The Future of the Ambient Edge with Steve Statler of Wiliot

There's the Edge, the Tiny Edge, and there's ...this. The Ambient Edge.

Self-powered via "spare" Bluetooth energy, these sensors are the new frontier of edge computing. 

Steve Statler, otherwise known as "Mr. Beacon," is an expert in the field, and will help us unlock the mysteries of this rapidly evolving tech landscape. Steve's unique insights from his time at Qualcomm and his role at Wiliot, a company at the forefront of Ambient IoT, are worth their weight in digital gold.

As we venture further, the founder of Wiliot joins us to shed light on the groundbreaking work they are doing with battery-free sensors. Imagine a world where energy from radio waves powers our everyday devices - this isn't a sci-fi movie scene, but a reality Wiliot is crafting. We scrutinize how this technology is set to revolutionize the IoT sector, surpassing conventional RFID tech, and the role of 3GPP and 5G advancements in this transformation. It's a glimpse into the not-so-distant future that you won't want to miss!

But wait - there's more! We also dive into the transformative power of IoT in the realm of supply chain optimization. Discover how raw data from sensors is turned into actionable insights, impacting industries like the grocery sector by significantly reducing food waste. We also contemplate the future potential of IoT in homes, setting the stage for the emergence of 'products as a service.' Ambient IoT is another game-changer we discuss, highlighting its potential for businesses and the need to be updated with the latest standards in Bluetooth, 3gpp, and IEEE. Buckle up for a thrilling ride into the future of technology!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

When you ask people what Edge Compute is, you get a range of answers Cloud Compute in DevOps, with devices and sensors, the semiconductors outside the data center, including connectivity, ai and a security strategy. It's a stew of technologies that's powering our vehicles, our buildings, our factories and more. It's also filled with fascinating people that are passionate about their tech, their story and their world. I'm your host, pete Bernard, and the Edge Celsius show makes sense of what Edge Compute is, who's doing it and how it can transform your business and you. So let's get started Cool. So, steve Stattler, thank you for joining. Do you go by Steve or Stephen?

Speaker 2: 1:05

Steve is good, but I will answer to either.

Speaker 1: 1:10

OK, yeah, I do the Pete Peter thing all the time. Yeah, thanks for joining me, and you know, I think this, this episode, is going to be a little bit meta because you're you're an accomplished podcaster, so being on a podcast is always a little bit of a thing. So I've been on some podcasts too, and it's always the podcast topic. On the podcast, it's something that we'll have to definitely talk about.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Yeah, I love podcasting. I probably spend much too much time listening to them and you know it's a bit like the garage band. You, you, love Led Zeppelin. You know you're never going to be as big as Led Zeppelin, but the fact you're trying to play Stay Away to Heaven gives you this appreciation for the song. So I that's. Yeah, I'm probably I'm probably not going to be competing with Terry Gross or Mark Maron, but I enjoy it more. Having, you know, done my own little garage band version of what they do.

Speaker 1: 2:07

Yeah, yeah. Well, so the Mr Beacon podcast. So that's been around a while, I noticed. I mean almost 200 episodes on that.

Speaker 2: 2:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We. We've been going for eight years pretty much every other week and we've had guests from IBM, cisco, gs1, the Bluetooth SIG and over 100 CEOs of startups that are all focused on IoT, bluetooth beacon, bluetooth tags. That's kind of the space that we that we operate in and I'm very honored. We got an award from AIM, a journalism award, and it's but it's long form content. It's like everything that I need to know to learn about a new area, whether it's digital product passports, the new EU legislation, fisma 204, food safety regulations or how this cool new printed battery beacon works. That's. That's the kind of thing that we do, and essentially my agenda is anything I think someone needs to know that's getting into this space. Then we'll have an hour's conversation with an expert and hopefully we'll learn.

Speaker 1: 3:25

Yeah, no, that's. That's an impressive catalog of information. So I was as impressed to have the, you know, to be able to kind of have it go for that long, for eight years plus plus. So especially. I think the frequency too, so you know it's going every two weeks. It must be. You're probably constantly in search of although at this point probably you've got a pretty good backlog of folks who just want to be on the show, but I kind of it goes back and forth for me.

