Sound ambitious? That’s because it is. Members of Hsieh’s Downtown Project are being asked to get rid of their personal cars and start using the Project 100 transportation mobility system app when it becomes available later this year or next. They’re starting an invite-only beta program in the coming months, and when the transportation system is fully deployed it’s supposed to hit all those 100 numbers.

Here’s how it works. A Project 100 member opens the mobile app and is offered a number of choices based on their location and the location of the nearest transportation option. A member could see:

• 1). An on-demand Tesla Model S that can be driven to you and pick you up. Like an Uber but with a subscription and a Model S.
• 2). A bike parked near you that you can unlock and pedal to an appointment that’s several blocks away.
• 3). A bus shuttle stop near you for longer trips.
• 4). A neighborhood (slow and low range) electric vehicle that you can unlock and drive and park at your desired location.

Details are scarce about how much this would cost to build or how much the monthly subscription would cost users. The customer pricing will be based on zones in Vegas and tiered plans.

The Downtown Project calls its plan “the ultimate in collaborative consumption,” and the FAQ says that the team looked at currently available options like Uber, Zipcar, and public transportation, but wanted to build an entirely new option. That’s in keeping with the spirit of the Downtown Project, which is using the clean slate of downtown Vegas to create a new type of community and urban living system.

Project 100 is working with a startup called Local Motion, which is out of Stanford and is building the software and hardware to share the bikes and cars and manage the reservation system. Local Motion is also working with Google for fleet sharing on its campus. Originally Local Motion was developing the electric vehicles that fleets would share (in addition to the software) but it looks like the company has moved more away from that model.

Isolated and defined communities are the optimal places to try new, outside-the-box, and just plain wacky new forms of urban transportation. San Francisco has actually been a pretty good place to launch an alternative transportation startup in recent years, due to the city’s early adopters and lack of parking and good public transportation. Scoot Networks has been building an electric scooter sharing network here, and Ridepal has been developing Google-style commuter buses for companies (both Greenstart companies).

Better Place has focused on Israel for its electric car sharing and battery swapping network, and found mixed success (to put it politely). Masdar City has built electric public transportation pods, though I’ve also heard that not many people use these. New transportation doesn’t always catch on. Downtown Vegas and Project 100 could be an interesting option, though success will be based on how attractive the service is for the customers and how much the network ultimately costs.

Check out our coverage of the tech revitalization of downtown Vegas:

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OpenSignal has recorded more than 1,500 signal strength readings in eight metropolitan areas from devices connected to T-Mobile’s network: Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York City, San Diego, Seattle and the Bay Area. OpenSignal has mapped those signal readings on its blog, though it represents multiple signal readings as single data points, largely to respect the privacy of the testers.

Though the network isn’t commercially launched, OpenSignal CEO Brendan Gill told me that its crowdsourced app is popular with engineers at all of the carriers for ad hoc network measurements. What we’re most likely seeing, Gill said, is a bunch of technical workers from T-Mobile and its vendor partners that have the OpenSignal app loaded and running on their test devices. A good indication of this is that one of the devices sending data is a Samsung Galaxy S4, which isn’t yet available to the general public.

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray has already confirmed that its LTE network is complete in Las Vegas and Kansas City, so test data from those cities is hardly a surprise. We’ve also seen evidence of the network in NYC: A GigaOM reader mapped out a cluster of cells in Astoria, Queens, and T-Mobile has given several live 4G demos to reporters in Manhattan.

The other five areas are new, but because of their importance you would expect them to show up early on T-Mobile’s national rollout schedule. OpenSignal recorded the biggest concentrations of tests in San Jose, Calif., and surrounding Bay Area cities like Mountain View, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. OpenSignal even tracked tests in the East Bay, but recorded none in San Francisco proper.

The Seattle area had the second highest concentration of readings, many of them around Bellevue, which just happens to be the location of T-Mobile’s national headquarters. Las Vegas yielded many data points as well, though the signal readings in Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, New York and San Diego were much more sparse.

