Dean Mariani, Partner, CBRE Office Corridor Group sits down with Anthony Coelho, CEO of SiteVue to discuss how SiteVue started and how the company is helping the construction industry embrace technology.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
CBRE Interview Transcript
Anthony Coelho:
When I started the company, the biggest thing for me was the fear of failure.
I think that you need to embrace that because I would rather try and fail than not try.
I would definitely tell people to let go of that. Be open to failure because, to be honest, you’re going to learn a lot more through failure than success.
Anthony Coelho, I’m the co-founder and CEO of SiteVue. We have offices in Toronto as well as in Kitchener. Our platform is a mobile application for construction projects mainly infrastructure and transit.
It focuses on bridging the communication between what’s happening in the field with what’s happened in the office.
We're a media-centric app. A lot like Instagram actually. The way the app works is when you take a photo or video on-site, we instantly map that to a construction drawing and we also run image recognition on it to automatically tag what's in these images and videos.
The reason that’s really important is because our app is being used for dispute resolution. So if there’s a major, catastrophic failure in construction, our clients will need to revisit all their photos and videos. They use our app to quickly get the data that they need. Having image recognition makes it that much faster.
So I actually dealt with the problem first-hand in the field. I worked in the office and in the field. One of the biggest challenges was communicating everything that was happening in the field with the office.
What I realized is that the most efficient way to do that is through media. Sending out photos and videos is a lot more efficient than spending a long-worded email or having a phone call.
What I felt is that context was missing when you send a photo. If I take a photo of this room and send it to anybody, they won't know where that was taken unless you were very familiar with the project.
So having a tool that would be able to quickly share what was happening and provide that context by instantly mapping, showing you exactly where this photo and video was taken was a huge value to our clients.
Then I thought to myself, this is a global problem. What can we do to make this into a company.
The competitive advantage is definitely being in a very niche sector of construction and also being media-centric. What we're seeing is that there a lot of opportunity right now in infrastructure and transit. Federal governments are coming out with these big budgets and building transit lines and subways and everything basically.
I would say that what we're focussing on right now is making sure that we can give our clients something that's easy to use, as easy as taking a photo and as fun as taking a photo, while still providing that ability to communicate everything that’s happening in the field.
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