Technology
Oakland’s educators met with Silicon Valley technology companies this weekend at a conference to discuss how they can work together to improve science and technology education in the classroom.
For years, Oakland has been the subject of startup-centric speculation: Is it about to blow up into the Bay Area’s next tech hub? Will San Francisco’s astronomical rents drive companies out of SoMa and across the bridge? There’s plenty of reason to bet “yes” on both. While the tech sector accounts for only about three percent of the city’s jobs, it’s growing at a gallop. Oakland is now home to more than 400 tech firms, according to the Chamber of Commerce,…
kindVR is developing customized 360 degree virtual reality therapies aimed at pain mitigation and stress.
Impact Hub Oakland strives to become an intersection for technology and social change.
The new kids on the block look to change the face of video game journalism.
For years, Oakland-based Learn Tech Labs co-founders Bella Baek and Jordan Hart heard the same complaint from employers and jobseekers in tech fields. Colleges weren’t teaching graduates practical skills, and coding bootcamps weren’t offering the computer science foundation needed for many programming jobs. Hart says he used to interview people with computer science degrees who had never heard of Git, the industry standard software that allows users to track changes in their code and collaborate. “It wasn’t like they’d been…
Electric vehicle charging gets easier in apartment garages.
Education software company Turnitin is arguably one of Oakland’s biggest technology companies that few people know about. Turnitin, which makes anti-plagiarism software, was founded in 1998 by John Barrie and Christian Storm. Both were doctoral candidates in neuroscience at UC Berkeley when they came up with the idea after seeing a high level of plagiarism in the undergraduate papers they were grading. Using their expertise in brain wiring, Barrie and Storm wrote pattern matching recognition algorithms that can scan text…
Lucid has been around for 12 years, but the clean tech company still considers itself a nimble, innovative upstart. The company’s marketing head Ralf VonSosen said that every employee is required to be versatile enough to handle multiple tasks and responsibilities. He added that he has personally done everything from preparing for board meetings to working on the website. To VonSosen, a start-up is defined by company culture rather than a timeline. Gavin Platt and Vladi Shunturov started Lucid as…