Palouse Exhibition Shows Off High-Tech Kin The Farming Region’s Hidden Brain Trust Struts Its Innovative, Futuristic Stuff Today In Pullman
If you meet Kurt Kimberling any time soon, you might ask him how work on the Starship Enterprise is going.
A project engineer for D8, an aluminum mold manufacturer, Kimberling is converting a computerized rendering into a mold that can eventually crank out hundreds of 16-inch models of the “Star Trek” spaceship.
Working with about 30 other employees in Potlatch, Idaho, he’s one of dozens of workers in the Palouse’s all-but-invisible, high-tech trade.
Starting in garages and basements, often with ideas spawned at the two local universities, the region’s tech-based companies have grown enough to support the Palouse Technology Expo that continues today in Pullman Industrial Park.
A brainchild of Schweitzer Engineering Labs founder Ed Schweitzer, the two-day exposition is a way of moving some of the area’s most innovative crops from the back fields to the roadside.
“I was slightly aware that there were lots of small businesses that received no notoriety, and I was also interested in what businesses were here, developing and growing in the region,” Schweitzer said on Friday. “I was surprised.”
The businesses are a good fit with the University of Idaho and Washington State University, Schweitzer said, and they tend to be good neighbors.
“It’s a very clean and desirable growth that’s based on people’s scientific understanding and their creativity and their inventiveness,” he said.
Schweitzer’s own company, which designs and produces protective relays to monitor electrical systems, has grown in 15 years to 228 employees and more than $25 million in annual sales.
The other 20 or so exhibitors at the expo range from a WSU engineering club - the Robotics Research Organization - to Advanced Hardware Architectures, a high-end semiconductor company.
Decagon Devices Inc. started in a Fisk Street basement as Gaylon Campbell, a soil scientist, developed a method of measuring water in soil. The company now has 23 employees and more than $2 million in annual sales, marketing a machine that measures how much water is available for bacteria to spoil packaged food products.
“Anybody making a borderline perishable food uses our instrument,” said Tamsin Campbell, Decagon president.
Other companies on display include the Impressions digital video production company, Design West Architects and First Step Internet, a Moscow-based Internet service provider that brought e-mail and the World Wide Web to Colfax, Palouse, Potlatch and, next month, Garfield County.
, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO The Palouse Technology Expo runs today from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. To get there, follow the low-tech, hand-stenciled signs posted around Pullman.