Philly tech-sters bring home honors

How cool to see young, Philly-spawned technologists earning honors for their good work.

Earlier this week, local guys Ari Weinstein and Conrad Kramer were part of the team honored at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference with the prestigious Design Award. And Cherry Hill native David Nghiem is still basking in the glow of his recent Hackathon win at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC.

Weinstein and Kramer are developers of Workflow, a popular (and now award-winning) productivity app released last December then  fast landing at #1 on the App Store. For good reasons, as spelled out in the App Store description: "Workflow is your personal automation tool, enabling you to drag and drop any combination of actions to create powerful workflows for your iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Workflow includes over 200 actions, including those for Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Music, Photos, Camera, Reminders, Safari, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote and iCloud Documents, to name a few."

Practical uses include making  PDFs from Safari, sending a message that includes the last screen shot you took, scoring directions instantly  to the nearest  coffee shop and creating  a home screen icon to  call your special one with a single click.

Hardware developer Nghiem earned his Hackathon first place victory for the aptly (and comically) named "Stove-Top Sensor for Paranoid, Stubborn Older Parents."  Inspired by his engineer dad's memory loss after a car crash, Nghiem created a sensor that can answer the troubling question "Did I walk out of the house without shutting down the stove?"  To ease dad's stress, he might send a text message to the web-connected sensor, which would then detect a stove's temperature, determine if a burner was on or off and feed back a "yes" or "no" response.

Along with his $5,000 cash award from Twilio, a cloud communications company based in San Francisco, Nghiem  won a trip to the company's headquarters. He's returned with "some investor interest. They want to see the next prototype."  If he can demonstrate his product holds up well in prolonged use, he could win support from appliance makers as well as kitchen accessory producers.  Next move: a fundraising campaign on crowdsupply.com.