The winners of the Juneau Economic Development Council’s Innovation Summit’s annual pitch contest were announced Thursday. <\/p>\n
The two winners were each awarded $1,700 and round-trip tickets with Alaska Airlines. The pitch contest — sponsored by Alaska Airlines and the Greater Juneau Chamber of Commerce — was held Wednesday evening and featured six contestants.<\/p>\n
The winner of the Judge’s Prize was Jay Byam, founder and CEO of Kartorium, a software company that uses scans to create 3D environments for industrial projects. Officially Kartorium is “cloud-based digital twin platform,” Byam told the Empire. “Which doesn’t mean much to most people.”<\/p>\n
The company uses scans done by drone fly-over or using LIDAR, Byam said, and then renders the information into 3D environments viewable on a phone or computer. The company sometimes does the scanning itself, according to Byam, but he wants to make it easy for customers to upload their own scans.<\/p>\n
The Anchorage-based company is already operating but is looking for additional funding. Byam said he’s been able to raise $300,000 from Alaskan investors.<\/p>\n
The winner of the People’s Choice award was Jack Finnegan with Fishability Alaska. Finnegan is a charter fishing captain and has an idea for a boat designed to be universally accessible for people with disabilities. The boat would be 34 feet and made from aluminum with a fold-down front for wheelchair access. Finnegan — who’s based in Ketchikan — said he’s been in contact with a boat-maker in Washington state but still needs to secure funding.<\/p>\n
• Contact reporter Peter Segall at psegall@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @SegallJnuEmpire.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Entrepreneurial Alaskans. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":82996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-82995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82995"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=82995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}