Rob Stott: All right, we are back on the Connected Design Podcast. And I’m sitting here, it’s gloomy and rainy today up outside of Philadelphia. So I’m excited to talk to some people that maybe can bring a little sunshine up my way from down in Boca Raton, Florida. so the Boca Tech and Automation team, Mr. Jeff Galea, founder and CEO, and Marcio Gomes, marketing director there at Boca. So gentlemen, appreciate you jumping on and wanting to do a podcast and putting up with me for a little bit. I appreciate your time.
Marcio Gomes: Thanks for having us.
Jeff Galea: More than welcome. Glad to be here.
Rob Stott: Awesome. Cool. So, Jeff, founder and CEO, tell me how’s business down there in Boca right now? How are things?
Jeff Galea: Business is good. We’ve had a great summer. I would say business is up year over year. Last year was our I would say our biggest year in twenty four years and this year we may exceed it. So we’re we’re on track.
Rob Stott: That’s awesome. And I always love learning you know, a little bit about origin stories in this industry. So I’d love to hear you know, from you. Is is this founding and owning a business in the integration world, was this something you always thought you would be doing?
Jeff Galea: Well to be quite honest, this is Jeff 2.0 or maybe 3.0 depending on when you start counting. I started out life in corporate America like a lot of people. I got an engineering degree from General Motors Institute, did my thesis in Syracuse, New York and spent fifteen years in General Motors doing plant automation and operating system development with our mutual partner at the time IBM so I was one of the guys that worked on OS two and Pen Operating System and all kinds of manufacturing automation. we had Factory of the Future, which was a joint venture between IBM, EDS and General Motors. Electronic Data Systems was a big deal at that time. Remember Ross Perot and all that? So I did all of that. I’ll call that Jeff 1.0. And then I got hooked into Silicon Valley. We moved to California. To make a very long story short, I ended up joining a company that was already going as VP of engineering. That company went public. And then one of the founders of me started our own company. And then we took that all the way up to when we got acquired by a then public company.
So that’s when I decided to exit my Silicon Valley career and retire comfortably in Boca Raton, doing, you know, something I’ve been doing. on the side just for me for all those years which was smart home. So that was in 2001. And I mean full blown smart home because you can think of my background. We had everything from day one, you know, from lighting control. The only probably the only thing I didn’t really do was landscape lighting and shading. Well probably the two things I did not do, you know, twenty five twenty-four years ago. But everything else we you know we did. It’s just different now. You know, we’re using different tools. But yeah we’re Yeah, so I guess the rest is history.
We’re now here in Boca. we’ve moved a couple of different times within Boca. We’re now in our own building. We’ve been in this building since twenty fourteen. We own the building and the acre of land that it’s on, which has helped us a lot ’cause we’ve been able to make a lot of investments into our showroom that you know, in our previous showrooms you’d leave behind, right? So we’re now full Ketra certified showroom. We are a Control4 certified showroom. We’ve got Shades on display, we’ve got landscape lighting on display, we’ve got pretty much anything. If you walk into our showroom, you’ll see a reference theater. we’ve got vignettes, because we sell a bunch of different products that we manufacture ourselves, as well as obviously typical integration work where we’re bringing in products and assembling them into what we would call a vignette, you know, like Rooms To Go on steroids kind of thing, I guess, because we actually also sell furniture.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: Believe it or not, we started, you know, like everybody, hey, we needed something to sit on in the theater and then that kind of evolved over the years into media rooms and then like, why not an office chair? What like why are we stopping there, right? So yeah. There you go.
Rob Stott: No, that’s all well, I love that background, ’cause it gives a little I you can alm almost tell you were planting the seeds for where the conversation’s going and you know, it it’s neat like I have to imagine a lot you can pull from your previous two chapters, the previous two versions for this latest upgrade, on Jeff and who you like who you are and what the business is today. I that’s Big transition? Or you know, I know the tech kind of I guess permeates the entire story for you, right, in in terms of like understanding systems and how things come together and work, but like I anything that has sort of carried through beyond that more broadly that you’d speak to?
