This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and David Knight, President & CEO of Terbine. David is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, filmmaker, and experienced startup executive with a history of innovation and market development in many core technologies. In this episode, David talks about his involvement in the early days of digital entertainment, online storage, and the private space race. He also explains how his company, Terbine, is working to revolutionize the way data is exchanged and interacted with in everyday life.
This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and David Knight, President & CEO of Terbine, a data exchange for the physical world that has built a highly scalable system enabling wider use of data to inform and radically reshape many industries and everyday life.
David is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, filmmaker, and experienced startup executive with a history of innovation and market development. He has a background in core technologies, including multi-spectral sensing and communications, messaging, enterprise software and distributed systems. David has founded, co-founded and held leadership roles in tech companies with exits including two IPOs, two M&A buyouts, and two recession-triggered meltdowns. He now leads Terbine, a big data & AI startup.
In this episode, David talks about his journey from working on ham radios to being a pioneer in the early days of digital entertainment. He also discusses his involvement in the beginning of online storage, helping to launch the private space race, and dedicating himself to dealing with, analyzing, and processing the overwhelming amount of data that comes out of everyday life. David explains how all of this led to founding Terbine, and how the company has partnered with the City of Las Vegas to help propel the world to prosper through insight, communication, and emerging technologies.
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“They really want to make Vegas a place where they work on smart city technology and next generation communications. And, they're really investing in it, but more importantly, they're inviting startups and large companies to work together. And, so if you’re thinking of a city as a platform, which is not a normal way to look at a city, we are really trying to help the city itself become smart and also sustainable. You don't necessarily think of Las Vegas as a sustainable city, but if you think about it with things like the water shortage is coming up, it's a place that really needs to be sustainable.”
“The most interesting applications, which absolutely are going to be dependent on very rapid edge processing with low latency communications, are going to be in things that move. And, it could be a human moving. It could be commercial things. The first applications that we're actually looking at, and we will be doing very soon are in the commercial world.”
“What we're trying to do is say, look, we've already said, we're going to take the pulse of the earth, so now we're going to wire the physical environment into the digital twin and then collectively you can now navigate around it.”
“The more we can help the cities learn about the past, the present, and then extrapolate into the future, the better. So, it's not just the hedge funds that are going to make future bets. It'll be the cities themselves.”
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(02:45) Getting into technology
(03:30) Arc to current role
(05:55) Working with new computing technology
(02:43) Early days of email / Start of Click to Send
(08:30) XPrize Competition development and execution
(19:17) What is Terbine?
(21:10) Breaking apart the problem space
(22:10) Looking at issues in 3D
(25:15) Breaking down data silos
(26:10) Dealing with fear and greed
(27:06) Motto - ‘Take the pulse of the earth’
(29:30) There are sensors everywhere
(32:30) Mobile Edge Computing
(36:28) Processing data and storage
(41:48) Compression algorithms
(43:15) Sharing data
(44:40) Solving business and technology problems
(45:30) Tech Startups in Las Vegas
(49:30) Las Vegas Smart City Showcase
(52:00) Terbine and Las Vegas partnership
(53:30) Las Vegas as a privately funded smart city
(54:30) How Las Vegas conducts business
(56:30) Vegas loop
(57:30) Brightline rail from Las Vegas to California
(58:52) Uses for Terbine platform
(01:03:30) Using Drones
(01:05:30) Digital Twin implementation and uses
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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Connect with David on LinkedIn
[00:00:00] Matt Trifiro: Hi, this is Matt, host of Over the Edge, the only podcast focused on teaching you about edge computing, the grid and the future of the internet. On this show, I interview experts and practitioners with deep knowledge and expertise in digital infrastructure and the software and technologies that support it. We'll even throw in a little metaverse web three and cryptocurrency to keep it on trend.bJoin us each episode for a mind expanding romp through the vast technological and business landscape that is quickly defining our new digital worlds.
[00:00:29] Narrator 1: Hello and welcome to Over the Edge.
This episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and David Knight, President & CEO of Terbine. The company’s focus is as a data exchange for the physical world that has built a highly scalable system enabling wider use of data to inform and radically reshape many industries and everyday life.
David is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, filmmaker, and experienced startup executive with a history of innovation and market development. He has a background in core technologies, including multi-spectral sensing and communications, messaging, enterprise software and distributed systems. David has founded, co-founded and held leadership roles in tech companies with exits including two IPOs, two M&A buyouts, and two recession-triggered meltdowns. He now leads Terbine, a big data & AI startup.
In this episode, David talks about his journey from working on ham radios to being a pioneer in the early days of digital entertainment. He also discusses his involvement in the beginning of online storage, helping to launch the private space race, and dedicating himself to dealing with, analyzing, and processing the overwhelming amount of data that comes out of everyday life. David explains how all of this led to founding Terbine, and how the company has partnered with the City of Las Vegas to help propel the world to prosper through insight, communication, and emerging technologies.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsors…
[00:02:01] Narrator 2: Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting Dell.com for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
[00:02:21] Narrator 1: And now, please enjoy this interview between David Knight, President & CEO of Terbine, and your host, Matt Trifiro.
[00:02:28] Matt Trifiro: Hey David, how you doing today?
[00:02:30] David Knight: Doing great.
[00:02:32] Matt Trifiro: Um, terrific. I'm happy to have you on my show over the edge. So the way I like to get started is asking my guests, how you even got into
[00:02:40] David Knight: technology.
I got into technology and fairly early age, my grandfather was really into techie stuff and he introduced me to gadgets and building little electronic kits. I think about the age of six or seven. And it just kind of went radio, radio shack kits
[00:02:59] Matt Trifiro: with the Springs and the lead wires.
[00:03:02] David Knight: Yes. And of course, a lot of those were called night kits.
So I thought they were made just for me when I was little. That's awesome.
[00:03:10] Matt Trifiro: And so you've had a career in technology, I mean, did you study computer science? Did you study engineering? What was your arc into your current
[00:03:17] David Knight: role? You know, it started even earlier, I, [00:03:20] at about 12, I started getting into ham radio.
We had a neighbor, older gentlemen worked in the aerospace industry because I grew up in LA and at the time everybody was in the aerospace industry and he kind of fooled me into thinking, I wasn't taking the test to get my ham license and it turned out I was. And so I qualified. And then I started using the radio two-way radio to talk to people all over the world.
And it was really fun to actually build the radios or tweak the radios. And I also ended up with a stint in actual radio that sort of broadcasting. And that just kind of went from. I eventually I went to university to take applied physics. I kind of jumped out of there directly into a part of the entertainment industry in the very earliest days of digital.