Speaker 1: 3:54

Sometimes I have lots of people that ping me, other times I have to go hunting for guests, but it's constant.

Speaker 2: 3:59

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's all. It becomes part of your life.

Speaker 1: 4:04

Yeah, exactly so you were doing Mr Beacon for a while, but did you do that? So you were doing that before you joined Will IOT and we'll talk about Will IOT.

Speaker 2: 4:12

Yes, was that yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:14

So what was the connection there? How did you? What's the? Well, this is, here's the story.

Speaker 2: 4:19

There is a story. So I was working at Qualcomm and had helped start a new business unit called Qualcomm Retail. I was basically the strategy guy and we ended up looking at how we could find a home for Qualcomm's IP innovation chips. They're spending like $6 billion a year on R&D, and so we came across this thing called Bluetooth Beacons and we sold a bunch to Apple. They deployed Qualcomm Bluetooth Beacons in every one of the Apple stores and I became convinced that this whole digital physical convergence thing was going to be the future. Qualcomm changed their CEO. The new one didn't wasn't that interested in retail or health care or all the other verticals, and so basically shut us down.

Speaker 2: 5:16

I left and I felt like there was unfinished business and this was the future, and so I wrote a book called Beacon Technologies the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Beaco system. It's published on A-Press. It's like of encyclopedic length. But once the book was published I was like, oh, I'm really sad I don't get to do all the research and I love the research calls and you know I would speak to super interesting people for an hour. I'd become smarter and I'm like other people need to understand this and there needs to be a future for the book. The book can't just end, and so the podcast became a continuation of the book and it then turned into training courses.

Speaker 2: 6:01

I was giving a training course at the RFID Journal Live conference. There was like a full, very large room full of people, and at the end of that I was like I'm going to be a good person. And I was like I'm going to be a good person. That training and israeli guy came up to me and said hey, we are, we just started up this company. We're thinking of creating a I passive bluetooth tag. Would you like to do some consulting for us? And that point.

Speaker 2: 6:28

Then I was making money out of consulting and so I said no because I was like really insecure and I'm like have no idea what this guy is talking about. I don't wanna be a nightmare. But he persisted and long story long, I ended up consulting for Williott and when they offered me a job one month later to be the first person to join outside of the r&d team, first person outside of israel, I went from being skeptical to being a complete convert, thinking that this battery free, bluetooth technology, postage stamp size computer devices Was gonna change the world and it was, you know. So I basically said yes and then. So six years ago I started Working for willy out and I did a bit of everything. I was the first product manager, sales guy, marketing guy, and then gradually we bought on people who are real product marketing people and real sales people and I focused on the marketing bit and still do the podcast. So that is the story.

Speaker 1: 7:40

Wow. So what's good? I mean your passions, you know you stuck to it and you know a little bit of Kiz met there to kind of align you with someone who also had that passion and now it's a. It's a gig, you know, and your many, many years into this, into this tech, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 2: 8:00

It's a remarkable thing. I had sort of blind trust that these engineers would get this seemingly impossible Thing to work of getting an arm processor with ram, ram, flash memory, secure communications into a Form factor that is no bigger than a postage stamp, and I can't believe that. I thought that they would do it, and it's kind of remarkable. But they did. But yeah, yeah about to release version three, so yeah version two, we probably made about one hundred and fifty million those tags.

Speaker 1: 8:43

that's not nothing and we're working with some really interesting companies yeah, I came across your company at mobile world congress actually I think I saw you speak there but I was kind of, you know, trolling along the floor and I came across this and I was like what is this like? How does this work? So maybe we can dig into it a little bit for our listeners. Interesting way, I just had a conversation speaking of qualcomm I don't know if you know of getting goose from qualcomm who's the chairman of tiny ml consortium I had him on the show recently and someone from renaissance, no, and they were talking about tiny ml. So that was more like running like ten kilobyte models on these little cortex. And the meetings but we're talking about, we guys are doing, is like a whole other Beyond thing, because what caught my eye was like oh, there's no battery in this device, yet there is computer and so yeah kind of give us a little bit of what is going on here.

Speaker 1: 9:46

Seems pretty magical.

