Unit Circle

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of CUE Audio. We work in stadiums and arenas to synchronize a bunch of devices for fan engagement, such as smartphone light shows.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Unit Circle?

There’s a lot of connectivity challenges in stadiums — many of them have no connectivity, so you can’t synchronize using traditional network protocols. We use ultrasonic audio from the speakers to synchronize everyone’s device, and we have an ultrasonic modem that we deploy.

Before working with Unit Circle, we had a rudimentary version of our system that wasn’t very resilient and had poor performance. We engaged Pi (Founder) to make a better version.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

During the first phase of the project, Unit Circle worked on implementing a higher performing and much stabler version of our system, which Pi did himself. He built on the original version to make a significantly improved version. 

The second phase was to build a state-of-the-art version by sourcing PHD with digital signal processing and building something that has peak optimal performance, which is what we have now.

In terms of technologies, they used C++. They did a lot of digital signal processing and Python prototyping. They also made iOS, Android, and Linux wrappers. It involved quite a bit of different architectures, systems, and languages. They also created tests, a good deployment pipeline, and different build systems.

What is the team composition?

We mostly worked with Pi, but there were other people that he managed as well. Some of them were more focused on hands-on work, and others were experts.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent just right over $250,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We brought Unit Circle in around January 2018, and we worked with them until October 2019. We worked together for over a year at a very high capacity.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Measuring performance is really difficult when there’s no connectivity for your users. To measure performance, we had to upload analytics and build a lot of customization. The leading KPI we used was the ratio of successful detections to misrecognized or completely failed detections. Keeping the central processing unit (CPU) usage minimal to extend battery life was another KPI.

Unit Circle’s performance was great. We were able to implement a much more powerful version of the system quickly. It was a huge priority of ours to improve performance. Then, we were also able to do a long-term play to get something really high-quality. Unit Circle provided us with a short-term, quick fix and a long-term plan.

How did Unit Circle perform from a project management standpoint?

Unit Circle did really well. There were times in 2018 when the whole team put in well over 40 hours a week — probably around 60 hours or so. They made late-night calls. They definitely demonstrated a high level of commitment.

For project management tools, we used things like  Trello, Slack, and Clubhouse. They used all of those tools well and provided a good level of communication.

What did you find most impressive about them?

A high level of commitment is definitely a stellar strength of Unit Circle. There aren't many people out there that will consistently do super late-night calls and work as late as needed. More than that, being an engineer myself, I was able to look at the code that they produced, and it was really high-quality. I felt like there was no technical project that we wouldn’t have been able to complete together. We did some high-level, PHD-required work and accomplished it cost-effectively compared to what it would’ve cost to outsource it completely; it would’ve been millions of dollars.

All in all, the project was definitely cost-effective They demonstrated a high level of commitment as well as a high capacity for problem-solving, and they produced good code.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The communication was good, but it was almost too much. More succinct communication would be good.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would say it’s a very cost-effective decision. They’ were very resourceful and accomplished a lot for us. We paid quite a bit of money, but compared to the alternatives, we really saved a lot.