This Software Can Whip You Up an Antibody

Monica Berrondo pulls up a digital schematic of an antibody. It resembles bits of different-colored yarn stuck together by someone with no sense of design. Each color and bend represents information about the amino acids that comprise the antibody, explains Berrondo, whose company, Macromoltek, made this model possible. If the antibody shown in this image works, it may one day be deployed in the body of a sick person, where it will hunt down and cling to a specific pathogen. There, this colored squiggle may stimulate the immune system to go after the pathogen, mark it as an enemy for other immune system cells to take out, or attack it outright. Antibodies, unlike many older pharmaceuticals, don’t have to carpet bomb healthy cells to attack specific pathogens. They’re efficient.

It used to take months to design an antibody like this, just to get it to the point where it could be created and tested. With Macromoltek it takes hours. More

Our Technology is Only as Empathetic as We Are

I’ve been to SXSW Interactive six times. Maybe it’s just me, but for many years I took away a sense that the technological revolution was upon us, ready to sweep up everyone in its path. Resist at your peril! To survive, humans would have to embrace a whole new paradigm of existence or be left behind. This year, however, was very different. The emphasis in 2018 was on how tech could better serve humanity, rather than drive us in a new direction. There were more than 40 sessions in which experts talked about the relationship between empathy and technology, and that’s just counting the ones with the word “empathy” in the title. Many other sessions addressed this underlying theme: By creating tech to achieve commercial ends, without understanding how it would impact people, we’ve done great damage. It’s time to repair it.

In his keynote, for example, digital anthropologist Brian Solis quoted Tristan Harris, founder of the Center for Humane Technology, saying the designers of social media manipulated neuroscience to make us dependent on the tools they created: “They had the power of gods without the wisdom, prudence, and compassion of gods. They designed without actually understanding what the net effect of this would be.” More

Beyonic Makes a Global Payment System

Non-profit organizations spend more than $30 billion every year in overhead costs, trying to get cash to people around the world, according to Luke Kyohere, president and CEO of Beyonic. That $30 billion goes to armed guards and armored trucks, currency exchanges and even helicopter drops to rural farmers and all that money could be used to lift 42 million more people out of poverty. The non-profits use cash because it’s the only currency that translates across countries and payer systems.
Ironically, in the countries where this cash goes, more than 80 percent of the rural population uses smart phones to buy goods and services. But the mobile and payment networks are so disjointed, it would very difficult for any organization to use them. That’s where Beyonic comes in. Beyonic is a cloud-based platform that lets payers use mobile networks for payments. Right now, Beyonic is working in Uganda, Kyohere’s native country, and Kenya. But the founders have in mind expanding globally as well as becoming the payer system of choice for governments and other enterprises currently relying on cash. More

The Vast Unexplored Possibility of Data Visualization

When scientists began working with artist Francesca Samsel in order to visualize things like how deep ocean currents ran, or how diseases travel, or how fast flooding from rising oceans would affect specific shores, many were accustomed to working with the Rainbow Color Map. This simple visualization tool, of colors so bright they look like a poster for psychedelics, might show a field of bright red next to a field of bright green. The dramatic color change implies that something dramatic happened in the data. But often, that’s not the case; it’s just that the color palette is so limited. But if the artist tries to indicate that values are similar by using similar hues, key data can get lost in the pool of saturated color. The idea of data visualization is to understand what the data is saying. So Samsel designed custom maps that use color theory to tell a story of subtle and dramatic changes, and draw the eye to the important information. More

The Lure and The Danger of Seeking International Investment

SalesVu’s Pascal Nicolas told the kind of story every entrepreneur fears, of draining his company’s investment money on trips to Dubai, and a useless valuation report, in expectation of a huge infusion from a United Arab Emirates investor. On a brighter note, Jagath Narayan of Orodoro told of the VC from Brussels who found his company on AngelList and invested nearly $1 million after spending two days in Austin. Austin Technology Incubator’s Startup Week session “Attracting International Investment” gave a snapshot of the possibilities for startups who seek investment beyond U.S. borders.

How CEOs Use Sci-Fi to Imagine Everybody’s Future

In two very different sessions one afternoon at SXSW, speakers led off with a story they got from writer Neil Gaiman. Gaiman had told of being at a science fiction convention in China, where the government once viewed the genre as anathema to its campaign against ‘spiritual pollution.’ When Gaiman asked why that had changed, he was told that some Chinese government and business leaders, pondering the fact that their country was better at copying technology than innovating, sent a delegation to Silicon Valley. There, they interviewed tech leaders to discover where their innovation came from. They learned that the Silicon Valley disrupters were all lifelong fans of science fiction. More

ePatient Finder a Matchmaker for Patients, Clinical Trials

According to a study by Tufts University in 2014, 60-to-80 percent of the cost of any new drug or treatment goes to clinical trials, and most of that is money is channeled into luring in, then weeding out patients to test the drug. They have to have the exact combination of age, health status, family history and dozens of other factors to make the clinical trials valid. That’s what ePatientFinder, a startup in Austin, was created to deal with.The ePatientFinder platform data mines physicians’ and hospitals’ medical records looking for keywords that would mark a patient as a good candidate for a phase III trial—the kind where people actually benefit from the treatment, rather than just being used to measure things like toxicity. If candidates are found, their primary physicians, who are signed up with ePatientFinder, contact the patients to tell them of the opportunity and further screen them to determine if they are, in fact, a good fit. More

Help! AI is Invading My Privacy

It’s easy to compartmentalize the idea of digital privacy. “Whatever,” we may think. “No one is interested in my life.” Then we watch something like The Social Dilemma that explains how companies — and Russian hackers  — use AI to plumb the depths of the internet, registering our every move as fodder for their neuroscience-based behavior modification triggers. Maybe they’re just trying to get us to re-engage with Twitter, or buy that new mattress you’ve had your eye on. Maybe they’re Russian hackers using AI-collected information to push your outrage buttons. Either way, even though they don’t know you, they’re crawling around in your data finding ways to direct your behavior…and that’s just creepy.

That’s the thing about AI when used for data collection: by itself it’s neither good nor bad; the question is how it’s used.

How to Tap into Austin’s Investment Landscape

According to the PWC Money Tree, Texas was the sixth highest investment region in the country in 2013. With $1.3 billion invested it was a small player compared to Silicon Valley’s $12 billion in investments. A fact that continues to gall Austin’s startup community. The good news for startups is that, in a lot of ways, Austin is still a small town which means it’s easier to meet investors here than in it is in many markets. Angels and venture capitalists attend pitch competitions, Startup Week events, SXSW, and even crazy things like Startup Olympics. But even in Austin, walking up to an investor and launching into your pitch is considered a major faux pas.