Thank you So I must thank and Ned first because I was wondering when I was preparing the talk how much of a detail and Specific examples should get into or not and I decided not to hoping that he would get into some and he did so thanks, Ned my talk I will spend just a few minutes on the background and Not Discuss many other things that Ned has already mentioned But hopefully move the conversation into what what is our doing? And what are the needs and the barriers that we are facing right now that need to be overcome? So the background is the first context we have numerous reports whether from the eGap the US preventive services task force from the NIH state of the science conferences in many other guideline developers and charismatic reviews There are large gaps in our knowledge of the impact of therapeutics and especially in diagnostics on patient outcomes in real-world clinical practice and this is not just for rare diseases although This is more so for rare disease. It's even in common diseases So that's one challenge that we face right now The second which Ned had mentioned as marginal benefit is this issue And especially for common diseases, we don't lack treatments. We don't lack diagnostic tests There are plenty whether it's for treating high blood pressure for lowering your cholesterol for treating osteoporosis We don't have a shortage of Drugs what we need to know for anything new is what is the added value of this new thing new technology new drug new test and Everyone who needs this information Has to be sure the information is valid and credible on what the benefits are and what the harms are Regardless of what the context of making the decision is whether it's the clinician Having a patient walk into the clinic whether it's a guideline developer Whether it's a pair who wants to make a covered decision or a federal agency that wants to make a regulatory decision There may be some other aspects beyond benefits and harms they consider but this is certainly the critical element Another issue that we face in their numerous examples of this is That for many diseases even in common diseases the natural history and the pathogenesis of the disease are often incompletely understood So this is an issue when you decide are we studying surrogate markers are these actually surrogate markers or not And if they are if you're seeing an improvement in a surrogate marker Will that translate to a benefit in the health outcome or not? And you've had numerous examples when that hasn't panned out to be true. So even say a common disease like osteoporosis Sodium fluoride showed increases bone mineral density. It doesn't decrease fracture risk And that's really what the patient cares about not that their bones are dense, but that you actually have fractures The same is true for screening for prostate cancer. Happy to see there are so many examples when the natural history of the disease and The unknowns limit the ability of a guideline developer to say clearly there are more benefits than harms So what are the reasons? We are facing this and I'll put two points across one. I think is There are limitations in our existing infrastructure capabilities So the electronic databases that we have they don't talk to each other The information is siloed often. It's not the right kind of information And so we have Problems that need to be overcome from the infrastructure point of view It's also a party to do with the study methods Whether it's observational studies or randomized controlled trials depending on the question being asked There are often issues that can lead to bias and confounding that affect the validity of the results So you want the results to be valid and generalizable and The last point of course, you know for several reasons we can have a long discussion on this The goals of biomedical researchers are not typically aligned with those of clinical providers so With this context, you know one of the challenges that we are facing is can we improve our health care delivery? Infrastructures that we can use it for research. We can use it for improving quality of care and for new information like genetic tests Now the other thing that had briefly been mentioned is comparative effectiveness research I won't go into the definition in detail. This is the one that the Federal Coordinating Council came up with I'll just highlight three things in here that I think are important One is that in comparative effectiveness you are looking at the benefits and harms of different interventions So it's not a placebo. It's not doing nothing. It's actually comparing different alternative Interventions where it's diagnostics or therapeutics in a real-world setting, which is important. It's not in an artificial Highly selected patient population highly selected clinical settings where you don't know if you can generalize the results It's actually real-world practice And the last part of the definition which I think is important is we are doing this to improve health outcomes Not the surrogate markers not for creating new knowledge But we actually improve the quality of life or the care of the patient So what ARC has done in the past several years and this started with the Medicare Modernization Act Was to create a new program called effective health care which focused on Comparative effectiveness and the four goals of this program are to create new knowledge To review and synthesize existing knowledge and that actually has been Something we have been doing for a long time The ever-spaced practice center reviews that Ned mentioned are part of what we use for reviewing and synthesizing the existing knowledge Then the two other components are to translate and disseminate the findings Including tools such as clinical decision support tools decision aids and to train and build the capacity in this field Which is still new So I have only one slide on genomics projects, but this is to tell you that ARC has not been inactive in this field So I mentioned the evidence-based practice centers of the EPC reports which have Helped many different guideline developers eGaP US Preventive Services Task Force the NIH state of the science conferences on family history CMS and their MedCAC process CDC and of course topics that get nominated by clinical societies We have also Done work in creating new knowledge. We funded a randomized controlled trial This was a March Field Clinic on looking at warfarin base gene-based dosing calculator and comparing that to clinical dosing calculator alone that was published in genetics in medicine and There are two add-on genomic projects in Prospect studies and I'll tell you in more detail