So it was digital sound, digital pitcher. And I had the great fortune to be acquainted with people that were really working on those things at the leading edge, you know, almost early, early nineties, or was it earlier than that? Uh, it was earlier than that. It was definitely very pioneering days. We were working on things that other people hadn't seen or experienced yet.
And it was just amazing. So for example, we were taking the original master tapes of very, very well-known albums and we would write. Put them through some early exotic processing, which you can now do pretty much on your iPhone by the way. But at the time it took a wall of equipment and very expensive [00:05:00] rooms.
And we were able to remaster things like the Beatles albums and led Zeppelin and steely Dan and pink Floyd and stuff that had been only released before that on vinyl. And we brought it to the digital realm and it was just amazing and it was really privileged. But of course I was so young. I didn't realize that it was a privilege then just now when I look back, I said, man, that was awesome.
[00:05:26] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of things in your life have, have been like that. Have they? Sure
[00:05:31] David Knight: if I kind of roll the tape forward, as they say, I realized that we were basically working with computing technology in fairly new and at the time, again, these are exotic things to do with computers like digital signal processing.
And I realized that. I'm in computers. So I kind of stepped out of that realm, which was ostensibly what's become now how we just take for granted that everything's digital and went into straight up computing. And so there was a time when I worked for a variety of companies. This is all in Los Angeles area, which believe it or not was a big home detective.
Back in the day, the shift is Silicon valley, north of LA really took place during my lifetime. And pretty much hasn't looked back. So eventually I went to Silicon valley with a brief stint in Europe, in the middle of that, you know, I got to be involved with some really neat stuff, very early days of what they call interpersonal email.
That was where, you know, we had to convince companies that they needed this email thing. I know that sounds crazy, but you [00:06:40] always have to, I can
[00:06:41] Matt Trifiro: probably date that. That was probably 88, 87.
[00:06:44] David Knight: Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah. Somewhere around there. Yeah. Eventually I kinda skipped forward myself and some great co-founders.
We started this company called click to send and it was click to send.com and the point of the company was to allow you to sell, send large files over the internet. Now we totally take for granted, but it was really hard to do because of things like firewalls and. Pretty funny about it is it came from my email background where an email pretty quickly, it became so pervasive that it, administrators would start limiting how big an attachment you could send in an email, mostly because of the cost of the bandwidth and the storage in those days.
And so we kind of figure out how, how do you defeat those limits? And the answer was, we kind of fold the firewalls into thinking that we were doing what's called an HTTP put and just trust me, that's how your browser sends files commonly. Now, now everything we did at click to SIM was sort of the great grandfather of things like Dropbox.
And it's all very, very commonplace now, but those all kind of informed a lot of things I've worked on in the information technology space, but there was a big, big side trip after that we never got away from the physics. It was, I think probably never get away from the physics. Well, it's very interesting in a sense of serendipity, I ended up running into a very interesting guy called Dr.
Peter Diamandis and he had he and some other [00:08:20] great guys and gals had created single the X prize and singularity university. Right. Is that right? Well, that's separate, they started singularity after the original X prize, but it's mostly the same people. Uh, those
[00:08:36] Matt Trifiro: who don't know the X prize. W what was that?
[00:08:39] David Knight: So the X prize was really the first. Well-publicized price competition for the development of technology. So we, the X prize foundation offered a $10 million prize, which is a lot of money. And the prize was for the first person or group who could build a spaceship and get in it and go to space. And it couldn't be a robot had to be you or somebody convinced well space, the border of space.
There really isn't one, by the way. And I know in the last year or so you had this big debate between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Richard Branson. What's the border of space. Well, this goes back to the X prize. So we had to set a limit, a lower limit and say, you have to exceed this line. And the line basically was a hundred kilometers above the earth surface.
And he couldn't cheat and launch from Mount Everest. You had to do it from something more or less like sea level. We had a lot of rules because it was $10 million at stake. Yeah. The fun part was I went to a lecture at Caltech that was held on a Saturday and Dr. Diamandis was there and a whole bunch of people talking about this idea of private space flight.
Like we're going to have [00:10:00] private spacecraft and you're going to be able to go. And I was just so blown away by that, that I kind of chased down. Dr. D Amanda is after. And the next thing you know, we're Larry flying on a plane and we ended up meeting up with Charles Lindbergh's, grandson, Eric Lindbergh, and some other people who had become involved with the X prize.
By the way, did you know that Charles Lindbergh being the first person to solo flight across the Atlantic, he was trying to win a prize called the Orteig prize, which in today's dollars would calculate to roughly $4 million. And that actually, and the amount even inspired the X prize. But I have to tell you the fun part of the story, the X and X prize.
Originally, a lot of big companies were approached. And I started getting involved with that myself because I ended up joining Peter de Mondelez and the others and trying to make this thing happen. And the, a X was just a placeholder, like X the variable. So we, they went well way before me, even they went to people like red bull and sponsor X was for the sponsor trying to get a sponsor.
So it could have been the red bull prize. It could have been the, I dunno, the Coca-Cola prize or the general motors prize, but. It turns out that very few companies would dare want their name on something that could blow up. So they were really worried about that, having their name associated with something that could blow up.
And so I know that sounds kind of funny, but that, that was their concern. So even red bull, even, you know, Virgin who were very daring in their sponsorships, wouldn't go for it. Well, [00:11:40] eventually this really cool family called the Ansaris, um, came along and they had made a lot of money in the telephone industry or telecoms industry.
The in saris invented the first and I'm going to probably get this wrong, but there's lots of stuff on Wikipedia about them. The Ansaris developed the first bridge device that would link the old world of telephony called pots, plain old telephone service, which is really the term they use copper lines.
Bridged it to the world of internet protocols, TCP IP, and they did this. They were based in Texas. They actually. Ended up selling their company for quite a lot of money to a bigger company that eventually got acquired by a bigger company called Sonus networks. And they really had a lot to do with why so much of phone calls now go over TCP IP, even if you don't know that's what's happening.
So they suddenly had a lot of money and a new HSA and sorry, who's really the inventor of the group. She really, really wanted to be an astronaut, but she was born in Iran. And in those days, as she said, she had the wrong passport to be a cosmonaut or an astronaut. And so she says, but now I'm a woman of means.
So I'm going to buy a ticket to space. Uh, she eventually did go to the international space station, which is so cool. She's, she's an awesome person. So she threw a whole bunch of money into the X prize. Literally made it take off. And because of that, I made a lot of friends and, you know, I've got a lot of amazing experiences with, what's [00:13:20] now taken for granted as a private space flight industry.
Yeah.
[00:13:24] Matt Trifiro: D did someone win the X prize? Did somebody go with a 100 kilometers?