OpenSignal also recorded about a dozen speed tests on T-Mobile’s LTE network, averaging an impressive 25 Mbps on the downlink and 8 Mbps on the uplink (though keep in mind that the network is largely empty so there’s no congestion). The speed tests were so few because they must be manually initiated, while OpenSignal’s app takes signal strength readings automatically on a regular basis.

Gill said that he’s fairly convinced that these eight markets will be among the first to launch based on the activity OpenSignal is tracking, though he cautioned that his conclusions don’t constitute a scientific study. The results are dependent on a fairly limited pool of people using OpenSignal’s app, so there are likely many more cities with live LTE networks that the company couldn’t track.

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Nevada’s governor signed the law on Thursday with bipartisan support and described it as a “new frontier” for the gambling industry. The law came about after the federal government in late 2011 decided to change its policy and permit online gambling to take place in states that explicitly permit it.

The new policy is significant in light of research that predicts online gambling will be worth $100 billion worldwide on mobile devices alone by 2017. This potential market has attracted the established casino industry as well as tech companies that are vying to make gambling games or process back-end betting operations.

The new U.S. gambling rules are also a potential lifeline to social game maker Zynga which has seen its titles like Farmville and Mafia Wars stutter. And since being cast adrift by Facebook last year, Zynga has seen its shares fall around 80 percent.

The Nevada law, however, is unlikely to change Zynga’s fortunes anytime soon as it only applies to internet users in the state. The law is also primarily intended not to help social gaming sites but to ensure that Vegas casinos have a first-mover advantage in providing operational support when — and if — other states follow suit. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports, the Nevada law is written to keep out companies that already have existing player data. The story in question refers to “illegal operations” and those who “operated online gaming with U.S. patrons” — it’s unclear if this refers to organizations like Full Tilt Poker who broke the law in the past or to any company with gaming data.

The upshot is that the U.S. will, at best, have a patchwork of states in the foreseeable future where online gambling is permitted. If big states sit it out, it will not be easy for companies to guarantee that online poker tables are full. It also means operational headaches and potential criminal penalties for the game makers which must ensure, for example, that a player in Colorado doesn’t slip into a Nevada-based poker game.

The bottom line is that full-scale online gambling is still far on the horizon as the U.S. regulatory process shakes out. In the meantime, the winners and losers among Zynga and other tech companies like Big Fish are likely to be determined in the U.K. and elsewhere.

This story was updated at 12pm PT to clarify how the law may favor Nevada companies.

(Image by Beto Chagas via Shutterstock)

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T-Mobile has been overhauling its network, realigning them with the 3G bands supported on most North American GSM phones, while simultaneously clearing frequencies for its future LTE network. T-Mobile has already revealed that it has converted over thousands of cell sites in New York City, Seattle and Las Vegas and many of T-Mobile’s current customers using unlocked iPhones have already encountered big boosts in speeds on a site by site basis.

But Ray said Friday that the spectrum refarming process is now 75 percent complete in Vegas, providing the consistency of coverage necessary to let start marketing HSPA+ to potential iPhone users. Until now, any iPhone on T-Mobile’s network was limited to 2G EDGE speeds.

Older generations of the iPhone won’t be able to access the full bandwidth of T-Mobile’s dual-carrier HSPA+ network, which can support theoretical speeds of 42 Mbps — though they will still get 3G connectivity — but anyone willing to shell out the dough for an unlocked iPhone 5 would be able to access the fastest HSPA network in the country. LTE support on T-Mobile, however, won’t be available until next year when its network overhaul is complete.

As for the rest of the country, Ray said its quickly turning up the new HSPA+ network at PCS in cities nationwide. He wouldn’t reveal any specifics on when the process will be finished, but he has said that a “material” portion of T-Mo’s footprint will be iPhone ready by year-end.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Last weekend, in fact, SuperNAP data center operator Switch Communications hosted the second-annual Startup Weekend Las Vegas. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Vegas Tech Fund put up $500,000 for the winning team for the upcoming Crowdstart LV competition into which the Startup Weekend winner — which ended up being a password-management app called Launch Key — gets automatic entry. Switch actually has its own venture fund, too, as well as multiple programs designed to bring high-tech jobs to the city.