what the prospect stands for We also created a new computer-based clinical decision support tool for assessing a BRCA Mutation risk in the primary care setting and this was done because the US Preventive Services Task Force had made a recommendation For the primary care that when there are women who had a higher risk They should be referred for appropriate counseling and testing the challenge is The primary care clinician does not have the time and sometimes some can argue the skills to actually get detailed cancer family history to know what the BRCA risk of the woman is so we created a tool for that and it's not live because We spent more time creating the tool with how there was much more knowledge about what to do in primary care turns out There wasn't so we spent most of our resources in creating the tool not so much on validating the tool And so we actually have a collaboration with the CDC to do bigger studies And get a sense of how well this tool performs in the real world Then we also had to I guess conceptual reports I would call them one was done in collaboration with the CDC to Look at the existing infrastructure in the US and to ascertain How well can we use the infrastructure to look at utilization of genetic tests or the outcomes of genetic tests? and another one which we recently released a few months ago was Looking at the analytic validity Quality rating and evaluation frameworks So this was a report to build on the work that eGap has done the preventive services task force has done the CDC has done with the ACC e-framework and an older Thornberry fry fryback framework on evaluating diagnostic tests So this report essentially Looked at the different clinical context in which are scenarios when you would use a genetic test Who the audience is who the user is and then one of the most important questions that are should be addressed in a evidence review So our work on creating new infrastructure. We started two pilot projects back in 2007 on Distributed research networks. So for those who are not familiar with distributed research The the traditional model of research is all the participating sites organizations send their database into one large centralized database Which then there are some issues about both the quality of the data as well as privacy and confidentiality of the information Available in the data. So people are always nervous in giving their data to an unknown centralized entity that can use it anytime in the future One way around this is can we actually do distributed research where the data or the databases actually reside in different clinical organizations they are partnering only on an as needed project to Distribute the information selected information so that you're not sharing all the information in one repository And this would allow you the ability to connect different electronic medical records to connect different databases and Overcomes some of the privacy and confidentiality concerns. So we had two different projects that we funded One was to create a new. This was a dart net project This is the University of Colorado. They had linked six different EMRs in the first go around link the EMRs with claims database pharmacy databases clinical lab databases And showed that can actually be done and that you can also collect patient reported outcomes using this linkage To improve the quality of care and use it for comparative effectiveness research The other was to enhance an existing Collaboration the HMO research network Which was there already spent many years building the virtual data warehouse The challenges can you actually get virtual data warehouses from the different organizations to talk to each other and generate the information? So we published that this was done in two years ago in Annals of internal medicine And we learned both from the successes and the challenges in these projects So that our goal was to build on this and build new Systems that are multi-purpose. So not just for research, but also for quality improvement for disease surveillance clinical decision support These are dynamic. So it's not just one data entry static You can't do anything with that, but you can go back and change add new fields change the data as needed These need to be electronic. So they are based on EMRs or EHRs from the get-go and they can collect prospective data In this span several of the ARC portfolios This is just to tell you that this has widespread interest at ARC and also this is a new multidisciplinary effort So our good fortune in getting the ARRA funding, which was for those of you who haven't followed it $1.1 billion dollars for comparative effectiveness research Out of this about a hundred million were spent in building these new systems So I had mentioned prospect earlier. So this is one of the RFAs I had taken the lead in writing on prospective outcome systems that used patient specific electronic data to compare tests and therapies We awarded six RO1s from these Then we also came up with two other RFAs and because of the time crunch, I didn't have enough time to think of creative new acronyms So these are just as is One was scalable distributed research networks. We funded three RO1s here and The third one is the enhanced registries that can be used both for quality improvement and for comparative effectiveness research The fourth RFA was you know, it's well and good to do the research Can you actually bring the lessons learned in a convening forum so that you can advance the national dialogue in analytic methods in clinical informatics and in the data governance issues, so we awarded to Academy Health a cooperative agreement on creating a new electronic data methods forum So the common themes across these RO1 projects The requirements were they had to be able to link multiple health care delivery sites So in this case, it would be in patient care outpatient care specialty clinics Nursing home long-term care. So these had to be Different care delivery sites. It's not just linking two clinics in one academics and rinsing. This is enough They needed to connect multiple databases Be a different electronic health records Be it linking with claims databases pharmacy databases They needed to focus on priority populations and conditions. So the concern about underserved populations generalizability of the results Those were to be addressed They needed to demonstrate they can collect prospective patient-centered outcomes To use it for comparative effectiveness research so that you can ultimately get valid and generalizable conclusions Another theme that we stressed was there was a focus on governance and stakeholder engagement And