[00:13:29] David Knight: They did. In fact, they went past it, uh, just like Branson. And so what was really interesting is that there were teams from all over the world, like Romania and Japan, trying to build spaceships in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
There was one insane one where they drop it from a giant balloon and then launch it from while it was falling, which is how Virgin galactic and Virgin orbit work. But it, it, it was a lot more radical to use in a balloon. The team that one happened to be in Southern California led by a very visionary designer of aircraft named Burt Rutan, Burt written it designed to ship that his brother had flown around the world nonstop and now hangs in the Smithsonian.
And Paul Allen co-founder of Microsoft had put up all the money for him to develop the world's first privately built spaceship. And, uh, so they won the prize and we joked a lot that giving $10 million to Paul Allen was around an error and he probably dropped the check on his way back to his aircraft and that he ended up funding.
Another huge airplane called the straddle launcher. That's exists. It's now out at the Mojave Aaron spaceport. So there's a lot of really neat things that came out of that. So yeah, the prize was won. And while we were there, when the prize was won, Richard Branson was there. And cause he was a friend of her tan.
He had flown around the world in a hot air balloon by the way, a Branson. So he said something to the effect of I'd [00:15:00] fancy making a company out of this. And that led to what is now Virgin galactic, which takes people on suborbital flights that took 17 years. You can see that it took that long to finally launch some humans, including him.
And then they created a sort of a spin out from it called Virgin orbit. And that's a very serious operation that uses a 7 47 to drop a huge rocket off of its wing. And then that boosts up into space and put satellites in low-earth orbit. So there's been a lot of offshoots, I think for completeness, everybody asks, what about space X?
Well, it turns out that right around that time. After his successful sale of PayPal to eBay, Elon Musk, besides taking over a fledgling company called Tesla, he founded space exploration technologies, and they shortened it to space X. Just so people with the placeholder, it's going to be X nine minutes.
Yeah, you're right though. It's funny. So space X and we went there, we went to visit them when they were just in this big warehouse in Elsa Gundo and he came out to see these launches in the Mojave desert. He did not compete though. He was going to orbit and he all that time, all that time, going back to 2004, he wanted to go to Mars.
He would talk about that stuff. You know, now he's very open about it, but at the time he was kind of quiet because he didn't have any credibility in the space fairing world, because he was this guy made a penny in PayPal and zip to before that, and. [00:16:40] Once he finally had his rockets go to orbit and eventually connect to the space station.
Then he obviously had his chops and they have incredible technology at space X, and they're just going, going, going. So I decided not to go into that, believe it or not. I thought about it. Flirted with it could have joined. One of those companies could have started a company could have started a satellite company, but eventually kind of roll the calendar forward quite a bit.
I decided that I would do something completely unrelated to space venturing. That's
[00:17:13] Matt Trifiro: awesome. And, and before we go from the edge of space to the edge of the internet, I do want to encourage people to look at the show notes because you have an incredibly interesting history in between there, including making a movie about the space shuttle, being relocated after its final voyage, which encouraged people to watch because it's a great movie and there's some great news clips that are there as well.
So the edge of the internet. So turbine turbine is the company that you co-founded. What do you, what does turbine.
[00:17:39] David Knight: So turbine is really trying to answer a suite of questions that people aren't really asking that much right now, but we knew they would. And sort of the creation story is that over five years ago, some of us were kind of thinking, all right, what's our next venture going to be?
And I've been involved with companies that co-founded one that went public. I've been involved with companies that got bought, but of all the companies that fizzled and the big economic downturns, I've had all the food groups of the company. And we didn't really have an idea. We had a lot of ideas for what company we might do, and that even included, Hey, let's put in a synthetic aperture radar [00:18:20] satellites into lower earth orbit and things like that, or communications, which pretty much is what Starlink from from a space is.
And we saw that all those kinds of ideas where somebody was going to do them and say, well, we don't want to do what other people are doing. And we want to do something interesting. That's unique. Well, we started to look at. Way out like five, 10 years, which in tech world is a lifetime. Right? And I said, well, you know, what people aren't doing is they're not realizing that eventually the amount of data being generated and consumed by machines.
And I mean, everything from a subcutaneous glucose monitor all the way up to a container ship, anything that's a device that is everything's becoming smart and connected, and we need to start looking at the data part and realizing that the volume and velocity of that data would eventually vastly overwhelm the kind of a status quo idea that, you know, it ended up on, uh, on your screen or the screen in your hand.
And that eventually the self-driving car might need to talk to the drone or something like that. So we really started breaking apart the problem space and saying, well, what would the future look like? And we realized that. Everything that, you know, you would kind of pull under this umbrella called the IOT internet of things, which is a very commonly used term.
Now that the IOT wasn't an internet of things. It literally is not right now, an internet of things. It's an internet of silos and it's just a bunch of everybody collects their data and they hold onto it [00:20:00] and they don't let it out. And especially commercial ventures, there's an incredible lack of open source IOT data, believe it or not.
So we really started looking into it very deeply in three-dimensionally. And then we had the fourth dimension being time. I know physics. And we said, well, what is way out there measured in years that is going to stop all this and really expanding exponentially. And we realized that you had to do with the phone companies did when they went from analog to digital.
Like what the in saris we're working on as a matter of fact. So we, we said, well, it's not just protocol stacks and things like that. It's gotta be the things they solved. into the digital realm. What are those things? Well, they assume that deregulation was happening back then when they did this with phones and you would, and then the mobile idea that things could move around was new once.
And they realized that there's all this stuff that nobody wants to talk about, but you have to solve, you have to solve it for everybody. And that's things like, well, who does what to whom and what circumstances. Like if my phone call goes across the country, around the world, how many phone carriers does it have to switch through?
And who worries about that? Who decides which ones get it and who does the terrifying cause they all want to get paid and are there taxes? Are there regulatory compliance issues or their quality of service issues and all this boring stuff, but when you really add it all together, it's what makes the world phone network operate today.
And you'll also notice [00:21:40] it's been incredibly reliable. I mean, I, I can't think of the last time a phone call drop because of a fault in the network. It's all, it's almost though as a fault in the radio signal when you lose a phone call. So with that, all being said, now we're looking at the internet of things.
There's no humans dealing with this stuff. And so we just started kind of chipping away at the problem. Chipping away is probably not as good as an analogy is whack-a-mole just whack them only in problem after problem. And in the end that which was originally called the turbine project, we decided would be just a company in call it turbine.
And now we've built this pretty complex platform that knows who can do what to whom under what circumstances, where the whom might be an artificial intelligence. And it will. The drone get data from the car, but drones and cars belong to somebody, a person, a corporation, a government agency, somewhere in the world.
