Unsatisfied with the music-related apps on his new iPad, Spencer Salazar decided that he would make his own. That is how he came to create Auraglyph, an audio composition and design app for the Apple Inc. device. “The idea is to let people’s imaginations run wild in this musical world that has been created,” Salazar said of the app. Auraglyph features a stylus and handwriting recognition software to help users create graphic images and patterns on screen. The app then converts these images into music. It will become available on Apple’s app store this summer. Salazar is on the faculty of the school in the music technology program while working on his doctorate degree at Stanford University. Auraglyph is part of his dissertation. Salazar and the students showed off Auraglyph as part of the school’s Digital Arts Expo on May 4. Five musical compositions were performed with the app, including a signature piece involving Salazar and his eight students. It was the first public performance of Auraglyph, Salazar said. The expo also featured students demonstrating apps made in Salazar’s class, including a drum machine and one for exploring different musical tones. In addition to Salazar’s mobile technologies for music performance, the expo featured virtual reality storytelling using existing consumer devices, robotic instruments and creative expressions of bio-design. Ajay Kapur, associate dean for research and development in digital arts, said the school encourages students to push technology in new directions. “Our students are developing prototypes for things I’ve never seen before – hacking and reinventing existing devices and originating completely new applications and virtual environments,” Kapur said in a prepared statement. CalArts was founded in 1961 by Walt Disney and his brother Roy as a training ground in all the arts – film, music, photography, writing and theater. The current Valencia campus opened in 1971. Allergens Beware Twelve teams of entrepreneurial engineers competed in the second Ventura County Startup weekend last month at Rancho Campana High School in Camarillo. With the purpose of developing products for health care and agricultural uses during a 54-hour period, 80 entrepreneurs participated at the event that took place April 21-23 and was sponsored by Dignity Health St. Johns Hospitals, Camarillo Chamber of Commerce and Ventura County government. Martin Shum, a serial entrepreneur and member of the chamber’s board, said his guidance for this year’s 12 executive judges was to give the top cash prize to the team that has a possibility to move forward with their idea. “What we do is not a for-fun competition,” Shum said. “We do it for real.” Receiving the $10,000 prize for her health care app company, Spritely, was Haley Jeffers, an eighth grader who will attend Rancho Campana in the fall. Spritely helps people with food allergies know what foods they should or shouldn’t eat based on information inputted into the app. The winning ag-tech team, led by Julio Orozco, did a proof of concept on Field Force, a hexagonal shaped floating mat for use in reservoirs to prevent evaporation that includes sensors for monitoring water quality. Michael Panesis, a member of the steering committee and executive director of the center for entrepreneurship at California Lutheran University, called the event a lot of fun and one in which the organizers expended effort to attract participants willing to build a product and not just hang out for the weekend. “Little companies account for a substantial portion of jobs in the country,” Panesis said. “To the extent that we can encourage people to launch startups, we want to do that.” Among the judges in the competition were Mohan Maheswaran, chief executive at Semtech Corp., the Camarillo semiconductor developer; Ross Dueber, chief executive of mini-battery developer and manufacturer ZPower Inc., in Camarillo; and Chris Meissner, president of Meissner Filtration Products, also in Camarillo, who was the chairman of the judging panel. Maheswaran was impressed enough by some of the teams and the products they developed to provide seed money to some of them. Among those receiving money from Semtech was Orozco and Field Force with $5,000; a team from Cal Lutheran that made Field Vitals, a soil quality monitor that received $5,000; and a team receiving $10,000 for its device that monitors the vital signs of firefighters. The firefighter monitor and Field Vitals used Semtech’s long-range wireless communications technology. Staff Reporter Mark R. Madler can be reached at (818) 316-3126 or [email protected].