 It's The Cube, here is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're on the ground in San Jose, California at Zebra Technologies, a really interesting company with a great history, but also doing a lot of new innovative things and we're really excited to be down here. We're joining this segment by Jill Stelfox, the VP of Location Services, right? Yep. Excellent, welcome. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, we went to a little show, Location and Context World in the City, a couple of weeks ago, and you were speaking, and I was fascinated by your keynote, for a whole lot of reasons, so let's just jump into it. You talked about what you guys are doing in professional football, so give people a little overview. So, Zebra Technologies is the solution for next generation statistics for the NFL, and what that means is we do player tracking. We track speed, distance of NFL players in every game. Yeah, so you talk about tracking and statistics, but it's a whole different thing than your traditional kind of fantasy statistics. You're not talking about yards and distance, well, you are, but you're talking about real time, real motion, where these guys are on the field, how fast they're going, where they're going. Exactly. So, we put these little tags in the shoulder pads of football players, and they blink at 20 times a second, and so we're tracking their left-right shoulder movements and how they get down the field very, very fast. All of that information is collected on a server in the stadium and delivered to broadcasters in less than half a second. So before you and I see it on television and can argue about it on our couch, the whole story is documented. So the example you gave in the keynote, which again, I don't know if people are quite getting what we're talking about, but if it's Sherman and Crabtree, right, and they're running down the field, before they show the replay, you guys can actually calculate the speed off the line, the closing distance, how far they went, their acceleration, their miles per hour, all that distance, and then provided back to the viewer in the way of a graphic before they can go to the next play. Yeah, and what's really kind of interesting is that we can tell as the game unfolds if Crabtree's ability to hold that speed over time is the same or does it go up or down as the game progresses. And so it's really, it's really very interesting and really fun to see those interactions. And they're just beginning to show it on television and sort of us as fans get to see it real time. So from the application space, right, there's a lot of different applications there. There's the application for the entertainment, right, for we can see people I know. They did a lot of that in the World Cup soccer, they would tell. How far does the guy run when he gets substituted out. And then there's also the coaching applications to know whether Crabtree's been working out enough and he's got the ability to hold that acceleration throughout the distance of the game. How are people starting to use this data in ways that, God, there must be a ton of applications. Yeah, so we work with the Saints, the New Orleans Saints in practice, and with Sean Payton. And you know some of the things that they're really interested in are how do we keep these, you know, important assets for us, these players, healthy. And one of the ways is how often you work out and at what speeds. And so it's really important to track all that. So a very simple statistic that we're able to give the Saints is how long do you spend running at maximum speed in practice. And you shouldn't, in a lot of cases, you should save that for game day, right? And so it's without actually monitoring something like speed, how would you know? And by eyesight it's hard to tell. Can you pull in other data like bio data from other types of sensors and pull that into the mix as well? Yeah, so we thought, in our traditional business, we actually pull in lots of sensor information into our system. And so we brought that same kind of philosophy to sports and really what we do is we take heart rate monitors, temperature sensors, all that kind of stuff in practice. We collect it on the tag and we deliver it to our system in real time. And then back to you, if you were Sean Payton on the side, and you could see, oh, look, the heart rate of somebody is really high, Drew Brees, for example. The interesting thing about a heart rate being high, and I think we as people can sort of think about this, if our heart rate's high, it's hard to think. Because we're focused on, oh my gosh, it's hard to breathe and what's going on and I'm getting exerted. And you don't think. In football, you actually have to think, especially in the quarterback position, to be able to make the play, right? And so knowing heart, lung capacity, things like that, it's really critical for practice. So that's half of the story. The other part of the story that I think is fascinating, and you just touched on it, is the history of this company, right? Zebra Technologies, I've never heard of them. You look it up on the internet, founded in 1969, right? 