What’s next for tech in Arlington?
Michael Stiefvater, Director of Business Investment at Arlington Economic Development, sat down with ARLnow’s James Jarvis to discuss Arlington’s emerging tech industry over the last decade and the future outlook for the local tech scene.
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Next month, Arlington Public Schools is set to roll out a new, electronic campus management platform at a number of middle and high schools.
The goal is to improve building security and provide better oversight of students as they come and go from classrooms.
Kenmore, Dorothy Hamm, Gunston and Thomas Jefferson middle schools, as well as Wakefield, Washington-Liberty and Yorktown high schools, will adopt the app and web-based platform Minga, says APS spokesman Frank Bellavia.
The platform provides hall passes and monitors students coming in and going out of buildings to ensure that only students are in the school, Bellavia said. Schools can limit the number of students in the halls at one time and limit the number of passes per student, per day.
This comes as APS has separately upped its budget for safety and security measures, including school safety coordinators, security cameras and other technological upgrades pertaining to safety. That comes amid reports of student drug use, for which some teachers say skipping class is partly to blame, and nearly a dozen juvenile overdoses in Arlington this year.
Students can download Minga to their smartphone or use it on their laptop or tablet. The platform issues digital IDs with scannable barcodes and digital passes, which would replace physical ID cards and paper passes.
Wakefield High School Principal Peter Balas imported Minga this year from his days leading Alexandria City High School, which has had issues around violence inside and outside of the school.
“I see it as a tool to help me get better safety and security and to help things run more safely and smoothly,” he said. “My experience is that it has been… well-accepted by staff.”
Kenmore piloted an e-pass system last year and, when Balas arrived in Arlington, principals were discussing whether to adopt such a system. That is when he suggested Minga.
Minga notifies teachers of students who are out of class and can ensure certain students are not in the hallways at the same time — if they tend to break school rules when together. It tracks trends over time, such as overall time spent out of class and passes issued or students who spent the most time not in class and where they went.
Balas would like to see students scan their IDs to enter school buildings, too, so staff know who is in the building before they take attendance. He said it also can help staff track down and follow-up with students who arrive at school but ditch class or leave mid-day.
“[But] for me, one of the most important things, from safety standpoint, is that it basically would prevent anyone who doesn’t go to school from trying to get in,” Balas said.
Earlier this year, Wakefield was placed in lockdown after reports of a trespasser, possibly armed with a gun, and a threat against a student.
“Almost every period, we have comings and goings in the school,” he continued. “It will also help us keep track of all that movement and make sure access is secure and legitimate.”
When asked how this might interfere with building-level “Away for the Day” policies — in which phones are required to be off and stored during school hours — Bellavia said students can request passes from their tablets or laptops.
Balas says he does not think this will interfere with Wakefield’s mobile phone policy.
Administrators and security staff are in the first wave of training on the new system and teachers will soon follow.
“I was purposeful not wanting to inundate [teachers] when we aren’t ready to launch yet,” Balas said. “I’m hoping in the next month or so to have it fully up and running but it is something where I have to take the temperature of everyone and make sure it doesn’t overwhelm people.”
Minga will cost around $50,000 to roll out, Bellavia said.
Ambulances were temporarily re-routed to other hospitals after VHC Health suffered some technology issues this morning.
The re-routing for non-critical cases was broadcast to Arlington County Fire Department medics around 10:30 a.m. As of 12:45 p.m., another broadcast suggested that the hospital was back on line for ambulances.
A spokesperson confirmed to ARLnow that technology issues prompted a re-route notice out of “an abundance of caution.”
“VHC Health is experiencing intermittent downtime of some non-critical systems,” the VHC spokesperson wrote. “The redirection is in an abundance of caution. Care for all patients on campus is not impacted.”
VHC did not directly answer a question about what caused the systems issue. American hospitals have been dealing with a wave of cyberattacks and ransomware hacks, sometimes knocking systems out for weeks at a time, various news outlets have reported.
Formerly known as Virginia Hospital Center, VHC Health opened an expansion of its Arlington campus earlier this year and has been expanding to other Northern Virginia locations.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
Fear nearly prevented Scott Love from starting his data analytics firm, Arlington-based Lovelytics.
“I always wanted to start a company… There was always an excuse not to do it, like, ‘Oh, I don’t have enough money. I don’t know how to do that,” he shared during a panel hosted by Rosslyn-based tech accelerator Unstuck Labs in August.
