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Almost every major tech company is making a bet on smartwatches.

We've heard rumors of an Apple iWatch for a while now. We have knowledge of Google working on a smartwatch. Executives at Microsoft's suppliers in Asia told Bloomberg last month that the company asked them to ship displays for touch-enabled watch devices. LG is reportedly working on a smartwatch, and so is Samsung.

But if any company is going to succeed in the market, it sounds like it's going to be Samsung or Apple, or maybe even both.

"Samsung and Apple are traditional hardware companies and have spent nearly the last decade combining powerful technologies into the smartphone," Skooks Pong, VP of technology at Synapse, tells Business Insider.

Synapse is the engineering firm behind the Nike FuelBand. About a decade ago, Pong worked on early prototypes of Microsoft's SPOT smartwatches.

"[Apple and Samsung have] been able to overcome challenges like extending battery power, while minimizing its size and they've combined multiple technologies like Bluetooth, GPS and NFC into a small piece of hardware," Pong says.

Pong notes that the smartwatch will present similar challenges to smartphones because of its small size. In order for a smartwatch to truly appeal to the masses, it will also need to do more than just send notifications to your wrist.

"It's about introducing a device that consumers never even knew they needed, like Apple did with the iPod," Pong says. "Because of the need to combine sophisticated technologies into a body-worn device, based on their track record Apple or a Samsung would be better poised to create a transformative device. But with Google, you can't ever count them out."

The latest rumor about the Google smartwatch is that Motorola would manufacture it for them. That makes sense, given that Google acquired the company for $12.4 billion last year, though initially just for its patents. for its hardware expertise.

Google hasn't had much luck with its hardware products. Its Nexus phones sales could not even compare to the iPhone. And then there was the Nexus Q, Google's very short-lived media streaming device.
Motorola hasn't fared much better. Since Google's acquisition, Motorola has not had any "hit" products. By the end of last year, Motorola's market share fell from 2.2% worldwide at the time of the purchase to 1.7%.

We reached out to Google yesterday, but the company declined to comment.

Roca, la Fundación We Are Water y la Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation acogen un encuentro de partners que se celebra del 8 al 11 de abril en el Roca Barcelona Gallery con el objetivo de promover soluciones innovadoras para la problemática de la falta de saneamiento en los países en vías de desarrollo. A través del programa Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, lanzado en 2011, la Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invitó a investigadores a presentar propuestas que pudieran solucionar la falta de saneamiento básico que afecta a unos 2.500 M de personas; aproximadamente, un 40% de la población mundial. La falta de saneamiento puede provocar graves problemas de salud que llegan a suponer unos 1,5 M de muertes infantiles por diarrea cada año.

Durante el encuentro, unos 60 representantes de multinacionales, industrias e instituciones de investigación incluyendo Unilever, P&G, Eram Scientific Solutions o Synapse Product Development - exponen los avances realizados por las entidades participantes en el desafío Reinvent the Toilet Challenge. Carlos Velázquez, Corporate Marketing Director de Roca: “El ambicioso objetivo que plantea la Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation entronca con el compromiso histórico de Roca de mejorar la calidad de vida de las personas mediante el acceso a mejores condiciones de salud e higiene. Como líderes mundiales en la definición del espacio del baño, participamos en esta iniciativa aportando nuestro conocimiento sobre las necesidades específicas de comunidades de todo el mundo, así como nuestra experiencia en los campos del diseño, la capacidad industrial y la distribución”.

Xavier Torras, director de la Fundación We Are Water: “Es un orgullo para nosotros poder colaborar en un proyecto de este nivel y que tiene una importancia vital para miles de comunidades y millones de personas en todo el mundo. La colaboración con la Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation en este encuentro se orienta hacia uno de nuestros objetivos principales: la intervención en infraestructuras, educación, salud e investigación en las zonas más necesitadas del planeta”.

Just last year, Synapse, a leader in engineering design services, left behind an aging Exchange server for Google Apps. Read on to learn how this cutting edge company is making the most of Apps with the help of FlashPanel.

Employees: 300
Founded: 2002
Industry: Engineering Design Services
Website: www.synapse.com
FlashPanel Customer Number: 1,907

Founded in 2002, Synapse works with the world’s leading companies to help them turn ideas into reality. Matching engineering and technology expertise with product management oversight, Synapse enables organizations to create products and experiences that change the way we live.

Based in Seattle with offices in San Francisco and Hong Kong, Synapse has helped companies like Nike, TomTom, Samsung and General Electric conceptualize and produce some of the world’s most inventive products.

Overcoming Growing Pains with Google Apps

While Synapse was producing cutting edge technology for its clients, the company’s email system was left to run on outdated on premise Exchange servers. As the company continued to grow, Synapse’s IT Director, Brian McFarlane, knew a change was in order.

In April 2012, Synapse made the switch to Google Apps. “In one year we doubled in size and we simply didn’t have the IT staff to double our capacity on Exchange,” explained McFarlane. “Ramp up times for new hires are faster on Google Apps,” he added, “ more people are familiar with setting up Google than Exchange.” For Synapse, making the move to Apps was a no brainer.

In addition to Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Groups and Chat, Synapse has embraced Google Hangouts to provide seamless communication between its offices and rolled out Google Drive, which allows team members to simultaneously edit and collaborate – a boon in any creative environment.

Managing Google Apps with FlashPanel

While Synapse initially installed FlashPanel as a solution for Shared Contacts Management and mobile contact syncing, McFarlane and his team have found the application’s reporting and end user tools tremendously helpful.

FlashPanel’s in depth reporting tools allow McFarlane to provide vital statistics to company managers. Data on email and storage quotas, the number of Google Drive documents that each employee creates and how each document is shared is all information McFarlane gleans from FlashPanel.

While Synapse has yet to set up sharing compliance or alerts for Google Drive – at any given time the company has between 60 and 70 projects all with their own sharing regulations – FlashPanel’s Drive overview gives Brian and his team a clear snapshot of all Drive activity occurring within the organization.

With offices around the globe, it’s important that employees remain connected and a huge part of that is knowing what role each employees plays in the company. Synapse has enabled end user access to allow employees to view team profiles, group memberships and vital contact information – all without having to ask the IT team or HR department.

Restaurants are subject to an incredible amount of credit card fraud—over 60-percent of data breaches happen in the hospitality industry, costing consumers billions each year. However, restaurant “skimming”— when servers illegally copy your credit card information—is a very easy scam to pull off. We willingly hand over our credit cards to complete strangers who walk away—oftentimes completely out of sight—before returning the card several minutes later.

In 2010, Viableware, a Kirkland, WA-based startup, conceptualized a solution to this costly problem, a tableside ordering and payment system called Rail. To develop the system—an integration of hardware and software—it turned to Synapse, a Seattle-based engineering firm specializing in product realization.

According to Ziv Magoz, electrical engineer for Synapse, Viableware had several requirements for the device. It had to communicate wirelessly with restaurant POS systems, have RFID and NFC capabilities, and a touchscreen durable enough to accept signatures without scratching the surface.

