from the crossroads of America in the hooer state of Indiana this is get in the podcast focused on the unfolding stories and extraordinary Innovations happening in the Heartland today I'm Nate spangle head of community at patri Egg and I will be your host for today's conversation today we have a live recording from rally the largest global cross sector Innovation conference that was held right here in Indiana on the show today is valter salamaki founder and CEO of edge sound [Music] research valter salamaki is the CEO of edge sound research a company focused on bringing realism to sound experiences by introducing a new patent pending audio
technology EDG sound research was selected as a winner of the in prize pitch competition for sports Tech at rally this interview was recorded before they knew they were selected as winners and it is gold please enjoy this live episode of get in from rally so my name is salamaki I'm the CEO of edge sound research oh okay and where are you from I'm from Riverside California right outside of Los Angeles all right right outside of La tell us about your company our company Edge sound research has invented a new patent paining audio technology where we can actually transform any ordinary object so let's say a
stadium seat into a multi-sensorial audio experience allowing you to hear and feel every frequency of sound so you can actually enjoy a sporting event like a basketball game and here and feel every dribble every shot every swish directly from your seat in your body are you wearing headphones you're not wearing any headphones so I'm sitting up in the rafters at the staple center right and how does that work so the way our technology works is we figured out a mechanism to control vibration and the vibration to a seat emanates all the acoustic sound that you could hear the dribble has a little pop sound to
it so you're hearing all those sounds but also since it's transmitting through vibration it gives you the entire range that your body can actually also feel oh my gosh so this sounds like a heck of an experience how long you been working on this so we've been working on this now for almost 4 years we originally started it with research at University of California Riverside I met my co-founder there I was doing my MBA he was doing his PhD in in music and we stumbled upon it because my co-founder was originally born heart of hearing became a professional musician composer and audio engineer and the
way he was able to compete in that industry obviously somebody who's heart of hearing was he used to touch speakers and drums and instruments and he realized that all the information he wasn't getting from his ears he would pick up through the touch of his skin oh my gosh that's amazing how big is your guys' team so the core team is only six people so it's me on the business side and five Engineers uh knocking out and building out our technology yes okay and where are you going to take it to market app first what's like the one where you where's like the plan and
where is like the end goal to be yeah so right now we've been working with both Major League Baseball with the Minnesota Twins and also with the NBA we were one of seven companies working with the NBA over the last six months in their NBA Launchpad program deploying this in in in live environments so we did live games Sacramento Kings we did NBA 2K their Esports League we've also done the summer league which we were recently at in Las Vegas uh so the introduction right now is in sports first uh focusing on premium experiences uh but the ultimate goal is to then take it out
of V use and bring it to people at home in their living room so you can watch a basketball game or sporting event at home and you can feel like you're still Courtside or enjoying that game in a new way but uh that's only a small fragment of our business since sound is everywhere sound is in your car it's in gaming it's in literally every industry uses sound in one way shape perform so our ultimate vision is this becomes the new mechanism of Designing audio experiences and building the very first ever multimodal operating system to create this future of sound that has just never been
possible before now is this mostly software or are we talking Hardware as well it's a combination of both we had to build the hardware cuz the hardware didn't exist but we used off the shelf components to show that it's possible to create the hardware but the magic really is in the software to control so that any object we attach our devices to can create this full range audio experience that you can hear and feel that's amazing all right so how did you find out about rally so I found out about rally uh a couple ways um I I have a couple investors out here in
uh Indiana as well as uh folks from elev reached out to me uh one of our First Investors was Miles Gro from Omni dollar Adventures yeah uh so it was it was a great opportunity to see everything that's happening here and in Indie uh but the other thing that's so exciting to me about Indie is just it has all the sports here we have a basketball team here there's a football team here there's Motorsport so that combination made it very interesting for me to come out and come here to Rally the premium audio experience of the Indie 500 would be something special have you been
to Indianapolis before U I've been here now a couple times so this is my third time here in IND third time okay what was your first impression of Indianapolis or Indiana as a whole so the the the first impression I had was everybody's actually incredibly nice and and really wanted to support that was actually one of the things that was quite refreshing is when I came here everybody wanted to make connections everybody wanted to support open doors even prior to me having any standing at all here in Indie so that was a cool kind of opening that it felt uh really fresh that people really