this is all in an effort to make it sustainable. We knew the RFA name was a one-time large bolus But if the projects do things that are valuable to different stakeholders be it patients providers payers clinical guideline developers professional societies Then the hope is once the initial investment is done There'll be support to sustain this beyond the three-year timeline of these projects Now the other Special features of the registry and distributed projects For the registry the requirement was to build on an existing registry because the three-year timeline did not allow us To start a new registry and then to show they can use it for comparative effectiveness research Another requirement was to do comparative effectiveness research and quality improvement So you've heard some of the challenges about the tensions and research and clinical practice But the same happens in people who do quality improvement and who do research Generally quality improvement folks don't have to worry about an IRB, but on the other hand They're not looking to publish findings to get grant funding. So They do live in different worlds and can you actually Bring those two worlds together when you're building the registry and make it sustainable and therefore hopefully scalable the other R01 other RFA focused on Distributed research networks Where the emphasis was emphasis was to build on multiple cohorts So we had asked for at least four different cohorts of at least two different unrated conditions So this is sort of a contrast to registries where registries can often be disease specific or patient population specific But All right, I guess I don't want to buy this now There's nothing confidential here. So there's no reason for a security on this slide And the other challenge as you as you heard is it's one thing doing research It's another thing trying to use the information in real life clinical practice So you need to have data that you can get Soon you can't wait for a few years and then say okay now. What do I do with my patient? So one of the challenges with these distributed research network projects was can you get near real-time data collection and analysis? And of course like the registries make them sustainable and scalable So I just spent a couple of minutes on what I hope is something that you can engage with the EDM forum So this is a central repository and resource for information on Collecting prospective electronic clinical data that is being done in all of these projects There's a website and I'll have that at the end that you can access as you want the purpose is for them to collect and Synthesize the lessons learned across all of these 11 projects to engage the different stakeholders in the science But also to learn from them What their needs and challenges are and to build the resources and tools to advance the science in this field? The activities of this forum are on analytic methods Clinical informatics as I mentioned data governance, which includes security, privacy and privacy and access of information And there's a new subcommittee on the learning healthcare system, which talks about what I would call non-research issues This is quality improvement clinical decision support and meaningful engagement. So this is the organizational chart I'll just leave this as my last slide There's a the PI of this is an whole we at Academy Health There's a steering committee and Ned Colange who you have here. He's the chair of that There are 11 projects and investigators in There are part of the forum and I'll stop there Mission for PCORI Certainly well arc of course predates PCORI for the longest time the Arc's mission has been the effectiveness safety Efficiency and quality of health care From our understanding and PCORI is still evolving it's focused primarily on patient-centered outcomes So what happens about issues that are not directly relevant to patient-centered outcomes? It's not clear if PCORI is going to be Taking those on or not There's certainly collaboration between the two of PCORI has Funded arc activities or will be funding arc activities on Dissemination on training so there will be some amount of collaboration But down the road what is it that PCORI will actually do hasn't yet been clarified that I think from what I heard last time We will know more about that in January about their specific topic areas and projects and the mechanisms of funding for those So I'm going to speak both as a member of the methodology committee and also having been very involved with stakeholders who work to put You know to to support PCORI Back when it was called the comparative effectiveness entity that is through the through the blues and I think the intent is That division of PCORI patient-centered outcomes research incorporates comparative effectiveness but it is Larger and will incorporate New kinds of information that will add to it so it includes that agenda it goes beyond it What the priorities in the agenda will be is still being worked out by PCORI the rules of the road for that are still being set methodology committee has pretty strict Task which is to get a comparative effectiveness guidelines Report methods report delivered in May. I think there has always been the intent At least on the part of the stakeholders who are Funding PCORI. It is largely funded through payer funds some through government funds that this should Amplify what ARC is able to do and not replace what ARC is able to do. I think there is a high appreciation that What we often need is new primary Evidence so many systematic reviews and other efforts and with the conclusion that we really don't have the primary evidence So this was seen As a vehicle to start to fund that primary evidence There really are not entities that exist now that have that is their mission or their interest Sponsors they're going for registration are interested in their product not comparison The NIH I think is more infused with the spirit of comparative effectiveness, but I has not really been The scene that is its mission and this really is sort of the one place that this important social Objective can be lodged and it's now enhanced with a broader vision of patient centered this so Thank you very much presentation Just the big devil in comparative effects research is channeling or put more simply New drugs are given to slightly sicker people, and I wanted to with your mythological research how you were getting on with that particular issue so they I mean say in the US There is the FDA labeling that tells you what the drug or the clinical scenarios of what it can be used and not used for But there's also what we call off-label use and The comparative effectiveness research doesn't limit itself to only FTA approved indications So any public so the main Issue for comparative effectiveness research is do you actually have the evidence not on What it was originally approved for what's being used for now So if things have changed over time and that change has been captured in Publications then that forms the basis of comparative effectiveness research But to how well this is characterized. I mean that's going to be the challenge is to make sure Many of the databases that we have or for example when you when I doing observation studies They don't capture the severity of the disease The test results So it's very hard to know what patient what type of a patients were given these medications and are they comparable? And so those are all challenges that I think once we get more clinical details in the databases and can link them Hopefully we can address some of those issues


