Embedded - 39: I Blame Space

Episode Date: February 19, 2014

Jen Costillo (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) joined Elecia to talk about Jen's start-up: Bia Sport (@BiaSport). They discuss the difficulties of being in an underfunded start-up as well as the joys of shipping a new product and their upcoming conference talks. Jen discussed the company's focus on safety and privacy at the DesignCon sponsored Geek Girl Dinner. She will be speaking at : Wearables Device Conference. Beyond Activity Trackers: Sport Wearables Thursday, March 6, 2014 3:15pm. (Use the coupon code COSTILLO to save 30%.) EELive's embedded systems conference. Battle Out of Painted Corner, Thursday, April 03, 2014 10:45am. EELive's EE Times Fantastical Theater of Engineering Innovation (in the Expo, free!):  Bia Sport Teardown. Time TBD. (With Elecia!) Elecia will also be speaking at EELive, on how the internet of things isn't serving consumers very well on Thursday, April 03, 2014 at 1pm, though the talk title keeps changing. 

Welcome to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Elysia White, and I'm excited to say that Jen's back to talk about her super secret startup. It wasn't really secret. It was kind of secret. My guest today is Jen Castillo, one of the instigators of this podcast. I thought I'd conned her into being on the show regularly. Then she got busy with this apparently not so secret startup. However, we get to finally hear what she has been busy with.

Yes. Thank you for joining me, Jen. Thank you for having me back. So you've been working for? Ever. You've been working for a company. This is just a game. This is just this game. This is like taboo.

No, you've been working for Be A Sport. Yes, I've been working for Be A Sport now for coming up on eight months. And what's your title there? I am director of engineering. That's a nice title. And all things fantastical. But I haven't put that last part because it's a little long for the business card you could review all things no it's not a

good review so as director of engineering what do you do at bs sport everything and and whatever i don't have dedicated resources for like firmware and hardware i pick up the slack on all the rest of the technical aspects so sometimes that means going to china and standing over operator's shoulders and going you didn't do that right sometimes it's actually just doing the work there and training up people in china other times it's becoming a mechanical engineer. You learned a lot about epoxy, didn't you? Yeah, there was, we refer to it as epoxy gate. And that was when, well, let's take a step back. So my product, since we skipped over all that.

What does Be A Sport do? Be A Sport makes a woman-focused GPS watch because that's what all the cool kids are doing. Sports watches, yes. I do believe I have ranted about sports watches before. A lot of the cool kids are doing them. But this one is actually pretty cool. Yeah. So the first thing that it does completely differently from all the other products that are out there is that it is made for a wider variety

of arms and wrists which is to say women's yeah because what happened was my founder and you know her original founders really hated all the products that were out there in the field so i don't bulky garmin watches i mean oh i guess oh yeah the garmin watches yeah the the big bulky the big bulky garmin watches um and and there's a couple of other ones out there that so if they're waterproof and functional they are so enormous that they hurt your arm they will cause rashes they will cause wrist um bruises because they basically hit up against the bone on your wrist and they are so ugly that you probably would never want to be seen wearing them they're just heavy they're heavy they really are heavy and and your founder cheryl uh is a triathlete so this is

not just for runners this is swimming swimming, biking. Biking. But we're not going to worry about that one. Well, you know, you're going to find out very quickly when I talk about some of the other awesome things that we put in here that it really doesn't matter if you're a woman. It can't tell that you have boobs. Oh. It will let you wear it regardless. I'm sure that my producer is currently writing down a show title. It can't tell that you have boobs

uh okay so but the the watch so so what happens is the watch is just better accommodated to be slim lined lighter weight and more comfortable to wear so you brought me a couple can i yeah you can buy one so what's what you'll notice immediately is that it is two – well, there's Velcro. Maybe that's the first thing you notice. Well, one of the things that even I found in the course of my testing is the bands on a lot of these watches are – The rubberized ones? Yeah, the rubberized ones. They crack really easily easily and then you know

you're forced to get another band but no one sells another band and and they they do break easily they get fungusy looking which we're not going to say that it's really fungus but it doesn't come off and if you dishwash them then that's right often worse um and they're not that i'd know and they and they chafe they chafe so this is a neoprene band that is soft. You can customize it. And it's infinitely adjustable. So even if you have the tiniest wrist, it will adjust to that tiniest wrist. But it sits at an angle.

Is that normal? Most watches are like 90 degrees from their strap, but yours isn't. Yeah. So first thing, it keeps you from... You're wearing it a little high. Okay. You want to let it go back a little bit so it goes past the big knobby ankle bone. On my wrist.

On your wrist. The big knobby ankle bone on my wrist. Oh, sorry. Wrist bone. Okay. Is that right? I did take anatomy did take anatomy i swear yeah that's a little bit that's better okay but it's angled it's angled so the reason why it's angled is one to to miss that bone entirely whether it's on your ankle or whether it's on your wrist and the other thing is that when you're out running it's you don't have to move your arm as much to get a view of the display.

