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Field Technologies Inc - Episode 8
204 Plays10 years ago
Chris Cameron talks about his software, ArchaeoGen, and it use in digital field recording.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 8 for January 29, 2014. I'm your host, Russell Allian-Williams. Today on the show, Chris Bubster and I talk with Chris Cameron of Field Technologies Incorporated. Hi, good to be here. Hey, me too. Good to be here.
What is Field Technologies Incorporated?
00:00:25
Speaker
So Chris Cameron, can you tell us a little bit about some of your work and some of the projects you're working on with your company Field Texts Incorporated? Yes. So we're a technology company. We were founded by archaeologists for archaeologists. We provide technical solutions to the situations in the field. And the whole idea is to let archaeologists do more digging and less paperwork.
Introducing Archaeogen: The Shovel Testing App
00:00:54
Speaker
So right now our main product is a phase one shovel testing app called archaeogen. And we're just trying to get the word out about it. We debuted it in mid-November at the Southeastern Archaeology Conference. Cool. Very neat. So Chris, a little bit more about archaeogen. You said it's a shovel testing application, recording application? Yes. So it's for iOS only, which we can
00:01:22
Speaker
get into why it's only for iOS in a few minutes. And basically what it does is it replaces your shovel test form on the front end. It's really designed to be productivity neutral in the field though we have had positive feedback from people so far. And the real values on the back end because all of your data will be compiled together from every body. You get nightly updates and all of your data comes in a spreadsheet format
00:01:52
Speaker
in Excel, which means that it's searchable, sortable, whatever. But Excel also plays really well with other software, so you can import it to ArcGIS or just plop it into Google Maps, whatever you feel
How Does Archaeogen Optimize Fieldwork?
00:02:05
Speaker
like. That's awesome. So again, you're kind of using the digital advantage to remove kind of the transcription back in that a lot of us have to do. We'll get back from the field with a big sheaf of grubby shovel test forms.
00:02:19
Speaker
Yes, so I don't know how many thousands of dollars I've been paid over the years by companies to stand over a photocopier at the end of the week, trying to get crumpled, sweated on dirty paperwork to go through the feeder, which doesn't usually, guys, you have to do it one at a time. And when you think about it, then what does the PI do? They pull out their wheelie mouse and scroll through hundreds of PDFs to see the things that they want.
00:02:47
Speaker
And so we're just trying to make that easier for the people in the crew, you know, crew chiefs, you know, they don't have to do the paperwork and order every day. Field text, it makes their lives a little easier because, you know, you don't have to worry about the paper, you know, running out of forms and, you know, protects you from yourself. We have some features in there like you can't have shuttle test B5 three times in a row. And then the person on the back end can do some really powerful analytical stuff.
Advanced Data Analysis with Archaeogen
00:03:15
Speaker
that they can't currently do right now. Could you give a few examples of maybe some of the analytical features? Because that's something we've been excited about by other applications is to be able to get data really quickly and make decisions based on that out in the field. Yes, so it's pretty open-ended. It depends on what people are interested in. Because it's an Excel, you can write a quick macro script in Visual Basic to
00:03:42
Speaker
figure out whatever you want to do when we can help people do that, though there's plenty of YouTube videos that will probably do a better job. You can do things like see who digs the most holes, who finds the most stuff, who waited for both of them, who finds the most per hole. When you have enough data in one geographic area, you can start mining it for a predictive model. It's not just a reaction to water. You can do things like
00:04:09
Speaker
And you know that's some of the more complicated medium term stuff on a daily basis, you can just do things like make sure people are digging on the right side of the road because you're getting a nightly update and literally two minutes, you can import it into
00:04:23
Speaker
you know, just Google Maps for internal consumption or for report ready, you can, you know, plop it into ArcGIS or something similar.
Customization for Diverse Client Needs
00:04:30
Speaker
Great. So you do have kind of a workflow then that goes along with the application of, you know, go out, collect data, and then maybe the crew chief for the PI back at the hotel that night or back in the camp that night is able to download that data and put it into some sort of analytical engine, like you said, either a map on Google Earth or ArcGIS.
00:04:48
Speaker
Yes, so it depends on people's specific needs. And we basically help them figure out how to get, we give them the data and we help them figure out how to get the goal that they need. If it's better oversight from the office, then we can teach them how to do that. Obviously we can't put it into whatever software they have for them because we're not there. And different people have different needs.