So we did have to kind of bound all those issues so that the owner of the drone is happy about this and lets that happen to the benefit of everybody involved in the transaction. And we definitely had to worry about how do you monetize the data and just a whole bunch of issues. But we've been working on this for a while and now we've hopefully solved.
I'd say probably 80, 90% of the issues. So it's it's now, now we're bringing it out to the world because it's it's ready. So
[00:23:10] Matt Trifiro: turbine is a platform that will consume sensor data, IOT data from someone who owns those sensors probably, or at least owns the [00:23:20] data output from them. You will process it, normalize it, obfuscate it, where you need to wrap security around it.
Identify. Who's allowed to use it and not based on the person who created the data. So for example, if I'm the city of Las Vegas and I want the autonomous car people to have access to the, the traffic sensor information, I only want the people authorized to have access to it. And I may want to meet to wipe some personally identifiable data from it.
Am I essentially getting that right? And then you have to like, who gets paid and how and where those monies flow. And then you can do you consummate the transaction as well. You actually make the, the
[00:23:57] David Knight: money flow. Well, actually your descriptions. Perfect. And you know, and there's more behind the scenes.
There are a lot of issues, especially. Transactions go across borders and a border. It could be from a city to a county. It could be state to state, could be country to country, could be ground to space and all of the satellites. So we did have to kind of, like I said, whack-a-mole a lot of those issues, but in essence, yeah.
It's w I CA I call it kind of a brain or the data from things and breaking down the silos, but in a way, people are happy about, and part of the way you make them happy is you tell them they can make money from the data. And everybody goes, oh, it's
[00:24:40] Matt Trifiro: not so bad that somebody
[00:24:41] David Knight: has it. If you're paying me, we kind of joke about it, but it's, we're kind of dealing with fear and greed, right?
So fear is, oh, no, I don't want my data to spilling around on the ground, out there. Especially specially people like car companies, especially worried about that. If you're going to pick a sector and. At the same [00:25:00] time greed is, oh, I could make money from it. Sure. So, but it's, it's never that simple, the fear and the greed kind of bounces back and forth.
So it reminds me of a scene in animal house where the guy's got the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other shoulder. And I think if you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about and I will not repeat it. What happens next? Not because it's a spoiler, but because it may not be appropriate for all ages, this a family safe save podcasts, but animal house is awesome.
So what we've been doing is that's kind of like trying to eat the world one, one bite at a time. We also have a, what I would definitely call a grandiose motto for the company. The motto is take the pulse of the earth. The reason we chose that is we mean that literally. So I'm a scifi geek. If you haven't figured it out and.
I used to be as fascinated that they pull the Starship enterprise up to a planet and Picard would say, number one, tell me about this planet. And, you know, he would say tricorder or whatever. Yeah. There are type on the console, which had no real buttons, but nevermind that. And he would say, well, captain given the constituency of the atmosphere and the bipedal organisms moving around, and the fact that they have sub flight, transportation and air quality and radio missions, it's kind of like earth in the late 20th century.
And then they'd go down to San Francisco and have an episode there. But, um, which was, you know, a plot device. Can I use
[00:26:32] Matt Trifiro: truth? Because it, it, you have to have, you have to have a warp drive, right. In order to reveal that you're actually
[00:26:37] David Knight: using yes. And the Vulcans show up. And it's really a [00:26:40] big diplomatic issue.
But what's funny is I really thought about it. And I said, they're taking the pulse of the earth from the Starship enterprise. That's what they're doing. However, We can do that. That exists. It's just not all in one big, incredible Starship, but it does exist. There are sensors everywhere, but they just belong to so many different entities and organizations.
So, you know, and if you look at things like climate change, if you'd really get all that data going on, like all the carbon data and all that, I would probably be pretty helpful, but it's not in one system. And so we started to think about how could we literally take the pulse of the earth? Well, you've got to start somewhere and we decided we would focus on what I call the intersection of three, normally distinct sectors.
One is mobile. So mobility is kind of the new fangled name for what I used to call transportation, but that term was kind of, you know, used in different realms, but now it's been hijacked and applied to transportation pretty generally. So when you look at mobility and includes everything from these hourly rental scooters that you find in a lot of cities, it includes trains, planes, and automobiles, and it includes generally really cool new stuff.
We are literally about to have flying taxis. We are going to have delivery drones. That stuff is being incredibly well-funded with many, many players, Boeing and people like that are working on flying taxis and a whole bunch of really cool startups. They have names like Archer and Joby and kitty Hawk are working on.
Flying taxis. So they're not going to roll on the ground like a car. They're not flying cars, they're [00:28:20] flying taxis. If you see the difference, it'll be sitting there someplace like a landing pad and you go get in it. A United airlines just ordered a thousand air taxis that we'll be able to take you from an airport where you get off the big United plane out to your neighborhood.
If you live in the suburbs or downtown in a city, that is actually a thing. So these really cool technologies are coming along, you know, at pun intended warp speed. So when we looked at all of that, we said, it's not going to be enough to solve all those issues. We were talking about a minute ago with legal stuff and who does what to whom and monetization.
It also has to be distributed. And so the intelligence that makes all this work has to be out in the network itself like near where the flying taxi is or near where the augmented reality glasses are on somebody's face. The more, we looked at it, we realized we had to get really hip about telco technology.
And that led us to what is now called mobile edge computing. And so we turbine, it was almost a, a diversion for awhile where we had to really think about our software architecture. And could you make that run in potentially millions of places, not one big giant cloud center. And we also realized that the way cloud computing has kind of evolved it's, it's ironic that the internet was originally this decentralized thing.
And then, and then it
[00:29:51] Matt Trifiro: became centralized because of economies of scale. And now we're decentralizing it
[00:29:54] David Knight: again. Yeah. It's funny. Well, don't get me started on how cryptocurrency has evolved or [00:30:00] devolved, but when you look at all of this, you realize that to get the speed you need, you know, to have real time communications.
And then there's something that gets processed. Not in the device. Right. And then it has to be beamed to maybe somebody else's device, which means there's a whole transaction that has to go on and you really need to do it at the edge. And of course, by edge, I'm referring to the idea that the bandwidth and processing are all handled locally, usually in association with one or more cell towers.
Which are the cell towers that those devices are communicating through. So when you start to talk about things that are really coming at us rapidly, like autonomous cars, autonomous flying machines, especially really next generation devices like augmented reality glasses, you know, those are really coming.
Uh, there's even a company working on augmented reality contact lenses, like the ones Tom cruise wore in mission impossible. Somebody's actually working on those. So it's, there's so much stuff in the realms of displays and interactivity. And you realize that a lot of these things, we we're all familiar with what that might look like as we go forward.
