WBT Conference Draws Eclectic Innovation Mix, San Diego Included

Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures moderates WBT Innovation Marketplace panel

Can innovation come in more than one flavor?

We have become so accustomed to the Silicon Valley way of doing things that it’s easy to forget that ingenuity engenders a million flowers to bloom. The WBT Innovation Marketplace, an annual tech conference that moved to from Texas to San Diego last year, provides a stage for entrepreneurs from the far corners of the world to present technology innovation from both beaten, and not-so-beaten paths.

“This is what I call hard tech; it’s very different from your usual software and Web technology conference,” said Ping Wang, a co-founder of San Diego’s Ansir Innovation Center (a technology incubator), during a break in the proceedings Tuesday.

“This conference appeals to a different kind of investor,” Wang added. “A lot of the shoppers are large corporations looking for deals.”

The two-day conference, which ended yesterday at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, included a Federal Lab Consortium Regional Meeting with representatives from the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies. The conference also was scheduled to follow Monday’s Global Connect Summit, which draws organizations from around the world that are working to nurture their own regional technology clusters.

As a result, the WBT Innovation Marketplace features an eclectic mix of speakers and topics. The defense contractor Northrop Grumman is the biggest conference sponsor, and retired Vice Adm. James Zortman, who oversees Northrop’s aerospace systems operations in San Diego, outlined his view of the innovation ecosystem from 38,000 feet. By contrast, Bill Reichert of Santa Cruz, CA-based Garage Technology Ventures provided more of a “street view” of the hot markets and innovation sectors.

The main attractions of the WBT Innovation Marketplace, though, are short presentations by nearly 70 startup founders and research scientists. The 6-minute pitches were pre-screened by a WBT selection committee that included technology and life sciences investors from San Diego to New York, and they offer a great opportunity for tech investors who are searching for great deals in unusual places. But here again, the eclectic mix of technologies and startups can pose challenges.

Take The TalkList, for example. The TalkList is a software platform that

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.