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Feature Article
America’s Techno-Laureate
He set out to save 40 million lives by the age of 40, and may have accomplished his goal. Scott Redmond, a San Francisco-based start-up executive and “Venture Solutionist”, is regularly sought out by major companies and investors to lead and engineer revolutionary projects in the fields of technology, media, environment and science. He is known for his ability to visualize, architect and deliver cutting-edge developments for global markets, problems and needs. Redmond holds many seminal core patents for his inventions, most of which are geared to the development of products and tools that improve lives. Through his ground-breaking innovations and astonishing productivity, he demonstrates a superhero-like ability to see the big picture and deliver results that tangibly enhance the way people experience their world.
A senior tech executive who is also a product designer with many issued U.S. and foreign patents, Redmond has received numerous awards and accolades for innovations that revolutionize human process. As a writer, he is published in a variety of media. As a subject, he has been covered in over 200 newspaper, radio, TV and magazine stories, articles, cover stories and features. His inventions are so forward-thinking, some might even say he designs and builds the future. Take for example the human mobility system that he invented: it eliminates cars and allows people to fly using sustainable energy from a global green energy grid. It may sound crazy, but Redmond‘s patent overcame an established NASA patent when he showed the U.S. Patent Office an actual unit in flight. His inventions and innovations are numerous, diverse and sometimes mind-boggling, and they all pave the way to deliver the future.
Redmond’s recent projects have focused on green, sustainable and new energy. As with most of his enterprises, his work is at the forefront of the current green and sustainable energy trends. Over the last 18 years, Redmond has developed a process to rapidly design and build green, sustainable self-powered modern homes. His greater objective is to reduce the toxicity of modern living by up to 75%. One such project is the NowHouse™, a modern, affordable, green and digitally integrated demo home. "The NowHouse was conceived to give consumers and builders alike a fully functional example of the advances that have taken place in home construction," says Redmond. The stylish, modern, high-tech home was designed from safe advanced green and sustainable materials in a highly integrated manner and featured the best digital accoutrements. The first demo was built in the San Francisco Giants Stadium in 2004 and donated to Mayor Gavin Newsom for use by the San Francisco community. The two-story, 2400 square foot structure has since been lifted onto wheels, pushed onto a barge, sailed down the bay to Candlestick Park, hauled across its very own bridge and mounted on a permanent foundation to become the Hunters Point community center.
Other green projects on Redmond’s resume include Clever Homes, a green pre-fabricated home company he founded, which has been featured in more media than most competitors in the industry. He also developed the Better Homes & Gardens America’s Home project featured as a series on the Discovery Home Channel. More recently, Redmond was the Project Director for the Green Hill Home Project, a national leading education program for air quality and CO2-reduced homes. The Green Hill Home Project was created for educational seminars, training, media demonstrations and workshops in cities across America and around the world. The project is a showcase, for the public and industry, of the latest building technologies for modern, green and zero-energy living. In another example of innovative leadership, Redmond developed the Nexus Array micro-generation sustainable energy plant, a sustainable home power generation system capable of producing energy around the clock. The Nexus Array system provides a 100% uptime, intermittency-free, integrated power station for the home or neighborhood. It is environmentally friendly and low-maintenance, designed to survive all types of adverse situations from extreme weather to California's fires and earthquakes.
Redmond has a long history of expertise in energy science and its practical applications, and takes a proactive approach to setting hydrogen energy policy. He authored the core hydrogen energy transport patents and secured major grants from the Department of Energy via congressional action in the Iraq war bill. His patented methods, if put into action, could eliminate the need for gasoline in the world, and thus obliterate a major cause of war and toxic chemicals polluting the earth. For one customer group, Redmond developed an innovative, plug-and-play hydrogen energy solution which is capable of powering a broad range of electricity-based consumer and commercial devices, as well as automotive transport, and eliminates the need for any specialized power delivery infrastructure (patent is pending).
America’s techno-laureate is currently working on a low-cost, modern electric car with a novel battery system which will be entered in the new international Automotive X Prize contest. Once the logistics are figured out, he will post them for free to the world on the internet. This mix of ingenuity and genuine camaraderie with his fellow humans is what makes Scott Redmond a rare breed. With no fear of failure, he truly exemplifies the saying “If there’s a will, there’s a way”. Yet he remains conscientiously sensitive of his impact and footprint on the world around him.
