From the fanboys and fangirls who power our pop culture to the techno wizards who shape our future, this is the time of the geek — just as the ancient prophecies foretold! Let's celebrate their spirit.
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These Las Vegas tech entrepreneurs are out to change the way you bank, shop, give, ride and eat
CEO, Robocoin
He’s mashing up cutting-edge crypto-currency with the good old-fashioned ATM machine.
Ah, banks. Remember banks? Those quaint 20th-century financial institutions with their tellers and checking accounts and PIN numbers? They’re still around, sure, but to Robocoin CEO Jordan Kelley, they’re living relics of a bygone age. No wonder he talks about them in the past tense.
“Banks offered a hugely valuable service,” he says. “They securely stored people’s wealth and provided comfort for people. But we look at Bitcoin and Robocoin as a sound alternative way to store wealth.” And a way to invest it, transmit it and move it around.
Haven’t caught Bitcoin fever yet? It’s likely Bitcoin fever may catch you instead. Once considered the shadowy scrip of hackers and techies, Bitcoin is rapidly going mainstream. Today, you can spend Bitcoin at websites such as Overstock.com, Expedia.com and Wordpress.com, and online retail giants like Amazon and eBay aren’t far behind. But, as Kelley sees it, the real obstacle in the way of mass mainstream adoption of Bitcoin isn’t online retailers. It’s, well, the fact that Bitcoin is just still kind of weird and confusing to your average person. Kelley’s company, Robocoin, marries this new kind of money to something we all recognize: the ATM.
“The Robocoin machines familiarize people with Bitcoin in a way that brings some tangibility to it, which never existed before,” says Kelley. “Now we’re building into those machines the services that people are familiar with — walking up to a machine, buying Bitcoin or withdrawing money or sending it anywhere.” Robocoin’s “wallet” software means that even Luddite Joe can stroll up to a machine, enroll for an account and start buying and sending Bitcoin. “The problem was that prospective customers had to have a prior understanding of Bitcoin to get some utility out of it. Our Robocoin machines are that missing link.”
Indeed, the function of Robocoin is just as much cultural and educational as it is financial. Robocoin machines say: See, you, too, can use fast, convenient digital money.
Since the launch of their first machine in October 2013 in Vancouver, Robocoin has built a network of 70 machines, from the Strip to Tel Aviv to Tokyo. The company sells the machines to independent owner-operators — the basic model runs about $15,000 — and gets 1 percent of every transaction; the owner-operators take a percentage, too.
The consumer advantages hyped by Kelley: speed and security. Since Bitcoins are essentially information, transactions are nearly instantaneous — none of this three-days-to-process-your-transaction stuff. The Robocoin security system glues the account to the account holder with a cell phone number, PIN number and a biometric scan of a user’s palm veins. “We want to unshackle people from the idea that Bitcoin is just used by hackers and crypto-enthusiasts,” Kelley says.
This brave new ATM network does lack some old-school elements of traditional banking. For instance, Robocoin accounts aren’t insured, but Kelley says any account holder can easily audit the transparent system at any time for a confirmation of “provable reserves.”
Half of Robocoin’s 10-person team work in San Francisco, the other half in Las Vegas. That’s due in part to Kelley’s Vegas roots: He’s a graduate of The Meadows School and his father, Kevin Kelley, is a veteran gaming executive who most recently served as executive vice president of Station Casinos. But that Vegas presence may also have to do with strategic positioning. While the younger Kelley passed on a casino career in favor of building a crypto-currency ATM network, he’s keenly aware of the next frontier where digital currency becomes the de facto payment method that powers online gaming.
“Bitcoin and gaming?” Kelley says. “Like peanut butter and jelly.”
— Andrew Kiraly
Founder, Grocery411.com
He crunches data (and haunts grocery stores) to highlight food deals and steals
Here’s a tip for your next grocery shopping trip: Avoid buy-one-get-one-free deals. If you calculate the per-pound cost including the freebie, you’re probably overpaying, says Bill Guerra, founder of Grocery411.com. How does he know? From spending the past four years meticulously tracking sale prices of groceries all around the Las Vegas Valley and logging them into a database.
Guerra and his lead price researcher, Deb Steva, pointed out this example of the BOGO trap on a recent trip to a Henderson grocery store: boneless, skinless chicken breast cutlets for $7.99 per pound. A good sale on these, according to Grocery411 data, would be $1.49 per pound — less than half the BOGO price, even counting the free item. (We were at Albertsons, but Guerra and Steva assured me all food retailers use this marketing tactic.)
