Hard Living at the Colorado Green Tech Group

Last night I made it up to the Colorado Green Tech Group meeting at the Law Auditorium Wolf Building on CU Campus. I used to work with one of the speaker so I was really excited to see what they were up to. I didn’t get to see my former manager but I did get to see and hear from a great line of companies.

The Wolf Building is the perfect place for this type of meeting; it’s kind of like a geek’s geek meetup: green technology, which in itself is often times quite sophisticated, short presentations with clear needs articulated and a well-educated, non-shy group who asked tons of great questions.

My only complaint is that during the networking time everyone clusters around the food/beer and does not budge creating a kind of green house effect – a sort of micro-climate suitable for ferns, frogs and other semi-tropical species and not for casual, relaxed exchanges of ideas.  So, like water on a hot plate, I landed and quickly steamed. Nevertheless, despite overreacting I met some interesting folks and listened to great talks.

Pulmor – wants to provide mobile and brick/mortar business fronts for charging cell phones using PVs. Their focus is mostly the developing world where the gap between available electricity, the population and the population that has a cell phone is enormous. They want to work with existing businesses and arrangements but make it easier for people to charge their cell phones. For some reason their logo includes a kangaroo.

BioVantage  Resources – talked about how water is the next oil – as in peak water. Water will be the next finite immensely valuable resources  and they have the technology – scalable algae growing systems for bioremdiation of wastewater and algae research. Well-prepared speech, very polished.

The standout for me, though, was the VAIREX air systems speaker. I’m a sucker for someone who makes me laugh and Ski had me laughing and out loud…in public.  The speaker, Ski, was candid about his company’s innovation and the mistakes he made along the way growing his company.  His talk was titled Hard Living and included great pieces of wisdom, like focusing 100% on “customers that support you” instead of “customer who suck you dry” or “if you are single stay single, if you are married, stay married”. Gems like this were interspersed with an update about the company – a fuel cell company