But by his second tour, his heart was no longer in it. Determined to chisel his way into the fraternity, Patton used his spare time in San Diego to create his own luck.
He spent a year learning to weld and shape metal; attending races and schmoozing the right people; and videotaping himself changing tires, to perfect his footwork and achieve maximum efficiency. One day in , he got called in to pinch-hit on a pit crew--and soon, he was in for good, ultimately rising to chief mechanic on the Lowe's Racing team.
That has been the pattern ever since. Once Patton set his mind to getting his college degree, it took him less than three years to graduate magna cum laude from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.
Afterward, while helping to run a software business, he set his mind to learning about forensics--and got so good at crime-scene investigations that he ended up training the local police force. He set his mind to learning about business and before long had his first ownership stake in a company building shopping centers. Along the way, he set his mind to coding. Apparently, he got pretty good at that, too. Over the next several years there was a marriage, a divorce, at least one bad car accident, the starting-up and then the selling of a flooring company, and much moving around between North Carolina, Hawaii, and Vegas.
Eventually, via a dating website he'd built for his own use when he was racing it "mined and scraped early AOL and Yahoo personals," he recalls with a chuckle , Patton met one Jennifer Peck the future human "missile," who seems today no worse for wear , and they set up shop in Vegas.
There, for the first time in his life, Patton settled down. Sort of. By , he had become fixated on mobile technology and was traveling frequently between Vegas and Boston, taking some classes at MIT, searching for inspiration for a tech company. One day he missed seeing a friend whom he served with in Iraq who also happened to be at Logan Airport.
So that when there's someone of interest anywhere near me, we don't have to be on the same damn app? Patton resolved to do just that, and set to work on a "friend-finding" app he called Peer Compass; in , in a hunt for funding, he traveled to San Francisco.
While he was there, Peck called from Vegas to tell him about a small hackathon the next day. Patton showed up--and won. Emboldened, he entered another hackathon soon after, this one at Google. Despite walking in, he says, with "no team and no idea for a product," he won that, too. As Patton is the first to point out, "no one walks in from out of town and wins two hackathons in a week. It was a heady start. Then, in March , Patton went to South by Southwest.
But I hated the space. I thought we'd be the king of it. But we'd be the king of shit. Despite having spent a sizable chunk of Blue Run's investment--and even though his app was ready to go to market--Patton marched in and told his investors he was canning Peer Compass and starting over.
He let go of all but one member of the company and set out on what one Blue Run associate took to calling Patton's "walkabout. And I built Banjo in 72 hours--from zero. We get a 'game-changing' ad-tech demo every week," says Andrew Essex, sounding bored in advance.
Essex, the co-founder and vice chairman of advertising agency Droga5, was scheduled to get a demonstration of Banjo that afternoon. He had already met Patton and found him interesting, but wasn't exactly panting with anticipation. Later that day, however, when I wrote to ask how the demo had gone, Essex responded with a string of emoji: all thumbs-ups and money bags.
The next morning he told me there was now "a distinct possibility" Droga5 and Banjo would be in business together even before this article came out, completing a perfect literally overnight. Essex wouldn't name the companies he's met that claim to have solved this conundrum, but it was clear Banjo had shown him something radically new. The implications are staggering. And if you overlay location with that, then you're into some pretty remarkable intel.
That you can measure it, that you can codify it, is head-spinning. Banjo's "visual listening" capability is a function of what seems to be a major step forward in photo classification technology.
Banjo asked me not to reveal certain elements of its solution, and I am certainly no expert in the field, but Patton's nontechnical explanation goes like this: Banjo combined two analytical techniques that "never would have been mixed before--and because we mixed it, it unlocked a 'Holy shit!
Image classification is a field in which Google has toiled for years. It recently announced that it had developed software with Stanford that can describe the entire scene depicted in a photograph, thanks to a combination of visual classification and natural language processing.