Speaker 2: 9:48

It doesn't like magic, but it isn't, and there are limits to what, what, what it can do. I mean you're probably not gonna be playing on one of our tags, all running a generative model, so, but it is an arm. You know we license the arm core and it's actually a three core processor and it it powers itself by harvesting energy from radio waves and yeah, but the whole thing next year. You know our target prices less than ten cents for one of these things that can sense temperature and Tell you where your inventory is, real time visibility into the inventory. And we'll kind of get into how this converges with three gpp and five g advanced and why fire and blue, two standards in a bit.

Speaker 2: 10:44

But if we go deep into the technology, what we're doing is trading a path that is already been trod by rfid. So if you think about rfid, with the radio frequency identifiers that are used, different frequencies, and one of the ones that's got the most scale is the rain rfid, u, hf, ultra high frequency tags that you see in a parallel, you go to zara, or actually I don't know if someone younger than me goes to zara to buy fast fashion clothes, they'll see there's an rfid tag in there that allows them to do inventory a lot faster than they use these and held scanners. So we make our pixels. That's what we call these battery free bluetooth tags, using the same production processes rfid. So we, rather than this proprietary what I take that back, so I'm pretty rather than putting a u? Hf rfid chip on the tag, we glue this bluetooth chip which we've designed onto an antenna and wrap it up in paper. The way I did works is it uses back scatter, so you take a very strong radio signal and you blast it at this very simple tag and the tag Essentially reflect back the signal and remodulate, sit and encodes a very simple bit of data. In that is, the back scatter is kind of one of the the most basic ways of getting a battery free device to communicate.

Speaker 2: 12:32

What we am and really was founded when I joined we were gonna do Back scatter as well, but we looked at it and we realize that it wouldn't allow us to work with phones and we felt like this place we were going, which we now call ambient iot, which is basically connecting everything with everything, having every radio that surrounds us, talking to Food, clothing, medicine, not just the internet of expensive things, but the internet of everyday things that are really connecting the everyday things with the cloud, with generative, is where the big pay off is, where we Gail from relatively small numbers, which is where we are with our idea for id cells between thirty four billion times a year, which sounds a lot and that's thirty or forty times bigger than the phone market. But it's not this world changing technology that was originally in visage Thirty years ago, when I did first started with. We're basically tracking these expensive things, not the everyday things. So we figured the phone and the smart speaker and all these other devices were key and we need to move from scanners and readers that cost a thousand dollars, which is what it cost to buy a Read. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's ten thousand, hundred thousand, depending on you know what, where you want to scan. Let's move from moving from these expensive scanners To use the radios that are already everywhere they're in the phone, they're in the wifi access point, that are in the smart speakers and generally.

Speaker 2: 14:14

There's a bunch of different radios standards, but one of the most pervasive is blue tooth and if you're gonna use blue tooth, the signals are relatively weak, and so we decided to develop an active tag and active energy harvester, and what we do is, rather than reflecting the signal back, we absorb and harvest the energy and basically store it up gradually in a tiny, tiny capacitor, and so we get waves of energy coming in, we capture the energy and if you think about a bucket that's filling up with water we fill up this capacity which is the metaphor Bucket until there's enough energy and then we do something with it.

Speaker 2: 15:00

And that's really the secret of the way we do what we do. We're very good at capturing energy from very weak signals. We accumulate the energy over time and then we use these bursts of energy to accomplish something interesting. And we do the interesting thing by breaking down a big task into small tasks, and this is what we call wave computing. So the small task might be bringing up the CPU, calibrating the radio, doing some sensing, doing some computing, doing some encryption and then finally doing a broadcast. So we take waves of energy over the course of maybe half a second, which is a long time in the world of radio waves and we accumulate this energy from a weak source, which might be your phone or your smart speaker or from some other device, and then we actually broadcast out a signal that's stronger than the initial one that we absorb.

Speaker 1: 16:00

So that's, that's how it works yeah, so just to be clear then. So RFID the way that works is you have sort of this proprietary scanner that you zap at a tag.

Speaker 1: 16:10

It absorbs that energy and sort of some information and that's it. But what you guys are doing is absorbing sort of ambient bluetooth energy around, right, doesn't have to be specific from a specific device, and you're, like you said, collect the unit in this capacity bucket, which is a nice metaphor and so, and then doing stuff with it, like proactively, without necessarily walking up to it and zapping it. It's proactively, you know, sending out status.