00:05:16
Speaker
Right now, we're in the process, hopefully by the end of the day, knock on wood, we'll be signing a university that's interested for a field school. You know, and they have different needs from, we have a job coming up for, where the DOT is the client and the contractor obviously has different needs than the field school. So, you know, some are, the field school is interested in figuring out who is productive, who needs the most help to figure out how to go faster or fund stuff more reliably.
00:05:44
Speaker
Whereas our contractor that's gonna be working for the DOT in a couple weeks, they're much more interested in what drives the report. The report drives the field work for them rather than just to see who does what. It's really more about the results. So different clients have different needs and we just try to help them take that information and make it useful to them.
00:06:11
Speaker
That's
Importance of Standardized Data Collection
00:06:12
Speaker
neat. So with kind of different clients and different needs, different use cases, even shovel test forms, this is something I found quite a bit. No firm I've worked for, no state I've been in has the exact same form when it comes to recording archaeology. Could you speak a little bit about the design process for choosing what fields that you include or whether you tailor that to different uses? Yes, absolutely. So it would have to be a pretty big client for us to customize the fields.
00:06:40
Speaker
We can move things around real estate on the page if people want, but we are trying to standardize things, and we've been getting a lot of buy-in from regulators, agencies that use a lot of contractors, you know, forestry service, and some DOTs, obviously some agencies outsource more than others. A lot of them have been really interested in the standardization across their contractors, because they can have three different contractors, and all the data comes back looking the same.
00:07:10
Speaker
both the actual forms and the compiled data. So on the form, we have the standard stuff, project, area, first initial and last name, the date, the crew, whether or not the STP is a standard shovel test or if it's a radial or judgmental, transect, transect number, whether or not it was dug, not dug, and for what reason,
00:07:37
Speaker
basic terrain choices, measurement units, centimeters, and most of this is in drop downs, and most of it auto fills from one hole to the next, because obviously you don't dig one hole in centimeters, and then the next intensity. We even included inches, because I did one time, a
Features and Customization of Archaeogen Forms
00:07:54
Speaker
long time ago, work for a firm that did inches, and God bless them. So we included that. And then, of course, the stratigraphy is what you would expect, beginning and ending depth.
00:08:06
Speaker
beginning depth auto fills from the ending depth of the previous threat of a horizon designation soil color, which is an open field. Some people actually, most people do them on cells, but we do have a client or two that just types in, you know, reddish brown or whatever. Soil texture, we have a little soil texture widget that pops up with basically a button for the four choices, silty, sandy,
00:08:32
Speaker
you know, lung, clay, and, you know, you type in the combination that you want, and then whether or not there were cultural materials found in the strat. So, and of course we have a comments box for anything that's more open-ended. Like, we don't have a site number field. You know, if people have particular idiosyncratic needs that they want written down, we do have the comments box, and we prompt people to take a picture.
00:09:01
Speaker
That was going to be my next question, especially when you're talking about stratigraphy, if it has the ability to use, even though the iOS cameras, they're improving, but they're still not up to where, you know, even some of the more complicated Android cameras or especially like a point and click or an SLR camera. So the app does allow people to take pictures because oftentimes that clears up a lot of ambiguity right there.
Enhancing Data Accuracy with GPS and Photos
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah. So we strongly recommend that people take pictures for two reasons. One is the picture is just nice to have.
00:09:28
Speaker
The second is, and this is really more of a work around for people than a technical solution. Because there's GPS in these devices, and they're typically accurate to within five meters. Sometimes less than that, but we just have it programmed in so that every data point will never say less. It bottoms out at five meters. So you can have more accurate than that, but we, for legal reasons, we don't want to advertise consistently being more accurate than that.
