The event drew more than 200 attendees including representation from more than 30 MBA programs.  Attendees had the chance to attend 2 different breakout sessions in ‘Career’, ‘Leadership’ and ‘Venture’ tracks.

For me, it’s always a great chance to meet new people and I never fail to learn something new from the great speakers we manage to attract.  I also tried my hand at “live-tweeting” the event for the club this year under our @KelloggDFW twitter account, and we managed quite a few tweets under the #kcs hashtag this year.

Hopefully all attendees got a lot out of the day!

Guest speaker @scottariens and @mck125 catch up over coffee #kcs pic.twitter.com/fD1YaKaW

“Customers can quickly and easily implement a variety of 3D audio applications by combining our power-optimized floating- and fixed-point C6000™ DSPs with Sonic Emotion’s Absolute 3D technology,” said Matt Kurtz, business manager, Singlecore DSP, TI. “TI’s complete and scalable platform of DSPs enables real-time processing of Sonic Emotion’s software for a home audio experience that is second to none.”

The solution also won a CES Innovation Award and received a great deal of customer interest at the show.

TI / Sonic Emotion Demo at CES 2013

We’re particularly excited about this announcement as it falls directly in our focused area of Analytics (Biometrics) and we see it has a market with huge growth potential as companies and governments around the world look for more reliable forms of real-time identification in applications like secure access, mobile banking, time & attendance, and point of sale systems.

As stated in the press release, it’s also great to see customer applications like this where TI’s DSP is solving real customer issues and providing solid opportunities for differentiation.

“TI’s DSPs offer parallel processing of computationally intensive algorithms to enable real-time biometrics access control and identification systems,” said Matt Kurtz, business manager, Singlecore DSP, TI. “In addition, our C6748 DSP offers a variety of integrated security features to safeguard proprietary algorithms and sensitive user data, giving both systems developers and users the ultimate in security.”

Here’s a link to a blog post about our efforts in the biometrics area as well as some more commentary on why we’re excited about the IriTech IriShield product.

Even cooler are the focused markets we’re pursuing (and winning) with these products in the areas of Audio and Analytics.   Our products have a dominant market position – especially in the area of home audio – and they provide a great deal of differentiation for customers in their end product.

TI’s DSP offering is well-known in the market and amazingly we celebrated 30 Years of TI DSP this year – starting with the wildly famous “Speak N Spell” product and leading to an astounding range of markets and end products.

Stay tuned for lots more !

Bill Geiser and the team at MetaWatch have found great support on KickStarter - securing 1,350 backers and $235,430 with 12 days to go!

If you don’t know about MetaWatch, it’s a Bluetooth/BLE-enabled SmartWatch that works with Android and iPhone based on TI’s MSP430 low-power microcontroller and CC2564 Bluetooth/BLE single-chip.  It allows you to check messages, see who’s calling, control music, view weather, and more, all from your wrist.

At TI, we first started working with Bill and David on this Bluetooth-enabled watch project several years ago, so it’s very exciting to watch it come to market.

Below is a link to the video where you can learn more:

The Dallas Morning News also covered this story today (subscription required):

At Design West earlier this year, I spoke to Chris Ciufo.  Chris is senior editor for embedded content at Extension Media, which includes the EECatalog print and digital publications and website, Embedded Intel® Solutions, and other related blogs and embedded channels.

My discussion with Chris was centered around TI’s overall wireless portfolio, TI wireless competitive strengths and what we do to make our customers’ lives easier…

For those of you interested in the play-by-play details, each contestant kept a detailed blog outlining their development progress and experiences. Anyone interested in the “Cliff’s Notes” version can go to the video submissions.

The winner – Monte Chan from Australia – was chosen based on a combination of community votes and some folks at Element14 and TI (myself included).  Monte’s project “Code Name” is a hunting-season-ready toy concept similar to the “Big Mouth Billy Bass” concept, the <1min video linked in the pic below is definitely worth a look!

Modules from partners like LS Research are critical to help customers deploy complex RF solutions like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and others without significant internal investment and exposure to major schedule and cost risks.

I was happy to provide a quote in the press release and to see LSR continue to deploy products customers need.

GER_Markt+Technik_Wireless support from the sky_CC4000_Matt Kurtz_8Jun12

For those who cannot read German, Willem’s article discusses  TI’s SimpleLink-GPS CC4000 solution and why we’re excited about the opportunities it’s bringing our customers now that we have lowered the bar for a wide range of microcontroller-based products to add location and precision timing information.

To learn more, check out the CC4000 product brief, visit the CC4000 product folder, or check out the CC4000 press release.