Providence Technology Group

In one of the iconic scenes from the teen movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” sun-baked stoner Jeff Spicoli has a double cheese and sausage pizza delivered to his classroom, boldly interrupting his uncompromising instructor mid-lecture. Spicoli was considered a mischievous airhead for flouting early-1980s dining etiquette, but he may actually have been way ahead of his time. More than three decades later, a California campus is embracing a kind of food delivery — via robot. On Wednesday, students at University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., will be able to order snacks and beverages for the first time from a bright-colored roving robot on wheels known as the “Snackbot.” Keep reading this article on The Washington Post

Siemens Mobility has been awarded a €650 million contract in Canada to design and build the next generation of VIA Rail Canada’s trainsets. This includes 32 bi-directional trainsets, with a supplemental 15-year service agreement for VIA Rail, Canada’s government-owned intercity transportation operator. The new trainsets will service passengers on VIA’s busiest route, the Quebec City – Windsor Corridor, which connects Canada’s two largest cities, Toronto and Montreal, and spans more than 2,200 kilometers in a northeast-southwest direction. The line carried more than 4.5 million passengers in 2018, representing an increase of more than 30 percent over the past four years. The trainsets will ensure the highest level of safety while also significantly enhancing the passenger experience, with e...[Read More]

Ex-Tesla Motors official believes electric tractors, other innovations will virtually eliminate growers’ fuel costs. Disruptive change is likely coming to California agriculture in the next decade, as technological improvements will lead to electric tractors and alternative-energy storage that will virtually eliminate farms’ energy costs. So suggests David Deak, an expert in “disruptive innovation” who has served as senior development engineer at Tesla Motors, Inc., and chief technology officer at Lithium Americas Corp. “I imagine running an almond orchard with zero cost of energy,” Deak told a luncheon audience Dec. 5 at the Almond Conference in Sacramento, Calif. “What’s really limiting us? Not time, because we have plenty of that. And it’s not money, because there’s some of that, too. I...[Read More]

UC Davis Team Gunrock won the global 2018 Amazon Alexa Prize for creating the best conversational chatbot and advancing modern artificial intelligence. The announcement of this $500,000 prize was made yesterday at the annual Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Zhou Yu, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science, led the 10-student team to victory. She joined UC Davis in 2017 and was recognized in FORBES’ 2018 “30 Under 30” in Science list for her work developing algorithms that enable software to adapt to users. “When our team first came together, we were competing against teams that had already participated in this challenge,” Yu said. “For us, it was our first time competing. Now, we are the best in the world in social convers...[Read More]

As wildfires raged this month in California, insurance claims experts at Travelers sat in a command center 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) away in Connecticut, monitoring screens showing satellite images, photos from airplane flyovers and social media posts describing what was happening on the ground. Real-time data and technology that were unavailable to property-casualty companies even a few years ago have shaped the industry’s response to the Camp Fire, which has burned nearly 240 square miles (622 square kilometers) in northern California and the 151-square-mile (391-square-kilometer) Woolsey Fire in the Los Angeles area. By overlaying the data on maps marking its customers’ locations, the company can quickly identify those who are likely to have been affected, said Jim Wuch...[Read More]

What’s it like helping build and “future-proof” the most technologically-advanced sports and entertainment arena in the world? At the 2018 GeekWire Summit, attendees got a behind-the-scenes look at the working being done inside Golden 1 Center, home of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings. Eric King, vice president of technology for the Kings and Golden 1 Center, and Ian Wheat, director of esports and innovation, joined us on stage for a discussion about the 17,608-seat arena that features a 2,500 square foot Tier-4 datacenter with more than 1,000 WiFi Access Points, 900 miles of fiber and CAT6a copper cabling, and redundant 100 Gigabit internet connections. The Kings, owned by longtime tech executive Vivek Ranadive, were also the first NBA franchise to use Google Glass, drones, bitcoin, and augment...[Read More]

SACRAMENTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Envoy Technologies, a provider of shared on-demand, community-based electric vehicles (EVs), today announced the first wave of live sites and vehicle deployments under the Electrify America Green City initiative in Sacramento called Sac-to-Zero. The companies joined Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg at an event to unveil the first EVs, and outline the vision for future development. More than 20 Volkswagen e-Golf vehicles are now available across Sacramento at over 10 multi-family properties, each with an accompanying Level 2 charging station. The majority of these sites are in disadvantaged communities where drivers can use the “Envoy There” mobile application to use vehicles for a myriad of uses, including personal errands or exploring job o...[Read More]

Self-driving shuttles are en route to the Sacramento region. Sacramento is one of two test tracks for Olli shuttles, which can carry eight to 14 passengers without a steering wheel and a driver. “We actually are a center of technology and it’s burgeoning,” Sacramento’s Chief Innovation Officer Louis Stewart said. The company, Local Motors, is hosting the “Olli Fleet Challenge” for businesses, nonprofits and universities in Sacramento and Phoenix. Two winners will get their own fleet of Olli vehicles for three months. Stewart said the idea is to use these shuttles in neighborhoods, on college campuses and healthcare facilities. “We actually can get these shuttles on the road and get kids where they need to be, or patients on a healthcare campus or students who are running late for class,” h...[Read More]

Through the Startup in Residence Program, city workers collaborated with developers to create Outreach Grid, a program designed to improve municipal efforts to address homelessness. To combat homelessness, the West Sacramento Police Department has begun using a tech platform called Outreach Grid, which the agency helped create by collaborating with developers as part of the Startup in Residence program in 2016. With Outreach Grid, case workers and other public servants in West Sacramento can now map homeless encampments, consolidate client info from multiple agencies into one platform and customize intake forms based on needs. Other cities across the country have developed similar tech-based improvements to their homelessness outreach efforts, while at the same time almost universally agre...[Read More]

Sacramento has earned a reputation as the “farm-to-fork” capital thanks to a thriving agriculture industry with businesses that grow, pack and produce everything from tomatoes to wine. But these days the focus is shifting from rural farm fields to an urban core is buzzing with activity. Downtown Sacramento is experiencing a surge of development with more than $1.1 billion in public and private investment that has been made over the past decade. Some of the projects that are expected to be “game changers” for the city include: Keep reading this article on Greater Sacramento Economic Council

Apple is expanding its facilities in Elk Grove, California, adding more office space to complement its existing operations at the campus, with the additional space likely to help expand its AppleCare operations already well-established in the area.  The new premises consists of a one-story building located at 2216 Kausen Drive, which is approximately one block away from the existing campus, revealed in property records to have cost Apple $4.2 million. An Apple spokesperson has confirmed the purchase is part of an ongoing effort to increase its operations in Elk Grove. According to filings seen by the Sacramento Business Journal, the 24,400-square-foot building was previously used by DeVry University, which started to use the facility in 2004. Elk Grove economic development director Darrell...[Read More]

Yuba City-based company launches subscription service for educational toys. In 2017, Aaron Watkins launched a rental service called STEMtrunk because he doesn’t believe educational toys should be left behind. He calls his Yuba City-based startup “Netflix for learning toys” because it works with the same subscription-based concept. Parents need only look at their children’s old toys to recall the law of inertia — that an object not played with will sit on a shelf collecting dust. In 2017, Aaron Watkins launched a rental service called STEMtrunkbecause he doesn’t believe educational toys should be left behind. He calls his Yuba City-based startup “Netflix for learning toys” because it works with the same subscription-based concept: Parents select a STEM toy (LEGO Mindstorms, Parrot Minidrone...[Read More]