Another important requirement was that the device had to be waterproof, meaning it could have no plug-ins for charging. To address this, Synapse developed an inductive charging station. Functioning like a transformer, the primary coil is in the transformer and the secondary coil in the Rail. When the Rail is placed into a slot on the charger, the distance is short enough to have roughly 70-percent efficiency between the two inductors, driving 5 watts of power into the Rail. Fully charged, the 4.2 amp/hour battery in the Rail has enough power to last 16 hours.

With security being the paramount concern, Synapse incorporated a card reader with a magnetic stripe that encrypts the credit card number before sending it wirelessly to the server. The decryption then occurs on the credit card company’s side of the transaction, making the information secure throughout the entire transaction process.

Viableware is currently piloting the device in PF Chang’s and has plans to also expand into New Orleans-based Dickie Bennan restaurants. More recently, the company announced that it had integrated its technology with leading restaurant POS systems, MICROS, NCR Aloha and Dinerware, which serve over 60-percent of the 400,000 full-service restaurants in the US.

This week on the GeekWire radio show, we wrap ourselves in the world of wearable computing, talking about the current state of the art and where we’re headed from here.

Our guest in the studio is Skooks Pong, senior vice president of technology at Synapse, a product development and engineering firm in Seattle that has worked on wearable computing projects including the Nike FuelBand.

We also talk about the rumored Apple iWatch, and the privacy implications of having all these sensors in our lives, as highlighted recently by the 5 Point bar’s decision to ban Google Glasses even before they’re widely available to the public.

See this recent post by Pong on the topic of wearable computing. He writes, “The hardware resurgence, combined with an unprecedented interest in quantified self data, makes the market ripe for wearables. We now have the hardware and software technology to produce high-quality wearables that present our data in a convenient, easily digestible format, and this technology will continue to advance.”

For more background on wearable computing, see this recent post by our colleague Taylor Soper, featuring Artefact wearable technology designer Jennifer Darmour.

The wearable computing conversation starts in the second segment, at the 8:00 mark in the audio player above. We kick off the show with our weekly news roundup, including a discussion of Google’s expansion in the Seattle region, the discontinuation of Google Reader, and the debut of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and its advanced eye-tracking features.

Kate Cummings - Electrical Program Lead

How did you get into engineering and when did you start?
I wasn’t planning to go into engineering, but when I was looking at colleges in 2002 I found Olin College, which was then accepting students for their first class. I was interested in education and Olin’s mission was to create a better engineering education and produce engineers who wouldn’t just be good at math and physics, but would also have communication, innovation, and entrepreneurial skills to make them successful at real-world engineering challenges.

I was accepted into Olin’s inaugural class with a full scholarship and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help create a new college, even though I was doubtful that I wanted to be an engineer. I wound up liking engineering more than I expected, and I was lucky enough to get a job with Synapse straight out of school. It wasn’t a typical entry-level engineering job. In my first couple years at Synapse I worked on at least 10 different products and did everything from creating 6 prototype devices in 6 weeks for a trade show, to developing products that were going into high volume manufacturing in Asia.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?
I work on a lot of small, battery powered devices, so having good tools to monitor power consumption is essential. We use a USB connected multimeter and a Labview program to pull current consumption measurements off a device at up to 50k samples per second. From that data, we can differentiate things like when our processor is waking up and when it is asleep.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?
I think the most difficult problems to solve are the ones that are hard to reproduce and can’t easily be isolated as a hardware or a software problem. A couple years ago, a device I was working on had an issue where it stopped logging accelerometer data. Everyone working on the project, including the firmware team, assumed that it was a software bug. Eventually we figured out that the problem was actually mechanical in nature—there was a spring contact to the battery that was intermittently losing contact. This caused a small droop on the power supply rail and was setting off the accelerometer’s power on reset circuit. This caused the accelerometer to lose its configuration, which caused our firmware to stop accumulating accelerometer data.

What is on your bookshelf?
I don’t have many engineering books on my bookshelf. I use The Art of Electronics as a laptop stand and consult it occasionally, but I find most of the technical information I need on the internet. Recently, I’ve been reading about innovation—The Idea Factory, which is a book about the history of Bell Labs, and another book called Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

What has been your favorite project?
One of the best products I’ve worked on was the Nike+ SportWatch GPS. It was fun to work on something that I can now go into a store and buy. Plus, as a runner, its something that I can use. Fitting GPS capability into a small, low power watch was a good challenge. I also had the chance to be involved in ramping up the production line and making sure the product could be manufactured in high volume.

Do you have an experiential story you would like to share?
We recently asked one of our interns to do some ESD testing but neglected to give him any advice on the proper procedure. He assumed that since the product was wrist-worn, he should have it on his arm while doing the testing and repeatedly shocked himself.

What are the non-technical skills that engineers need to learn?
In my experience a lot of engineers aren’t good at big-picture thinking—you can come up with the world’s best technical solution to a problem, but that doesn’t get you anywhere if you’re not working on the right problem. Communication is also incredibly important. Being able to write a clear email or presentation that explains an issue can keep a project on the rails, particularly when it involves multiple partners located all over the world.

What are you currently working on?
That’s top secret!

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?
I’d like to see us increase the number of women in electrical engineering. In 2010, only 12% of electrical engineer graduates were women.

What do you enjoy outside of electrical engineering?
I enjoy any activity that gets me outdoors and active—trail running, skiing, and rock climbing are a few of my favorites. On a recent project, I had to spend some time onsite at a contract manufacturer in China for prototype builds and I was able to add a long weekend of rock climbing on the beach in Thailand to the trip.

The WTIA’s initiative that formed the Information Technology Coalition in 2012 had its first Olympia Day last month.  Several of our IT tech leaders headed to the state Capitol for a twelve hour day of meetings with legislators and with Washington’s new CIO Michael Cockrill (fantastic appointment by Governor Inslee!).  Companies represented in this excursion included Amazonand Microsoft (big), Synapse Product Development and Vertafore (mid-market), Hidden Path andNiviera (small), as well as Legicrawler and Herres Consulting.  We were delighted to have leadership from these diverse companies, along with the WTIA and the Technology Alliance, in meetings with state legislators.  It gave the legislators the opportunity to hear directly the impact that the talent gap had on each company’s ability to develop product and plan for expansion; as well as the benefit of the R&D tax credits to their operations, which is effectively to be able to hire more tech talent.

The trip was noteworthy because it’s one of the first small steps in getting the state’s IT sector leadership directly engaged in advocacy.   Politics as a “contact sport” is a cliché we haven’t had to experience.   With some notable exceptions, the IT sector has largely stayed out of the public policy arena in WA.  By contrast, the aerospace and biotech sectors have done a fantastic job at being present with both leadership and money to advocate for their constituents.  For example, the WBBA held its own Olympia Day in January and drew 40 biotech CEOs to Olympia. They were also met by Governor Inslee for a 25 minute discussion on important policy for the sector.   This turn-out is the result of years of focused effort from the biotech sector to be heard by our lawmakers.  We applaud the great work that Chris Rivera and his team have done for WA’s biotech industry and are delighted that many of our own policy agenda items match those of the WBBA as well as the Technology Alliance’s.  It is also significant that WBBA has a $50K-$60K political action committee that helps the life sciences industry increase its influence.  Our own PAC is modest in comparison. Both biotech and aerospace have made a serious long term commitment to policy and political influence.  The IT industry needs the same commitment.

