GCOI 2015 – Celebrating Arizona’s Technology Community

For those of us that are part of the Arizona Technology community, the official kickoff of holiday and end of year celebrations is the Governor’s Celebration of Innovation, or GCOI.  A who’s who of key people from startups to large aerospace firms gather at the convention center to recognize students, academicians, companies, and individuals who have had a significant impact on the State’s high tech industries.  This is always a special evening for PADT because many of the attendees, and usually a few of the award winners, are our customers.

In fact, for 2015 we are proud to congratulate the following long time PADT customers who were recognized last night:

• Medtronic Tempe Campus for Innovator of the Year, Large Company
• Raytheon Missile Systems for winning the Pioneering Award
• ASU’s Michael Crow, the OneNeck IT Services People’s Choice Lifetime Achievement Award winner (ASU is a large PADT customer… so we feel Dr. Crow is our customer as well.)

You can find a full list of winners and some great pictures  from the event in Tishin Donkersley’s article at AZ Tech Beat.

This fantastic event is put on by the Arizona Technology Council and the Arizona Commerce Authority.  For those that were there: Mac & Cheese bar FTW.

About the Awards

As in past years, PADT was honored to be able to fabricate the awards that were handed out. This year we used the overall design for the event, created by Atom, as our starting point. We used our Stratasys FDM printers to make the stair steps and “tech guy silhouette” The graphics are then printed on large stickers that are adhered to the back of an Arizona’ish shaped piece of plexiglass.

The PADT Booth

This year we decided to not bring a 3D Printer and instead focus on parts made on a wider variety of printers. The hit for visitors were the metal parts that were made on ConceptLaser Direct Laser Melting systems.  In addition we got to talk about the great work that our product development team did for GlobalStar on the Spot devices and Orthosensor for their intelligent orthopedic sensors. We even had a few simulation people come by to talk ANSYS.

Hopefully you had a chance to talk with Andrew Miller, Kathryn Pesta, or Mario Vargas. If you missed us and want to know more about PADT, what we do, or the Arizona Technology Community, reach out and we will be happy to chat.