PLUGHITZ Live Presents (Audio)

With everything being quantified these days, user testing has become important within multiple business applications. Paul Cheek, CEO of Vempathy, was at Collision Conference 2018 to showcase their new online usability testing platform and video analysis software.

He explained how there are now a lot of companies that put a lot of emphasis on user research. But it is so time-consuming to go through hours and hours of video to discern the insights and emotions required for this type of research. Vempathy's AI approach is able to bring research faster and at scale. The process starts at the project launch when clients decide what exactly they want to be tested, whether it be their website, onboarding flow, or even a new feature. They then send their Vempathy URL to the testers so that they can record themselves.

In the next step, they review the qualitative results with their emotion analysis technology. Vempathy produces qualitative emotion reports so that can easily identify the most insightful moments of the user's recordings to then collaborate with their clients on annotations. And it's not just raw data. They also produce short highlight reels of the most emotional moments that can be shared with the teams.

When it comes time to present the results, this is where they shine. Their specialty is extracting quantitative data from the qualitative research. They provide a reporting suite that provides clients with quantitative data, which can be presented to the entire team to not only justify changes but also inspire action. Output includes journey maps that are automatically generated that allow clients to measure emotion throughout the user experience. There are also iterative Results that show how user emotion valence is increasing and decreasing from iteration to iteration. And advanced emotion tracking is more of a deep dive on all of the 4,200 emotion data points that are tracked by the millisecond.

To learn more about their process and pricing, be sure to visit their website after the interview.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Although Michele has worked in the banking industry full time for many years, she originally went to school with a concentration in communications, advertising and marketing. She began her career in sales and retail management, selling electronics and computers. Her love of all things tech eventually brought her back into the electronics arena three years ago when she started with PLuGHiTz Corporation to help with special events as a Production Assistant. Soon she began to dabble with the audio and video and is loving her role as Producer. She's also one of our content writers and assists with product reviews. Looking forward, she is excited to expand her skill set into editing and helping the company continue to grow.

Breefly is a cloud-based platform that simplifies business reporting while delivering multi-structured data and analyzed insights, as well as curated, actionable content to users. Founder and CEO Marcus Jimenez soft launched Breefly at Collision 2018, and spent some time telling us about the goals and value of the platform.

Jimenez found the impetus for Breefly while working with research and data clients who constantly needed help articulating data to make it more consumable and digestible for teams less interested in reading a 400 deck than getting to the crux of the matter. Breefly is an enterprise level type product built with the market research industry in mind, but which Jimenez says has broader corporate applications for a multitude of business reporting needs.

Essentially, the platform helps socialize impersonal data into meaningful stories. It integrates multi-structured data including text, imagery, and rich audio and video media, and allows users to create almost any type of shareable content for everything from business and sales briefs featuring data visualizations to general marketing and corporate communications to podcasts and video ethnographies. Users can create their customized briefs within minutes, for more palatable and meaningful business reporting.

Reports are end-to-end encrypted to remain secure and private, and the platform is cloud-based, giving users full control over their reports, with the ability to grant access as needed and only when needed. Because users love swiping, the system interface allows users to swipe left and right to visit the selected brief and a couple of taps to access the story-based format of data and content. The system allows users to create flash briefs, good for general recaps and summaries; marketing briefs for things like trends reports and campaign summaries; research briefs for executive summaries and tracking study updates, and video briefs for ethnographies, video project updates, and corporate communications. Briefs are also auto-tagged upon creation, so users can simply use the keyword search to easily search and view briefs.

Visit the Breefly website to learn more.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Lloyd Reshard, CEO of Cognitive Big Data Systems, stopped by our Collision studio to tell us about their new software system. It provides a great way to get more security and upgrade your system without having to purchase new equipment as it works with your existing hardware. The software, AVAE, is a third party add in system that basically acts as a filter that is able to detect all the normal activity that is specific to your home and then alerts for unusual activity. It allows for the processing of real-time video data on your PC without having to change the cameras or video management systems. AVAE is able to remember the patterns of over 25M numbers per second and how they relate to each other without storing any of the numbers.

AVAE is unique because of the unconventional way that it processes large amounts of data. This quick and efficient system transfers regular video streaming into pixel data. Once pixelated, it is then able to detect and classify abnormal behaviors and patterns based on what is normal for a particular person, device, time of day or situation. AVAE can also issue automatic alerts and/or be programmed to take action as needed. The point, click and tag design offers real-time training of target objects with minimal setup.

