Breakthru Finalist Has Smart Phone Game Changer

By Jennifer Campbell – Telegraph Journal | link to original article

You're at home in Riverview, wondering about the rapidly changing situation in Egypt. You have some choices: You can look at a newspaper, log on to the Internet to check news sites for the latest updates or you can tune into 24-hour TV news channels.

But what if you could watch live streaming the cellphones of people in Tahrir Square, around the clock? That's what Erik Gingles envisions as he puts the finishing touches on his business plan for the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation's Breakthru business plan competition, in which he's one of six finalists. He'll find out March 16 if his project, known as “The Gingle” wins the big prize of $100,000 or either of the two second prizes of $50,000. Each prize also comes with valuable business services.

“We're hoping to be able to live stream from smartphones, so basically anyone in the world can see what you're streaming,” Gingles explains. “The technology already exists to be able to do live streaming but a lot of it exists as person-to-person (such as Facebook) or live networks. And the big thing is going to be the search engine and how it's arranged, so anyone can watch whatever's streaming anywhere in the world.

“So if you are interested in what's going on in Tahir Square in Egypt, there might be anywhere for 20 to 50 people who are there, live streaming. You can see from a street level, real time what's going on.”

Think of it as the YouTube or the MySpace of the live-streaming world. But don't ask him what his secret weapon – his technological advantage – is.

“We're in development, so I can't say too much,” Gingles says coyly of what he calls the biggest part of the puzzle. “How we do that is the game-changer but, basically, we would create our own place. We're looking at different service providers in terms of where to see the video. For now, let's call it our search engine.”

In addition to housing the live streams, this “place” would also provide archived recordings of live streams from the previous 48 to 72 hours.

“We want to be able to have the footage if someone gets something amazing,” he says.

A potential revenue stream from the recorded pieces would be reselling them, but he admits they haven't fully considered if and how they compensate the person who got the footage. Maybe it would be a 50-50 deal, he says.

The main financial revenue stream, however, is the application that allows the live streaming in the first place. That's basically their product, which they hope to sell in huge quantities.

Gingles isn't uncomfortable marketing himself. After all, he's president of i communications, a Moncton-based advertising and marketing firm he founded seven years ago. The shop has grown to employ five people and clients include Tourism N.B., Paderno, Corrections Services Canada, Aliant and the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, to name a few.

He sees this latest idea as a no-brainer, what with all kinds of communications moving online.

“We figure there must be a new way to bring something to the market,” Gingles says.

As a nod to the way “everything is going online,” his firm established what it calls NBTVtoday.com, which offers a variety of web-TV series produced in-house. They developed them as marketing tools and have since been selling similar ideas to clients. For example, they developed a series of videos from the World Junior Track and Field event held in Moncton. Tourism New Brunswick was the client, and each of the 45 five-minute videos they produced began with a tourism ad. In the end, the videos received 65,000 hits from around the world.

“So that's the background of how we came up with the live streaming,” Gingles explains and adds that his company was live streaming a brainstorming session with client Picaroons Traditional Ales this week. Through the stream, they asked people about their thoughts on the branding of a new beer they were launching. They embedded the Twitter feed so people could be part of the process.

Their new live-stream application will allow smart-phone users to stream live and then viewers can access the footage through their own smartphones, or on their desktop computers. “Either way it goes through a central hub,” Gingles says.

One interesting feature, he notes, is that because the streaming is through cellphones, it's based on global positioning systems, so, in the rare instance where someone's streaming something illegal or “deplorable,” the authorities can track them down instantly. Needless to say, their membership with i communications would also be revoked.

Though he's not willing to talk about his technological advantages just yet, Gingles is bullish on his idea.

“If it's adopted half the way we hope, it will create a tremendous amount of opportunity for a lot of organizations.”

Third in a series about innovators to be honoured at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation Breakthru gala on March 16 in Fredericton. Tickets for the are available at www.nbif.ca