{"id":423997,"date":"2026-08-05T00:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T00:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/423997\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T00:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T00:16:10","slug":"mountain-view-tech-showcase-amazes-crowds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/423997\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountain View tech showcase amazes crowds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lasers, self-driving cars and chess-playing robots were on prominent display at Mountain View\u2019s 11th annual Technology Showcase on July 30, which gave residents a glimpse of the innovations being worked on throughout the city and exhibited resources they can use for their own purposes.<\/p>\n

More than 500 visitors flitted in and out of the free showcase<\/a> at Civic Center Plaza, co-hosted by the city and Mountain View Chamber of Commerce. Visitors could peruse 37 exhibits featuring dozens of interactive and demonstrative technologies, followed by a two-hour panel on artificial intelligence\u2019s uses for small businesses in the evening.<\/p>\n

\"PeopleHundreds of visitors attended the tech showcase in Mountain View. Photo by Michael Molcsan.<\/p>\n

There was a broad variety between the exhibits. NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center<\/a> brought stacks of a futuristic block known as \u201cvoxels\u201d and the machines that assemble them into structures in outer space. A Waymo was parked just across the street, showcasing the autonomous driving technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the plaza, visitors were challenged to a game of chess against smAiT\u2019s<\/a> social robots, and invited to engrave messages on metal with XTOOL\u2019s<\/a> laser cutters.<\/p>\n

To Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Peter Katz, the variety shows how much is going on across the city, from established companies to inventors working in their garages.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are still one of the centers of innovation,\u201d Katz said. \u201cWe are still an attractive hub to bring it in and export it to the world. We\u2019re a small city that changes the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AAn attendee asks the RB Labs humanoid robot a question at the tech showcase. Photo by Michael Molcsan.<\/p>\n

Grant Xu, a rising sophomore at Prospect High School, attended the showcase with Verilog-Meetup<\/a>, an educational group focused on teaching teenagers and children the basic principles of circuit boards. While he was there to present his own work on field programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, Xu said he was interested in seeing the other exhibits.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou get to present the cool stuff you made, and you get to see all the other cool stuff other people made,\u201d Xu said.<\/p>\n

As a hobby chess player, Xu was especially interested in smAiT\u2019s chess-playing robot. While he lost his match against it, he said he wasn\u2019t surprised, and appreciated the amount of effort and innovation in its creation.<\/p>\n

\"ASteven Schaadd of XTOOL demonstrates a laser engraver. Photo by Michael Molcsan.<\/p>\n

These interactions are why smAiT founder and CEO Fan Tan Smith was excited to bring the robots out to this event. She launched smAiT two years ago to manage the full lifecycle of robots as a workforce, everything from the manufacturing to the programming and fleet management. Along with its social robots, Smith said smAiT offers a hospitality robot and a security robot, performing tasks associated with those industries, such as reception work or patroling.<\/p>\n

Smith said the robots were launched about six months ago in businesses around Silicon Valley, including some in Mountain View, and they\u2019ve seen a big demand as businesses face a labor shortage and rising costs. At events like this, she\u2019s glad to see visitors interact with the robots, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s good to interact with people,\u201d Smith said. \u201cIn the end, it\u2019s to serve the people, so this is a great opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ANASA intern Mario Jerez stands next to the Autonomous Reconfigurable Mission Adaptive Digital Assembly System (ARMADAS) project during the tech showcase. Photo by Michael Molcsan.<\/p>\n

The showcase\u2019s panel featured representatives from LinkedIn and Intuit, along with Ryan Keenan, director at the educational platform DeepLearning.AI<\/a>, and Danny Barry, store manager of St. Stephens Green, located on Castro Street.<\/p>\n

The panelists discussed how people are interacting with AI, especially when it comes to running a business. Barry described an example of how he used AI to build a reservation tracker for his restaurant, catered to its specific needs. But they agreed users need to approach AI thoughtfully as a tool, not a replacement.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI can absolutely be there to help you, but if you lose sight of your individual point of view, your ideas, your core content, that\u2019s probably when you\u2019ve taken it too far,\u201d Judy Nam, vice president of small business marketing for LinkedIn, said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lasers, self-driving cars and chess-playing robots were on prominent display at Mountain View\u2019s 11th annual Technology Showcase on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[2080,712,88,90,89],"class_list":["post-423997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-centerpiece","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}