Tech Tidbits From Across New Hampshire

The Waypoint Team with their Vector robots.

Waypoint Robotics, a Nashua-based spinoff of Stanley Elevator Company that developed an industrial-strength, omnidirectional, fully autonomous mobile robot, was a finalist in the robotics category at the Annual New England Innovation Awards, the oldest and longest-running innovation program in New England. Twenty-five companies received awards for ground-breaking solutions and pioneering advancements in a variety of business sectors. Historically, the Awards have helped catapult start-ups and young companies to success (Genzyme, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, zipcar, iRobot, KRONOS, MassChallenge, Vistaprint, and Staples) for the past 35 years. Waypoint will to move on to the New England Innovation Showcase, the final and live phase of the competition; they will exhibit their innovations, present a three-minute pitch, and answer questions about their break-throughs on Wednesday, October 21st, for the New England Innovation Award of their category.

Great Bay Community College will offer a suite of new foundational courses for the digital economy. Instructor Nicholas Marcus will teach a trio of successive non-credit online courses, beginning in September, on the use of the data visualization software Tableau, a fast-growing program that many companies are using to help understand and present data in visual formats. The course is designed for people who are already employed and seeking to add to their skills to make themselves more valuable to their employer, as well as those who simply want to learn how to use and present data effectively, for any purpose.

While some companies invest in statisticians and mathematicians to process data, others are investing in software like Tableau and recruiting people who know how to master it. Tableau allows proficient users to process raw data into easy-to-understand charts and graphs. Great Bay’s Business and Training Center will offer three successive courses in Tableau, with discounts to people who sign up for all three. All will be taught remotely, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The first class, from Sept. 8 to Oct. 29, will introduce the fundamentals of Tableau. Students will master the Tableau desktop, learn to connect to data sources and how to customize that data, as well as how to group, sort and filter it and make charts and graphs that are specific to a company’s needs and goals.

Electronics manufacturing services industry veteran Joe Garcia has joined Emerald EMS, a leading global high-tech contract manufacturing and engineering firm in Salem, as its vice president of sales and marketing. Garcia, a Silicon-Valley executive who brings more than 21 years of experience, will be responsible for business development and global sales strategy for the high-technology EMS marketplace and for managing Emerald EMS’s multi-divisional sales and marketing teams, Giglio said. Garcia will report directly to Giglio.

Emerald EMS, which serves high-reliability end users in the industrial controls, semiconductor, utilities infrastructure, aerospace/defense and medical sectors, was launched last month with the merger of two leading global EMS providers, DataED and Bestronics. Domestically, the new company has a bi-coastal footprint, with two manufacturing facilities located in Boston’s “high-tech corridor,” including a dedicated New Product Introduction facility, and two more, including a dedicated box build facility, in San Jose, the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. Additionally, the company has two manufacturing facilities in Shenzhen, China.

Prior to joining Emerald EMS, Garcia held executive sales, marketing and business development positions with several Silicon Valley-based electronics manufacturing services companies, including Green Circuits, Creation Technologies and ViaSystems, where he excelled in building national and multi-national sales teams and in cultivating new global markets. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration, Finance, from California State University, Northridge.