J2G Please tell us a little about your company, Findware.

Findware is a company that uses telematic devices to collect information about the use of a company’s physical assets. Telematic literally means “the remote reading of a value” such as temperature or humidity or location. It means being able to collect detailed information about the environment and location and usage of assets from a distance.

We can tell our clients exactly how much use they’re getting out of each individual lorry. Or what levels of temperature and humidity a piece of medical equipment has been exposed to over a certain period of time, and how much it’s been used. This can be applied to almost anything.

We don’t really dictate what our clients do with the data, but if they want us to advise them on how to use the data to make their company more efficient, we can do that.

J2G Where did the idea for Findware come from?

From a story about a lost dog, actually. In 2001, while on holiday in Barbados, I read a book about a dog that got lost and this kid who found it. It started me thinking about people being interested in knowing where their stuff is. I’d heard about GPS, and I could see it being applicable not just to dogs of course, but to all kinds of things. People naturally like to know where their things are and I saw that now we have the technology to make that possible for almost everything imaginable, from your car keys to a lorry or a van.

J2G How did you set about making the concept a reality?

I got a partner, Lawrie Hutcheon, involved, who’d worked with me on a previous venture. We put together some little laptop-based tracking systems and just started the company from that, really. Gradually, we came to understand the market a lot better – what people needed and wanted. We experimented with loads of systems and loads of devices. After working with the laptop version for a while, we decided that a web-based system was a better way to go. We went through a few iterations of the internet platform before settling on an Ajax-based system that will basically track anything anywhere on the planet. It’s device agnostic, which is one of the lessons we learned early on.

J2G What does ‘device agnostic’ mean?

That means it’s compatible with any kind of hardware, so it doesn’t really care what sort of edge-device you’re using.

J2G And what’s an ‘edge device’?

It’s any piece of technology that can be installed on the thing you want to track. So it’s literally the device that’s on the outer edge of the system, the data-base being at the center.

J2G What are the advantages of a device agnostic system?

When the system is device agnostic, it can track anything. There are so many types of tracking devices that if you tie your business to just one particular type of device, it drastically limits your options and capabilities. Because we’re device agnostic, we can track any device, and we don’t really care about the edge-technology. RFID, GSM, GPS, Bluetooth, whatever. We can track all of those. So we can advise companies as to what devices will be most useful to their particular needs and then create a solution around that.