Jacob Silzer, Trusted Security Director at Heroku, is co-hosting this episode with Trey Ford, VP of Platform, Trust, and Strategy at Salesforce. They're sitting down with Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare. Microshare began as a platform to aggregate wireless sensor data from IoT devices. Much of their use cases were for smart offices; for example, seeing how occupied a conference room was, whether a hot desk was open, and when a particular area had been cleaned. For hospitals, their platform monitored physical equipment, such as patient beds and medicine carts. These devices ran on a LoRaWAN network, which doesn't communicate through Wi-Fi, making it ideal for secure locations.

Then, COVID hit. Suddenly, information from these devices, where were useful from a logistic and compliance standpoint, became extraordinarily important. By tracking the amount of people in a room, the amount of times an area was cleaned, or the movements of an unknown carrier, whole industries can monitor their overall health efficacy, comparing their performance not only with their past, but also, with other similar businesses. Tim gives the example of an airport here: one could potentially see how their cleaning efficiency is compared to other airports around the world. Part of the success of their platform is their reliance on the blockchain. Businesses can monitor not only how their data has changed over time, but they can look back on any block and identify what factors may have contributed to a decreased in performance.

Tim notes that the platform is not bulletproof. For starters, tracking equipment requires people to remember to add trackers; a simple error, to be sure, but one which is frequently forgotten as new crash carts are added to quickly meet increased demands. But more urgently, no one really knows how the future will change in response to the knowledge we only currently have. Microshare was only able to pivot because they were wise enough to recognize that their business and their software needed to be flexible. They essentially threw out their 2020 roadmap in order to focus on tracking clean air and open spaces. The best way to move forward is not just to collect more data, but to also add context to it, which will create meaningful value.

Links from this episode

• Microshare is a data leverage platform utilizing IoT devices
• LoRA Alliance is a non-for-profit group consisting of companies committed to LPWAN