Yes, we know...SXSW ended a week go. Still, we find that sitting back and sifting through our notes, reflections, and memories provides a chance to be more thoughtful about distilling our experience. Attending panels, meetups, parties, concerts, trade show, and movies allows us the chance to think about the common truths across each of these experiences and to carry ideas back to our team and to solidify our thinking in various areas.
From many panels on the Internet of Things (IoT), a recurring theme is the idea of excess of data. People generate their own data in things like fitness trackers, leave breadcrumbs based on product usage, or provide genetic information voluntarily. Two key problems emerge here. One is determining what is valuable in this mountain of information. Two is what action should be taken as a result of what’s valuable in this data. For us at 6SensorLabs, we know Nima will be able to provide you some indication as to whether a food contains a specific allergen. You’ll have to make the determination about what to do with that information - eat it or not. You may also want access to this data to do your own analysis about your behavior over time. What do you do when you have a long stream of tests over a long period of time? Does how often and what you test matter in any way? These are questions we have to ask and answer.
One panel reflected how technology enters our lives and then becomes part of human culture - nicely stylized in a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are technologies that are just ideas and at the top, technologies that are just part of society. Those integrated with society are things like agriculture and clothing. In between are spaces where technologies are vital to daily life (indoor plumbing for some!). Everyone wants to build something vital in this way, and one of the best things about working at 6SensorLabs is that we’re on a mission. We know to achieve on this mission and vision, we have to make Nima easy to use, reliable, and accurate. This is something we are already laser focused on, but seeing the long term vision of technologies in general underscores solving real problems in a wonderful way.
Over the course of hearing restaurateurs discuss the ways they try to create community with diners makes us think even more about the relationship between the diner and the staff. How can we make this seamless? How can we create a real conversation around food and food allergies without alienating line staff? We also heard from restaurants who want to do their part to educate people on the link between what they consume, its source, and its place in our culinary history - a different form of food transparency. Hearing food critics talk about how they visit places multiple times looking for consistency of experience provides a parallel as to why people would want to test food more than once in a restaurant. Jonathan Gold astutely noted “food is different every time you eat it.” For people with food allergies, knowing a place can be consistent is critical.
Labeling, which we covered in a previous blog post, is also something that came up in conversations. Not every person feels the need for labeling, while other startups are trying to provide direct connections between producers and people, from startups to restaurants. You’ve noticed restaurants promoting the provenance of the cuisine -- people want to know what they can trust. We have to think of ways to help both restaurants and people dining out to understand what menu items truly mean and when the best time to use Nima is.
The intersection of trends in fashion from places like Rent the Runway and other is now coming back to tech (anyone remember the days of renting your land line?). The idea of leasing a product for a while, and then getting the updated model, is also worthy of some investigation. Definite long term food for thought!
There was some discussion around new ways to provide sustainable food. Cricket sourced food was available in abundance and the rise in startups creating food substitutes as Soylent, Muufri, and Hampton Creek all came up in conversation. Sustainability and feeding the Earth are great outgrowths of the recent interest in food and ag-tech.
Looking across all panels, meetups, and parties, one thing we noticed is that our company sits at an interesting intersection. We are food+health+tech, and don’t fit neatly into only category. We found that the two of us in Austin were criss-crossing between health tech, IoT, and food panels to grab the maximum value. We talked to some interesting folks focused on food transparency in food policy and in agriculture, but very little from the consumer point of view. We even spoke to people from GMO seed companies who talked to us about how they work to develop new products. One panel had opposing viewpoints on the GMO debate where both conventional and organic sides are ultimately striving to provide safe, abundant, and nutritious food for the consumer but they have different thoughts on what that means and how we get there. We also had the chance to meet people and hear what they want us to test -- we heard about specific food allergies such as foods with latex and then requests from people at sports panels who want to make certain their nutritional supplements are free from illegal additives. This shows that there is a huge need to help people navigate the waters of what is in our food. More importantly, it shows that people are the center of this need to understand food, its source, the nutritional qualities, and yes, the allergens which they may contain.