Free Friday, Defence Minister, the Prime Minister launched the 2013 Defence White Paper, the sequel to 2009. You were at the Red Cup at Premier, what did you think? Well it was a chilly morning in Canberra but it was a pretty good launch actually. Australia seems to be doing these Defence White Paper launches with a bit of American style pomp these days. I was at the one in 2009 where Kim and Rudd kicked off his White Paper on the back of a frigate. This time round it was in a hangar surrounded by aircraft. There was a super hornet over to one side of C17 where the press conference was held. It was a surprisingly good launch, a surprisingly solid script if you like. If this is a movie it's actually a sequel that's better than the original. But no one was really expecting a blockbuster this time. I mean our expectations were pretty low. We didn't really think that there'd be all that much meat in this White Paper but I've been pleasantly surprised. There's a clear shift in the way that the White Paper writing team has assessed the region that Australia is in. Well I was pleasantly surprised too. I thought that the hand of various senior officials was pretty obvious in the drafting of this thing. It was sophisticated strategic analysis and in many ways that was the strong part. The weak part is still the budget if you like. I mean this should be a movie made on a big budget but at the moment we just don't know how much it's going to cost. But we know how much everybody would like to spend, which is 2% roughly TDP, which seems to have been unanimous amongst the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister, former Defence Ministers and future Defence Ministers as well. Possibly. But 2% is still leaving the Defence Force underfunded by about $7.5 billion and no one's really yet made it clear what sort of risks we're incurring whilst we leave Defence underfunded to that extent. There was a promising sign that there'll be a slight budget boost in the budget in a couple of weeks time. There was some money allocated to purchases like the Digital 12 Growlers. But still there's a lot of question marks. This White Paper will promise a Defence funding model that would react to the adversity of the global financial crisis. But there's only 700 words and 132 page documents. So not quite what we're expecting there. No and I agree with you on all of that. I think that we were hoping that the Prime Minister would address some of this in her script if you like at the launch of the White Paper. But really we were given assurances that the government will try and move back towards 2% of the GDP. The opposition has promised the same. There almost seems to be a gentleman's agreement between the two sides that they weren't pushed that topic too hard. And in the meantime, those of us who are concerned about Australian Defence policy are left wondering how is the government or a future government going to get the Australian Defence Force back to the level spending it needs to do all the things that the White Paper says it should do. And the White Paper does lay out a pretty sensible set of missions, a pretty sensible structure for Australian Defence policy in terms of challenges and objectives. It's just that we're still a bit in the dark as to how we're going to get there. And in this White Paper there are the big stars, the big ticket purchases. So we've got a promise of joint strike fighters still to come. We've got now a mixed fleet. We're going to get new armadale or patrol class, patrol boat class replacements. We're going to see the new amphibious ships. We're going to see the new air warfare destroyers all coming down the track. But what's missing, I think, really in the modernisation of the Defence Force is the sort of deeper production values. So what kind of infrastructure and basing we're going to see around the country? What kind of logistics systems will underpin these big new purchases? How we will deliver fuel in Northern Australia, for example. So there's a lot of those questions still to be asked. It kind of feels like a work that's kind of halfway there but not quite fully convincing to me that there's going to be a modern Defence Force ready to face the challenges of the Asian century. Well, I see this White Paper as in some ways a good corrective to the 2009 White Paper which promised a lot. It kind of spoke loudly but ended up carrying a pretty small stick to use a sort of a reverse definition of what good statesmanship should be all about. But at the same time we're still left wondering what will the next White Paper look like. I think this is kind of part two of a trilogy of films. And I suspect that the best is going to have to be yet to come whether it's from one particular director or another. And I think you're right, a lot of the, and very nicely done with that little director references, that was beautiful. But I think you're right, we're still not quite where we need to be as far as developing a military strategy for new and uncertain times. A lot of the references to what the ADF will do are still under the old bottle talking about deterring and defeating lodgements in the archipelago around Australia. The principal tasks for the ADF are still the same. I'm sorry, you're right, I think there's still a way to go and this is only the second part of a trilogy. With that in mind, reviewing the White Paper in its entirety, what would you give it out of five stars? Look, if this was a movie, I'd give it probably three and a half. But I really want to know how much it costs. And when I find that out, it will be either a two or a five. A two or a five? Or I'm going to give it about two and a half just to split the difference.


