What to Expect When You're Connecting
What to Expect When You're Connecting includes interviews with a wide range of industry subject matter experts who share their journey, advice, and the mistakes they've made along the way in IoT. If you're adding connectivity to your products for the first time or seeking to optimize and scale your existing connectivity operations – welcome to the conversation.
What to Expect When You're Connecting
Building Cellular-powered Asset Tracking and Cold Chain Monitoring Solutions
In this episode, we welcome Rosie Amlani, the CEO of ColdChase, to discuss the multifaceted applications of asset tracking, IoT, and connectivity solutions provided by her company. Rosie explains the integrations and custom solutions offered by ColdChase's sub-brands: AssetChase and PaXChase. She delves into the origins and progress of the ColdChase platform, focusing initially on cold chain logistics during the COVID-19 pandemic and expanding to other sectors such as food safety and airport operations. Rosie highlights the importance of simulation in product development from her engineering background and the rigorous testing required for regulatory compliance. We explore how ColdChase leverages connectivity solutions like Soracom to ensure global coverage and robust data transmission, providing a comprehensive and reliable customer experience. The episode also touches on the challenges of technical sales and the importance of understanding customer needs in delivering tailored IoT solutions.
00:00 Introduction to Rosie Amlani and ColdChase
01:43 Origins of ColdChase: Cold Chain Solutions
02:49 Customizing Sensor Solutions
04:54 From Manufacturing to In-House Product Development
06:02 Importance of Simulation in Product Development
08:14 Understanding the Customer and User
12:24 Regulatory Compliance and Business Optimization
16:54 Environmental Considerations and Connectivity Challenges
20:59 Early Tests with Other Carriers
21:30 Testing Connectivity Across Borders
24:16 How ColdChase is Getting it Right: Connectivity as a Customer Experience
25:52 Customer Story
27:25 Importance of Asset Tracking
30:32 Challenges in the Food Industry
39:21 Security and Data Encryption
40:22 Final Thoughts and Contact Information
43:50 Closing
Today on what to expect when you're connecting, we're with Rosie Amlani, who's both the CEO and a CPA at a company called ColdChase, who also has AssetChase and PaXChase, which is an airport assets and facilities tool. But before we get into asset tracking and IOT and connectivity, I have one question. What does the PaXChase stand for?
Rosy:It stands for passenger experience.
Ryan C:You know you are the first passenger experience solution we've had on this podcast?
Rosy:Well, we try and please all our customers, so"Pas" is what airports use for passenger.
Ryan C:These names make sense ColdChase is cold chain, so restaurants or refrigerators. We're going to have assets themselves. I'm assuming it's logistics companies, people moving things around. And then there's the airport side of things, which is the passenger experience. Which to me seems like it's not just airplanes. I was looking at some of the different solutions you have. Airports are restaurants, their retail. I mean, there's just so much going on in these little mini cities. Before we get into the specifics, which of these three industry solutions was first.
Rosy:the cold chain side was the first one. focused really on air cargo. And that was the original focus right around COVID. If you remember all the vaccines were being transported around that time. So air cargo was the primary focus for us initially. And then we started getting into coolers and warehouses and freezers that were storing perishable goods being food, pharma, Also live animals is one on flight. For example, when they were transporting bees, bees have been put to sleep, queen bees. And so during flight, they're supposed to sleep. And in one instance, the bees woke up during flight and ended up killing each other. So, so they didn't know what happened. Was it temperature? Was it air quality that caused these bees to wake up? We've actually done trials with bees to see how they do on planes.
Ryan C:Was this the same product you used for monitoring vaccines going from one destination to another?
Rosy:Exactly.
Ryan C:of sensors do you have in that type of solution?