While Love admitted these were real challenges, he said navigating them became easier after tapping into Arlington’s business community.
“From the time I was one person… Arlington made me feel like I was going to be a 6,000-person company,” he said.
Anything Love needed, whether it was advice or introductions to investors, he said people made themselves available to help.
Natalia Micheletti, who co-founded Pryze, an app that encourages employees to minimize phone use at work, agrees.
“It just felt like we had a million opportunities,” Micheletti, the CEO of the Arlington-based startup, said during the panel.
Despite starting companies in different fields, both founders faced similar obstacles, including fundraising and managing employees effectively. They said talking through their struggles with startup founders who had been there before helped them persevere.
For instance, Love and Micheletti noted securing investors was a “draining” process. Micheletti said she heard “No” from 100 people before finally getting that “Yes.”
“And being able to take feedback from all these people who are in the industry, or you think no more than you, without losing your essence, without losing, like what’s making you special and what made you like be crazy in the first place to start this one thing… is hard,” she said.
But Micheletti said she and co-founder Tim Hylton were able to push through that wall with support from their peers in the start world and Unstuck Labs, which gives founders like Micheletti mentorship, office space and investment.
“I think what’s keeping us here, other than Unstuck Labs… I think it is the roots that we’re planning in the community as well,” she said.
Love said pitching to investors was hard work but another challenged he faced, as his company grew, was refining his leadership skills.
“I think one of the weirdest things for me when I started, it was like, you change your title, and all of a sudden people care a little bit more about what you say and trust you… It’s a completely uncomfortable position,” he said.
Love, who oversees a team of 82, said talking with other Arlington founders made him realize the difference between delegating and leading.
“And I thought I was delegating. But in reality, I was just having them do all the work and come back to me and ask for approval. And that gets me nowhere,” Love said.
Instead, Love said he needed to learn to step back and trust his employees to handle tasks independently.
The mentorship the two founders received from Arlington’s business community appears to be paying off.
Pryze hired its third employee and plans to expand its services after raising nearly $1 million in venture capital, Micheletti previously told ARLnow.
Meanwhile, venture capital firms Databricks Venture and Interlock Equity made “strategic investments” in Lovelytics this June. These investments, for undisclosed amounts, will help the company deepen its expertise healthcare, media, financial services, retail, and manufacturing, Love said in a blog post.
“This investment will accelerate the growth of Lovelytics’ team and expand its technical offerings related to enterprise data environment creation, AI and [language learning models], business intelligence, data science, and cloud infrastructure,” a press release said.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
Arlington-based Pryze is expanding after raising nearly $1 million in venture capital.
The startup is focused on boosting productivity and retention for “deskless” workers through material incentives. Co-founders Natalia Micheletti and Tim Hylton said the funding success was only possible with the mentorship and guidance they received from a local tech accelerator, Unstuck Labs.
One night in 2017, while working as a store manager for the retail chain Great American Cookies, Micheletti watched through the security camera as smoke began to billow from one of the seven cookie store’s ovens.
Micheletti quickly called the store to alert a distracted employee, who was engrossed in his phone. By the time he answered, it was already too late: two dozen cookies had burned to a crisp.
Realizing the financial consequences of such mishaps, store owner Tim Hylton quickly did the math with Micheletti. He found that if each of his seven stores lost a single tray of 24 cookies per week — each cookie costing $1.79 — the annual hit to the company could exceed $180,000.
With this realization — and the smell of burnt cookies still lingering — Micheletti started working to find a solution.
Micheletti presented Hylton with a simple napkin sketch outlining a concept for an app designed to keep tabs on employee phone usage during work hours. The app aims to incentivize hourly workers to focus on their tasks by offering points that could be redeemed for prizes ranging from gift cards to airline tickets and gaming consoles.
“And that’s where she started to create the idea of Pryze,” Hylton said. “It kind of moved from just this drawing that she created on a napkin to, ‘Well, let’s see if we could take some of the things that you’ve talked about and some of the things that you started to put down and see if they actually really work.’”
Excited about the idea, Hylton and Micheletti began surveying local business owners around Northern Virginia. Micheletti says most reported that phone usage negatively impacted their businesses and expressed a willingness to invest in a solution if one were available.
