40 Under 40: A Look at the Industry’s Brightest Young stars

Mike Seamons, 35, vice president of marketing for whole-home automation developer Exceptional Innovation in Westerville, Ohio, agreed, saying standards help industries grow. “The market is bigger than hundreds of companies creating end-to-end solutions that are primarily proprietary to themselves,” he said. “Our roots as a company come from the retail point of sale industry where a similar environment developed around fear that the only way to sell my receipt printer is to also sell my cash register. When the market embraced standards that allowed products to integrate, vendors realized exponential sales because their products could stand alone regardless of the systems they were connected to. We are poised as an industry to see similar growth when we not only standardize the physical interface we connect through, but also the communication language we speak.”

We’ll give Rafi Spero, 31, COO and cofounder of NeatReceipts the final word on challenges. Spero, whose Philadelphia-based company makes the Scanalizer digital receipts scanner, understands the relatively high turnover of the retail business but wishes the big box boys would do a better job at keeping their sales people up on the technical aspects of each product. “Most retailers have positioned themselves as real estate companies: They sell space, and that’s it. If they had more people who actually knew what they were selling, the sales would skyrocket,” said Spero, who often visits some of the big boxes that sells his products to test the sales reps. “Some guys actually make up crap about my product. Most of them don’t get it and it drives me crazy.”

And the Awards Go To …