Shakin’ the SOLD OUT blues

You know the drill: you’re working on 3 hours of sleep, you’ve got 46 seconds till your next class, and about 46 cents in your pocket (mostly pennies). There’s way too much blood in your caffeine stream, and if you don’t get a Coke NOW, things are going to get ugly.

The new tardy bells are about to ring when you finally score the perfectly crisp new dollar bill that might work in the Coke machine, muscle your way through the Tokyo-subway-car-like crowd in front of it, perform the "take my dollar, PLEASE" ritual, and press the button.

SOLD OUT.

1998 MBA graduates Aruni Gunasegaram and Erin Defosse know your pain. Well, sort of.

The pair are President and Chief Technology Officer (respectively) of Isochron Data Corporation, winner of the 1997 UT Austin MOOT Corp® business plan competition.

From its office in the Austin Technology Incubator (part of their 1997 MOOT Corp® booty), Isochron is developing wireless technologies that will allow companies to gather and analyze data from their field equipment—like vending machines—in real time. In fact, Isochron’s first product, VendCast™, is aimed at the beverage industry. It will allow machine operators to not only collect sales and inventory data, but to change prices remotely.

Of course, your caffeine fix was rather low on Erin and Aruni’s list when they came up with the concept for Isochron last year; VendCast™’s value proposition is more concerned with reducing product delivery and maintenance costs, as well as increasing sales by keeping machines functioning and stocked with product priced to maximize the proverbial cash "pie",. With VendCast™, the guy in the red striped shirt will know exactly when to restock, how many bottles of each flavor to bring when he does, and when to bring along his buddy from maintenance.

VendCast™ works by relaying data over a fixed wireless network provided by partner SkyTel Communications, Inc. The network Isochron uses is similar in concept to a cellphone network except that it has much higher reliability and is less expensive to use.

The data is sent to Isochron’s Network Operations Center. From there, Isochron can perform value-added services on the data, forward it on to the vending company over the Internet, or forward it to a third party for further processing (e.g. for payment processing).

As cool as VendCast™ is, it ain’t the only trick Erin and Aruni have up their sleeves.

Once VendCast™ is up and running, Isochron intends to offer a full suite of accompanying information services. For example, they’re working with Austin’s Trajecta Inc. to develop data mining and warehousing software for use with VendCast™. With these tools, Isochron will be able to manage, organize and analyze the data a company collects using VendCast™.

And things at Isochron are moving right along. Since graduation in May, Erin and Aruni have raised over a half million dollars in seed funding (their lead investor is Marc Seriff—one of the co-founders of America Online). Shooting for a live VendCast™ demo in January of 1999, Isochron has outsourced engineering to two Austin companies: Ten X Technology, which will implement the hardware designs, and PSW Technologies—a spin-off of former ATI company Pencom—which will help Isochron put together the software.

As VendCast™ matures, Isochron hopes to leverage the lessons it provides to exploit similar opportunities in areas such as utility meters and office and industrial equipment monitoring. If all this sounds pretty high-tech, well, it is. That might have something to do with Erin, who has a master’s degree in aerospace engineering and spent 5 years designing spacecraft for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before entering business school. Erin designed VendCast™, and as the "CTO" of a two-person company, pretty much handles everything technology-related at Isochron.

Aruni handles Isochron’s business side. A UT BBA and Certified Public Accountant, her pre-MBA life included stints at KPMG and Dresser Industries; her during-MBA life included winning the 1997 Texas Business Hall of Fame Scholarship. Aruni has also spent some time as the Operations Manager for an embedded systems consulting firm.

At UT, Erin and Aruni took advantage of one of the top entrepreneurship MBAs in the country to develop their skills and business plan. Interest in entrepreneurship—as measured by course offerings and Entrepreneurhip Society membership—grows each year at UT. The class of 2000 is probably the most entrepreneurial yet.