Tag Archives for " Appareo "
Q&A with General Manager Dave Batcheller
1. What’s something Appareo has worked on or achieved this year that you’re most proud of?
Appareo has undertaken a great deal of growth. An organization cannot grow as rapidly as our business is growing without being capable of change. It is a difficult challenge for people, in general, to change. We’re all in our own ways resistant to change, comfortable in our norms.
Over the last year, we’ve undertaken strategic changes, structural changes, and operating changes that have been really significant. We’ve onboarded great new production capabilities through substantial new investments in infrastructure that have changed the shape of how we deliver products. How the whole team at Appareo has worked through change and uncertainty with a growth mentality, understanding change comes with a few bumps and inconveniences but being focused on what we’re growing toward and the organization we’re becoming is something that our whole team should be really proud of.
2. Can you share something about Appareo that most people don’t know about or would be surprised to learn?
Appareo is a Latin word that means “to appear” or “to become apparent.” The name was chosen because we were a new business, appearing in a new space, with a whole new category of products. As we’ve grown as an organization we’ve never been afraid of appearing, being new, and bringing brand-new things to the world and I think that is really amazing. We’ve created whole new categories of products in multiple industries, breaking new ground in: aviation with ADS-B receivers, flight data recording, and cockpits cameras; agriculture becoming the first company in the world to control equipment with iPads and developing a whole new category of monitoring technologies for seeding, fertilizer application, and harvesting; and in off-highway equipment with the most rugged, longest living, asset tracking products in the world.
I think it is a great privilege to be in the business of creating new things. Many people spend their entire career focused on distribution, service, and support of things that are already in existence but we’re part of a small family of organizations globally that gets to come to work every day and be inspired to pursue, achieve, and deliver the creation of things that make the world a different and better place.
3. What projects or work is Appareo doing that you’re most excited about?
There is a great deal to be excited about in the products that the business is developing. I can honestly say that there is no one product or project that I’m most excited about.
Really the work that I’m most excited about is the great product development and production operational system that we are building at Appareo. Over the last year we’ve grown more than 30% in headcount and more than 40% in revenue. We’re building an incredible team here, which is in part a testament to the individual capabilities of the people that join the “A Team” but it is more about the way in which the team interacts. We’re constructing a really unique, and special culture that is going to enable this organization to accomplish really impressive things.
https://appareo.com/2022/11/08/qa-with-general-manager-dave-batcheller/
Josh Gelinske to present at ISR & C2 Battle Management USA
Appareo’s Director of AI Systems, Josh Gelinske, will be presenting at the upcoming ISR & C2 Battle Management USA event.
Josh’s presentation will focus on speech to action, where he will share a brief background on the history of speech recognition and where it is today. Speech recognition isn’t new, it’s been in development for many decades. However, only recently the technology is at a point where it can be useful in a broad range of applications. Josh will cover how it is being used for human machine interfacing via voice user interface (VUI), speech information processing at the edge and finally the edge speech processing capability Appareo has built for the aviation market.
“With the introduction of powerful pretrained language models we will look back on 2018-2019 as the beginning of a natural language processing boom similar to 2012 for image classification. This will unlock a tremendous number of new applications, but also new threats on the multi-domain battlefield. This conference is the premier platform to talk about these technology advancements and what it takes to stay on the cutting edge. ” – Josh Gelinske, Director
For more information regarding this conference, visit the website here.
If you would like more information on Josh’s presentation or this topic, please contact Josh directly at jgelinske@appareo.com.
https://www.appareo.com/2019/10/31/josh-gelinske-to-present-at-isr-c2-battle-management-usa/
Future of Farming (Appareo Featured in AgViews)
AgViews: Future of Farming Grounded in Technology
Our founder Barry Batcheller and CEO David Batcheller were recently interviewed for Bell Bank’s Agribusiness Newsletter AgViews to offer their perspectives on the future of farming, the latest in precision agriculture, and Appareo’s partnership with AGCO, a joint venture called Intelligent Ag Solutions.
Below is a sampling of the Q&A from the AgViews interview:
What has been the biggest advancement in ag technology in the last five years?
Barry: I would say it’s been the translation into precision farming that is bringing a new level of productivity to farmers.
The advancements in agriculture that have happened over the last 50 years – plus additional advancements – will be required to feed the predicted global population of about 9.6 billion by 2050. If we continue at the level of productivity we have today, we’d fall short in feeding the planet by about 50 percent. So we need increasing advancements in agriculture if we’re going to feed this planet.
David: Precision protein is going to be an emerging part of agriculture. The poultry industry, for example, has refined making chicken to where producers can go from chick to chicken with shocking speed. I think we’re going to see, in pork and even beef production, more drive toward precision production to cater to the public’s interest in high-quality, low-cost meat protein.
What are some of your more popular products?
David: On the Intelligent Ag side of the business, we make a popular monitoring system for air drills called Recon Wireless Blockage and Flow Monitor. If you seed soybeans or plant wheat, canola or barley, and you have a monitoring system, there’s a reasonable probability that you’re running our monitor.
For people who buy and use AGCO equipment, things like RoGators, TerraGators, Massey Ferguson, Gleaner combines or Challenger tractors, we do the telematics products for those machines. AGCO launched a new combine last year, called the IDEAL combine. We developed all of the automation and sensors for that.
We also developed an aftermarket section control product for John Deere Air Carts called Engage Zone Control. It communicates with an air seeder’s GPS mapping system to boost yield and reduce inputs. A lot of growers are benefiting from it.
What advantages does an independent company like Appareo have over larger manufacturers?
David: We and others have done a nice job of building new businesses and opportunities around getting more out of a piece of equipment you have rather than replacing that piece of equipment. When those trends really start to take, then the manufacturers look to incorporate that capability onto the machine from the factory. There’s a lot of innovation coming in the aftermarket, and rather than being a little bolt-on capability, it’s getting deeper into the machine.
https://www.appareo.com/2018/10/17/future-of-farming-appareo-featured-in-agviews/