Vig Sherrill : Aldis

On March 1 we visited Aldis in Oak Ridge. Aldis is Vig Sherrill's most recent venture. Aldis is seeking to improve traffic flow with control systems using fish eye cameras and vehicle recognition software. The Aldis system tracks vehicles and sends calls to traffic lights when vehicles approach intersections. It does this all through a camera which replaces the current in ground induction systems which fail and have to be replaced fairly often. Aldis is strictly a software company, they allow others to produce the hardware which their system runs on. This allows the company to take advantage of Moore's law; next year when faster processors come out Aldis does not have obsolete products, they just install their software on the new faster platform giving their product more functionality. The real problem with Aldis's business is that the end user is not the person who will pay for the technology. The end users will be drivers however the municipal government which maintains the traffic lights will be the decision maker on purchasing the product. There has to be some value in the product for the city governing offices. For this reason Aldis has built in the ability for the software to count every car that comes through an intersection over a given time period. Normally cities send workers out to intersections with clipboards to take samples of traffic numbers. With the Aldis system there will be no need to count with a clipboard, the data will also be much more accurate. This data can also be used to determine the best place to build new stores or community attractions. Aldis is a venture capital funded company not because they think they will make a ton of money selling camera's to put on every traffic light in the US, but because there will be substantial value in the data that is collected from those systems. Vig's memorable advice was "Don't start a company, you have to work really long hours, put in tons of effort, success chances are small, why would you do that? You would have to be crazy!"