In this study, researchers observed the presence of shiral magnon polarons, chimps, in a layered zigzag antiferromagnet, AFM. These hybridized causal particles were found to have a gap of 0.25 Mv and could survive down to the quadrilayer limit. The researchers also discovered that these chimps were created through a coherent coupling between AFM magnons and shiral phonons with parallel angular momenta. This coupling was due to the underlying phonon and space group symmetries. Furthermore, the researchers found that the chimps exhibited a unique Raman circular polarization, which could potentially lead to the development of angular momentum-based hybrid phononic and magnonic devices. This article was authored by Jan Kui, Emil Venus-Bostrom, Mikhail Ozarev, and others.


This paper provides a comprehensive review of the epidemiological trends and public health implications of diabetes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study found that type 2 diabetes accounts for over 90% of diabetes cases in the region, with population prevalence ranging from 1% to 12%. Type 1 diabetes prevalence is low, ranging from 4 to 12 per 100,000 people. Gestational diabetes prevalence varies widely, from 0% to 9%. Diabetes is associated with a range of complications, including retinopathy, neuropathy, and microalbuminuria. The study also found that diabetes increases the risk of several important infections in the region, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, and sepsis. Antiviral treatment for HIV increases the risk of obesity and insulin resistance. Five-year mortality proportions for patients with diabetes range from 4% to 57%. The study identified barriers to accessing diagnosis and treatment, including a lack of diagnostic tools and glucose monitoring equipment and high cost of diabetes treatment. The total annual cost of diabetes in the region is estimated at US.03 billion, or US.36 per diabetic patient. Overall, the study highlights the significant burden of diabetes in Sub-Saharan Africa and the need for integrated responses to communicable and non-communicable diseases. This article was authored by Hendrickson or Thompson Rehma W. Hall Victoria, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Well thanks for joining. My name is Lance. I'm an engineer at Huawei and today we're just going to talk about unified limits in OpenStack and what it means for helping us enforce quota consistently. So we have a lot to get through in 10 minutes but I'm going to kind of do a quick introduction into what unified limits are and level set on some terminology and then I'll tell you how they're advantageous for both operators and developers. We'll go through some of the work that we've already done and then I'll tell you how you can get involved. So what are unified limits? If we take a very like unofficial definition of the term limit it's essentially a theoretical maximum of the number of resources that you can consume right and that's a very important distinction to make from another definition that we need to define which is usage which is the current number of things that you're currently using. When we started the unified limits work a couple years ago we wanted to make a very distinct distinction between those two terms because it could be managed by two separate systems or entities. Ultimately what we're trying to do is make limit management combine that with usage enforcement and then you have the basis for a quota system that lets you regulate consumable use consumable resources to your users. So what that means for OpenStack is that we're replacing limit management with Keystone and then keeping usage enforcement and calculation at the service. So what does a unified limit look like? It essentially consists of three pieces of information a resource which is a key that describes the thing that we're limiting the service that's responsible for it and then a limit which is essentially an integer. There's a couple of optional pieces of information like regions since not every service is deployed globally and also projects. Keystone offers a couple different types of limits. We have registered limits and these you can think of as project-wide defaults so they apply to every project in your deployment. The information is relatively static but essentially what we're saying here is that the compute service in the Berlin region is limited to 32 cores per project. So projects that don't have an explicit override will be assuming this as their default limit. This is something that operators might set up after they roll out a new service or after they deploy a new region they're going to go through and set up these registered limits to kind of let everybody know this is the baseline of what you can consume. The second type of limit that we have is a project-specific override and here we're actually overriding a registered limit and we're giving it a specific project and also we're modifying the resource limit. So in this specific case instead of 32 cores we're cranking that project down to only consuming 16. We can also do that in the inverse which is cranking it up to 64. So this is a really really high-level example. It'd be nice to go into something with a little bit more detail but this just shows the basic flow between the various actors. If we have a user a service in Keystone a user is going to make a request right and that request is going to contain some information about the resources they want to claim. So that could be the attributes of a flavor it could be the size of a volume and they're going to make that against a service. At that point the service knows the project that that user is operating against and it can calculate the usage underneath that current project. They can also go to Keystone and grab the current limit information for that project which Keystone will return either the registered limit or a project-specific override. At that point the service has everything that it needs to start building an enforcement check. It has the project usage which it calculated itself based on the project ID. It has the claimed usage which came from the user's request and then it has the project limit which came from Keystone. Based on all of