Jeff Galea: Well, I mean, yeah, that I’m in and up about the tech. My weak spot is the finance. I’ll be quite honest with you. I’ve always had somebody that managed the books. You know, I can write the software that runs the company and that kind of stuff, but when it comes down to like doing taxes and doing things like that, that’s an area where I’d just as soon not know, right? And have someone else do that part. So My favorite world would be be I’d be the guy behind the closed door and you could throw meat under the door every once in a while. I’d be happy if I never but in my role I have to actually talk to people, which I’ve learned how to do over the years. I did not start out knowing how to talk to people. And but yeah, I think you’re right is that you look back I always used to say is like, well, you know, the last you know, whatever, twenty-five years prepared me for this moment, right? In one way or another. And whether it’s simple integration when we were trying to figure out how to make things work on a factory floor, you know, all the way to writing software. because the company that I was involved in was a salesforce automation, like before there was Salesforce dot com, right? we were doing these kinds of things and it was browser based and a configurator and all that stuff. So you learn those tools. It just helps you build software that’s purpose built to run your company as well as
Rob Stott: Yep. Wow. Yeah.
Jeff Galea: user interfaces because at that time we were writing our own code. We did not have Control4. We were AMX. We were writing we had a graphics designer on staff from day one that would write the user interfaces. So you just kind of get better and better at your craft in identifying good products, bad products, kind of like being the CTO for each household. Is that a flash in the pan? Stay away from that. We had to make those same decisions at a corporate level, right? Not to get in bed with something that you know isn’t going to be there, doesn’t have the proper support. Finding good vendors and relationships. You know, I learned a lot of that from automotive with General Motors and then the software industry with the Silicon Valley kind of put the two together and that’s what an integration business is.
Rob Stott: Lo and behold. Yeah, lo and behold. I well you mentioned the storytelling. Well, I guess that’s why you got a gentleman like Marcio sitting next to you. He can help you talk to people and learn how the ins and outs of proper marketing. So I want to bring you into the conversation, Marcio. Tell tell us a little bit about your background and path to Boca Tech and Automation.
Marcio Gomes: Yeah, yeah, I I worked in various advertisement companies back in Brazil and then like variety of industries and I never imagined that I would end up here at Boca Tech and Automation doing, you know, working with home technology and but all these other industries that I worked gave me the experience and when I met Jeff and knew that they were looking for someone to work with marketing it was interesting because when you have a good product to market it’s you know it’s half of the work that you need to do, right? And also it’s interesting because we don’t work with that usual marketing for lead generation. We are more trying to educate our clients, trying to show them new products, develop new products for them and y you know, it’s it’s we don’t take over projects. So we have a very solid clientele, so we try to develop experience with them, make them be happy and showing them things and that’s the way that we work marketing here.
Rob Stott: Yeah. I two follow ups I almost want to ask you there. I’ll start with sort of, you know, I you’ve seen different industries like you’ve mentioned. This is obviously one where custom integration, there’s there’s not a product, right? It’s more of I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it’s like you’re an experience that you’re trying to sell and market, right? So I wonder, you know, what’s been the biggest adjustment or the coolest thing you’ve realized about this industry as you’ve experienced it and dove deep been able to dive deeper into it from a marketing perspective.
Marcio Gomes: It’s always evolving, right? You you don’t have like one product that once and done and you are you are good and you just keep promoting that and generating sales through that. So every day we have a new product, new storytelling, we have new ideas and we are always trying to promote those, you know, and not and not just like generate sales through that but also showing people how interesting a well done home technology project can be because we see a lot of frustration, we see we hear a lot of people calling us to help them to fix something that was not well done and what we try to show here that if you do it well once you you can just evolve with your needs as your family grows or your family change the needs and you just keep evolving with them. I think that’s the interest
Jeff Galea: So let me throw my my two cents in this. Every client that walks in here says they want simple, simple, simple, right? And like everyone says the same thing. And it’s like, no, we’re really trying to make this hard. Like of course we know we gotta make it simple. But simple means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But at the most fundamental level, this industry is guilty of putting a list of line items in front of a client and saying, Here, do you agree? Sign here. Give me half down. Or whatever, whatever your deal is, right? And it’s like, but we are in the business of I have to explain first of all, I have to understand what you want. I have to then explain how we’re gonna meet it, and then prove to you I’m not just putting a whole bunch of line items, expensive line items on a piece of paper and say, trust me, it’s all
Rob Stott: Yep.
