Tech Tidbits From Around NH

Interoperability Lab to host Plugfest … and more

October 10, 2019

NH Business Review Staff,

A winning alliance made up of teams of high schoolers based in New Ipswich, Contoocook and Nashua won the second annual Governor’s Cup, an off-season robotics competition for the state’s FIRST Robotics competitors. Seniors on the winning alliance receive a one-semester tuition waiver to any of the institutions in the University System of New Hampshire or Community College System of New Hampshire. Some 26 teams with more than 300 students from across New Hampshire took part in the competition, which was held Sept. 28 at upon Plymouth State University.

Petra Bonfert-Taylor, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, has been selected as a member of the 2020 class of the Association for Women in Mathematics Fellows. For more than two decades, Bonfert-Taylor has developed programs and tools to make engineering and math accessible, particularly for students who want to pursue a STEM degree but whose early years didn’t give them the academic foundation, encouragement or role models to help them succeed.

The Franklin City Council and School Administrative Unit 18 are partnering with are manufacturers to present Manufacturing Night from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., Friday, Oct. 25 at the Elks Lodge, 125 S. Main St, Franklin. Representatives from Watts Water Technologies, Vitex Aluminum Extrusion, Eptam Precision Manufacturing Solutions, Sealite USA LLC and Graphicast will be on hand to share some of their products and talk about how they impact their respective industries worldwide. The evening will be hosted by Zenagui Brahim, president of the NH Manufacturing Extension Partnership. This event is free and open to the public.

NS1, a New York-based provider of DNS and application traffic management solutions with an office in Londonderry, has raised a $33 million Series C venture round. The round was led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Cisco Investments and existing investors Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, Entrée Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, GGV Capital, Mango Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sigma Prime Ventures, Telstra Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures. NS1 customers include LinkedIn, Dropbox, Pitney Bowes, a top 5 U.S. airline, a top 10 U.S. automotive company, a top 10 global gaming company and a top online payment provider. The company has reported a nearly 90% compound growth rate since 2016 and more than 450 major customers worldwide.

The Ethernet Alliance, a global consortium dedicated to the advancement of Ethernet technologies, will be holding a members-only High Speed Networking Plugfest on Monday, Oct. 14, at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory in Durham. The alliance said its Plugfests “provide an ongoing development environment for conducting confidential, non-competitive interoperability testing against published and draft IEEE 802 Ethernet standards.”

Portsmouth-based Precision Campus, a higher education data analytics reporting platform, has been chosen by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities to expand the user-friendliness and capabilities of the association’s Voluntary System of Accountability. The goal is to offer institutions an easier way to incorporate the VSA into their decision-making processes. The VSA is designed to aggregate more than nine years of data from public sources.

Work has begun on the $100 million Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society at Dartmouth College. The institute, named for the Irving Oil chairman, “addresses the intersection of energy and society, focusing on the challenges and opportunities in transforming today’s energy systems to meet the needs of the future,” according to the college. Elizabeth Wilson, the institute’s director, said the three-story, 55,000-square-foot building “will amplify the institute’s impact through its labs, meeting spaces and classrooms. It has been designed to enhance collaboration across all disciplines.”