Trade Show Live! On the Road

You're listening to Trade Show Live On the Road, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors and trade show industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries from healthcare to consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of the Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live.

Janet (00:28):

We're at CES 2020 looking ahead to another exciting decade of innovation and consumer electronics development. However, you can't do it without money. So with me right now is the founder of Angel Launch, Zahava Stroud. Zahava welcome to Trade Show Live at CES 2020.

Zahava (00:50):

Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Janet (00:52):

Now we're on the first day of the show for us, which is Tuesday. However, Zahava you've been busy; you've already done a number of things at CES. So tell me a little bit about Angel Launch and what you were up to yesterday.

Zahava (01:06):

Sure. So our website is angellaunch - l a u n c h - .com and we are a leading producer of investment forums, summits and networking events in Silicon Valley. We produce events almost every week connecting startups to investors from around the world. They consist of networking receptions, hitch nights, demo showcases, venture forums, and one of our most popular ones is called backyard capital, where we do a monthly reception in a private home in a very elite area of Silicon Valley where we get 150 startups and investors for informal networking. The goal of these events has been to connect investors to promising startups through deal-making and many startups from around the world have received millions in funding. Yesterday we produced an annual conference at CES; we do every year for over 10 years, called Silicon Valley Funding Summit. And it's a one day conference where we bring in startups from around the world. We bring in investors ranging from millions to a hundred million in funds looking for promising startups. We do a full day of networking, pitching and a demo showcase was very successful. The startups met a lot of great investors and in fact serves told me that they now have been funded from our past events, which is very exciting.

Janet (02:26):

Oh, we love hearing about people getting money. Now she may sound like it's got a singular focus, consumer electronics, but really we've got everything here from the health tech to virtual reality to toys and games and all kinds of silly stuff to very, very serious things. I'm curious as a Angel Launch person putting together people who have ideas with people who can fund them, are you agnostic to, you don't really care what kind of business it is or are you in any particular area?

Zahava (03:01):

So the great thing is that what we do is we produce live events. We don't actually invest. We connect startups to accredited investors and we cover all markets. In the last two months we get a FinTech event. We did quite a few on health tech, life science and medical devices, automotive and connected cars, enterprise and consumer applications, AI, deep tech, machine learning. We cover all markets. And what we found is that there's such a huge community of people traveling to the Bay area who don't live there, that we can do events almost every week and we can get several hundred people, those startups and investors who attend, but at least 40% don't live in the Bay area. They're just traveling through for meetings or deals, so we're a great resource for them to meet other people.

Janet (03:49):

Tell me about the investing or the vetting of the investors. Do you require that ultimately they invest in something? How do you prove that they have the money they say they have to fund people?

Zahava (04:03):

so we don't do rigorous due diligence since we're an event producer. What we do is we ask investors and we rely on their self representation that they are accredited investors. If we don't know, then we ask them for some types of documentation such as websites, LinkedIn profile, angel list profile, or people that we know and then we rely on their representation. And so far we haven't had any issues with that because again, the events are free or low cost. And the whole point is to connect people to investors. Many of the investors also are syndicated, which is very common. Maybe they'll get 10 or 20 investors who invest a small amount in a deal. So we often find that angels come to our events, refer their friends to startups. In fact, I just met a startup that pitched at an event a year ago and then recently met an investor who was at a different event, but one of the investors he met knew of the startup and said they'd be great for you, connected them. And now he's a board of advisor and investor in this startup because they had all attended two different events in the Bay area. Networking is the number one place that startups make deals. So that's why it's important to go to as many events as you can.

Janet (05:10):

I'm curious about the startups themselves. Do they just come into it cold and learn by the school of hard knocks, how to pitch? They've come to you with that experience or is this a great place for them to learn those skills?