Jeff Galea: gonna work, right? So it. And when it comes down to sort of our topic here, which is like landscape lighting, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Like we’ve heard that a it’s we’ve heard it a million times, right? But it is so true. Because if you take a creative person like Marcio, who is born it doesn’t matter which language he spoke, he knows how to tell a story. And that story is typically visual, right? If we can figure out how to tell our story visually They can click on it, understand the value of it, understand what they’re getting, and by the way, here’s the number. As opposed to here’s a bunch of different things, all these wires and transformers and this and that and it’s gonna like you get to imagine what it looks like only after it’s installed, and then you can tell me if you like it or not. What if we could flip the story on that? And that is part of what we’re trying to do here, is make storytelling start in pre-sales and then help guide it all the way through, and then we can also use it in case studies and things like that. So it really is about making it simpler.
Rob Stott: Yeah, it’s that’s what I feel like you’ve almost explained a challenge that no matter the technology, no matter the area in or around the home, like the challenge that this channel has always faced, right? Is how do you tell that story because or how do you, you know, it’s the ultimately the experience that you’re providing to the client when the project’s done. And how are you how can you show that yeah, sure, a TV you could put two TV side by side, but that doesn’t even begin to touch on what this industry does, right? With lighting and shading and all of the new areas that you’re now able to touch in and around the home. and, you know, I we’ve seen some cool use cases of technologies or platforms that you know, I know. And it may even be I know you guys are part of the Azione group, one of the met the showroom 360, if you’re familiar with David and kind of what he’s done with that. Almost is like Google Street View where you can walk through a home and click on it. But like experiencing it, right? Like you gotta experience that and how can you provide that in a way that the client can see it before they’ve read a line item or or or you know, put their their pen to the paper on a contract or program with you guys. But I you are y’all are doing it in a really cool way. So get into it. I know we’ve kind of buried the lede sufficiently here on the
Jeff Galea: Mm.
Rob Stott: the technology and the way you guys are doing landscape lighting. LiDAR. I like when I first saw that release come through and heard about, you know, what you guys are doing, I hear LiDAR and I anyone listening to this, when they hear the term LiDAR, they probably immediately think of those like Google, I said Google Street ones already, but Google street cars that walk around and they’ve got the you know, those sonars on top that shoot out LiDAR and create the Google maps and the street view or autonomous cars, things like that. So I
Jeff Galea: Yeah. It it you know, LiDAR is is the easy word to say and everyone sort of it sort of clicks a little bit ’cause we have it on our phones and stuff like that and
Rob Stott: Right.
Rob Stott: Yep. Yep.
Jeff Galea: If you had a Tesla at one point they had LiDAR, now they are all cameras and stuff like that. This is actually the marriage of multiple technologies together. There’s something called Gaussian splat, which I won’t try and explain. I don’t think I could, but there’s a mathematician out there that came up with this algorithm. There’s also 360 degree high resolution cameras and it’s kind of putting all this stuff together. But let’s just step back for a second. You’ve all heard of Matterport. Real estate agents have used it forever, right? And it’s just like you’re saying, you get this little virtual walkthrough. But I can’t make measurements off of that, right? So when you go, just think about anything inside or outside. Landscape happens to be a big one because we know that a lot of the problems that people have, they want a fixed price from us. All in. Just give me your number. What is it? So we’re taking big risks, right? because we don’t know what the heck is gonna happen on a job site, we can’t even really measure it. If you tried to actually go out there with what? A hundred foot measuring tape, that’s not gonna get you anywhere in anyone’s house. Try and use a laser pointer. Yeah, it’ll hide in the light. Right? Like how are you gonna record what you’ve got and quick enough ’cause clients are always busy, right? and they’re not gonna make a lot of time. We need something we could get in and out in like a half hour and have enough measurements
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: enough accuracy that we could measure pre-made cable lengths from say Coastal Source, right? ‘Cause the advantage of their wiring system is they’re they’re waterproof connections. It’s not very good if you cut it, splice it, and I have the classic problem again. So that was kind of there’s a technical hill we’re getting over, but also sort of the storytelling part of it. So when you put these three things together we get this this this view that we can make renders from pretty pictures, but also we can do accurate calculations on and then even one step further once we have the because again back to that Matterport, all it is is a picture you could do that with your phone you’re just sort of walking around and just seeing what it looks like but you can’t like levitate above and sort of look at the entire plot and say yeah that’s 300 feet to here and then as we walk around it’s recording where are all the outlets on this house? I gotta know where to put the transformers. Am I going under sidewalk? Like you have to know all of this stuff. It’s very hard to do with that with just photographs. You’d have to fly a drone or or something and I mean think of all the different things to do this and do it right and get a fixed price that you can count on. and that is what this technology is doing.