It's got a honking big display. I mean, I can see that. I mean, I can see that from across the room, and it's got a honking big button, but just one of them. Right. So that was the other thing that was, that was irritating. My founder, my CEO, and me when I look around at a lot of these devices, was you cannot, you know, there are so many buttons. The top-rated Garmin device has seven buttons and a manual that is hundreds of pages, well, maybe not hundreds, tens of pages long, at least over 100 pages long. It's thick. So think about this for a second. You're a triathlete if you're

training and still working and still having some semblance of life you're not going to spend your time trying to figure out your watch and you're sure as hell the other thing you're not going to do is you're not going to you're not going to go home every night after you train and sit and upload your data no i mean life's too short for data uploads right so the watch is something you can wear daily but what we did was because in order to get it that slim is we needed to take the gps out of the watch well you did hand me two parts and then i put on the watch and you you forgot about the other part. But the other part I'm just holding, it's... Like a pack of gum.

Yeah, it's about a pack of gum with a clampy bit. With a little clip, yeah. On the bottom. I bet this goes on a belt loop. Your belt or your goggles or your pants or your shirt strap. And so this has a GPS in it. That has the GPS and...

The ghost stick as opposed to the watch. Yeah, it's called the ghost stick. And it also has GSM in it, which means it's effectively taking the place of your phone. And apparently we have listeners who are not in the U.S. I don't know if GSM is everywhere, but basically it has, oh, yes, it is everywhere. Sorry. But basically it has a cell phone modem inside of it.

Yeah. Okay. What's nice about that is now when you're done, so now we only have one button on the watch and you have a touch screen. So it should be really straightforward how to use the product. Well, I could touch the button. That seems like the main thing that I can do or I can read the time. Yeah, you can touch the button. And I think you've already shook up the ghost stick.

So it already has some lights flashing on it. Yeah, it looks like it's winking at me. It's got two little lights. And there's one light that's already on. So that means that if you went in to just do a run right now. So I push the button, and now it's going to let me choose run, bike, or swim. So do whatever you'd like. If I want to run, just run.

Run, walk, indoor. Run. All right. I don't really have to run. No, no, we can just sit here. So it connected to the GoStick. It was waiting for GPS, and now it's all ready. So now you press the button, and you can start your workout.

Apparently, I'm not going anywhere fast. Yeah, that's pretty accurate. And you're also indoors, so it'll be really interesting. So we got GPS off because we're near a window. But for any of you tech people out there, you also know that GPS indoors is not going to be accurate because it's basically suffering from a multipath error. Because GPS, I mean, we all forget this when we're cursing our cell phones for not putting us in the right place. GPS is signals from space.

Yeah, that's a simplified view. So it's 24 signals in space it's 24 24 signals in space is that like pigs in space it's fair that was my intention yes um but yeah so it's not just that it's getting the signals from space it's also getting them bounced off of my neighbor's house and since it is coming through a window it's getting some weird echoey things yeah some reflections uh foliage also impacts it and then there's some places some government sensitive places that basically will nullify your gps so there's a bunch of different issues with getting accurate gps and you can't really blame your phone for it, really. No, I blame space. I also blame space.

But this is pretty accurate. I mean, it's not going to tell me my latitude and longitude. No, that's... Yes, I am the sort who knows what my home latitude and longitude is. It's just my life. That is not a current feature on there. One of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to get a product out there quickly. Right, because this was a Kickstarter. This was totally a kickstarter but like two years ago but almost

two years ago yeah little late no i went and looked at your kickstarter page and it did look like you were supposed to ship a little while ago apr April? Up last year. Which year? But you are now shipping. We are now shipping. And if you look at our... Cheers, roar, balloons fall from the sky. It's awesome.

The only thing that's preventing us from shipping out en masse right now is our late shipment of straps. Oh, that's so annoying. because it's not even technical or it's mechanical but they're cute straps but it's it's neoprene and velcro i i can totally make a few of these for you i know that's what i even offered i told you i'm like you know we could just go buy a bolt anyway so so it has GSM built in it, and no one else has GSM built into their sports watch. But having a cell modem inside this, wow, this says a lot.

It's got a GPS and a cell modem inside the pack of gum. But who's paying my cell phone bills here? We are. So it's like the original Kindle thing where you guys have worked out with the carriers that it's going to be okay and I'm not going to get hit with another $20 a month charge. Right. So we've prepackaged a certain amount of data already in there. Now there's other subscriptions that will follow on.

Like if you want to have live tracking because you're in the – if you want live tracking when you're in the Boston Marathon, we will offer that. So you can see your friend online as they're in the boston marathon we will offer that so you know you can see your friend online as they're as they're doing the boston marathon oh that's cool with a minimum delay probably about 10 seconds and and so you could i mean if you had 10 friends running in you could like look at them fake race them you can fake you can see them all fake race on google maps so what happens is when you're done with your workout, so if you press the button. I've gone.02 miles. Yeah.

I bet that's just GPS wandering. That's just GPS wandering. So touch to finish. Okay. I have finished. I can save and delete. You can save it. Save it.

Save it. And so at that point, if you look at your Go stick, you'll see that a red light should be on there. It's not as happy but it's still winking yeah well you can start another workout immediately you don't have to wait so it's uploading in the background and if you go to the website you'll see it upload and you'll see your position on screen and how fast you went and all the metrics that we gave you on average and does it does it uh does this have an accelerometer and it counts my steps too, or is it just GPS?

So both devices have accelerometers in them, but we are not using the accelerometers currently for assisted navigation purposes. That is something that we are- Oh, assisted navigation is really hard. So we can do that later. Yeah. So here's the deal.