While the brilliant Nikola Tesla is Redmond’s biggest inspiration to date, he credits his parents and modest upbringing for his socially and environmentally-conscious work approach. His father, a forest firefighter and ranger, taught him from an early age the value of trees and how to protect and respect your environment. These values are reflected in Redmond’s projects to this day. Redmond got his start as product designer in his parents’ garage where he assembled myriad gadgets and began studying the process of inventing things, putting their pieces together and making them work. His parents purchased a small projector on which Redmond could play animated cartoon reels. Redmond taped some wax paper over an empty refrigerator cardboard box, placed the projector inside, and invited the neighborhood kids to sit in his garage and watch the “giant TV”. Not surprisingly, the invention was an instant success with the neighborhood children. Even more successful and infinitely more formative was the day a car occupied the garage. Without space for the neighbors to sit and watch the makeshift television, Redmond decided he could make the experience more intimate and intense. He placed the projector outside the box this time, and for a nickel, let the kids one at a time go sit inside the box and experience the cartoon from the inside. The feedback was thrilling and the experience was Redmond’s first invention in virtual reality.
“I realized, the deeper you put people inside media, the more excited they get about it,” he says of the experience. Since that moment in early childhood, he never stopped mulling over how to make a box that could also be a movie. This first, rudimentary idea of virtual reality eventually became one of his first patents for the Digital Environment System. It is the core of the Sun Microsystems CAVE systems, used as military immersion trainers and featured as the “HoloDeck™” on the Star Trek television series. Redmond’s virtual reality patent was also leveraged for Oliver Stone’s “Wild Palms”. In the sci-fi miniseries produced in the early 1990’s, three-dimensional animated images are projected in living rooms around the world and become a new sort of disruptive television. This type of Immersive 3D can now be seen in Microsoft and Google Earth 3D online mapping and Sony Playstation “Home” systems.
As technology evolved, Redmond realized there were ways to implement the ideas he had visualized or dreamed about. He also understood that investors would fund his dreams if they represented worthy objectives that would help improve the world. Redmond pushed his Virtual Reality dreams a step further after seeing the film “Fantastic Voyage”. In this 1966 science-fiction story featuring Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch, a submarine full of scientists is shrunken to microscopic size and then injected into the blood stream of a dying diplomat. The scientists then use lasers and other tools from the inside of the body to save the diplomat and help avert an international crisis. The film inspired Redmond to target his Virtual Reality patents on scientific objectives. He felt that with enough data, doctors and researchers could simulate and visualize a disease like cancer from the inside of the body and, by running mock tests, reach a cure much faster. Thus came the development of simulation technology for cancer efficacy studies. This immersive visualization technology is now used to train surgeons through complex surgeries, and has been employed by large companies to accelerate and improve product design and employee training in fields like farming, retail, and auto and aircraft manufacturing.
A technological and scientific savant, Scott Redmond is a member of that small group of individuals with extraordinary and very specialized cognitive skills. But like superheroes, geniuses have their Kryptonite. For Redmond, his disability appeared in a peculiar form of dyslexia. One of his clients, fascinated by Redmond’s incredible capacity to comprehend and analyze large-scale complex processes, offered to pay for a study of his brain. Redmond participated in research at multiple medical universities and underwent brain-mapping and other cognitive neuro-scientific testing. The results concluded that he suffered from a type of audio dyslexia about numbers. He is unable to aurally process numbers, sequences of things, times or time spans, and must manage numbers in a visual context. To overcome this obstacle, he has invented “organic math”, a new way to experience mathematical concepts which some have adopted as a new way to teach math.
“Almost everyone who has dyslexia has an accompanying “super power”” says Redmond. His “super power”: one of the highest measured spatial reasoning and rapid perceptual skill sets the researchers had measured in the U.S.. Not satisfied with this gift, Redmond has spent the years since his diagnosis researching and training himself on how to improve and maximize his special capacities. His self-training has paid off, particularly for his investors: the productive inventor is now able to process and construct complex patent-awarded systems much more quickly and efficiently than ever before.