Rob Stott: So the t technology itself like is it something and I don’t know how proprietary we’re talking, so I don’t want you to give away like trade secrets or anything. I so I hesitate to ask, but like is this a system that you guys built internally and have built out to like explain what’s all involved with it?
Jeff Galea: Okay. yes, I yeah, it we could absolutely ’cause it’s been a learning curve for us as well. so it starts out with with Marcio and now we can’t, this is a podcast, we can’t show you stuff, right? but he’s got a handheld scanner. So why don’t you start out like a new guy comes to us and says he he wants something, right? We have now whether it’s inside, outside landscape or not, our first step is gonna be to scan the house.
Rob Stott: If you can.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: Right. And Marcio, why don’t you take that one? What’s your step one here?
Marcio Gomes: Yeah, so that’s show you just for you to have an idea. This is the equipment. So it has the LiDAR on top, it has four cameras, and then once I have this on, we walk through the house. First we let it capture the satellite, the closest satellite that is around to give us that a aerial view. And then once we have that, we go and walk around the house. We go in, go out. you know, measure everything. Things that we know that we want a better resolution we stay closer and for longer time get more visuals. If we wanna integrate a drone to it, we can also integrate a drone to it. We can integrate DSLR images. I can also attach a three sixty camera here to have a high high resolution image. So once we have that house all scanned, we bring to our shop and then we start the processing feature.
Jeff Galea: Right. So let’s let’s pause right there because there’s a that was a lot going on right there.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t know if I could simplify it, but in my head it almost like the techno the product you just showed and the process you just talked through, how different obviously you can get into like the up above and around, you know, aspect of it. How different is it from a an iRobot going around and mapping so it can you know effectively vacuum a home? Is it is it not very okay.
Marcio Gomes: No.
Jeff Galea: i it’s very, very d different. because you’re well, there’s a lot of there’s similarities. I’m gonna say very, very, maybe just one very makes sense. But so that little unit, you can’t see it over the podcast, but it is what, I would say five by five, maybe five inches by five in like a little square, and then the handle is the battery pack. So it’s it’s light, it’s meant to walk. So he’s walking with it at I would say breast level, roughly. like test height. He’s not, you know, going up or down or whatever. And he’s not trying to like navigate around with like a robot would never make it through grass or whatever, right? Like he’s literally walking. In fact we did an experiment once with his truck. He’s he strapped it on the cab of his pickup truck and scanned an entire neighborhood. And it caught it. It i it’s a it’s amazing what this is doing. And it’s actually picking up little point clouds and then also the images. And what he was saying with the drone and all that is
Rob Stott: Right, right.
Rob Stott: Wow. Yeah.
Jeff Galea: It’s got the smarts to be able to bring other third party things in. We haven’t really needed to do that. we’ve been able to just work with that. And it records everything on a little SD card on it. So he’s typically walking, like if he’s walking around a property, he may go around a couple of times to get higher resolution. It’s just like you can just overlap it. It’s almost like you’re spray painting. It’s just sort of like shh. And if you go back and forth, well it’s gonna cover a little bit more, right?
Rob Stott: Right.
Marcio Gomes: Right.
Rob Stott: Okay.
Jeff Galea: And like if you’re going inside, because you can just walk inside, you would want to open up all the doors and not be moving things back and forth. It’s also very clever that it knows how to remove moving images. So himself that’s in there that’s walking, it doesn’t record him. And if there’s other people in there on the job site, like there always are, if they’re walking around, it’s not seeing them. It knows to remove those. It’s smart enough to do all that. So y you know, that’s what we want to end up with is this sort of clean picture that we can make a two D floor plan, if you will, for as well as being able to have a point cloud that we can rotate around and make renders with and we actually drop the IES files from Coastal Source in so we get the actual light pattern, the color temperature and the angles and we see how it how it goes. But that capture with the geolocation, yeah.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Marcio Gomes: W with with the geolocation, right? You can place the geolocation and you can have the right time, the right sunset for the client to see how that will work into that time of the day.
