Since Miovision was founded by Kurtis McBride, the company has always tried to stay ahead of the curve in an industry slow to change; the company got its start after McBride had experience counting cars at the side of the road for developers and municipalities seeking data for traffic optimization or building development.
“We have four core values which we use whenever we’re hiring or designing products or picking investors, all of those things get filtered and evaluated through those four core values.”
“We built hardware and software that allows you to use a camera at an intersection to collect video, and then the software turns that video into traffic data. We did that for years, and then that product got introduced into the broader need for cities to manage flow of traffic,” said McBride. “We started out just providing data, and then the city or engineers would figure out what that data meant. Then, we recently started branching off into the broader smart city and are building products to provide low-cost interconnectivity to intersections, basic alerting around power, all the way up to real-time control of traffic flow.”
Since then, McBride says that Miovision has been dedicated to finding innovative solutions to ensure that the company is always ahead of the curve; he said that as far back as five years ago, they were trying to use cell networks to connect hardware to the internet before IoT was a thing. “We’re always pushing the envelope on what’s possible, whether that’s new products or upgrades, or whether it’s new hardware devices or new web capabilities, we try to stay up to date. We don’t innovate just for the sake of it, but where it can make the customer experience better.”
That dedication seems to be paying off. The company recently celebrated its 10th birthday back in November, and has announced partnerships to ensure that its innovation strategy is always up to par. Its latest partnership includes one with Swift Labs, a company dedicated to helping its clients identify critical issues with products as quickly as possible in order to keep development resources focused. Swift Labs will be helping Miovision in the development of new products.
“We have a group inside Miovision called innovation labs, and one of the things that it does is that it maintains projects we’d like to work on if we had more time in the day,” said McBride. “We met Anthony Middleton from Swift and his team there, and we got know their capabilities and saw a natural fit between their skill set and our list of things, and I find that as you grow, you find that you have more people there and you think that you should do more things but that isn’t always the case.”
McBride gave Middleton the list of projects that the company had been meaning to work on and gave their team an “impossible timeline”. Swift Labs was given seven weeks to create a fully functional prototype of a patented design in response to a Miovision RFP.
“Part of it is being able to attract enough people to work on problems, and part of it is that there was some technical challenges we had to overcome that required very specific skill sets,” said McBride, citing the fact that many Swift Labs engineers have extensive BlackBerry engineering experience. “Between them they have close to 100 years experiences doing intricate radio frequency design for some of BlackBerry’s phone products. They had a very specialized skill set that made it easier and possible for them to work on this project, where other teams including mine might have had some challenge.”
As Miovision continues to grow past its 10th birthday, maintaining a consistent and strong culture within the company is something that McBride stays dedicated to by being able to communicate core values internally. “We have four core values which we use whenever we’re hiring or designing products or picking investors, all of those things get filtered and evaluated through those four core values,” said McBride. “Sticking to them sometimes takes longer, or means you spend more money, but ultimately we find if you stick to those guiding principles, as long as you pick them right the first time, that allows you to maintain the culture,” he said.