RIS News Interviews SmartSense President Guy Yehiav at NRF 2023: Retail's Big Show

Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure seeing you again. Now it's a lot of fun. We are SmartSense, part of Digi, which is a publicly held company. We have more than thousands of customers. We're securing more than two billion dollars of products every day and we save lives every day. We have the deep pockets of a large company while we continue to innovate because we have customers that allow us to innovate with them. And what we do is we have sensing as a service solution where we help secure the quality, any requirement for the state of the products, from temperature, humidity, positioning on shelf, availability, etc. So it's a lot of fun being part of SmartSense.

So a lot of companies, yeah, they invested in a lot of handheld devices. I've been at Zebra for about two years before. A lot of companies bought a lot of different sensors, and as you know, sensors are generating even more data than before, and people are sitting today on a lot of data. What we are doing is taking all this data, taking telemetry type data, and creating sense out of it from the optimum task to get the most out of the product, secure the product, provide the service to the customers, have it on the shelf when it needs to be consumed. For example, if you go and you consume just even a basketball, if it's deflated, no one can use it, right? So then you have a bad quality. Same thing in food, but even more critical, right? Because food can kill you. And the idea is to check that the humidity and the temperature and the cooling process and the warming process, it's all based on house of compliance. So we're helping all of our grocers, retailers, restaurants, retail pharmacies secure all of their products.

So that's critical. When you get, let's say, bananas, if you get the truck of the bananas coming back into the store, you open up the door and there's a lot of brown bananas, the stock is here but the state of the positioning of the stock is not sellable. You cannot sell that, right? And so the way that we help them is that we have different types of sensors, and we also open up our sensor platform to use even our competitor sensors. Now, as we said before, a lot of companies already bought a lot of sensors. So if you already have sensors for humidity and for temperature, we can start reading those temperatures collectively with our sensors in order to provide you the best activity option as an outfit. Let me just show you a few of those if you are our product. So one of the critical products for any food maker is a food probe. Our food probe is very unique in a way that it's automatically connected to Bluetooth devices like Zebra, iPhone, iPad, and then it has a green and red light that will blink based on the temperature of the food. So for example, if now I'm making a chicken, it will call me, 'Hey Guy, this is time to check the temperature of the chicken.' You take the food probe, you put it in the chicken. If it's green, all good, you continue on. That's great, and the system will comply with guide check the chicken temperature within range at three o'clock in the afternoon. So now you comply with HACCP and everything else. If it's red, you look at the app and it will tell you, 'Oh, you need to put the chicken back in the oil for another five minutes,' and you put it back in and you just secured the food, right? So this is really, really critical. Other sensors that we have, we have small sensors that go into freezers, refrigeration, open cool air. And those sensors are really cool because they connect with our gateway. Our gateway is connecting to cell towers, and that's a differentiation compared to any other IoT. If you have any smart home, you know any smart devices in your home, you know that you'll have a lot of different applications to run them. What we do is we connect all of the different sensors to our gateway that speaks all of the protocols: Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN, any type of protocol. The customer doesn't even need to know about it. What they do is they connect it to power, it goes and checks all of the different sensors, and then takes the data, sends it to the cloud through cell tower. So you don't need to configure it to your Wi-Fi, you don't need to put passwords when you change it, you don't have the risk of any cyber attack because it just goes to the cell, data goes out, telemetry data continues on. We optimize all of that and then send you just the prescriptive action that you need to do. Nice thing about our gateway also is that if you don't have power next to it, guess what? You can actually connect it and have a power of Ethernet, or you can connect any other twisted wire type sensors. So we can connect even with all sensors that are twisted wire, not just Bluetooth or Zigbee. So we're going backwards in time, you don't need to reinvest in new sensors. It's wonderful.

We've been approached by a lot of our competitors as well as partners to work together on our open platforms just in the last two days since our press release was released, and we're working really well with them on getting that data and adding value to their customers as well as our customers. What you see on the show floor today is that everyone else speaks about the fact that data is not enough, but you need to turn it into actions, which is what we've been doing for 12 years. The next big thing is connecting all of those IoTs to one backbone to then enable our customers to move on that tangent of optimizing the quality and delivering better product to our customers.