Rosy:So every client is different in what they require. So when you're doing flight or when you're doing transport, going from one place to another, what's really important is your cellular connectivity. Also companies are looking for GPS location being really important. And then your basic in terms of temperature, pressure, humidity. Depending on what you're transporting, if it's animals or vaccines, light might be important. So what we do is custom solutions. If a customer wants light, we add light. If they don't want light, then we don't put in light for them. So every sensor we sell is customized for every client. I mean you have your base product and then you add on to it. So we don't even sell online I have to interact with a customer to really understand what they're looking for
Ryan C:So you've got a enclosure and you've got a series of sensors. Now, are you adding in different types of sensors and shipping out bespoke solution kits, or is there a standard SKU that you carry?
Rosy:so we do have a standard product which is basically your cellular depending if they want GPS And you have your temperature humidity and pressure. Those are standard And then we add variety of sensors depending on, for example, if it's pharmaceutical, the temperature sensor they would want is mistraceable down to 0. 1 degree. So we would include that sensor rather than a regular sensor in temperature.
Ryan C:Do these sensors, are they hardwired to the main unit, or are they wireless sensors that communicate to a base station?
Rosy:So we basically use chips that we put on our board.
Ryan C:Oh, okay. So this is more of a, just more of a, one of those modular plug and play type scenarios,
Rosy:so it's, you know,
Ryan C:slots.
Rosy:we put in additional slots in our design so we do purchase all the components and then add them to our design.
Ryan C:One of the things that I know is that you guys come from a background in manufacturing and designing products for other companies. And now you do that for yourself. So you've got all of the equipment, the diagnostics, the development, the tooling to make these products. So how does being a manufacturer of products from other companies inform your ability to make your own products?
Rosy:Yeah.
Ryan C:What are the efficiencies that you find from that?
Rosy:So for the last 15 years before Cold Chase, we were helping companies develop their own products. We had 40 engineers on staff, different disciplines. We had electrical, physicists, laser, mechanical engineers, autonomous software programmers. Every single capability in advanced technology. So that's what we focused on was in advanced. technology. So we focused on areas where companies needed product development support. A lot of people that came to us would have a certain skill set, but not all the skill sets that they needed to build a product. For example, what I've learned, working with engineers. is how important simulation is before you build a product. People don't simulate.
Ryan C:of this?
Rosy:So I'm trying to think of one, but think about flow of liquid. How does it flow through a device? We can simulate that before you build your product. That's what we taught our customers. We helped over 500 companies develop products for themselves. The first thing we would do is simulate for them before we built anything. Sometimes we'd get some resistance and we would talk about the value of simulating. So you know what some of the issues are before you build your first prototype. A lot of companies don't realize that your first prototype is not always going to work. You're going to be building one, two, three, maybe 10. So it gets expensive to build prototypes so, it is best to simulate. We taught a lot of our companies, yeah, there's a cost to simulating, but in the long term, it saves you the cost. Oh,
Ryan C:a number of former peers that have worked in mechanical and fluid dynamics they always tell the story about. How a customer skipped out on the early proof of concept stages and tried to put together a solution using existing equipment. The difference is that they were trying to move not fluid through a system, but tomato paste and it has an entirely different physics profile on how, when it's spinning or when it's moving. And so, it was a cannery and. There's a lot of these little things that if you're not thinking about having the right specialists in then. Doing some of the simulations or tests. It was the cautionary tale of having to go back, retool, completely swap out entire components and re mill how the centrifugal force would move things through a system. So super nerdy, super cool. Uh, I'm curious to know who is your customer? when we're talking cold chase, AssetChase, and who's your user? Because there's buyers and users. And we think we conflate them into the customer far too often, right? But they're different people. So what's an example of who the buyer or the customer would be, and then who the users of your product would be.
Rosy:Okay, so if I think of a customer, on the cold chain side, think about the food industry. Storing food in restaurants, convention centers. Let's pick a convention center. Some of the larger convention centers have a lot of food going through there. There's FDA regulations on monitoring your freezers and coolers. That's twice a day. That's the requirement. But what time of day you pick, that's up to you. The customer for us would be the convention center that needs to pay for putting sensors in all the freezers and coolers. But who's the user? Nine times out of ten it's the chefs because they're the ones that have to make sure the food's at the right temperature and that spoilage is important, so making sure that food safety is taken into account. So I would say in that scenario the user would be the chefs, the executive chefs.
