When Doug Erickson started the Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup in 2008, attendance was generally less than 20 people. Erickson, who lives in Santa Cruz but worked in Silicon Valley, says he had to beg his friends to attend. But he kept at it, driven by the desire to connect with tech people locally. “I…
Posts Tagged: technology
UCSC's Hackathon is Out to Fix the World
I’m LOLing during my phone interview with Mark Adams, the UCSC senior responsible for creating the university’s first ever hackathon—a 30-hour sprint of coding and developing in which 150 students will team up to create new mobile apps and web programs from scratch. UCSC’s Hackathon, called HACK UCSC, is unique in that it will bring…
Santa Cruz’s Internet Music Pioneer
The Internet co-opted the fan relationship; Jon Luini is bringing it back
Sol Lipman’s Journey
The outline for Sol Lipman’s talk at Thursday night’s TechRaising meetup would read like a standard-issue business-inspirational presentation: Your startup is a journey; it isn’t about the money; don’t be afraid to fail; My Five Rules for Startups. But this was not a standard-issue presentation.
TechRaising Fosters Santa Cruz Start-Up Culture
In recent years, Santa Cruz has developed an active and vibrant tech community—in fact, tech has become so prominent so quickly, new startups are sprouting up all over town.
Santa Cruz’s Crush on Tech
Welcome to Silicon Beach. Or at least that’s what we should be calling Santa Cruz, according to a recent survey by the online polling and policy outfit Civinomics. The six-question poll, taken at the Chamber of Commerce Business Fair at Cocoanut Grove on March 14 by a Civinomics team (which included the author, a Civinomics co-founder), found that the industry in which Santa Cruz businesspeople have the most confidence is technology. In fact, 40 percent of those surveyed stated that if they could invest $10,000 in any local industry, technology would be their first choice, followed closely by tourism at 35 percent. Retail and agriculture finished substantially behind, with 18 percent and 16 percent respectively (some respondents picked two industries). Forever 21 might want to take notice of these results.
How 3-D Printing Works
When describing the actual 3D printing process, a good analogy to use is that of an inkjet printer, which takes information and prints it onto paper, in two dimensions, line by line, from the top down. In a similar fashion, 3D printers take information and print it, in three dimensions, layer by layer, from the bottom up.
Why 3-D Printing Matters
On Star Trek: The Next Generation, crew members use a machine known as the replicator to make replacement parts for the ship, prepare food and fix Captain Picard’s usual: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” Creating something out of nothing, the replicator is, sadly, pure science fiction. But using a newly emerging technology, we can design a wrench, a toy, a bike or a flying monkey, and with a click of the mouse, create it. This replicator is a printer, but what it makes is not a two-dimensional image of the design; not a paper model that folds into a 3-D one. This printer creates, quite literally, the object. Three-dimensional printing is here.