00:09:58
Speaker
But the GPS fires when people take the picture. And the reason for that is in early beta testing before we added the picture capability, people would be filling out the last couple bits of their form on the way to the next hole in the GPS with firemen and they, you know, click done. So this just, if they're taking a picture, they're at the hole. You know, and whether the hole is open or a hole is backfilled,
00:10:24
Speaker
You know, that's up to whoever is on site, you know, whether or not they care if you know Because that might interrupt some people's workflow to have to do it while the holes still open. I personally Don't like taking a picture while it's open because I'm used to doing paperwork at the end after I backfill But you know just proof of work but the big thing for the picture is and make sure that the person is actually where the GPS needs to fire and
00:10:51
Speaker
Chris, you had one question for the other Chris, Chris Cameron. Right, yeah, so you mentioned that you have, for a bigger client to meet their needs, you do have some ability to maybe move some fields or rename some fields to meet their needs. That tells me that, you know, you said this is for iOS, this must not be an application that's available on the App Store for purchase, then they have to go through you guys, and how are you working that out? Like, what's the platform you're on here? Yes, excellent question.
Licensing and Availability of Archaeogen
00:11:17
Speaker
So, we offer our software in two different ways.
00:11:21
Speaker
The first way is we offer a hardware rental because not everybody has a fleet of tablets or if you have short-term work, it doesn't make sense to buy it. And you can rent it from us. Obviously, the software is already installed. It's just an app. This is not available on the app store. You have to come through us to get it. If for our clients that want to do software as a service, they already have their own tablets or happy to maintain, keep track of them,
00:11:49
Speaker
all that jazz, they just want our software, then we offer unlimited licenses usually is the typical deal. So you can install it on as many devices as you want and we charge by how much you use it because the data comes back to our servers. So just having the app isn't gonna help you a whole lot because we get the data and we have to recurate it and send it to you because we have to compile it from everybody and whatnot and convert it to a usable form.
00:12:20
Speaker
Because it does not come to us in the next cell format. Right. So that brings up another question. I know I'm out here on the West and in I'm actually in Nevada and I was in process of getting my BLM permanent for California. And one of the questions they ask is about data security and data management because I mentioned as far as part of my facilities that I save
00:12:41
Speaker
When I can, I have a lot of my stuff saved in Dropbox. So I record on tablets in the field and I upload to my Dropbox account and they actually had a problem with that because technically the data was leaving California to go to Dropbox's servers via satellite and then they didn't have a problem with it going into my computer or storing it at my house in Reno, but they didn't like it going out via satellite. So have you had anybody question you on that?
00:13:07
Speaker
Yes, so remember we have more than 50 regulating authorities here between state territories and government agencies that might have different standards than the actual state level regulators.
Navigating Data Storage Regulations
00:13:20
Speaker
So there's a real hodgepodge of regulations. Some places are like the Wild West here in North Carolina, I believe the regs for data storage refer to what kind of box you store your magnetic tape and microfecion, whereas then you end up in places
00:13:36
Speaker
like California, which I'm not sure, I would be curious to know if the burden, if the safe, the legal safe harbor is on them to prove that your server is located outside of California, because the server might very well be in California. Obviously, I'm sure for business, for just a good working relationship, you don't want to put the burden of proof on them. We do have some places like that that just for very idiosyncratic reasons,
00:14:06
Speaker
We can't do business until we have a workaround. A good example is Arkansas. They are for some reason specifically exempted from the Freedom of Information Act. And so they have a concern that as a third party, we could be Freedom of Information Act requested as a workaround if we're holding data for even a small amount of time. And if we have anybody that
00:14:32
Speaker
When we start having clients in Arkansas, we've committed to sitting down with them and then working out a solution. You're going to encounter stuff like that. California, unfortunately, is a huge market, so it's tough to deal with that, but you just have to be committed to working with the regulators. Otherwise, it's not good for them, it's not good for you.
00:15:01
Speaker
So that brings up another follow on question to that. And, you know, working out here in the West, I know it's a completely different animal, because I actually started on the East Coast in the Carolinas, Florida, Virginia, doing shovel testing and stuff out there. And I know, I know that a lot of the work out there is done on private land. So some of these regulations just simply don't come into play sometimes because it's on private land. One of those being like, for example, out here in Nevada, if we were to use that application, you have to be permitted by the BLM to
00:15:28
Speaker
access and record archaeological data here in Nevada. So technically, I think these guys, unless you talk to them and were to explain to them what's going on, if we were to use your application out here and then you guys process the data, I think you'd need to be permitted by the BLM in your offices or whoever's seeing the raw data. It depends on what format you're seeing in it. If you're seeing archaeological site data from sites on BLM land here in Nevada, you'd probably have to be permitted or on somebody's permit.
