Ep. 32: Mike Kula of Avalon Integrations

One of the best things about bringing you the 50 summer stories of Pittsburgh Tech with Comcast is talking to a bunch of companies that are developing just awesome solutions to help us manage through this covid 19 pandemic solution to help us get back to work, for crying out loud and get back to work and know that we're going to be safe. That's what we're all concerned about is our safety of course, and safety is number one. And seeing these solutions come out, I think it's just great. I love putting a spotlight on them. And that is the case what we're doing today with Avalon Integration's Mike Kula. Mike, it's been a while since I've seen you it's always good to see you. Thanks for being part of the show today. I'm really excited to learn more about what's going on with you accent system. You know your guy john vancleave called me up all week or so ago was telling me about this. He's like the things a store here I'm like, Yes, there's a store here. This is cool stuff. I can't wait for the world to start knowing more about this because I think this can be a really affordable, easy, secure solution to make sure people aren't you know, If you've been if you've been in contact with someone with COVID, that you know it and you can then make appropriate plans, the core, stuff like that. So first off, like what's your background real fast? What do you do with the company? And they give us the elevator pitch?

Sure. So I'm, I'm Vice President of Sales at that one. been with the company since the beginning. We are a provider of integrator of barcoding. RFID Internet of Things, technology, typically in manufacturing and distribution environments very well. You know, our customers are people that make products and ship products, you know, all over the world. Mm hmm.

Absolutely. I love I mean, you see IoT I get excited. I think that's one of the most fascinating fields to be in because I think that's where the magic happens without.

Absolutely, absolutely. And that kind of got us to our COVID tracking wristband solution. Yeah.

So tell us about this. This is called the accent system. I was describing this to me, you're gonna give us more details about it. I was pretty impressed with I love the simplicity of it. And more importantly, I love the security of it, because that's the big thing people are worried about. Give us the overview, how's this thing work? And you have all these to show?

Yeah, let me give you a little let me give you a little background. So, you know, in March, when all of this stay at home orders kind of hit and you know, I live in Pennsylvania and, you know, we were shut down. For a long time, you know, our clients actually came to us and said, Hey, we need assistance. Okay. You know, because we're manufacturers, we're making a critical item, our plants are open how we protect our employees. So hey, you know, we started at first with, you know, things like signage on right to remind people, right, because that's kind of the low hanging fruit and then, you know, barriers and thermal imaging cameras. And as we the walls through this, I started thinking said, Well, you know, the real issue is if someone comes into the work environment, and They either potentially are positive for COVID-19, or they have tested positive for COVID-19. What's the plan to do? Right? So you're making a critical item. And you know, we've seen cases all over the United States where, you know, meat, plants, things like that plants are shutting down. So what what, what could happen? So, I did a little research, talk to a lot of customers to get their input. And one of the big things was, they wanted their data to be you know, they want to be anonymous. Right? Apple, Google, right? I've talked about putting things on phones and if you you know, do any research about that people are like, No way it's going on my fault because I don't want everyone Big brother to know where I am his immediate reaction like that across a lot of people for sure. Right. So, so we you know, one of our partners is accident systems and accident systems is out of Spain. And as you know, Spain, you know, had tremendous COVID-19 issues as hotspots in the world.

They were making headlines among the first countries back in the day. It's like, it seems like forever ago, but long ago. Exactly. So, um, so XM systems is an IoT provider. Right. So what they did is they adopted some of their technology. And they actually developed a wristband like this that kind of looks like a Fitbit. And I'm actually wearing one on my wrist. Exactly. It's nice and slim, and looks like it's Yeah, absolutely.

