Tech Watch 2017 with SkyVue Pittsburgh Apartments
February 14th, 2017 by Ryan Sundling
Many of our residents at SkyVue Pittsburgh Apartments work in the tech-industry. The Steel City is quickly transforming into The Silicon City, thanks in large part to tech companies in the health and education sectors.
Anyone who’s familiar with the city’s tech scene knows about Thrival, a 3-day innovation conference where Pittsburgh entrepreneurs can show off their big ideas. Dan Law is the executive producer of Thrival, and he believes the two sectors are responsible for Pittsburgh’s economic growth.
“Eds and meds are the bedrock of the economic transition. UPMC – University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – alone is a $13 billion health system and there are dozens of ancillary industries that began to innovate,” said Law in The Guardian.
Young people graduating from Carnegie Mellon and UPMC are actually sticking around their apartments in Oakland, Pittsburgh instead of leaving for San Francisco, CA or Austin, TX. That is a testament to Pittsburgh’s burgeoning tech industry.
The transition from an industrial city to a tech-driven city may come as a surprise to some longtime Pittsburgh residents, but Pittsburgh has actually been a leader in technology for quite some time. The Carnegie Mellon robotics program is known to be one of America’s most distinguished robotics institutions, and Uber recognized Pittsburgh’s innovative spirit by releasing their first fleet of automated vehicles here.
Pittsburgh is finally getting recognized as a hub of innovation, and some Pittsburgh tech companies are anticipating big time growth in 2017 as a result. With some help from the good folks at NextPittsburgh, SkyVue put together this list of 3 tech companies to keep your eye on this year. Who knows, these could be the companies that change the way you live.
Think Yelp, but for a much more serious industry: healthcare. OnlyBoth is a benchmarking tool that hospital managers can use to compare their level of service to other hospitals around the country. OnlyBoth compiles data from many different public sources so that patients and healthcare professionals can see which hospitals are doing well and which need to step up their level of service. The company has also recently expanded its capabilities to provide benchmarking services for colleges and universities.
Some truly amazing things are going to start happening when the robotics industry starts working with organic matter. RoBotany is one of the first companies to head down this road, using robotics and analytics to, “improve labor efficiency and crop output.” The company currently does their vertical farming out of a warehouse in Oakland, Pittsburgh. According to Wikipedia, vertical farming is “the practice of producing food in vertically stacked layers, such as in a skyscraper, used warehouse, or shipping container.” Sounds delicious, right? We’re all going to have to get used to this method of farming as America continues to use up all of its farmable land.
In 2015, 57 million people in the U.S. and Canada played fantasy sports. That means roughly 20% of the U.S. population was playing fantasy sports for cash prizes or otherwise. The founders of Sqwad are hoping to tap into this massive fantasy sports market by creating a whole new kind of fantasy contest. Although their product has yet to be released, Sqwad has announced a few details about their game. The most notable difference between your average ESPN fantasy league and a Sqwad league is that players will be able to change their lineups mid-game. This means that if an NFL player gets hurt during his game, you can switch him out for his backup mid-game. Sqwad’s slogan says it best, “Be the coach of your fantasy team, not the GM.”
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