HaptX Announces Release of DK2 Virtual Reality Gloves

HaptX Announces Release of DK2 Virtual Reality Gloves

HaptX (previously known as AxonVR LLC) announced prototypes for virtual reality gloves back in 2017. After years of researching, developing, and prototyping, they have finally succeeded, and announced the release of their HaptX Gloves DK2.

These gloves are top of the line technology, providing realistic tough feedback for users. The design uses microfluidic technology to precisely displace skin on a user’s hands and fingers which simulates touch. HaptX promises these gloves deliver industrial-grade performance for professional applications with endless possibilities. Alternative haptic gloves are limited to vibration and force feedback, limiting precision and functionality. The DK2 gloves use more than 130 points of tactile feedback per hand, providing the realism required for training and simulation, as well as robotics. Haptic gloves are already in use around the world for training, simulating, and controlling robots from a distance – but with the increased precision and realism from the DK2 gloves, these uses could soon be expanded. 

Are you developing new technology? Did you know your development work could be eligible for the R&D Tax Credit and you can receive up to 14% back on your expenses? Even if your development isn’t successful your work may still qualify for R&D credits (i.e. you don’t need to have a patent to qualify). To find out more, please contact a Swanson Reed R&D Specialist today or check out our free online eligibility test.

Who We Are:

Swanson Reed is one of the U.S.’ largest Specialist R&D tax advisory firms. We manage all facets of the R&D tax credit program, from claim preparation and audit compliance to claim disputes.

Swanson Reed regularly hosts free webinars and provides free IRS CE and CPE credits for CPAs. For more information please visit us at www.swansonreed.com/webinars or contact your usual Swanson Reed representative.

Little Caesars Testing Out a Plant-Based Pizza with Impossible Foods

Testing Plant-Based R&D

After investing a lot of time and money in Research and Development (R&D), Impossible Foods has created the long-awaited meat-free sausage, and Little Caesars, the pizza chain, will be the first company to jump on the bandwagon and try its hand at plant-based proteins with its “Impossible Supreme” pizza.

Impossible Foods is the same company responsible for the plant-based Impossible Burger.

The new vegan sausage made its exclusive debut on May 20, 2019, as a topping on Little Caesars’ $12 pizza alongside green peppers, caramelized onions and mushrooms. It is currently available in 58 restaurants in four different locations including Naples, FL, Yakima, WA, Myers, FL, and Albuquerque, NM.

Little Caesars said it will test the product for four weeks, and if it’s successful, they’ll decide if they’ll roll it out to more markets around the nation. The pizza company started paying more attention to the plant-based protein trend in 2018 after realizing more meat-eaters were switching from animal-based products to vegetarian alternatives.

So, in an effort to wrap itself in its mission of attracting carnivores and vegetarians alike, Little Caesars partnered with Impossible Foods in October 2018 to create a meal boasting a plant-based protein.

“These kind of flexitarians have been growing in nature,” Ed Gleich, Little Caesars’ Chief Innovation Officer, told CNN Business. “They’re not hardcore ‘vegans or vegetarians,’ but they’re more adventurous in their choices. The Impossible Supreme pizza is designed to appeal to meat eaters, and isn’t vegan (it’s topped with cheese, along with the fake sausage and other items).

”At first, Impossible Foods proposed the plant-based beef they were using on their Burgers. However, Little Caesar told them that most clients order sausage-topped pizzas than beef-topped pizzas, so Impossible Foods went back to the drawing board and come up with a sausage alternative.

“Normally companies want to sell you the product they have,” said Gleich. “Not a product they’ve got to get out and put some R&D time in, and put resources against and develop.”

2019 Innovation Rankings By State

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The United States is usually accredited as one of the most innovative nations in the world. However, that does not mean the country’s technological and innovation quests are divided equally around the nation.

Burgeoning technology and innovative concepts usually find their inception in major regions such as San Francisco and New York, while middle tier states in the nation try to play catch-up.

With the United States predicted to spend approximately $581 billion on Research and Development (R&D) in 2019, and New York City recently no longer under consideration for Amazon’s 2nd headquarters, finance and research website WalletHub recently published an enumeration ranking the 50 U.S. States and District of Columbia in terms of innovation rate.