Rob Stott: Right.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Well, it I mean, even too, like when you’re just someone that’s I think just generic I say generic, but like basic landscape lighting design, you have ideas of how things are gonna go, but if you have an actual rendering, I’m sure like you guys can get down to the detail of if I point this light in this direction and there’s this object here, like it’ll is it able to get as detailed as tracking like potential shadows and th like things like that. So that’s that has to
Jeff Galea: hundred percent.
Rob Stott: That’s a game changer. Like in my I can’t even imagine.
Jeff Galea: See that’s where someone like Marcio is key to this. Because he has this creative background, he knows Adobe Tools and he can do things, but he didn’t need to be taught to like, that doesn’t look good. Let me put a light shining down, like put it up in the tree and shine down, or up in the tree shining up. Like now we’re able to play and use I would call him director of creative services, right? And we can apply that to marketing or apply it to this visualization task. But If you had that resource, that’s what we’ve learned here at BTA, is you really needed a resource that learns how to do that capture, that watches the podcasts, that tests experiments, like let’s make a measurement manually, let’s do it with with our tool, let’s make sure we understand how it works. We spent probably six months playing, just and we were working too, but we were testing our results because I wasn’t a hundred percent willing to just trust it blindly. Now we do. Now we’ve done hundreds of these things, so we really understand it in and out. But it like if I’m say starting all over again, is that you gotta find a guy that can do these measurements and scans, takes it seriously, learns, evolves with it, and then we’ve we’ve sort of adapted that to everything from measuring for window coverings as well as landscape. Like we can measure everything. What w and we try and do as much as we can on the first visit, even areas that They’re not even sure about it. It’s like then I don’t have to make another site visit. Just bring this thing up and look at it. You know, it could be a full acre and it doesn’t matter because it captures all of it.
Rob Stott: Yeah. I now Marcio, I wonder do you have a like an Apple watch or Fitbit where you how many steps are you putting in on a typical scan? So
Marcio Gomes: Yeah. Right. Don’t don’t even count it, you know. It’s like I know that some days I’m gonna really walk. We do like some days I of course you cannot go too slow because of the file is gonna be too heavy. So we’ve done like five acres of homes in in an hour. So it’s really like you cannot stop to think or you know, just keep going and we do in and out two stories, three stories, keep going, you know sometimes You know, we get some aerial view, gotta climb a like a ladder or go up and down. Yeah, it’s very it’s very interesting. But one w another point that is good to bring up is that the Jeff’s knowledge about technology was also crucial for this whole process because the files are heavy and you need to process them. And we took a lot of time to figure out how to have a an like adequate computer to do this with no like first it was crashing and crashing and people were showing the computers that they had. but I have this like massive computer. I’m having pro pro problems processing. And then Jeff came with this idea of having a virtual machine that’s so it because it will keep growing, it will keep evolving, you’re gonna need keeping better machines. So if you have a virtual machine you can upgrade as you go. So I think Jeff y you can tell That was a little bit about this, that was a very stuff.
Jeff Galea: Yeah, so that’s the next step. Right? He he he’s a good segue. So, okay, now we have the scan and it’s on an SD card, what are you gonna do with it now? You have to run it through a big process. It’s a program that we license that knows how to take the raw data and produce what we call an LCC file, which is this point cloud thing. Okay. But you need serious hardware to do that. Now we had just spent the previous year
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: removing all of the servers. We had sixteen bl or ten sorry ten blades Cisco blade servers here and ran our own operation on premise in our IT center. All of that’s in Azure and then the last thing I wanted to do is go invest in another high-end thing and be hardware boy again. I mean whether I enjoy it or not isn’t the point I don’t have time for this stuff anymore. and it was changing so often where we needed more and more resources. So
Rob Stott: Right. Yeah.
Jeff Galea: I had everything up in Azure already, so we created an Azure workload, a virtual machine in Microsoft’s data center. Now it could be a big huge PC sitting right here, but I could get a lot more hardware and a lot more storage in terms of memory and SSD high speed enterprise disks and double NICs and so on with network interface cards and put that in there and then just turn the VM on, which is very expensive to run, but we only need it for a few hours. A couple of times a week, right? So we created this process between Marcio and I when he’s done with the scan, I turn on the virtual machine, we copy everything up to Azure, we let the thing process, we copy the files back down. we have a a big storage system here, and then and then we shut the virtual machine off. Now we don’t really have any hardware costs. And then g when remember when when they came out with the new version and needed more RAM? Right click ninety eight gig.