Because you're trying to ship we want to ship yeah so that's the other awesome feature that we put in here is we put over the air update so when we're ready to give you guys more features when they're all tested and all ready we basically roll it out to you that That's not uncommon, but it definitely increases the complexity. And you have separate firmware in the gum pack, the ghost stick. The ghost stick. And in the watch.

Yes. And so, wow. So you have to version everything and make sure they all play together and deal with the problem. It's a really interesting. If you update one, but the other one fails and well they don't necessarily have to be they don't necessarily have to be concurrent but we always update the watch first and then we update the

ghost stick so and both images get downloaded to onto the ghost stick first because the ghost stick is the one that has the cell modem and can always talk to home and get updated itself how do they talk to each other we're using uh ant so that's one pan protocol that people use i don't know how many more p's i could put in there um ant is the 2.4 gigahertz it's not i mean it's proprietary it is not like bluetooth low energy where you can have different vendors having the same thing and ant is ant ant is ant well ant is not going to communicate with bluetooth le but they're both operating on the same frequency as each other as bluetooth le and wife wireless and just about and zigbee and a bunch of other so it does suffer from interference so when

i just basically lump all those protocols in to the personal area network set of protocols and that's about it because they all suffer from the same issues okay i keep falling is this not tight enough i think it is not too tight not tight enough. Okay, so we're going to Velcro and tighten it. But you got to put it back. Okay, so the other thing that we did now, just to bring it back to who our original target market was, was women. It's really pretty, too. It's pretty.

There's lots of fashion colors. I mean, when we talk about women-designed things, it always feels like it's pink and it's expensive and therefore it's for women. And even though this does have the simplified design and a lot of style it's it's mine mine's black and purple she's so not getting this back no you i need that that's my test watch that's how i test my algorithms all she has to tell me is this is the one she used the artificial sweat on oh my god okay so but they they look nice um but how else are they designed for women you said smaller wrists small wrist uh easier interface so i mean these are these are

things that are not specific to women per se um but in our market research what we found was you know for women in particular they felt they felt like the biggest obstacle to them doing their training was the fact that their family members were worried about them right you told me about this and this is really cool this is the this is the big reason why i personally love this product and that is there is sos alerts So it's not necessarily if you feel, you know, unsafe or that someone's going to attack you. But it's also to, you know, when your knee gives out or you just can't get back from the trail because something happened, you can press and hold down this SOS button. The one button that's on the device. The one big button.

The one big chunky button, and it will connect up to our servers and will text message your friends and family where you're located. And that's because I set up a friends and family text. You set up a friends and family. Yeah. It sets up a friend. You have a friends and family list when you register your device. And you, so, and then my friend, my, my friends get a text that say, Edicia is drowning at such and such coordinates. Yeah. Is it like that or? It's, it's, it's, it's your name or whatever name you registered with that says so-and-so.

They are in trouble and they are located here and they give you a link, a Google map link that will show you precisely where they are. So are you going to replace Life Alert with this? I would say there are some applications that could be used for it because it does feel like Life Alert. Yeah, to help by falling in and I can't get up except I can be anywhere and not just in my house uh i mean this is this is kind of cool because it's a real safety measure absolutely okay but you do have some caveats yeah we have some caveats it's got to be charged you have to have both parts the watch and the ghost stick which from a workout perspective this is kind of nice because

i can balance my weight better um but from a carry it around in my purse perspective this is kind of you know we we got that feedback from some people particularly when you're in a triathlon and you're tearing off your your swimsuit so you can get onto the bike or start your run or whatever it is they're like oh i'm gonna lose it at the bottom of the lake or and it turns out we're not people aren't having that problem to be honest with you they just they figure they practice with it a couple times to figure out you know where they're clipping it and they just move on uh the the interesting thing is that you know for triathletes they just need to be very cognizant of the fact that they need to clip the go stick to the back of their swim cap near their goggles because it needs to be out of water for you to get GPS.

Water turns out to be a powerful attenuator. But they can both get wet. They're both rated for three atmospheres and above. Or below. Three atmospheres and higher. Yeah. I wasn't sure if I was claiming that or not. Three atmospheres and lower.

So you can't go more than about 30 feet. Yeah. Which, if you're doing a triathlon, you probably aren't anyway. I hope not. Maybe you're doing it wrong. Okay, so that's the product. It's a sports watch primarily for women. Nice design that is more user-centric. I could totally see my husband using this because it's not pink.

It's just very nicely designed. Yeah, that's been the one thing that's been really interesting is that guys are very, they're like, but this doesn't necessarily have to be for women. You are correct. How much do they cost? Are you taking orders? We are taking pre-orders still.