It came as no surprise that the least innovative states on the list included the Midwest states, usually ignored by leading tech firms in favor of metropolitan areas that have historically enticed top tech talent and major tech firms.

In order to come up with the rankings, Wallet Hub based its findings on multiple metrics divided into two different categories: innovation environment and human capital.

The human capital category includes units such as projected STEM job demand in 2020, the share of STEM professionals, and participation and performance in high school level science and math exams.

The innovation environment category, on the other hand, included each state’s tax-friendliness, number of jobs in new companies, level of research and development spending, and every state’s share of firms that are tech oriented.

Below are the most and least innovative states in the U.S. according to WalletHub:

Most innovative states

  1. Massachusetts
  2. Maryland
  3. Washington
  4. District of Columbia
  5. California
  6. Colorado
  7. Virginia
  8. Utah
  9. Delaware
  10. Oregon

Least innovative states

  1. Oklahoma
  2. Nebraska
  3. Hawaii
  4. Kentucky
  5. Iowa
  6. Tennessee
  7. Arkansas
  8. West Virginia
  9. Louisiana
  10. Mississippi

The Best and Worst CyberStates for 2017

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The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) is a leading not-for-profit technology association. Their 18th edition of the Cyberstates report aims to provide a representation of the size and scope of the US tech sector. The report analyses the industry and workforce by state and uses metrics such as tech patents, venture capital funding, business establishments and job postings.

Here is a summary of the results by state:

Tech Industry Employment

There were around 6.9 million US tech workers in 2016, up from 6.7 million in 2015.

Top 5

  1. California
  2. Texas
  3. New York
  4. Florida
  5. Massachusetts

Bottom 5

  1. Wyoming
  2. South Dakota
  3. Alaska
  4. North Dakota
  5. Montana

Tech Patents Granted

Top 5

  1. California
  2. Texas
  3. Washington
  4. New York
  5. Massachusetts

Bottom 5

  1. Alaska
  2. South Dakota
  3. Mississippi
  4. Montana
  5. West Virginia

Innovation Score Per Capita

The number of tech startups and new tech establishments grew to 36,508 in 2015. Many were IT services covering data processing, hosting and web search portals.

Top 5

  1. California
  2. Massachusetts
  3. Washington
  4. Colorado
  5. New Jersey

Bottom 5

  1. West Virginia
  2. Mississippi
  3. Arkansas
  4. South Dakota
  5. Ohklahoma

Tech Gross State Produce (GSP) As A Percent of Total State Product (in billions)

Top 5

  1. Oregon
  2. Washington
  3. Massachusetts
  4. California
  5. Colorado

Bottom 5

  1. Wyoming
  2. Louisiana
  3. Oklahoma
  4. Mississippi
  5. West Virginia

Average Tech Industry Wages Rank

The average tech sector wage was 105 percent higher than the average national wage of $53,130 in 2016.

Top 5

  1. California
  2. Washington
  3. Massachusetts
  4. New Jersey
  5. New York

Bottom 5

  1. South Dakota
  2. Mississippi
  3. Wyoming
  4. West Virginia
  5. Montana

The full report is available at Cyberstates.

US tech companies undertaking qualified activities can apply for the state and/or federal R&D tax credit. To check whether your projects meet the necessary criteria, contact a Swanson Reed representative today.

U.S. Universities Spending More on Research and Development

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U.S. universities are spending more and more on R&D these days. In 2015 alone, colleges and universities spent a combined $68.8 billion on research and development with the top 20 colleges accounting for 30% of that.

To discover the universities spending the most in research and development, 24/7 Wall St. assessed R&D expenditure by university for the 2015 fiscal year with data from the National Science Foundation. Of the 1,871 major colleges and universities reviewed, 10 schools spent more than $1 billion on R&D.