If you've ever played a modern video game, you have these first person shooter games. And as you go down the corridor and you're looking around the corner for the creatures or whatever, or maybe a driving game everything's happening really, really fast. If you look at it for the last couple of decades, the gaming world, it's all been about speed, right?
It's like, you know, don't have the latest PS PlayStation or the latest ripped [00:31:40] up gamer machine and they'll have the highest possible bandwidth to my, my box or my home computer that's because it actually helps your competitive advantage to have more performance. So now take that out into the real world.
Then you've got to be able to do the processing as close to the point of. Data generation and consumption as possible. So we've, we've really architected to work in that environment in the edge computing environment. There's
[00:32:08] Matt Trifiro: two camps that I've noticed emerged. And I'm curious on your point of view on this.
So everybody agrees there is going to be a daily use of data, petabytes zettabytes of data generate because like probably the most common sensor is going to be a 4k or an AK camera. Right? I mean, that, that is a lot of data. So there, there seems to be two schools of thought, one school of thought is a process that as close as you can throw most of it out, just, just spit up the anomalies and the, and, and what you need, that the historical data, it's not going to be that useful.
You're never going to take the time to go back and analyze it, yada, yada, yada. And it's very expensive to store and even more expensive to move around. Okay. So that's, that's one camp and I think there's a, there's a lot of truth to that. And then I think what you're doing seems to me to depend to some degree on storing and transmitting the data around.
And so I'm curious how you, you look at those two, those two elements that, that are sort of pulling and pushing against each
[00:33:14] David Knight: other. So I'll give you what I'll call a two-part answer to that, those issues. One [00:33:20] in the case of once it's done, you're done with the data, another fun movie reference. If you remember the original movie about the Cannonball race called the gumball rally, it was this really cheesy movie made it in the seventies.
So there's a great scene where this guy comes over to the U S to race across the U S you know, and get pulled over by a lot of cops. And he's in a Ferrari Daytona spider, like a 1971 Ferrari Daytona spider, which by the way, at auction is worth like $6 million. But they crashed one because it was a new car back then.
Anyway, this guy, he's got the scarf and the gloves and the hat, and he's such an Italian driver, and he's got his beautiful companion with him in the right seat because it's configured for left-hand drive. Cause it is a European car. So he grabs the rear view mirror on the Ferrari and breaks it off the windshield.
And he throws it out of the back of the convertible. And he says, first rule of Italian driving, what this behind you does not matter. And by the way, that rear view mirror is probably worth 2000 bucks. Jay Leno's probably got one. So anyway, so what is behind you doesn't matter is kind of what you're talking about, where people would say, well, you know, once I'm done with the data, I don't need the data, throw it away.
This is also how a lot of security systems work by the way they, they loop hours or 24 or 48 hours. And because of the cost of storing all of it or the bandwidth to send it to where it's longterm stored, they just throw it away. They said, well, who cares? But just like. In the security world, the way this IOT data, the way the use cases are evolving.
Somebody may come along [00:35:00] later and need the archive data for forensic reasons. So obviously in security cameras, that would be like the police departments looking for the bad guy that might've gone in case to join. If you look two days ago, but when you're talking about IOT data, there are many, many use cases that would be very helped by having the older IOT data.
So in the world of our. System turbine, we call old. Data's pretty much anything more than a few seconds old. And anything beyond that, even if it's 10 years old is just archival data. We also had to, by the way, make it so that you can treat that the same as real time data. Because usually the thing asking the question is the same format, same format, same API, same everything, same metadata.
So it turns out that you do want to store it, but you're right. It's a staggering amount of data. So one thing we've been working on and I, I use a, a perversion of a well-known mathematics term called the Pareto analysis, P a R E T O. So Parado expressed in sort of regular terms is what we call the 80 20 rule that 80% of the time, 20% of the possible solution.
We'll solve the issue. Uh, the 70% solution is also an expression of Parado. So we have a thing we glibly call the flying Parado analysis. And what that means is constantly looking at data and trying to decide, do you need to keep that or not? It's a very tough question to answer because you're answering it all the time for [00:36:40] potentially millions or even billions of sources, but it's something that has to be solved.
Yeah. And to
[00:36:45] Matt Trifiro: some extent, I mean, that's, that's what, at a very simple level, what compression algorithms do they look for? Strings of redundancy that they can eliminate from, from the cycle, but it sounds like Seagate and Western digital are going to be good friends of yours.
[00:36:59] David Knight: You know, it's interesting when we did click this end, it was really the first serious attempt at online file transfer and storage.
And this is oh, in storage. So the way the end of the nineties. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you exactly about 20 terabytes. Way over a million dollars back then, and now you can go to Amazon and get 20 terabytes for, I don't know, like 500 bucks or something, so it's come a long way. But what was funny back then is I realized we could never, ever scale the business with what storage costs.
And so I went to this company, which was the biggest company in storage for big companies and government agencies called EMC EMC then got bought by Dell. But at the time it was a standalone company in Massachusetts. I somehow got in front of the CEO and explaining this weird internet thing, this wacky thing we were trying to do, but he realized that he was really visionary guy.
And he realized that you're kind of talking about where this is all going. And a lot of time with them, I ended up, I literally ended up like a poster child that was in some of their commercials that they'd show at trade shows and golf tournaments. It was, it was amazing ride, but they gave me. Uh, I shouldn't say it's quite free, but we got a lot of storage from them.
They were able to use it as a showcase. There's something like [00:38:20] that going on with us right now, uh, turbine. And, uh, it's it's but now it's the cloud. So you can get through the usual suspects are well,
[00:38:30] Matt Trifiro: in that case, the cloud's got to be right next to you though, at least for non
[00:38:33] David Knight: archival stuff. Okay. Right.
So, you know, as things move forward, of course the cloud people are extending to the edge and it's all becoming a big happy network. In theory, we still, the one thing, if you really want to bring it all down to a very straightforward set of terms, I think what we're going to solve, meaning turbine and a whole bunch of collaborative partners is that now I'm going to talk about that issue.
That's still not here yet. That I've mentioned way back at the beginning. The issue is what happens when you have lots of different actors. All needing to share data. So it's car companies, sharing data with drone companies, sharing data with the augmented reality people with, I don't know, insurance companies and whether people and maybe hedge funds and who knows, you know, first responders probably probably hedge funds and insurance companies, and it goes on and on.
And so the way that a lot of these things have been architected so far is still kind of, I hate to say it, but archaic they're, they're very monolithic. When you talk to tacos and cloud companies, they're all building stuff for the edge, but they all talk like about the watch your application. And it's very monolithic, meaning there's like a customer who has an application.
