Air taxis in Nashville | Winners of PIT’s Tech 50 Awards | Navigating sponsorship deals

Healium wins CES Innovation award

COLUMBIA, MO—Virtual reality app company Healium has won an innovation award from CES ahead of its January show. Healium is a software engine between consumer wearables and spatial computing environments that turns biometric data into augmented, virtual or mixed realities. Instead of just tracking the data that comes from your wearables as a number, Healium personifies the data into a 3D object with which you can interact and train.

Air taxis in Nashville

NASHVILLE, TN—A group of researchers at Vanderbilt are working with NASA to develop “air taxis” that could pick up passengers from the Nashville suburbs and transport them downtown in mere minutes. Vanderbilt computer science professor Gautam Biswas is developing the new mode of transportation as part of a $2.5 million project with NASA.

Winners of Tech 50 Awards

PITTSBURGH—The Pittsburgh Technology Council recently hosted its annual Tech 50 Awards. Honors are not only given to tech companies who have reached big milestones but are also bestowed upon companies that show promise as upcoming leaders in innovation. You can see the winners and finalists of each award here.

An app for student athletes to navigate sponsorship deals

KANSAS CITY, MO and LINCOLN, NE—Artisan Technology Group and Opendorse, a sports tech firm, have joined forces to create a platform that allows student athletes to navigate sponsorship deals. This platform, called Monitor, allows brands and fans to discover athletes and pitch opportunities for the athletes to leverage their name, image and likeness.