But Launch Key is less than a week old right now. Here are five of the city’s most-promising startups that are actually doing business:

1. Counterless

Think Square, only easier, and you have Counterless. Its app seeks to eliminate the need to wait in line at places like eateries and bars by letting the establishments upload their menus, and letting users order and pay from the comfort of their seats with their mobile devices.

However, Counterless is very young and raw — the idea was first hatched in November 2011 — and its business model requires buy-in from businesses as well as users. So far, Counterless’s only customer is Slidin’ Thru, the city’s favorite food-truck-turned-hamburger joint. But among Counterless’s advisors are a couple casino executives with nightclub businesses that could make ideal testing grounds.

It’s also not alone in this space, as startups such as Storific and Tabula are also trying to use smartphones to streamline the ordering process.

2. Lucine Biotechnology

Lucine Biotechnology is a small, still-unfunded biotech startup that aims to fundamentally change healthcare for women. The current state of affairs, according to Founder and CEO Chandler Marrs, is that it’s pretty much a crapshoot as to whether medicines or treatments will work on women because relatively little attention is paid to their very real hormonal issues. Often times, women end up serving as “their own experiments,” she said.

The idea behind Lucine is to be a version of PatientsLikeMe focused specifically on women. Women join the social platform (which will launch in October) and share everything of relevance about their health situations — age, race, medicines, supplements, hormone levels (Lucine will actually conduct testing), symptoms, etc. Members can learn from others like them what treatments are working or how common side effects really are, while Lucine analyzes their data to draw correlations among the myriad variables.

Given a large-enough user base, platforms like Lucine can do crowdsourced medical studies faster, cheaper and with more data points than can traditional corporate or academic researchers. Although, Marrs acknowledges, that’s just the first step. Hopefully, the next step is that Lucine’s findings will provide enough data to spur scientifically validated studies that change how doctors, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies approach women’s health. With enough data, Marrs said, “I anticipate we’ll find patterns no one has thought to look at.”

3. Romotive

Romotive, with its vision to fuse the worlds of smartphones and robotics, might be one of the coolest consumer-tech companies around, not just in Las Vegas. And its vision is catching on. It launched in November 2011, and when I first met the company in February, it had four employees (three of whom were the co-founders), had just closed a $1.5 million round, and was hand-building thousands of robots from inside the condo that doubled as its office.

The team still works from their living quarters (one unit now houses a MakerBot 3-D printer), but it has grown to a staff of 13 and continues to hire. One of its newest additions, former Habit Labs co-founder and CEO Jen McCabe, just spent months in China setting up the company’s new production operation that Romotive hopes will help it have 10,000 of its $99 robots ready to ship by the holiday season in order to fulfill demand from some upcoming retail partnerships.

Although it’s very appealing to geeks and hackers, Romotive will have to make a smartphone-powered robot that’s both easy to program and physically approachable if it wants to appeal to a mass market. Its new design (currently under wraps) certainly meets the latter –McCabe describes it as akin to the first-generation iMac — although she acknowledges the user experience piece is a bit more difficult. Like any application in its first real iteration, there’s a fine line between too difficult for laypersons and too simple for experts.

Here’s a video of an app that lets users draw a path for Romo (shown in its current form) to travel, and a blog post explaining how it was built:

RomoDoodleDemo from Romotive on Vimeo.

4. Tracky

Tracky launched in March as an HTML5-based, one-stop shop for collaboration tools, and it has been on a rapid upward trajectory since. The company is planning for general availability in the coming months, and in June topped off a $1 million angel round with an additional $500,000 from Switch Communications Founder and CEO Rob Roy.

The product does project management, chat, calendars, file sharing and more from a single interface, but tries to be more social than standard business services by letting users invite quite literally anybody to collaborate on projects. So, while a team of co-workers could work together, so could a group of conference attendees who just met, or a bride-to-be trying to coordinate her DJ, bridal party and cake baker.