Zahava (05:22):

So we don't do any training or there are many resources that do and we have many partners that offer training. For instance, at our backyard capital, which is held on a Thursday, we offer a free training by someone who's a mentor on Wednesday nights for anyone who's pitching to come and learn. So if someone asks me for training, we have many other resources in the Bay area where you can go and learn about how to pitch. But one reason people come is to see other people pitch. Because of course when you live in the Bay area and you're pitching all the time or going to events, you have a much higher level of presentation and you know what investors inspect. So we find it's very helpful for people who never pitched to get an idea of what they should be doing. We use that as a learning process.

Janet (06:04):

You know, when I think about pitching, I think about it being elevator pitch, you know, tell me 30 seconds. But generally, how long do people have to pitch their ideas at your events?

Zahava (06:13):

So before my current life, I was a trial attorney and I was used to being in court with the judges who had a very limited attention span. I was used to pitching, you know, a lawsuit. That's where millions of dollars I had two minutes. So I tell all my startups, pretend that you are pitching for your life and you have two to four minutes to convince someone that they should invest in you because you're actually pitching for millions of dollars. So most of our pitches are three to five minutes because they're in front of a stage. We tell startups you need to learn to have, to have an elevator pitch so that when people want to meet with you, then you can do the extensive dialogue in the PowerPoint slides and the more extensive presentation. But you should have a very charming, with a short pitch to get their initial attention.

Janet (06:57):

You know, sometimes technology can be, uh, kind of boring or a little over people's heads. And yet those could be the billion dollar ideas. Do you find that folks that are successfully landing funding that they really do bring a presence to the stage?

Zahava (

Season 2, Episode 6

CES 20 Jennifer Capps, NCSU

Matt Kruea (00:00):

You're listening to Trade Show Live on the Road!, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries, from healthcare to consumer products. And everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live.

Janet Kennedy (00:28):

Janet Kennedy: (00:28)
Trade Show Live is on the road at CES 2020 we are in Eureka Park, which is where all the startups are and we happen to have a number of startups with us, with a very strong NC State tie. So we brought in one of our honor guests here today, Jennifer Capps, who's a leader in the entrepreneurship program at NC State to talk about her impressions of CES and where she feels NC State's ecosystem of entrepreneurship would fall. So Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer Capps (00:59):

Thank you so much for having me here today.

Janet Kennedy (01:01):

Okay, I bet you're sort of like freaking out at your first experience at CES.

Jennifer Capps (01:05):

I am. This is like the world's biggest playground for entrepreneurship and innovation. Nerds like myself. This is amazing. How can you just walk down an aisle and not be super inspired? You absolutely can't. I keep getting distracted.

Speaker 2 (01:19):

If I'm going to meet someone, I had to make myself pull away from some of these booths because the ideas are just phenomenal. You know, this is the ultimate shiny object syndrome issue except in Eureka park or think where it's like 2000 different businesses ideas, just amazingly overwhelming. Oh absolutely. But outside come coming from NC State and working with our students, they overwhelm me in the exact same way. I get the absolute privilege to work with students from all across the university and one of our intro level classes and these students are very new to this world of innovation and entrepreneurship in many ways, therefore is to go out and study markets and identify pain points that could become entrepreneurial opportunities. And then very quickly they proposed solutions. Well when I come to a place like this and I see so many of the ideas that students have proposed in the last few years, showing up at CES in some way, that is such a powerful tool for me to take back into the classroom to inspire them and all of a sudden this becomes something that's aspirational for them.

Janet Kennedy (02:27):

Do you feel like students are coming in a little more hardwired to think about themselves as entrepreneurs or owners of businesses?

Jennifer Capps (02:35):

I do. In many ways students are coming in knowing the word entrepreneurship and knowing that it sounds really cool. They're open to exploring the idea of entrepreneurship. What many of them don't understand is one, the work that goes into it, you know, in many ways they have sort of the shark tank view or they think, I just have to have a great idea and get up in front of national TV and people will fund me. So we about the steps that it takes and we talk about the fact that it's okay to fail as long as you do so for the right reasons. We talk about pivots, you know, it's so interesting that entrepreneurial pivot is a generally accepted principle here. We've already talked to dozens of companies represented here who talk about the pivots that they've made because of information they received at CES, but as individuals we often don't give ourselves the same permission to pivot in our career choices.