Speaker 2: 16:39

That is a key point that you make. So we are Constantly harvesting, constantly broadcasting. So with RFID you need a scanner and you also typically need someone to scan something right, whereas we.

Speaker 2: 16:57

Precisely, whereas with ambient IOT you're constantly harvesting and broadcasting, harvesting and broadcasting, and you know we're not immune from needing extra infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 17:08

So at the moment the signals from phones Are kind of not very dependable as a source of energy.

Speaker 2: 17:16

So we we tend to like Software on devices that drives the radios, like the Bluetooth radios, so that there's a more predictable source of energy and we actually harvest energy at two frequencies one is the Bluetooth frequency and the other one is 900 megahertz, which is the frequency that's used by lots of different radios, like the Laura Wan radios that are in Smart speakers made by Amazon, and it's not actually the frequency that's used by, you know, what we describe as legacy RFID.

Speaker 2: 17:54

So we can take energy from, harvest energy from Bluetooth devices and we can harvest energy from other devices that have sub gigahertz 900 megahertz radios In them, and so in places where your Bluetooth devices are not busy enough to create enough energy to energize our tags, you can supplement that with specific works with willy ott IOT devices that cost tens of dollars rather than thousands of dollars. So it's a process of Using the devices that exist and then filling in the gaps with extremely low-cost IOT devices that bring down the capital cost to a Fraction of what they would be for an RFID environment, and in that way you can light up a distribution center or a retail store, for you know almost nothing and Suddenly see where everything is and so and also so, how far do the signals travel, then, from a typical tag?

Speaker 1: 18:58

I mean, are these a meter or two?

Speaker 2: 19:00

ten meters.

Speaker 1: 19:03

So you need something to capture that, some sort of gateway device or something to capture that, and then that hooks up to the cloud or whatever the rest of the infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 19:11

Yeah, so we, where we're using deployments where phones are the readers, and we have some supplemental energizers that are very low cost that can either take the form of a special battery pack that goes on the phone, or you can have fixed infrastructure, and so that's and and the architecture of that infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 19:36

We have the edge devices, which are the readers, and the energizers, and and we've adopted a two-tier architecture.

Speaker 2: 19:45

We have these things called bridges and we have these things called gateways, and Gateways are things like Wi-Fi access points almost every Wi-Fi access point that you buy today as a Bluetooth radio, and so we have worked with the major manufacturers of those and they now Recognize the broadcast from our tags. So you've got a Cisco or an HP, a Ruber or a Juniper mist Wi-Fi access point. You have a gateway that works with, with the OCT tags, but they're probably not going to energize our tags, because sometimes those Access points are like 20 meters up in the air. They're the ceiling of a of a massive warehouse. So we have these low cost Think of them as stepping stones, which are our bridges, that they Again cost small tens of dollars, maybe 50 bucks, and you can dot them around the place and they generate Bluetooth energy and and sub gigahertz energy, and they also listen to the whispers from our tags. They consolidate the signals and they relay them up into the the, the gateways that might be up in the ceiling or in your pocket.

Speaker 1: 21:02

So you do a little bit of energy broadcast to while they're at it. I mean might as well. Yes, they do power them a little bit and also, like you say, consolidate signals. So that's, that's pretty cool and the? So in terms of the business model for wheel IOT, is it all about selling tags or you're also in the licensing? Are you licensing the technology to other, like Silicon manufacturers, or what's the?

Speaker 2: 21:26

It's interesting. No, we actually don't sell tags and we don't sell edge devices. We, we design the chip and we then make it available to anyone that wants to make tags. And Our goal is to make no money from tags, because we want to drive the cost of tags down as rapidly as possible. And we, yeah, so it's a license, it's a licensing model, and If someone wanted to make the chips to our design, we let them do it and we wouldn't charge them anything for it. So, and and the edge device, we provide the software that runs on the bridges and the gateways for free. It's on GitHub, it's open source.

