Aerva

SANJAY MANANDHAR: My name is Sanjay Manandhar. I'm founder and CEO of a company called Aerva. The company is primarily in the software and cloud business, but in particular being able to manage content unto any kind of digital nodes. A digital node could be a digital display-- tablet, tags, and so forth.

A lot of billboard management technology is what we call coming mostly from the broadcast technology, and as such, you go to a particular place to be where the billboard is situated, and you do your work-- manage the content, publish the content, and so forth.

What we started doing almost nine years, 10 years ago now, is we said, wait a minute. There's this thing called the browser. Everyone has one, and there's also universal connectivity. Why do you need to go there? You shouldn't have to go to a studio to do something. You should be able to do it from anywhere using any device.

So our technology allows our customers to use any browser and manage content onto any digital asset of their choosing that they manage and do it anywhere in the world at any scale. If you went to South Station here-- the largest transit point in Boston-- all the digital screens are the assets of Clear Channel. They, of course, sell media on those digital assets. All of that is driven by our technology. So the software will allow them to schedule, monetize, and get the reporting on all their ads that are on their digital billboards.

Another use case might be what we call employee communication. And just down the street here, in Kendall Square, The Broad Institute use digital screens for community building, employee communication, that sort of stuff. And they have many, many displays in their lobby, inside their elevators, in their cafeteria, and all of that. That entire network, across campus for them, is driven by our technology.

In both cases the customer, gets a log in into our cloud. All they need is a browser. And after that, they get to do whatever they need to do. In Clear Channel's case, they want to sell media. In the case of Broad, they want to do employee communication.

SANJAY MANANDHAR: The idea came first. Really, I spent about five years in Europe-- in finance, and particularly, technology finance-- and I took the London Underground every day, and there were very beautiful posters. And this is late '90s now and I thought, wait a minute, all these posters have to be digital someday. When they become all digital, what happens?

How are people going to be able to manage that content and manage that scale? Furthermore, if you remember, we're carrying two devices in those days-- a phone and a PDA-- if you remember those words-- like a PalmPilot, right? One could just extrapolate and say those two device would be one.

So I also thought the platform should be able to ingest data coming from end users and indeed, in real time, be able to publish it on traditional screens. I decided to come back to Cambridge, and situated myself next to MIT in Central Square. And just because of various dynamics, I ran into another MIT alum, who was my first employee-- a brilliant, brilliant software architect-- to whom I told him, this is what I think we ought to do, and it'll be a very, very big business.

We made some very, very important choices early on which we still benefit from. As an example, a majority of the technology's in Java, which basically meant that we could distribute on any OS. But we only distribute on Linux. Why? Because we felt when we're going to be the custodian of our customers' data, it better be very, very, very secure-- in the cloud as well as at the edges.

And as you know, there's inspectability of code for Linux. And because of that, we could tune it to our liking. We could update it. We could provide security and other patches at will. We do not have to wait for people from Redmond, Washington to give us a batch.

So to-date, fortunately, we've had a very good record of zero-- in the security world, 0 is a good number-- zero compromise in the cloud and zero compromises at the edges. And for that reason, the US Navy uses us for their employee communication exclusively. We also made a decision that there should be no scale limits. So as such, our cloud expands with the need of the edges, right?

So we can not only drive thousands of screens, which we do today, but we can drive millions-- and perhaps a lot more-- of tags-- or price tags at retail shelves, beacons, and so forth. So the scale limit-- or not having the scale limit-- was a very important architectural decision we made. And I would say, finally, both my main architect and myself coming from the Media Lab-- MIT Media Lab-- we're very cognizant of the user interface.

Very often, very technical products look very technical. I mean, the user interface ought to look very, very simple-- almost deceptively simple-- and all the complexity should be hidden away from the user. And we think we have one of the best user interfaces, as well, in the marketplace, and these are some of the big decisions that we made, and we're still benefiting from it.

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SANJAY MANANDHAR: While we drive screens today, those are the ones that the market is asking for most immediately today. But our platform is quite generic. It doesn't necessarily just drive content onto screens. Without even knowing, we're in big data now, because we drive a lot of [? in ?] tags, a lot of sensors, a lot of beacons.