Jennifer Capps (03:26):

And I think that's one of the things that I work with our entrepreneurship students on. I think that's one of the interesting things too about coming even when you're not 100% ready, but you're still flexible enough to rethink. An example is NC State grads who founded brilliant soul came last year thinking this is a gaming thing. Now what they, what brilliant soul is for those folks who haven't listened to Jeff guard's podcast is basically an insole that has haptic technology in it and sensors that they envisioned using for VR and gaming purposes. Well, they got a ton of feedback from the biggest names in footwear last year and they haven't pivoted. They have expanded how they've developed their product. So now they're thinking about how does it apply to healthcare? How does it apply to other types of non-gaming functions? They even had a podiatrist who's a Colonel in the U S army stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina helped them with very specifically redesigning from some of her perspectives in a military environment.

Jennifer Capps (04:34):

So I'm absolutely so proud of them for not thinking, Hey, people didn't want my product. They recognize that input that the product needed to evolve to grab the market. That was one of the most impressive things to me as well about that company, how open they are to making these adjustments and going where the market's need them. And I think that's such a powerful thing that we can show to our NC State students. It's something that I'd like to get our NC State alumni entrepreneurs involved with because I think they need those reminders as well. I could see NC State entrepreneurs having an entire wall representation at the next CES. That would be an amazing dream of mine.

Janet Kennedy (05:14):

So the program at NC State does involve mentorship, right?

Jennifer Capps (05:18):

Absolutely. In many different ways. NC State entrepreneurship offers a mentoring program where we bring people from the community in to interact very naturally with our students and we let the students and the mentors pair themselves off as they see fit.

Janet Kennedy (05:34):

One of the other things I found interesting at CES is the number of people who have come up who either are from North Carolina and they're so excited to see the state of North Carolina represented here or they recognize that we are a growing, expanding dynamic technology.

Jennifer Capps (05:52):

Absolutely. The NC State Alumni Association has done such a wonderful of creating an entrepreneurs affinity group within that association, so entrepreneurs can now get together, they can network, they can build relationships, find potential new clients, and let's not forget, NC State doesn't just produce entrepreneurs. We produce really great employees of startup companies so they can recruit for their first level employees as well.

Janet Kennedy (06:20):

You know, that's a really good point because if you have employees with an entrepreneurship mindset, they're going to be problem solvers. They're not going to expect you to hand over a fully written job description and it not change. They're probably going to push back a little bit and challenge the companies that they join to do better, to be better and to innovate.

Jennifer Capps (

We continue our interview with Tom Miller, Senior Vice Provost at NC State University about entrepreneurship culture to innovate and programs fostering business-building environment at North Carolina State University.

Joining me on the Trade Show Live podcast is Colin Kaiser from the EDPNC, which stands for the economic development partnership of North Carolina. Colin works in the international business development group, focusing on foreign direct investments coming from Europe and India. His role is helping North Carolina develop business partnerships around the globe. The EDPNC will be at CES 2020. 

Jeff Guard is the Founder and CEO of Brilliant Sole. They are returning to CES 2020 as part of the North Carolina Startup Pavilion at booth #52318.  Brilliant Sole is a smart footwear platform for VR with multiple applications from gaming to health care.

Joining me on the podcast is Jeff Cameron. He's a partner in and also handles the business development for Logistimatics. Logistimatics sells GPS tracking devices and services for individuals and for businesses. They provide real-time GPS tracking for vehicles, fleets, assets and people.

CES 2020 on the Trade Show Live podcast! An interview with Tom Miller, Senior Vice Provost at NC State University about entrepreneurship culture to innovate and programs fostering business-building environment at North Carolina State University. 

