There’s Silicon Valley in San Francisco and Silicon Alley in New York City, but tucked away in the Pacific Northwest, Portland’s Silicon Forest draws its own oddball collection of makers, tinkerers and visionaries. In our new video series, Got it Made, join host Ezra Cimino-Hurt as he meets some of the unique people who marry cutting edge tech with innovative ideas in the city “where young people go to retire.” And believe us, they’re doing Portland proud.
Meet Cera Crockett of DevisePDX, a concept development firm that does everything from prototyping, to pattern engineering, to global material sourcing, to hosting hands-on workshops. Their clients are just as diverse, with representation from Fortune 500 companies, local designers, and first-time entrepreneurs.
So what exactly is a concept development company? In essence, Cera told us, her clients come to DevisePDX with an end product in mind, and her team has the thrilling job of reverse-engineering a solution. “Every single product is so new and so different that I get to be putting a puzzle together backwards,” she said.
One of her most recent projects comes from Nike, which charged DevisePDX with the task of creating an action figure sporting one of the company’s signature Dri-FIT jackets. Not only did Crockett create a miniature Dri-FIT hoodie, but she also took tiny details into consideration — everything from the color to the seam tape in the hood — to ensure that her product was absolutely perfect.
She also told us about a project from Gatorade in 2014, which involved an insulated soccer training bag. DevisePDX took this concept from illustration to a prototype, and finally, to physical samples, which were tested in the 2015 World Cup by both the Brazil and U.S. national soccer teams.
How’s that for creative problem solving?
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.