Rob Stott: Right.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: Click, done, restart, over. I would have had to build another machine, go figure out which memory would fit and how many SIMMs I had. Like I didn’t have to do any of that stuff. It’s all virtual.
Rob Stott: Right. So as a content guy sitting here, I think, you know, I look at what a podcast like this that we’re recording, what that typically runs me from a gigabyte perspective, I that may make you laugh, right? you know, into one one to two gigabytes per episode. What do you when you do a scan just to give people a sense of how big these files ca I know it obviously depends to your point on whether you’re walking a five acre home or, you know, a three story townhouse.
Jeff Galea: Yeah, yeah.
Rob Stott: type of deal, but you know, what’s what’s like a an average file size when you’re done with one of these scans? Tw yeah.
Marcio Gomes: Two hundred gig. Yeah. Yeah. Just you y you yeah, we have our backups there.
Jeff Galea: So yeah, we have done I guess we’ve done eighty s yeah I’m counting it right now, we’ve done eighty seven homes and so far it’s still counting five hundred and eighteen gig and it’s counting. So there you go. It’s a half a terabyte.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Yeah. So I can imagine it it the processing power needed to take one of those scans in, it has to be a lot. But like to your point, it this we be able to offload that. But that I imagine lets you access it once it’s everything’s done and you guys get the files back, how I guess next step then becomes what do you do with it?
Jeff Galea: Yeah, so i think of it s a little bit like Adobe PDF. Once you have the PDF, it’s very lightweight and there is a viewer that like I’ve even given clients a viewer and then their LCC file, which is very small, and then they can navigate around. I’ve done, you know, I’ve designed houses with people that are still up north because and they forget what their house looks like. They they walk through it months ago, one time. It’s like I don’t know, is there a window above that? Like go in there, grab a measurement. So inside, outside, you can walk around and do everything because it’s it’s a memory. We’ve actually gotten in the into the habit of going to the same house different times during the construction cycle. Like here’s the house before they did any landscaping, so I can see everything. Now they added the landscaping or you know, or pre and post drywall, you know, think of all the different ideas.
Rob Stott: Yeah. I and I know I mean you even mentioned it, right? Like this was something that you know, we’re talking about the concept of the landscape art lighting and design there, but you know, when you’re talking about these scans, I have to admit, can you get as detailed as, you know, audio design and where to place speakers based on like how audio cones will will show up or the distribution like if you’re designing a home theater in a house and you have that scan of that room, you can visualize the audio frequencies and where they’re gonna go. Like how, how the potential of this type of thing. Talk about that a little bit.
Jeff Galea: Yeah. Send them the link of the theater we did with it or the two theaters we did with it. So the answer is a hundred percent. A hundred percent. ‘Cause you can get all of your all of your sight lines. That’s an easy one. In fact there was a client just to your point, there was a client that wanted it was a sort of a sad story. H his wife was starting to get dementia. And so and she’s young. It’s it’s so sad. Very good client says, I gotta put
Marcio Gomes: Yeah, yeah. I was saying the yeah. How much traffic yeah.
Rob Stott: So it’s been done. So there we go. Yeah.
Jeff Galea: I gotta put cameras inside my house because when I’m at work, sometimes she gets lost and she doesn’t know where she’s at. Okay? But it’s inside the house, so I want to be able to turn them on and off. Right? I don’t want them on all the time, but I want to turn them on and but I don’t know where to put these and I don’t want you to turn up my entire house. So we scan the whole thing and then we’re looking through. It’s like if the camera was here, this is what you’d see. If the camera’s over here.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: This is what you see. So we just basically put the eye where we wanted and then and then it so just like you were saying is we could visualize it and agree in all the points and then we did it once and the results were exactly what he wanted.
Rob Stott: Wow. That’s incredi like this is this is mind blowing. Like I know we were gonna talk about it just from the landscape lighting point, but I like that’s a that’s an awesome use case, right? Is there an example from each of you? you may even have different ideas of what’s mind blowing to yourselves, but like the way you’ve used this tool that is not at all how you expected to potentially use it.
