BusTracker

BusTracker

By Sean Roth

Real Estate Editor

The emergence of technology has helped most business people, but seemingly none so much as the entrepreneurial wunderkinds that came of age in the 70s. People like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

And on a more locally prominent scale there's Sarasota's Brad Baker.

Baker, 45, a Pine View School grad, got the entrepreneurial bug at 16 founding what ultimately became Computer Centre Inc., a chain of four computer stores in Southwest Florida that was generating $3 million in sales annually until it was sold in the mid 80s. It opened in 1978 and was the first computer store in Sarasota

A millionaire at 26, Baker embarked on a wide-ranging career, one that included stops working in the White House and in Florida government. He also found the time to start some new business ventures. Now, the restless entrepreneur is back on the Gulf Coast, getting ready to introduce his 2-year-old technology company, Nexus Biometrics Inc.

Nexus Biometrics' flagship product, BusMate100, is aimed primarily at tracking school buses and their young passengers. The basic idea is to allow school officials to track buses as they go about their routes, looking for potential driver and bus equipment problems, such as speeding, dropping kids on the wrong side of the street, engine failure or in the more extreme case immediate notification of a traffic accident. The student component is designed to track exactly when and where each student gets on and off a bus and it can use fingerprints - the source for the Biometric element in the company's name - to identify each student. The technology also allows administrators to interact with the bus, ultimately letting them disable the engine if necessary.

All that technology sounds great but the dollars and cents side of the business has been considered as well. Instead of the more popular, and costly, GPS technology, BusMate100 uses less costly existing cell-phone technology.

"Think about it, you can get a cell phone for about $50 a piece in the store while a GPS system still costs about $200," Baker says. "We take that cell phone and then write lots of software around it. Because of recent legislation, the cell phone providers are required to be able to locate a cell phone for 911. That helps us a lot. This is the equivalent of a GPS chip for a lot less."

How much less? Try a total operational cost of about $10 a month per bus to the schools.

Parallel with the implementation of BusMate 100, Rauch and Baker's Nexus Biometrics is putting together a second product KidTrack 100, a system for foster care program administrators designed to create a clear record of their visits with children. The program, based around a mobile fingerprint identification system, will also take a photo of the foster child. The product, which has been under development with government input for about a year, is expected to go into the testing stage in the first quarter of 2006.

"It is really dealing with government that we see the most applications," Rauch says. "A CEO may not feel it is as critical to know exactly where his employees are at a particular time. The people who are most interested are parents about knowing where their children are. We may also do a targeted program for probation officers."

Research & Development

The two years spent in research and testing phases for Nexus Biometrics makes it two years older than a more typical startup heading to market. But the extra time was necessary, Baker says, and should make it virtually irresistible to schools. Aside from finalizing the technical aspects, another major focus of that development time was spent making sure the technology was approved for non-profit based funding from a federal telecommunication tax to pay for the majority of BusMate 100. This means the service cost to the school, Baker says, would be extremely limited, bringing the cost per month down to as low as about $2 per bus.

Nexus Biometrics, which currently has no paying customers, has been testing its system in a Tampa area school district for about three months.

"I would like to have said that we were in five schools at this point," Baker says, "but I'm finding that it's not as easy to implement as we thought. The challenge is really that government agencies, schools, move slowly. It takes time to budget and plan for such a technology revolution. But we will be successful because of the pricing and the safety advantages. No administrator is going to want to say they didn't do everything they could do protect children."

Baker, Nexus' CEO, is joined in the venture by company President Marty Rauch, Jr. Baker and Rauch are financing Nexus Biometrics through their personal savings.

Baker's entrepreneurialism didn't end with the sale of his computer company in early 1985. Baker, who at the time was 25, started Nokomis-based Tech:Time Inc., a company based around a computerized time clock for businesses. The root for the clock system came from a payroll program Baker wrote from scratch for the Desert Inn in Daytona Beach when he was 17. The time clocks automatically calculated virtually every paycheck variable including time worked, overtime, deductions, and then transmitted the information via a telephone line to a business' computer.

"Within two years we were doing $35 million in sales," Baker says of the company, which he took public. Three years later, Baker sold his 51% ownership to a group of employees, and ultimately, the company was purchased by a division of Automatic Data Processing.

Baker, then 28, was appointed by Pres. Ronald Reagan to be a White House Fellow, where he ultimately served as acting executive secretary to the secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

When his year was up, he was appointed executive secretary on the executive board of the Resolution Trust Corp., a government appointed group designed to reorganize the thrift banking industry following the savings and loans system collapse. His colleagues on the four-man panel included Alan Greenspan, former Secretary of the Treasury Nicolas Brady and Jack Kemp.

Looking back, Baker says one of the best projects he worked on in federal government was advising senior Treasury officials updating their computer systems.

A faster Internet

After his time in government, Baker returned to his technological roots with the creation of NetLine Communications in 1995. NetLine became one of the first providers in Florida of Internet access and developed the first frame relay network in Florida, a technology system fostering continuous, and faster- for the time- Internet access. The latter innovation drew the interest of major national companies.

"Pretty early on we were in discussion with Comcast Cable but we could never come to terms," Baker says. "Our plan was to eventually go public so we continued along that line. At one point we got a call from Comcast wanting to buy us. I had to tell them 'We're going public next Tuesday. We'll send you a one-page deal. Take it or leave it.'"

So a mere eight months after its birth, NetLine Communications was acquired by Comcast Cable for the introduction of the cable-service provider's rollout of @home.com cable-modem broadband service. As part of the purchase, Baker went to work for Comcast, first as general manger and later as director of business development for Comcast On-line, where he helped plan the launch of Comcast's Internet Division.

In 1997, through a connection with another former White House Fellow, Baker left Comcast to head several commercial and residential real estate partnerships in Kansas. The main focus of the development company was on building affordable workforce housing using tax credits from the government to offset much of the cost. Baker partnered with Rauch on some of those projects.

With two years of real-world development experience and his background in government property management, Baker was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush to be executive director of the Florida Housing Finance Corp.

"The organization had big problems, and I was brought in to clean it up," Baker says. "There had been a lot of really dishonest dealings. When I came on board we faced almost a dozen different lawsuits from developers. I settled all of them."

Baker wound up firing about 12 people in the restructuring, too.

"I left shortly after that," Baker says. "But I moved Florida Housing to the next level. Before I got there none of the computers had ever had a CD drive, because management was afraid employees would listen to music. All the correspondence had to come through one door; no one had e-mail. There wasn't even an Web site."

After that job, Baker helped another White House fellow grow a securities and investment banking company, Sterling Financial Inc. Baker headed the company's online division and Rauch served as chief operating officer. The two helped grow the company from one office to 60 with revenue of about $40 million.

Rauch's background emphasized and accentuated Baker's communication and sales skills. Rauch started his career as president, CEO and founder of Athletics International Inc., a sports management company representing professional athletes. In 1988, he started Rauch Realty Inc., a full-service real estate and mortgage brokerage firm, which he ran for 11 years.