So we're delivering on Kickstarter and then we start filling our back order. So we reopen back orders sometime around Christmas. How much does it cost? $270. So it's pricey. It's no more pricey than the other garments on the market. It's completely in line with other GPS watches

that are the least bit recognized. Cool. And I guess the question I should ask as a user is, does it connect to my cell phone? That is a common question that will be, you know, if we talked in other places, you you know there's a whole roadmap of things and that we could do with this product but at this moment we're focused on getting this one right and delivering to the kickstarters and i can always surf your website on my phone if it

comes to that yes you can so absolutely yes it connects to my phone it is mobile friendly yeah um so that is very cool are you just like thrilled to be sending products out the door for the first time or are you just frantically planning the first firmware update so the it's it's all of those things so yesterday it was planning what the menu the the shipping room floor would be like because, you know, we're really, okay, let's take a step back. China is great. They can manufacture many things for consumers, but you have to monitor the quality. And with these first units, we are very cautious about quality. So we are, we have most of those devices in house. And what we're going to do is we're going to retest everything, set everything up for the users, and then pack them into our new,

you know, boxes, we're really doing a packout. We're going to update them one last time with the awesome firmware that we have, and that'll be local, that way we don't incur ridiculous charges from doing a bunch of OTAs. We need to retest them, make sure that all the antennas are working the way we anticipated, especially after they've been tested. And then we're going to pack them out

and ship them out to users. And we have some volunteers helping us. I know my intern's coming in. We have... Are you having a party we are kind of having a little mini shipping party because it's it's that big a deal for it is such a big deal yeah so uh so yesterday was like i said planning out what the shipping room floor was going so it was like setting up setting up shelving and unpacking our our our um pallets of shipping materials and getting that all set up

which was interesting because I never thought I would be planning the workflow from how things go from one station to the other with all these different caveats like this wall you know this station needs power this one doesn't this one needs a line of sight to the window so we can double check gps this one needs this other, this area needs to be very isolated because we're doing a lot of wireless updates and we don't want it to update the wrong device so that things need to be a little more isolated. And then we have all the packout stuff. And so it's interesting because we're also testing out a new shipping and procurement team, which is very popular. So there's a bunch of different companies out there

that will come in, provide you the manpower, and will follow directions, and they will pack all your stuff for you. So we're training them up at the same time. So it's just a bunch of stuff happening, and we're still figuring out what the final firmware will be, and I'm tweaking algorithms still, and I'm talking to investors, and yep yeah you've so as part of your

your role as director of engineering you have been seeing more VCs yeah I am the technical representation of BIA they don't have a CTO yet they do not have a CTO Until they wise up and give you that title too. Yes. How has that been going? It's been very interesting. Everyone's really excited about hardware. Especially when you actually can hold it in your hands. Right. That's such a big step. That change. Well, when you say you're shipping, that changes the discussion quite a bit. But very few people are, you bit but very few people are you know very few investors it feels like are familiar with how to work with hardware so many of them are software centric and don't understand the difficulties of physical objects and getting not only electrons from china but also protons and neutrons and all the things that go across on little boats.

And plastic. Plastic. And plastic that doesn't break. And metal that doesn't break. What has the testing been like? You mentioned that you had to buy a vial of fake sweat. Oh, yeah. So, you know, I don't think this is surprising for anyone. If you have a product

that has, that, that sits on people's bodies and is exposed to the elements, you may want to test it for extreme conditions. So, you know, we use the environmental oven to, to take the temperature up and down between several extremes over a short period of time to make sure the plastics and metal don't crack or warp and what i did is because it's against sweaty people's skin is i knew that i needed to test for corrosion and color fastness and a couple other things because you know we don't we have ionized or sorry anodized metal on our devices but you know if we etch them, because we want to put our FCC stuff and everything all etched, if you go too low, you go past the anodization

and you're going to corrode, especially because these devices go in the ocean. We had someone go in the ocean with our devices, and over time it started rusting across these two programming pins that we have exposed absolutely i worked at shot spotter and putting microphones and we had them all over the place but we put them in boston and they had salt fogs and suddenly the sensors just kept breaking because the salt is just bad for electronics. Really bad.

Yeah. Yeah. Not only that, but we found also that the ocean water was bridging across reset and ground and constantly resetting our device. But you fixed those, right? Yeah, we fixed that. We had to work around. But it's been interesting because, you know some start startups are funded much better than others and we were definitely on the on the scrappy side so we're we're putting

out a product at two and a half million is that with only kickstarter and and angel or is that do you have vc funded we are not VC funded at all. Wow. That's so cool. So going back to your investor question. You might be VC funded in the future, but now that you're shipping, things may unstick. So what I see in what I'm hearing and seeing when I go visit investors or talk to my other friends who are doing similar things is that no one, a lot of people don't want to even talk to you until you shipped,

which puts you at a huge disadvantage because it takes money to get those protons and neutrons across the ocean. And when you do, then, then they're all worried about what's next. So there's, so there, there are, you know, once you ship, there's this interesting thing that investors then do is like, okay, now we need to see you ship, you know, now we need to see that there's really want and desire beyond the Kickstarter or beyond, like, this initial set of people.

So they only want to give you money after you've proven that you don't need it. Right. So our, our shipping in our shipping, our funding situation changes merely on the basis of shipping. Now there's other types of funding available to us, whether it's short term to handle. Bridge loans,

actual regular standard funds. Right. And VCs, you know, they either they're going to be in or they're going to be out. I have opinions on that, but I don't know whether that should be public knowledge. I bet that's an entirely separate show. That's the anonymous I hate VC hour.

But the VCs that we have touched base with who have been interested have been, you know, they are they know hardware they're comfortable with the risk and that's really important particularly in this field of wearables that is becoming very saturated very quickly there are a lot of people doing sport watches yes and and you make a difference oh actually you have some conferences coming up and i know that one of your talks has to do with the difference between a wearable activity tracker and a sports wearable. What is the difference?