Why advocacy matters has a national if not global context.  For IT we have been late to the policy advocacy effort partly because we’re effectively unregulated and our labor pool is not unionized.  These characteristics, along with the relatively young status of our sector as a whole, have kept us heads down building some of the world’s leading tech companies.  The talent pool shortage that’s now painfully pervasive in all size IT companies, has begun to shift the interest that companies have in long term solutions to the talent gap (i.e. quality STEM education) and the need to provide a healthy competitive environment for continued innovation (i.e. R&D and other tax incentives).

It’s unfortunate that our state government is looking at quality education and economic development incentives as trade-offs for each other as they attempt to close the budget gap.  More unfortunate will be if tech itself begins to accept this one-pays-for-the-other policy as the underlying presumption of how to solve educational funding gaps.  There is no question that our state has intense budgetary pressures but making the environment less attractive to tech companies has long term consequences.

Every day we read about other states’ initiatives to attract tech companies.  For example, Maryland is considering tripling its R&D tax credit.  The list of state initiatives to develop centers of innovation is exhaustive but the message is the same–these states are hungry to have what Washington has had for 30 years.  The recipe for the secret sauce to make this happen is no longer a secret.

Losing tech job growth here is not something that will happen in the future.  It’s happening now.  The WTIA frequently hears from its member companies the decisions they have made to expand in other states—50 jobs, 400 jobs, 1,200 jobs.  Reluctantly these companies have concluded that they cannot expand in Washington.  The decisions are not accompanied by corporate headquarter relocations or union protests so they don’t hit the media. Rather, it’s a quiet slipping away of digital jobs to other places that are not so quietly wooing these companies’ expansion plans away from us.

What to do?  The IT sector must engage in the public policy advocacy arena.  At one of our final meetings on Olympia Day, a Senator from Puget Sound stated the IT sector’s legislative influence predicament pretty bluntly: “You’re not feared.”  His response to, “What should we do?” was equally blunt:  “Have leadership show up in Olympia and talk directly to legislators and raise money to reward those legislators that represent your interests.”  This is what every group soliciting support for their constituents has been doing, some for more than 100 years.

It’s the IT sector’s time to get on the band wagon and have a clear voice for best policy to keep Washington’s biggest economic contributor thriving as the competition for innovation leadership unfolds.  The WTIA supports these initiatives because we love Washington’s create drive, its entrepreneurs and all the people the IT sector so robustly supports with direct and indirect jobs, and we believe the state should consciously envision its future as one of the leading innovation centers in the world.  Talent, passion, and collaboration manifested in public and private alignment for a shared objective is the key to Washington’s future.

As the WTIA policy efforts move forward on the advocacy front, we are also moving full steam on short term initiatives through our Workforce Development Committee led by Tayloe Washburn and through our events.  Check out TalentLink on March 26th.

The WTIA would love to have every IT company in Washington engage in the pursuit of good public policy and we’re organized to do it.   Please consider getting involved in the Information Technology Coalition by contacting me at ssigl@washingtontechnology.org, saying yes to the next Olympia Day, and/or giving a contribution to techPAC.  Your support is greatly appreciated.

"This is the raw stuff."

Stefan Olander, head of Nike's three-year-old Digital Sport division, is watching a group of his engineers hack an experiment together. They're using a pair of Nike trainers with embedded sensors. The sensors measure pressure created when the shoes, which happen to be on the feet of a lanky product manager named Brandon Burroughs, strike the ground. The data are collected and then fed wirelessly to an iPhone; the iPhone is plugged into a MacBook; the MacBook's screen features a program that is busily imitating a 1987 Nintendo video game called Track & Field II. Which brings us to the ostensible goal of all this madness: finding out if new-age sensors and wireless devices work with an ancient video game.

One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that's happy with its success.
That's why Burroughs, who is outfitted head to toe in Nike attire, is crouched in anticipation like a runner before a starter pistol is fired. Suddenly, a whistle screams from the MacBook--it's the game's signal that a steeplechase "race" has begun--and Burroughs starts sprinting in place. It isn't pretty. He's panting heavily. He's been at this for a while and is clearly spent. His feet thud against the carpet like a clumsy drumroll as his crude avatar lurches forward on screen. And he's doing all this in a big, clean, stark corporate lab full of engineers, which isn't very glamorous. But the experiment is working, sort of: As his avatar nears the first hurdle, Burroughs leaps too late, leading his digital self to trip and tumble into a pixelated pool of water. "Arrrrrrr!" yells Burroughs. "Come on!"

Olander, who bears a distracting resemblance to Matthew McConaughey and looks fit enough to have cleared that hurdle with ease, jokes that the only problem here is that Burroughs "is not very fast." He actually loves that the group is "just mucking about and having fun," as he puts it. "Really cool stuff can come from the opportunity to test without constraints." And that, in sum, is innovation, Nike-style: a messy, exhausting process culled from myriad options and countless failures.

Nike CEO Mark Parker. Photo by Art Streiber; Fashion Styling: Melanie Leftick; Grooming: Juanita Lyon
In 2012, Nike's experimentation yielded two breakout hits. The first is the FuelBand, a $150 electronic bracelet that measures your movements throughout the day, whether you play tennis, jog, or just walk to work. The device won raves for its elegant design and a clean interface that lets users track activity with simple color cues (red for inactive; green if you've achieved your daily goal). Press its one button for a scrolling stock ticker of how many calories you've burned, the number of steps you've taken, and your total NikeFuel points, a proprietary metric of activity that Nike encourages you to share online. The FuelBand is the clearest sign that Nike has transformed itself into a digital force. "Nike has broken out of apparel and into tech, data, and services, which is so hard for any company to do," says Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

The other innovation is the Flyknit Racer, featherlight shoes that feel more like a sock atop a sole. Created from knit threading rather than multiple layers of fabric, it required a complete rethink of Nike's manufacturing process. The result is a shoe that's more environmentally friendly and could reduce long-term production costs. "Flyknit could turn the [shoe] industry on its head," says Nike sustainability VP Hannah Jones.

To produce even one of these innovations in a given year is a rarity for any company, especially one with 44,000 employees. But Nike CEO Mark Parker knows he can't just rely on celebrity endorsements and the power of the swoosh when confronted by big-name competitors such as Adidas and upstarts like Jawbone and Fitbit. "One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that's happy with its success," he says. "Companies fall apart when their model is so successful that it stifles thinking that challenges it. It's like what the Joker said--'This town needs an enema.' When needed, you've got to apply that enema, so to speak."

Every CEO says this kind of thing (minus the enema part). The difference is that Parker delivers. Last year, Nike's annual revenue hit $24 billion, up 60% since he took over the reins as CEO in 2006. Profits are up 57%, and Nike's market cap has more than doubled. This story is about how he has achieved that growth, and how he has driven a commitment to the company's culture. Nike is a business with much corporate lore, that lovely, misty story of how a bunch of renegades with a waffle iron bucked the system and revolutionized an industry. But a close examination of the development of Flyknit and the FuelBand, based on interviews with top Nike executives, current and former designers, engineers, and longtime collaborators, reveals four distinct rules that guide this company, that allow it to take big risks, that push it to adapt before competitors force it to change.

