2015 Utah Innovation Awards: inventing a better future.

• Position: Cover story

Presented by Stoel Rives LLP and Utah Technology Council

By Utah Business editors

The late Steve Jobs once said, "I want to put a ding in the universe." A "ding" is one way to describe the lasting impact Jobs left on the world of technology and innovation through his Apple products. That's because Jobs understood that without innovation, the world would cease to move forward.

Many other pioneers of innovation have understood this as well, and that includes the inventors of the products and software for this year's Innovation Awards. These creators are helping to put the next "dings" in the universe, whether it be through a new form of testing doctors can use to diagnose diseases within minutes or a mobile app that allows credit union members to protect themselves against card fraud.

Thanks in part to these innovators, a better future for Utah and the world is certain. Please join Utah Business in recognizing and honoring these creators' unique inventions.

Enterprise Software, Cloud and Big Data

SaltStack Enterprise CloudOps by Saltstack

Imagine a world where you couldn't flawlessly binge-watch your favorite shows on Hulu or look up something on Wikipedia in a flash, That would be the reality without SaltStack Enterprise CloudOps, a software that's used for server automation, application configuration management and cloud orchestration at massive scale.

The software was designed specifically to accommodate the speed and scale of the modern cloud by automating data centers to house computing at scale and organize billions of moving parts and lines of code integral to making the Internet usable.

Many configuration management software companies can be considered "one trick ponies," but not SaltStack. The company also provides DevOps efficiency, IT operations orchestration and infrastructure automation,

SaltStack's software is used mainly behind the scenes to keep data centers running smoothly, and while many consumers of its services will never know what the software does for them, they can bet it will continue to bring innovation to the modern world of computing.

Blyncs by Blyncsy

As a home buyer, wouldn't it be nice to know how busy the street is that your new home is on? Or as a business owner, wouldn't it be nice to know how much traffic goes by your store each day? With Blyncs by Blyncsy, that's an easy possibility.

As people go about their days, Blyncs devices capture the movement of each person's electronic devices, performing a traffic study every second of every day in real time. By harnessing the power of Blyncsy's data and analytics, the big data of the traffic grid becomes more intelligent. Typically, traffic grids don't respond to the actual traffic on a road--they respond to average traffic over time. This does little to mitigate traffic congestion, but with Blyncs, these types of issues can be avoided.

That's because Blyncs captures more than 90 percent of the vehicles, pedestrians, commuters and bicyclists on the road each day. It is a radical innovation in the traffic-management space, providing real-time data of what Is actually occurring on local streets.

Honorable Mention: ActiveNet by ActiveNet Technologies

Life Science--BioTech

XCR by Fluoresentric, Inc.

With Fluoresentric's XCR technology, the ability for a doctor to test and confirm a patient's disease or a field clinician to detect Ebola within minutes of testing has become actuality.

The XCR technology was created to dramatically trim laboratory test times, reduce healthcare costs and deliver hyper-accurate molecular diagnostics testing at the point of care up to 10 times faster than previous testing methods.

The current industry standard for laboratory testing for pathogens such as Influenza and measles Is polymerase chain reaction (PCR), but this decades-old standard has numerous limitations. That's why the XCR technology utilizes a new approach to nucleic acid amplification testing (NAAT), which provides detection in less than five minutes with both DNA and RNA target nucleic acids.

It also eliminates amplification artifacts while dramatically reducing turnaround time, delivering a PCR-like clinical result while also lowering costs and using a smaller sample size than most existing methods require.

Cloud-based Genomic Interpretation Software by Tute Genomics

Every human has about three billion base pairs in his or her DNA--far too much data to analyze with a simple Excel spreadsheet. That's where Tute Genomics' cloud-based genomic interpretation software comes in.

The software helps to bring about precision...