Still, a key Google executive doesn't even try to hide his admiration for what Banjo has achieved. Judging by the reactions of people like Bardin--and just seeing for myself how Banjo appears to extract even fragmentary images of, say, the Coca-Cola logo from a deluge of social media posts--the photo classification does seem powerful in the extreme.
And it seems to work instantly. Banjo's chief data scientist, Pedro Alves, is a year-old Mensa member who's finishing a computational biology PhD from Yale. Sitting in a conference room in Banjo's engineering cave in Redwood City, California, he says that before Banjo cracked the photo classification problem, it got a quote from a service offering to scan the photos flowing through Banjo's system.
The system he and his team subsequently built, Alves says with a smug smile, costs "a few hundred" dollars a day. That's pretty badass. But that was just in the second half of the year--through word of mouth, with no sales team. Malloy says he fully expects Banjo to grow by a factor of 20 this year. One senses he thinks that estimate may be very low indeed. Malloy, who was, famously, the first investor in PayPal, says he thinks Banjo "could be at least as big an opportunity.
Several of Banjo's customers declined to comment for this story. But Banjo put in an appearance at this year's Super Bowl, powering the social media streams for Bud Light's House of Whatever, a massive Millennial-baiting frat party, and curating and serving images to Anheuser-Busch's various digital advertising platforms.
Banjo's applications in media are the most developed. Sinclair Broadcasting, a publicly traded company encompassing television stations in 79 markets, had nothing but praise for Patton and his work: "Banjo has allowed us to enhance our coverage across all screens in a very fluid and easy solution," says Rob Weisbord, COO of Sinclair Digital Group.
He says Sinclair now uses Banjo in eight of its TV stations and plans to roll it out to more. Banjo allows news operations to perform several feats they could not previously. Once alerted by Banjo about a breaking story, a news director can then use the software to "travel" to the scene--an accident, a snowstorm, Egypt's Tahrir Square--and see exactly what's being publicly posted there.
If we get artificial technology wrong, we as a society are not even in grave danger. Patton says the system gives the information contained in the social media to law enforcement. At the Silicon Slopes conference earlier this year, Banjo CEO Damien Patton talked about the importance of getting privacy concerns right when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Photo credit: Team Banjo Instagram. The technology is cutting edge and it is being developed in Utah. Banjo does what other systems and organizations are already doing, but faster, the company says.
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Email Story. The U. The university originally deployed license plate readers to monitor paid parking lots and ticket those who overstay. The Tribune submitted a records request to the university about the arrangement, but the university citing a records request backlog has yet to provide any information.
Banjo is also in the process of building an opioid heat map for the state which could include data from hospitals, such as which beds are open at a certain time, emergency room reports and naloxone kit reports. Those rules would theoretically be approved by the Legislature. Cantrell was the chief of staff and Smith was his deputy. Smith also was executive director of the Utah Republican Party.
The only people who can list all the Utah law enforcement agencies using the platform work at Banjo, and they are not talking. The Park City Police Department was an early adopter, according to Chief Wade Carpenter, and uses it for free as part of a pilot program.
The city signed a memorandum of understanding with Banjo in February Since that time, police have used Banjo to track assaults, hit-and-run accidents and burglaries.
Park City also is sharing bus GPS locations, and about half of Park City businesses have agreed to share their private surveillance cameras with Banjo, Carpenter said.
Banjo also plans to build a system for Ogden police that tracks beds available in homeless shelters, which it will provide for free, Weloth said. It prohibits using the data to track or determine an individual's political affiliations, religious views, social views, locations and associations.
It also bars its customers from using the technology to monitor employees. Banjo says it has patented technology to anonymize personal information from the public data it collects, though some technology experts have raised concerns.
A recent analysis by Vice found no information about Banjo patents that strip personally identifiable information from data. Among the potential dangers from a platform like Banjo, Lawson said, is the opportunity for false positives — whether through a glitch in the algorithm or a bad actor gaming the system and spoofing a crime or traffic event.
Just four geotags from a smartphone can be enough to identify someone, according to a study.
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