Rule #1: TO DISRUPT, YOU MUST GO ALL-IN

What makes Flyknit so truly disruptive is that it isn't a shoe--it's a way to make shoes. As the team members who spent four years developing the technology like to say, they're "breaking the sewing machine." The old Nike model involved cutting rolls of prewoven material into pieces, and then stitching and assembling them. But with Flyknit, a shoe's upper and tongue can be knit from polyester yarns and cables, which "gets rid of all the unnecessary excesses," says Ben Shaffer, studio director at the Innovation Kitchen, Nike's R&D center. The Flyknit Racer, one of the first shoes in the Flyknit line, is 5.6 ounces, roughly an ounce lighter than its counterparts. Nike uses only as much thread as it needs in production, and the shoe can be micro-engineered--tightened here, stretched there--to improve durability and fit.

Parker clearly has big expectations for Flyknit, telling shareholders it "is one of those technologies that has incredible potential, not only within running, but across multiple categories." That's a massive bet given Nike's dominance of the athletic-shoe business, where, for example, it owns half the running market and a whopping 92% of the U.S. basketball shoe business. And Nike has gone all-in on that bet, building a whole new manufacturing process around the product. "Does this change our business model in some cases, or our supply chain? Absolutely," Parker says.

Shaffer shows me some of the 195 major iterations the Flyknit went through as we tour the Kitchen. Some appear as rudimentary as a ballerina's slipper. The prototype that marathon runner Paula Radcliffe marked with scribbles now looks like a rejected Project Runway design. Nike's ambitions for Flyknit can be seen in the trays full of feet that live in tall carts around the Kitchen. The disembodied wooden lumps--most generically sized and others made by scanning some of the actual feet of the thousands of professional athletes that the company sponsors--are all waiting to be fitted, like Cinderella, with the perfect prototype shoe.

"Flyknit is a platform," Nike's Jones says. "We're reimagining the upper, the bottoms--the whole caboodle." In addition, as materials such as rubber become harder to come by because of overharvesting or climate change, "we're going to be able to navigate the volatility of these resources," she adds. Then, perhaps reminded of the fierce competition Nike is in with Adidas over knit shoes, Jones stops short and wavers, "I can't say anymore."

Rule #2: ANTICIPATE A PRODUCT'S EVOLUTION

Before the FuelBand, a product called Magneto was, briefly, Nike's next big thing. You'd tape magnets to your temples and then clip futuristic eyewear onto them. "Perhaps we went too far with that idea, because we actually started to make it," admits global brand EVP Trevor Edwards. Parker decided the product was impractical, and he killed it.

That sounds like an obvious call, but Parker reputedly approved Flyknit after being shown only a tube sock stitched to a rubber sole. Early on, great ideas can resemble bad ones: They both sound ridiculous. "Steve [Jobs] had a good bullshit meter, but also an open mind," Parker says. "It's that bullshit filter that says, 'Really? Is this really compelling?' We kill a lot of ideas."

Parker says he often feels like Tom Hanks in Big--a kid at a toy company whose job is to approve only the products he has fun with. In the FuelBand, Parker saw what athletes would instinctively value. As a "smart" version of the already popular Livestrong bracelet, the FuelBand would give users their own digital coach to motivate them. They could connect with other users and with their friends and family via social media to cheer them on, whether it's to lose weight or train for a marathon. Nike would benefit from this community, thanks to the ongoing connection with its customers, as well as every user promoting Nike with each post or tweet of their activity report. Plus, people were already comfortable with wearing a silicone wristband, unlike, say, face magnets.

As if to prove the point, when Parker and I meet, he's wearing a FuelBand on each wrist--exactly double what any user needs. "I don't normally wear two," he says, beaming, "but I have to admit, I'm obsessed." The company is now working to extend that obsession to others. In December, Nike partnered with the startup mentoring firm TechStars to woo entrepreneurs to launch companies that will build on top of Nike's digital platform. Nike has already announced games built on Fuel points.

This three-steps-ahead thinking is important for any product. Flyknit is not only valuable because its technology will help Nike make all kinds of lighter, better-fitting shoes, but also because it fits into the company's global growth initiatives. With Brazil hosting both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, Sterne Agee analyst Sam Poser believes Flyknit will help Nike reorient how it makes and sells shoes in such an important international market. "The duties importing from China [where Nike does much of its manufacturing] to Brazil are absolute craziness--way too cost-prohibitive, and the [manufacturing] in Brazil is so expensive," he says. "But Flyknit is much less labor intensive. If they can go into Brazil and set up [knitting] machines, they win." Poser goes further, imagining that Flyknit will one day allow customers to digitally personalize shoes to match the exact shape of their feet.

Great ideas have something in common with bad ones: Early on, they both sound ridiculous.
Parker wouldn't be blamed if he had passed on Flyknit after seeing a modified tube sock, but if Nike doesn't bet on crazy ideas, its rivals will. "They're like sharks," says Poser. "If they stop swimming, they die." Adidas, also after four years of research, launched its Primeknit line only months after Flyknit's. Nike then dragged Adidas to court over patent-infringement claims related to knit technology.

Rule #3: DIRECT YOUR PARTNERS

Stefan Olander has barely ushered me into his neatly arranged office when he invokes FuelBand lore. He has an early prototype at the ready, the very one that his team used in 2010 to pitch the idea to CEO Mark Parker. "We pulled up [our sleeves] and revealed this," he says, sliding his fingers over the white leathery Velcro bracelet marked with green calculator-like numbers. "Mark is so consumer-driven that instinctively he said, 'Go do this now.' His first question was, 'How fast can you build this?'"

The tale is burnished to a high gloss, which is a shame, because an idea as big as the FuelBand does not get cooked up in a single lab. It doesn't become a sophisticated, beautiful product just because Parker admired a leathery wristband. Nike doesn't like to discuss the gritty details of how something like the FuelBand gets made, but the real story shows how messy true innovation is.

In a world of rapid disruption, companies no longer must--or can--own all the skills required to thrive. Just as Google needed Android to attack mobile and Apple needed Siri to give it a foothold in search, successful businesses need to constantly evolve, either through partnerships, new talent, acquisitions--or all three. "You can't have a barrier or restriction," says lead Nike engineer Aaron Weast. For the FuelBand, Nike had to open its doors.

The FuelBand's road to reality began in March of 2010, when a three-person Nike team flew to San Francisco to share their idea with the industrial design firm Astro Studios. "They had this concept of a tennis sweatband with an electronic watch," Astro design EVP Kyle Swen recalls, as he sits in the same third-floor conference room where the meeting took place. "They wouldn't even leave us the pitch; it was super confidential." Nike also consulted engineering firms Whipsaw and Synapse, and longtime digital marketing agency R/GA.

This team of outside partners created hundreds of prototypes, imagining concepts for displays that resembled an Amazon Kindle screen; bands that fully illuminate with color; ones that fit over your leg or upper arm; and even a fastening system modeled after a gas nozzle.

"Everything was custom, custom, custom," says Astro designer Anh Nguyen.