5. Walls360

Walls360 isn’t a tech company, per se, but it’s definitely high-tech — and it’s doing (almost) more business than it can handle. The company’s high-resolution fabric wall prints, which range in size from a small poster to a life-sized Captain Kirk and which can be removed and re-stuck hundreds of times, are proving very popular. The company sells individual prints to consumers, specially designed prints for conferences and events, and has shipped tens of thousands of promotional posters for partners such as EA Sports.

According to Co-founder and CEO John Doffing, literally every time a content creator was able to see and touch the company’s product, Walls360 has closed the deal. The result, he said, is that the company has hundreds of thousands of images that it’s licensed to reprint and sell, although only about 5 percent are currently available on the company’s site. The company can’t talk in specifics about some of its upcoming deals, although Doffing was willing to share that it’s making a move into the realms of sports and music that could prove very lucrative.

In order to meet that presumed demand, the company is looking to double its headcount in the next couple months and probably ramp up its production capacity, too. “We’ve built an infrastructure that’s designed to be huge,” Doffing told me recently. “I want to sell billions [of prints] a year.”

Walls360′s advisors include Guy Kawasaki, Panoramic Images CEO Doug Segal and Facebook Director of Engineering Lars Rasmussen.

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That’s what coworking is betting on, as the movement sells itself as providing ideal environments for serendipity, relationship building and nurturing the creative spark. But it’s not just spaces for entrepreneurs and independent pros that are adopting these ideals. “The future, I believe, is that corporate offices are going to become coworking offices,” Harvard-trained designer and ParallelCities.com founder Sidi Gomes told GigaOM in the run up to this year’s Global Coworking Unconference (GCUC).

Zappos for one is already embodying this change. The company’s new downtown Las Vegas base is “a great extension of coworking ideals,” another GCUC participant, architect Jerome Chang, told GigaOM. “Zappos is looking to build a whole mini-city community by having encouraged a lot more people to live, work and play all in the same area as their office. The surrounding community becomes the campus itself,” he explained.

But don’t take Chang’s word for it. Recently, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh laid out his own thinking about his company’s $350 million investment in Las Vegas at Venture for America‘s Summer Celebration, giving a presentation explaining just what the company is up to in the city. The plan includes $50 million for local small businesses, $50 million for technology startups, $50 million for education and $200 million in real estate. Business Insider has posted the entire 60-slide presentation.

Or for the short and sweet round-up of Hsieh’s thinking look to Las Vegas Weekly, whose reporter J. Patrick Coolican met with Hsieh recently and was converted from his previous skepticism about Zappos’ plans. “Is he building a Burning Man encampment Downtown?!” Coolican wondered, but after speaking to the Zappos boss, he understands there are pragmatic business reasons for the company’s hefty investment in Las Vegas as well as philosophical ones. Coolican writes:

Zappos considered building a new suburban mega-campus, like Apple or Google. These campuses have creature comforts to induce workers to never leave, and/but they can be very isolating.

Hsieh had a radically different idea: Downtown, because he believes, he knows, that workers in cities are more productive. He thinks Zappos will be more profitable Downtown.

Here he leans on the work of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, who notes that per-capita productivity increases by 4 percent as population density rises by 50 percent.

It’s not entirely clear why this is true, but Glaeser calls cities “machines for learning.” Humans have succeeded because of our ability to collaborate, and cities are the best geographical mechanism for doing so. Hsieh refers to “serendipity,” the chance encounters between technologist, thinker, social entrepreneur, artist and venture capitalist to create the new.

More human interaction means more serendipity and happiness, which therefore means higher productivity and profits.

Does this equation seem sensible to you? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Moyan_Brenn_I’M BACK NOW. 

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I recently visited the headquarters of two Las Vegas startups, Romotive and Walls 360, that are busy making their own stuff. It was eye-opening to see to see how hardware and physical goods are made in an increasingly software-centric world. You can read more about what these companies are up to, or just check out this slideshow of what daily life looks like.

Eat, sleep, build robots

For Romotive, one of the startups that Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh has lured to Las Vegas, life is definitely interesting right now. The company, which is less than a year old and just raised $1.5 million from some prominent angel investors (including Hsieh), spent the month of February building around 2,000 mobile-phone-powered robots by hand in two apartment units that serve as both living and working space. When I stopped by, the apartment was packed with parts and shipping boxes, and marketing head Zach Buchanan told me there was more to come. On average, he said, it takes about 20 minutes to build a single robot, although the team assembles them in stages rather than doing one at time from start to finish.

