Milwaukee innovators, investors, academics and business leaders packed Turner Hall Tuesday night for gener8tor's 2019 Accelerator Studio Premier night, which featured a fireside chat with Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft.
The event highlighted the completion of the Wisconsin accelerator and venture fund's inaugural Accelerator Studio, a program designed to build startups from scratch using only Wisconsin-based entrepreneurs.
Smith, a Wisconsin native who grew up in Appleton, talked about his new book, "Tools and Weapons: The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age." The book, he said, depicts the impact the digital age is having, and will have, on communities and businesses.
During the Q&A chat with gener8tor co-founder Joe Kirgues, Smith expressed his pleasure with Milwaukee hosting the 2020 Democratic National Convention, but also talked about how Microsoft is developing technology to protect political candidates from having their emails hacked and creating technology to protect U.S. voting systems from hackers.
Other topics discussed by Smith included Green Bay's TitletownTech, the venture and tech startup partnership with the Packers through its TechSpark Wisconsin program, and the importance of providing broadband internet access to rural regions in the U.S. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has a four-year agreement with Packerland Broadband, a division of CCI Systems Inc., to provide broadband in northern Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan.
Smith, who was making his fourth visit to Wisconsin since 2017, also said Microsoft's high school computer science program, Technology Education And Literacy in Schools, or TEALS, will be active in more than 50 high schools in Wisconsin this year; mentioned Johnson Controls, Rockwell Automation, American Family Insurance and Northwestern Mutual for their tech-focused strategies; and singled out the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Milwaukee and UW-Green Bay as higher education institutions that are shaping Wisconsin.
Other presentations included All-in Milwaukee on its initiative to support first generation and minority college students in Milwaukee; the American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact, and gener8tor's Milwaukee 2020 Summit, an event in February hosted by Northwestern Mutual where social enterprises will pitch solutions for the community issues.
The four startups created in gener8tor’s Accelerator Studio were:
- Altin Labs: Developing a machine monitoring solution that enables manufacturers to monitor the performance of manufacturing equipment in real time for predictive maintenance. Its first product, Altin Links, allows manufacturers to capture electrical, mechanical, optical and other data from their machines and send the data to the cloud.
- Cloudux: Created a software platform that simplifies the creation, management and deployment of code in a multi-cloud environment, allowing software engineers without cloud development knowledge to quickly build and deploy serverless and containerized code on any cloud platform.
- Alive & Well: A direct-to-consumer startup that sells sustainable hair care products specifically for people with wavy and curly hair. Its kit includes reusable bottles for their hair products, and every month users receive refills in the mail.
- Last Lock: Allows homes and businesses to transform any mechanical lock system into a highly secure smart lock. Electronic sensors are placed in the startup’s smart cylinder, which scan and store the physical key’s profile, allowing owners to digitally manage, track and grant access.