00:15:57
Speaker
which means you'd have to meet all the qualifications, which means fieldwork in different districts in Nevada, it's all very convoluted. So have you had to deal with that back there yet? We have not had anyone bring that up yet. That's something I would have to refer to our legal counsel. I have a suspicion we would be fine because it's not substantively different from, I mean, if you put anything into, say, an email or Dropbox like you, as you used earlier as an example, I mean,
00:16:26
Speaker
Just because it goes on our servers doesn't mean that there's a person coming through looking at it. And at the moment, the only people that do have administrative capabilities are RPA eligible people. So I would have to ask them what would make them feel comfortable. I suspect from a legal standpoint, they probably, I would have to refer to my counsel, I suspect that legally they
00:16:53
Speaker
don't have a great case to make, but obviously, you would rather work with people. Oh, trust me, there's lots of loopholes in the system. They'll make you run through the hoops on regulation, but yeah, they'll shoot side forms via email and not bat an eye about it. So, it's the tech wild frontier out here, quite honestly, and they don't really know how to deal with it. Don't even get me started on talking about drones. Yeah.
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, this the southeast seems to be a lot more interested. We have a lot of agencies that are we have one do T that's planning project and a couple more were in discussions with So yeah, I think it really depends on who you're dealing with. But hopefully they'll all come around because I'll see that it's more secure than doing it with with paper and fewer eyeballs will actually see the information.
00:17:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely something that is interesting in our field that there are so many technologies we could be using, but sometimes the regulations just aren't up to date with what's currently possible. We'd like to take a break now and have an ad from our sponsors.
00:17:59
Speaker
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00:18:27
Speaker
business networking, negotiation, relationship management, etc. But we also branch into other topics like I had a guy on the show named Brad Salas a guest and he talked about millennials and how they can relate to their bosses better, their boomer bosses and how boomer bosses can relate to the new millennials better because as you can see in workplaces,
00:18:46
Speaker
Those are guys are butting heads and it's kids are so dumb these days and it's old people don't get it. And it's just like, if we can bridge that gap, we can be more productive. So we gave a lot of practical exercises and steps to use that. We've also talked about how to burn fat while you're working with weird things like treadmill desks and being cold while you're working in the office to burn calories while you're just sort of being you working all day. And we cover hundreds of other things, but those are two kinds of concrete examples of it.
00:19:14
Speaker
Hey, and these are real world things you can use. I've actually turned the temperature down in my home office because of that podcast about just being cold because it's something you can do that's easy. Yeah. And there's plenty of guys out there listening to the show who bought these weird ice vests and they're sitting there freezing right now, but you know, losing weight doing it. So we're weirdos, but we assume we're in good company. That's right. Well, you can check out more from the art of charm at the art of charm.com and you can check out the podcasts on iTunes and Stitcher radio and everywhere you download podcasts. Thank you.
00:19:47
Speaker
So Chris, I had a question for you about a little bit of the design process with your application. Is this something that you went and just kind of said, what's my dream application being an archaeologist out in the field? Or did you test it out with users? Have you gotten feedback on people using it across the different places you've been and you've sold the app to? And then what sort of feedback have you gotten in real world use of the application?
Designing Archaeogen: Insights from Archaeologists
00:20:11
Speaker
Yes, so this is out in the wild. When we sat down originally,
00:20:18
Speaker
I and another guy who had originally been in archaeology, but then ended up going back to graduate school for database management, was my original co-founder. He unfortunately decided to go a different way, so we have a different pool of ownership now. But the original idea was some years ago when we had worked together, we had said, you know, this would be so much, this would be great if we had
00:20:46
Speaker
back then, a PDA or whatnot. This was, you know, back in the days before tablets. Yeah, going around here somewhere. Yeah, maybe in a museum. So the technology caught up and the fact that the GPS in the Apple products, because it uses both GLONASS, which is the Russian constellation of satellites and the US GPS satellites, which Android devices don't
00:21:16
Speaker
It's one of the reasons why we went to Apple. Yeah, there were a number of reasons why we went to iOS only. That was one of them, is that it meant that we have a GPS that we can consistently get five meter accuracy, sometimes 10 under bad cover. Though with RQGED, every single point, every single shovel test has its own accuracy, horizontal accuracy. So if you get seven points that are out in 10 bucks too, and the rest aren't, you can determine if the person dug it in the wrong place,
00:21:43
Speaker
or if it was bad data. If you get trash data, we want you to know. So that's one of the fail-safes we put in there.
