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If you’re heading to Home Depot this weekend, keep your eyes peeled for Sumant Yerramilly: The young Boston entrepreneur will be talking home-automation software with Joe Homeowner, using some of the same tactics that got him to a near miss on the opportunity to install credit card machines in Boston taxicabs.
In 2008, Boston officials announced a mandate for credit card capability in every cab by July 2009. Yerramilly’s startup, Amp Idea Inc., went for it — but lost out to more established and savvy competitors.
This summer, working in Boston’s TechStars incubator program, Yerramilly and co-founders Praful Mathur and Sergey Grabkovsky have repurposed Amp Idea’s technology. Instead of dealing with a fleet of cabs across the city, they now hope to link an array of networked devices within the home.
That mission has sent 20-year-old Yerramilly to hardware stores to meet his potential customer. In 2008, you could have spotted Yerramilly at the Logan taxi pool in a prototype cab he built himself — a Ford Crown Victoria with Amp Idea’s touchscreen payment device installed. He had 320 drivers signed on before selling that business to VeriFone Holdings Inc. (NYSE: PAY). By that time, Verifone and privately held Creative Mobile Technologies LLC had swooped in, wooing taxi dispatch associations with attractive offers. Boston’s Independent Taxi Operators Association went with CMT, which has since installed $2,500 worth of equipment in each of its 350 member cabs at close to no cost, said ITOA manager Larry Meister.
The associations brought their cab drivers along for the ride, explained Capt. Robert Ciccolo of the Boston Police Department hackney division. “You’ve got the radio associations (informing drivers), you’ve got to get the VeriFone or you can’t be in our network.”
Yerramilly said he and his co-founders learned their lesson and are ready to jostle some new Goliaths, in home automation — such as SmartLabs Inc., Leviton Manufacturing Inc. and Royal Philips Electronics.
Incumbent providers offer devices on a locked-in network, but user interfaces are poor, and their software is closed to outside developers, he said. Amp Idea proposes a web-based control panel with an open application programmer interface that will integrate with hardware made by multiple companies.
In Amp Idea’s taxicab play, “We never really understood the whole value chain,” Yerramilly said. This time, the young company has mapped out a niche: creating a simple user interface and an accessible platform for developers.
With an easier, web-based interface, users can control networked devices such as light switches, appliances and alarm systems from anywhere via the Internet, he said. With an open API, applications like voice control or location-aware capability are possible. “The reason the market has been slow to grow is that there haven’t been enough compelling applications,” Yerramilly said. “If you open up this platform for developers, developers will create compelling applications.”
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