Pyro-E: King of Prussia shop demos waste energy recovery technology “to do for human mobility what Steve Jobs did for human intelligence”

Pyro-E thinks it has found treasure in the equivalent of energy trash.

Founder Kevin Lu says his company has developed a technology that improves the efficiency of electric generation by turning waste heat into electricity. The technology Lu and his team are working on at Pyro-E involves a complex feat of mechanical engineering so the actual functionality could not be demonstrated at last night’s Philly Tech Meetup, but Lu did show off some of the system’s components while explaining the company’s plans to bring this technology to market.

“Our first strategy is to explore ways to improve existing systems,” Lu said, adding that one immediate goal is to improve the efficiency of fuel cell servers by 10 percent.

Lu said Pyro-E’s mid-term goal is to “attack the transportation market” by improving automobile exhaust recovery systems.

“The immediate goal is to improve about 5-15 percent efficiency for these cars,” Lu said. “One benefit is to reduce how our country’s reliance on foreign oil by improving the way we transport ourselves.”

Ultimately, Lu said Pyro-E hopes “to do for human mobility what Steve Jobs did for human intelligence.”

Curalate‘s CEO and cofounder Apu Gupta and marketing manager Brendan Lowry demonstrated the Pinterest analytics dashboard it launched in May that helps companies engage with Pinterest users who engage with their brand. The launch accompanied an announcement that it had secured $750,000 in seed funding, as Technically Philly reported.

“Interns would spend hours going back through and figuring out what was working [on Pinterest] and what was popular,” said Lowry. “Now with Curalate, we do that for you.”

Gupta said that Curalate is moving toward more sophisticated image analysis techniques in the future and added that the company had recently hired someone with expertise in computer vision.

Curalate also announced that it is hiring with an emphasis on “people with development-type backgrounds and sales-type backgrounds” and asked the Philly tech community to spread the word.

Unfortunately, what seemed to be a WiFi outage hindered the second half of the demo.

Curalate wasn’t the only one to have a demo snafu last night. Basho‘s Tom Santero, a presentation from out-of-market, attempted to demo the company’s Riak database using a rig of six Mac Minis to represent a network.

Santero explained that the database is a distributed, masterless system with persistent data storage that is scalable and resistant to failure due to its cluster-based design.

“Data you write to Riak is replicated three times,” Santero said. “This makes [Riak] durable in the event of failure.”

With a disclaimer that it’s quite difficult to demonstrate how a database works live, Santero showed how Riak was able to store one million values. As the computers were executing for loop command, Santero then attempted to simulate a disaster scenario by unplugging one of the Mac Minis.

“Live coding is fun,” Santero said, more than once, when he couldn’t get the demonstration to work in front of a crowd of more than 100 entrepreneurs, developers, and investors.

Basho, with four locations in the UK, San Francisco, Virginia, and Massachusetts, is hardly a Philly startup, but even so, the open-source, distributed database could have relevance to the application developers on hand at the event and throughout the community.