Ryan C:Are they the ones that are checking the devices or using those devices?
Rosy:Yes, they're checking the devices. We have different features that we've added on our web interface so they can set those limits and get alerts on temperature exclusions so they know ahead of time that something's happening. We can also predict when a freezer's gonna fail.
Ryan C:Is the prediction looking at things like motor vibration monitoring or drops in coolant or Freon levels? Or is it a serious engineering HVAC type? Formula
Rosy:it's just by looking at the data you can see. When things are pretty consistent, the data is pretty consistent. For example, I can look at a date on temperature and if it's in a freezer, I can tell you when they're, Oh, they're, what do they call it? The cycling of the freezers happening. I can see that. And so our clients can see it too. So once that changes, know something's happening. The
Ryan C:out the users is going to be maybe different from group to group, but if we're looking at the value chain of cold chain in particular, you've got the chefs and the people that are doing prep, they're going in and out of the units, there might be the distributors who are bringing goods in, or maybe even the distributors own the coolers themselves.
Rosy:Warehousing, that's what a lot of them do, right? They use warehousing facilities that hopefully are monitoring the temperature and know when there are issues. I can tell you horror stories where they don't, so, yeah.
Ryan C:And then there's maintenance teams. I'd imagine that are also getting this check engine light.
Rosy:Oh yeah, they're getting the alerts as well. The logistic companies that are transporting food from point A to point B, use temperature requirements of pharma and food, and, hopefully they're using sensors to tell them what the temperatures are within the time of transport.
Ryan C:Fascinating. So how much of a setup process goes into each one of these client installs.
Rosy:Normally we start with about half an hour just to give them an overview and then we check in and say, do you need more training? There's some features that we've got in our web interface in the beginning. They don't need to know that, but as we get good at the system and understand the data, We do advanced training setting up the actual hardware is trivial. I can do it, depending where they want to put the sensor. It's, you can put sticky tape or whatever, just place it in an area. There's no installation required. You don't need an electrical person to come in and set it up.
Ryan C:So I've got a question here. looking at things like airline asset monitoring, there are some interesting use cases that I see. Which of these applications have to do with maintaining regulatory compliance, and which of these is more about improving or optimizing the business? There's air bridge deployments, noise level monitoring. concessions monitoring and congestion tracking. They seem very different.
Rosy:They seem very different, but every use case is different. So if you think about, let's pick on airports, what's important for you when you're traveling? You go to an airport, let's say it's a first time what are the things you remember? You remember when you got off the plane, was it really humid, stuffy, or was it freezing cold for you to walk to the terminal? Then how noisy was it? How does the line upset the bathroom? Was it clean? Those are all things, I mean, you've gone into bathrooms at the airport where they have these happy faces and sad faces, but how do you know who's going in when all your congestion is happening? And it gives you some intel in terms of the things you need to do as an airport. Maybe you've got too much congestion at Starbucks. Maybe you need to have another concession stand not too far away that's a Starbucks as well. So these are the types of things we try and measure.
Ryan C:So when it's, when it's congestion, is this using cameras or how are you tracking congestion and the movement of people like using ultrasonics or the stuff that you might see in a, conveyor line or anything else.
Rosy:So we've integrated various sensors and made it work.
Ryan C:You're saying it's a special recipe of 11 sensors and spices to, get a calculation on what congestion levels look like. I'm just curious to know who the consumer of data is.
Rosy:the consumer of the data, in that setting would be airports.
Ryan C:The airport themselves.
Rosy:yeah. Because they would be looking at the data, where are the congestions? Do I need to have a cleaning staff there? Do we need to have more security there?
Ryan C:Are they looking at like a heat map? Cause I've seen retail stores will track where people go, where they slow down to know where end cap placement should be. Is the output something visual, or is this a special skill set that's required at an airport to look at all of this data?
Rosy:The visual could be charts. Graphs or numbers depending on what they're looking for.
Ryan C:Okay.
