Hi, we're Ynomia (https://www.ynomia.io).
I'm Robert (I still try even though I lost the battle of being called Rob a long time ago :) Postill and I'm the CTO at Ynomia. I've been in the ruby community for a long time. I mentor and I talk... a lot ;) I've worked around Melbourne for over ten years; at places like Dius, Sensis, and MYOB. So you can ask around and find people who know me easily. You can find me on Ahttps://github.com/robertpostill or https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertpostill/. So you can do some due diligence on me before working with me.
We track things and provide real-time location services. Like all over the world. For construction businesses. With our own IoT devices feeding real-time data to a platform that were building! Although in the fullness of time... well let's not get ahead of ourselves :)
Easy, construction is a massive global industry that still uses pen and paper in many cases. Right now it is an industry going through a revolution of technology and new ideas. Historically it's been seen as an industry with perennially low productivity and dangerous working conditions.
At Ynomia we are building IoT products that automate the capture of data in difficult construction environments (low power and no mobile reception) to help understand the status of a project. We then make meaning from the data we collect to help teams stay informed and improve the timeliness of decision-making. So we can help construction teams manage information in real-time through an end-to-end IoT platform solution. They're glad we're here and we're happy to help.
Also, like a lot of good startups there's so many ways this can go. I talk a lot about technology as a superpower. There's no point in the technology without the people you're trying to help. So here's a couple of super quick examples:
- We track bins. Why, becuase bins are a proxy for tidy sites (you're getting the good order vibe aren't you? ;) Tidy sites are safer sites. With 35 construction workers being seriously injured each day (see https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/construction) we clearly have a long way to go. Our hypothesis is that keeping track of the bins allows them to be emptied more efficiently and should create a virtuous cycle like better sites → less money spent on health and safety (as in payments to injured people) → more profitable sites → more incentive to make better sites.
- We provide the real-time status of critical path, high value construction materials, like glass facades across international supply chain. From their creation to their installation. Because you can't get electricians, plasterers doing their jobs until the building is sealed. So if you're a tradie you're very interested in when you need to be on site and when you can do other things. If you work for a construction company we know that you stress about where those facades and you know that a blockage there can send the entire construction effort into panic mode. So you want to know what's going on with the facades too
- We track plant and equipment on an active jobsite. In this case, not only do we provide the realtime position of forklifts and scissor-lifts but we also are building safety compliance systems to automatically notify site teams of expiring inspections and unauthorized use.
Hopefully you get the impression we're trying to create as many winners as possible. So our products have real value to the people who use them and the people who pay for them. And those are just the things we're doing right now. There's so many more stories to tell here;
We are building towards a vision that will create what we call the Connected Jobsite. An integrated platform to support construction teams with the location information of critical resource applications for plant and equipment, asset and machinery, safety and people, progress tracking and more...
Good people. Yeah, us and everybody else :) So when I say good I mean:
- Empathetic people - this isn't a product set by and for developers. So you're goig to need to be able to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.
- Curious - "how does that work?", "why do you say that?" are the kind of questions you're always asking. We're working with research groups like CSIRO and Monash University so there's plenty of questions to ask about cool teh as well as contruction.
- Enthusiastic - "fancy seeing the 92nd storey of a bulding beig made?" was my second interview. If you're the kind of person that would think that's a great idea then we think you might like working with us. To be clear though that is no longer a part of the interview process :)
If you know about radios and IoT you're more interesting and if you know your way around a construction site that's also a bonus.
We're on a pretty standard MERN stack; Mongo with Node.js and Express sprinkled with some React. We describe our stack with terraform and are using Raspberry Pis for some of our edge devices but this is expanding to other network devices.
The craft of software is important to me personally and us a group. So TDD, devops and learning are all part of who we are. A bunch of our stuff is pretty POC right now so expect to be adding tests and renovating where appropraite but the
We're starting to deploy a technology called BLEAT. Seehttps://research.csiro.au/dss/bluetooth-low-energy-aware-tracking-bleat/ for a early version of what we're working with.
It comes form Eunomia, the Greek goddess of good order. We riffed on the idea and thought we'd change the eu to a y and so here we are :)
- Send us your latest CV
- Tell us about the last thing you built