Jeff Galea: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: Well, I think the aha was actually landscaping ’cause I was originally thinking that I could walk around the house and get all my window measurements. Like y you know? Like that was what I was thinking, ’cause I don’t need a ladder, I don’t need multiple people, you know, like hold this while I’m on that. I think it’s always a chore, right? So we were thinking about that. theaters was an obvious one ’cause it actually that was our very first use case. Went in and scanned a room and then
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: We were able to give them different versions, like flipped all around different ways. We changed the color of the room. We showed an automatic screen coming up and down. We could model everything to like a sixteenth of an inch. It’s like this is what it would look like. Do you like this one? What if we changed this? And so that was we were like solving a problem. That ended up being a double six-figure project. And I don’t think it would have gone that way if I was just throwing out ideas. Imagine if, and waving my arms around, right? So I think there was we started to catch on that visualizing the solution was way more important than all of the individual line items. You know, because the line items don’t we know the line items, they don’t really know the line items. So you’re always trying to explain, explain, explain, right? Where this sort of took that out of it. And then the outside the landscape was was the aha moment because we realized
Rob Stott: Right.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: That you could raise up like three, four, five hundred feet. It looks like a Google Earth, but with precision that is outstanding. You’ve got I know that that he sent you some pictures, but I think that would be part of it is take a look at the video because it’s it’s really hard to visualize without seeing it one time, and then it becomes super clear, you know, of of what you’re actually getting. It’s the measurement. So the Matterport thing is just a
Rob Stott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Galea: It’s a picture, a distorted one at that, right? You see how it kinda stretches and so on. But you can’t just draw a line across and like today, today I was doing this is I we scan a house pre-construction. We’re gonna do landscape lighting when they’re ready for it, but now I’m doing pre-wire. How long of an HDMI cable? I gotta go up, over, through and so on. Well, I just traced it all the way through and I’m gonna get it. It’ll be within a foot. I’m gonna add extra of course, but Like I’m not just totally blind guessing and then you crawl all the way through the attic, fish it down and you’re short by two feet, right? Nobody wants that. So that I mean, that kind of precision measurement up, down, sideways, whether it’s inside or outside, I think that was the thing that really enabled me.
Rob Stott: No.
Rob Stott: That’s awesome. Marcio, how about how about yourself?
Marcio Gomes: Yeah. I think l two things that really on the sales point point of view is the layers of light in terms of outdoor lighting. When you are showing a client and are saying we’re gonna put up lights here to this palm tree and gonna put path lights here and some marker lights there, some down lights, you know, you explain the layers of light but they don’t really see the effect of that. You know, and then when you have you can make a video with your renders that you can show now I’m gonna turn on the down lights, now I’m gonna turn on the up lights, now I’m gonna have them all together, and then you they can really see the layers of light and the difference and they’re not really like considering how the how much would that cost more because they see the result. Before they were like, but if I put more down lights, it’s gonna be cost me that. It’s gonna cost me that. You just talk about price after you have all that experience lived and they are really sure about what they want to have and that’s the result of your offer.
And then we sell it. Okay, they bought it. And then you have your team. Then the project management becomes another thing because those guys they’re going to install of that. They they they’ve never been into that house thinking about outdoor lighting. They probably went there to do other stuff, but I can have a meeting with them on my desk and showing them all the difficulties that they’re gonna have in a driveway, pathway, if you need to remove a rock. Hey, you have this big rock here. What are you gonna do with that? You’re gonna go around, you’re gonna do which way? You know, how we’re gonna connect that fixture to another one so we create the zones. Sometimes when I have a meeting with them, I idealize a zone and they come and they say, that zone’s not gonna work because this or that so we go, let’s go to the LiDAR scan and then let’s see what we can do and then we can replan the whole zone like on the computer, you know, we it’s it becomes very complete. Once you get to the point that you’re gonna into the s on the site, you have the whole vision of the project. The whole team is cohesive and integrated into the idea. There’s no guesswork or you didn’t tell me that or you forgot telling me that. No, you had the chance. And it’s interesting because they need to play with that image, that thing it becomes like,
Jeff Galea: Yeah, that’s that’s that’s
Marcio Gomes: It’s it’s it like a video game. So they come here and they like to navigate and it’s it’s it’s a fun thing to do too.