Rosy:So we've, and that's why I said we're custom solutions. When the customer wants it in a different format, we'll provide that to them.
Ryan C:Internal specialists who understand from the engineering and sensor side are converting business requirements into a deployment of a technical solution, then saying, based on our experience, this is how we would measure or monitor something
Rosy:Exactly. And you know, the fact that we have engineers on staff that were part of the company that did a lot of the product development. So it's understanding how you put sensors together and make sure that you're meeting all requirements. For example, on our cold chain that goes in airplanes, we had to get certifications to be safe on planes. As you know, the reason that you turn off your cell phone in airplane mode is because you don't want to interfere with the plane systems. So we had to go through certification, which is called D0160, which means that our sensors are safe on planes. They will not interfere with the controls of the plane. And the second big thing that people don't realize is a lot of sensors have lithium batteries and they can explode on planes. So we made sure we did not use lithium batteries
Ryan C:so you're able to use lithium batteries, but I'm hearing that they're safe ways to use them and
Rosy:Don't use lithium.
Ryan C:Oh, you're not using lithium batteries, so you have an alternative source. It's the same reason why very cold regions use a lead acid battery versus a lithium
Rosy:Exactly. Yeah. Yep. You get it. Yep.
Ryan C:Absolutely.
Rosy:if you think about the environment, a lot of sensors get thrown in the garbage. And a lot of them have lithium. That was one of the reasons we were conscious of the environment, and wanted to make sure that we were not polluting our landfills.
Ryan C:I've worked with engineers a long time. I hear you've worked with engineers a very long time. One thing I know for certain is that engineers love solving really interesting problems. A problem that you and your team have solved that you're all really proud of to have cracked the code and come up with a solution to address either a regulatory or a business challenge through the products that you're selling.
Rosy:There were technical issues. The one I just talked about is the D0160. The test of it is pretty rigorous. And so there's a lot of things our staff had to do you know, we're a manufacturing facility as well, so we have a lot of equipment we can use. When we were doing the D0160, we had to make sure Our boards would pass the test that there were no shorts or, issues with it. We have a piece of equipment that looks like a photocopier, but it's not. And it can test all the circuits. We were able to do that in house before we went for the certification. which saved us time and money because every time you go for the certification you're looking about fifteen, twenty thousand dollars each time.
Ryan C:Yikes.
Rosy:So the fact that we have the equipment in place, we have test equipment, we have reliability equipment, and we have manufacturing equipment. The other challenge we had was connectivity.
Ryan C:Okay.
Rosy:I would say the big thing for us, we tested about 12 service providers. Sorocom was one of them. Reliability for us was really, really critical and we were seeing a lot of failures providers. Either they did not have Cat N1 or they did not have NB IoT and cost was a big factor for us in Canada as well because we only have three major service providers. And so we have to look at other providers that could provide us better connectivity to our sensors. And also, it needed to be global. So, not only Canada, it had to be US, Europe, Asia, that was one of the reasons that we picked Soracom because you hit all those buttons in terms of we're getting reliable information, you don't only have SIMs, you have eSIMs, which is important for us, Remember, we do our own manufacturing, so we can put eSIMs on our boards. Not an issue.
Ryan C:Is there a preference
Rosy:we prefer eSIMs.
Ryan C:I'd imagine just Vibration alone my experience has been anytime you're in an industrial or commercial deployments, you can't always control some of the environmentals, whether it's really dusty or,
Rosy:Exactly.
Ryan C:static levels or especially vibration and just seeing the little contacts wiggle back and forth. So that's, interesting that because you are a manufacturer, you're able to so easily leverage eSIM. ESIMs are, definitely One of those hardware pieces that most people don't even realize exists, or it's not being worked into the designs because products, if you're assuming it's going to have cellular, you've just got just an empty SIM slot that you're going to fill later, you'll figure that out when you're ready to deploy it or even pass the buck and go, if that's that, that empty SIM slot is someone else's problem, they can shop for a plan and pick a carrier that's, in their backyard or, wherever they're going to deploy. Talk to me about some of those earlier tests when you started having to evaluate different carriers, where did you see failures where was there friction in the experience that you were looking for? And, was there any standout moments that you can think of?
