Past Innovate Durham Cohorts
2022 Innovate Durham Cohort
ZROverse, Inc.
City of Durham Participatory Budgeting, City of Durham Office of Performance & Innovation, City of Durham Office of Economic & Workforce Development
ZROverse is a Metaverse as a service infrastructure startup. ZROverse provides a gaming, ecommerce intersection that both enables businesses to create virtual brick and mortar stores, and creates opportunities for hard to hire populations to develop design skills needed for “new collar jobs”. ZROverse will partner with the City of Durham to pilot a Pathway Program that takes up to eight Hard to Hire (H2H) participants and provides them with entry level training for new collar jobs and work on piloting a visual component for Participatory Budgeting projects.
Lavni, Inc.
Durham County Emergency Management Services
Lavni provides online mental health services for underserved communities. Clients can choose a mental health professional that aligns best with their needs and receive therapy via text, voice, and video call. Lavni will be working with Durham County Emergency Management Services to test their app with frontline employees.
SmartBridge Inc.
City of Durham Office of Performance & Innovation
SmartBridge will be working with the City of Durham Innovation Team to run three different workshops for Innovate Durham Cohort members and City of Durham employees. The failure foundry workshop will help government employees acknowledge that failures are already occurring in the status quo and view failure as a necessary step towards positive change.
Resolved Analytics
Durham County General Services
Ground source heat pumps (GSHPs), also known as geothermal systems, are the most energy efficient technology in the context of space heating and cooling applications. Conventional ground-loop heat exchangers are currently a barrier to wider market adoption of GSHPs due to their high installation costs, long lead times and landscape disruption upon installation. We would like to test our innovative ground-loop heat exchanger that overcomes these commercial and technical limitations in collaboration with Durham County.
Durham Success Summit
City of Durham Office of Performance & Innovation, City of Durham Office of Economic & Workforce Development, Durham County Economic Development
Durham Success Summit provides programs and tools to increase access to business education, mentorship, and professional networking opportunities for young Black men between 16 and 24 years old in Durham. The City, County, and DSS team will work to determine and identify the most impactful content for job-seeking Black male youth 16-24 in order to increase their skills and employability.
2021 Innovate Durham Cohort
Acta Solutions
Partner Departments: Durham County Register of Deeds and City-County Inspections Department
Acta Solutions is a software-as-a-service company that automates customer service communications for local governments to save time, increase revenue, and speedily provide residents, developers, and businesses with the services they need by intelligently suggesting automated responses that staff reviews before sending.
CoWorks
Partner Departments: City Budget and Management Services, County Library, and County Strategic Initiatives
CoWorks provides a space management portal that allows users to organize billing, conference room/meeting space, desk reservations and more as well as a member portal to assist people working in a shared space.
DayWatt
Partner Departments: City General Services and County General Services
DayWatt's technology enables rooftop solar installations on commercial buildings to supply long-term backup power to the facility during blackouts, a feature unavailable with conventional renewable energy approaches. The system also provides lifetime benefits through lower energy bills, decreased maintenance, and reduced carbon emissions.
2019 Innovate Durham Cohort
AC Analytix
Partner Department: County General Services
AC AnalytiX is an air conditioning/refrigeration early warning, monitoring system that utilizes data analytics and cloud technology to analyze, and troubleshoot. The system also alerts anomalies that may be occurring in real-time. AC AnalytiX gives the end-user the ability to view multiple locations from a desk, or on the go.
B.combs
Partner Department: Durham Public Schools
B.combs is a comprehensive platform that aims to save teachers’ and administrator’s times, by aggregating activities and events, automating processes, and providing actionable metrics.
Don't Waste Durham
Partner Department: City Solid Waste
Don't Waste Durham's vision for the future is a circular economy that designs waste out of the picture. Don’t Waste Durham builds technology, infrastructure, and logistics to make possible the mainstream use of reusable food and beverage packaging. Through Innovate Durham, Don't Waste Durham will explore using the City's existing recycling infrastructure for collection of reusables and test new technologies for sorting.
NeedsList
Partner Department: City-County Emergency Management
NeedsList is a real-time needs registry for crisis response. NeedsList's vision is to build resilient communities by tackling this challenge of communication and coordination of needs and offers during crisis. Our platform aggregates supply, volunteer, and funding needs in real-time from the field intro a centralized database to help communities get what they need, when they need it. For Innovate Durham, NeedsList is partnering with Emergency Management to pilot their platform as a viable crisis response registry for Durham.
