 Live from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering Splunk.com 2015. Brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Rick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for Splunk.com 2015. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLES. Joining my co-host, Jeff Frick, who's the general manager of our CUBE business. Our next guest is Dan Pong, software engineer of Orion, formerly on BEAP. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So you got a device there, so let's just get right into it, right before we get into the whole Splunk thing. You got a device that's flashing. That's your product. Describe it, give us the data. So, Orion Onyx is a group communication device. We support instant group communication to the people that you need to be connected to in real time. So, you basically connect this to your phone. You create a group. You add all your friends or your colleagues, whoever you need to be in contact with into your group. And you pin this onto your shirt. You put your phone in your pocket and you're present with whoever you're talking to in real time. And that's really important because today, people are always on their phone. They might be tweeting something and then they'll look away from you and then they'll pick up a call and we do that all the time we tweet while we're interviewing. Yeah, and you lose that eye contact, which is so important for human connection, right? And this helps us keep you present. So, it's voicemail meets group me for tech? Not voicemail, this is, no, it's beyond that. It's instant streaming data. We're not recording a whole message bit, saving it somewhere and delivering that for later reception. This is streaming data right from when you push the button. As soon as you start talking, bytes get on the wire and transfer it to all of your group recipients. And they receive it on their device and store it. They don't store it, they play it right out. Okay, right. But then is it on all the time? So, you're hearing, if two or three of the other people in the group are having a discussion about something, are you hearing that? If they were talking, yes, we would hear that right now. But it's not always transmitting, you have to push to start the transmission. So, it's push to talk. So, when do you find that you use it most of the time? Kind of what are the applications, kind of situations that it really works wonders? Yeah, for something like events like spunk.conf. I ran into a bunch of vendors yesterday after the keynote and they weren't ready for everybody coming out. And so, I was talking to a vendor asking about its products and we were really engaged, but he got interrupted by a phone call. So, we had to pick up his call and was like, hey, you know, the keynote got left out early and I'm here with one laptop. Can you bring one laptop to me? And then he looks back at me and we were just talking about Ryan and how you can have instant group communication. And that's all the idea right there. Like, he lost engagement with me as a customer, me as, you know, just face-to-face communication. And so, for coordinating events, it's a compelling use case. Right. Other things. So, talk about the technology behind it. So, it's a hardware device. You wrote the software for the back-end service. What else did you guys write? So, you got a little interaction. What's the battery like? Give us some of the speeds and feeds of the overall end-to-end system. Oh, well, I mean, it's fairly simple and that's the beauty of this whole thing is it's a very simple stack. It connects, right now it connects over Bluetooth to your phone, it uses your phone's data plan or whatever it's connected to the internet. So, it could be wifi, it could be a satellite phone. We have an example in our talk that we just gave where our CEO is in a boat in the middle of the sea in Palau and he has a satellite phone. And this is the power of internet-connected wearables. So, if you're connected to the internet, you're connected to the Orion network. And if you're connected to the Orion network, you're connected to all your colleagues, all the people that you need to be connected with in real time. So, you have this device, it's connected to your phone through Bluetooth and then it uses your internet connection, goes to our back-end service. And from there, we stream the data out to all the recipients. So, what's the URL for more information real quickly? I want to get that out. Oh, it's www.orionlabs.co. Okay, great, orionlabs.co, okay, great. Orionlabs.co, check it out. So, what's the feedback? It's very much Star Trek, like Scottie beat me up. I mean, it's a communicator. Yeah, that's one of the accessible kind of stereotypes that we're able to use. It is very much- Good for concerts, live events, moving around. Biking, like if you go biking with your friends on a long trip and you have to have your phone in your pocket, you can't be biking and pull your phone out to text or to make a phone call. Or like when you're driving. Skiing, vikings. No boarding. I use it for even day-to-day tasks. I have this paradigm that I call yell to talk. If you're, we live in San Francisco, we're in this pretty small apartment. But even then, my wife could be in the kitchen doing something and I could be in another room with the kids. And there's so many times where I'm like, hey, do we have any more diapers? And she'll be like, what did you say? Turn off the radio. Your whole neighbor's here too. Right. Welcome to our world too, we've got four kids. We know what you're talking about. Yeah, so you have this thing and you're like, oh, I can just talk like a normal human. You can hear my voice. And you're talking like, hey, where's our diapers? I don't see them. Other end. Oh, they're in that cubby over there on the left. I kind of clean them up and hit them over there. Also, do you configure a number of different groups? Because it sounds like the hand-free heads-up value is really a really big one. In all the examples you've just cited, that's a pretty significant rank order value prop. So do you have multiple groups? So you've got your bicycle riding groups and you flick it over to group A when you're doing that activity and you've got your work group, flick it over to group B. Exactly, yeah. And my family group, my friends group, my going out drinking group, however you want to group your friends. There's an unlimited number of groups you can create. There's an unlimited number of people that can be in each group. And it's a full duplex communication device as well. So it's duplex, so it goes both ways. Yes, it goes both ways. And a lot of people ask, how do you manage that? Doesn't it get chatty and uncoordinated? People can do this. People can say, hey, guys, can everybody just shut up for a second? Does it have a mute? Hey, John Mutes. Right, so yeah, it gets