Last Thursday I had a wonderful opportunity to speak on a panel at the Emerging Technologies Summit hosted by the University of Texas at Dallas and the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center. The conference was jam packed with evangelists, experts and those with interest in the topics of Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Fintech. It was also keynoted by Blockchain evangelist and technology prognosticator, and a good friend, Don Tapscott.
My panel covered the topic of Emerging Technologies for a Better World, and it was memorable and fulfilling as my fellow panelist, Richard Margolin of Robokind, and I covered the two topics that are near and dear to my heart these days – inclusion education and rapid advancement of health & wellness.
I was able to highlight many of the things that Nano Vision is advancing in curing healthcare, including disrupting the way the current funding and research models (don’t) work for curing disease and human health threats such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and superbugs (anti-microbial resistance, or AMR).
This article published by Dallas Innovates titled “Harnessing AI, Blockchain and IoT for Future Disruption” captured a couple of these key thoughts that I shared on the panel.
What a wonderful time for innovation where we can finally harness the world community for targeting great causes.
I cannot remember the last time I wrote a blog post, and have been wanting to start writing on Medium. So, here goes to kick off 2018 with something easy, a recap of my 2017 professional projects, which will inevitably lead to the next post which is teeing up my 2018 professional projects.
2017 was a very good building year professionally. In 2016, I started a new company with longtime friend Frank Krasovec and a good friend and former colleague Joe Canterbury. After many, many years doing business in China in fields from Dominos to Starbucks to mobile application software between us, we all collectively realized in early 2016 that the Chinese mainland consumer was growing rapidly in income and spending power and was desiring healthy lifestyle services and brands. Thus, Pacific Springboard was formed.
Our goal was to bring the leading US healthy lifestyle service brands to China with a principal ownership and operating position in each one we secure. We targeted brands in health & wellness, fitness, entertainment and lifestyle. We closed our initial funding into Pacific Springboard in late 2016, and brought on another strong solid partner with JLM Financial, led by our new partners Larry Meyer and Trey Owen.
By 2017 we had already begun negotiations with a medical service brand in the Urgent Care market and were pursuing a top entertainment based service brand. In 2017 we achieved the magic of what makes a new startup a reality, landing our first deal — FastMed Urgent Care. Following the closing of the deal, we also opened up our first FastMed branded clinic in Shanghai with our key Chinese partner Yosemite Clinic, which was founded and is led by our good friend and partner Dr. Keying Song.
We are thrilled with the progress of FastMed and are looking forward to bringing convenient, affordable and high quality urgent & family medical care to the neighborhoods of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens!
Additionally, in 2017 we were able to successfully close $1.5m of funding for the FastMed China business and $1.5m of additional funding into Pacific Springboard, and began to build out amazing teams to deliver on the promise. We are eager to land yet another big brand for China in 2018.
In mid-2017 I also reacquainted myself with Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that truly came of age by the end of 2017. This new research ended up dovetailing with my continued research in two aspects of my youngest daughter’s condition of Down Syndrome: inclusion education for K-12 and medical interventions to ameliorate the negative health effects of people with Down Syndrome having a third 21st chromosome.
How that all ties together is the topic of another post and future posts in 2018, but expect to see significant engagement from me on achieving progress on human health and inclusion education leveraging blockchain and crypto assets. It’s time to change the game on these fronts.