Jeff Galea: I know that everyone in our company knows how to pick up the viewer and navigate around in 3D. and h his point is a hundred percent on because once you sell it to the client and once you buy all the pieces and you’ve made your assumptions, loss per foot, right? We gotta know the distances and all this stuff, then You gotta install it exactly the same way. You gotta tell a story again. It’s to a different audience, and maybe the discussion is shorter because these are guys that have done it before, but they still have to know what your intent was and why did you give me, you know, three five footers and a twenty-five? Well, we expected you’re gonna go like like this, right? and then through experience, w if because of the feedback loop that we had in in the company, we’re able to do better on the next ones because we could we’re s now seeing things from doing this a couple
Rob Stott: Right.
Jeff Galea: at times that we maybe didn’t see on the very first one, but but then we can go back to the scan and check for it. Does this does this particular situation occur? and I think Marcio’s sort of staying with the process, that was the other thing is Marcio Marcio’s was a first person on site and the last person on site. ‘Cause he’s then doing the tuning at the very, very end. Like they have everywhere where they are, but you still have to go there and dial it in one time. You know?
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Rob Stott: Right, right. I wow is like all I can think that like this is so such an awesome technology that you guys like not even tech that is an understatement in terms of what it like the process that you’ve built out because to your like everything you’re describing, right, is you’re able to use it as a sales tool, whether the sales/marketing tool for the customer so that they can understand and visually see an experience within their home before a single nail has been moved to what the finished product could look like. So then I the teams at the internal side, like you cut you can visualize, you can almost, you know, plan out the entire project without again, without lifting a nail and getting the team sort of ready for what they’re gonna have to go through. The process could look like for the install. like wow, that’s awesome. Like I it’s just it’s crazy. Yeah.
Jeff Galea: And then think think about the next thing is that because you’re doing this process all the way through, you’ve collected this entire story now. Now at the very end, we can tell that story from a marketing purpose because I see the before, the during and the after and everything in between that you now have created nuggets that you can use in whether social media, website, w whatever you need, because you’ve got this entire visual path that is
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Jeff Galea: Like a story that you can just play again and again.
Rob Stott: Yeah. I now, Marcio, maybe well I guess both of you could r answer this, but intended for you, does the technology improve I almost wanna I don’t wanna relate it back to AI, but it that term permeates everything, right? So like the more you use this platform, the more you use this technology, does it get better or is it something that you have to upgrade sort of physically?
Marcio Gomes: No, it’s they are always changing the software. We need to constantly be on their website to monitor the new updates, they have new kind of all kinds of files now, they have new technology that you can upgrade to your equipment. It has like a software for it has an app, it has a software for viewing, it has a software for video editing, it has a software for processing. So everything it’s always it this is like something new, it’s not It’s not this technology and the way that they are evolving in using AI it’s it’s fast paced. So you need to always be aware and watching the webinars and they always come up with new ideas, new possibilities, new new s situations that you can use with. So it’s very interesting. It’s
Rob Stott: Yeah. I feel like we could keep going and I’m looking at the clock. I wanna be cognizant of people’s time because there’s a million more questions I wanna ask because it’s so awesome. Like this thing is it’s impressive. I well the one thing I’ll end on, and you may have you may have already said it, but I want to give you the chance to just call it out specifically. we use the term LiDAR here, but I know part of the story that you’re telling is that isn’t exactly the right term or a term that’s gonna be easy for a consumer to understand or
Marcio Gomes: Yeah.
Rob Stott: Or digest, right? So w how are you guys referring to this when you talk to a client?
Jeff Galea: We’re we’re trying to introduce the term digital twin. we think that’s appropriate, but we keep falling back to LiDAR because people just sorta say it, right? Like they they click on that word, it’s it’s a kind of a sexy but easy to say word, you know, a couple of syllables, you know, it’s really a little easier than Gaussian splat, you know. I don’t know.
Rob Stott: Yeah, yeah.
Rob Stott: And they think they understand it, right? Right. That’s awesome.
Marcio Gomes: LiDAR is one tenth of the whole technology, right? But yeah, it’s what summarizes it, yeah.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Right, right.
Jeff Galea: Yeah, yeah.
Rob Stott: No, that’s awesome. Well, I Jeff and Marcio, I like this was awesome. and I appreciate the time and I think there’s more to it and I think we’ll certainly have you guys back on to dive even deeper into it as you continue to learn the tool and use it in different ways. So I thank you for the time and sharing just a little bit of knowledge on it here with us today. And like I said, I look forward to catching up down the line.
Jeff Galea: All right, sounds good. Thanks a lot for having us.
Marcio Gomes: Definitely. Thanks for having us again. Yeah. Great.