00:21:49
Speaker
You can see kind of the quality of the data and make decisions about hey, this is something would be point averaging or I know this one less confident precisely where this is Maybe I want to tie it up with you know someone had a sub meter GPS out there to tie it back Yes, and we can get sub meter with we can wreck we have an external antenna that we can recommend we you know, we do not make money on these we don't sell them or anything, but it's I believe it's I
00:22:18
Speaker
what's it called the ISX GNS2 or something.
GPS Accuracy and Equipment Recommendations
00:22:23
Speaker
It's made by Ginec, G-E-N-E-Q. And there's a specific one that we recommend. It costs about 3,300 bucks from a reseller. If you want it. There's a few of those on the market and there's more almost every month, it seems. But they're all about that price range that I've seen, two to $4,000. Yeah, and they're a lot cheaper than Trimble. Of course, it's just the antenna.
00:22:46
Speaker
But unlike with a tremble, it means that your hardware doesn't get out of date, because you can, every year, you can refresh your hardware, you can pair it with a different device. And people need to remember, because I've seen, I actually saw somebody use this a couple years ago, they had the little, it was Bluetooth linked to the tablet, and they had the antenna in their backpack. And I was like, you know, that's where the points being taken, right, is in your backpack, not on the tablet, because it's where the antenna is. So then we started velcroing them to the back of the tablet.
00:23:16
Speaker
Actually, if you ever rent any of their antennas, they come with these really dorky hats with a top of your head. Really look dorky, but it's you can stand on your point. I think I'm gonna ask for an antenna hat for my birthday in April.
00:23:42
Speaker
regardless. But to get back to your original question it was mostly a wish list of what we wished we'd had in the field and then you know I've gone all you know I've done all the steps from field tech to crew chief to field director to write and reports and you know I want I think that I wanted on the back end and stuff that I wanted in the middle because I've been on those projects where you have to get nightly updates at
00:24:11
Speaker
So you go back to your hotel room and, you know, spend an hour off the clock, you know, putting together, you know, putting things in order, summarizing fines and, you know, whatnot. And so we just thought at each step of the way, you know, we want something for everybody. So for the field tax, we try to make life easier just because a lot of stuff auto-fiddles, so they don't have to, they really just have to fill in the stratigraphy and the shovel test number. For the crew chief and the field directors, the data aggregate,
00:24:40
Speaker
so that they can get, you know, updates quickly for the PI or the report writer back in the office. They can do all sorts of stuff with the data, you know, because right now, you know, you don't know who your most productive people are that you maybe want to retain for the next project. You don't know, you don't know, you know, if there's what kind of pattern is going on with your site stuff. Like, for instance, with archaeogen, say you have a,
00:25:10
Speaker
a big site that's in a plowed field and you just want to see quickly, you just want to sort by, um, shuttle tests that were positive in the second, third, or, you know, however many strats, but not the top. You can do that because each shuttle test has its own, yes, no flag, but it also has, um, you know, each individual strat has its own, uh, flag for positive for prehistoric, historic, both, or neither. Um, so.
00:25:37
Speaker
So that reminds me of a question, Chris. When we were talking back about data, how the data comes out of the tablet, goes to your offices, gets processed and comes back, what's the turnaround time for that? And are you guys set up for scalability? Like if you end up with 100 clients by May, and you've got everybody sending you data every single day, how scalable is your operation for dealing with those data? Yeah, fantastic.
00:26:04
Speaker
We provide nightly updates. Usually that means that afternoon, but we say nightly to hedge our bets in case it's a busy day. You actually have a human behind every one of these sinks and kind of putting the data back out there in Excel. So to double check stuff and we will as we get more clients, we have several developers that are constantly working on stuff right now. They're working on new products, but
00:26:29
Speaker
If scalability becomes a priority beyond getting, say, a phase two, phase three application or a pedestrian survey application out the door, then we'll further automate the procedure. We basically just have someone double check to make sure that when things get translated from JSON format, that's where our files come from, which for those who aren't familiar with it, you can think of it as like a three-dimensional spreadsheet
00:26:57
Speaker
I guess is the best way to visualize it and then flatten that out to an Excel spreadsheet. And then just make sure, you know, things make sense. Because we don't want to send people data that doesn't make sense. And obviously, we don't want to send just the raw JSON file to most people because most people wouldn't be able to. Yeah. So we have most things automated, but we try to, we put eyes on everything just to double check, make sure it makes sense before we send it to people.