Well, there's a couple different things. So activity trackers, so we're talking Fitbit and some of the Nike bands, some of the job up. They actually I should Nike's not necessarily an activity tracker. Scratch that. Activity trackers are pretty much targeting anybody. You know, if you're breathing, you have a pulse. They want to sell you an activity tracker.

To make us more active because obesity is a problem and to just get us out there. Having a pedometer makes you walk more. There are a lot of studies that say that. You know what? I use a pedometer when I go on my runs. I don't care so much about how fast I'm going or anything like that. I can go sit at a treadmill if I really care about that. And because in the past, I can get an $8 pedometer.

It works just as well as, I'm going to say, my Bia watch. For a pedometer? For a pedometer. Well, just for measuring distances. I think for whatever reason, maybe you and i are suffering from first world problems here but you know those are my favorite i i honestly i don't need to spend you know hundreds of dollars just to find out how many steps i am when i know a ten dollar pedometer will do just fine as long as you look at it and as long as you don't want the support

from the other features that things like fitbit give you um the web the tracking the history the food tracking i mean there's lots of they have a whole community and you're buying into the community you're buying into the community which an eight dollar pedometer won't do for you no but the eight dollar pedometer won't require me to to to scrutinize vast amounts of data and have to take pictures of my food and have to deal with other people quantified self thing i'm not a quantified self i mean i geek out on data but you know i i think the thing is like i don't necessarily need another company to help me keep track of my data i i can keep my data all by myself but that is my opinion but other people do not feel that way and they're very eager to get their hands on it so going back I can keep my data all by myself. But that is my opinion.

But other people do not feel that way, and they're very eager to get their hands on it. So going back, activity trackers, if you're breathing, have a pulse, you have two feet, you may want an activity tracker. Sports wearables tend to be geared towards amateur to professional athletes who are really focused on how they are performing in a quantifiable and qualified way. So basically they're more serious about their data. It's more serious and they're not, you know, unlike activity trackers, they aren't wearing them 24-7. They're

wearing them in very contextualized ways. Activity trackers, you're wearing it all the time. Yeah, when you're training. Yeah, my Fitbit lives in my pocket. Sometimes even when my pocket's being washed. Do you get extra bonus points for that? No, but before we shipped these Fitbits, since I have worked as a contractor for Fitbit, there was one that somebody sent me the logs and said, this Fitbit is having trouble. It just threw a whole bunch of asserts. Can you figure it out?

And I read through the logs and I looked at it and I thought about it for a while and I contacted the user and said, at 4.45, did you wash your Fitbit? And he emailed back and said, do you guys put cameras in those things? I thought as a beta tester, I had some privacy. And I had to explain that his logs just said that his Fitbit screamed out a giant cry of electrostatic data. And he said no, that 4.45 was not when he washed his Fitbit. But that's when he put it in the dryer.

So, yeah, sometimes Fitbits. and he said no that 445 was not when he washed his fit but that's when he put it in the dryer so yeah sometimes it fit bits fit bits are cool i really like them but i can see how they're different because they are casual they're casual they're not they're not giving you know they may not be giving the depth of information at that particular moment i mean they can tell when you're exercising versus not exercising but they can't necessarily tell you about the quality of the exercise that you're doing. Oh, yes. I love it when people bring me their Fitbits and say, all I have to do is shake it. Like, well, yes, if you're intentionally trying to defeat your activity tracker, you can. That is a life hack tip. Yes. You want to make your thousand your 10,000 steps by shaking your Fitbit? Have at. Here, I've got a whole list of other ways you can hack it, too.

Oh, yes. Yes, drumming. My producer drums and his Fitbit often. Where are you keeping your... Oh, he's got a wristband. Oh, you got the wristband now. Do you have any rashes? Awesome.

No. So, okay. Let's skip past the activity tracker versus sports, because we may come back to that. And on to talks, because now there is shipping. That leaves me with plenty of available time to talk about whatever the hell I choose. Well, more now that you're shipping, you can talk about it. And you have been.

You did the Girl Geek Dinner at DesignCon. Yes. The DesignCon is the UBM EE Times for Hardware Engineers conference. It's like the Embedded Systems Conference for non-software people. Like for chips and PCB level stuff. Yeah, I didn't go. I was on vacation, so I had a good excuse. Yeah.

But they threw a Girl Geek dinner, which is one of these things where they provide a little bit of money and the Girl Geek organization sends out their emails to their giant list and lots of women show up to talk about technology and to network and eat food, eat cake. Um, what was that talk about? That was short. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They, you know, no one wants to sit around and listen to a bunch of people talk and self promote necessarily. Well, they had like four separate people they wanted little snapshots of successful women yeah um and you were one of them i know high five yeah

okay so it was cool to be invited to speak it was really cool actually actually i would say that um for those of you who have been to other geek girl dinners maybe christopher no okay this one was really nice um and i want to give a shout out to the organizers of that particular one because not only do we have a really nice stage but we had uh voiceover music and a voiceover announcer and i had to come out from behind a curtain it was like being on the tonight show it was there was a little green room i actually didn't watch the the talks because i went back to the green room to say hello to you and i just never left yeah you're having a lot of fun back there um so anyway i ended up talking about bringing safety to wearables which is something i believe has been woefully overlooked