Team Romotive. Credit: Andrew Seid.

The big order was the result of a successful CES outing, where it sold 80 of its $99 robots, which offset the cost of its booth space and generated some positive press. For the Christmas season, Co-Founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo told me a few days earlier, Romotive only had to build about 100 robots. Buchanan said the company was selling about 6 robots a day online before CES, but now is selling about 26 per day.

Romotive plans to move out of its apartment and into a co-working space Hsieh is building in downtown Las Vegas, but I was left wondering if shared space will suffice if the company scales as its investors think it can. Rinaudo suggested that a change in the company’s focus, which is now split about 50-50 between hardware and software, might change its need for space.

“We’re defining this new market of smartphone robotics,” he told me, and as the hardware part becomes commoditized and new form factors spring up to do new things, Romotive could be in the position to serve as the platform powering them. It wants to “bring the app store to robots,” he said, where Romotive apps would serve as the brains for whatever physical robots consumers want to buy.

Where artists and mechanics meet

The decision to come to Las Vegas was a little different for Walls 360, which creates high-resolution, stick-on wall art on special fabric that can be removed and replaced up to 200 times. It didn’t need Tony Hsieh’s money — Guy Kawasaki and a who’s-who of graphic arts already invested in its angel round — but it did need cheap space and lots of expertise in large-format printing. Las Vegas gave it both.

Tavia Campbell, avatar-style

Co-founders Tavia Campbell and John Doffing have actually been at this for a few years, previously working out of San Francisco and then Philadelphia, but when they decided last year to stop outsourcing and start printing their own products, they had to make a new business model and find a new home. Las Vegas has proven to be a great decision, Campbell told me, because the company’s only real costs now are administrative, ink and fabric — rent in the industrial sector (its neighbor is a crankshaft repair shop) is practically a non-factor — and the city actually has a great mix of artists and printing professionals that honed their skills working on projects for casinos and trade shows.

Walls 360′s other co-founder, Yiying Lu, lives in Australia. She’s best known as the graphic artist who designed Twitter’s infamous “fail whale.”

Right now, Walls 360 makes most of its money from partnerships like those with EA around its video games, from contract printing jobs for conventions and other events, and from individual sales of its custom prints. However, because individual orders are printed on demand, Campbell said the plan is to let customers upload their own images and have Walls 360 print them. She said Walls 360 is also thinking about leveraging cheap storefront space in downtown Las Vegas to open its own store, possibly doubling as a gallery where artists could display and sell their work as Walls 360 prints.

Life is a little more complex for startups when they have to account for stuff as well as staff, and when delivering a product means the workers — not their servers — have to deliver the goods. But it also creates some unique go-to market opportunities and might make it easier to convince consumers to buy a product. Apps are great, but there’s nothing quite like forking over some cash and having a new something in your hands.

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Las Vegas might not be the ideal place to try and build a technology hotbed, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. As I reported previously, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is investing an impressive amount of money — $350 million — to help revitalize the city’s urban core and create a community of tech startups, and he already has some key pieces of his puzzle in place. And while it’s easy to be skeptical of Hsieh’s grand vision, the companies that have moved to the desert are confident they made the right decision, in part because Las Vegas isn’t Silicon Valley.

It’s not Silicon Valley. That’s a good thing.

Members of the Las Vegas startup community who’ve had experience in places such as Silicon Valley and Seattle relish their new home because it’s not those places. The path to success in Silicon Valley follows certain patterns, both Habit Labs Co-Founder and CEO Jen McCabe and Romotive Co-Founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo told me, but Las Vegas gives them the opportunity to blaze their own trails and actually help shape whatever process ultimately results from Hsieh’s experiment.

