interactive displays planned for their booth this year. In addition to the db0 folding bicycle, they will be featuring their XTools floating fishing equipment, Identity Stronghold Secure Sleeves, and the Vectrix VX-1 Maxi Scooter. They will be reaching out to technology companies to offer design, production and capital solutions. Dickie Herbst, Director of New Ventures for ROBRADY, will be available Friday morning at the booth and is looking forward to meeting with technology groups in the Tampa Bay area. Matt Leiter, Director of ROBRADY capital, will be available Friday afternoon as well.

CoolTECH, hosted by the Tampa Bay Technology Forum, is annual event featuring a display of interactive experiences designed to showcase the coolest technology coming out of the Tampa Bay region and beyond. Attendees check out cutting edge technology, gain insight from industry leaders and take part in interactive voting for the coolTECH Awards. The event attracts hundreds of attendees from the technology and business community and has something for everyone including industry leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and students. CoolTECH 2010 will take place June 4 at MOSI in Tampa.

ROBRADY design is a multi-disciplined product design and development studio that offers its multinational client base—including General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Dell Computers, Parker Hannifin, AT&T, Merial and Volvo Penta—progressive industrial design, mechanical design and engineering, graphics /packaging / GUI / web and eCommerce design, market research, brand and retail development, complete rapid prototyping and production program management. ROBRADY design stresses comprehensive speed-to-market product solutions by collaborating to identify the greatest areas of opportunity and producing innovative designs to deliver profitable product solutions. ROBRADY delivers design, production and capital solutions to their clients in support of their research to reality philosophy.

ROBRADY has teamed with Xhale on many projects since 2007, and worked closely with them on the design, ergonomics and engineering requirements of the HyGreen™ System. ROBRADY CEO / Design Director Robert Brady feels the complimentary partnership the two companies share will continue to yield many profitable products: “Xhale Innovations’ appreciation and understanding of the importance of design working in unison with technology drives their success in product development. ROBRADY will continue to strive in positioning Xhale as a source for highly desired market-leading medical products.”

“Choosing ROBRADY has been one of the best decisions we’ve made,” says Xhale CEO Richard Allen. “We wanted a highly innovative design that would be readily brand-identifiable, but also wanted a product the customer/user would find to be completely intuitive and easy to use. ROBRADY delivered in every way. They did an outstanding job of helping us with ideation, and integrated the design concepts with customer-driven ergonomics and our unique engineering requirements.”

The 2010 Medical Design Excellence Award winners will be honored during the Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) East Conference and Exposition, June 9 at New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

Canon Communications LLC organizes the MDEA award competition, the only awards program that exclusively recognizes contributions and advances in medical product design. Entries are evaluated on design and engineering features, including innovative use of materials, user-related functions that improve healthcare delivery and change traditional medical attitudes or practices, features that provide enhanced patient benefit and the ability of the product development team to overcome design and engineering challenges to meet the product’s clinical objectives.

Xhale Innovations, Inc. is a subsidiary of Xhale, Inc. Xhale was formed in 2005 following six years of research and intellectual property development at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Xhale is funded by private equity investment, and has been awarded two NIH SBIR Phase I grants and one NIH SBIR Phase II grant. The company’s corporate operations are headquartered in Gainesville, Florida, near the University of Florida campus, and the company’s production and engineering facilities are located in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

ROBRADY design is a multi-disciplined product design and development studio that offers its multinational client base—including General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Dell Computers, Parker Hannifin, AT&T, Merial and Volvo Penta—progressive industrial design, mechanical design and engineering, graphics/packaging/GUI/web and eCommerce design, market research, brand and retail development, complete rapid prototyping and production program management. ROBRADY design stresses comprehensive speed-to-market product solutions by collaborating to identify the greatest areas of opportunity and producing innovative designs to deliver profitable product solutions. ROBRADY delivers design, production and capital solutions to their clients in support of their research to reality philosophy.

UPDATE: The HyGreen™ system has been featured on Fox News. click here to check out the story.

