037 - Changing the Game with PodClear

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What kind of a company gets started on a road trip? In the podcasting world, what is a “double-ender”? How does a boot-strapped US-based startup company get connected with a startup incubator in Chile?

Hey there, Innovation Nation! Today’s guests have a fascinating story. If you’ve ever thought about starting a company in your spare time or if you’ve had an idea for a company in the strangest place, you’ll find some kindred spirits on today’s show.

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

These words from Steve Jobs underline the fact that innovation is driven, not by money or even other technology, but by people. Creative, observant humans are the engine of innovation. It is easy in our tech-filled world to equate new tech break throughs with underlying technological infrastructure, but in reality while currently available technology does enable future technologies, the future begins with a dream in the heart of a person.

“Even though the map to educational makerspace success remains vague, pioneers in the field are pushing forward and reporting their findings.” – Gene Roddenberry In the late 1960’s, Gene Roddenberry had a dream. He turned this dream into a television show we all know as Star Trek. In this fictional future, the crew of the USS Enterprise used a device called a tricorder. This device had the capability of reading information from it’s surroundings, geo-locating the user, taking chemical, biological, and physical data along with connecting the user to the computer in the sky aboard the USS enterprise for analysis.

Today the tricorder has largely become a reality in the smart phone and it’s supporting technologies. We are connected to the computer in the sky via our cell signals and WiFi. We can geo-locate ourselves using the GPS features on our phone. We can take a photo of an object, and the “computer in the cloud” can tell us what that object is, what it can be used for, and it’s other physical, chemical, and/or biological properties. With appropriate add-ons these devices are now also monitoring our health, connecting us to the electronics back at home, and allowing us to track other humans on the planet via their GPS signals.

It can easily be argued that the smart phone and many of it’s supporting technologies began as an idea in Gene Roddenberry’s creative imaginings. So here at Table Top Inventing we spend the bulk of our time investing in the inspiration of creativity in teenagers. We know that by feeding their fanciful imagination and then putting tools in their hands to begin exploring the possibilities, a new generation of innovators will arise quite naturally.

Just the other day, some students in our Inventor’s Bootcamp learned that hobby-grade, quad-rotor technology could be used to lift a person off the ground. Now I don’t know exactly what they will do with that knowledge as time goes on, but they are already discussing how they can improve their own DIY quad-rotor project. Perhaps they will invent an improved hoverboard like the one I saw just this week!

To find out more about Inventor’s Bootcamp, visit InventingZone.com

Speaking of innovation, today’s guests are quite familiar with the development of game-changing technology. Spencer Handley, Hannah Russell-Goodson, and Josh Lankford recently started a small company called PodClear. Their technology is already revolutionizing how I am conducting podcast interviews. Listen in for engagingly clear answers in today’s podcast!

Original Release Date: 5/28/15