Miovision – a company with a history of teaming up in the Waterloo Region sandbox – has just announced its most recent strategic partnership: with hardware design and testing startup Swift Labs.
Swift Labs and Miovision are both the sort of hardcore, engineering-focused company that’s becoming the hallmark of Waterloo Region tech, and they’ve joined forces on a mysterious project codenamed “Magic Sensor”. According to McBride, developing the prototype meant Swift Labs “stretched the laws of physics beyond what we thought was possible.”
NDAs are keeping details mum, but the tea leaves suggest a wireless, connected sensor designed specially for the smart city. Miovision is no stranger to smart sensors: the company’s flagship product, Spectrum, tracks vehicle movement in real-time, collecting data that planners use to make roads and cities more efficient.
Swift Labs specializes in wireless hardware, with particular focus on regulatory and compliance testing: whatever the two companies are cooking up, it’ll probably play nicely with others. Swift Labs prides itself on working with the world’s top labs to make sure their clients have full predictability before entering the certification cycle.
“Smart cities are going to be driven by the Internet of Things,” said Miovision CEO Kurtis McBride. “Cities are basically made up of little point-problems. Some of the larger, more well-known companies are coming in with a top-down approach, saying ‘you’ve been a dumb city for a long time, now we’re going to make you a smart city, just pay us oodles of money.’
“Our approach is to come in at the point-problem level. Focus on intersections, focus on data-collection, focus on parking. Understand the real problems, and come up with smaller tools to actually solve them, but always with a mind to the bigger picture: how it will all come together to create a smart city. We’ve found an incremental approach is a lot better than one-time, transformational change.”
For Swift Labs, the partnership was most unique for its intimacy.
“Miovision is a big company with a really strong reputation for its engineering talent,” said Swift Labs co-founder and CEO Anthony Middleton. “But the team really trusted us and enabled us to provide services to them. In a way, we were able to augment the teams. Rather than just be stand-off and deliver a service or product in six weeks, we really integrated ourselves and embedded ourselves within their teams to understand their use-cases, customers, and culture. This delivery wasn’t stand alone, we were really enabled by Miovision and I think that’s reflected in the result.”
As Miovision brings the “Magic Sensor” to market, details will start trickling out. For now, McBride and Middleton are basking in the success of a locally-grown partnership bearing fruit.
The biggest surprise that came from these firms collaborating?
“Anthony hitting the date,” said McBride. “It was impossible."