Dr. Graham Snyder is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SEAL Innovation. Graham co-founded SEAL Innovation to bring SEAL Swim Safe to market in direct response to the tragedies he witnessed while treating both adult and pediatric victims of drowning. Dr. Snyder joined Janet Kennedy on the Trade Show Live podcast to as part of our CES 2019 coverage.

This project received support from NC IDEA

Announcer:                      00:00                   You're listening to Trade Show, Live! On the Road, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries from healthcare consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live!

Janet:                                00:27                   Welcome to Trade Show, Live! On the Road. In January 2019, we are headed to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show with an amazing group of startups and business leaders from North Carolina will be in Eureka Park and displaying some of the best cool new ideas coming from the startup community here in North Carolina. Joining me is a fascinating product that is very close to my heart because I grew up swimming from an early age. It's still scary that drowning is a public health epidemic. Joining me on the podcast is Graham Snyder. He is an ER Doc, a physician-entrepreneur and CEO at SEAL Innovation and he's got a solution. Graham, welcome to the podcast.

Graham:                           01:17                   Thank you Janet. Great to be here.

Janet:                                01:19                   I was very interested in hearing about your company because I actually worked with a scuba organization where you did some of the early prototype testing of your product called SEAL Swim Safe and I think it is so needed and so important. Do you mind telling me a little bit about the history of SEAL Swim Safe and the company SEAL Innovation and and how you came to be.

Graham:                           01:46                   I'd love to Janet. As you may know, my background is as an emergency physician and so I work in a large trauma center taking care of sick and injured adults and children. It is a hard job where there is a lot of tragedy and loss of life and one of the things which really became a passion of mine was preventing probably the single greatest tragedy that I see in the emergency room and that's the loss of a child. Unfortunately, every spring and summer we have far too many children brought to us either on the brink of death or already lost who have drowned and these children, they look just like my children and their parents look just like me and are oftentimes doing the right thing. They are doing their best, they are paying attention, they are good, responsible parents, but they just miss it. I saw this again and again broke my heart and unlike many problems in life, this is something which is solvable. So I set out with my friends, some physicians and some engineers to come with a solution.

Janet:                                03:00                   I think the idea that physicians as entrepreneurs is really critical for solving a lot of health and safety problem. So often we have developers on the one side inventing something they think is a cool idea and physicians on the other side looking at the problems and they don't often get together. So when you have a physician who can look at both sides of the issue, I think you're going to come up with something really effective and it sounds like that's what's happened with SEAL Innovation.

Graham:                           03:30                   Thank you. Janet and I, I really feel like one of the reasons that I chose drowning as something which needed to be stopped was because it's the low lying fruit. If you were going to look at the risk of losing a child, if you looked at gunshot wounds or poisonings or bicycle crashes or ski accidents, none of those things even hold a candle to drowning in terms of their frequency. We lose 10 times as many children from or we lose 10 times as many young children from grounding as we do from bicycle accidents and is against the law to put a child on a bicycle without us bicycle helmet. If you think about what we can do to help the public health, we should start with the big problems and go from there.

Janet:                                04:24                   Well, I understand there's a lot of misconceptions about drowning as well, so I'm going to toss a couple of you out. One is that, well, if you've had swim lessons, you're fine.

Graham:                           04:32                   Well, unfortunately that's not true. Now, the reality is swim lessons are very important. Eighty five percent of children that drowned never had a single swim lesson, but by that number tells you a 15 percent have had swim lessons and unfortunately children that know how to swim technically can drown as well. Children by their nature are not that strong and do not have incredible endurance and frankly don't have the best judgment, and so children hit their head. Children swim until they're exhausted. Children choke on water. They get water up their nose and panic. One of the hardest cases that I had, and I'll never forget, this was a six year old girl who was in her backyard pool at a family reunion with loving parents, uncles, aunts, nephews, and one of the parents looked down and saw her pull her up and she was dead and what no one can tell me and what the parents will wonder for the rest of their life is how long was she underwater?