Actually, Rinaudo said, being in Las Vegas has been a huge advantage for Romotive. Software developers hold all the cards and there are lots of well-funded companies looking to grow their staffs, so he can’t hire the people he wants just by waving money at them, there has to be something more. Rinaudo says Las Vegas gives Romotive the opportunity to sell potential employees on being part of a tight-knit tech community and, perhaps, the birth of something great.

Team Romotive (Rinaudo second from left). Credit: Andrew Seid.

And when companies get the employees they want, being in Las Vegas should make it easier to keep them. There’s not Google, Facebook and Palantir acqui-hiring the people or technologies they want, McCabe said. There’s nothing wrong with building a company where the ideal exit or career path is quick absorption by a dominant force, but people who want that won’t come to Las Vegas, she added.

There’s also the benefit of being a big fish in a small pond. Romotive got a magazine cover in Las Vegas, Rinaudo noted. There’s no way a several-month-old company that hadn’t even announced funding could have got that treatment in San Francisco.

Zappos’ Zach Ware, one of Hsieh’s close associates, takes a particularly astute stance on this issue. Business-wise, he says, California actually has bigger obstacles with taxation and regulation than does the relatively lax and tax-free Nevada. Las Vegas’s biggest problem is “quality of life for the creative class,” but that’s exactly what Hsieh is spending a fortune to build.

Live together, work together, play together

When it comes to selling new companies and employees on the Las Vegas culture, Hsieh has put a unique system in place. If one really wants to call Hsieh’s Las Vegas startup effort an incubator, it’s only in the loosest sense. Yes, startup employees will tell you, Hsieh and his close associate Zach Ware are always there for advice. Yes, there is a lot of networking. And, yes, Hsieh will gladly chip in with funding. But he’ll also give companies a place to live in one of the dozens of units he owns in a downtown condominium complex that overlooks the forthcoming Zappos headquarters.

Presently, a handful of startups have taken Hsieh up on the offer, and they live in close proximity on the building’s 17th floor. Jen McCabe, co-founder and CEO of personal-health-platform Habit Labs, compares the experience to college. Doors are always open, she said, and the companies do community dinners in the evenings. For leisure, almost everyone goes indoor rock climbing together.

The companies also work together, from their apartments, as they await the completion of a nearby co-working space Hsieh and his Downtown Project are opening. No one hesitates to walk 30 feet down the hall and ask each other business- or technology-related questions, McCabe said. Romotive, which moved to Las Vegas shortly after forming in Seattle, is presently building about 2,000 of its iOS- and Android-powered robots from its apartment, meaning nearly every free inch of space is covered with stacks of components and shipping boxes.

Jen McCabe

McCabe, something of the group sage given her relatively high 32 years of life experience, admits the experience takes a certain type of individual and company. She’s one of those people: she visited Hsieh over Thanksgiving in 2011 and her team had relocated by the end of the month. But if you’re an early-stage company hellbent on changing the world, she told me, you’ve already assumed a high level of risk.

Shaun Swanson of Ayloo.net and Counterless actually grew up in Las Vegas (as did the company’s other founders), but, he told me, “I left when I was 18 and wanted to get as far away as I could.” After completing his bachelor’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University and briefly studying at Caltech, Swanson has now been back in town just more than three months. “I’d never been downtown before I left,” he said, but he got excited about what was going on with the Downtown Project, and now he lives downtown.

Reality check

Blue is where people moved; downtown is in the center. Credit: Data Pointed

Despite the optimism of the startups that now call Las Vegas home, though, there are some very real institutional challenges. For the greater Downtown Project that funds these companies, redeveloping the city’s urban core is rife with hurdles relating to zoning, mass transportation, and a population that lives and works in the suburbs or on the Las Vegas Strip and often doesn’t spend enough time downtown to know or care about what’s going on there. For the startups, a major challenge will be finding new employees to grow their companies.

In Silicon Valley, for example, Stanford and UC-Berkeley pump out candidates well-versed in computer science and the business of entrepreneurship. For companies headquartered in Las Vegas to hire without having to convince candidates to up and move to a new city, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas might have to become the city’s own feeder system.