that information it can evaluate that and then give an appropriate response to the user as to if it's going to pass or fail. So how is this helpful? For operators it's nice because it gives them a single interface that they can use to query all limit information against all projects. They don't have to go and individually hit every single service to figure this information out. It also supplies consistent validation so if you want to adjust the limit of the size of your volumes and you want to adjust the number of cores that you can have on a project that validation is going to be the same. And that also leads into a single definition of enforcement rules. So as Keystone being responsible for all the limit information and associating that to projects it's also in a good place to propagate the enforcement model out to the consuming services so that we can do consistent enforcement. This is really important for providing a consistent look and feel for how limits should work across OpenStack as a whole and not having a different user experience in one part of OpenStack versus another. How does this help developers? Developers no longer need to build their own limits API. Instead they're really only responsible for usage enforcement and I put an asterisk next to usage enforcement because I don't want to downplay it. It can still be a complicated problem but now you're not having to solve two different things. You really just have to calculate the usage of resources under a given project and then work with that data. And that also eliminates projects from having to understand this super complicated tree structure that you can get from Keystone since we support hierarchical multi-tenancy. If you get back a tree of projects that is n levels deep and you're trying to figure out how the limits work, we're trying to isolate all of that logic into a couple of key places so that we're not reinventing the wheel across all these services with a very complicated object. So some of the work that's already been done and Queens Keystone merged implementations for register limits and project limits. So that work is in there and ready to go. The API is still marked as experimental but we're not expecting any major changes to happen to it. That status will change as soon as we start having a consistent consumer. You can also start using all of this work from Python OpenStack client and OpenStack SDK. This release we're actually working on also limit and smoothing out the interfaces in that library so that it can be readily consumed by services. Some ways that you can get involved if you're a developer working on an OpenStack project and you're looking to solve this limit problem or implementing quotas, we'd love to get you involved and get your resources in Keystone so that we can tighten up that integration. That's also going to help us smooth out the interfaces and also limit because if your project is doing something interesting with how you're calculating usage for projects, chances are there's probably another project that's doing that too. If we can figure out where those places are and put it in also limit, it's more useful for everyone. And if you're an operator, if you have a very specific story for quota or how you're applying limits to your deployment, we want to hear that information so that we can start developing other enforcement models that make this usable for other people in OpenStack. And that's about all I had. I kind of blew through a bunch of that information, but we do have a couple of minutes and I'll also be hanging around here too if you guys have questions, but thanks for joining. I appreciate it.


This video was brought to you by Paramount Plus. Anyway, more of the story. Don't do mechanical work on a running warthog inside a closed garage! Those exhaust fumes really messed with your, um, that thing up there. What is that thing? Your brain! Sarge, there was no first part of that story? Yeah, we were totally quiet and you just started talking. Also, warthog exhaust is just water vapor. Silence! Prepare to demonstrate what you learned from our new training videos, soldiers! What training videos? The training videos with THE master chief that we all watched together! Duh! Sarge, those are episodes of Halo. You know, the new show on Paramount Plus? Hey, don't say Paramount Plus unless they're paying us! They are. That's why we're recapping the episodes. In that case, I have the perfect investment for the money. No! Don't buy a car! Hello? Hi. We're contacting you about your vehicle's extended warranty. Dang it! Every time. So, anyway, episode one is pretty intense. It starts with some Madrigal Rebels talking about how Spartans never die. Which, of course, is true. Observe! Ow! We are not Spartans! Then, we see some rebellious rebel teens doing drugs in the woods, and instead of being killed by a lunatic and a hockey mask as usual, they're blasted into pink mist by a Covenant excavation crew looking for an artifact.  She's rescued by none other than our boy, Master Chief, Boom! See the air horn noises! He and the Spartan team corpse up that Covenant real good with the four basic food groups. Bullets, feed-downs, bashing, and lambing.  Master Chief reaches out and touches it, and as Forerunner artifacts are wont to do, it changes his life. When I was 15, I took something that changed my life! And it exploded everywhere! You never forget your first grenade. The artifact somehow unlocks bits of Master Chief's memories. It goes rogue, and he even takes off his helmet! Can you believe it? I didn't even know we could take our helmets off. Of course we can! See? Huh? Yep. Dad's rasters came to Navian, and Mom's pixel Irish. You definitely have her squares. Episode 1 ends with the UNSC about to kill Master Chief, but the artifact creates an EMP that allows him and Kwan to escape. See? Spartan's never done! Knock it off! Episode 2 begins with Master Chief AWOL, and it's revealed that Dr. Halsey is secretly developing Halsey 2.0 with the AI we know as Cortana. Meanwhile, Master Chief and Kwan go to the Rubble, which is like a burning man if it was inside a collection of asteroids. That's where they visit Master Chief's friend Soren, who real heads will know from the Halo books, and take a wild subway car ride. Is a subway still a subway if it's in space? All I know is, their sandwiches are meteor! Okay, now you can shoot me. Meanwhile, at the Covenant's Jellyfish Clubhouse, the Prophets and their human pet McKee scheme to hunt down the Master Chief and the artifact.  