Tech Never Sleeps

Think about the last time you showed your ID. Maybe at the airport, maybe at a bar, maybe somewhere you had to prove you were who you said you were. You pulled out a card. A piece of plastic. Maybe it was a little beat up. Maybe the photo was from ten years ago.

There’s a decent chance that if you live in Louisiana, you’ve also used a phone to do that. That digital driver’s license on your phone — that was built right here, in Baton Rouge, by a company called Envoc. Calvin Fabre built it.

Calvin Fabre, Founder of tech company, Envoc, the folks who created LA Wallet. Today Calvin and his company are developing cutting-edge personal ID technology that is essentially a digital fingerprint equivalent for your face – it turns facial recognition into a QR code

Calvin is a long-time friend of Out to Lunch: he’s made multiple appearances on this show over the years as he’s developed his company, and some of Louisiana’s most advanced tech. He’s been writing code since he was 12 years old — 1978, give or take — when he got an Atari 800 and discovered that he could make a computer do exactly what he told it to do. He has essentially been doing that ever since.

Calvin studied computer science at Southeastern Louisiana University and built Envoc into a software firm that now works on some of the most consequential identity technology in the country. You may know Envoc best as the company behind LA Wallet — Louisiana’s digital driver’s license. Calvin divested the IP on that about a year ago, but the work continues: he’s now sitting at international standards meetings with Apple, Samsung, Google, and representatives from Hong Kong, New Zealand and Canada, working out what digital identity should look like everywhere.

He’s also thinking carefully about who gets left behind when identity goes digital — seniors, low-income users, people who don’t trust the technology or can’t easily access it. For Calvin, that’s not an afterthought. It’s the whole point.

Samantha Morgan, Founder of Quick Flip Media. Samantha’s personal credo is, “ABR – always be recording. My video camera is my favorite plus-one, I take it everywhere.”

Samantha Morgan started her career as a journalist — arts writing, then Hurricane Katrina turned it into hard news overnight, then broadcast, then the BP oil spill, then digital. Eventually she stopped working for other people’s newsrooms and started her own production company – Quick Flip Media. She says she named it after a phrase she repeated every day for twenty years in television: flip it quick.

Calvin and Samantha have both ended up running their own business after years of building something for someone else. And in both cases, the reason seems to be the same: the problem was too interesting to leave to other people. Calvin has been at this long enough that he was building software before most of the people who use it were born. Samantha has covered enough Louisiana history that she has a personal archive most newsrooms would envy. Not surprisingly, neither one of them are done. Because, after all, tech never sleeps.