And if there's more than one application, it still belongs to the customer. And that's cool. But it's not [00:40:00] scalable. So what if there's a company that's generating X data company B would love to get their hands on that data, but it's totally siloed. It's just now the silos kind of spread out. So we realized that we have to really break down.
The technology part is actually fairly straightforward. It's really a lot of you say you've solved them.
[00:40:22] Matt Trifiro: You're solving a business problem as much
[00:40:23] David Knight: as solving a business problem. Yeah. So there's a lot of evangelism we're really getting into kind of get out there and explain it. Now I will tell you, we've been chipping away at this for awhile and you mentioned Las Vegas.
So we realized that we needed to find a way to kind of create this tent pole pilot, where you show off all this technology at once, including lots and lots of players and getting the players to participate in kind of play well in the sandbox together before we. Focus on the monetization, even though that's all there, but that's not even kind of switched on at this point, we decided way back in way back in the time in the BC era, which means before COVID now.
So BC COVID. So in 2018, we looked at our situation and our, and as a company and we're fledgling startup, we'd raised some angel money. We were in downtown San Francisco. Awesome place to be, but awesomely expensive and crowded, awesomely expensive. So we realized that now's the time to move [00:41:40] the company. We didn't want to move.
Once you get big, it's hard to move like Palentier moving out of the bay area. Crazy thing to do and, or Hewlett Packard, the seed of Hewlett Packard. We said, why don't we do it now, before we start having to tow a bunch of people with us that aren't going to easily dislodge. So we moved after looking all over the country and even at Toronto, where they're doing a lot of AI work, we ended up in Las Vegas, Nevada, and you say, why Las Vegas, they really want to attract startups.
And in particular tech startups got
[00:42:12] Matt Trifiro: it. You were in Las Vegas too. So we, we totally know the, what they're doing there.
[00:42:17] David Knight: And everybody assumes it's because of the lack of corporate and personal income tax, which we notice that it's a good thing, but that's, that's not even a number. That's like number five, but we decided that Las Vegas, which is a population over 2 million people, that's a pretty healthy in the United States terms.
It's a healthy mid-sized city that wouldn't fit in China, but it's, it's, it's healthy for the U S we also knew that no matter where you go in the whole planet, they've heard of Las Vegas. What's funny is they probably have a lot of different ideas of what Vegas means. And they've got from coming there, watching it on TV or movies, but it doesn't really matter.
As long as the it's a brand, Vegas is a brand. So I came and met with a lot of the really great people that run the town. I've met the mayor, I've met the city. A lot of the city council I've sat down with the city council members. Sometimes we developed a terrific relationship with the big university here.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas has about 30,000 students and they're highly rated in the research community. Believe it or not. [00:43:20] And we also realized that they really want to make Vegas a place where they work on smart city technology and next generation communications. And they're really investing in it.
But more importantly though. They're inviting in startups and large companies to kind of work together. And so if he's thinking of a city as a platform, which is not a normal way to look at a city, we're really trying to help the city itself becomes smart and, and also sustainable. And you don't think of Las Vegas as a sustainable city, but if you think about it with things like water shortage is coming up, it's a place that really needs to be sustainable.
Yeah. They've got challenges
[00:43:59] Matt Trifiro: around crime and water supply and population growth and commuting and transportation and stuff, but they, they also have another challenge which became very cute during COVID, which is they needed to diversify their economic base away from hospitality and conventions, which is, which is, I think if you build a smart city as a platform, that's a very attractive reason for potentially relocating your business in Las Vegas, which you've been a pioneer there.
[00:44:25] David Knight: Yeah. That's very interesting. I mean, Turned out to be really good. We moved here pretty much just in time for COVID. And we said, oh no, I should've moved to Fiji. I could just work from the beach. But biggest was a beach once a hundred million years ago. Right? So we decided to not just be in Las Vegas, we looked around and said, Vegas is our front yard.
Why don't we go out into the front yard, work with the city and help. And that became a smart city showcase and pilot. And what's really cool about it is a [00:45:00] lot of very large companies, but a bunch of startups are all involved and of course, vapor.io is involved. We also have a really neat new autonomous vehicle company called halo.car and another one called Innova.
We also have whole bunch of fascinating applications, everything from traffic to air quality, to water management and over the next time interval. And I don't know how long it is, but. Probably not just months more and more and more gets added to the platform. And I mean, the city is the platform it's made of a bunch of sub systems, turbine being one of them, and everybody is kind of contributing their stuff and it's really been amazing, but I can't tell you how awesome it is to have a city that really, really wants to work with the technology industry and even foster it as much as possible of it to exist in Vegas.
They've been opening incubators. They they're really going big. What I think I'll tell you, having spent a lot of my life and my adult life in California is things that happen in Vegas. They don't stay in Vegas by the way. They're all on Instagram. They literally in what seems like seconds can approve things.
It's unbelievable. Like you, if you come with a good idea, And they don't just randomly say yes, they, they take it apart. They want to really analyze what it is and what are you trying to accomplish and who are you? And, but once they say, yes, you're going, and having spent a lot of time in places like Switzerland, and we didn't go into all that, but I've lived in Europe.
And [00:46:40] we, the sensibility in Vegas is, is very, it's almost Swiss, which is kind of how a lot of the Midwest operates. You know, if you, if you have a deal, you got a deal. There's no fishing around. It's like, no, you've got a deal and you can go with it. So if they say you're on. Go, you're on. And we've built a version of turbine that is designed to run at the edge.
We are now working on all that. We've already installed a little bit of it, and what's fascinating is we've even installed our code on servers that belong to the city. Cut it approve. You could do that. And what's really neat is they don't just say yes, they help you. And I just can't say enough about it.
So we're using this whole thing is a gigantic chemistry experiment. Or as I said, sandbox for. Trying things like the drone data goes to the car or something because we can, as a nice layer of that Nevada or Las Vegas is located, happens to be one of the few states that the FAA is anointed for the testing of unmanned aerial vehicles that could carry humans, or they could carry medical supplies and whatever.
Yeah. But the fact that seven states have been given that designation and Nevada's got a lot of open space. So the next thing will be to add the aerial components to this right now, we're really focusing a lot on the land. And so we're not getting to the satellites or the drones, but that's all, it's all going to happen.
[00:48:14] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. Well, one of the things that is happening in Las Vegas that I've observed because of the way the city I think has [00:48:20] approached these innovators that other cities should model Las Vegas is building a smart city and it's almost entirely privately.
[00:48:28] David Knight: Yes. So
[00:48:28] Matt Trifiro: the public private partnership is we'll approve the permits.