1969 became Z, it was the data specific corp or something like that, which turned out to be pretty interesting. It became Zebra in 1982, went public in 1991, and you're an RFID barcode company that has been a billion, what, like 1.1 or 1.2 trailing revenue, public company. So it's really cool that you're using this old technology to really go after a brand new application and new business. Yeah, it's actually really exciting. So I think two big things for Zebra. One is that we acquired the Enterprise Solutions Group of Motorola a few months back. And now we're a three and a half billion dollar organization. And we really consider ourselves to be in what we call the enterprise asset intelligent business. How can we tell you everything about your assets, whether you are a company like Ford Motor Company, and you need to deliver supplies to your supply line really quickly, whether you're the NFL and you want to know about your highly paid assets or your players on the field. And so the ability to kind of collect data is what we're about, whether it's traditional barcodes, which have been around for lots of years, or active RFID, which is what we use. Right, right. And talk a little bit about some of the technologies that have enabled you to take it to the next level. I know at the show we were at, they talked about low power Bluetooth, that all these sensors all over the place are basically like GPS for inside, or GPS in a mall, or GPS in a stadium, that you're able to leverage to really kind of bring what you had in the show floor and manufacturing now into some of these other cool applications. Yeah, I think a combination of things have come together to enable something like this. Because the goal is to take data off a player in 120 milliseconds, add character to it, you know, what play is it, what down marker is it a pass, and then put it out on broadcasts for fans in less than half a second. So everything has to move very quickly. And so what's changed is databases are better. Computer software is better. The compute power on hardware is better. And in our case, we work with, you know, because we manufacture enterprise intelligence devices, right, we've got Bluetooth sensors, we've got active RFID. We've got passive RFID. You can bring all those collection mechanisms together and you can collect so much information now on these players. It's amazing, actually. Collect it and process it and display it back, right? Exactly. So the classic case of, you know, taking data, you know, converting it to information and then actually providing the insight. Exactly. I mean, it's really one of the things I would say that our team is most proud of is on Thursday nights when they're during Thursday night football, you see it every week now. There's some amazing statistic, you know, in the, there was a Thursday night Houston game where JJ Watt, who is an amazing, yeah, athlete, but defensive lineman and should not be running super fast. That guy intercepted the ball. Long run, right? Right. And he ran so fast. And that was, by the way, only the second time in the history of football that speed was shown on television, the speed that the player was running. We did it once before then in a game prior where we also showed a defensive interception. And so those were the first two times that even speed was ever shown. And I think what's fascinating about that is you look at how we watched football games 15 years ago and there was no score. There was no down marker, down and distance marker on the television and you had no idea where you were in the game. And now we've got that, but we're going to the next level of information that we can provide. So one last topic before we go. You're obviously a woman. You're super passionate sports fans. We won't talk about Sherman anymore because I don't want you to square on camera. Surrounded by football things, shoulder pads. Talk a little bit about being a woman in technology and sports. So you're kind of crossing two pretty predominantly male dominated industries. Yeah. How's that going? How did you get here? What tips and advice would you give to young girls, young women that would like to pursue this type of career? You know, I'm a big believer in young women can do literally anything. And I also think it's a big advantage, especially in a man's world. So what's funny is when I go into sporting environments now, they'll say, Oh, I know you. You're the woman in sports. And it's good to be known for something. If they don't remember my name, they remember who I am. So that's good. And in terms of, I think, what you can do on your journey, it's really one of the things I say often to girls is you actually can push yourself harder than you think. And don't be worried about people telling you no, because, you know what? Just keep moving and keep moving forward. Everybody's going to tell you no, or maybe it's not possible. But it totally is if you just keep pushing. When somebody says no to me, what I honestly hear in my head is not no. I hear not yet. And not yet means keep trying. So it's not about the no. It's about keep pushing. Good advice. Just like Hank Stram and one of the great NFL films I was sharing with Greg Super Bowl Four, just keep matriculating the ball down the field. Exactly. And you'll get there. You'll get there. Well, Jill, thanks very much for taking some time out of your day. We're really excited to be here. Again, Jeff Frick on the ground, San Jose, California. You're watching The Cube. I'm with Joe Stealth-Exford. Super Technologies. Thanks. Thanks.