System capabilities include:
• Detection and classification of objects, both indoor and out
• Automated detection of people at parking entrance/exit
• Vehicle / human detection - with further classification into subtypes
• People, vehicle, object counting
• Crowd density management
• Static object (such as items left behind, abandoned baggage, etc.)
• Trajectory between cameras
• People detection on a conveyor belt
• People detection on railroad tracks or on gates
• Meaningful data about the volume and direction of pedestrians, bikes, motorbikes, cars, and large vehicles.
• Can easily be integrated via APIs, Services or libraries.

After you view the full interview, head over to their website for more information and video demonstrations.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Although Michele has worked in the banking industry full time for many years, she originally went to school with a concentration in communications, advertising and marketing. She began her career in sales and retail management, selling electronics and computers. Her love of all things tech eventually brought her back into the electronics arena three years ago when she started with PLuGHiTz Corporation to help with special events as a Production Assistant. Soon she began to dabble with the audio and video and is loving her role as Producer. She's also one of our content writers and assists with product reviews. Looking forward, she is excited to expand her skill set into editing and helping the company continue to grow.

Field Complete makes managing contractors in the field easy and efficient. COO Timothy Tesluck joined us at Collision 2018 to tell us what sets this field management software apart from the others. One of the signature features of the platform, he says, it the fact that that it's "industry agnostic." That means Field Complete can and does handle contractor field services across a wide range of job categories, including property maintenance to plumbing, landscaping, appliance repair, green energy and more.

Additionally, Field Complete utilizes a job sharing feature so that companies on the platform can send jobs to each other. Currently being test marketed in Atlanta and Los Angeles, the job sharing feature allows vendors to share jobs across a wide range of industries, streamlining operations to the point where the platform basically becomes a job source for contractors.

Uber keeps coming up as the easy analogy for many of the services surfacing at Collision 2018, and it works here, too, as the company looks to release a customer application where a customer can take a photo of whatever is broken in their home, and a verified licensed technician can be at their door in a short time frame. Tesluck points out that the difference between Field Complete and Uber is that his platform empowers the field service industry with the right tools for contractors to compete in an in-demand economy.

The company prides itself on the fact that their co-founding team has a combined 50+years of field service management experience, and intimately understands the industry, its needs, and challenges. Field Complete is designed to be user-friendly, utilizes a route optimization feature for dispatchers and contractors, has easy to manage business rules and offers configurable software solutions. From estimating and assigning jobs to contractors, to monitoring and updating field service progress to collecting payment, Field Complete does it all.

Visit the company website to learn more.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

BriteBee is a new way to shop for insurance that refreshes the experience for the online consumer as well as improving outcomes for insurance professionals. CEO and co-founder Keagan Henson joined us at Collision 2018 to share how BriteBee is disrupting the $1 billion a year insurance industry in a positive way by putting the consumer in charge.

With the BriteBee three-pillar platform of "Share, Compare, and Communicate," the customer maintains full control of their policy search process without falling prey to lead generation sites that collect and sell consumer info, and subject the customer to robocalls, spam and phishing threats. Customers share their information a single time, saving it to a secure and private profile that is not visible to insurance companies. They can then compare quotes, agents, and experiences in one place, choosing only the agency with which the customer wishes to work. The platform also gives customers the ability to request quotes from up to five agents at once. The consumer communicates with agents on his or her own time with no unwanted calls or emails from insurance companies, and consumer information remains private until the customer decides to share it.

By creating a consumer-controlled platform, the company looks to build trust and brand loyalty and seeks to build their revenue model off subscription services to agents rather than insurance customers. The benefit to agents is that by the time a customer decides to connect, it's a warm lead for them, from a potential client who reached out independently and who is ready for and expecting a quote. Agents have opportunities to market on the BriteBee site but in a controlled environment, through agent "spotlights" and blog features. BriteBee currently offers home, renters and auto insurance, with plans to expand as they grow.

You can learn more about the company at their website.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Every generation has been impacted by times of great strife. On one hand, we've come so far, and on the other, we are stuck in the cycle of conflict. Same pattern, different topic. And being right in the middle of the current set of divisive circumstances, we can either sit by and hope it passes or we can get active and try to effect positive change. Luckily, more and more people are choosing the latter. They want to get involved in their communities, to make a difference. Unfortunately, it's not always so easy to get started.

Patrick English, Founder of WokeUp, came up with an easy-to-use platform to assist with community organization. The tool empowers citizens who are concerned about a particular topic to take direct action in their local areas. He came up with the idea after the 2016 elections as he felt that the viciousness of the election cycle revealed disconnects within our democracy. It had broken down to the point that people were no longer actually communicating with each other. The division between the ideologies was deepening and we needed a way to come back to a basic level of respect. What better way than to work together for a common, community-based goal to get back on track. We can all work towards a shared purpose to realize that there is more that can bring us together than there is that divides us.

