Lexington, KY - Anthony Pistilli, CEO of Phoenix Global Designs, has won the grand prize in the second annual 5 Across pitch contest for local entrepreneurs. Pistilli's presentation for Guardian Ace beat out four other contenders at the event, sponsored by Commerce Lexington, Lexington Venture Club, the University of Kentucky and Awesome Inc.
5 Across gets its name from the way the bi-monthly event is set up: at 5 p.m., 5 start-up companies pitch their ideas to judges for 5 minutes using no more than 5 PowerPoint slides for a prize of $500.
Guardian Ace involves wireless technology that Pistilli thinks will revolutionize the management of human and physical assets. "We have a wireless tag and can track anything and tell you where it is within a building or an area," he explained.
The tag is a wireless transmitter; very small and with low power. The tag can be attached to any person or asset. A beacon, or location ID, uniquely recognizes an area, a room or anything or anybody that a company or institution wants to identify and monitor.
"The markets include hospitals, governments, universities, warehouses and nursing homes," Pistilli told the audience during his pitch, which was judged by a group of experienced local business experts.
"In the case of a nursing home," Pistilli continued, "if you had an Alzheimer's patient and they started to go where they shouldn't, we can alert a staff member so that can go and help them out immediately."
Guardian Ace uses a graphical user interface (GUI) which is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands.
"The GUI basically brings all the information from the tag and the beacon and presents it to you in a database," said Pistilli, during his presentation. "The time stamp tells you when the tag last told you where it was. If the information isn't recent, (the warning) goes to yellow, then to red and sends out an alarm so that you can take action."
Pistilli says the process begins with a floor map. Location beacons are placed around the site. If a company or institution has more than one location, information from them can be fed via the Internet to a single location.
Pistilli believes Guardian Ace is more useful than bar codes because while a bar code can identify what the asset is and assist with inventory, someone still has to go to the asset location and scan the object, which involves relatively high overhead.
"The Guardian Ace gives you a real-time location, data logging, data base sorting, resource optimization (if you know where something is, you can use it better) and real time security and alerts," he concluded.
Upon winning the 5 Across Finals, which included a $3,500 prize, Pistilli said he was "very pleasantly surprised. There are some excellent business people and ideas here in Lexington."
Pistilli told the crowd that he has demonstrated Guardian Ace to the National Health Service in a hospital in the United Kingdom. NHS asked him to prepare an RFQ (request for quotation) for possible use in operational efficiency and asset safeguarding.
"About 20 to 30 percent of a nurse's time is wasted looking for equipment. So it's very easy to see why hospitals are interested in this product. It will save them serious amounts of money in an economy where all budgets are being cut dramatically," said Pistilli.
Also looking at Guardian Ace for military equipment tracking is the UK's Ministry of Defence. "The Ministry has pie in its face because an article came out and revealed that five billion pounds of military equipment ($7.8 billion U.S.) cannot be accounted for. It's no wonder that when we called to tell them how we could help, they asked us for information."
Phoenix Global Designs is also pursuing other businesses in Europe and the U.S., but Pistilli would like to launch his new product from Lexington, where he and his family relocated recently. "I'd like to start here by getting the applications locally and then growing it," he said.
Other finals contestants included Michael Hartman for Frogdice, an independent developer of online role playing games and virtual worlds and Evan Leach and Scott Wagner for Crowded, a free application that uses live interactive play prediction and trivia for fans at baseball games to test their baseball knowledge.
The other two pitches came from Shawn Campbell for iJonze, a real time, location based, on demand advertising engine and Eric Hartman for the ACLerator, a machine that provides electrical stimulation to rehabilitate damaged leg or knee muscles and tendons.
Scott Shapiro, senior administrative aide to Mayor Jim Gray, attended the event on behalf of his boss. "The mayor is a big supporter of creative ideas in Lexington. He's an entrepreneur himself. I was blown away by what I saw. I was impressed with the creativity and passion, but mostly the potential. We need more folks like we saw tonight."