Oh hey! I'm listening to pure moods in my helmet right now! Really? You aren't balled with a ponytail or wearing sandals? I like the vibes. Plus, if people don't buy New Age music, pretty soon keyboard players are gonna be clogging up the streets on recumbent bikes. Traffic jam! Meanwhile, Master Chief learns why the Covenant want the artifact, and he touches it a bunch more, unlocking even more memories. Yeah, I was talking about this, unlocking one of my favorite memories. Ow! That just happened a minute ago! Ah, it seems like it was only yesterday. Now, we're in Episode 3, where Master Chief returns to base, and Dr. Halsey implants him with Cortana. Cortana? I wanted to talk to invisible people! I'd just be a kid, scribbling at the beginning of all horror movies! Speaking of horror, remember when McKee hijacked a UNSC ship with a writhing mess of tentacles? Oh yeah, that was my favorite part! Yeah, no kidding. Try cleaning your search history every once in a while. Anyway, at the end of the episode, Master Chief removes the pellet in his back that dulls his emotions. Thankfully, I don't have emotions. What? You totally do.  I don't have emotions.   Oh, that's better. Are you okay? Yeah. Thankfully, I keep this book close to my heart. Well, that does it for us. See you back here soon for more Recaps of Halo, which you can stream now on Paramount+.


So, I've been asked to spend a few minutes talking about this book that I wrote called Return on Influence and what I've examined in this book is what are the differences in how people acquire power and influence in the real world we're here today in our carbon based forms compared to how people are beginning to acquire power and influence on the internet. And it's quite interesting because if you think how much of our influence in our world comes because we're on an organizational chart or we have a title or maybe we've gone to a certain university. Well on the internet none of that matters people hate rules on the internet they hate organizational charts and if you ever try to tell somebody what to do on the internet you're going to get a lesson pretty quickly that nobody's in charge and they don't want to have anybody in charge and yet people are undoubtedly becoming powerful on the web. So I want to tell you a story about how I started thinking about this and this was my own experience about a little over two years ago now I wrote a blog post about this company called Cloud as K-L-O-U-T and they have the audacity to say we are going to try to measure your influence based on what you're posting on the web and how people are responding to you. So this created quite an outbreak and some of the people that were commenting on my post said Mark I hope you will join me in stopping this this is un-American that anybody would try to rate our influence and the other thing that happened is this article that I wrote it spread. It was tweeted over a thousand times so it went beyond my network and started going into other people's networks and thousands and thousands of people read this article and about three weeks after I wrote the article I got a call from a reporter from the New York Times. She said Mr. Shaper I've been researching this new trend this new marketing trend and when I googled it I found your article I read your article I thought it was really interesting can I interview you for the New York Times of course my answer was duh you know that term here right? So I was interviewed in the New York Times and my quote appeared four times and it gets crazier because the New York Times has syndicated it went all over the country I was quoted four times in this article it gets even crazier it was it goes all over the world so I'm in newspapers all over the world even the London Daily Mail that's not me I know your attention goes right to that it's not me it just happened in fact you know what I should just cut and paste this out and put me in there but I would so they rewrote the article I took my quotes and I was in the London Mail and then that was syndicated and that was going all over the place so I started thinking about this and I started wondering why me why me now this was before I wrote the book okay I'd written one book but it was just starting to go I don't have a degree from Oxford University I've never been in a movie I've never been elected to office I've never played for Manchester United or you know I've never been a supermodel that might be hard to believe it or not when I gave the talk earlier this week I mentioned that and this whole group of IBM they just started laughing I thought why would they laugh they just brought the house down and I would mention that I wasn't a supermodel but I guess it's that obvious so anyway I began thinking about how did I become an influencer and I wasn't born from a family of wealth I came from a very poor family actually and so I started studying this and I came across this model some of you probably know this the author Dr. Robert Chaldini Dr. Robert Chaldini has written several books on influence he's the foremost authority on influence in the world he actually left his position as a university instructor and went under cover for three years doing different jobs at companies to do research on how people become powerful at work so it came up with this model called the six weapons of influence and he said when you become influential at work it's for one of these six reasons but as I started to study this and read the academic research and and and talk to people I discovered something was missing that there's actually a seventh weapon we'll get to that in a minute so in the first half of my book I look at how do these six factors show up on the internet what's different now what's the same what's different and what I found is there are vast differences I just have a few minutes today I can't go through all of this but I want to give you example around social