and that also includes privacy because, you know, one of the things that I'm trying to balance with Bia's product is although we are trying to purport safety and provide safety to the users via the SOS feature, it's also important to keep our users' data private. What, you don't want to just post to the internet in clear text where all of the women who are afraid are are or or where all of the women who are currently very athletic and hanging out in their so some things i didn't necessarily know you have uh companies like

strava who have an online website where you were there were you were you basically upload your gps workouts you know using whatever device you have oh is this the one where you were there were you were you basically upload your gps workouts you know using whatever device you have oh is this the one where you can like run against someone in in a designated area in a city and like you're you're competing you're king of the hill yeah yeah and what i didn't realize um until maybe a while ago was that the way that they deal with privacy issues because you know you you go, you run near your house, is they actually shift, you know, GPS shift your track over. So it's shifted over.

And then they also, they don't provide a beginning and end. They basically make it into a continuous loop. So you don't know where it started. And that way you can't tell where the person lives so that's one way that they're vaguely providing safety for for users but we're doing it differently we we want to one provide more encryption on the data that you're uploading over the web or through through the ghost stick we also are really eager to make sure that, you know, if you don't upload, you know, if you're not uploading your workout, that, you know, none of your data gets up on the servers. So we're, even by mistake, so we're trying to put in more features that will

eventually enable people who just wanted to really just be a glorified pedometer, which is me in some cases, we'll be able to do that. So does the website also have a public mode or a friend mode where you can share your workouts with other people? It will in the future. So right now, you know, we're really just shipping MVP, but we've put in the infrastructure specifically. Minimum viable product. Minimum viable product. Thank you. That will enable us to, like I said, roll out new features. We'll really develop that social interaction aspect. Because this is the first of your products. Mm-hmm. And there'll be more.

I hope so. And you're probably already collecting the list of what everybody wants. We are always collecting a list of what everyone wants. The hard part is putting it down into what you can sell. Whether we want that list or not. You know what? That's the one thing that I've really enjoyed working on this product

is that people are eager to give feedback, really eager to give feedback on it, whether it's something they like or something they wish was different. And they're doing it in not a shitty way because it's you mean they're because they're excited about it even if they don't want it because it's an interesting neat thing i think they're i think they see the potential in it yeah when you started working there i was not sold on the potential of the company you were dubious at best i was dubious and then you told me some stories that made me When you started working there, I was not sold on the potential of the company.

You were dubious at best. I was dubious. And then you told me some stories that made me more dubious. But seeing them, they're really attractive. Very, you know. I like how you're trying to sell this over the radio. Precious. Well, no, it's not, you know know selling it to listeners it's more

wow i kind of thought you made a mistake but looking at this is pretty cool and now that you're shipping i remember i remember there were several discussions that we had at coffee shops you're like you know if it's a mistake you can always just move past it you had a neat job you could go back it's fine no no but i can see it now now why you wanted to do this. It's really neat. Much in the same way that, is it Chris from the Amp Hour? Yeah, Chris Gamble. Chris Gamble left his job to go pursue his passion full time.

That's what I'm doing here. It was a chance for me to merge exercise and motion with the electronics that i really love doing so even if it failed i still felt like i i i had a a good opportunity well there's less chance of that now that shipping my fingers are crossed indeed so you spoke at girl geek dinner that's in the past and but you have another conference coming up so two things are are coming up. The first one is Wearables Dev Conference. I have never heard of that. It is the first one of its kind, supposedly. And that's March 5th through 7th in Burlingame, which they're calling San Francisco,

which I'm sure the Burlingame-ians are thrilled about. Yes, it is very close to the Caltrain, and I think there's some sort of shuttle. It's near the San Francisco airport for sure. Yes, yes. And so that's going to be all wearables and engineering stuff. All wearables, all the time. And the title of your talk is Beyond Activity Trackers?

Mm-hmm. So I'm going to talk about how to design a sports wearable, which is really focusing on how it differs from activity trackers, how rugged it needs to be, designing with a purpose, running. But for anyone who needs something that's going to be able to endure lots of sweaty situations, I have a couple of different cases along the way that can tell you these are the types of environmental issues you really need to work on that may differ from that that nicely carefully manicured activity tracker that you may have around your neck or in your pocket mostly having to do with sweat but there's a whole lot of rf stuff in there also so if you love rf is there impact as well i mean oh yeah we have so there's the waterproofing yeah there's the's the desert situations. And as you mentioned already, it sounds like your beta testers or beta users were already doing the washing machine test pretty regularly.

I do too. Part of our design test, because we're a startup, we don't have elaborate machines to do waterproof testing it was always whenever we got new plastics or new casings in we put in a a slip of paper called you know you know something that would bleed easily screw up everything and then throw it in the washing machine and just see how it would work out if it was still waterproof after taking all those tumbles. And so you'd take out the piece of paper, and if the piece of paper was still dry, it would be good. Yeah. But you also had Cheryl as an alpha tester from day one because she does a lot of triathlons.

