Our speaker will be Jeff McElroy. Many of you know Jeff as a member of our IAB. Jeff has also started a number of highly successful high tech companies. Presently he is a principal of Bang! Technologies which specializes in helping entrepreneurs start high tech companies. Jeff is a good speaker and has had a number of interesting experiences that he will talk about. Jeff was a student here in the 1980s. At that time he persuaded Prof Hillborn in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department to let himself and another student do an Individual Study class to build a “car” to compete in the IEEE SoutheastCON hardware contest. This was our first entry into that contest which later became the basis for the capstone project in both the Electrical and the Computer Engineering programs. Following graduation one of his first companies was formed to develop a cell phone assistant using voice recognition. The basic idea was that you could use your phone as a personal secretary. For example you could ask your phone to “call Joe Smith” and it would look up the number and make the connection (this was 25 years ago, long before the iphone) or you could ask it to make a note of something said during the conversation so you wouldn’t forget it.