Photos by Marta Sola-Pfeffer
Last Friday, Sept. 26, a group of entrepreneurial Colorado College students hosted an event to test the functionality of their recently released iPhone application Neonic. The Neonic team—consisting of sophomores Comrac Siegfried, Nick Ravich, Mishig Daavadori, Malcolm Gabbard, Noelle Edwards, Greg Williamson (now attending Northeastern University), and Penn State ‘13 graduate Sam Miller—worked throughout the 2015-16 school year and this past summer to develop the application, the beta version of which has been released to the public.
Neonic’s goal is to revolutionize live events by using Bluetooth technology to create a lightshow using a crowd of smartphones, incorporate mobile ticketing to events, track crowds, and more.
While many first-years enter college unsure of their majors, Neonic co-founder and CEO Cormac Siegfried came to Colorado College last year knowing that wanted to immediately become involved with the start up community in Colorado Springs.
While forging connections in the greater intellectual and entrepreneurial community of Colorado Springs, Siegfried met Sam Miller, a recent graduate of Pennsylvania State University and a resident of Parker, Colo. The two of them began to brainstorm the relationship between technology and raves. Interested in what he dubs the “burning man culture” of using art to bring people together, Siegfried believed that “[startups are] their own art form with a very rigorous work ethic.”
In setting out to create a technology that brings people together, Siegfried and Miller decided to create a DJ-controlled lightshow using people’s cell phones. Creating a “crowd-sourced lightshow,” Siegfried explained, “sounds really simple […] but [our team] got it, and now we have the ability to project any image or light show across a large crowd.”
The ability to create and constantly manipulate an atmosphere “means a lot for other industries [besides concerts and sporting events] as well,” said Siegfried. “It means the unification of any group. As simplistic as this concept sounds, however, the process was not.”
Having worked the entire year to conceptualize the app and develop the technology, Siegfried felt as though “there’s nothing [I could] do to succeed. By the end of last year, I felt like I had done nothing […] and [the team] couldn’t figure [the technology] out.” Still without technology for the app, the Neonic team won Colorado College’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship competition, “The Big Idea,” during the 2015-16 academic year.
Siegfried found himself “not taking care of [himself] for Neonic” during his first year at CC, so over the summer he and his team traveled to Alpine, Wyo.—population 800—in order to hyper-focus on creating the technology behind Neonic.
“After two weeks of focused learning, we invented the whole new Bluetooth function that solved the lightshow problem,” Siegfried said. “Seeing that first rendering, I could almost cry. It really set the tone for the summer.” Riding the momentum of solving the Bluetooth connection issues that made the team’s first year together so difficult, the team finished their beta.
“So much of this is owed to Mishig Daavadorj,” Siegfried said. “He is the only coder on our team who can deal with iOS. He, by himself, coded two iOS apps and wrote the patent for our technology.”
Neonic’s beta was officially published a month ago, and the team—now joined by Noelle Edwards—set out to test the technology on a larger scale. Having spent so long building the intention and ethos of the app, the Neonic team created an event on Sept.16 that sought to bring CC students together to both advertise Neonic and experiment with the functionality of the app in an event-based setting.
Before the event, many CC students were aware of what Neonic hoped to do—if only abstractly—but had never seen the published app in action. When asked by Social Creator Noelle Edwards what Neonic is, sophomore Aaron Alcouloumre responded that his impression of the app is that it “brings the power of the concert into the hands of the user. It is a good opportunity for people to have a sense of involvement.” This human connection is the center of the app’s ethos: one that enhances people’s experiences at an event with each other, instead of with their phones.
In order to get into Neonic’s first event, attendees had to have the app downloaded on their phones and their Bluetooth turned on. After that, their phone could stay in their pockets the entire night. It is fairly ironic that for an event revolving around an iPhone app, the Neonic team’s goal was for “people [to] just be talking to each other and having a good time,” said Siegfried. “We don’t care about our users interfacing with our app. You interfacing with our app is you talking face to face with another human, which is a little different from other apps that want to keep you on the screen. It ties into a point in the future where mobile phones are going to be the only point in computing for anyone, and those digital truths that exist in the mobile phone need to be attached to physical realities.”
“[A conversation about Neonic] starts with a conversation about IOT [the internet of things]. It is supposed to be worth trillions of dollars in the next five years. It is based around the idea of consumers being able to interact wirelessly with inanimate objects,” said Business Developer Nick Ravich. “Right now, your phone is a lens—a portal—through which you can view the virtual world. IOT is now connecting it to things around you.”
Instead of connecting with inanimate objects, however, Neonic uses Bluetooth to connect phones with one another. Although this has been tested before, no one—including Microsoft—has been successful in harnessing the potential of this technology. This summer, however, the Neonic team was able to create a grid of connections based off of Bluetooth signal. “The purpose of last Friday’s event was to have the largest collection of Bluetooth-strength data in the history of the world,” said Ravich. “That wasn’t even that hard. That happened within 10 minutes of the event beginning. The rest of it was trying to gauge how hard it was for people to use [the app].”
This face-to-face experience is exactly what the team embodied in last Friday’s event. Covered in neon art done by CC students and live performance art dispersed throughout the venue, the app’s goal of an intentional and collaboratively artistic atmosphere came to life. While users of the app were busy dancing and experiencing the atmosphere of the venue, the Neonic team was collecting and analyzing data of who entered the venue, when, and where they were throughout the night.
“In the first couple minutes of the event,” explained Siegfried, “we got so many data points, that our subscription to Firebase [a data collection server] exceeded what we had paid for. After that, it kind of crashed […] but that was easy to fix. We were actually talking to Google during the [event]. It was actually kind of exciting that we know what happened, and the next time we do it, it’ll be a lot better.
“We are not interested in being Big Brother,” he clarified. “We are never going to see [people’s personal information].” Neonic is, however, developing “something called the nearby function, which will map out who everyone is [at any given event] and where they are, but if you’re not Facebook friends, you cannot see their contact info. It just shows the crowd.” Additionally, the Neonic team hopes to simplify the app for their users, and “figure out a way to take the [collected data at an event] and give it back.” This addition would allow a user to see where they were during a night, and how many people were at the event at any point.
“The other thing I’d like to do,” Siegfried continued, “is have the ticket manager [function of the app] say how many people are inside [a concert or sporting event].” Ravich added, “We could figure out how to tell where people are in relation to one another to the point where you could find pathways through crowds. You could make a map of a crowd, which would be adjusting all the time. That would be a nice feature for some people, but for EMTs at a rave or in a mosh-pit, that could save someone’s life.”
“If people at CC used the same function,” said Siegfried, “[the Neonic team] could map where all the big parties are, and map the flow of people between them. We could end up being the college with the most data-driven parties.” And this data cannot be collected without risk, without the support system to continue to try things with the high chance of failure. In terms of Friday’s event, Ravich openly admited his team “knew [they] were biting off way more than [they] could chew, and learned as much as [they] would have at three or four events at a regular nightclub where [they would be] too afraid to mess up.”
Neonic will continue to test new elements of the app during the second half of the semester, such as the lightshow and nearby functions. “We are going to keep [testing at CC events] until we can crush it every single time,” said Ravich.
Until they do—and especially when they do—CC will see this group of students changing the way events on campus function in order to then impact greater local and national community experiences.
“I have a core belief that if you are talented, and you come from a place of opportunity, then you have a responsibility to the world to really take advantage of those talents and work very hard to become an international citizen. I don’t think you can think about yourself anymore,” said Siegfried.
Having dedicated their past year to only beginning the process of using technology to increase human connection and community experiences, the Neonic team will continue to work to change the way a facet of the world works.