Yeah, she completed her Ironman in Tahoe. And how long has Cheryl been testing? Well, we started our first run of field testers before even I, I think it was May. So right around the time when I came on. Yeah. And we've been using those carefully selected beta testers for all this time. And they really do span across the 50 states. And they're dedicated. They're dedicated really athletic they love they you know it would amaze me how many people in in

the polar vortex were going out and still doing their running yeah yeah because i did spend some time in in madison wisconsin about a month or so back and I just stayed in my hotel. It was bloody cold. I remember you saying you were having trouble getting GPS. I was having trouble. You refused to go outside. Well, we went out once just to go get some cheese,

but that was about it. Okay. So the wearables DevCon in early March, um, and that's activity trackers versus sports wearables, but that's not what you're talking about at EE Live, the Embedded Systems Conference, at the end of March, beginning of April. I'm going to talk, in that case, I'm going to really do a post-mortem on BIA and the product itself, which is to say that the thesis is

the decisions that you make in your prototype work will, especially when you have no money to change them later, have tremendous impact on how you get to the finish line, which is shipping the product. And there were a couple of things that were decided early on that, man, if I had an extra hundred grand, I could spin the board. I could make other choices. Like what? Or are you saving it for the talk? Well, I mean, I could tell you one. You know, there was enough space, but, man, they really skimped on discreets.

So they didn't put pull-ups or pull-downs on some lines that really needed them. Oh, that makes life adventurous for software. Mm-hmm. Huh. And it also, remember I was talking about the salt water on the reset line. Oh, yes, that does become more clear now, doesn't it?

So there are things that you, you know, you would be able to handle like, oh, I'll just put a stronger pull up on this line. I'm like, there is no stronger pull up. There's no pull up at all. There's nothing here. No. Yeah, I know the organizer, Karen Fields, the general manager of EE Live was kind of excited about the idea of really having you talk seriously about, yeah, we're a startup. We screwed up. We did the point is to to to be very honest and open it's like first of all don't repeat what we did um but after getting in the shipping part which is get

the shipping part um yeah it still is amazing to me that we ship because you know i think a lot of it's because dedicated team that was purely working on sweat equity. And that literally means like money that would come in would go right to the devices. Would go right to the CM. And, you know, and when people are upset that they're not getting paid, you know, when your manufacturer is upset that they're not getting paid and you have to go to China, you have to look them dead in the eye.

Like, no, I need you to do this and not flinch when they throw up. Wow. Oh, that's, I need you to do this and not flinch when they throw up in bed. Wow. Oh, that's going to be cool. Because everybody makes mistakes. And if you aren't making mistakes, you really aren't pushing the boundary hard enough. You're not pushing limits. And we really are, you know, the more I think, I was a little naive coming into this thinking like, oh, we're just putting a cell phone in here and we're doing this.

Yeah, it's a block diagram. It's not that complicated. Right, but then you start looking at what people are willing to carry around with them. Keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Some of these chips are just enormous.

And then you've got to figure out, where am I going to put this antenna? And you have three antennas in the GoStick. One to talk to the watch one to talk to the one for the gps and one for the cell motor unless you got some more in there that i yeah yeah so total is four across the two devices yeah wow antenna design and that and that like i said that in itself was was an education and then how to affix them in such a way how to put everything together such that you get a good result was also is also a big topic how do you manage to have

metal on any of these then you do yeah all right well um and then at ee live you and i are doing something in the oh karen told me what the fantastical Theater of Technology and Innovation? It's very close. It's very close to that, guys. Just check it out. It really is. I think she got it right. And we're going to do a radio show. We might even record it, a podcast,

where you take all of these pieces that we have here today and you take them apart and I ask dumb questions. Well, maybe not dumb questions. Maybe I'll just ask random questions. Well, can you bring tools? Because some of these parts are hard to break apart. I have a screwdriver that size

and then I've got another screwdriver I often use as a pry bar. Yeah, we're going to need something to pry all the parts apart. Yeah, some of these are epoxy. No, that's not... Oh, yeah. That's a gasket. It of these are epoxy. No, that's not. Oh, yeah.

That's a gasket. It's a delicate balance. Oh, that's nice. Don't mess with the brains. So we are going to mess with the brains a little bit and open one of these puppies up and talk about what's inside and probably still go through a little bit of the challenges. But it's like a cooking show

where they have a camera above you so you can see your hands it should be pretty good pretty cool i'm gonna you know do my best vanna white i don't think that one's been scheduled yet but we will uh yeah it will be on the website when it is scheduled but i believe it's gonna be in the expo floor area yeah where your other talk, the battling out of a painted corner, the postmortem talk, is pay for, the teardown will be free in the Expo Center. Yes, and therefore more exciting. And therefore more exciting, especially if people come out and say hello, which you should do if you're going to do that. Or disrupt horribly. If there's a flash mob at this one i will be very proud that's great i will also be talking in the pay section of the ee live

conference and what will you be talking about i have no idea well you might want to get on that. The slides are due next week. Would it be perhaps something that's near and dear to your heart, which is devices communicating with other devices and entities? So, as Jen knows, I submitted a blog post about how the Internet of Things is a bunch of hooey, I think is the name of the blog post. And then to UBM or EE times, and then they liked that and said, Do you want to talk about it at the conference? And I said, Sure. But it went through a couple of separate people who read even less of the blog post as they went along until finally the last person who set up my talk really only read the first paragraph that was the introduction. And since it was an introduction, he thought I was going to do an introductory tutorial about getting on the cloud.