So. So the idea is there is a Bluetooth Low Energy radio in this device. And effectively what it does is, it scans one second every five seconds for another Bluetooth radio that's within six feet of each other. And if it sees it twice, so it's 10 seconds, it actually provides a haptic alert so it will vibrate to alert alert. Okay, it'll give you a buzz right? Okay, good buzz, hey, I need to back up. So it's kind of like you know, you got an eye watcher, or smartwatch. You felt like when You get an email, you feel a little vibration. But more importantly, what it does is it actually logs the other wristband. And it keeps looking at repeating that cycle and they can determine what your late period of time is that you've been within 60 of distance. So, gotcha. Right. So the idea is, you know, an organization gets a wristband, they get a power supply, like regular USB, you know, what I really liked about this is the simplicity. You pull the band off, that's how you charge it and the battery lasts about three days. Oh, nice. And it'll store about 40 days worth of data, right on the band itself. Okay. Band itself. So So the way that we've been deploying it is you know, the band just has a number there's no personal information on it whatsoever. It's, you know, CT wristband number one, this a CT wristband, number two, and the idea is that the employer gives the student employee gives them a power supply to charge him at home at Tonight, and records down, you know, Mike Kula has wristband number one. In a perfect world, we'll never have to get this wristband back because what do you want the employee to do is wear it and do their job, like they're counting out what they normally would, and provide, you know, abide by all of your social distancing and COVID-19 protocols. And the idea is, and the concept behind it is, in the event, you know, let's take for example, I come to work the next day, they take my temperature, and they say, Mike, you got a temperature of 101 we really want you to go home. What they would do is they would take my band and download the data off of that and then be able to see what other employees were exposed to me within 60 feet and you know, the last week the last two weeks and then take appropriate precautions. So so the idea you know how I look at it, it's it's kind of like a flight data recorder. Right? The only time you need to play data in college, when you have a problem or you haven't problem, right? It's really the same concept. And you know what we like about it and what our clients have said they liked about it is, you know, it's anonymous data. It's it friendly because essentially, this thing comes kit it, you hand it out and you're done. Um, it doesn't sit on their network, none of that company's information is up in the clouds, you know, where it could potentially be act or something like that. And if in the event they think they have a problem or they know they have a problem, they can you know, isolate and mitigate that problem pretty quickly in their workforce that is just amazing to me, it's Tell me more about how like someone would actually deploy this so you can buy these individually buying groups in cases like how well you can buy them individually. So you know, there's price discounts obviously but you know, a single wristband is about $37 and 50 cents. Well, that's cheap, you know, this is not like a huge investment here my total health of your of your of your work. Absolutely, absolutely not. Then there is a component for the software if you need to upload that. That's a service fee. So it's a it's approximately 1500. dollars a month for up to 1000 users. Right? So the more users you get that that fee actually reduces per user, we have a client right now that's looking at it, I think it's gonna end up being like $15 a user, actually, it's gonna be less than it's gonna be like $11 per user per month. I feel like this has to be a pretty, pretty simple sale, because you're looking at those numbers and what that means to the health of your employees and keeping your operations open. I mean, it just seems like yeah, this is a sensible thing to do especially easily explain how secure the system is. Anonymous the system is that it's just simply to let people know that once something happened, you can be alerted, but you want to be alerted because it's all about contact tracing. Right. Absolutely. contact tracing, I guess Absolutely.

You know, I had a conversation with someone that worked in an office environment for a fortune 500 company. They were working at home. And I said, Well, you know, when you go back to the office, how's that gonna work? And they're like, they're trying to figure out how are you up and down the elevator? Right, cuz. Exactly.

Exactly.

And you know, and I asked the question, I said, Would you wear a wristband like this? Based on all the parameters I told you? And I said, and the idea here is, when you want to know, as an employee, you potentially were exposed to protect your family. And she's like, absolutely, where that all the time. Right? And, you know, again, I think the key is, is data privacy, right? And the ability for a low cost is really gives an organization the ability to not only protect their work environment, but to protect their employees and our employees, families.

And I feel like this is something that even after the pandemic, I mean, see over because it's going to be like a long, too, it's over. But now it's in our, in our sights, in our minds, that you know, this could happen again, it's the idea that you're continually able to contact Sorry, trace people, you don't want to use this like all the time, I would think, right? Lastly, you know who's been in touch with who said something does happen, something new comes up, you can immediately see who's in touch with it. Right?

Yeah, that's, that's an interesting. We have a discussion with the ascent system guys about that. Because they're also what do you know, once we deploy these, what do we do with it afterwards? Right. And we've had some customers say, well, we're going to try to change our thinking, because a lot of our employees that come to our plants, you know, if they have a cold or they have a flu, and they kind of shove it off, and they come in, and they and they work, right, we'll just get over there. Like, we want to change that mindset in our company and say, You got a cold, or flu or flu symptoms, stay home, right? And you know what, and if we know you were near this person or that person, then we could say, hey, you might have been exposed to a flu site type symptom.