Graham:                           05:41                   They don't know. They don't know what happened. She probably got water up or nose panics, spun around in circles, gagged a little and then passed out. And if anyone had noticed, if anyone had happened to see her, they could have saved her, but it just didn't. The biggest misconception I feel about drowning. Drowning doesn't look like drowning. If you watch, you watch jaws or you watch a movie or someone's drowning, normally they're waving their heads and screaming, Hey, help me. I'm drowning. That's not what happens. If a person was strong enough to scream and yell, put their hands in the air and tread water without using their hands. They're outstanding swimmer. But when a person is drowning, they're exhausted. They can't breathe. All they can do is quietly bob up and down and inhale. And then they slip under and it's quiet. No one notices.

Graham:                           06:32                   Um, that's the, that's the thing that I'm trying to prevent. So what does your technology do? What is it when a person drowns? Normally they get exhausted quietly, bob up and down, and then slipped to the bottom. What we as human beings notice is not things that are quiet out of you. And still, that's what drowning looks like. What our device is as our device tracks a child, whether they're above or below the water, and when they're below the water, it monitors how long they're below the water. If they're below the water, beyond the threshold of pain than the device itself fires off a strobe light and siren that's too quickly warn a person who is holding their breath for a long time. Hey, you're really pushing things, but if you go beyond that limit, then it sets off an unmistakable strobe and siren on a hub, alerting everyone in the area., Hey, you got a problem! And you need to do that rescue now.

Janet:                                07:31                   All right, let me ask you a que

Myxx makes mom’s lives easier through creating a frictionless experience for shopping and eating healthier meals with families.

Joining Janet Kennedy on the podcast are COO Dede Houston and CEO Monica Wood, Co-Founders of Myxx.

Announcer:                      00:02                   You're listening to Trade Show Live! On the Road featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries, from healthcare to consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm, and now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live!

Janet:                                00:30                   Welcome to Trade Show Live! On the Road. This podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager and features an in depth look at the people, companies, and organizations that bring trade shows to life. In January 2019, we are headed to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show with an amazing group of startups and business leaders will be in Eureka Park and displaying some of the best new ideas coming from the startup community in North Carolina. With me today is the team that has co-founded Myxx. Myxx is spelled m y, x, x, and it is a platform designed to help you shop so much more intelligently so that you are getting healthy foods into your basket, designed to match up with recipes so you actually know what you're cooking when you get home. I think that is a brilliant idea. I'd like to welcome Dede Houston, who is the Co-Founder and COO and Monica Wood is the Co-Founder and CEO to the podcast. Welcome ladies.

Dede:                                01:29                   Thanks Janet.

Monica:                            01:31                   Yes, thanks Janet. We're excited to be here today.

Janet:                                01:34                   I love your platform and for folks who aren't aware of what Myxx is, this is a new and exciting thing. We have another podcast episode where we get deep into the details of what makes is all about and how it works. However, I would really like you guys to give us the high level. How do you describe Myxx in your elevator pitch?

Monica:                            01:55                   What Myxx is, we like to say, when you come to our site, it seems like a recipe sites, but we're nacho average recipe site. I will definitely not a comedian as a trained data scientists, but what we really do is we help you understand what items match to the recipes at your local store. You don't need to wait a week and have something delivered in a box for a recipe. You can do that using recipes you cook with today and product you love at your local grocery store.

Janet:                                02:29                   Oh, that sounds so easy. There's gotta be a challenge here. Like for instance, I'm a terrible cook.

Dede:                                02:38                   If I can do it, anybody can do it.

Janet:                                02:41                   All right. Is that what? What made you start Myxx?

