The Monthly Beat - September '24 Edition

A recap of the most interesting news from August 2024 plus some extras for the months ahead.

Good morning!

Hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend. This month’s edition is coming a little later because of the holiday and because, well, you know how it is with folks trying to squeeze 5 days of work into 4. As always, lots to talk about from this past month.

Let’s get into it.

What Happened in August

The Big Story

In a scathing post, the folks behind Pittsburgh Startup News (PSN) pulled back the curtain on a spout of infighting among local tech leadership. The post details how XchangePgh, a prominent former tech entrepreneurship initiative, was essentially forced out of existence (hence the 403 Forbidden error on their TLD) by a conglomerate of the current City administration, Google Pittsburgh, Walnut Capital, Pittsburgh Tech Council, and other groups. Then, that same group of corporations and government officials launched a website for an upcoming “Tech Week Pittsburgh” which rehashed some branding elements from XchangePgh. PSN ends the post advocating for a more community-focused effort, labeling the current direction as little more than a corporate PR stunt.

At the time of my writing this, it looks like “Tech Week Pittsburgh” has since modified some of the branding to distance it from XchangePgh. Outside of that, I am just shocked at how bad the website looks while having Google prominently displayed as a sponsor. Outside of that, while this definitely seems like a highly opinionated piece, I think the PSN folks do make some good points. Lastly, I should say PSN posted this on September 3rd, but I felt I should include it early here rather than wait till next month’s edition.

The Headlines

• Local technologist Adrian Jones’ augmented reality app, Looking Glass, which allows users to experience Black history as they walk around Pittsburgh, exited Beta this month and is now available on iOS. This is a super cool concept and really does a lot to unearth the hidden history of Pittsburgh. I highly recommend you give it a try if you’re on iPhone. It’ll be available on Android later this year.

• Local frontend dev Brad Frost and several other notable frontend folks rocked out at Mr. Small’s for the Frostapalooza benefit concert. Ryan Trimble of css-tricks.com said, “At times it felt like the Wu-Tang Clan of CSS on stage.”

• Economic adviser to President Biden, Lael Brainard, quietly visited the ARM Institute at Mill 19, a former steel manufacturing site that has now been transformed into a center for robotics innovation. The visit highlights Pittsburgh’s growing national reputation as a robotics hub, even though we didn’t get the “tech hub” designation from the feds earlier this year.

• Duolingo published a blog post detailing their engineering interview process. To me, this all sounds like an absolute pain in the ass and a waste of time. Would love to hear what you think in the comments, though! This month, Duolingo also reached a deal with Sony to feature licensed music in their app.

• Ed-tech company Niche.com announced that over 100 colleges have now joined its Direct Admissions program, which provides prospective college students with real-time acceptance and scholarship offers. Nearly 930,000 students have received at least one acceptance and scholarship offer through the program.

• Astrobotic published a report detailing the reasons behind its lunar lander failure. It states that “the most likely cause of Peregrine’s anomaly was the failure of a singular helium pressure control valve, called PCV2, within the propulsion system.” In the wake of the lander failure, the company is now turning its attention to building a solar array for NASA.

• In AI news, healthcare megacorporation Kaiser Permanente has now contracted with local AI transcription company Abridge to provide ambient scribes at its clinical locations in 8 states and D.C. The move is being hailed as “the biggest rollout of generative AI in healthcare so far.” Abridge was also featured in Politico recently for developing regulatory policies and standards around their AI.

• For some morning reads, NEXTPittsburgh published a couple of tech pieces this month—one showcasing the growing level of Pittsburgh-based startup investment and the other profiling a local law firm that has just introduced its first AI assistant. On the AI assistant, the firm’s CTO says, “We just haven’t gotten to the point where we’re comfortable opening it up to other law firms yet.” So you’re safe (for now) from being thrown into jail by an AI.

• Now for a few quick hits. After a $6 million fundraising round in June, local crowdfunding platform Honeycomb Credit just launched their mobile app, which is now available on iOS and Android.

• Velo.ai was awarded $200k by the US Department of Transportation to improve transportation safety for cyclists through data collection and their bike-mounted AI system.

• Technical.ly published their “ReaLIST Engineers” of 2024, a list of local engineers honored for their contributions to their companies and the surrounding community.

• Finally, PublicSource’s Atiya Irvin-Mitchell interviewed Pittsburgh-based writers who are concerned that unfair AI practices could jeopardize their craft.

For the Months Ahead

• September 25th at 6:30pm, Code & Supply is hosting a Résumé Build Systems talk “to inspire you on how to productionalize your résumé or CV pipeline” followed by another Build Night on Monday, September 30th.

• October 14th, CMU is hosting an AI summit at Bakery Square with some big names in attendance.

• As mentioned earlier, Tech Week Pittsburgh is apparently October 14-17th, but the site still looks like trash and has no info on it, so we’ll see what happens there.

• As always, I’m looking for guest writers and podcast interviews! Do you have a local Pittsburgh tech topic you’d like to wax poetic about? Hit me up! Spoiler alert: It’s not a paid gig, but I would be more than willing to host or repost your piece if you want to publish it somewhere else as well.

And that’s it for this month. I’ll see you 30 pumpkin coffees from now!

—Austin