In the Fall of 2016, I was able to live at home and participate in Miami's Digital Innovation Semester in Cincinnati. The Digital Innovation Semester is a Co-Op that is offered through the Interactive Media Studies major at Miami University where you work Monday through Thursday as an intern at a startup company downtown. Every Friday, everyone a part of the program went on visits to various startup comapnies around the city. These included some of the comapnies that we worked for, smaller startup companies still in the incubation stage, and larger startups that are already well established. This gave us a well rounded view of the process that startup companies go through which was very interesting. Finally, we also worked with an early stage startup company as a part of our capstone project where we produced mockups for a website, in-depth competitive analyses, and a marketing campaign. All of these things made this semester a truly unique experience in which I learned many useful things.

I had the awesome opportunity to work at the startup company, LISNR, in Over the Rhine in downtown Cincinnati. LISNR is a very unique company that created a technology called Smart Tones which are supersonic tones that can be emitted from any speaker that can be picked up by your smartphone microphone to cause certain events to be triggered on your phone. For example, they are partnered with the Indianapolis Colts and have their SDK in the Colts smartphone app so whenever the Colts score a touchdown, a Smart Tone is played throughout the stadium and triggers a touchdown celebration animation on any phone with the app installed. Another use case they have is the ability to use targeted marketing using Smart Tones to determine where someone is in a department store. For example, if Kohl's installed the LISNR SDK in their app, they could know when a user is in the shoe section and then send that user a coupon for shoes. These are just two examples of the many different use cases that this new technology has and to be a part of something that has the potential to be revolutionary was very special.

My role at LISNR was a marketing intern which was quite different from my main focus of UX design, but it was very useful because in many companies UX works with the marketing department to ensure that the brand image and marketing campaigns are properly deployed within the different digital interfaces of the company. The summer before, I was working at Fifth Third on the UX team and we regularly had to work with the marketing team for this exact reason so it was interesting to work on the other side at a much smaller company.