Top 10 Universities for R&D Expenditure

  1. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland
    • Annual R&D spend: $2.31 billion
  2. University of Michigan
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.37 billion
  3. University of Washington
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.18 billion
  4. University of California, San Francisco
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.13 billion
  5. University of California, San Diego
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.10 billion
  6. University of Wisconsin – Madison
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.07 billion
  7. Duke University in Raleigh, North Carolina
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.04 billion
  8. Stanford University in Stanford, California
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.02 billion
  9. University of California, Los Angeles
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.02 billion
  10. Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts
    • Annual R&D spend: $1.01 billion

Contact Us

If your company is conducting R&D through a local university or college, you may be eligible for a higher R&D tax credit rate. Contact a Swanson Reed specialist to find out more information.

How Does Your State Rank on the Innovation Scale?

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Innovation Is Key

Innovation is crucial to sustainable economic growth, but for innovation to occur businesses must have both the incentive and the capacity to invest.

As innovation is key to the United States’ economy as a whole, many U.S. states are showing off while others are falling short when it comes to patents, R&D, venture capital and academics.

So which states are excelling in innovation and which ones are lacking, you ask?

Patents

The top states in patents per population include:

  1. Wisconsin
  2. Washington
  3. Texas
  4. Utah
  5. California
  6. Massachusetts

The bottom five patented states include:

  1. Alaska
  2. Mississippi
  3. Tennessee
  4. West Virginia
  5. Wyoming

Venture Capital

The top states for venture capital are:

  1. Massachusetts
  2. California
  3. Utah
  4. Washington
  5. Colorado

The lowest are:

  1. Arkansas
  2. Alaska
  3. Hawaii
  4. Wyoming
  5. Iowa
  6. South Dakota

R&D Spending

The leaders in R&D spending are:

  1. Delaware
  2. Michigan
  3. California
  4. Connecticut
  5. Massachusetts

The states that spent the least on R&D include:

  1. Arkansas
  2. Wyoming
  3. Louisiana
  4. Alaska
  5. Mississippi

Academics

As for academics, the top states include:

  1. New Mexico
  2. Maryland
  3. Rhode Island
  4. Massachusetts
  5. Alabama

The lowest academic rankings were for:

  1. Louisiana
  2. Arkansas
  3. Delaware
  4. Wyoming
  5. Nevada

If you are a U.S. based company conducting R&D you may be eligible for the federal and/or state research tax credit. Please contact a Swanson Reed representative to find out further information.

Silicon Valley Company Opens Seattle Office

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Snowflake Computing recently announced the opening of an engineering office in Bellevue, Seattle, expanding away from its Silicon Valley headquarters.

Run by former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia, Snowflake is a cloud-based data analytics platform that uses SQL to organize and analyze business data. The platform was ranked the number one cloud data warehouse by Gigaom Research, receiving an impressive score of 4.85 out of 5.

Snowflake plans to hire up to 15 engineers at its new Seattle office in 2017 and expects to eventually expand to around 100. Nationally, Seattle has become a central hub for cloud technology, with companies like Microsoft and Amazon placing headquarters there.

Snowflake illustrates how thinking long-term and investing in R&D is critical in the fast-moving tech sector. In 2015, the company raised $45 million in funding for R&D and business development. Muglia stated that data warehousing was, “Ripe for disruptive innovation, driven by the shift to cloud computing and the explosion of customer interest in data insights.” Snowflake’s vision was to, “Reimagine the data warehouse for the cloud era with a completely new product built from the cloud up that doesn’t require retooling and retraining.”

Companies like Snowflake are putting pressure on even the largest companies. They outperformed Google’s BigQuery and Microsoft’s Azure SQL for the title of Best Cloud Data Warehouse. They also price matched Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service, stating that price was a key consideration for technology officers. “All organizations are keen to harness the insights derived from more and more data… It all comes down to technology and the cost of storing that data.”

Today, many billions of dollars are being invested in R&D by technology companies in order to stay relevant. Alphabet Inc, Intel and Microsoft spent over $12 billion each on R&D in 2016 for projects like Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car technology. Just a decade ago, the list of highest R&D spending was dominated by automotive and healthcare companies.

Corporate spending on R&D in the US is at its highest ever. A study by Bloomberg found that large companies that spent more on R&D got the largest returns with faster market capitalization growth. It also discovered that older companies that invested in continuous innovation performed better over the long-term.

Want to benefit from the federal R&D tax credit? Contact Swanson Reed R&D Tax Specialists today for an eligibility assessment.