Speaker 2: 22:13

What we sell is the software, the cloud software that orchestrates the flow of data through the edge devices up to the applications. So it's kind of a I would technically I would call it a data carrier platform, so it's a SAS platform. We sell software as a service and that's normally. People hear that and they're like, well, I just want the tags. But actually you don't just want the tags, because guess what happens if you have a hundred thousand tags in a store that are all, they're all broadcasting constantly, you've got a tsunami of data.

Speaker 2: 22:52

And if you take that raw data and you feed it into your application, your application is going to blow up. It's gonna. Your cloud bill will be astronomical. So what we do is we turn the rapid broadcast from all these tags into events and we feed Events into applications. And the kind of events we're feeding are oh, there's been a location change, the the pallet just moved from one part of the warehouse to another part, or it just got loaded into a truck, or we sell temperature events, which is, your strawberries are in danger of being frozen on the way from the distribution center to the store. So we deliver alerts or events or triggers to apps that Sit on top of our platform, and those apps might be a food safety app and inventory app, a Some kind of retail application.

Speaker 2: 23:49

I see and so yeah, so I think I read some Services as opposed to software as a server. Yeah, indeed, yeah, sensing as a service Cool.

Speaker 1: 23:58

And then sensors of service. I like that, the, and so I guess customers for that. So there's all kinds of really cool sensors out there. I mean I did some work with Bosch and some other folks. I mean you know you, can you talk about?

Speaker 1: 24:10

temperature, but you can sense, like gases, and you can sense all kinds of interesting things. So is that sort of where you're seeing some pickup, where people maybe they're in the sensor business and now they have a way of you know, but he's self-powering these sensors and connecting them up to the cloud, is that?

Speaker 2: 24:25

is that the hot?

Speaker 1: 24:26

area or what's the, and also curious like what's the hot verticals? You mentioned a lot about inventory and logistics, but yeah, so yes or no on the sensor front.

Speaker 2: 24:36

So we're big in, so every will. Your iret pixel is a temperature sensor and so we think that that is the ability to do cold chain, end-to-end cold chain from Harvest to store and maybe even into the home in the future We've done a few projects like that already is key. We just announced and demonstrated at grocery shop a humidity attack with a humidity sensing strip and we've done conceptual demos of light sensing and Pressure sensing and we've even done a bit of R&D around sensing things like ammonia, which are produced by Fish and meat as they start to degrade. So these are very much Sensors.

Speaker 2: 25:24

But you don't just take a old-fashioned sensor and plug it into this tag. That wouldn't make sense. The the footprint is just so different and the fact is that the mems chips that are often in these you know, typical sensor logger type devices, are super power hungry. So what we do is we work with material science companies that have Competency in chemistry and materials that change their electronic properties, their resistance, their capacitance, and we measure those changes and we use that to report back the sensing. So we, you know what we can sense things like tamper with circuit breaker type tags that have a line that can be broken, and we can interface with people that have a Material that can be used to sense different chemicals. But you wouldn't just take an accelerometer, for instance, and plug it into our tag.

Speaker 1: 26:33

Yeah, so that's the. That's the sensing thing. So it's very tag oriented, but the tags I mean the sensor oriented. But the sensors really need to be designed from the ground up to fit into this power profile and, like you said, kind of the way. Architecture.

Speaker 2: 26:46

Let's do so yeah, I think said electronics is where it's at from our perspective. So we want something that is going to cost small numbers of pennies and you typically get that with kind of a printed technology and then. So then the other part of your question was what, while customers, applications and the reality is you can do Sort of so many things and that's actually a bit of a problem. Yeah, that's part of what's taken us a while to Figure out is, where is the sweet spot? What? What is what are the applications for this? Now? And we're seeing quite a few still and we're trying to focus desperately.

Speaker 2: 27:25

One of the areas we have succeeded in focusing is grocery, because you know grocery is it's all about food. There's huge amounts of food waste that you can help reduce. You can make the supply chain leaner. If you know where everything is in the supply chain all the time, you can avoid out of stocks, which are very important. Now We've been trained through co vid to buy online, pick up in store, buy online and have things delivered.

