Point-and-Talk integrates voice and gesture with pictures to recreate the experience, with remote collaborators, of standing in front of an object and discussing it. Unmated video output from point-and-talk input and asynchronous video sharing via email and twitter allow for seamless collaboration. The zthere Mission is to help companies that work in the field seamlessly construct site information, share it anywhere, and track progress over time.
Thanks for having us here.What we would like to do today isIntroduce you to zthere and give you an overview of what we have builtTell you about our plans for where we are goingAnd learn about your needs so we can inform those plans
Matthias and I founded zthere late last year.As you can see, Matthias and I have been doing high-tech start-ups for some time. Between us we have founded and built 3 companies (not including zthere) and have raised over $40M for those companies.We have spent over 15 years in the digital imaging industry and all our businesses have served large industrial customers such as Tyco, Bosch, Emerson, etc.I’ll tell you a bit more detail about our last venture, RedShift Systems. At RedShift we were building disruptively-priced hand-held thermal imaging tool for energy auditing, industrial predictive maintenance and construction. We found that there was tremendous demand for such a product given how expensive the incumbent technologies still are. Ultimately, RedShift’s core sensor technology did not mature fast enough, but in the process we found many problems that customers were experiencing in these end markets. One key problem was, do the field tech’s really have the expertise to use the camera because they are quite complicated. There were centrally located experts and the challenge was how do you get what’s in their head into the field so the tech’s know where to point the camera and how to interpret the image. This clued us into the more general and widespread problem of how people in the field, who work in physical, real-world contexts, can share, discuss and collaborate about those contexts with remotely located people who can bring to bear their expertise. From the realization of this general challenge, zthere was born. So far, we have funded zthere ourselves. But we are at the stage where it will require outside capital to take it to the next stage and that is why it is so important for us to understand the needs of large potential customers such as yourselves.
So what is zthere all about?We want to make communicating about the real world with remote collaborators as easy as pointing and talking on site.Think about it. When people are on-site together discussing physical, real-world issues they work together by pointing and talking. “That insulation needs replacing.” “This part of the furnace needs replacing.” “Cut that wire.” “Turn that switch”. But despite all of the e-mailing, tweeting, video streaming and photo sharing we have available to us today. This kind of dialogue is still impossible if you aren’t in the same location.We aim to recreate that experience remotely by harnessing the power of touch-based mobile computing, wireless communication and the web.
So what is zthere all about?We want to make communicating about the real world with remote collaborators as easy as pointing and talking on site.Think about it. When people are on-site together discussing physical, real-world issues they work together by pointing and talking. “That insulation needs replacing.” “This part of the furnace needs replacing.” “Cut that wire.” “Turn that switch”. But despite all of the e-mailing, tweeting, video streaming and photo sharing we have available to us today. This kind of dialogue is still impossible if you aren’t in the same location.We aim to recreate that experience remotely by harnessing the power of touch-based mobile computing, wireless communication and the web.
And we’ve started doing this by building app’s that test key elements of our system.Let’s take a look at the first app we built, “zthere Free.”So this was designed to give small teams of people access to the core communication method—pointing and talking—on mobile devices. It is based on an iPhone app and a server functionality that stores all the session information and makes it available to any user who has been given access. Any user can create a session, play one back or add to one wherever they are. If they are connected at the same time as another user in their group and they have a good connection, they can interact in real-time. So zthere Free is about testing the core pointing and talking communication method.Matthias will tell you about another app we’ve built to test some other ideas we have for outputting information which has been gathered with this method.
So for us, today is really about better understanding your needs so we can figure out if what we are building will be of value to you and which elements are the most important.What I’ve understood from Ron so far that in the auditing business you are interested in improving the rate at which end customers make actual energy efficiency improvements as a result of the audits. And that there is hypothesis that better involving technical consultants will help and that zthere might be a tool for doing this.We’d love to understand a bit more about the energy auditing process, how these consultants are involved and based on what we’ve told you, do you think zthere can help?