Their mission at WokeUp: "(to) Develop the necessary political infrastructure for the 21st century through a virtuous social network, providing technology tools and resources for effective activism. Encourage the smallest acts of justice and kindness, with an understanding that the power of personal connection can shape our world. Make civic involvement simple, fun and an enduring American value."

At their core, they are a group of longtime activists who made a few simple hypotheses:
• Social media can be a tool to effect meaningful action.
• Volunteer time is as valuable a resource as donor dollars.
• Protests and resistance are losing their effectiveness.
• The American Renaissance will begin at the community level, not in Washington.
• When the right people get connected, change happens.

In their own words, they are an elegant experiment to test these assumptions. They are building an online infrastructure that allows members to easily organize with fellow members around civic action in their communities. They will be accomplished by providing a repository of resources, as well as an archive of past actions for the purpose of providing guidance and feedback.

If you are ready to get involved in a way that is both empowering and fun, check out their website to learn more.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Although Michele has worked in the banking industry full time for many years, she originally went to school with a concentration in communications, advertising and marketing. She began her career in sales and retail management, selling electronics and computers. Her love of all things tech eventually brought her back into the electronics arena three years ago when she started with PLuGHiTz Corporation to help with special events as a Production Assistant. Soon she began to dabble with the audio and video and is loving her role as Producer. She's also one of our content writers and assists with product reviews. Looking forward, she is excited to expand her skill set into editing and helping the company continue to grow.

Mintor co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Kasra Khalili joined us at Collision 2018 to talk about his online connection platform for mentors and mentees (those being mentored). His own life experience, post-college, was the impetus for developing Mintor. It took several months of research and personal networking before he found the right professional guide for his needs. He ultimately found the experience so transformative and perspective-setting that he was inspired to help others more easily find their own personal experts and career guides.

While there are other matching platforms available for mentors and youth or under-represented populations, most are broad in scope. Mintor aims to create a more customizable and organic experience, utilizing a proprietary algorithm that screens for compatibility between mentors and mentees based on professional needs, level of current expertise, topics of interest, goal alignment, personality and learning style. After an initial match, student and guide meet to get to know one another and confirm compatibility.

The platform provides a scheduling tool for future meetings, as well as a continuous feedback loop to foster community moderation and performance accountability. The system also allows users to set learning goals, track their progress, and share milestones.

Currently in the alpha, pre-development stage, Mintor hopes to launch January 2019. With 60 mentees already in the pipeline, the company wants to build their network and get as many people as possible interested, and build out with multiple subscription-based platform offerings that range from access to one mentor to premium membership that expands user and platform feature options. Mintor also recognizes the need for mentoring in corporations, businesses, and universities, and plans to be able to provide the vital metrics these larger institutions value.

You can learn more at the Mintor website, where visitors are also invited to share their mentor stories.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Paramvir Maniktala is the founder of Servicio, which delivers a competitive gig-economy platform for e-commerce and retail where anyone can become a courier. Servicio is a supply chain & logistics company with a twist: think Ubereats but which delivers a lot more than food inexpensively to your doorstep. Servicio delivers everything from groceries to electronics, clothing and more.

Inspired to solve the challenge of expensive gas and high delivery costs encountered in his native India, which can shrink already modest profit margins, Maniktala took a page out of the peer-to-peer rideshare platforms common today, and launched Servicio, with the tagline "Connecting Life to Life." Now even small companies with limited delivery needs can offer the perk of local shipping without incurring the expense of contracted services, in-house staff or the cost of a company delivery vehicle. In addition to the low cost, the system provides fast turn around within a small hyperlocal delivery area, transparency, and a verification process that ensures products are safe and drivers are vetted. Servicio also changes the delivery dynamic by giving 90% of the delivery fee to local couriers, with only 10% commission to Servicio.

With the peer-to-peer web platform, users can book their consignments with the goal of better brand placement for retail, e-commerce & SME industry at affordable pricing. Servicio benefits from low overhead costs, requiring neither warehouses nor a delivery fleet. It's a decentralized process of one person to one person, with no middleman or central distribution center to incur additional costs.

For individuals, the website platform allows users to sign up to book their own consignments. Local transport company owners can also participate. Servicio is banking both on the social welfare component of its mission, that not only motivates local couriers with the majority of delivery fee earnings, but also a royalty program, as well as the lure of cheap labor for companies wanting to offer local deliveries as an extra perk.