We'll support you. We'll help you get stuff done. We'll make introductions. You got to pay for it, which is, which is really sensible because we talk about sustainability, having a, engaging the capitalist profit motive in a way that benefits the region and the people and the businesses.
[00:48:47] David Knight: Yeah. And that, that pervades the way that Vegas conducts business pervades far more than what's happening now with us or tech.
If you think about transportation, it's sort of a joint public private partnership, which they also do that with Elon Musk's company called the boring company, which like half of the things that Elon does, the name started as a joke. And now it's like insane mode or ludicrous mode or plaid mode on the Tesla.
You know, they're all from movies, Spaceballs. So the city of Las Vegas has, and the county, the Clark county have been working with Elon Musk's company called the boring company. And they've been drilling tunnels underneath Las Vegas that are designed to have autonomous electric vehicles to shuttle people around.
So incredibly quickly approved, probably I would say that some amount of Ilan star power, I will use the pun bore on that decision, but it's really amazing how fast they approved it and he built it. So now there's tunnels that go under the new extension of the convention center and the [00:50:00] old convention center.
It's about a mile in each direction and it loops back and forth is not a. By the way, it's not that technology it's, but it is called the Vegas loop. So the Vegas loop are electric vehicles in tunnels that shuttle you around. And right now they're driven by humans. It's sort of like Uber in a tunnel.
Actually, when I went in it, it really reminded me of Uber in a tunnel, but once they get it all cranked up, it'll be these high capacity, autonomous shuttles, silent. There's no fumes there. They're awesome. Right. And they're now going from three stations to, I believe 54. So, you know, in Vegas goes, they go big, right?
They're like, well, this. Let's let's go from three to 54. So all the hotels, eventually the football stadium downtown, and eventually even the airport, we'll all be on this network of electric vehicles running around under the streets. And again, that's a public private partnership. There's another thing going on, which is after probably four decades of people talking about it, a private company called bright line is building a high speed rail system to go from Vegas to Southern California.
And it's actually starting to happen, which everybody's amazed, you know, and there's also how fast they built this beautiful new football stadium and got the Raiders to leave Oakland and come to it. And they built the, also a public private partnership. They built the hockey stadium and. Got the NHL to let them set up their own franchise team.
I believe soccer and baseball are next. So there's, there's sort of a, a [00:51:40] way and modus operandi that the area has been in Vegas that really allows private companies. If they do need to work with a government or get funding from the government, it usually is a collaborative thing. But as you say, a lot of it's just funded privately and men, the execution speed, the government, they really let things happen.
They keep track of it. It's all done quite intelligently, but man, the speed is awesome. Yeah, that's
[00:52:08] Matt Trifiro: incredible. So, so two last things that I want to touch on because they're really important to what's happening in Las Vegas and to what turbine is doing. So let's imagine that. Where you've assembled all these data sources and you've got the new agree to allow them to pass through your system and to be used by other people.
What are some of the uses of it? Walk us through some scenarios of how different pieces of data that may already exist today that are completely under utilized, how they could be utilized in a pretty straight forward manner. I imagine with the turbine platform,
[00:52:40] David Knight: great question. And I would argue that's the question.
And we think that this will quote explode in a good way, in the same sense that we went from a very poorly set up way to run applications on phones, to the app store for apple and the play store for Android, where you solve so many of. Large and small issues that it just made it easy for applications to show up.
So assuming we accomplish all of that, I think the most interesting applications, which absolutely are going to be dependent on very rapid edge processing with low latency communications are going to be in things that move. And it [00:53:20] could be a human moving. It could be a commercial things. The first applications that we're actually looking at, and we will be doing very soon are in the commercial world.
So they have to do with logistics. So. Each car company, and I'm going to include the trucks and the vans and the all that stuff. They are rapidly becoming smart and connected. People might be shocked to realize that very few cars actually have their own data transceiver on board. But it's amazing that that hasn't been a thing.
If you've been in a Tesla, it's like a spacecraft where high speed two-way communications that can update the functions of the car while it's moving. Actually I think you have to be in park to update the applications, but the data's moving around really fast. So now we'll have 5g that allows multiple applications to run at the same time and edge computing.
And then all of a sudden you can have multiple vehicle manufacturers, products, meaning trucks, and vans talking through the system to other trucks and vans not made by the same company. So just that one thing is huge.
[00:54:30] Matt Trifiro: How does that benefit? Those who operate our
[00:54:33] David Knight: own or, yeah, I'll give you a very, and this is absolutely a pun when you hear what it is a concrete example.
So modern vehicles, and we're pretty much talking about electric vehicles going forward, right? There was probably a pun in that statement too. So electric vehicles, what you have is all this neat stuff. You have a suspension that's controlled by active suspension processing. You have any long breaks. You have all that kind of stuff.[00:55:00]
Most vehicles actually believe it or not sample the ambient air temperature and barometric pressure for various reasons in a, in an internal combustion, it's for calculating fuel mixtures, but they kind of carry that forward into the world. So you can worry about heating or cooling the battery packs and stuff that you don't have to worry about that stuff.
So now you've got a rolling package of sensors. You're talking about anywhere from 50 to 300 sensor outputs on a modern vehicle. So now vehicles are running around. They're kind of like very low flying satellites and they're picking up like every pothole in the road or roads that antilock brakes and the traction control go off when they shouldn't, because we're reading the air temperature and saying, it's not that cold, but the wheels are slipping.
There must be something spilled on the road right there. And this is the vehicles doing the talking. Unfortunately, a lot of people think you're just going to get all this from weighs or something and go, well, no, because that phone is in the comfortable, safe interior of the vehicle. It doesn't know what's happening outside the vehicle.
And so the vehicle knows. And so also all the new tires from Michelin and continental and Goodyear, they literally have sensors in them. Most people don't know that, but they have sensors that you can get that data. And so if you're now collecting data from a whole. Consumer vehicles even then rapidly pool that data over to the delivery track.
That's about to come around the corner and it might say, Hey, you need to go over there. Don't go over there because a condition happened like five seconds ago. That changed it. Same with a flying drone. I've [00:56:40] mentioned that a lot, but drones are coming. The, you can only put so many sensors in so many, so much processing on a drone because the drone has what they call a weight budget.
And it's pretty much dedicated to the motor, the batteries and the payload. So sensors, aren't really a big part of the budget. So if you can use the sensors from the external world to say, you know, if you go around this corner, that the drone can't see a, and you're going 30 miles an hour, you know what a truck just stopped in the middle of the street or who knows a crane is there.
And these things sometimes happen. Warp speed that you need to process them like right now. And also, especially we learned a lot talking to the city, the chief innovation officer of Las Vegas, who's named Michael Sherwood, really amazing guy. He has been involved with things like law enforcement and his career, and he says, there's all these awesome public safety and security applications that'll come when you can really build on these platforms.
