Speaker: Matt Tolentino

Matt Tolentino is the founder of a new company call Namatad (interestingly, this is “dataman” spelled backwards, a sort of nickname he had), and has now been working for several years on a product known as Firefly. This started out as using sensors in buildings to predict the occupancy of different rooms and areas of buildings at different times, with astounding accuracy. This evolved in to trying to use similar sensors within buildings to pinpoint the location of individuals. As it turns out, this was far from a trivial task. But in Matts search for potential customers, he realized that fire fighters could make great use of a technology such as this. After all, they run in to unfamiliar buildings that are potentially collapsing resulting in changing pathways out of the building, and disorientation for the firefighters. If a firefighter gets lost in a burning building and can’t be quickly located, things can end quite badly. But with Firefly, devices are worn by firefighters while others are dropped throughout the building that when used together can help locate individual firefighters. I found this technology to be quite impressive and very interesting. Because of the nature of this technology, he was able to receive funding in the form of a grant, which is basically a best case scenario when trying to fund a business. Matt also discovered that he was not alone in this idea, and there were others attempting to develop very similar technology in other regions. He was able to use this to his advantage by looking at what the other companies were doing right to improve his product.