In 2018, Hylton sold his cookie business so that he and Micheletti could turn their full attention toward making Micheletti’s napkin doodle a reality. After sinking about $90,000 of their own money into website development and consulting that first year, however, Micheletti and Hylton started to get discouraged.
“Coming from the restaurant world was so different coming into the tech world. I was just like, ‘How do people do this? If you’re not a millionaire… how do you even launch? How do you learn everything you need to learn quickly,” Micheletti said.
After doing some research, Micheletti came across a tech accelerator program based in Arlington called Unstuck Labs.
Micheletti said Unstuck had “a good track record” so they decided to give it a shot.
“So, the first meeting we went to… we had this napkin with this idea scribbled on it, and we’re like, ‘This is it. We sell cookies. How can we be millionaires,” Micheletti said, recalling a conversation with Untuck’s co-founder and CEO, Wa’il Ashshowwaf.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
An Arlington-based company that helps startup founders turn their ideas into viable ventures has a new permanent home in Rosslyn.
Founded in 2017, Unstuck Labs is a small venture capital and consultancy firm that provides founders of small tech startups with mentorship, office space and, sometimes, investment.
Until recently, Unstuck operated from various co-working spaces across Arlington. With the help of Arlington Economic Development, the Rosslyn Business Improvement District and the county’s Innovation Fund grant, Unstuck moved to an office in Rosslyn, where Co-founder and CEO Wa’il Ashshowwaf says he hopes to add more programming.
Ashshowwaf says Unstuck is not a typical accelerator program.
Whereas most accelerator programs provide founders with a “curriculum” on how to set up their company, Ashshowwaf says Unstuck treats the program more like an apprenticeship.
“Think about sitting in a classroom versus doing an apprenticeship. Like someone can tell you, ‘This is how you fix a car,’ but our apprenticeship is going to be like, ‘Okay, let’s open the hood and fix it,’” he told ARLnow.
The program lasts 12 weeks, during which Ashshowwaf says the company assists founders in everything from designing a logo to pitching to potential investors — including Unstuck.
Although Unstuck does not guarantee it will invest in participating startups, Ashshowwaf noted that “86% of the founders got some kind of seed funding… within three months of the program.”
“The goal is you come in on day one, and no one really cares about you. You have your idea. By week 12, people care about you. You have an idea. You have a customer. You have revenue, and you’re invested in,” he said.
Even if the product “doesn’t work,” Ashshowwaf says it is not the end of the world. For Unstuck, a failed product launch is less a setback and more a learning opportunity that can lead to a more successful venture down the line.
“If the idea doesn’t work, that’s not a failure because in 12 weeks, you would learn, ‘Okay, that didn’t work.’ You didn’t spend two years of your life doing that. And then you can move on to the next thing,” Ashshowwaf said.
In addition to its accelerator program, Unstuck offers free workshops, such as “Startup Patent Survival Skills, and weekly meetups where entrepreneurs can discuss their current projects. Ashshowwaf says he hopes to host 50-100 free workshops and weekly meetups a year now that Unstuck has its own office.
Ashshowwaf says the free workshops cultivate an “ecosystem” where entrepreneurs can collaborate and help each other get “unstuck,” instead of navigating the often daunting process alone, he said.
“Someone has an idea. Says, ‘Okay, I want to build a startup. I want to build a business.’ So they’ll ask friends and their family, then they usually jump to a company and say, ‘Hey, can you build the app? How much? Oh, $100,000? How do I find the money?’ And it’s a very disjointed process,” he said.
(Updated at 2:30 p.m.) Channeling the energy of an iPhone launch, Amazon unveiled its new line of AI-powered gadgets in Arlington on Wednesday.
While a September product launch is typical for the tech giant, this event was the first major unveiling Amazon has hosted at its new HQ2 in Pentagon City — and the top brass went all out for the occasion.
Inside the 2.1-million-square-foot complex, which wrapped up its first phase of construction in June, Amazon employees ushered attendees to their seats in the airy auditorium. Caterers served hors d’oeuvres, kombucha and cold-pressed juice. Pop music from the likes of Dua Lipa and Ellie Goulding played in the background.
Then, an ethereal voice put an end to the bustling activity, leading the crowd in a countdown and asking everyone to “silence their cellphones.”
Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices and Services David Limp took the stage first, making arguably the most consequential announcement of the day. He explained how generative AI — the buzzy tech that people use to create anything from raps to digital illustrations — will shape the future of Amazon’s products.