Olander played the shepherd. "You will never get good work out of anyone if you hand over a brief and go, 'We have no clue what we want, but why don't you just do it for us,'" Olander says. During the FuelBand's development, for example, Nike's specific requests to partners included its red-to-green color scheme; the idea of Fuel points, which Olander felt would encourage competition among users regardless of their sport; and a dead-simple interface without excessive metrics. The team learned that last insight from its experience with Nike's earlier digital products, for which 30% of users turned off calorie tracking.

Nike's role was between a coach and a traffic cop. Nike designer Jamian Cobbett describes it as an "ebb and flow." Astro's Swen relates how engineers from other parts of Nike's assembled team would see what the designers had in mind: "They were like, 'No fucking way,'" he says, laughing. "But that's innovation: full throttle, hit the brakes; full throttle, hit the brakes." The effort produced several breakthroughs, such as when Whipsaw embedded 120 LED lights in the bracelet (to look like an old-time scoreboard) and Synapse developed a curved lithium battery. Both are key features of the final product.

Read the entire article

BY: AUSTIN CARR

The Amazon chief’s new patent on an airbaglike system to protect falling cellphones or Kindles raises plenty of questions about its practicality.

Jeff Bezos, don’t quit your day job.

Gee-whiz news reports marveled this past week at the Amazon chief’s new patent on an air-baglike system to protect falling cellphones, Kindles and such.

But plenty of practical factors suggest this invention won’t be stuffed in anyone’s stocking next holiday season, if ever.

Two Seattle experts in consumer-electronics design confess that their own smartphones lack even the minimal protection of an impact-resistant case.

“I’m living on the edge,” admits Redwood Stephens, vice president of engineering for Synapse Product Development.

Sean MacLeod, president of Stratos Product Design, says his phone remains “unwrapped” even though “I go through one about every six months.”

Both designers say that while the idea of more active protection is intriguing, the challenges boil down to technology and money.

“It would clearly be competing with low-cost passive systems” like a plastic case or a rubber bumper, says Stephens, a mechanical engineer by training who has worked on Nike digital technology and other consumer electronics.

“ ‘I’ll be more careful’ —- that’s a fairly cheap solution,” agrees Mac­Leod, who has done projects for Apple and Microsoft, designed ruggedized laptops and worked on a lot of handheld electronics.

“When it gets down to it, cost is really such a brutal part of the consumer game.”

The patent, filed by Bezos and Amazon Vice President Gregory Hart in February 2010, involves using an air bag, springs or a jet of compressed gas to cushion a portable electronic device’s uncontrolled drop. There’s nothing in the patent’s broad descriptions to suggest Amazon, or anyone, has built such a system.

An automobile air bag seems almost simple by comparison. In a car there’s plenty of room for electronic and mechanical components. The added weight is minimal. The position of the person to be protected is fixed.

And while there’s not much time between the car hitting an obstacle and the rider hitting the dashboard, that 1/20th of a second is enough for the sensor at the front end to detect an impact and deploy the air bag inside.

Saving a phone or tablet computer, by contrast, first requires predicting a serious impact. As the patent explains, the system must determine that the device is falling, measure the distance to the approaching floor, calculate the crash velocity and then determine “whether the risk of damage to the cellphone ... exceeds an acceptable threshold.”

To differentiate between dropping the phone on a shag rug and a driveway, the patent says the system might include a “surface-type detector ... that may use a number of technologies, such as infrared, radar, X-ray or image recognition.”

Next, the “protection system” would kick in. That could require a “reorientation” element that rotates the device so it falls with the protected side down. This, says the patent, could use “gas expelled from a compressed gas cartridge” or a movable weight.

Finally, there’s the “protection element,” most intriguingly an air bag. Multiple air bags could be used to protect all sides of the device, the filing says.

Stephens says detecting a fall would not be difficult with the accelerometers, gyroscopes and other orientation systems now found in many smartphones. That’s the “lower-hanging fruit,” he says.

The next plausible step would be building a mechanism to “actively deploy mechanical bumpers, which are significantly lower cost than would be required for compressed gas,” he says.

But an air bag powered by compressed gas? “I could envision that getting bulky really quickly,” he says.

And some catlike mechanism to twist the falling device around so its cushioned side lands first? That seems like a tough nut to crack, Stephens says. “The question is how much weight do we have to throw around, or how much air do we have to blast, to accomplish that?”

MacLeod says miniaturizing the various components might be possible but expensive. “If it costs too much to actually develop the solution then it’s impractical from a business perspective.”

Still, he’s not ready to write off the mobile-phone air bag. “I wish I had one.”

There’s also an alternative approach to protection — insurance. One insurer of tech products, Asurion, reports that 53 percent of its claims last year were for damage, as opposed to loss, theft or malfunctions.

Whether it’s financial or physical protection, MacLeod says consumers may not pay much to protect the longevity of their devices “if you’re going to trade in every time there’s a new version, every six months.”

Of course, even if this Bezos patent goes nowhere, the man shares authorship on more than 70 others assigned to Amazon. Plus, he invented Amazon.

And even if this invention succeeds, there’s something air bags or springs won’t do: keep a phone dry and afloat when it’s dropped in the toilet.

That problem is still waiting for its Jeff Bezos.

By Rami Grunbaum, deputy business editor

One of the defining features of the current economic downturn is that when people lose their job, they tend to remain unemployed for a loooong time. Of the nation's 12 million unemployed workers, 40 percent have been unemployed more than six months, and the average duration of unemployment is nine months.

Many workers inevitably struggle with the question of whether to strategically pursue jobs within their chosen field or just grab any job they can get.

Obviously, if bills are piling up and you need to get food on the table, you happily take any available job. But what if you have some savings set aside and can afford to ride out your job search for a while?

There aren’t any hard-and-fast rules in that case, experts said.

“There is no one right answer. You need to do what’s best for you,” said David Palileo, a recruiter for Synapse Product Development.

Cathi Hight, president of the Boulder Area Human Resource Association in Colorado, echoed Palileo’s comments, noting that both long employment gaps and unusual, interim jobs are increasingly common these days. “HR people are a little less judgmental, because a lot of people are out of work – a lot of HR people are out of work. They get it.”

Whether you take any job you can find or hold out for something in line with your long-term career goals may depend on what industry you’re in. “Think about what industry you’re in – what’s the future for that industry? If you’re in a declining industry, you’re going to need to find some resources to switch industries, switch careers,” said Josh Warborg, district president at Robert Half International, a staffing firm. “However, if you’re in an industry like IT or health care, you may be better off staying in your field and hunting down an opportunity there.”

However, Joe Bonura, author of the e-book “Throw the Rabbit and Get That Job In 30 Days or Less!,” advises job seekers to take any job they can get. He says it’s important to do something productive, even if it wasn’t what you were trained to do. “I would clean toilets in between [jobs] so I could keep my pride and keep earning money,” Bonura said. “While I’m cleaning toilets, I’d be thinking, ‘What am I going to do this afternoon so I can get the job I really want to do?’ And there’s no shame in that. There’s no shame in any labor. The big thing to do is maintain your self-esteem.”

Whether you hold out for the job you really want or take any job you can get, experts recommend addressing that choice in your resume and cover letter.