Rosy:I would say, a lot of companies say they have worldwide coverage, right? It's one big one. We have people testing connectivity for us all over the world. when people were flying out, they would take a sensor with them and that's how we checked for reliability on the 12 we tested. And to be honest with you, a lot of them failed because they did not have connectivity in certain countries. For example, in certain places in Europe or even Asia. That was an issue. So we had to test a lot to find the right one. We also,
Ryan C:about modeling earlier on,
Rosy:exactly, but you had to do physical tests. So it was a good thing we were connected to people that do travel a lot. They ended up being our test case. The big one for us was NB IoT. We're in Canada, a lot of the carriers aren't NB IoT ready. So, it was finding service providers that could connect to NB IoT and give us reliable data. We found reliability on a lot of, the providers was not there. We, we will see data coming in and what we would do is compare. So we could compare, product one versus product two and see which one was better. So we ended up doing a lot of testing and eSIM was important for us. We didn't want people taking out the SIMs, so that's why we didn't go with the SIM card. And also temperature requirements means eSIM works better.
Ryan C:So what I'm hearing is you selected your connectivity vendor because you're bundling the connectivity in with your product offering itself. So. I'd imagine that, from a customer experience, were you ever at a point where you had people having to manage their own connectivity or was it a decision from the get go? Like, we're going to make this simple and take care of the connectivity as part of your solution.
Rosy:we actually decided up front that we were going to provide that service for example, if you're on a flight from, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to, Tokyo, if the customer was to buy their own provider, let's say Verizon, it works in Canada, but they wouldn't even know whether it's going to work in Tokyo, we wanted to give them that service where they have the confidence wherever their product is going, they're going to get connectivity and they're going to get data. Real time data is really important. You're not going to get data on a plane, but as soon as the plane lands, data starts getting transmitted. We didn't want customers trying to figure out. What provider to go with, depending on what country that we're going to. So this way, the fact that Soracom has, capability in 150 countries or more, we were able to give that to our customers. So that's a value added service. We provide our customers.
Ryan C:Having been in your shoes, been the product company selling products that go out into the world that need to connect, I have to applaud you on that decision for one, for just the experience reasons, but I know I've been in the alternate role as well in which it was a client where they said, we're going to let our customer figure it out. The learning that they found is the device will get deployed. It was a telemetry device. In a vehicle. Every time it stopped working, went into a different region, they would start cursing that product name. So I could imagine like if other people had to pick their connectivity and they're like, Oh, stupid ColdChase, things is not working again. And it has nothing to do with your brand. It had everything to do with the connectivity on the other end, but it's hard to diagnose that in most cases, you don't get the tools to diagnose what happened. So I think that's really interesting that you've been focused on this holistic customer experience from the very beginning, where you're talking to your customers, thinking about what is the problem you're trying to solve, putting together. A bundle that's got additional sensors that meets the fidelity level their regulations might require, like the vaccines and how much variance you're allowed. And you're able to put together an experience where they don't have to make decisions outside of their own expertise. Chefs can make decisions based off of temperature of food, which is something they understand and not have to know how to diagnose whether their freezer is going out.
Rosy:But they'll see it. I have a customer that, basically sells and stores high quality meat. They have our sensors in all the coolers and freezers. They have one cooler that's outside. So, and it, it's down to minus 50. And so when it's really cold, everything gets cold I get a call from them in January of this year. It was minus 45 C in Alberta at that time. She said, I have to tell you something. And I said, what happened? So we had a freezer failure on our outside cooler. It overheated, but she said, I was able to tell there was something wrong with the freezer before we lost over a hundred thousand dollars in meat. So she said four of us came to work at midnight. It was minus 45. We unloaded all the meat, put it outside because if we left it in the cooler, it was all going to go bad. The freezer overheated because the unit basically froze.
