Kansas City gamers battled to raise money for the Children's Miracle Network on Saturday. Members of the Extra Life Nerds raised money by collecting pledges and donations then playing games of their choice at The Nerdery's downtown office. The Minneapolis-based digital business consultancy's offices in Minnesota and Chicago also joined with their Kansas City colleagues to participate in the Extra Life 24-hour gaming marathon.

As of 10 p.m. Saturday night Troy Cleland was looking at losing six inches of his foot-long ponytail. If money kept coming in during the 24-hour Extra-Life Marathon to benefit Gillette Children’s hospital, he could end up bald. This was Cleland’s personal challenge to donors participating in the annual virtual marathon fundraiser. Extra Life unites thousands of gamers around the world to play games in support of their local Children’s Miracle Network Hospital. One of those organizers is Cleland, who hosted about 100 gamers at the Nerdery, a digital business consultancy in Bloomington.

"Every person who can vote should go and vote. And if this gives you a little nudge, what's better than that? I see this as a win-win across many fronts," said Nerdery VP of Delivery Arpit Jain about Vote With Me, an app created by The New Data Project.

At Nerdery this weekend, gamers kicked off a 24-hour marathon raising money for Gillette Children's Hospital. Parents and patients stopped by to join the fun.

"Too often, IoT projects get thrown to IT departments that don’t necessarily have the capabilities or bandwidth to take on new ventures," said Derek Chin, Director of Innovation Strategy at Nerdery. "The quickest path to realizing a return on investment is not to start from scratch but to find the right partner to accelerate your learning curve leveraging IoT in the manufacturing industry."

Peggy chats with Ben Dolmar, director of software development, The Nerdery, about how people getting into the IoT space look at technology and what they could do. He suggests looking at the needs and the workflow—and then measuring and streamlining. Further, he talks about machine learning and how it can help automate simple tasks, but there is still human value at the end of it. He suggests there are places where AI (artificial intelligence) may or may not take over a process, but we will end up with new jobs when we automate processes.