Software could track food, help prevent contamination scares

Former baseball prospect Tyson Hartshorn has switched from throwing 90-mph sinkers to pitching software his fledgling technology company has developed to help businesses track everything from tomatoes to thoroughbreds.

Hartshorn, 34, and partner Chris Valencia have spent the last year developing software for their Colorado Springs-based company, New Planet Technologies Inc., that would allow businesses to use wireless technology to automatically maintain electronic records tracking items ranging from agricultural products to patients at and pharmaceuticals used by veterinary practices.

Hartshorn said he hopes to market the New Planet's AgriSync software as a potential solution to tracking food contamination. The software, he said, could help eliminate such erroneous warnings as those from this summer that told consumers to avoid certain types of tomatoes thought to be contaminated with salmonella bacteria. The scare cost restaurants more than $100 million and may have cost tomato growers even more before the contamination was traced to jalapeño peppers.

"We want to be able to attach radio-frequency identification tags to the shipping container to give the items in that container an electronic pedigree or record of where it was grown, processed, stored and eventually put on the shelves for sale," Hartshorn said.

"Our software converts the data scanned from the tags so it can be sent through the Web to a database that organizations worldwide can update and share."

New Planet uses RFID tags produced by Celis Semiconductor Corp. They tags work with off-the-shelf RFID scanners and equipment made in Taiwan for New Planet that converts and sends the information from the scanner for use in an Internet database.

New Planet shares office space and a development lab in northern Colorado Springs with Celis, a small semiconductor firm that produces RFID tags used in printer cartridges.

The system will soon be used in a pilot program by a Culligan water distributor in Chicago. New Planet also hopes to integrate its system into a Canadian company's software package to track patients and pharmaceuticals for veterinary practices, Hartshorn said.

And New Planet is working with IBM Corp. to integrate its software with the computer and information technology giant's retail inventory tracking and database systems, he said.

Hartshorn said he and Valencia have spent $150,000 to get the company off the ground and added that they have been trying since summer to raise about $400,000 to meet the product development milestones in their agreement with IBM. The credit crisis and deteriorating U.S. economy have prompted the pair to switch from seeking investors to looking for strategic partners who will help the company fund its product development, Hartshorn said.

Both Hartshorn and Valencia previously worked as software developers in the Springs for semiconductor manufacturer LSI Logic Inc. They started New Planet nearly three years ago and became full-time employees a year ago. Hartshorn got his engineering degree at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs after spending several years in the Toronto Blue Jays' minor-league system after the team drafted him out of Lamar High School in 1993. His baseball career ended after elbow surgery in 1998.