Servicio is currently an alpha stage company, which Mankitala brought to Collision 2018 to help raise interest and capital. Learn more at their website.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Mike Fairclough, is the founder of eebudee, an Australian software company dedicated to helping keep kids ages 4-12 safe and savvy online behavior through an emphasis on digital citizenship and social media education. Inspired by the personal experience of a friend's 14-year-old daughter killing herself because of cyberbullying, Fairclough joined with other tech-savvy parents and experts to create eebudee as a family friendly platform where parents can educate their children about the online world in a safe, secure but also fun environment.

eebudee recognizes the positive aspects of being digitally connected - like access to information, communities of like-minded friends, and staying connected to family - but hopes to help children develop digital armor and digital resiliency, protecting them from falling into internet addictions and falling prey to online predators. The point of eebudee is not to shield kids from the online world but to empower them to reap the benefits while properly protecting themselves and developing effective communication and positive social skills. "Bud", developed by kids for kids, is the digital safety mascot of the eebudee community, a friendly cartoon fridge recalling the kitchen as the symbolic gathering place for families, and which has all the ingredients needed to raise digitally resilient kids - education and social media training.

For a modest monthly subscription fee of less than $10/month, a portion of which goes to the eebudee Foundation to help fight problems associated with digital addiction and cyberbullying, families have access to all the educational curricula and resources in the platform. Once subscribed, families receive guidance on appropriate usage to set the stage for savvy usage from the start, and then children have access to regularly updated games and other content that reinforce safe online behavior.

Next steps for eebudee is expanding roll out in the United States and Fairclough hopes to leverage the experience of Collision 2018 to connect with investors and raise awareness of the importance of the work being done through eebudee. You can learn more by visiting the company website.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Vladimir Goloborodko had been an IT Consultant for 15 years and while managing a large team with clients that had multibillion-dollar budgets, he realized that he wanted to do something new and take the path of a startup with a great idea. So he founded a crypto payment system for small and medium-sized merchants to assist them and their clientele with those smaller purchases that decrease the profit margin because of certain roadblocks that are inherent in the system. The result is a really great idea called SmartPay.

As busy humans in the middle of our on-the-go lifestyles, we've all been in situations where we need to grab a quick drink and pack of gum while we're out or pick up that quintessential loaf of bread on the way home. Then we realize that either we don't have any cash on us at the time, or we have a large bill that we don't want to break for something that totals three dollars and seventy-two cents (the "large bill" example not being me, by the way). Not only is this a hassle for us consumers, but it's an even bigger hassle for the merchants. Especially considering the fact that up to 30% of their profit margin get automatically eaten up with bank merchant fees when we use our debit and credit cards. So they end up either imposing minimum purchase amounts when we use a card for payment, or they increase their pricing across the board to help compensate. That leaves us to either pay more for what should have been a quick and easy purchase or keeps us from making these types of purchases at all.

SmartPay has a perfect solution that makes it easy for both parties to quickly and easily make these smaller transactions a breeze. Their payment platform is specifically designed to accommodate these exact transaction that we encounter on a daily basis and it doesn't even require them to have any special equipment. The basic premise consists of QR codes that are either generated on their existing smartphone or tablet and in cases with preset pricing, they don't need anything except a sheet or sticker with the QR code. It only takes them about 10 minutes to set up the mobile app to start excepting payments. So customers merely need to scan the code for the payments to instantly be sent to the merchant from their mobile account.

It's such an interesting idea, not only for the simplicity of use but also the cost savings and it takes the multiple middlemen out of the processing of each payment transaction down to just two. And as if that weren't incredible enough, it also takes the banks out of the equation as the payments will now go straight through your mobile provider. According to their statistics, mobile operators already have approx. 5 billion customers, while banks have 2 billion. Payment technology on this level has the opportunity to streamline efficiency in much the same manner that the video streaming companies have with network and cable television viewing. We also love how many different uses it would be able to accommodate. It would make paying for lunch, or even things like bus fare, so much easier.

Their model also includes proximity marketing that will allow participating merchants the opportunity to send out digital campaigns that are designed to generate new leads, increase business and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Check out Vladimir's full interview to learn more about this blockchain solution and then head over to their website to find their roadmap for future platforms that include a web-based gift version and financial services.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Although Michele has worked in the banking industry full time for many years, she originally went to school with a concentration in communications, advertising and marketing. She began her career in sales and retail management, selling electronics and computers. Her love of all things tech eventually brought her back into the electronics arena three years ago when she started with PLuGHiTz Corporation to help with special events as a Production Assistant. Soon she began to dabble with the audio and video and is loving her role as Producer. She's also one of our content writers and assists with product reviews. Looking forward, she is excited to expand her skill set into editing and helping the company continue to grow.