But healthcare costs too because if someone is exposed to the flu, you can get him Tamiflu a lot faster and Exactly.

You can do a while and I never even thought of That's really a good point, you can do a lot of preventive measures at that point. Other ideas that have come out of this is because it's Bluetooth Low Energy, and it has unique number, maybe you use this as card access, right? You change your card access readers. Yeah, that makes sense. Right? So there's, you know, so I think the the ideas are, you know, this is fairly new, right? The one thing that was kind of impressive for me when we when we partnered with the sensor systems is they developed this from scratch in the middle of a pandemic, and enable the manufacturer so they're shipping right now, which is really, really kind of cool. You know, when a customer says, Hey, I want to do a proof of concept. Two weeks, we're live, right? And they're doing a proof of concept. So. So it's really, really exciting for us. And I'm glad that we're able to provide a solution that will help our clients and just just a good thing to do, I will tell them the world at the end of the day, if you think about it, because I mean, the more you can keep people safe, the more you can keep them thing from spreading. And that's why it's so impressive. Why wouldn't John's like, is this a story? I'm like, Yes is a story. This is some cool stuff. And I don't seem these types of solutions happen. It just goes to show you man, you cannot keep human beings down, we figured out ways to make, we figure out ways to survive.

And Zach was a really great stuff, man, great stuff. And so it's a really, as you said, before that the price point you can be an organization of 50 people, and this makes sense or 1500 people exactly sense, which I think is exactly and and really the thing that we've seen initially is, the larger organizations are definitely leading, right because, you know, think about it, you know, when they lose a manufacturing plant, and let's say, you know, they're that plant is the only one that makes this product in the world. Mm hmm. That's a really, really big issue. Right? And that affects thousands and thousands of people that work at that plant. Right. So so you know, they've obviously putting a lot of protocols to keep those plants up and running. This just gives them that little extra level of if we have a problem, then we know you know how to isolate that and how to mitigate that.

Good stuff. I love telling these stories. I'm so glad good to hang out with us anything we haven't covered that people should know about this product. I think it just seems like such a no brainer. It's so simple. All you need are designer colors.

Yeah. Went out there. Yeah, no. And you know, one thing that some people have asked for, and we're actually testing in a PLC right now. So, you know, the one downside of a wristband, and maybe the factory environment is let's say, you're a food producer. You're not allowed to wear jewelry. Right? So the option to do that? Yeah, we haven't we haven't tested it yet. But we know that you'd be able to take this and put it in your pocket. Okay, so it's not like a necklace or something and hang it like, or do that. Yeah, cuz right now, this is the only form factor it comes in. doesn't come in an ID form factor or anything like that. Right. But the idea is, if I had to put it into my pocket, I'm still going to get that contact tracing capable If I come within 16 so gotcha. Um, but yeah, if there's any interest, you know, certainly reach out for us. Now we're, we're really excited that we're able to bring this to market and hope that it can help a lot of people.

And as fast as it came to market, which I just love in Spain, and now we're here in Pittsburgh selling this thing. So it is pretty awesome.

It is shocking. It is really, really talking about us. That really was just that's what blew me away, right. And our support that we're getting from the guys insane are, it's unbelievable. Six hours ahead of us. I sent them an email when I wake up in the morning, I got a response right there on it.

This is not to be messed with this. Yeah. So it's really, really cool.

Mike Kula, and you are the best. And like I said, this is why we're hanging out with Comcast telling these 50 summer stories because these are great stories. I can hear everywhere. And I hope someone you know, listens to this, watch this and like I think our company needs this this this could be a solution. So we do have your website. We'll put that in our line. notes in this soaking everyone wants to learn about this. They can go and check it out. We'll talk to john, are you and it's gonna work out. I think it is it's for joy.

Hey, thanks for having us. Have a good weekend. Stay safe, safe, stay healthy.

That is the plan like you do the same. All right.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai