Subway Labs: Big Data Tools for Energy Materials R&D

The development of new energy materials and devices is hobbled by inefficient tools for data analysis and management. Across the industry, companies, universities, and national laboratories that develop energy devices (batteries, solar photovoltaics, fuel cells, capacitors) all use specialized test equipment that generates vast quantities of experimental data. The software tools packaged with these systems look and feel a decade out of date, with little or no web integration and minimal functionality around organizing, visualizing, analyzing, and sharing test results. At present, researchers in this field waste valuable working hours and brainpower on clerical data management tasks, slowing development cycles and limiting the time and energy needed for the higher-level thinking at the heart of development. Subway Labs is developing modern software tools for managing the big data problem in energy materials research and development. Our first application, IV Spy, is a browser-based tool that accelerates battery R & amp;D by providing a seamless platform for uploading, viewing, comparing, analyzing, and sharing battery performance data. In this SBIR Phase I application we seek to demonstrate the feasibility of providing IV Spy as an enterprise, cloud-based software as a service (SaaS). Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: Our software tools will accelerate the development cycle in energy materials research and development, helping companies and researchers in this field bring new products to market faster. Engineers will spend more time innovating and less time managing volumes of experimental data. The two largest industry verticals in our target market, batteries and photovoltaics, together comprise more than $100B annual revenue with large budgets devoted to R & amp;D. These two industries include thousands of potential customers: public companies, startups, national labs, and universities. Subway Labs deployed an early version of IV Spy to a battery developer in July 2012.