Limp demonstrated Alexa’s new enhanced AI-powered capabilities talking to the the company’s forthcoming $150 Echo Show 8, highlighting the smart home device’s capacity to comprehend complex requests and engage in more human-like interactions.
“We’ve studied what it takes to make a great conversation over the past nine years. It’s not just words, it’s body language. It’s understanding who you’re addressing. It’s eye contact, it’s gestures,” Limp said.
To create “much more conversational experiences” with Alexa, Limp said Amazon combined the sensors in an Echo — including its camera and ability to detect someone’s presence — with its newest Large Language Models. These “talk to” humans by processing large amounts of text on the Internet and predicting the right response.
After Limp, a cadre of Amazon executives introduced new products such as the $50 Echo Pop Kids smart speaker, the $180 Echo Hub Home, a control panel for managing smart devices, and a more aesthetic upgrade to its smart glasses, the $270 Echo Frames.
Each announcement sparked a flurry of keyboard activity from tech journalists in attendance — with resulting headlines in Engadget, The Verge and elsewhere — as well as applause from employees and stakeholders.
Before inviting the audience to try out demo devices, Limp said he believes this new technology can “redefine” the way people “interact” with their homes.
“Customers have now connected over 400 million devices to their Alexa Smart Home and they’re using Alexa to control those devices hundreds of millions of times each week,” he said.
Most devices will start shipping in October. Customers can pre-order through Amazon’s website.
The full list of products announced is below.
Virginia’s Attorney General has authored an amicus brief supporting the ban of TikTok on a statewide level.
The short-form video app, which is especially popular with younger users, is set to be banned next year in Montana. In response to a federal lawsuit challenging the ban, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares — joined by 17 other GOP state attorneys general — says the ban should be legal as it amounts to a “garden variety consumer protection statute.”
More from a press release:
Attorney General Jason Miyares filed an amicus brief, joined by 17 other state attorneys general, in support of the State of Montana’s law banning the popular app ‘TikTok.’ Montana’s action protects its citizens’ privacy from TikTok’s relationship with China and the Chinese Communist Party, and its citizens’ wellbeing from the proven physical and mental health detriments the app has on young children.
“Montana’s elected officials voted to ban TikTok, and Montanans voted to elect their representatives. This legislation is a result of the will of the Montana voters,” said Attorney General Jason Miyares. “We know TikTok poses a threat to our privacy and security because of its connection to the Chinese Communist Party, and study after study shows the app harms our children’s mental health – especially young girls. Montana has the right to protect its citizens.”
In March, Attorney General Miyares joined 45 states and the District of Columbia in asking a state court to order social media company TikTok, Inc. to fully comply with an ongoing investigation into whether the company violated consumer protection laws. As part of the multistate investigation, the state attorneys general sought to review internal TikTok communications to determine whether the company engaged in deceptive, unfair, and unconscionable conduct that harmed the mental health of TikTok users, particularly children and teens.
Earlier this year Virginia banned TikTok and some other apps of Chinese origin from state-owned devices and networks, including on college campuses.
While a total ban does not appear likely in Virginia, would you support a ban if one was proposed?
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
As more modern conveniences and critical infrastructure connect to the internet, increasingly commonplace objects — like electric vehicles — can be hit with cyberattacks.
In this ever-changing landscape, Ballston-based cybersecurity company Fend has put forward a new piece of technology to protect large systems and small devices alike from offenses launched by alleged thieves, cybercriminals and nation state actors.
It recently patented a microchip that allows Fend to protect a wider variety of goods. Any manufacturer can embed the chip into small-scale products, such as medical devices and delivery drones, to keep them secure.
“We’re talking about cars, power plants, and other machines that keep the economy going,” CEO and founder Colin Dunn said in a press release. “Our users will be able to feed data into next-generation AI tools while permanently keeping attackers out.”
Like its first product — a “data diode” that looks like an internet modem — the new chip dictates how devices “talk” to the internet, such that hackers cannot find a way to wrest control.
“Because we maintain that physically applied, one-way data flow, that means nobody from the outside can ever hack in, and that’s a bold claim but it’s the sort of thing that our infrastructure needs,” Dunn told ARLnow.
Amid reports of continued attacks on national infrastructure, he said, governments also have to protect their older systems, such as energy plants, which have been retrofitted for internet connectivity.
