Innovation Saskatchewan is responsible for implementing the province’s innovation priorities and helping grow Saskatchewan’s tech sector. Effective April 2022, this includes operation of the Innovation Place technology parks in Saskatoon and Regina.
Innovation Place is home to some pretty cool companies doing some pretty interesting things. Shiverware, an interactive software company providing mobile application development and hardware integration services and a tenant at Innovation Place in Regina, is definitely no exception. The team at Shiverware has a huge range of expertise and skills and has worked in a variety of fields, including intelligent plumbing, music creation and even Olympic-level swimming! Pretty cool, right?
We spoke with Co-Founder Brett Park about what makes Shiverware unique in the tech world, what they’re working on now and how the pandemic has affected them.
“We were looking for something interesting to do and that became the premise for the company -- Shiverware, we make cool stuff,” says Park. Focusing on working on interesting things, instead of looking at the best business model, is the driving force for the company and for solving problems.
Shiverware worked with the University of Regina and the Canadian Olympic Swim team to research competitive swimming technology. The project involved collecting and analyzing data about the swimmers movements, specifically their stroke performance, using body sensors and providing feedback to coaches and athletes to adjust movements. The project was the recipient of the Award of Innovation in 2018.
SpeakBeat Metronome is a fully customizable voice metronome that uses spoken timing counts, such as “1 and 2 and..” rather than just the standard clicks and ticks. “With music students getting less time in front of their instructor they are doing more independent work, but still need a metronome to help them keep time while practicing,” says Park. Most music teachers recommend students use SpeakBeat Metronome rather than other metronome apps or even traditional metronomes.
“It’s one of our most innovative products we’ve ever put out,” says Park. “Essentially it is a way to democratize the creation of music.”
Musix Pro uses an isophormic layout to organize notes, keys and chords. Imagine a honeycomb structure, instead of a horizontal piano layout where each honeycomb is a note. The way the user puts notes on that honeycomb lends to different ways of playing different styles of music and ease of playing. It allows users new to music to explore the musical harmonic spectrum in a much easier way than existing instruments and existing musicians to explore musical space with full capabilities in the music creation process.
Shiverware worked with Uponor, the market leader in intelligent plumbing and climate solutions, to create a user-focused interface for in-floor radiant heating systems.
The team had two main problems to solve: (1) how to indicate that room temperature would gradually change to the desired temperature so users would not continually tap the button (guilty as charged) and (2) how to set individual rooms at a desired temperature at a certain time (say 5:00 p.m.) while taking into consideration factors like level of sunlight and placement in the house. Well, using a little machine learning and a user interface point of view, they came up with a pretty clever system that Uponor and its client were happy with!
The team is working with acclaimed hair stylist Chris Pritchard on a new social network for hair styles and hair stylists called Hair+.
Pritchard came to Shiverware with a specific need: a place where stylists can post photos of their work and people can find styles by stylists in their area. He was tired of both physical lookbooks because they’re expensive, stagnant and unused and instagram because finding and searching things is next to impossible. The content may be on other social networks, but you can’t find it or it’s irrelevant for you! Shiverware created a solution that focuses on (a) finding a style that works with your hair type and (b) connecting you to a stylist who can actually do it!
“Often tech doesn't solve underlying issues,” says Park. “We try to find the sweet spot between what problems we can solve with the tech and not creating elaborate interfaces for things that aren't going to help.”
When people come to Shiverware with an idea, the team fleshes out the human issues they’re trying to solve, how they can improve an existing process and, crucially, what the actual problems are!
“What makes Shiverware unique is our breadth of ability,” says Park. “There’s not many of us, but we’ve got pretty much every hat: mobile development, Internet of Thing integration, deep learning and machine intelligence and signal analysis.” This large tool set allows Shiverware to solve many different problems.
Learn more about Shiverware in its Meet the Tenants profile.
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