State firm develops Fitbit-like device for cows

Cook learned skills for his startup from an entrepreneur development course at Fond du Lac's Emergent Technology Center. The 12-week session aims to help people bring their business ideas to fruition. Wisconsin often tracks near or at the bottom of state-by-state start-up rankings, but the center is working to change that.  Cook learned to develop back-end business planning steps to launch BoviSync. The software was largely completed when he enrolled in the course, but there are always more steps to starting a business than developing a good product, Cook said. He and his team had worked years on the software, so getting constructive feedback before launching was helpful, he said. "It's like building QuickBooks from scratch," Cook said. "You're not going to do it overnight."  Sitting at his kitchen table, Cook pulled up the BoviSync site on a Microsoft tablet. Through an array of graphs, he can see how much milk each cow produces over an extended period. The software allows nearby dairy farms to share their statistics (neighbor farms are rarely in direct competition) to compare if a production drop is isolated or a seasonal trend.