For those who take any job they can find, Hight recommends noting it as an “interim” position. Tell prospective employers that you had to make careful decisions during this difficult economic time. She notes that it’s important to mention something positive about that interim job in your cover letter. “Don’t make it sound like complete drudgery. Tell them you learned something new on the job. Then, potential employers can say, ‘Wow, this person made a hard decision, but they’re making the most of it and learning something.’”

While Hight advises applicants to address their interim position in the cover letter, she says it’s important to talk about the job they are applying for as well. Many cover letters and resumes are scanned and filtered by computers before a human ever sees them, so it’s important to include the right keywords for a particular job in those documents; otherwise, Hight cautions, computer filters may dismiss a resume before a real person ever has the chance to lay eyes on it.

Palileo agrees that it’s important to address both gaps in employment and those interim jobs on your resume. If you took a job just to get through a tough spot, Palileo says, it’s important to put the right spin on it, both on your resume and in an interview. “How do you encapsulate that [job] into your story? Rather than say ‘barista,’ say that you’re a java addict who dove into the subculture of coffee houses.”

Dana Macario is a Seattle-area writer.

A growing number of tech-savvy women are encouraging other women to follow in their footsteps.

The pizza has been cleared away and the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade girls in Mawiayah Fields' classroom at South Shore School are ready to learn how to write computer code.

But first, a dozen or so volunteers, who have taken time off work to help on this September afternoon, introduce themselves with stories of how they found their professional calling.

"I come from a dysfunctional family, so I like to fix things," Vazjier Rosario, 27, a Microsoft engineer and mother of three, told them.

Sekela Rabb, 33, says that as a kid she "loved to press buttons to see what was going to happen." That curiosity has led her to pursue an associate's degree in network engineering at a community college.

And pink-haired Martine Stillman, 31, a mechanical engineer at Synapse, a local firm that develops cool stuff for Nike, Samsung and other companies, says a college professor inspired her.

He said, "You're never going to be an engineer." To which she said, "You wanna bet?"

Amid concern that the nation isn't preparing enough students for the high-tech workforce of the future, accomplished tech-savvy women are emerging as a force aimed at unleashing the untapped potential of girls. The first step: disproving a stereotype that computing is a guy thing.

"If you look at the media, and who we worship in this tech space, it's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg," says Ruthe Farmer, director of Strategic Initiatives for The National Center for Women & IT, based in Boulder, Colo. "We want girls to see women, to see a possible glimpse of their future," Farmer says.

Women graduate from college in larger numbers than men, but they fall behind when it comes to degrees in some of the fastest-growing — and most lucrative — fields. Not only did just 18% of bachelor's degrees in computer science go to women in 2010, their numbers are down from 38% in 1985, Education Department data show.

The center, a coalition of 300 corporations, colleges, government agencies and non-profits, was created in 2006 to promote efforts to reverse that decline. It has been helped along by member organizations such as the Girl Scouts, the Computer Science Teachers Association and this program, called Inspiring Girls Now in Technology Evolution, or IGNITE, offered through Seattle Public Schools since 1999.

A growing number of women who have advanced into high-profile, high-tech positions are encouraging women to follow in their footsteps. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has been particularly vocal, as has Yahoo President Marissa Mayer. Even foes of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education programs, say private support of such programs is commendable.

"You're going to be hard-pressed to find anybody who doesn't think it's a wonderful idea to have role models and outreach programs to help mentor women in science, or any gender or any profession," says Carrie Lukas, managing director of the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Even so, she questions whether males are being similarly encouraged to pursue fields traditionally filled by women such as nursing. "I find it strange that we continue to have an obsession" about women in science, technology, engineering and math, "which are essentially the only disciplines left where women aren't outperforming men."

The push to engage more girls is not just about filling jobs or earning better salaries. In a speech this summer at a conference hosted by Australia's Radio National, Intel Corp. trend-watcher and anthropologist Genevieve Bell said her research shows that women in their 40s, 50s and 60s are the lead adopters and heaviest users of new technology.

Companies that fail to consider the female perspective may be at a competitive disadvantage, says Microsoft's Rane Johnson, who helps lead efforts to grow the pipeline of women in science, engineering and research. At Microsoft, where about 24% of the company's employees are women, "our challenge today is we don't have enough diverse teams," Johnson says.

Power in networking

Women who have achieved success in computer science and engineering are eager to reach out to younger girls, IGNITE founder Cathi Rodgveller says. Each year, more than 200 women in the Seattle area participate in some aspect of the program, which includes workshops, job shadows and internships.

Since 1999, when Rodgveller had 14 professional volunteers, female participation in high school technology classes has risen from 10% to 50%, she says. The program also has spread to other states and abroad.

"Women sharing their stories, that's really the heart of why we're so successful," Rodgveller says.

A new online mentoring program with ties to the national center follows a similar theme. Nearly 600 women have pledged to spend at least an hour this fall offering advice to female college students considering careers in science, technology, engineering and math. Since the program began Oct. 1, students have raised topics on a range of issues, including graduate programs and how to respond to inappropriate remarks.

The idea for the online discussion was to make it easy for professional women, who "are some of the busiest people on Earth," to get involved, says Maria Klawe, president of California's Harvey Mudd College, a co-sponsor of the project and member of the center's executive advisory council. "Many of them are very aware of how much help they have gotten from other people," she says.

Joy of discovery

That message comes through in this noisy Seattle classroom, as volunteers oversee pairs of girls as they program computers to make a tiny turtle paint a line while walking across their computer screens. First, the girls make the turtle draw a square, then a pink square, then a multicolored polygon. By the end, the girls squeal upon figuring out how to make the turtles walk in a spiral or make a starburst.

"At first, I thought it was going to be boring but, once I got the hang of it, it was fun," says seventh-grader Tyra Roberson, 12. For her, the big lesson of the day was that "no matter where you come from, you can do what you always want to do."

It's too soon to know whether a career in computer science is in her future. Right now, Roberson's sights are set on being a lawyer.

Rodgveller, who has heard that kind of response before, isn't fazed. "We're just starting with them," she says. "Talk to them again in a couple of years."

By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY

Evaporative coolers, which use water as a refrigerant, are one of the few viable energy-saving technology alternatives to air conditioning. But they only function when the air is dry, and tend to deliver humid air.

A new technology from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Boulder, Colo., AIL Research, Princeton, N.J., and Synapse Product Development LLC, Seattle, Wash., has the potential to bring evaporative cooling to a wider audience. DEVAP: Desiccant-Enhanced Evaporative Air-Conditioning operates on the same principle, but is indirect: Incoming air is in thermal contact with a moistened surface that evaporates the moisture into a separate air stream. As the evaporation cools the moistened surface, it draws heat from the incoming air without adding humidity to it.

The system uses a desiccant to absorb water vapor. Because this is an exothermic process, it releases heat that can warm both the desiccant and the incoming air. However, DEVAP's liquid desiccant is also in contact with a plastic sheet that provides thermal contact between the desiccant and a stream of water, which is wicked into a flocked surface that is bonded to the plastic sheet. As outdoor air flows past, water evaporates, cooling this surface. The cooler water also draws heat from the desiccant, keeping it cool and maintaining its effectiveness. The two stages of DEVAP allows it to operate effectively in a wide range of climates without consuming high levels of water.

