A Visit From Dr Tolentino - FireFly


A Visit From Dr. Matt Tolentino

In this writing I will simply refer to our visitor as Matt with the hope that is not taken as an act of disrespect as quite the opposite is true. Matt has earned my respect in the relatively short amount of time he took to speak with us. He is clearly very driven, highly intelligent and has a very busy mind and life. Matt has been busy, to include some of these past and present experiences, figure skating, working at Intel, research and advisory work, organization and community activities, filing patents, completing his Phd, inventing products, starting a business, personally developing his product and even finding more problems to solve with it.

Particularly of interest to me is Matt’s business experiences as he seemed to masterfully leverage his ideas and their potential applications (in the common good) to fund the development and protect his intellectual property. Because of the nature of the first application of his product (FireFly) he was able to get funded by the National Science Foundation for developing the product. And then he recruited the University of Washington’s with it’s many resources to file a patent and help to protect his intellectual property, at a cost trade off of course. This was encouraging to see this creative use of available tools. There were even aspects of the sequencing of events and strategic applications of technology at work here. Matt is definitely a person to learn from.

The technology behind Matt’s FireFly product, if all that it seems to be, has a great many potential applications, some of which my current industry of hospital facility management, may be able to benefit from.  I could easily see applications in building management, in both emergency and day-to-day operations. More importantly, I could visualize many broad and localized disaster management situations for which this technology could be life changing and life saving on large scales, such as active shooter situations. The potential to know exactly where a shooter is and his or her movements, independent of line of site, could change everything and speaks for itself. As you can tell I am hopeful and excited about this technology. In fact I hope to attend the NFPA convention in June and to be a potential candidate site for a pilot deployment of the product.



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