One very important customer of ours is the largest brewer in the world, Anheuser-Busch, and we drive cooler doors for them. And there's a network of about 2000 cooler doors that Anheuser-Busch has deployed. Cooler doors are like any other cooler, except instead of a transparent glass, it has been replaced with translucent screen, which basically means now that creative folks can play with the translucency and sometimes show you the product inside or indeed sometimes make it more opaque and you through motion video.

Why is this important? This is important, because now with the juxtaposition of end users apps that they may have downloaded and may even have opted to say, well, look, my name is Sanjay, and I'm a Patriots fan, and I also like these kinds of fashion objects. The content will change based on your likes and dislikes.

That is a lot of data. So because of the proximity sensor, we know how far away you are. We know whether you open the door or not, whether product was removed or not. We know how many times the door opened out, where the temperature is, and where the actual cooler is sitting in the world. 2000 coolers is a drop in the bucket.

AB InBev is a global company with global distribution, and really, their objective is sales lift. Beer is a mature market. You will not get sales lift without stealing a market share from someone else. And you have to continue to innovate like this. And we, fortunately, through their due diligence are this central hub of their digital strategy.

SANJAY MANADHAR: My undergraduate was at MIT electrical engineering, computer science. Graduate two years was at MIT Media Lab. While undergraduate, I was amongst a lot of very, very smart technical folks. Being at the Media Lab, suddenly, I was having to work with musicians, with graphic designers, and other engineers.

And what I learned at the Media Lab is that sometimes form and function have to go hand-in-hand. The functionality absolutely matters, because that's the minimum. But if it cannot be used by end users in a meaningful way, it doesn't matter how beautiful or how vast your functionality is. It's not going to be popular in the marketplace, so we're very happy that we've designed it in a way that our technology, our web based application is used by very, very novices.

But also, there's enough layers in the interface that if you're an Avid user-- Avid is a software for very, very high end graphical work. If you're an Avid user or Adobe products user, you're not going to be offended. It works for savvy users, and it works for very novice users. And it is not easy to design your technology, your software, your user interface without having had the training in a place like the MIT Media Lab.

Many of my customers ask me, shouldn't you move your company to wherever. New York City as an example, and they're pretty much every week. Because we have many customers and partners there. But my answer always is no. We can sell anywhere in the world, but we will only build next to MIT.

So we're in Central Square, which is a quarter mile from MIT. And the ecosystem is phenomenal here. I actually volunteer for a MIT enterprise forum in the software SIG, special interest group. And we're a bunch of volunteers that bring topics and speakers that will help new company building.

There are other groups like the MIT [INAUDIBLE] Center, where I mentor three students who have businesses or ventures in other countries. Now I'm really appreciating where the ILP sits. It is obviously giving access to very large companies, all the research, and access to professors that are my team.

But it also provides access to startups with very interesting ideas and a lot of agility, which so many large companies may not have. In exchange, the smaller companies, the startups like ourselves, we have access to larger companies which we might not have otherwise. So Cambridge MIT is a very, very diverse environment, very rich ecosystem for company building.

SANJAY MANANDHAR: The platform can be used to drive networks of screens or edge nodes. Or it can be used in a campaign like manner. To us, the difference is that networks don't stop using our technology. Campaigns have a specific start and stop.

Beats by Dre came to us. In fact, their media buyers, Kinetic Worldwide, came to us and said, what Beats wants to do, we think only EVAR can do. What they're doing in October 2012 is they're launching colorful headphones. As you know, before then, they had only black or red headphones.

They used hashtag #showyourcolor, and they set up photo booths, six photo booths actually in the middle of times square. You went there. You got your picture taken with the choice of one of the colorful headphones, and you also gave one word about yourself. The creative was done by RG London, and they said the face of the end user should be here. We should take up 80% of the risk screening state, the Beats logo, and the word that they chose in the right color.

And of course, we get the end creative called PSD files. Based on that, as people walk in and get their pictures taken, the end result is on three billboards, an American Eagle board and two Clear Channel boards that make the north side of Times Square. That is 12 hours of non-stop driving three billboards and bringing in real time data. Which you know are these three elements, picture, color, and a word.

And you cannot have a do over. This is live, and you cannot have a dark screen. And you cannot have any failure. Everybody is very good at that. First of all, our software is very, very reliable. But also, we've done these kinds of campaigns where we can drive any number of screens.

To us, whether it's a small screen, a cooler door, or a big giant billboard, it doesn't matter. It's a screen to us. We just need to know a resolution, that sort of stuff. So it went flawlessly and Beats loved it.

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