In this community, your keychain can hold access to shopping after hours

By |

The MRKT at the Montecillo apartment community is never closed to residents – even if no one is on duty. Instead, residents of this smart-growth community on El Paso’s West Side can use a special key fob to enter the bodega and shop after hours. The cashierless concept follows the technology innovation of vendors like Apple, Sam’s Club and Amazon Go that make it convenient for shoppers to use an app to scan their own purchases and bypass a checkout line. The scan-and-go shopping concept is slowly catching on across the U.S., but mainly only available through major companies and generally limited to large, digitally savy cities. Amazon operates its Amazon Go convenience stores in Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.

El Paso becoming new frontier for space research, business ventures

By |

Our lives are full of consumer products that can be traced back to NASA: invisible braces, infrared ear thermometers, memory foam and cordless drills. Now one El Paso-area organization has partnered with NASA to make this kind of technology transfer easier. The Space Race challenge offers business planning, networking, mentorship and support to teams who are competing for up to $1.2 million in funding from venture capital investors. The Center for Advancing Innovation, a global public-private nonprofit is facilitating the program with El Paso-based Medical Center of the Americas Foundation. “NASA has a very large number of researchers who are primarily dedicated to solving NASA’s problems, but once that technology has done its job for NASA, by and large, that’s the end of the road, said Jeff Fuchsberg, the director of intellectual property and innovation projects at the center.

Osborne 1 on a Mac screen. (David Smith-Soto/Borderzine.com)

The space time technology continuum

By |

Teaching and Learning and Caring Blog

EL PASO – Sometimes I get so mad I could spit. Talking to an IT person (Information Technology, or so they say) makes me feel like I spent the first forty years of my life living in a cave and the next twenty-four being either senile or hopelessly incompetent. I was there at UNM medical school when we had large machines that punched holes in IBM cards and we used things that looked a bit like knitting needles to analyze the data. I was there at the School of Public Health in Berkeley when the one computer took up an entire room that was climate controlled and almost surgically clean, and I had keys to it. I was there in 1981 when “portable” computers first came on the market and I bought one.