As a prequel to the ISA conference, Sage Environmental is hosting an all-day LDAR Experts session. This should be a great forum of owner/operators, managers and regulators going over the nuances of the LDAR regulations. From my standpoint at Ei, it gives me some additional insight into the regulation and the challenges that face the industry in general.

You can find more information about the Sage Training Workshops online.

Ei's second mainstream software product is getting ready for final release and will be presented at the upcoming ISA LDAR conference. EiEverywhere is a web solution allowing users, clients, regulators, partners and other consultants to securely access internal data systems and information that you specify. Through full role-based security, you can control who see's what information at a fine grained level. Why is this important?

• Transparency
• Labor Savings
• Turn Around Time
• Global Accessibility
• Data Accuracy

All of these reasons make EiEverywhere a very cost effective solution that solves many of today's data delivery and sharing complications!!

Ei is finalizing plans to be present at the upcoming International Society of Automation's Fugitive Emissions Leak Detection and Repair Symposium which is happening May 18th-20th in San Antonio, Texas. We will be exhibiting and demonstrating our software at the conference and hoping to highlight some of our interoperability with 3rd party software applications utilized extensively in the LDAR world. Keep watch for more news and information as the conference gets closer!

Posted by Shane at 11:19 PM MST:

Well, yesterday was the final day of the conference, and in some right, perhaps it was the most productive.  We spent most of the morning speaking with potential partners, namely Intergraph, Bentley, and TotalCAD.  Intergraph continues to be an intriguing partner given their dominant market share in the intelligent P&ID market with their platform, SmartPlant P&ID.  We were able to finally introduce ourselves to Anne-Marie Walters, who's British voice we had heard many times on various exploratory conference calls with Bentley.  And the guys at TotalCAD stopped by the booth to see a demo of our software.  Their overwhelmingly, positive response capped off what was overall a good trade show for us.

It seemed by 11:00 AM that all of the exhibitors were itching to tear down their booths, and it really boiled down to who would be the first to "jump," so to say.  Once the first noises of an exhibitor echoed through the event center, it became a frenzied race to see who would be packed up and out of that place the quickest.  I think that Jess and, despite our trade show inexperience, finished 5th in that race...which is something we are proud of.  We have a little bit of work to do in order to win this game of "mad-dash," but if we commit ourselves to it, we can do anything. Ha.

The process of tearing down the booth was rather smooth, except for one notable glitch - how do we ship our LCD monitor home since the box it arrived in was destroyed?  Weel you know, it really is amazing to me how to bright guys can develop software that simplifies a highly technical and complex subject matter, such as environmental and safety compliance.  The truth is, that I think Jess and I had reached our max of spending time together, and it is 5 days in a row.  Don't get me wrong - I love the guy.  I love his family.  I love that I'm lucky enough to have such a talented, skilled, and eccentric business partner.  But all I'm sayin'...is that we are capable of doing amazing things with our software, and despite the time requirement to do so, it is rather easy for us to conceptualize solutions and bring them to life.  So you'd figure, boxing up an LCD monitor and shipping it via FedEx would be like clockwork for an engineer and a software architect.  I don't know what the deal was, but all I know is that he and I could not agree on the following things during that miserable hour of shipping and receiving infamy: 

1. How to arrange the monitor stand parts in the box;
2. How to use the bubble wrap for packing the monitor stand parts;
3. How much tape to tape the box with;
4. Where to ship the box from, UPS or FedEx; and
5. How to transport the box to FedEx (once we decided that FedEx was the way to go).

Again, it just purely amazes me that two bright guys like ourselves could take such a seemingly easy process, and make it one of the most difficult and inefficient tasks EVER.  Oh well, I blame my stubborn, Pollack characteristics...and well for Jess, I blame it on the fact that the guy is just too smart for his own good.

Anyway, we walk away from DigitalPlant 2010 having made some very important networking contacts, in addition to having potentially identified our first customer - let's keep our fingers crossed.  We have a list of no less than 15 follow-up action items, as we plan for 2nd and 3rd Quarter activities on the horizon.

If this week was any indication, I think 2010 will be a very successful year for Ei.

 

Posted by Jess @ 10:33PM

We just wrapped up day two of the Daratech Digital Plant 2010 conference in Houston, TX. It was an exciting day overall, with lots of things happening.

We started out actually having a chance to eat breakfast at the conference today, things were not so rushed and it was nice to start on real food rather than Red Bull and coffee. During breakfast we met two Engineers from a Norwegian EPC. Our conversation wandered to the last days of the Winter Olympics where the fact that Norway and the USA had both won an equal number of gold medals. The Norwegian fellows were quite anxious to point out how Norway was only 1/10th the size of the USA and so they clearly had a larger pool of skilled athletes in Norway. Shane quickly asked 'Was that the Norwegian Curling Team that was wearing those really ugly baggy red and white speckled parachute pants'?..... the two Engineers quickly admitted that was indeed the case and all of us settled on the fact that both countries have their strengths and weaknesses.

Back to business.... through the day, we had some excellent and insightful conversations with many of you attending the conference. There was a large number of attendee's from the Nuclear Industry present this year and it was certainly an eye opening experience to understand the different regulatory environment and processes for construction in comparison to the Chemical Manufacturing and Petroleum Refining industries that we are more familiar with.

We had the opportunity to record an interview with Sanjay Gangal of AECCafe.com. Sanjay introduced Ei to the conference via his interview and it should be available on his site by March 7th for viewing.

I also just posted a video demonstration of our LDAR intelligence module on the site today. This is a quick way for you to see the power and integration of our software with Autodesk's AutoCAD P&ID software package.

Time to get some sleep for tomorrow.... more updates to follow...

Authored by Shane @ 5:17 PM CST:

Well, I've consumed 2 cans of red bull, 3 cups of coffee, and a refreshing glass of lemonade on what has turned out to be a pretty interesting day on the first day of the Digital Plant conference.

I believe that life as an aspiring businessman requires extreme behavior.  For example, we (Jess and me) were up until approximately 1:30 AM CST on the eve -or should I say morning- of our first trade show of the 2010 year.  This is what happens when two intelligent men procrastinate.  In any case, we got the pleasure of having to operate on 4.5 hours of sleep for that moment of idiocy.

...and now for Jess' Philosophy on Procrastination: "Procrastination is not doing things when instead, you just want to sit around and do nothing; however, if you de-prioritize tasks because they are not as important...then what is the difference between procrastination and prioritization?"

I don't know what the difference is between those two things in all honesty - but perhaps the crux of the problem has something to do with marriage?  Right, Jess?

We arrived at our trade show booth, and then the fun began.  Not the smoothest of sailing, but we got through it like a Kenyan in the Boston Marathon.  Here is a list of what went wrong

• No batteries to operate the remote for our 44" LCD TV mounted out front of our booth.
• No VGA cord to operate the 22" LCD TV attached to our 10' x 10' display.
• Not enough red bull.
• Uncompatible video file type for my presentation.
• Highlighting of intelligent P&ID equipment still not working (dang it Jess).
• Oh, and we need a 3rd light for the booth.

Anyway, we reeled in Day One with a few libations at the Autodesk reception.  What a great company.  Free beer.  Awesome concept (thanks A.J.).

Stay tuned for thoughts from Day Two.

~Sk