So, how do you know what a good sale price is? That’s what Grocery411.com is for. The site, which charges $6.95 a month or $54 a year for subscriptions, offers a couple key services. Every Wednesday, Steva scours newly released grocery store circulars and finds the 350 best advertised deals in the region (Grocery411 doesn’t include individual in-store sales — say, if your neighborhood Smith’s puts its overstock of bananas on special). Guerra rounds them up in a newsletter that subscribers can either print or access via the mobile website.
That’s weekly. There’s also the online list, available year-round, that’s arranged by category — bakery, dairy, meat, etc. — and alphabetized by product. As she’s doing her weekly sales research, Steva updates the database to reflect any prices she finds that are lower than existing ones. The list, thus, provides an ongoing baseline of the best deals local consumers can expect to find.
After four years of doing this, Steva is a font of institutional knowledge. Strolling through the produce section, I point to one sale-tagged item after another and ask, “Is this a good deal?” Cantaloupe for 15 cents a pound? Yes. Red seedless grapes for $1.99 a pound? Not so much. The Grocery411 price is 99 cents a pound.
“Think about a family of four,” Guerra says. “They’d eat, say, 3 pounds of grapes. That’s $9 versus $3.” A savings of $6 on one item is nothing to sneeze at. Based on U.S. Department of Agriculture averages of families’ monthly grocery spending, Guerra estimates his guides can help people save as much as 70 percent on their food costs.
But there’s a catch: They have to be willing to shop at multiple stores. No one place will have all the best deals — otherwise, it’d go out of business. To get the most out of the Grocery411 list, then, consumers have to go where the sales are, getting chicken breasts at Smith’s, but cantaloupe at Albertsons, for instance. Guerra encourages his subscribers to work store visits into their other errands. Stop by one place on the way home from work, another after church. He also puts a cultural spin on it by including Asian, Mexican and seafood markets and challenging shoppers to try exotic fare.
Another potential obstacle for Grocery411 is the lack of a smartphone app. While Guerra points out that using the weekly list on one’s phone requires only a login and two or three clicks, he also says an app is on his wish list for the company’s next phase. A full-time RN who works in a busy hospital, Guerra launched Grocery411 on the side. But he’s taken it as far as he can on his own budget; now, he says, it’s time for an investor to give it that extra boost.
“We’re approaching year five of a 10-year plan,” he says. “I knew it would be a long-term project, and believe me, there have been times I wanted to give up. But I really believe in it.”
Why? Altruism, with a little entrepreneurialism thrown in. The idea came to Guerra one day as he scanned the 3-foot-long receipt from a shopping trip for his own family. “How do I know these are good prices?” he thought. “What would I compare them to?” And, more importantly, he wondered how low-income families could afford the fresh fruits and meats he was taking home.
“If this matters to me,” he says, “how much more critical must it be to those who are short on cash?” — Heidi Kyser
Suz Hinton
Founding member, Syn Shop
She’s helping makers, hackers and tinkerers to better understand the possibilities of technology — and create their own.
The traffic light in the display window at the front of Syn Shop’s downtown location is lit red when I meet Suz Hinton there on a hot September afternoon. That means the hacker space is closed, except to founding and vetted members who have keys, like Hinton. Regular hours are around dinnertime most weekdays plus Saturday afternoons, and key-holders may open the space to the general membership while they’re working, if so inclined. But the reconfigured stoplight serves as more than a practical “open/closed” sign; it’s also an example of what’s going on at 117 N. Fourth St.
“We’re a big room full of awesome tools that everyone can share, and people who can teach you to use them and inspire you to do cool stuff with them,” Hinton says. “It’s a club for tinkerers.”
The awesome tools include a heavy-duty sewing machine, laser cutter, several 3D printers and an entire room full of shop equipment, such as a drill press and table saw. Some of it was donated, some acquired with the group’s 2011 startup grant from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, some bought with proceeds from the shop’s $40-per-month membership fee.
The people who can teach you to use the awesome tools are the members themselves, who bring to the collective as wide a variety of skills as the equipment implies — from arts and crafts and carpentry, to electronics and robotics. Hinton, for instance, is a software engineer by trade. A sufferer of occasional anxiety, she made a heart-rate monitor bracelet that sends her phone a text message whenever her pulse goes over a certain limit. Being alerted to this early sign of a panic attack helps her avoid the unpleasant occurrence before it happens.