00:27:27
Speaker
And then we send it via an encrypted file sharing service. And we also host the data if they would prefer to not download it themselves, because obviously you're getting a photograph and a form with every shovel test that can add up. So in addition to the Excel spreadsheet, they're also getting the photographs as well. And I assume that the spreadsheet has a link to that photograph in a file folder or something? So in the spreadsheet, yeah, I should have sent you a demo set of data.
00:27:55
Speaker
Yeah, each Excel spreadsheet has a link to both the photograph of the shovel test as well as the form. So obviously that's two photo files, a PNG for the photo and a JPEG, just a screenshot of the form. So, you know, we understand that people don't want to batch download everything.
00:28:21
Speaker
So they can just download the spreadsheet because they probably don't want to scroll through hundreds and hundreds of whatever.
Data Storage and Security Solutions
00:28:27
Speaker
They probably just want to see the five that are interesting. They can either download them all and then search for them or they can just click the link in the spreadsheet and it's hosted on our server. So how long would you host it on your server for? Do people have to pay for that service or for a certain amount of time?
00:28:46
Speaker
Yes, so we obviously any project that's on the books you know being which we define as having been updated within the last 30 days is free storage and then we provide people an extra 500 shovel tests beyond that just as a free buffer in case they have some small projects you know that they just don't feel like taking the you know paying someone an hour to clean off all their cell tower projects and beyond that we charge one penny per shovel test per month
00:29:15
Speaker
for data storage. Data's cheap these days. Data's cheap these days. Yeah, it is. But you know, it does cost us something to store it. And like I say, since there's two photo files with every shovel test, you can see how that adds up quickly. So we really just try to make it cheap enough that people don't bother to migrate it to some other data storage.
00:29:41
Speaker
But there's probably enough data in most projects, after a few projects, that you wouldn't want it just sitting on your home computer, or if you're a small company, or you're at a TV server. So Chris, transfer the photo data, as you mentioned, could take a lot of bandwidth. As long as it conditions that, you know, field archaeologists typically work in, or either you've only got cell phone, internet access, or, you know, bad motel Wi-Fi access.
00:30:07
Speaker
Do you have kind of case studies of how long it might take to send, say, 100 shovel tests back with two photos each? Yeah. So, well, it depends because obviously it's going to be, if there's split of multiple devices, say you have, you know, three devices each with 35 shovel to three, three shovel tests on them. It's going to be faster unless you're just eating up the whole bandwidth for the hotel. You know, it's just going to depend on your conditions. Like you say, some places are better than others.
00:30:38
Speaker
But, you know, what's the alternative, unfortunately? And I should point out that Archiogen does not require a data plan. You know, this stuff is all local on the machine, and you wait until you get to Wi-Fi to upload. So if you are interested in loading our software on your tablets, you do not need a data plan, though you do need one that is a tablet that is GPS enabled, which may make the Wi-Fi only models or not.
00:31:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess to get back to your original question, we don't have a lot of feedback yet. Nobody's actually said anything one way or the other. I guess we should ask them. Okay. And then on your backend, are you kind of hosting the files yourself or do you have like an account with like Amazon S3 cloud storage or something? We use the same backend that Facebook does. This is not some Mickey Mouse FileMaker Pro kind of stuff. We're using the real professional stuff because we need scalability.
00:31:34
Speaker
Because otherwise, data storage would eat us alive as well as we don't want to down the road have to migrate the data anywhere because that's a mess. Because, you know, we want, say we have a client that's been with us for a year, they have, you know, 20,000 shovel tests across three states, you know, stored with us, and they come to us and say, we want to, we want you to help us make a predictive model that's not just, you know, is there a site nearby and is there water nearby?