Ryan C:It interesting how it just takes one, one time for something to go wrong, to justify the expense that actually a fraction of the expense of a lot of these IOT monitoring things. So like you were mentioning those air bridges at airports, aren't where they need to be, and there's a bunch of fines or penalties that you can be assessed.
Rosy:asset tracking can be on any piece of equipment. If you think about farm equipment, oil and gas equipment, it's things that get stolen, and people don't know where it's gone. At an airport setting, there's a lot of equipment moving around on runways and by the planes. And they're what they call ground handling suppliers. They do all that, like the Swissports and the Menzies. And so they basically manage all their equipment. And they get moved around, they get borrowed by others. And so some of the airports fine them for leaving equipment in places where it's not supposed to be. And from what I understand, some of these fines are pretty hefty. They can run thousands and thousands of dollars per instance. Add them up, it could be a million dollars or more for some of these companies. So, the fact is, they don't have sensors on the equipment And asset tracking is all about knowing where your equipment is. Also, if you think about airports, you're close to a runway, incoming planes, outgoing planes, they need to know where all the equipment is and where all the people are, because there's some pretty strict regulations on where you can and cannot be at an airport during takeoff and landing.
Ryan C:So that's a connected safety issue.
Rosy:It is a safety issue for them.
Ryan C:So are they looking at that data as a way to prove things that happened in the past? Or is it also. Something they can use as a preventative measure.
Rosy:Well, I think it's both. If they've had an incident and they had a sensor that gave them all that data, for example, if someone wasn't supposed to be there and caused an incident, you would know from that data that that truck happened to pass this runway at this time and was not supposed to be there. They can use it as a preventative, but also when they have audits that information is there. We keep all the data. We don't take down any of our data that's stored on the cloud. Customers have access to that data and they can have, they have access to also downloading that data. So then they can say you can remove it from your database because it's on ours now.
Ryan C:Someone who has lots of happy customers that are creating great experiences. Even tailoring the experiences to meet their specific needs. When it comes to talking to people in the market that are not yet customers, do you find that it is a demand capture scenario or a demand creation scenario? And I'll preface it by saying demand capture is there are people out there that are actively, like there's general awareness of, oh yeah, I can go, I just need to find which asset tracker I need to buy. Or is it you're still having to educate the market on what's possible or that this technology. Is as widespread or easy to get as it is.
Rosy:on the cold chain side people have a choice on what they want to put in for monitoring. It's probably not understanding what they're getting because unless you're technical and understand all the capability of every sensor you buy, they might not know some of the issues and challenges with them. What we found in the food industry, pharma industry not as much, but food industry is, the margins are so small, if you think about grocery stores and all the supply chain issues we've had, people don't want to invest in new tech, and that's basically what we consider ourselves as new tech. While they say we have a thermometer on our freezer, that's enough. And we take our temperatures twice a day, so they're good with that. But the issue becomes when they have a failure. And when they have a failure, then they don't know what to do.
Ryan C:You implying that the best customers in cold chain are ones who have touched the stove or when actually the opposite of that, they've had a problem and they're not going to have that problem again.
Rosy:Exactly. So, it's, you know, it was a real learning the first year when we started the colchon side. It was, we talked to hundreds of people in restaurants, convention centers, manufacturing companies of food, and again, margins is small for them, so to invest was an issue, but not understanding the implication of losses where they would not have a loss using a sensor that gives them reliable, real time data. There is a trick now when I am talking to a food producer or anyone dealing with food. I try and assess if they do care. Do they care what it's good or bad? Do they care that something was frozen when they got it and thawed and they refroze it?
Ryan C:Know what,
Rosy:know.
Ryan C:I can picture in my mind, these business meetings with people where like, Hey, it'll be all right. You know, it's our little secret, no, one's going to get hurt over this. So. What's their risk tolerance?