Speaker 2: 27:55

My mother, who's 85, has learnt to order her groceries on a tablet and she doesn't go to the grocery store except in very rare circumstances. So that's a problem, for if you're a grocer, if you're a big box general retailer, that's in grocery or a pure play grocery, because your supply chain systems were originally conceived before Omni-channel and so they're typically not accurate enough. And what we do is we allow you to instrument your Supply chain inventory management systems with this sense of technology that is typically on cases of product. So we're not on an individual Mars bar, but we, you can put us on a case of product, not on a banana, we have been on a lettuce.

Speaker 2: 28:49

So we did a project with the Japanese government where they were tracking the food that was going into Tokyo consumers, fridges and and telling them what they needed recipes they needed to use to, to to make sure they didn't waste perishable products by like lettuce. But that's really more of the future. At the moment we're very much focused on kind of farm to store, but we are probably a firmware upgrade away from smart speakers being able to energize and read our tags, and so eventually I think it will go into the home and it will be not just sensing as a service, but Enable products as a service. Have ambient IoT tags in the containers for food and and suddenly the people that are selling the food or even making the food get a sense of when you need more, and If they can understand that, then the supply chain gets a lot more efficient. Interesting.

Speaker 1: 29:50

Yeah, I know I did some work with retailers and I know that, especially grocers, the margins are very low. Maybe kind of listeners don't realize the margins are like what? Three or five percent, if they're lucky. You know, yes, we were in the software business or our margins are like 80%, whatever, so we don't understand that. So super low margins. The other thing is that, as you mentioned, in this new world where people are buying things online, one of the advantages slash challenges a lot of retailers have is around freshness. So there, that's, one of their value props is freshness. If you, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, we look at the ads for all the markets, it's all about fresh this and fresh that, because they feel that that's a Differentiator. You can go in and see fresh produce and fresh things where, if you were it online, you know you're just seeing a picture or something so maintaining that freshness and that tight supply chain is pretty critical.

Speaker 2: 30:39

Absolutely, and I think the other thing is understanding more about the food that we're buying. So provenance where did this come from? Is this organic? Is it organic? Is it regenerative? What's the carbon footprint? I go to a little grocery store here in San Diego called Jimbo's and they have these signs saying this was harvested from a farm. That was. They give you the name of the farm 23 miles away from the store and, believe me, I probably pay twice as much for the organics that are from a place which I can relate to, where there's a, I trust that it's not sitting, yeah, in a warehouse somewhere in south of the border.

Speaker 1: 31:26

Well, it's just like coffee. Coffee went there a long time ago, right? So now we buy beans from Ecuador versus Guatemala, versus you know, and the flavor, and it's almost like the wine industry, the tarar and all the regions and stuff. So I think food is getting there and, like you said, there's margin there to tell a better story and to have a story about freshness and authenticity, and it sounds like you guys are a big part of making that happen.

Speaker 1: 31:50

But yeah, legislation you know, yeah, legislation, I'm sure, yeah, that helps. Do you guys actively do, like you know, lobbying in Washington DC, stuff that sounds like big company stuff, but are you involved?

Speaker 2: 32:02

in that? No, but we do ride the wave of where legislation is driving big companies to make changes in the way they organize their supply chain. So in this country, here in the United States, it's the FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act rule 204, which suddenly is going to require a level of traceability that will potentially require massive increases in labor or in scanners, unless you use a technology like this that doesn't require scanning, it just reports the location of things. So that's one example. And then over in Europe, there's big focus on digital product passports, and they're starting off with car batteries, wanting to make sure that you can track where this came from and where it's gone to.

Speaker 1: 32:53

And so yeah, we don't do lobbying. Yeah, that's that's. That's a whole other level. No, that's fascinating. So how big is will Iot these days? Or should I say will yacht Will?

Speaker 2: 33:06

yachts. I mean, will you, yeah, will. Iot is still works and we are an Iot company.

Speaker 1: 33:15

And your San Diego base.

Speaker 2: 33:18

Yeah, all over the place. So we have probably one of our biggest offices is here in San Diego, but the chips get designed in in Israel. We have cloud development in Portugal and Ukraine actually believe it or not, and we have a ton of. We have a big field offices in Dallas and Bentonville servicing customers.

Speaker 2: 33:46

So we have and who knows the, the? The biking is amazing. They have amazing bike trails in Bentonville and and in London and we've got a team there working on some really great projects in logistics and with grocery and so forth. So 230 people approximately.