worked out by humans. We just connect the humans to do what they need to do. So the heads up and the hands freeze great. And as we were talking a little bit about it off air, we all know that texts and emails can really be a not good form of communication. I mean, there's so much nuance that can somehow get lost. There's things that can get read in, that shouldn't get read into a text or an email. So I'm sure for that function too, having a direct voice connection makes a big difference. Right, the power of the human voice is so expressive we lose that when we start typing that out. Just in what you just said, you had pauses, different inflections in the way you were saying things that communicated very different things that I can hear and I can understand much better than you texting and correcting your text and like, right? That loses so much and we're able to bring all that power of the voice back, all that expressivity. So what's the spunk angle? We're here at spunk.com for you gave a little talk. So what's the spunk angle? Yeah, so as a small startup, we're really focused on making group communication easy and seamless. That's our one core mission. And so we have other business needs that we need. Like we don't write our own alerting system and that checks our health and pages. We use pager duty. Like the booth's just over there, right? And we use Splunk as data as a service. So we use Splunk Cloud. We shove all our data up there and we're able to use all the rich transformation, data transformation tools, all the cool visualizations to get business value and operational intelligence right out of our data. So data as a service, microservices, Splunk fits right in our model of operating as a lean, mean startup machine. And was Splunk part of the core when you built the company or was it something that you guys added on after the fact? How did it, how did that kind of come about? Well, our CTO, Greg Goldbrecht, used to work, he was one of the early engineers at Splunk. Okay, the storm piece of it, right? Exactly. Okay, so he already had a predisposition. And the founders, the founders story's interesting. So you have DevOps guy, Greg, chef, very famous, provisioning. Jesse Robbins. Jesse, Jesse, and Greg was at Splunk. So you have those two guys. Both are volunteers for emergency services. Those guys are so bad at, yeah. So, I mean, that's pretty cool. So that's kind of seems where the DNA came from. Emergency response. Katrina was a project that Jesse was at. Was that inspiration for this? I think it is somewhat inspiration. You'll have to ask Jesse or Greg more about that. But I definitely see them bringing the Onyx to a lot of the events. They used Onyx at, what was that concert in Golden Gate Park, outside lands. For the EMT services. Alongside the rest of their radio technology. Because it is encrypted. It is instant voice communication. And it is connected. So, and you have GPS data. So you'll be able to do a lot of the tracking you need to understand where your personnel is. So does it play to the device? Do I have to put a Bluetooth headset in? You can put, no. So how do you get messages? If he sends you a message right now. Yeah. You're watching, Greg or Jesse, if you're watching, send us the message. Right, text. There's a speaker on this. So there's a mic, there's a mic jack if you need to be more discreet. Okay. And there's a speaker on this as well. Security, emergency personnel, easy, no brainer. Yeah, yeah. But then leisure. I mean, I think of skiing. I always have to put my phone in the waterproof bag. Right. I got to pull it out and fumbling it on the lift. With your, yeah. With your huge gloves. On the new thing. I don't want to drop anything. Yeah, you can just mash this button, this huge button to start talking. And people have done that. People, and it works well on the slope. And it's great for like, if you fall, if you fell or something and you're like a little stuck, maybe twisted your ankle, you don't want to wait for like your buddy to show up and start like, you know. You're upside down in a snow drift. Right. Help me. It reminds you that the next tell, you know, were they really promoted, you know, kind of the walkie talkie. Yeah, the push to talk. Kind of push to talk function. Right, so our third founder, Roger C Wood, was the progenitor of that whole system. So he's working with us and helping us bring this, the concept about. It's awesome to have him on the team. Yeah. And so how much money have you guys raised? I know there's Rich Leventos on an investor, friend of the cube. Venture capital, seed funded by the founders. How's the funding? We've been through series A, we're in the middle of the next round right now. I can't say much about that. Okay. And you know, as a, like a lowly software engineer, I don't get much privy of that. Though they are, they are very open to how that's all going, but right now that's all in the process. How many people in the company right now? Right now I think we're 35, very small. So very DevOps, 10X developer mindset, right? You guys have a, just what's the code base written in? Tell us about the software. Well, so the backend is written mostly in Python, though when I got there, we shifted the data server. I wrote it in Go, so that's now in Go, which is awesome. We're pretty much a polyglot. Yeah, I love Go. Go is a great language for this type of stuff. You just can sling it. It's a modern language, it has all the modern kind of awesomeness, right? We write our firmware in C and C++. I get to get my hands dirty with that too. Yeah. And Ruby for all of our, all of our chef and deployment stuff. But Dan, we're getting the, we're getting the time here. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Innovative startup. I wanted to ask one last question. There was, there was something that someone mentioned about how to become a CUBE alumni. Yeah. How do you just do it? You are now a CUBE alumni. You're in, you're in the inner circle. You made the club. You're in the exclusive. All right. Mostly it wasn't too painful. No, that was great. We wish we had more time, but they set the schedule along. We could spend another 15 minutes. But on the LinkedIn group, it's very exclusive. Only CUBE alumni. You'll get an invitation from me. So that, that'll be coming in your email. Or maybe through the, maybe through the device. That'd be awesome. That would be the School of Silicon Valley and Tech. Over 4,000 people who've interviewed these events. So welcome to the CUBE alumni. Awesome. All right, Dan, great to have you on. Innovations happening. Love, startup action. Again, Splunk. Use cases are all of, all of the math startups to financial services, hedge funds, banks. Everyone's using Splunk. We'll be back more with more ingestion of data in our Splunk machine called the CUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.