Technology
Air-conditioning system

Developers
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
AIL Research
Synapse Product Development LLC

Development Team

(l-r): Eric Kozubal, Ron Judkoff, and Jason Woods from NREL.

The DEVAP: Desiccant-Enhanced Evaporative Air-Conditioning Development Team
Eric Kozubal, Principal Developer, NREL
Jay Burch, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Dylan Garrett, Synapse Product Development LLC
Ian Graves, Synapse Product Development LLC
Ron Judkoff, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Andy Lowenstein, AIL Research
Steven Slayzak, formerly with National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Redwood Stephens, Synapse Product Development LLC
Jason Woods, National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Synapse took first place in Seattle Business Magazine's 2012 Tech Impact Awards in the IT Services category. This is the second time this year Synapse has been honored by Seattle Business Magazine.

According to the award organizers, Synapse is always doing something brilliant and continues to foster "a creative environment that has given the company a reputation for making really cool stuff." In his acceptance speech, CEO and co-founder Scott Bright, emphasized that the company's reputation wouldn't be possible without the people who make Synapse the unique workplace that it is. According to Bright, Synapse's organic culture "makes us who we are...and it's why our clients consistently remind us that they’ve never encountered a culture quite like Synapse's."

For photos from the event, visit Synapse's Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/synapseproductdevelopment

MAGAZINE STORY:

At Synapse, something brilliant always seems to be in the works. Its teams of inventors, designers and engineers tackle all sort of problems for clients, whether it’s creating a GPS sports watch for Nike and TomTom, developing plaque removal technology for Philips Sonicare, DNA field analysis devices for Seahawk Biosystems or a metered electricity regulator for use in Bangalore, India. Its latest effort, in partnership with Kirkland’s Viableware, is a secure restaurant payment system that allows diners to split the bill as many ways as they like and pay through their mobile devices. Started by four out-of-work engineers who liked to solve tough problems, Synapse has grown to a 200-person firm with offices in San Francisco and Hong Kong, fostering a creative environment that has given the company a reputation for making really cool stuff.

Photo Credit: Hayley Young - Caption: Synapse Product Development CEO Scott Bright, right, holding Indiana Dabreo, with President Ross Collins, seated next to Dakota.

OFFICIAL RELEASE:

Seattle Business magazine honored the best of Washington state’s tech industry at the first Tech Impact Awards, held at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. John McAdam, CEO of F5 Networks, received the Lifetime Achievement Award for helping to steer F5 from the edge of disaster to a place of prominence in the Washington tech community. Keynote speaker Rich Barton, executive chairman of Zillow Inc., exhorted a crowd of 230 to follow the path to their dreams with courage, heart and intelligence.

Nominations in 12 categories were submitted by companies from across the state. A judging panel of eight tech-industry experts narrowed them down to winners and silver award recipients. Honorees received their awards from representatives of presenting sponsor Comcast Business Class, signature sponsor AAOA Healthcare, and event partner the Washington Technology Industry Association.

"One of the great joys of covering business in Washington state is to see the development of new technologies, new services and new business models in every industry sector," said Leslie Helm, editor of Seattle Business. "We launched the Tech Impact Awards to honor this innovation and to recognize the effect it has on business and on society."

The award-winning companies are:

Tech Impact – Lifetime Achievement      
John McAdam/F5 Networks, Seattle

Tech Impact – Enterprise Computing
Winner: Apptio, Bellevue     
Silver: ExtraHop Networks, Seattle

Tech Impact – Cloud Computing          
Winner: Amazon Web Services, Seattle    
Silver: Microsoft (Windows Azure), Redmond

Tech Impact – IT Services 
Winner: Synapse Product Development, Seattle
Silver: Jackson Fish Market, Seattle

Tech Impact – Mobile        
Winner: Microsoft (Photosynth), Redmond
Silver: Starbucks, Seattle

Tech Impact – Construction         
Winner: EagleView Technologies, Bothell 
Silver: Skanska, Seattle

Tech Impact – Education  
Winner: Livemocha, Seattle
Silver: Edvation, Bellevue; Panopto, Seattle

Tech Impact – Real Estate
Winner: Redfin, Seattle         
Silver: Zillow, Seattle

Tech Impact – Consumer/Retail 
Winner: Zulily, Seattle
Silver: Decide.com, Seattle

Tech Impact – Games        
Winner: PopCap Games, Seattle       
Silver: Big Fish Games, Seattle; Zipline Games, Mercer Island

Tech Impact – Health         
Winner: Edifecs, Bellevue   
Silver: Mammography Reporting System, Seattle; RealSelf, Seattle

Tech Impact – Marketing Innovation       
Winner: SEOmoz, Seattle    

The mobilepayment industry just continues to heat up and that means more and more companies are trying to find their way in the door. That also means that companies are trying to find brand new ways to stick out from the crowd. With that in mind, the company known as HubWorks has come up with new software that is geared towards the iPad that is supposed to enhance the customer experience. This new approach allows diners to place their orders and pay from their table using an iPad. These iPads are mounted to the table so that customers can’t walk away with them, but they allow the diners to control their experience a little more, instead of being at the mercy of a perhaps overworked waiter who is taking a bit too long to get to their tables.

Hubworks partnered with Synapse to develop the Hubworks iPad Case that allows the mounting to the tables and solved two problems with one solution. The iPads are now more durable and customers who want to can pay remotely whenever they feel like paying and leaving.

"Synapse designed and developed a custom enclosure for the iPad, magnetic card reader and back-up battery," saysCraig Hummel, Business Development Manager for Synapse. "By fully integrating with restaurant point-of-sale (POS) systems, HubWorks offers customers secure payment peace-of-mind and an interface that's intuitive and easy-to-use."

Hubworks CEO Rob Berger said his company was looking for a way to have a table top interface that was new and fun and also very engaging. Berger added that, "by handing over the design of the case to Synapse, HubWorks was able to focus on our core competence, which was ensuring that we developed a breakthrough solution for efficient table service that restaurant patrons enjoyed using.”

This particular program is a first of its kind as far as making a digital payment device that is supposed to operate specifically on an Apple device and also integrates with restaurant point-of-sale (POS) systems. Hubworks feels as though their approach offsets the number of restaurants that still don’t allow payment through near field communications.

By: Oliver VanDervoort

Synapse has been named a finalist for a 2012 Tech Impact Award by Seattle Business Magazine. Currently celebrating 10 years of innovative people and projects, Synapse was recognized earlier this year by the magazine as 3rd Best Company to work for in Washington State.

“Synapse is the rare company to promote an organic office culture as a means to engineering breakthroughs,” said CEO and co-founder Scott Bright. “The market is demanding leading-edge ideas and approaches for new products and experiences. At Synapse, we believe the only way to achieve those results is encouraging everyone to be themselves. As we continue to expand and diversify, allowing our culture to evolve through grass-roots initiatives will keep Synapse at the forefront of technology innovation.”

Tech Impact Awards winners will be featured in a special edition of Seattle Business Magazine and celebrated at an awards event on September 25 at the Washington State Convention Center.

