Emerging Technology : Featured Stories

A husband-wife team (he's a techie, she's a psychiatrist) are developing fun-to-play (but scientifically sound) game-style apps that can help diagnose ADHD and other psychiatric problems in kids.

Charging stations for electric cars are popping up here and there in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. In fact, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is working to install up to 76 electric car-charging stations throughout the metro area, adding to an already expanding network.  Here's our guide (a work in progress) to our towns' car-charging infrastructure.

A proud "geek girl" from childhood, this globe-trotting scientist-businesswoman founded a local STEM-education program for elementary-school kids, moved away, then returned to find it still going strong. Now she's more committed than ever to strengthening science-and-technology training in our towns.

From Greenville, North Carolina to Baltimore, from Tampa to Denver to Cleveland to the Twin Cities, tech savvy, entrepreneurship, and investment are coming together to create bright clusters of digital innovation.

While the dynamic CoCo garners the headlines, a quiet coworking space at the edge of downtown Minneapolis welcomes solo entrepreneurs in search of a more serene scene. Owner Jackie Menne understands the needs of one-person, payroll-less microbusinesses--after all, Joule is a microbusiness itself.

Consolidating its position as a laboratory for cutting-edge design thinking, the University of Minnesota's College of Design hosted the first Public Interest Design Week. Its climax was an awards show that displayed ingenious design-driven solutions to the dilemmas of poverty and ill health in America and around the world.

Last Wednesday's kickoff event for the linkup between the search-engine giant and the local coworking space was full of energy, ambition, and promise for local entrepreneurs, some of whom think Silicon Prairie's ready to bloom.

The University of St. Thomas's Minneapolis campus is home to a quiet program that's incubated and helped fund some of the Twin Cities' most prominent (and promising) tech startups--including several run by women. It's a place where professors turn into business advisors and colleagues and the help just keeps on coming.

Despite some women-led startups, high tech here, as elsewhere, is still more or less drowning in testosterone. But some strong local initiatives are pointing the way toward more opportunities for women to get their geek on.

The education innovators behind this charter school are hoping to create a 21st-century fusion of classroom and digital space, where kids' fascination with technology helps them learn--at their own pace.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my enthusiasms and discoveries as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: You've got a chance on Monday to peek into the laboratories of advanced bio-researchers at the University of Minnesota, as guests of the U's union of GLBTQ scientists.

While the concept of the green job is a nice fusion of much-needed employment growth and environmental responsibility, it's been hard to get a handle on the size and even the definition of this part of the job market. But according to Matt Entenza and other experts, the picture in Minnesota is getting clearer as more jobs fit the category. In fact, this small but growing sector may be the IT of the future.

The historic Minneapolis building, once given over entirely to commodities like wheat and rye, is turning into one of the major hubs for high-tech in the Twin Cities. Credit an ambitious coworking space as catalyst, an ideal downtown location, and (surprise!) the continuing need for techies to actually inhabit the same physical space.

In the push for STEM-oriented education, are we underplaying the creative and communicative skills that 21st-century business needs just as badly as it needs math and science competence? Minnesota 20/20 communications director Joe Sheeran asks the question in a recent blog post.