Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

From Chattanooga:

An organization named Orchard, a company that bills itself as making “home buying stress free,” has ranked Chattanooga as the #1 city in the country for those looking for a new community for remote work. In the next two spots were Winston-Salem, NC and Greenville, SC. Nashville placed #6 in the rankings.

The report tracked data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, including unemployment rate, home value compared to earnings, percentage of monthly income spent on rent, self-employment rate, access to high speed internet, and availability of homes with at least two bedrooms, as well as proximity to amenities.

You can find the list and more here.

From Knoxville:

• Rapidly-growing Volunteer Aerospace, a Knoxville-based leader in metal additive manufacturing, has been acquired by Beehive3D Inc. of Deerfield Beach, FL. “The acquisition of Volunteer Aerospace brings together two companies that are committed to providing quality additive manufacturing solutions to their current and future customers,” Beehive3D wrote in a recent social media post. “We welcome the Volunteer Aerospace team and look forward to working together to serve our customers and promote the benefits of additive design and manufacturing.” Launched in 2016 by Jonaaron Jones, his wife (Rachel) and Devon Burkle, the company started in the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but moved in late 2017 into a building in the Hardin Valley Area of West Knoxville. You can access this early 2018 teknovation.biz article to learn more about how the company started.
• Lia Winter, Co-Founder of Winter Innovations Inc., developer of the EasyWhip^TM device, has been named to the 2022 “40 Under 40” Alumni Class at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Click here for the full list.

From Washington, DC:

• Representatives from SPARKZ Inc., a start-up that has licensed technology from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, were invited to a meeting last week hosted by the White House’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization. During the session, SPARKZ’s plans to commercialize a cobalt-free, American-made lithium-ion battery that would be manufactured in Appalachia were discussed as captured in this readout issued by the White House. You can learn more about SPARKZ, founded by Sanjiv Malhotra, in this previous teknovation.biz spotlight article.
• The Tennessee Valley Corridor has announced that the organization’s 2022 “National Summit” will return to the Nation’s Capital June 14 and 15. More details will be released soon.
• If you are one of those individuals who is really interested in the federal “State Small Business Credit Initiative,” the U.S. Department of the Treasury has released a “Frequently Asked Questions” document. It can be found here.

Again from Knoxville:

In many respects, a topic that has been top of mind for many individuals and certainly employers is workforce. With that in mind, we call your attention to the “2021 Pulse Survey Report” from the Knoxville Technology Council. It is based on a survey of companies in the Knoxville area and covered a variety of topics including perspectives and trends on the way people work and the future of technology. Here are some of the results.

• Only 2.5 percent of the respondents said they had not worked from home at any point during the past 18 months.
• Nearly one-half of those responding – 46.15 percent – said that team dynamics had not changed as a result of how they engaged with each other.
• Nearly 54 percent of the employers indicated that they did not have enough qualified applicants.
• No company said its technology budget would decline in 2022, and a little more than a third said it would remain the same. Conversely, a third of the respondents said that category of expenditure would increase by 25 percent or more.

Click here to review the findings in a very pleasing graphical presentation.

From Nashville:

Janet Miller, the former Chief Economic Development Officer at the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, is the new Chair of the Board of Directors of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. She left the Chamber in mid-2014 and is the Chief Executive Officer/Market Leader in the Nashville office of commercial real estate brokerage firm Colliers International.

From SFO but About Nashville:

Tony Skjellum, Director of the SimCenter at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, shared this article with us. The headline says it all: “What it felt like 10 years ago”: Is Nashville the next hotspot in the Bay Area exodus?”

 

---