“That’s the point of hacking: to control the technology around you,” she says. “Everyone goes to the store, weighs the pros and cons of a piece of technology and buys the one that’s good enough. Imagine if you could design something for yourself. It’s exciting to empower other people this way.”
That’s the inspiration part — arguably the common element of all hackerspaces. When curious people gather, big ideas often result. A hackerspace gives them the tools and know-how to execute those ideas. A recent local example is the Robot Army, a DIY delta-robot kit conceived by artist Sarah Petkus and engineer Mark Koch, who met at Syn Shop. After working through their design, the pair did a KickStarter campaign to manufacture their three-legged little bot for consumers. They met their $25,000 goal in March, and held a build party on Aug. 31.
“What’s so cool about this is that two people came together in the space, and we were able to equip them,” Hinton says. “Prior to this, Sarah was using plastic spoons and stuff.”
It’s that sort of nerd-magic Hinton sought when she came to Vegas from her native Australia for a job at Zappos in 2011. Although she’d gone the software route in college, she’s loved hardware since childhood, when her father would bring home kits for the two of them to put together. She was the kind of kid who wasn’t satisfied just soldering; she had to take apart the torch and see how it worked. When Hinton arrived in the States, she knew she’d need a community of like-minded people to feel at home in her new environment. She immediately connected with Syn Shop founders Jeff Rosowski and Brian Munroe, who’d started the meetup in Rosowski’s garage. Less than two weeks later, the group was funded.
“I turned up at the right place at the right time,” Hinton says.
The collective has come far since then, reaching its goal of 80-100 paying members this year. But Hinton thinks the greatest achievement is its alternative business model. The organization is flat and transparent: Board meetings are conducted out in the open, anyone in the shop is invited to listen in, and any founding or vetted member can vote.
“That’s the hackerspace way,” Hinton says, “trying to subvert things to a certain degree, to show people there’s another way, and that it can work.” H.K.
Nextdoor.com
Won’t you be my e-neighbor?
In an age when neighborhood barbecues have been replaced by tense HOA meetings, it seems like the communal spirit of the tight-knit ’hood has gone the way of the 5-cent lemonade stand. Or maybe it’s just gone digital. Nextdoor.com, a free social network for neighborhoods, hopes to be the new backyard fence where residents gather — virtually — to discuss community issues or just find a good plumber. The service started in October 2011 in San Francisco. Since then, it’s launched 41,000 neighborhood websites. Southern Nevada has been an aggressive adopter, with 113 websites in Vegas, 59 in Henderson, 31 in North Las Vegas and three in Boulder City. Cranky luddites are welcome: Company spokesperson Kelsey Grady characterizes Nextdoor.com as a virtual add-on to traditional neighborliness, not a replacement.
“People are really good at knowing the people who live to their left and right, and across the street,” she says. “This is a lightweight way to break the ice with people beyond who you might not meet otherwise.”
It’s free to use and easy to sign up for (they nudge you a few times to spam your neighbors and email contacts with invites, but you can skip it). A Nextdoor.com test drive of my own ’hood reveals helpful residents swapping tips on handyman services and a vigilant-bordering-on-paranoid eye on sketchy characters. Bolstering Nextdoor.com’s cred are partnerships with local governments. The City of Las Vegas recently signed, allowing it to broadcast news alerts and PSAs to members. Welcome to the e-neighborhood. A.K.
The place to start building your robot army
Polo-wha? Unusual name for a robotics company. Pololu President Jan Malasek explains: Inspired by Pololu Valley on the Big Island of Hawaii, where Malasek and buddy Ben Schmidel (now VP of product development) flew remote-control gliders together in high school, it’s pronounced like the game “polo” plus the name “Lou,” with equal emphasis on all syllables. What does Pololu do? It manufactures and sells specialty electronics, such as those used to make robots. But don’t head to company’s Pilot Road location in south-central Las Vegas expecting a storefront where you can browse motherboards and sensors; Pololu ( pololu.com, 702-262-6648) does its business online (you can order something on the website and pick it up there, but Malasek says most of his customers are out-of-state). It is, however, the occasional gathering place of tinkerers, most notably robotics club LVBots, which has been meeting there for 10 years. H.K.
Turning night riders into light riders
Emily Hartnett will have plenty of different scenarios in which to test future prototypes of her LED-lit motorcycle vest. Between them, she and her boyfriend have racing, road, dirt, dual sport and vintage models, along with a 1976 custom Harley — seven total bikes.