Now on the money money side, you mentioned, you know, the hedge funds. Um, certainly the more you know, about what what's happening in the world of logistics, you can do better bets as a hedge fund does on what's happening with commerce. And you can go all the way down to a microscopic level, like how many people are in that Walmart or Costco parking lot.
And you can know that almost in real time because you know what the vehicles are doing and you have cameras that can be converted counting the vehicles as little boxes. So the more you remove the friction from these silos so that they can. Communicate the, the more and more applications you'll have.
Well, that's how I [00:58:20] was
[00:58:20] Matt Trifiro: looking at turbine in many senses is when you think about like, I mean, it's a marketplace to some extent, a marketplace for data and any, any technology or any effort that has increased the liquidity of a market has, uh, has it, has this exponential effect. And so that's what you're doing.
You're creating, you're increasing the liquidity of data. The last question I want to ask you, and I'm going to try very hard not to open a Pandora's box because I realized we could probably spend another two hours on this topic, but it's important because it's, it's buzz-wordy enough that people pay attention to it.
They don't actually know what it means, but it actually is important to know what it means. And that's the digital twin. So one of the things that you're doing in Las Vegas is you're participating in a project or set of projects. I imagine where you're the collectively trying to create a digital twin of the city.
What, what is that and why.
[00:59:06] David Knight: So a big, big buzzword going around lately, all the way up to the level of renaming giant corporations is the metaverse and the metaverse, which is a term that comes from a really good science fiction. Novel has kind of taken the world by storm. And what it means is a digital twin of the real world.
Now, there are also ideas of a metaverse that are completely artificial, that have to do with video games and things. But when you're talking about the physical world, and then you're making a duplicate of it in the virtual world, that is a metaverse Nvidia calls, a bunch of meta versus an omniverse. So we already have that term out there.
What's really interesting is that a digital twin, that, that technology started in the aerospace world. So if you're trying to figure out how to maintain or when to maintain a jet engine, a very expensive [01:00:00] asset companies like Dasso and France and GE in the United States started creating perfect digital models.
Well, they had these already to manufacture them, but now they said, well, let's connect it to the real data to it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's amazing how sophisticated it's become and because of cloud computing horsepower, it's now possible to model a whole city as a digital twin. In fact, some friends of ours build a digital twin of the world expo.
That's been taking place in Dubai. They had, they had to really do it because of COVID like, well, what if nobody goes to the expo, let's digital twin. It it's fascinating. And they also used augmented reality so that if you are there physically, you have all these extra things on your phone or your tablet, or eventually I think they even have glasses for this that let you get enhanced views of the world you're moving through.
So ostensibly a digital twin is how you enable the metaverse if you will. And what we're trying to do is say, look, we've already said, we're going to take the pulse of the earth. So we're going to wire the physical environ. Into the digital twin and then collectively you can now navigate around it. So we're doing in Las Vegas and what's really neat is we initially built it sort of what I call a basic digital twin with Google earth.
And we've actually shown this to Google. They think it's pretty cool. We build it with people. Some of the people involved came from the university here. And so Google earth is a very mature product. It's been around for decades,
[01:01:31] Matt Trifiro: the digital twin with the data input and satellite images. And absolutely, absolutely.
And you're just adding those other sensor data
[01:01:38] David Knight: that you have. We were [01:01:40] talking to lots of people saying they build a digital twin of a city, but we kind of had the Homer Simpson moment where we went, 30 is a digital twin. It's a Google earth, but you have to dive down where you get all the 3d stuff. So Google has spent a staggering amount of energy and money on building Google earth.
They continually update it. And it's very 3d now, which is why it's different to Google maps, by the way it goes away. Hi, Reza and everything. So they have a set of APIs and you can drive data into it. And it appears in the digital twin. So with the help of these brilliant students, we were able to make a Google earth digital twin.
We showed it to people like members of the city council and so on. And he said, think about this. You'll be able to use this like a DVR for the city digital video recorder. You'll be able to go back in time and see what the sensor data is telling you from. Then let's say go back a week or even an hour, or it could be years.
You can see what it's doing right now. Like how many Evie charging spots are available on the street right now, or what's the air quality over there, or, you know, even noise pollution and all that stuff. They even have microphones to measure sound levels in, in most downtowns in the world. Now, then we. The future and that's where it really will go.
You'll be able to extrapolate. One of the things I'm really excited about is trying to calculate to the best you can, by taking all this input and saying, what will the actual impact of EVs be on cities? What, if you have 1%, you should be able to sell that right? 10%. Absolutely. And we got a taste of that during the COVID shutdown, where most cities in the world got really [01:03:20] quiet.
And the pollution, if you've seen, you know, I've encouraged people to go online. If they haven't seen this, there's staggering pictures of like Beijing or New York city where there's animals walking around in the street because there's no humans moving and the air is crystal clear and they're very quiet.
And well, if you get enough EVs to start supplanting the internal combustion engine vehicles, city should get quiet and the air should be cleaner. Well, how do you forecast that? Because that's a great tool that the. Politicians can use to justify expenditures that helped to do with sustainability there's areas you can do with water management like that.
And very practical things like, well, where do we put power substations to run all these Evie charging units? It doesn't, you can't put in a charging, a substation that power utility. You can't just do that overnight. It's a big, expensive thing that takes a long time. How do you decide where to put those?
When you look at traffic patterns and all these other things, and then you decide, so the more we can help the cities learn about the past, the present and then extrapolate into the future. The better. So it's not just the hedge funds that are going to make future bets. It'll be the same. And is it, that is
[01:04:30] Matt Trifiro: a great place to put a pin in this and end the interview.
But I, I think I want to have you back in season three and we'll find out what's happened in Las Vegas since then, before we leave, how can people find out about turbine and maybe find you online? If they're looking to connect?
[01:04:45] David Knight: I, I live on LinkedIn. I'm a LinkedIn Maven. I believe I have over 21,000 direct connections and I can assure you, everyone is curated.
I discard a lot of requests every day. Otherwise it fills up and [01:05:00] I'm David Knight. K N I G H T. You have to know more than that. It's two common words. So David Knight turbine, T E R B I N E. If you put that in LinkedIn, you'll find me. I'm pretty responsive to messages. As far as the company, it's really easy.
It's www.turbine.com. And if you want to go see the over 30,000 data feeds, we have already in the system from municipalities all over the world, you go to turbine.io and you can play around with the data.
[01:05:31] Matt Trifiro: Thank you for coming on the show, David,
[01:05:33] David Knight: thank you very much. That does
[01:05:35] Narrator 2: it for this episode of over the edge.
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