Recently I traveled to Miami to represent ROBRADY at the 2010 Social Networking Conference. Overall it generated some great enthusiasm and I walked away with fresh ideas for our social media agenda. The dominating theme of the conference was how to build relationships through the various social media channels and use Web 2.0 tools to strengthen brand, communicate with customers, and build sales.

The pre-conference discussions were hosted by Chris Rollyson, Director of CSRA, Inc and Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs and author of The Facebook Era. Rollyson gave a great discussion on what drives companies to engage in social media strategies. His point about the necessity of discovering how your clients use these tools before randomly creating sites was very insightful and something we discuss often at ROBRADY. The key to success with these tools is to engage your target audience where they are already congregating and provide them with useful and desirable information. Clara Shih’s discussion focused primarily on Facebook and highlighted some very creative uses of that platform to build brand and engage consumers. She also spent some time discussing the concepts of social media capital and transitive trust and how social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook lend themselves to these relationships.

During the main conference, trust, content, and collaboration were recurrent themes with many of the presenters. Ann Aikin of the CDC discussed how they collaborated with other health organizations to spread information on the Swine Flu epidemic. To complement the widgets, videos, and podcasts that the CDC created in-house, they also released XML files to allow users to build their own informational tools. By allowing the audience to participate in the process and create tools that worked for them, the CDC maximized their impact. This type of collaboration and crowdsourcing was met with enthusiasm among the attendees in the sessions. ROBRADY had experimented with crowdsourcing several years ago on our rMOTO electric superbike project and we are looking forward to finding new ways to use this tool and potentially collaborate with design students and fans of the studio.

Virtual meeting sites such as Second Life were also a hot topic. Sandy Carter from IBM discussed their use of Second Life and Virtual Forum sites for events. IBM experienced a 15% increase in consumer traffic at the virtual events and generated the lowest cost per lead in the industry. Amazingly, they have the same conversion rates at their virtual events as they do for their traditional live events. She attributed some of this success to the high quality content that was presented in a “sales-pressure free” environment. Content is definitely a main driver in the success of a company’s social media agenda. Steve Faktor of American Express defined good content as being a culmination of creativity, capabilities, and culture. To build and keep a dedicated audience, companies must regularly provide answers and solutions to their customer’s needs without pushing a sales agenda. This connects back into the concept of trust. The audience should see content as a genuine effort to assist and educate.

Proponents of social media say the power of disruption media has waned with the increase of technology. Consumers can block commercials from television, get their news from RSS feeds rather than papers or magazines, and look to their more trusted peers for product referrals. Businesses must add value to their marketing message and must listen to the conversations in the marketplace. As many companies have discovered, their products and service are being discussed with or without their participation. The statistics from social media sites are impressive and prove that the audience is out there. Companies must develop cohesive plans for tapping this resource. Many of the presenters discussed how some businesses are jumping into social networking without a plan only to abandon their sites because they didn’t see immediate ROI results. As Rollyson instructed in both of his talks, high short term expectations can be a set-up for failure. Companies must have realistic plans and set relationship goals, not just sales goals. Strategically, ROBRADY has worked hard to set a long term vision on how we want to utilize social media to build our brands, engage our communities, and grow our businesses.

In closing, I would suggest a few changes to better engage the technical profile that a conference of this nature attracts, such as a more robust Wi-Fi and better access to power for laptop use. This would have really benefited the audience. I am looking forward to the Social Networking Conference growing to the point where it can stand alone and not be combined with other conferences so that it can be a truly engaging environment. Miami Beach is obviously a fun destination and it is great to have access to these shows in Florida. I hope this conference continues to grow and improve.

The db0 3.0 received unanimous praise from the audience, who were impressed by its sleek designer appearance, eco-friendly message, and “humanized power”. The event also highlighted DK City’s relationship with ROBRADY by showcasing videos that introduced its studio and team. In early 2009, DK City had sought out ROBRADY design after seeing their award-winning work on the eco-friendly electric Vectrix VX-1 Maxi Scooter and Super Bike, as well as their work with designing many products for Segway. The two companies partnered in August 2009 to design, develop and manufacture the db0 folding bike line. The db0 3.0 has garnered international design recognition with the receipt of the gold Spark award in October of this year. Photos and video of the launch party can be seen on ROBRADY’s Facebook page.