Rosy:We've seen in Canada, I think it was last year, where we had a daycare where a lot of kids got really sick. They had to be hospitalized. They had to be on kidney dialysis. But. We were very lucky nobody died. My question is, why did that happen? Was it improper storage or food? Was it in a cooler or not? Don't know. But again, those are the types of things we think about. I did a presentation at a local chef school where all the graduated chefs and new chefs were there, and I talked about food storage, and they all knew about food safety. But again, the question is, do you care? If you don't care, I'm not selling to you. I know that. And so that's one of the things we've assessed. Even people that have had losses for some reason think insurance will cover it. Not realizing the insurance costs also go up. It's been an interesting experience dealing with the food industry. I have certain things that I would like to see in the food industry. When you go to convention centers, it kind of makes you wonder.
Ryan C:what types of regulation do you see right now driving asset monitoring, asset tracking, cold chain? Where it's helping drive an industry of solutions.
Rosy:I don't think on the asset tracking, it's really dependent on every industry. For example, some industries have really been hit by people stealing their assets and they don't know where it's gone that's one big area we see, understanding the location. When you think of a setting where there is hundreds of equipment and you need to find something and it's all over the place and it's due for maintenance. People spend hours looking for it. With our system, you know exactly where it is. So that frees people time in looking for something and also gets that equipment to maintenance faster. You're not keeping your maintenance team waiting as well.
Ryan C:It's fascinating to think about that it's not just where is something, but it's where is things in a rush. It's for guiding people, giving them directions to an asset that they need to maintain. So it's not just the sensors that are saying, what is my condition? But it's also where am I? Reducing the amount of time, labor and effort as labor is, one of the highest costs for most businesses. So getting to reduce that and get people focused on the expensive work, which is repairing the device or diagnosing the device. Or moving the asset from point A to point B and not just looking for it. We all know that there's the ideas of busy work, but this sounds like a way that technology is helping people create better experiences, passenger experiences, chef, restaurant and food experiences. Cold chain is arguably one of the most mature IOT use cases. In all of IOT, it's it, I think it's been in like the top 3 since, the early 2000s when people were talking about machine to machine internet of things or smart devices. It's neat to see that you've taken an oldie, but a goldie and have been evolving on it into asset. And then taking cold chain and asset tracking and, and creating something that again, is something that's really unique and is something that you can hang your hat on and that's that passenger experience. So I'm really excited to see where you take that and how many different unique applications you're able to bring these connected technologies in using cellular connectivity so you're never having to go to it and ask for access to their network because we, both know the answer is from the office of the C-I-No is no way you're not putting devices on our infrastructure.
Rosy:And we avoid that because we don't go on their infrastructure.
Ryan C:And they have the opportunity to pull the data down into the repository of their choice through your platform
Rosy:the fact that we get really good data from the Soracom website as well, we know where all our devices are, how they're connecting. And so that's really good to see that we know our sensors out there are connecting and are giving us data on, whatever frequency we've picked to get data.
Ryan C:I'd actually asked one of my engineers, what is it that we take for granted far too often when it comes to what our engineers put into what is normally a cellular service where you get a bill at the end of the month, and here's how much data you used. And he'd mentioned the ability to tag sims. You can add tags by customer or the device that they're on. There's a metadata service that gives you where they connected, how often they connected or additional details that you normally can't get. That's something that you'd have to call up your carrier and your customer rep and have them essentially run a trace and look that data up for you. And we just expose that same portal, to anyone that has, access. The event handler is one that, he mentioned, which is setting data thresholds to keep runaway devices from kicking out junk data and burning through data. Just like asset tracking keeps people from losing they're bottom line, by having waste. This is another way of reducing waste and identifying early problems. He also mentioned things like connectivity diagnostics and the ability to ping devices out in the field and get an acknowledgement without having to write special software, additional diagnostic tools. And, most of us in IOT take a lot of things for granted, just like things in cold chain, things in asset tracking, we don't think about how sometimes the difference between a product and a good product is these small, thoughtful additions to the user experience. So I'm really glad we got to hear about the time and effort and thoughtfulness that you've been putting into this customizable, solution, that allows people to meet very specific needs,
Rosy:the reason we started Cold Chase was all around, we were driven by a customer that came in here and said, I want this product because I can't find it. one of the other things we're very conscious about, because of the clients we're dealing with, our customers are very focused on security of their data. security of the that we use. And so we've been picking sensors that are either North American or European sensors, because that's important, when you're talking about data security. We've also focused on encrypting our data. So customers that come to us understand. If a customer is not interested in encryption of data, that tells me security is not really important for them. And for them, a cheaper solution might be better, but for us, we focus on providing value to customers that realize how important security is for them. We see it more and more now as people are getting hacked.
