The Weekly Beat: Special Extended Edition
May 21st - June 3rd, 2023
Hello all and welcome to the fourth issue of The Weekly Beat from Pittsburgh Tech Beat, a weekly roundup of the latest news from the Pittsburgh tech scene in the past week! This week’s post is a Special Extended Edition, including news from the past two weeks. I took off from writing/recording for Memorial Day weekend and then got super slammed with work at my day job this past week, so ran out of time to post till now. Sorry for the wait!
All companies mentioned are local to Pittsburgh unless otherwise noted. To listen to this summary, rather than read it, click play on the voiceover above, or check out the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Here’s the latest:
The mayor formally announced a new “Space and Innovation District” to be created on the North Side at a gathering of elected officials and local business leaders. Various government incentives will be given to space and defense companies like AFWERX and Astrobotic to host their operations in this new district. The project is to be tied to other community development efforts so current residents are not left behind in the transition.
The Pittsburgh Airport has partnered with local business Ecotone Renewables to turn airport food waste into fertilizer. The system built by Ecotone does this by accelerating the composting process to 8x faster than normal composting. There’s a video in the linked article that shows how it’s done—pretty cool stuff!
Also in eco-related tech news, Ansys made USA Today’s rankings for companies with the greatest emissions reductions between 2019 and 2021. Alcoa, American Eagle, Koppers, Wabtech, and Wesco were also Pittsburgh-based companies that made the list. Always good to see. You can view the list here.
Aurora is joining the Russell 3000 Index, a major milestone for the self-driving company. Inclusion in the index allows the company to benefit from Russell 3000-based index funds, a common tool used by investors.
Speaking of transportation, the e-scooter company Spin that makes the scooters you see around town is paying fans $100 gift cards to write letters of support to elected officials. Opinions vary on whether the scooters are a good use of taxpayer dollars, but if you ask me, this is a pretty scummy move trying to buy political support. You can sign a petition to ban them here.
The Pittsburgh Pirates are really good this year, in case you haven’t noticed. Hopefully, the Pittsburgh Pirates of 20 years from now will be just as good thanks to Diamond Kinetics giving out free smart baseball bats to over 500 Pittsburgh Pirates youth athletes. The bats use embedded sensor technology to provide training recommendations to users, as well as log training stats to a mobile app.
One final note: I am looking to start adding some additional content to podcast feed. If you are a Pittsburgh-based tech professional who is interested in doing a guest interview for the PTB podcast, please don’t hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn or elsewhere!
—Austin