The HyGreen™ system is designed to provide the first line of defense in the control of healthcare associated infections (HAIs). The system is comprised of a wall mounted unit, a bed mounted monitor, and badges worn by the medical staff. After cleaning their hands with an alcohol-based sanitizer, a medical staff member would place them under the wall unit sensor which ‘sniffs’ for alcohol. The unit then sends a wireless “all clean” message to the badge on the staff member’s pocket. The monitor on the patient’s bed searches for the “all clean” message. If it is not present, the badge vibrates to remind the staff member to sanitize their hands.  The system actively reminds busy healthcare workers to wash their hands and records all hand washing events and patient-staff interactions in the hospital environment, giving hospitals the first comprehensive and definitive tool to effectively monitor adherence to hand hygiene protocols.

Xhale Innovations, Inc. is a subsidiary of Xhale, Inc. Xhale was formed in 2005 following six years of research and intellectual property development at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Xhale is funded by private equity investment, and has been awarded two NIH SBIR Phase I grants and one NIH SBIR Phase II grant. The company’s corporate operations are headquartered in Gainesville, Florida, near the University of Florida campus, and the company’s production and engineering facilities are located in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

ROBRADY design is a multi-disciplined product design and development studio that offers its multinational client base—including General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Dell Computers, Parker Hannifin, AT&T, Merial and Volvo Penta—progressive industrial design, mechanical design and engineering, graphics /packaging / GUI / web and eCommerce design, market research, brand and retail development, complete rapid prototyping and production program management. ROBRADY design stresses comprehensive speed-to-market product solutions by collaborating to identify the greatest areas of opportunity and producing innovative designs to deliver profitable product solutions. ROBRADY delivers design, production and capital solutions to their clients in support of their research to reality philosophy.

The new db0 bike, which is scheduled for release to the market in the first quarter of 2010, is first in a series of electric bikes that embodies their mission to design a series of clean, bold, and innovatively simple folding bikes. The design promotes the folding mechanism unlike it has ever been done before in this market – as a “focal point” that adds visual value to the bike. The battery configuration and integrated travel handles are also treated as iconic elements that offer aesthetic as well as ergonomic benefits. The db0 bike design is currently being featured at the Autodesk Design Gallery in San Francisco, CA as part of the Spark Awards show.

While ROBRADY is well known for their design prowess in the electric scooter and super bike world, this is their first foray into the electric bicycle market. ROBRADY’s CEO / Design Director Robert Brady said his team “took a white page look” at the opportunity and set out to design a series of bikes that would be instantly recognized as the next generation in folding bikes:

“The three new db0 bikes embody our mission to design a series of clean, bold, and innovatively simple folding bikes. Our design work promotes the folding mechanism as an integrated piece of the design- a ‘focal point’ that adds visual value to the bike design unlike it has ever been done before. We don’t hide the fact that these bikes fold- we have made it a distinguished characteristic of the series”

Several features of the bike are currently in patent process. DK City, who will be the exclusive manufacturers of the bicycle series, is also taking a fresh approach to the build, incorporating unique manufacturing processes that will deliver a bicycle of superior craftsmanship. The partnership is planning several future projects beyond this series of bicycles.

DK City Corporation was founded in 1987 and is headquartered in Taichung, Taiwan with an additional facility in Shanghai, China.  They employ 1500 people and have an annual sales volume of US $400 million. They are committed to innovating, designing and manufacturing technologically advanced and environmentally friendly products. Known for their sophisticated fitness equipment, massage chairs, and recreational electric scooters and golf carts, DK City has recently expanded into the pollution-free electrical bicycle and motorcycle market. This expansion is driven by their desire to protect and preserve the planet for future generations.

With ROBRADY’s fantastic design ability and our production capability as well as our established sales network, success is just around the corner. – Hans Huang, President of DK City

There is great excitement at ROBRADY design as well.  ROBRADY feels that the two companies are very complimentary and that the partnership will yield many profitable products.

ROBRADY will continue to strive in positioning DK City as a source for highly desired market-leading transportation products – Rob Brady, CEO / Design Director of ROBRADY design