Video: Avnet Express' Drive for Innovation Celebrates Six Months of Inspiring People and Technology

PHOENIX and SAN FRANCISCO, March 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovation: dead in America? Hardly. After six months of driving around the nation and interviewing more than 500 engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, educators and students, our research shows quite the opposite -- innovation is thriving in America.

Avnet Express' Drive for Innovation – a year-long, cross-country road trip focused on uncovering innovation in the electronics industry, is celebrating six months of uncovering inspiring people and innovation in technology. Now at the half-way point of this exciting journey, we're pausing to note just a few of the innovation stories from our log book. They range from the sublime and sophisticated to the simple and powerful:

• Nanoforge, a startup company emerging from Duke University in N.C. is bringing to market copper nanowires using a low-cost, high-volume production process. Nanoforge's nanowires can be used in displays, solar cells and other applications and promises to lower cost and upset conventional application assumptions.
• Nextreme Thermal Solutions is making small, inexpensive devices to harvest energy from thermal differentials. Clamp the prototype onto a homeowner's sink's hot- and cold-water pipes and it generates enough power to illuminate a small light bulb.
• Two buddies, one a hockey coach, the other an embedded designer, are working together to make a helmet-mounted shock sensor able to send a constant stream of data to iPad and iPhone apps for coaches and parents.
• When Rockwell Collins teamed up with Lectronix, in Lansing, Mich. to build more effective and compact communications systems for police squad cars, Lectronix's chief executive officer put his experience as a pilot to great use in the design.
• To encourage and nurture engineering and computer-science students at the University of Massachusetts, administrators and professors have created a crash pad of sorts. In the subterranean M5 maker-space, students have access to space, parts, computers, software, probes and snacks to work on school projects and just be technologically creative.

Since July 2011, the Chevrolet Volt has been making periodic stops throughout the journey, where Fuller, the driver of the Chevrolet Volt, has been blogging and posting video updates about his experiences.   The multi-faceted program is anchored by a website that features content from the road trip, a drive tracker and an interactive map that highlights the tour as well as games and prizes to fuel community engagement.

Avnet Express gives design engineers and purchasing professionals online access to the world's largest catalog of electronic component products, which tops five million parts. Avnet Express offers parametric searching capabilities and the ability to upload a bill of materials (BOM) for easier sourcing of products and a consistent global platform of localized content. The site can be accessed in nine languages and 13 currencies.

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SOURCE UBM Electronics