“Dave Martin is a maker of disruptive technology: 2015 People to Watch” CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Entrepreneur Dave Martin has been preparing for 2015 for at least two decades -- since leaving his job as sales manager at Texas Instruments to buy into a tiny Chicago-based sales company representing semiconductor makers. He can remember one of his first clients, a start-up called SanDisk, a maker of flash drives. That was back when no one had heard of its now ubiquitous memory sticks and flash cards. And Martin can tell you about trying to convince Motorola to put flash memory into its cell phones. That was when cell phones were just, well, phones. Those personal memories date back to the dawn of the next big consumer electronic and industrial revolution that is just beginning to show itself -- the Internet of Things. The son of a Youngstown steelworker, Martin is a man who has not forgotten his Northeast Ohio roots, and he has been working for years on a technology that could put the region ahead of the curve in the next big manufacturing revolution. The Internet Revolution and Industrial Revolution are merging, said Martin, and IT control of billions of dumb things -- from dishwashers to factory production lines -- is happening. Everything from remote control of your home thermostat, hot water heater and porch light to the real-time diagnostics that jet engine maker Rolls Royce uses to monitor the in-flight workings of its engines on commercial air craft are examples that are already here. Martins company, Intwine Connect, is poised to be in all of these markets. And more. Intwines patented control system uses a Amazon cloud server and it includes a 4G high-speed cellular backup running over an encrypted VPN, or virtual private network. All of this means its secure. And because the 4G automatically activates if cable fails, homeowners keep their Internet access. Intwine is also a certified partner of Verizon Wireless, a much sought-after credential that means its system is far more secure than data transmitted through the Wild West of the Internet or even encrypted data transmitted over the open Internet. The guts of the Intwine system for homes is a secure server, a kind of computer, which acts as a gateway linking circuits and devices in the home to a distant cloud server. The gateway server has enough computing power that it can run things without constantly checking with the cloud, making it even more secure. In other words, a consumer can set it and forget about it or ask the gateway to send him alerts when something changes. Here are excerpts from a recent conversation with Martin at Case Western Reserve University, where the four-year-old company moved a year ago to access CWRUs engineering depth. Q. Arent you doing a project with the Northeast Ohio Public Energy Council? And is that your first major consumer service? A: Yes, we are. NOPEC is our first big contract. It will be called NOPEC Connect. We plan to launch the program in the spring. NOPEC is an aggregator, a retail energy provider. Q. But since NOPEC buys and resells electricity, why does it need Intwine? A: Retail energy providers lose 25-30 percent of their customers every year. We have developed the software and hardware to allow them to provide a service and not just energy. Thats what retail energy providers need to do. This will be a fundamental change between the energy providers and their customers. Q. Will NOPEC Connect help customers use less electricity? Can you give an example? A. Yes. Even now, you can use NOPEC to analyze your previous bills. NOPEC Connect will allow you to do that in real time. We can help NOPEC educate its customers on how to use less energy and we will give them the ability to control how much energy they use and how to manage consumption going forward. Q. Is Intwine talking to other retail energy providers? A: Yes, we have talked to other retail power companies. But we not be engaging with any other energy providers in NOPECs territory. Q. Have you worked with any utilities to help their customers reduce the amount of electricity they use? A. We have worked with American Electric Power, in Tulsa, in 2012 and 2013. The idea was to create collaboration between the utility and the homeowners. The homeowners could save money; the utility could reshape demand (reduce peak demand) and they would not have to turn on their power plants or build more plants. The project involved 500 homes. Anybody could sign up. We put five smart circuits or outlets in every home, including the thermostats. And we used pricing points. The homeowner could set price points (when circuits would turn off) for blocks of hours when prices (and demand) peak. What developed was a price responsive network. Q. If this kind of service is going to be common, especially in deregulated states like Ohio, what is it about the Intwine system that you believe is superior? A. Our gateway, which we like to call the cell phone of the Internet of Things, has the power to store all of the data if the connection goes down, and our system has embedded cellular, which makes it a lot more robust. That is our primary differentiation, the fact that we have a high-performing cellular connectivity to our devices. The cellular carriers are very committed to increasing the number of connected devices that are on the cellular network. They see it as the next big wave of connectivity, competing with the wire systems. Q. So, are you saying that the sophistication of your network is what makes Intwine different? A. Before you start talking about all of the cool, glitzy end devices, like thermostats, or air quality monitors, or whatever it is, it is only as good as the network it runs on. Q. What if a consumer has purchased products, say thermostats and light bulbs, that are controlled by a competing control system, such as Quirky or Iris? A. We have been involved in an industry consortium that is developing a standard that requires every device to use a standard connector. We have developed a module, an expansion module, that connects to our main board in the gateway. Its a universal translator. And it gives the power to the end user to pick a multiple of devices and not have to be limited by the devices and the protocol (software) that the provider of that hardware chose. Q. You mentioned that your system has the ability to include air quality sensors? What kind of sensors? And have you completed any projects? A. For the last four years we have been involved with the CWRU medical school studying indoor air quality and doing research for the National Institutes of Health and the Veterans Administration around the impact of indoor air quality on at-risk patient health, patients with COPD and asthma. In our next project with the VA and CWRU, we are going into the homes of 15 veterans with COPD. We will put our monitors in their homes. We are going to measure temperature, humidity VOCs (volatile organic compounds), nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ozone, and dust. Professor Ken Loparo, chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will look at the patient data the VA has. We are hoping to see a correlation between the air quality and the patient data. If we can change the air quality, we can help keep at-risk patients out of exacerbation and out of emergency rooms. Q. Will Intwine ever commercialize this system to offer it to consumers who might want to know whats in the air of their homes? A. In the connected home, we are going to measure VOCs, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, temperature and humidity. We will be able to learn the steady state quality of a homes air quality. When there is an inconsistency, we can notify you or turn on a ventilation system.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 18:08:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015