want to support new ideas and really Drive Innovation here in India amen you're hidden that's who's your hospitality we've been talking about okay so outside the pitch competition what have been some of the benefits or highlights of your experience here at rally so some of the the benefits have been really meeting folks from different industries that we're looking into in the long run so we met people in the medical field we've met people in research we've met people in the acoustic research side uh so Meeting those folks has been phenomenal because it's not only potential uh Partnerships hires and investors but it also leads to
uh the ecosystem as a whole and how our technology here could thrive in different Pathways that we didn't really think about because having universities out here like IU for research around the medical side having great engineering talents such as Purdue that's very attractive for a business such as ours which is a very deep Tech uh research-based organization that those are the kind of talent that we're going to need uh over the time to really build the future we want to build and so you talk a little bit about the background of your co-founder in the audio space what's your background in yeah so my background
is in uh marketing strategy and information systems I spent both my undergrad and my MBA really researching emerging Technologies uh I built a consulting company right out of my undergrad uh working on digitizing traditional businesses and using new types of Technologies to give them a fair Edge uh because I used to work at a company called ezri they do geospatial analytics so if for example Google Maps that's powered through e technology and understanding what big corporations and organizations have access to these different technology and tools I wanted to bring that to small businesses so that's where my entrepreneurial Journey got started and then from there
met my co-founder and ever since been building this company I love it so here's just a rapid fire quick hitter questions how do you plan on maximizing rally right pitch pitch competition aside how do you plan on maximizing the connections that you made here uh in the weeks to come yeah so one of the biggest things for me when it comes to conferences is I want to make sure that people that I meet I follow up with everybody and have next steps because it's great to meet a lot of people but if you don't really know what that next step is conversations tend to dwindle
away so for me right now the main focus is making sure that all the conversations I've had around opportunities for research opportunities for potential partnership sales all those kinds of things that next week I follow up what are the next steps and really moving those conversations along absolutely I love it okay before coming to Indiana you said you've been here three times what was Indiana known for in your mind basketball basketball basb oh the sports guy I love it I love it man so if if there are people out there listeners looking to connect with you all support you all become customers of you all
how can they find you and what's the right individuals you're looking for yeah absolutely you can easily reach out to us uh two ways that is the is one on our website Ed research.com you can uh request the demo or just Reach Out contact us directly through there uh I'm the I'm the one who receives all that so I'm very quick to respond when it comes to those messages but the other side is just reaching out to me directly on LinkedIn my my LinkedIn is going to be my full name which might be a little hard to write out it's salamaki v l t e
r i last name salamaki s l o m a Ki originally from Finland so that's where the the name comes into play but the folks that we really want to be able to talk to are are definitely researchers uh people that are designing new brands of experiences venue owners and those that are looking at like The Cutting Edge of what new types of immersive Technologies can do those are our essential bucket of folks that we're talking to today but also it's always great to be able to talk with sports enthusiasts and other people and have them be able to try their technology and give their
two sense of what they would like to see in the future cuz we're still in the early stage of building it who's your team for basketball for anything uh you're number you're a ride or die Team rer die Team right now NFL season about to start would be the Chargers uh I most of my life lived in San Diego so I still the San Diego Chargers they're not the Los Angeles Chargers to me but hopefully this year they make it to playoffs and don't lose in the first round who wasn't an LT fan growing up exactly LT is he's one of those guys and Gates
hey thank you for coming on appreciate it best luck with the pitch competition are you ready to transform your brand with award-winning video content that captures your vision and connects with your audience check out Alchemy the experts at building your brand using video from story-driven social media Snippets that leave a lasting impression to compelling fulllength documentaries they have got the expertise to take your brand to the next level Alchemy is actually our video partner here on get in they do amazing work all the videos across social across YouTube all that is done by Alchemy and they're an amazing partner to work with reach out to
me Nate at powderkeg or check out Alchemy film.com to get connected with Alden and his team they will take care of all your video needs this has been get in a powder kick production in partnership with Elevate Ventures and we want to hear from you if you have suggestions for a guest or a segment reach out to Matt or Nate on LinkedIn or on email to discover top tier tech companies outside of Silicon Valley in hubs like Indiana check out our newsletter at powder cake.com newsletter and to apply for membership to the powdercake executive Community Check out powder.com premium we'll catch you next time and
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