ProcessMaker
Partner Department: County IS&T
ProcessMaker makes it easy for business analysts to collaborate with IT to automate complex business processes connecting people and existing company systems. Headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, ProcessMaker has a partner network spread across 35 countries serving customers in 52 different countries. Through Innovate Durham, ProcessMaker is working with Durham County iS&T to pilot an automation of one of their workflow processes.
Reaszon
Partner Department: City Human Resources
Reaszon is a Durham-based technology company that provides a new and unique critical reasoning assessment to industry and academia. The Reaszon test is the first accurate, unbiased, and fully automated critical reasoning assessment of its kind. It is web-based allowing for flexible administration and immediate feedback. These characteristics enable frequent, easy distribution of a powerful assessment that accurately measures the critical reasoning ability of job candidates and students. For Innovate Durham, Reaszon is working with City Human Resources to see if there are significant correlations between a Reaszon score and job performance.
2018 Innovate Durham Cohort
Community Expert Solutions
Partner Department: County Public Health
Community Expert Solutions has a software platform, Digital LinCS, that matches, connects and manages eligible people to patient assistance programs for free and reduced cost HIV medications. Digital LinCS is configured to complete patient assistance programs for HIV medication and assistance programs. Through Innovate Duhram, Community Expert Solutions worked with Durham County to sign up residents for HIV prevention treatments.
Digital LinCS Demo Day Presentation
Deep Visual Insights
Partner Department: City General Services
Deep Visual Insights uses carefully tested artificial intelligence software to automatically and regularly check that security cameras are working properly. With the software, developed by Duke University researchers, unhealthy cameras are quickly identified and operators are alerted of the problem. For Innovate Durham they developed a software dashboard and worked with the City's security manager to test their software on the cameras in City Hall.
Hoverlay
Partner Department: County Library & Engineering Services
Hoverlay is a location-based augmented reality application that can display information about development projects at the location of the project. Anyone around that location would be able to experience a highly visual, highly curated content, about the project. Through Innovate Durham they tested the engagement of their platform at the construction site of the main Library and a new art installation at a County administration building.
Rownd
Partner Department: City Fleet
Rownd is an internet of things platform which makes every vehicle a smart vehicle. Using the OBD-II port on the dashboard they can monitor: engine performance and problems, location, acceleration and deceleration patterns, crashes and maintenance schedules. Rownd worked with the City Fleet Management to build an analytics platform to monitor vehicle and driver performance.
State Of Place
Partner Departments: City Transportation
State of Place is a predictive analytics software that quantifies walkability, sustainability and livability. State of Place is using a data-driven, holistic urban design focus to help achieve the City's Vision Zero goal of zero pedestrian fatalities. Through Innovate Durham they worked with Transportation staff to collect road safety and urban design data to recommend design changes that would make streets safer for drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists.
TRASHR
Partner Departments: City Solid Waste
TRASHR is an internet of things technology that seeks to make the waste management industry more efficient, while promoting sustainable initiatives. TRASHR uses sensors to measure how full a dumpster is and transmits that information to a database where analytics can be used to optimize pickup. For Innovate Durham they tested their devices in several dumpsters throughout the City and made recommendations on pickup schedules.
2017 Innovate Durham Cohort
DroPark
Partner Department: City Transportation
Dropark has a goal is to reduce the time and stress it takes to find a parking spot. Their software directs motorists to real-time available parking spaces using a smart phone app and internet of things devices in parking spots. As part of Innovate Durham, they tested their sensor technology for the first time in two downtown parking lots. They were also able to integrate their payment system with the City's financial system to allow for payment processing.
8 rivers networks
Partner Department: City Technology Solutions
8 Rivers Networks is an optical wireless communications system that delivers gigabit speeds over the air where fiber is too difficult or expensive to deploy. As part of Innovate Durham, they connected City Hall and the Parks & Recreation building using their technology in an urban environment for the first time. The technology increased network capacity and service for the duration of the pilot period.
Lucid Dream VR
Partner Department: City Community Development
Lucid Dream builds virtual and augmented reality software applications. They leverage VR/AR tech to create and deliver immersive experiences that impact audiences better than traditional web and screen-based media. As part of Innovate Durham they built a virtual reality rendering of a proposed affordable housing development project to show what it would look like. City Council members went through the experience before voting on the project.
Talented
Partner Department: City Human Resources
Talented is a micro-learning app, creating custom learning games for trainers and authors that are engaging and result in real-life skill transfer. As a part of Innovate Durham, Talented took about 25 City employees through their cyber-security game. This training helped employees institute better habits across their professional and personal online practices. It also allowed the City to test a new platform for delivering training to employees.
Service request:
Click or call 919-560-1200