Monica:                            02:46                   So if I go back to bed and I worked together at another startup and we always wanted to work together again and we really got along well and that was an exciting startup that we grew really, really bad and we worked with CPG brand manufacturer, so the product sold in grocery stores and marketing efforts, so digital ads. That was kind of our background. It always. We always thought about what we would do together and I had moved on to another startup out of Washington DC and I was flying there four days a week and I have three kids at home and I would call home and I would say, hey guys, would you have for dinner? And they would say, oh mom, it's so great. It's like Bojangles or burgers or pizza, and every time I called him I just felt like I failed.

Janet:                                03:31                   I mentally have a picture of you just cringing because you want to be supportive of your partner, but on the other hand you're like, why are you feeding them that?

Monica:                            03:39                   Absolutely, and I was calling home and really just feeling like I was failing them and that's really because eating healthy was something core to me in court to my belief because 14 years ago I lost 100 pounds and I did that through learning how to cook and cook by recipe and understanding what I needed to put into my body in order to be healthy. Before that I ate a lot of fast food and I didn't really understand the ramifications of that. On my health and I didn't want my children to ever have to face that because losing 100 pounds is not easy. It's hard and that's when I started with my crazy travel schedule that I am unable to feed my kids healthy food anymore. And Grocery shopping just seems like such a chore.

Janet:                                04:27                   I do have friends that will on Sunday meal prep for the whole week. And while that sounds really cool, that actually sounds like three or four hours gone on a Sunday that I wish I were doing something else.

Monica:                            04:40                   Yes. And that was my life too. I was spending a lot of time with meal planning and then going to the store and then you know, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and I was already traveling so often that I really wanted to have more quality time on the weekends and being in technology as I have conversations we started having one talks about how could we make this better because you're both single moms. The grocery challenge and one of those things was we already spent enough time doing chores and doing everything else around the house. How can we make this easier using technology and that's when we realized that wow, grocery, just moving digital and this is our opportunity to make our lives easier by taking away those hours of meal planning and making it like just minutes and just a few clicks. You can have all of these great recipes planned at your local store and it's such a relief knowing that you have a plan of what's for dinner tonight. I love to hear Dede talking about how she hates to hear that

Dede:                                05:43                   Monica, when she first approached me and it was about, you know, she wanted her kids to really understand the health and, and really eat more nutritiously and I just needed to feed my kids. I was like, I got tired of home and then being like, mom, what's for dinner? I'm like, I have no clue. What did you fix? You know, it was, it was kind of a pain point of like, you, you've got to feed your kids. And it's. I just wasn't comfortable. It wasn't that comfortable in the kitchen and I'm not a trained chef and all I could do to feed them anything, so this has been really a fantastic solution of being able to find recipes that actually fit my cooking style, but always now having an answer when my kids are like, Hey, what's for dinner? I know what's for dinner because it's not about spending, you know, hours of meal prepping on Sunday, at least not for me, but it's about just being planned out of li

The Consumer Electronics Show can be overwhelming for a startup but if you have an exciting product and a pro-active social media plan, you can make an impact. Wiser Systems attended CES in 2018 and had such a positive experience that they are returning in 2019.

Joining Janet Kennedy on the podcast is Stephen Taylor, Communications Director of Wiser Systems

Announcer:                      00:00                   You're listening to Trade Show Live! On the Road, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country and a wide variety of industries from healthcare consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm, and now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live.

Janet:                                00:27                   Welcome to Trade Show Live! On the Road. This podcast is a production of the trade show manager and features an in depth look at the people, companies, and organizations that bring trade shows to life. In January 2019, we are headed to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, with an amazing group of startups and business leaders will be in Eureka Park and displaying some of the best new ideas coming from the startup community in North Carolina and one of those happens to be why their systems. They joined us for our CES startup pavilion in 2018 and our back for more at CES with me, his director of communications, Stephen Taylor. Stephen, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen:                           01:13                   Thank you, Janet. I'm so happy to have Wiser back again. It validates that CES is viable even for a smaller startup and when I say smaller startup, we know that CES takes over the whole of Las Vegas and we're in a place called Eureka Park, which is where all the startup activity is and it's incredibly exciting, but there are 800 booths there, so the fact that you guys went last year and were able to make an impact in this arena is really impressive to me.