And there was some disconnect. And so when I went to go finally make my slides and start thinking about this talk, I read my description and it's like, let me see your weight. We'll tell you how to get on the cloud, the difficulties, the challenges, how to make your learning curve just that much less steep. And then throw it all in the garbage. So I talked to Karen today, actually finally got it settled and i am going to do the original talk instead of the kindler gentler talk but i don't know what i'm going to call it and i was hoping like dear margaret i mean the internet of things is a bunch of hooey i really

want to talk about how the marketing is not helping us and and how connectivity is hard and it's hard on our users and security and ease of use are constantly battling such that end users not not not factory users those i don't really care about end users my mother-in-law my 13 year old neighbor are not really having an easy time of internet of things they're being lied to they're buying these things that say internet of things and connectivity and they get them home and it sucks it's the same old thing it is but i'm tired of it and i'm tired of i'm tired of the solutions catering to me. We were promised flying cars. Where the hell are my flying cars?

We were promised flying cars and... Oh, my producer's holding up his iPhone and looking at us like... Were you going to throw that at my head? Is that the flying car that I was missing? It's not a flying car, but it is kind of cool. An entire Radio Shack from 1991. An entire Radio Shack from 1991. All right. Wait, I have a question.

Do you want to talk about the Super Bowl ads? Like the Radio Shack ad? I thought the Radio Shack ad was awesome. So did I. But I guess now I'm'm gonna have to go elsewhere when halted and some of the other local electronic stores are closed and i'll have to go to radio shack and then be angry when they don't have the parts the one regulator i need so i actually have a radio shack that is walking distance from my house and i have occasionally realized I was out of a part, walked over to Radio Shack, and realized I was still out of a part.

Does that make us old? When we're so desperate, like, let's just get this one part and we'll just go to Radio Shack. They got to have it. It's the most basic part. It's a wire. It's a resistor. For 70 ohms, right?

Well, I wanted a specific thing and they ended up having something that was good enough. But yeah. No, I do. I think I go to Radio Shack a lot more often than most people I work with just because it is so close that it's okay to walk over and wander through.

You mean look at the one rack of stuff? No, they've got like... They have more parts than I do. For now. We've got to get you a cap kit and a resistor kit because this is what I was telling the guy in my office when he was like, he's like, by any chance do you have one microfarer?

I'm like, otherwise I'm going to go out and I'm like, don't you have like, maybe you should just get a kit. My husband got me like three kits. I'll show them to you after, um, for Christmas. And so I have all of the resistors and all of the capacitors.

And I know there was one that was a bunch of FETs. Cause I, that was the one I opened and needed. So it has all the FETs, Bobo FET, Moss FET, Jabba FET. I don't know if he was a F no he was a hot i'm totally different it's jango fat jango thank you all right um well i think we may be

actually running out of time or um something no you had some good jokes. Oh, great. Jen is rated highly for her jokeability. Minus two to drawing. I'm a horrible drawer. You should know that about me. Okay, before we go, we'll have a list of the talks

and I think that's all the talks that you've got scheduled coming up, and that I've got scheduled. What is next in terms of the company in the short term for BIA? Well, next week we're going to pack out everything. That's about as far as I thought. Well, how about this? Are you hiring? That is a great question.

We are always taking resumes in preparation for, you know, pre-filling those slots. So when we do have funding, we can quickly onboard. It's basically, yes, we are looking for people. We are looking for firmware engineers, hardware engineers, mechanical. Oh my God, if you were a mechanical engineer and love making small things or a manufacturing engineer or both, like if you're a two in one, that would be even better. If you're somebody who's a web badass who can do front end and back end on the web, please. Oh, my God. Please. please please please send me your resumes

or get them to Alicia and they will be filtered gently to me oh great or you can tweet me just go to BSboard.com yep see if there can be

founders or jobs or something like that. All right. Well, I'll have, it'll be in the show notes. Yes. And if you would like to drop your resume through me, I'm happy to pass it along.

Just make sure you tell me that it is for BS sport. As I am currently getting resumes for another job. And, or be a sport, as I am currently getting resumes for another job. And you do not need to run or ride a bike or be a triathlete to be in this company, although it kind of helps. That's good. I mean, it's nice for fitting in with culture. And then we can go for runs together up the big hill into the sunset. That sounds like so much fun.

No, you're making the face of no fun. Well, I think that's it for this show. Do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I will see you at Wearables Dev Conference or EE Live or at my place of work soon. All right. My guest has been Jen Castillo, Director of Engineering at Be It Sport. Thank you for being on the show, Jen. Thank you for having me. I would also like to thank you listeners for listening. I'd love it if you'd drop me a line. Hit the contact link on embedded.fm or email us at show at embedded.fm. You can include your resume, but you don't have to. Tell me how you heard about the show and where I might be able to share it with others. That would be even more useful than your resume,

at least from my perspective. I will pass resumes along to Jen as long as you have Be A Sport somewhere close to the top of the email. Finally, thank you to producer Christopher White for making us sound good and occasionally glaring at us. It almost hit my head.

He didn't throw his phone. He would never let it out of his hands. I have one final thought. This one is one of Bia's mantras on their website that covers both sports and engineering, at least their approach to them. Push. Persevere, transform. Da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da-da. No, I made that part up.