00:32:03
Speaker
adjust things for time of day, because different lighting, your person, you know, whatever. If they had some kind of big need, like enterprise need like that, then obviously it helps for us to have it all in one place and in a format that comes quickly to us as far as moving things around. That's great. So before Chris Webster left, he had two more questions for you. First, he was asking about maybe some more details on your capital rental program.
Tablet Rental Options and Security Measures
00:32:31
Speaker
and then the licensing program to if they could license the software. Okay, what was that first question?
00:32:37
Speaker
About your tablet rental program if you know a new client came to you and say hey, I've got a small survey I'm maybe gonna have a crew of five out there one crew chief and say for tax Yeah, I want them all to have tablets and be recording each show test I want the crew chief to have their own thing to kind of do the management side of it Yeah, so so what happens is you call us up, you know, we discuss this and our standard price is 125 a week per tablet because we do the tablets in seven day by the week just
00:33:05
Speaker
So we did by the day, then people would argue about whether or not we're charging them for weekends. And it's just better to, cause people do, some people do four on, three off, some do, you know, 10 on, four off, some do five days a week. So again, just to not have people think that we're nickel and diming them. It's not the week, you know, it's just, it's this first seven day period.
00:33:25
Speaker
So what you get is you get an iPad mini, 16 gigabyte, first generation, because it's really overkill from computing capacity, but it's the cellular model. Again, no data package, but the cellular model is the GPS and GLONASS chip, which is vile for taking the GPS coordinates. We sent along some styluses, because some people prefer styluses. A lot of people are used to pencil and clipboard
00:33:53
Speaker
Or if it's cold or you just, your hands are dirty, you know, for whatever reason, some people like fingers, some people like styluses. And of course, power cords and whatnot. So we do send them along with ruggedized cases that are military grade. They're shockproof to seven feet. They are submersible, supposedly. You know, I submersed them in the bathtub to test each one, but I haven't ever like left it in the river, you know, and come back later.
00:34:22
Speaker
And so we charge our base price, which we do offer some discounts to nonprofits. Or if it's a large customer, bulk discounts and stuff. And then we also, whatever applicable sales tax, because that depends on where you are and where I am. So it's different for every customer, unfortunately. And shipping costs get passed through as well. Because if you need them overnight, that's expensive.
00:34:52
Speaker
Yeah, so we try to get people, whereas if you call me on a Friday, say I need eight of these shipped to Kentucky or Ohio or wherever, then that's a little more reasonable than I need them today. And we don't really want to be in the hardware rental business, but we know that a lot of people, if you're just doing a small survey, or you have your own fleet of tablets, but you have a big project for two months, it might not make sense to purchase a lot of
00:35:22
Speaker
a lot of tablets, and then you also have the hassle of maintaining them, you know, because somebody walks off with them or goes off a cliff or, you know, whatnot. And we do charge people if they lose them, though we give a significant discount if they send back the carcass. Our insurance is such that we have to turn in substantively the whole thing so that they know that we don't have a drawer full of them that we're claiming are lost.
00:35:52
Speaker
So the big thing is make sure nobody walks off with them, which if the crew chief collects them every day, then that shouldn't be a problem. Now, if you have your own tablets, we have software as a service, which our base price for that is 85 cents a shovel test. And again, we do offer some discounts to large clients and to nonprofits and academics. And we offer unlimited licenses, so for instance,
00:36:22
Speaker
I'm talking with a university right now that's interested for their field school. You know, normally we would say, well, it doesn't matter how many you have. If you want to run it on your own tablets, we charge by how much you use it because if you're not using it, it doesn't seem fair to make you pay for it. So we can if people have special situations where they would prefer a lump sum license, we can do that. Only paying when they use it because then when times are slow, your company's not
00:36:52
Speaker
sending money to those because this is a feast or famine industry and particularly if you're a small company you got to be able to manage your cash flow so if you don't have money coming in it doesn't make sense to have money going out. Yeah that's a model I've seen used by some other technology companies especially getting an archaeologist to adopt these technologies is renting the equipment at least to start with so that archaeologists don't have to worry about maintaining it spending a large amount of overlay to buy a drone or buy a fleet of tablets
00:37:21
Speaker
and then not have to worry about the upgrade cycle of constantly making sure they have the newest thing if they need it. Do you have a process for wiping off the old data with the rental unit whenever it comes back? And then if it's a rental unit, can archaeologists also install other things like PDF readers and say source documents if they have like projectile point typologies that they went about in the field?