Redmond’s cognitive super-abilities and his excellence at problem-solving have allowed him to lead a successful career as a launch CEO, project leader and self-defined “Venture Solutionist”. He boasts an impressive track record for developing new and recovered technologies from multiple disciplines into commercially viable products for industrial, commercial and military uses. Redmond’s multi-disciplinary training, education and experience includes the fields of material science, chemistry, electronics, management, systems, networking, intellectual property management, media technologies and applied science. Redmond has become an expert in the life cycle of an idea or startup project. Over his career, he has done it all: generating an initial idea --whether from his own technology or that of others--, securing intellectual property, gathering talent, raising money and developing companies, Redmond has taken dozens of revolutionary companies and products from idea to launch. He appears ready to leap with neurons firing at whatever daring clients or investors will bring to his plate next.
Utilizing proprietary conceptual development methodologies, Redmond and his team deliver projects that few others are able to bring to fruition. “The management of products, projects and businesses from concept to completion is my specialty,” he says. Whether the challenge is developing a visionary concept into an artfully designed product, marketing and launching an innovative start-up business, or producing a spectacular experience for several thousand attendees, Redmond seems to find the most novel and productive path to results. He describes his work approach as a partnership with his clients, to which he applies his multi-disciplinary expertise with the objective of designing and delivering the most innovative and efficient solutions. Creativity and productivity mixed with a laser focus on the big picture let him chart the path to success for any concept and create high value for a low cost.
This approach seems to work. Over the past decade, Redmond has been at the forefront of sweeping digital media advances. One of his many, well-known, patented technologies is the digital environment system, used as the core of the Sun Microsystems CAVE systems. Following in this vein of media-related innovations, Redmond co-founded a company which in 2000 provided the internet’s most advanced infrastructure to date for the delivery of full-screen, on-demand video and audio solutions. This advance revolutionized the broadcasting industry and Redmond received wide acclaim for his software-based tools. Another of Redmond’s widely acclaimed products is the particle broadcast system, the first all digital web-to-television full-screen, global broadcasting technology. The particle broadcast system breaks data into particles like water and “sprays” them across the internet to be called for as needed and through the fastest path possible. This technology is known for being the first design to particulate media for “scatter-and-reassemble” processing in order to effectively alleviate web congestion and provide extensive security.
Redmond invented the digital supply chain and device message broadcast technology, which allows systems to automatically talk to each other. That patent overwrote the patent of a major oil company. He also invented some of the first, and smallest, wearable computers and multi-media PDA’s, as well as the first PC-based 360-degree rotational flight simulator. He has produced and launched over 40 products, ranging in complexity and impact but all focused on launching us into the future. At Xensys Studios, a company he founded to produce large-scale projects using digital human management technology, he was renowned for the seamless design and management of major projects totaling over 6 million attendees. Over 25 years ago, Redmond started his first company, Clever Industries, with the foretelling objective to focus on creating breakthrough products that improve the human experience.
Among Redmond's proudest accomplishments is founding Production Works in 1978, an organization dedicated to empowering the “Future Today”. Redmond remains the inspiration behind Production Works, recruiting leaders in international business, government, design, engineering and education to collaborate on novel efforts and forward-thinking projects.
While remaining productive with inventions and product launches, Redmond tries to devote at least 15% of his time and income to community service. He manages a family foundation which focuses on three target areas dear to his heart: children’s issues, social change and medical issues. He has built an internet learning education center for the Children’s Garden of California, a center for abused children. He also offers workshops on creative visualization for inner city kids where he teaches that everyone has the same superpower as he does and that you simply must focus on it to use it. As co-producer of redevelopment, Redmond helped establish a major public events program for Ft. Mason Center in San Francisco which repurposed the center from military to public use. Redmond volunteers at the local crisis center and has worked with several established non-profit organizations like March of Dimes, American Red Cross, Planetree Health Resource Center, American Cancer Society, Amnesty International and others.
Scott Redmond has dedicated his career to developing technologies that help people lead better, more flexible and empowered lives, with a focus on clean technology and a respect for the environment and his fellow man. He seems to welcome the most challenging ideas and thrives on transforming dreams – his own or others’ -- into impressive reality. Over the past 20 years, his projects and inventions have led the way for major influential changes in our technology and society. When asked what makes his projects or approach different, Redmond responds “You can expect the extraordinary!” Based on his track record, whatever Scott Redmond puts his super-human neurons to next will no doubt be some incredible disruptive technology with extraordinary results.
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