Hartnett’s Ninja 250 illustrates a situation in which the vest, which has 72 integrated lights, is needed. “I’m not super tiny, but my bike is pretty small,” she says. “If you have a black jacket on, it’s hard to see, because the back has a slim profile.” Regardless of bike size, though, she believes visibility is on the mind of every motorcycle rider, especially in city traffic.
A few years ago, her boyfriend had the idea for lights that turn off when a bike stops running. Later, Hartnett wondered if there was a more fashionable and functional alternative to the fluorescent yellow vests worn by construction workers. The idea for what would become Big Skeleton was hatched.
Drawing on her UNLV physics degree and five years of working at Pololu, a robotics company, Hartnett developed technology that allows the lighting to change flashing patterns and color based on the movement of the wearer. When you slow down, for instance, it turns red, like a brake light. But the vest is completely independent of the bike. It has its own power source, and Hartnett says the production version will be rechargeable. She’s gotten some help from the Stitch Factory on the design, which is tailored to fit over a heavy motorcycle jacket.
“I took a sewing class last December, and that was when I decided I wanted to quit my job and do this full-time,” she says. “I’ve known since I was 7 years old that I wanted my own business; I just didn’t know what path would take me there.”
The bike path, apparently. Hartnett says the motorcycle community has already shown interest, and her next target market will be bicycle commuters and kids. H.K.
Giving in 140 characters or less
With its one-click buys, next-day deliveries, and digital carts and virtual wallets, the Internet wants you to spend, spend, spend. But what about give, give, give? With one foot still in yesterday’s era of call-in lines and pledge campaigns, charitable giving hasn’t exactly gone 2.0. Charles Huang intends to change that with Charitweet, which aims to make giving as easy as tweeting. Huang — who went to middle school and high school in Las Vegas — got the idea of a streamlined giving platform just before graduating from MIT in June 2013. He daydreamed it aloud to a friend.
“I was really into the ‘save the world with software’ thing,” Huang says. He continued to believe in it after he took a well-paying — but unfulfilling — job with a Big Data firm out of college. “My friend calls me three weeks later and goes, ‘Hey, I built that software program you were talking about.’ I couldn’t believe it. I try it out and it works.” Huang resigned his position with the Big Data firm and committed full-time to Charitweet ( chrtwt.org).
It’s simple: You just tweet a dollar figure at the Twitter-enabled charity of your choice, include @chrtwt and you get a link back for a making a secure donation. (Charitweet takes a 3 percent transaction fee.) Great, but what about scam charities and shady nonprofits? Huang landed a dream beta tester to avoid that problem: respected philanthropy watchdog Charity Navigator. “Forging that relationship was a really huge win,” says Huang. It blossomed into a partnership. For their October launch, Huang says Charity Navigator (itself a charity) connected Charitweet to the more than 4,000 charities that Charity Navigator has awarded at least three out of four stars. Next on Huang’s task list: becoming the official charity partner of Twitter, to put its new “Buy” button to work for some deserving do-gooders. A.K.
Nomic
Think globally, network hyperlocally
In the depths of the recession in 2010, Nate Boyd wanted to do something big: save the entire U.S. economy. He started with something small: the yoga place around the corner from where he lived in San Francisco. “It’s places like that — small restaurants, sole-proprietor services — that make the everyday economy work,” he says. He wanted to encourage networking in the bustling ecosystem of indie shops, freelancers and creatives to get the economy rolling again. Facebook and LinkedIn? Too big. He decided to create his own network — and he found the perfect test-case city to build it in. With Bay Area venture-capital backing, he moved to Las Vegas and launched Nomic (nomic.com) in January.
“Vegas has all kinds of urban tribes,” says Boyd, referring to professional subcultures that often live in self-contained cells: designers, writers, photographers. “And that can make it hard to find the right person for a gig.”
Think of Nomic as a hyperlocal LinkedIn — with a crisp interface and a focus on people rather than endless résumés. The core tool is the directory, a Tumblr-style grid of portals: arts, music, design, community and others. Those open onto grids of Nomic profiles that you can “ping” to start a professional connection. Boyd says they’re hard at work on an update that aims to streamline the process even more. If you’re raising your eyebrows at yet another social media platform, Boyd clarifies that Nomic is intended more as a tool — a fun, colorful tool — than a site for posting selfies and vapid status updates.
“It’s not a feed-the-beast model,” he says. “This is a much more focused effort to encourage people to make lasting professional connections.” A.K.