00:37:43
Speaker
So to start with, can people alter it? We have these things locked down pretty well. I mean, I suppose if you're smart, you can figure out a way to load something, but we don't want people putting Angry Birds on there and then they are in the field sitting around. And then I get a phone call from somebody, oh, well, you just gave a big video game toy to my employees. No wonder they're not digging. Can we want people to have a good experience? So we keep it simple.
00:38:12
Speaker
So you can't alter, you can't add or delete apps, or even use Safari, because we don't want people to have the temptation to let the crew take these back to their hotel rooms, because that's when they disappear. What was the first half of your question? Oh, so wiping the data. So when the tablet connects to our server, it has to make a secure connection, or it's rejected. So you don't have to worry about a man in the middle, even though you're on open Wi-Fi.
00:38:40
Speaker
We don't want someone snagging your data. I don't think shovel tests are generally very sensitive data, but regulators need to ask these questions. So another reason we use iOS, it's encrypted on the device. The NSA was recently not very happy about that. We do secure connection to our server, which is secure. And then we use an encrypted file encryption for getting the data to our clients. So at every step of the way,
00:39:10
Speaker
Now, once it makes a secure connection and successfully uploads a form, it double checks to make sure that that actually happened. And then it wipes the form locally. So you don't have the previous day's forms on your tablet. And also, you know, the rental units, you have to log in as a certain client to each company. And if they want to divide it up more than that within a company,
00:39:39
Speaker
have their own logins. So TRC can't see URS's data even if it gets left on the tablet and we somehow didn't catch that it was still there. There's not a lot of room for seeing someone else's data or even
00:39:55
Speaker
just stockpiling data and making your machine slow. That seems like a big worry for a lot of companies. Regardless of sometimes whether it's warranted or not, I know Chris has talked in the past about even photos on site, getting out even if they're not of site things, because sometimes people lead people back to locations. And while at least in far fetched at times, there are sometimes people out there looking and being aware of if a photo gets posted on Twitter and has geolocational data, you might come back in a year, six months, two weeks and find that site looted because of that picture you posted.
Ensuring Data Integrity: Field Technician Protocols
00:40:25
Speaker
Well, people also, it's good to point out that the field text do not have direct access to the files. You know, they can alter the shovel test form, take a new photo, edit the form, but they can't get the photo file. They can't get the shovel test form. You know, it's not accessible to them at all. They just create the data. They can't get it off. Great. That does seem like a good reason to have it additionally locked down.
00:40:50
Speaker
All right. Well, unfortunately, I think that's about all the time we have today on the show. Chris, I want to thank you for being on the show and talking to us about some of the work that you're doing and some of the work doing new technologies and introducing that to the field. If people are interested in the program, do you have a URL that you'd like to give them or a Twitter contact in order to contact you about the program? Yes.
Where to Find More Information
00:41:10
Speaker
So Field Technologies is on Facebook, first of all. So feel free to go give us a like. You can also go to our
00:41:17
Speaker
our website, which is www.fieldtechnologiesinc.com. So fieldtechnologiesinc.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter. We have a biweekly newsletter. I think I added you to our list so you could see the last one. And people can contact us on our website there. They can poke around, see a case study or two, and learn a little bit more about what we do. Great. I hope some of our users take you up on that.
00:41:48
Speaker
All right, everyone. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you in the future of the field.
00:42:01
Speaker
The CRM Archaeology Podcast brings together a panel of cultural resource management professionals to discuss the issues that really matter to the profession. Find out about networking strategies, job hunting, graduate programs, and much more. We'll often feature interviews with college professors, CRM business owners, and experts as well. Check out the show on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash CRM Arc Podcast. Let's get back to the show.
00:42:45
Speaker
That's it for another episode of the archaeotech podcast. Links to some of the items mentioned on the show are in the show notes of this podcast, which can be found at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash archaeotech. If you like the show and want to comment, please do. You can leave comments about this or any other episode on the website or on the iTunes page for this episode.
00:43:04
Speaker
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00:43:31
Speaker
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00:43:56
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:44:14
Speaker
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