There certainly are qualified graduates — Zappos employs many of them, and Romotive just hired a UNLV student they hope can grow into an integral part of the company — but the unique aspects of launching startups and some of the high technology required aren’t part of UNLV’s DNA just yet. One member of venture capital firm Originate told me he’s had trouble finding qualified engineers in Las Vegas to help the firm’s portfolio companies build their businesses, and all of the startups I spoke to acknowledged that hiring might be a challenge.

The times they are a-changin’

As Ware explains it, computer science students might get pretty much the same education anywhere, but it’s the understanding of how to use those skills and the access to investors and industry knowledge that sets some universities apart. Ware said the Downtown Project and Zappos, generally, are interested in helping foster degree programs at UNLV around the convergence of technology and business. They also think it could be helpful to locate certain university buildings downtown, or to hold classes there, so students can get more integrated into the technology scene. As it stands, the UNLV campus is about 5 miles from the new Zappos headquarters.

Las Vegas’s newest startups are getting proactive, too. Habit Labs’ McCabe said her company intends to reach out to relevant medical-school and computer science faculty to integrate the idea of personal health platforms into their curricula. Romotive wants to start younger, Rinaudo told me — when the company moves into a more-permanent facility, it wants to start holding robotics classes for teenagers to get them interested in the technology.

Apart from the efforts coming out of the Zappos ecosystem, Las Vegas-based technology companies might also get help from the city’s other IT powerhouse, Switch Communications. The operator of the SuperNAP data center and, soon, millions more square feet of data-center space in the city intends to unveil in March a series of educational and entrepreneurial efforts under the INNEVATION banner. Among those efforts is a plan to open a cloud-computing facility on the UNLV campus.

In the end, said Habit Labs’ McCabe, she views the effort to build a technology scene in Las Vegas as analogous to a mission to colonize Mars, but the history of Silicon Valley isn’t that different. With enough ideas and enough desire, she thinks Hsieh and those who sign on to his vision can create a technology hotbed out of the desert dust.

Feature image by Derrick Harris; Las Vegas population map courtesy of Data Pointed.

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The first tower standing at close to 200 feet

A first-of-its-kind, massive solar thermal farm that uses mirrors to tap into the sun’s heat, is under construction in the desert in California, a short drive from Las Vegas. On 3,600 acres of land covered in tumble weeds and home to critters like the desert tortoise and rattle snakes, Silicon Valley startup BrightSource and contractor Bechtel are almost a year into construction of the 392 MW farm. There are  hundreds of posts stamped into the ground that will eventually hold the mirrors (called heliostats), and one of the three 450-foot plus central towers, which will play a crucial role in turning the sun’s rays into electricity, is slowly rising up out of the dust.

In a rare opportunity, I got a chance to take a tour of the farm, called Ivanpah, which when fully built in 2013, is supposed to nearly double the amount of commercial solar thermal electricity produced in the U.S. While many solar thermal projects are being discussed by utilities and solar vendors, very few of this size — or even over 100 MW — have been financed, permitted and are under construction in the U.S.

BrightSource CEO John Woolard

Walking around Ivanpah is awe-inspiring for a few reasons. The sheer size — 5.6 square miles — is enormous, and BrightSource says there were around 700 workers on the site on Monday, and at peak construction, there will be about 1,400 jobs. While one of the central towers stood at close to 200 feet already, that tower will more than double, rising to 490 feet by the time that plant starts producing solar power.

Then there’s just the sheer elements of the desert. The temperature was a dry 100 degrees as we surveyed the site — complete with steel-toed boots, hardhats, safety glasses and neon construction vests — and workers commonly arrive on the site at 5:30 a.m. and leave by 3 p.m. to try to beat the heat. Safety precautions for workers (and visiting media) include things like checking under trucks and cars to make sure there are no tortoises shading themselves behind tires.

A project of this size needs massive financing, and BrightSource managed to secure funding from Google, NRG Energy, and a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. BrightSource has also filed to raise more money via an IPO, which should put deliver a nice return for the company’s venture capital investors, including VantagePoint Capital, Alstom, Morgan Stanley, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Chevron Technology Ventures.

Here’s a slideshow of photos that I took during the tour of Ivanpah, close to a year after it started construction in October 2010.

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