Inhalers count puffs. Peak-flow meters are read digitally. Nebulizers have shrunk to half their old size.

In the past few years, asthma patients have seen technology make the disease more manageable. Companies now are unveiling devices that track inhaler usage with GPS, measure wheezing, compile data on smartphone-mobile apps and share interactive online content.

With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pricing asthma at $56 billion a year in hospitalizations, doctor visits and loss of productivity, technology plans to target the nation’s 25 million asthmatics. Cutting-edge devices and mobile apps may attract adults, while animation and content may help children and their families better identify triggers, symptoms and behaviors.

“People who have a lot of symptoms of asthma sometimes are not aware of it. It’s really important to see if your symptoms are escalating and you have to use your inhaler more," said Dr. Teal Hallstrand, pulmonologist and professor at the University of Washington.

In 2006, Dr. David Van Sickle attached snap-on GPS sensors over the top of inhalers for a study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. GPS records the location and time an inhaler is used and Bluetooth sends data to a remote server.

So if a person strolls under a blossoming tree and uses an inhaler, GPS gives a location and time marker, signaling pollen may have triggered a respiratory reaction — and the person should avoid that route.

“Our goal is to build technology and tools to do a better job of managing asthma but with less effort," said Van Sickle, now CEO of Asthmapolis, a Madison, Wis.-based company that also released a mobile app for iPhones and Android smartphones.

Syncing the sensor data and sending text-message reminders to take medicine are some of the features. The company recently partnered with Synapse Product Development in Seattle to create more asthma-related products.

Last year, the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle tested the prescribed Asthmapolis sensor on three patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. Commonly confused with asthma, COPD leads to difficulty breathing and branches into chronic bronchitis or emphysema. Because the average age of the patients was 65, doctors thought the easy-to-use sensor forwarding them data on inhaler use would help both parties.

“I think what’s exciting for me is that there are other ways to monitor symptoms at home," said Dr. Vincent Fan, physician and study investigator. “Patients used to write in journals at home, and that’s a lot for patients to do. This tells us what’s happening with the medication in real time."

While Asthmapolis uses GPS, iSonea uses sensory technology to measure breathing vibrations with sound. The WheezoMeter, also available with a prescription, records the breathing rhythm once pressed against the throat and analyzes it to give a percentage for wheezing. When wheezing, it’s easy to miss the point where it escalates into an asthma attack.

In June, iSonea went the mobile app route with AsthmaSense, which alerts the user when the risk of an asthma attack increases and lets them log medicine use.

“If the market isn’t ready for you, then the technology will not adapt to the market," CEO Mike Thomas said. “This smartphone tsunami is enabling our algorithms, our technologies, our devices to reach millions of people."

Technology is helping people with asthma better manage their symptoms, even avoid certain triggers. Companies are unveiling devices that track inhaler usage with GPS, measure wheezing and compile data on smartphone mobile apps.

As someone who has had the terrifying experience of fighting for breath in the middle of an asthma attack, I’m always looking for new medicines and technologies to prevent the next one.

Asthmapolis, a Wisconsin-based company dedicated to advancements in asthma treatment, announced that it has partnered with Synapse to develop technologies for asthma treatment, including a sensor that attaches to existing rescue inhalers to collect data, such as when and where patients experience asthma conditions, according to a company press release.

The Asthmapolis sensor combines medication sensors, mobile applications, and analytics. It received U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance.

Asthmapolis will soon begin marketing the technology to healthcare providers for their patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

"Asthmapolis was a unique and challenging product for Synapse," said Dylan Garrett, director of business development at Synapse's San Francisco office. "For people with asthma, an inhaler is a device they rely on regularly and, in many ways, have a personal relationship with.”

According to the press release, the Asthmapolis sensor is being used by 500 residents of Louisville, KY to determine trends at the public health level and allows physicians to remotely monitor their patients' level of asthma control.
The really innovative part of the sensor is that, by attaching to existing inhalers, it communicates with the patient's mobile phone or base station to transmit usage data, including time and location, “providing valuable information on possible environmental asthma triggers, such as air quality and pollen outbreaks,” according to the press release.

Asthmapolis tapped Synapse for its strengths in multi-disciplinary engineering. "Our mission is to make it easier for patients and physicians to do a better job managing their asthma every day," said David Van Sickle, co-founder and CEO of Asthmapolis. "In order to do that, the sensor had to be reliable and it had to meet the needs of people with chronic respiratory disease. The team at Synapse recommended several design changes that have improved the performance of the sensor and helped ensure it can keep up with the day-to-day life of an inhaler. So far, the response from the participants in Louisville has been positive."

By Deborah Hirsch

Synapse competed in the 42nd Annual Seafair Milk Carton Derby Saturday July 14, 2012 and was captured by the Seattle Times photographer paddling back to shore in the "Pool Party Boat."

Interest in body-worn wireless devices has grown in recent years because of actual and potential applications in healthcare, sports, law enforcement, entertainment and other areas. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense is working on a wireless device to be worn by soldiers that will allow medics to measure vital signs and collect other medical information from the troops. Body-worn wireless devices have been developed to measure and record an athlete’s performance, such as running speed and the number of strides.

Regardless of the application, using a wireless device in close proximity to the human body creates a number of major design challenges. The radiated power of the device must be kept below levels that can create a health hazard. The device’s power consumption, size, aspect ratio and weight must be minimized to make it suitable for wearing. Yet the device must be designed to deliver a signal of sufficient power to the right location, with good reception by the target device — despite the fact that the human body may absorb a significant portion of the signal.

MODELING THE SYSTEM

Synapse Product Development solves such difficult engineering challenges from concept through manufacturing for leading consumer electronics and life-sciences companies. One of the company’s specialties is developing body-worn wireless devices for a wide range of applications...

Researchers funded by the U.S. Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) have won 12 of the 100 awards given out this year by R&D Magazine for the most outstanding technology developments with promising commercial potential. The Energy Department announced that it received a total of 36 awards across all of its research and development programs, including EERE. The coveted awards – now in their 50th year – are presented annually in recognition of exceptional new products, processes, materials or software that were developed throughout the world and introduced into the market the previous year.

Synapse has been named a finalist for Washington's Best Workplaces 2012 by Puget Sound Business Journal. In total, 85 companies have been nominated. Currently celebrating 10 years of culture and innovation, 2012 marks the second year in a row Synapse has made the list. Winners will be featured in a special edition of PSBJ and celebrated at an awards event on August 10 at Safeco Field.

“Synapse has always been about "people first, profit second",” said CEO and co-founder Scott Bright. “We are understandably very proud to be recognized as a 'best workplace' not only by our employees and partners but also by organizations such as Puget Sound Business Journal. We believe in the competitive power of an entrepreneurial culture and we strive to foster an environment where grass-roots initiatives can take hold and prosper–even as our organization continues to grow and become more diverse.”

If you had lunch recently at Boom Noodle at Seattle’s University Village, the server handed you your check in a folder, like at any restaurant. But this folder was different. This was Rail. Rail is a wireless device that integrates with point-of-sale systems to let diners swipe credit cards and pay their bills at the table, eliminating the need for servers to deal with payment processing at all.