Speaker 1: 34:08

Wow, fantastic. Yeah, I noticed that you guys are pretty well funded. I think he closed the series C a couple years ago for big chunk and so, wow, it sounds like you got the wind at your back and and a lot of opportunity ahead. But what's the next big breakthrough for you guys? You mentioned a firmware update for smart speakers, so what's the next big step? Function for, for this tech?

Speaker 2: 34:31

Well, there's a few things. So next year we'll have our version three chip out in the marketplace, which will get us down to, in the ballpark of that, 10 cents per tag piece and it'll just help. Everything will be smaller and faster and better range and all that sort of stuff. So that's something to look forward to. But one of the areas that we're focused on is standards. So today we use standard Bluetooth, so any Bluetooth device can hear the broadcast from our tags and many Bluetooth devices can produce the energy that we harvest. But the area that I think and that's amazing and probably is enough for us to scale to 10s, if not hundreds of billions of things being tracked, but to get us to the full potential of what we describe as ambient IoT, which is a bi says 10 addressable market of 10 trillion units, I believe we believe we need standards, we need three GPP, we need IEEE and there are very meaningful standardization efforts around ambient IoT in both of those bodies. And so three GPP, who are the folks that defined 3G and 4G and 5G they're working on something called 5G advanced and the kind of the release of that will be release 19, and ambient IoT will almost certainly be part of release 19, which will mean that you not only have license spectrum tags working over license spectrum, but you have a whole network behind it.

Speaker 2: 36:27

In the advent of the owners of smart speakers in your home suddenly making them work with tags like ours, then that'll be amazing. Some incredible use cases. But what about all the other retailers and product companies that may or may not want to work with? Whoever it is you bought your smart speaker from? That's where you need a network, and carriers and telcos are very good at networks. They have learned to work together with roaming agreements, number portability, calls work across this global network, and that's what I believe we need to really take us from an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude more things connected to the internet to three orders of magnitude and really have the incredible impact that we can have on drug safety, drug efficacy, all these other things. We need AT&T and Verizon and Samsung and Apple to pitch in and there's an IEEE effort called 802.11 AMP ambient power which potentially is yet another stimulus set of standards. Same concept of very low cost devices, but using the rails driven by the Cisco's and the other people that provide the Wi-Fi structure around us.

Speaker 2: 38:00

So we're contributing to all of those, and that's where we see the future.

Speaker 1: 38:04

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I think getting that standardized makes sense and then you can really kick it into the next gear. But, yeah, great, well, it's given us a lot of things to talk about, and think about and follow up on. For listeners, any kind of closing thoughts, words of wisdom calls to action.

Speaker 2: 38:24

Well, I think there's a huge opportunity for everyone that's interested in this future. Ambient IoT is not going to be something that will do on its own. We're just kind of one of the contributors to the standard. So I think, whether you're a business, then think about what would my business look like if my products could talk, if they could talk to the infrastructure that surrounds us. If you're a systems integrator, then think about what this means. Think about developing competency in this area. If you're a software company, think about how software would be changed if every product had a unique ID. Most ERP systems, most accounting systems, supply chain systems aren't serialized, and so that's you know. Start thinking about working with the latest GS1 standards on serialization for serial global trade identifiers. And if you're in the hardware business, then think about what's happening in the Bluetooth, 3gpp and IEEE areas and think about how that might impact your hardware business. So there's opportunities for everyone, but it requires a bit of thought, and so now's the time to get researching.

Speaker 1: 39:42

Yeah, for sure. Well, that sounds like Ambient IoT needs to be on folks' radar for sure in a number of areas. But yeah, it's been super enlightening. I really appreciate connecting with you, steve, and I encourage folks also to listen to your podcast, mr Beacon. I hope we can meet up again in the future.

Speaker 2: 40:00

It's been a pleasure, pete. Thanks for taking the time to check. Sounds good Alright. Thanks, steve.

Speaker 1: 40:16

Thanks for joining us today on the Edge Cells viewer show. Please subscribe and stay tuned for more and check us out online about how you can scale your Edge compute business.

Speaker 2: 42:23

Right, mr Walters.