Ryan C:You don't want to be the next crowd strike IOT.
Rosy:no.
Ryan C:It makes perfect sense. thank you for sharing Rosie, your experience and your time building out cold chase and addressing unique scenarios like passenger experience solutions, using IOT technologies. There's nothing radically new about what you're doing. It's the way it's being put together and how it's being presented in a meaningful user experience friendly way.
Rosy:Thank you, Ryan, for inviting me I could talk for hours about, what we do but my drive is seeing when a customer is happy, we're always checking in with our customers just to make sure everything's going well. If they say, can you do this report for me? It's like, okay, we'll look at it. And they get it.
Ryan C:So if we've got someone out there that has a asset tracking need or cold chain need that the solutions up to this point are not meeting their specific needs, how should they contact you?
Rosy:So we do have a website, www. coldchase. ca, and assetchase and PaxChase is all under that. And so my information is on the website as well. They can contact me directly. We also have a customer inquiry on our website, I get all the inquiries, so I respond to all of them. I try and turn around those requests within 24 to 48 hours.
Ryan C:That's great. What is the type of information you wish more people included? In the little blurb, when they say, here's my problem, what are the types of things you're listening for to better understand their particular needs?
Rosy:So they may say they have a problem in something, but understanding why it's a problem, what happened to you that you said it is a problem. So we need to understand what use case really they're trying to solve. And it's understanding all those issues before I can say to them, this is what I think will work for you. And these are some of your requirements, and we can meet that based on this sensor, that sensor, or whatever they need.
Ryan C:It's like going to a doctor and then just writing a prescription versus asking diagnostic questions and knowing what actually hurts before they write you that prescription.
Rosy:I'd like to end with one thing, because one of the challenges for the tech companies that we see is finding people that can sell. Technical products. We have found that to be the biggest challenge for a startup company looking for people that can do sales. They cannot sell the product because they don't understand all the challenges associated with food, pharma, asset tracking, and so they can't relate to the issues that people are facing.
Ryan C:what quality is most valuable for someone looking to break into technical sales or selling these solutions?
Rosy:I think they need to understand what challenges we're trying to solve Like it's it's really simple and I'm not technical myself, but I get it,
Ryan C:is it industry experience or curiosity?
Rosy:Industry experience because we live in Alberta, oil and gas country, different sales people, they would prefer to sit at their desks and make some phone calls. It's not going to visit people and understanding, Okay, what are your challenges? Like, what's not working for you? You're using an existing sensor, how's that working for you? Are you getting what you need? It's been very difficult finding those types of people, to be honest.
Ryan C:So for all those listeners that have their own startups or are looking at building a product, I think that's one of the things we might think, we're skipping out on is we're thinking about the product, but not the go to market. If you happen to know. People that are you from industries and can have that solution seller mindset, make sure you tap them on the shoulder and, and, and keep them in the know when you're building up that business plan. So, connectivity is a complex sale in many ways. It's not just a widget. Rosie Amlani of cold chase. Thank you for your time. And we appreciate you, sharing your story.
Rosy:Thank you. Take care.
Ryan C:Rosie, what is Soracom to you?
Rosy:Sorocom is a partner for us. Without that provider that we need on connectivity, We would not have a product, uh, a reliable product. And so I would say your partner, your supplier as well, but I consider it to be a partner because when I have a question, when I have things I need addressed, I just send out an email and get a response right away. What we've seen is you're more solution driven trying to figure out, if we have a problem, how do we fix it? Rather than saying to me, this is how it's done.
Ryan C:Thank you.