Janet:                                01:45                   Now. You weren't actually at the show last year, but we'll be this year, but as you were back managing the social media and a lot of the live communications, what was it like for you? What? What were you sensing about the energy and the activity at the booth?

Stephen:                           02:00                   Well, the first thing I noticed for sure was that just by virtue of being listed as an exhibitor at CES, we experienced a huge spike in web traffic, so I was monitoring that at home. We had more than 100 percent additional web traffic to what we expected for that month, which was amazing. And then seeing on social media, the amount of buzz we got there was also kind of very, really energizing and exciting. So even though I didn't get to talk face to face with new prospects, new potential customers, it was evident really quickly that we were getting some traction with something.

Janet:                                02:40                   Oh, that is exciting. Now you are of all the companies that we took last year, probably the one most vested in social media and communications and in really embracing the idea that you were going to CES. And thank you very much for that. as a social media person, I'm very pleased to see that and you are also doing it again this year. I appreciate that. But I'd love to talk a little bit more about last year. so you said your web traffic was up and you really feel it was because you were listed in the CES directory as an attendee. Did you see that before you even got to the show? Or was it a result during and after the show?

Stephen:                           03:18                   Well, we saw both. Well, are really all three before, during and after. We knew before that we already were getting some traffic specifically from the CES website and then during the show we saw a big boost after the show that continued for maybe maybe as much as a week or two while we did follow ups to people we'd met and things like that. So it really was from December when we first started tracking this through to the end of January, almost a few weeks after the show.

Janet:                                03:51                   And how does that compare to other shows that you've attended? Because you are one of the organizations in the Startup pavilion, the North Carolina's Startup Pavilion who did attend previous trade shows. You had been going to some trade shows. So kind of compare the two situations.

Stephen:                           04:09                   Trade shows are our main way of identifying leads and meeting potential customers and potential partners. So that's a big part of our marketing plan and I think it's fair to say we've never gone to a show where we didn't meet some potential customer or find some kind of benefit, in our sales process or our partnership process. But what was really unique about CES was, well, a, the size, it was five times as big as any show I had gone to, and then the breadth of different customers. A lot of the other shows are really specific, like manufacturing technology or Internet of things software. but from CES we had people coming to us from all kinds of verticals, a bunch of really different and disparate industries. and so that was, that was really cool because we're a kind of a technology kind of an industry agnostic system. And so we can, we can work in a lot of different verticals and it's hard to find a show where you can find people in so many different different industries.

Janet:                                05:17                   Oh, excellent point about CES. I do think that that's something that folks should realize is that while it's referred to as the consumer electronic show, what it really is, is the cool new idea show. And there are all kinds of people. They're looking for cool new ideas.

Stephen:                           05:32                   And we had consumers who saw something cool about our technology, but a lot of other businesses as well, a lot of professional groups that we crossed paths with their. So , it definitely is a gathering point for all kinds of technology organizations.

Janet:                                05:49                   I think people who are not familiar with Wiser might want to know a little bit more about what you do. So can you describe what the Wiser System is?

Stephen:                           05:58                   So Wiser Systems as a company, we deliver real time asset location and tracking in pretty much any environment. What we deliver to customers is a system of software and hardware components to create a wireless mesh. And then within that Mesh you can track our small asset tracking tags which you can affix to pretty much any physical asset. So a lot of companies, when they say asset tracking or management, they mean like digital inventories. We mean we're literally finding physical things and then showing you digitally where they are in a physical space. . So that's really what we do it how you use the data, how our end customers use the data varies quite a bit. Well, we really focus on is giving a system that can quantify the motion and the location and the movement histories of all these different physical assets.

Janet: