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LANINGHAM: I'm Scott Laningham for the developerWorks podcast
at IBM SmartCamp Austin 2011 with one of the five finalists, Sam Fuller, with Waldo Health.
Sam, thanks for talking to me for a second.
FULLER: Oh, it's my pleasure.
LANINGHAM: Tell us about Waldo Health, what you guys do.
FULLER: So, Waldo Health is a system for home telehealth
for generally older people, chronic diseases.
It helps manage their care at home.
We provide a system, a small system that actually supports video conferencing,
as well as a set of programs that assess the health of a patient at home, their vital signs,
how they're feeling, are they taking their medications, all of those things.
Pulls that information into a cloud-based database and then provides various analytics
on that to indicate those individuals that need follow-up care, maybe they need a phone call,
maybe they need someone to do a video conference with them
or they need to be brought into a clinician.
LANINGHAM: Okay.
FULLER: So from a development perspective...
LANINGHAM: Yes, I was going to ask you, what kind of software is involved?
A lot, I guess.
FULLER: It's mostly open source stuff.
Our platform is actually based on a smartphone chip set.
So it's a Linux-based system.
We use a lot of, at the low level we're using C, C++.
A lot of the application code is written in PHP, printing on a MySQL database on Linux servers.
A lot what we're doing now you would never have been able
to do it five years ago before the advent of all of this technology that we can build on
and very quickly provide a very, very functional system with a fairly small team.
We have five programmers that work on the development of our system.
LANINGHAM: I'm here with Matt Wensing, CEO of Stormpulse, a very cool company.
Loved hearing your pitch yesterday and today again.
Matt, nice talking to you.
WENSING: Yes, it's awesome to be here.
I appreciate the energy in the room.
It's contagious.
LANINGHAM: How was your SmartCamp experience?
What did you get out of it?
WENSING: I was rewarded tremendously.
So, from the mentorships yesterday and the feedback
and also people here understand B to B, and that's exciting.
Austin really gets enterprise.
And so I've gotten a great boost.
We help people make better decisions when weather is coming
and threatening their supply chain or their assets.
And we do that by giving them a visual of the weather that anybody can understand.
And that really allows us to scale weather insights to anybody.
You could load it up tomorrow if there's something coming,
and you'd be able to make a better decision.
By doing that, we're making a smarter planet, we believe.
And we're also attracting new enterprise customers and people buying into it
because they've used other solutions before,
but when they turn us on, things just become really clear.
LANINGHAM: What about just for the developers, what about the code involved in the back?
What's behind all this?
WENSING: Sure.
So we're actually an open source stack.
We use Engine X for our Web server.
We also use Python to do all the business logic and middle layers.
We use actually a best-of-breed architecture.
So we'll steal a little bit from here and a little bit from there.
We're not beholden to anything.
We think that's really important.
My CTO, I have to thank him for getting us in the cloud.
Amazon EC2 and S3.
But his philosophy overall is, let's create a loosely coupled system of the best parts.
And so from a technology standpoint, we're willing to take on whatever's best for us.
And right now I should mention there's an incredible language called HAXE.
It's pronounced "hex"; it's actually spelled H-A-X-E.
And I encourage you to look it up.
What it does is kind of like taking .NET and turning it on its head,
so rather than being able to write a number of languages in one runtime, imagine being able
to write one language and then delivering it to a number of platforms.
So for a bootstrap company like us, just imagine being able to write one code base
and then deliver it to iPad, iPhone, JavaScript, HTML5 and Flash.
LANINGHAM: Very cool.
TAYLOR: That's great, so yes, I just thought I'd mention it.
LANINGHAM: Congratulations, by the way.
TAYLOR: Thank you very much.
LANINGHAM: A cool competition.
Some great contestants you were up against.
But can you give us, give the audience a quick sense of what you guys are all about?
TAYLOR: Sure.
First, I'd like to thank IBM and all the people that participated.
This has been a fantastic event.
The other presenters were fantastic, and we're all winners here.
LANINGHAM: Absolutely.
TAYLOR: We've made so many friends and everything like that.
SecureWaters is a company that was started last year, 2010.
We've licensed technology out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
And the technology is a platform we use that we've developed, a water monitoring system.
And this system uses indigenous algae in surface waters to measure for toxic contamination.
LANINGHAM: Are there applications for this technology
that you guys are looking at beyond just security issues?
TAYLOR: Well, I'll tell you this, since we won this event,
and since we've met the people we've met here, it's opened possibilities up for us,
because the type of power and support you get with a company like IBM or the people
that have been brought here allows us to think in a much bigger way.
And not that we wouldn't have done it anyway; we just can't.
When you're a startup, and we're...you know, we have no resources, you can't think too big.
You've got to focus.
You really have to nail down what you're trying to do.
Now we can start to fantasize about, well, what would it be like if we could put a thousand
of these things out there on the Great Lakes and measure and keep that data
and then use that data to do something else.
LANINGHAM: Right.
TAYLOR: That's not something we were thinking about before, because it doesn't bring
in any revenue to us for what we're doing right now.
Well, now we can start thinking, what do you want?
What does IBM want to know?
If they want to know that, then there's a market,
then there's a market for it and we can go do it.
The same, wherever that is.
If we have an answer to a problem, we've narrowed that problem to a place and a space
that we can control, and now we have to start thinking bigger.
And not only that, but we've been given the mentors to really do that.
So it's not all on us now.
We can share some of that creative need for thinking big with some people
that really, really have thought big already.
LANINGHAM: These SmartCamps are really cool.
I mean, this is the first one I've been to.
But tell us about just the experience in general and what they're designed to achieve.
CORGEL: Well, the SmartCamp is an outstanding vehicle
to bring together all the interested parties in a community
that are trying to make their city smarter.
It starts with venture community.
It starts with local leading law firms.
The Chamber of Commerce of Austin, Texas is an incredible supporter; the University of Texas.
So when you get all the important elements of any local ecosystem together,
with some really bright ideas, from some smart entrepreneurs, use an IBM technology
and all the capabilities that we have, it's a winning day.
LANINGHAM: It's a great story.
CORGEL: So, the five finalists were outstanding,
and we've got a champion coming out of Austin, so.
LANINGHAM: How tough was it to decide back there?
CORGEL: Well, it was really tough, because in so many ways, you've got traction,
you've got credible solutions, working on a problem that we want to fix
as part of our Smarter Planet strategy.
So the first 10 minutes are tough.
But SecureWater did a great job of indicating how replicable their solution was
and how far along they are with all the patents that they need and the technology foundation.
And so in the end they became the IBM winner of this particular SmartCamp,
and they're going to go on to the global championship some time later
in the year, early in 2011.
LANINGHAM: Where is that going to be?
CORGEL: Well, we haven't decided yet.
You know, we're looking, last year we were in Dublin.
We had nine semi-finalists from around the world come to Dublin.
We had a great week.
The Dublin City Council and all of our key partners there rolled out the carpet for us.
So, we'll announce probably in mid-July where we're going
to be holding the global championship of entrepreneurs,
the IBM SmartCamp Global Championship, as part of our Global Entrepreneur Program.
LANINGHAM: Fantastic.
CORGEL: So, we're thrilled today because here
in Austin we partner aggressively with Start-Up America.
So the Obama Administration is on the same page that we are as far as,
what can we do to generate new ideas that build companies, that add jobs?
A pretty simple concept.
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