“These are folks that have big, important equipment that makes modern life possible, whether it’s making the goods in our homes or bringing clean water to our neighborhoods,” Dunn said. “And they also have a big target on their back as well from those who would like to disrupt their operations.”
This is Fend’s fifth year in Arlington. The company is in the midst of fundraising, with the goal of expanding further.
“We’re excited to have the opportunity here to — really from almost the very beginning — do this in Arlington, and make a contribution to the security of our country and around the world right here from home,” Dunn said.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
A Green Valley-based nonprofit is encouraging kids to dream about working in tech the same way they dream of being a doctor or lawyer one day.
To help launch them into those career paths, MySecureKid — which also educates families about internet safety — connects children and teens with programming, apprenticeships and mentors.
Since founding the organization in 2018, Quiana Gainey and JaLisa Johnson have focused on supporting children from underrepresented backgrounds. While cybersecurity and technology are projected to grow more than 13%, they say a “knowledge gap” is holding back Black and Hispanic people, as well as people with disabilities, from riding that job growth wave.
“We were the first IT apprenticeship in D.C., and we were servicing a population that was what they consider disenfranchised. We just said that they’re undiscovered,” Gainey said.
Gainey and Johnson have both founded for-profit companies in cybersecurity and healthcare tech, respectively. Using that experience, plus their backgrounds in government contracting and military service, the duo say they created curricula for students to bridge that knowledge gap.
“We want them to see that there’s a shortage in cybersecurity [and that] our infrastructure, our country needs this,” Gainey said. “So let’s start with building that into the curriculum, building partnerships with community, with nonprofits like ourselves, so that we can help the next generation realize their dreams and also help them not go into all traditional [careers].”
MySecureKid offers apprenticeship programs for teens as well as summer cyber camps and after-school programs for younger children. They pair high school students with mentors and provide scholarships to those pursuing education in IT, emerging technologies, healthcare, cybersecurity and entrepreneurship.
It also has worked with Arlington Public Schools for three years and has plans to partner with their apprenticeship program in the fall.
With these programs, Johnson says she hopes that students gain hands-on skills over time — similar to a trade school.
“We make things fun but challenging,” Johnson said.
She and Gainey also make sure parents have opportunities to learn about tech issues, such as internet safety.
“I always tell parents, when you give your childhood phone, it’s like leaving them in the middle of the intersection, and telling them to find themselves their way home,” Gainey said. “Now, you wouldn’t do that, right. So when you give them that cell phone, it’s time to have that conversation.”
Their space in Green Valley, which they call the “360XP Zone,” is self-sufficient, powered with renewable energy and connected to its own water supply. It features learning, retail and event spaces and is equipped with a full-service kitchen and bar. Small businesses can even rent these spaces and benefit MySecureKid in the process.
Calling on her healthcare background, Johnson designed the space to include clinics that she says meet Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards.
“We always say, ‘I don’t wait for someone else to do something. You can be the change you want to see,” Gainey said.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring Three Ballston Plaza.
The Courthouse-based hospitality commerce startup GoTab raised $18 million earlier this month.
Truist Ventures led the Series A funding round, per a press release. This milestone marks the startup’s first fundraising round after nabbing smaller seed investments a few years ago.
Founded by Tim McLaughlin in 2016, GoTab makes it possible for guests at restaurants, hotels, resorts and stadiums to order and pay from kiosks or phones — without needing to download an app — while streamlining order fulfillment.
“We have been incredibly intentional with the solutions we develop for our customers, and this latest capital injection will help us further enhance our existing solutions, while also helping us continue to scale the business across sectors and geographies,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
That includes going outside the U.S. and breaking into other industries. Last year, the startup announced its plans to expand into Canada and equip hotels with its solutions.
Already, GoTab says, hotels and resorts that use its platform see an average increase in sales of 28% and a 14% decrease in costs.
It attributes greater profits and deeper savings to its platform, which makes it easier to split checks, place multiple orders and communicate with the back of house. Participating vendors can combine GoTab with other services, such as the reservation platform OpenTable.
Meanwhile, the company is focused on making its platform easy to use for people who are colorblind or have other impairments, per a recent interview McLaughlin gave to Forbes.
This commitment to improving the experiences of customers and staff is one reason Truist Ventures said it led the startup’s fundraising round.
“Truist Ventures seeks out companies that drive innovation, deliver impactful solutions, and support their communities; this investment in GoTab is a testament to these values,” Truist said in a statement.