proof so what is social proof in the real world sometimes we can have an air of power or influence just by how we look or what's in our offices so in the absence of truth in the absence of facts we look around our environment for clues as to what to do and to who's in charge so we might look at what kind of car do they drive what do they have hanging in their office how are people dressed if I came in here in a police uniform you'd probably think this is well you think it was very strange but you'd know it wasn't a supermodel at that point so and so one example of this is there there's this doctor maybe you had this TV show here Marcus will be right so this is an actor named Robert Young now in his autobiographical writings he he reflected back and he said he was an alcoholic he was a drug addict he was a terrible father he was a terrible husband he was depressed and he tried to commit suicide twice and yet he was the most popular advertising spokesperson on American television for 20 years why because he played a doctor on TV he wore a lab coat and in his commercials he wore a lab coat and I can even remember my grandmother saying oh I just love that doctor Marcus will be that you know that's not really a doctor but there was a strong association of authority and power and influence just because he wore a lab coat now here's the difference in the real world we can figure that out okay we can figure out by talking to them by meeting them over lunch is this person kind of a fake who just dresses nice and wears a fancy car or is this someone we really should respect the difference is on the internet we don't do that we are overwhelmed by information density I heard this statistic the other day that in the last two years as much information has been created and put on the internet as in the history of the human race all put together I don't know if that's true or not and make up about 56.6% of my statistics anyway but it sounds about right and I think you you see that yourself that the amount of information out there it's incredibly difficult and it's getting more dense every day I live in a small town 600,000 people in Tennessee Knoxville Tennessee I googled Knoxville pizza and got 8 million results that is just ridiculous we don't need that so on the internet people look for these badges they look for these numbers they look for clues as to social proof and in the short term the numbers may be more important than what you actually do it's like walking into an empty restaurant if you walk into an empty restaurant at 8 o'clock in the evening you think something's wrong but if there's lots of people there that's social proof I've made the right decision if you see two articles and one on the same subject and one has been tweeted twice and one has been tweeted 200 times which one will you read and even though the first one may be the superior article the social proof is I only have time to read one go here so that's how social proof operates as as as power influence so that's one of the traditional weapons and yet something was missing so I interviewed Dr. Chaldini from my book and I said Dr. Chaldini I think there's there's a seventh weapon of influence and he said you are right and this is content because now we all have the ability to publish we have we all have a voice and the thing that's exciting is that this can only be happening now we've had these two technological enablers come together just in the last few years you know I was walking around downtown and I see Wi-Fi everywhere this has just happened in the last few years right and it's becoming global the other one is these free easy-to-use publishing tools like Facebook and Twitter and blogging they're free they're they're very simple to use and now everybody can publish I want to give you an example of how this really works this is an example about a friend of mine named Robert he grew up in a very very poor family in New Jersey and when he was a young man his family moved to the Silicon Valley moved to California and can you imagine what that was like in the 80s you know all the excitement he wanted to be part of this he wanted to be part of this industry and excitement but he didn't know how to do it you see he didn't have a college degree he dropped out of school he wasn't your exact exactly like a business type he was very shy very nerdy he didn't have any money he didn't come from a family well so he couldn't start a company couldn't invest in a company so after he dropped out of school he became a clerk in a camera store that's the only job he could find then he discovered blogging so he would sit in his computer each day and write about his observations of his growth in this excitement in Silicon Valley and this was the way he could connect to the people and the ideas and the gadgets and the products of Silicon Valley even though you know he wasn't he wasn't employed so he started blogging once a month then once a week then every day then multiple times a day because there was so much going on and an amazing thing happened people started to pay attention dozens hundreds thousands eventually tens of thousands of people are reading this guy's blog he's having an impact on Silicon Valley just through his words and companies start to notice they start inviting him to their product launches they're saying you come behind the velvet curtain with the big shots they start sending him free computer software hardware gadgets because they know that this guy's becoming powerful and just a mention of a new product or a new service or a new company in this guy's blog could really help the company in fact in one famous example he quadrupled the traffic to one startup company's website in 24 hours quadrupled it with one blog post and that was over a Christmas holiday now think about how's he doing this it's not because of his education it's not because of his wealth here's what he can do almost better than anybody he can create content that moves through his network and beyond that's the source of his power this is a guy named Robert Scoble he's the most famous tech blogger in the world he had one time he was the blogger for Microsoft he's built his entire career based on his ability to create content that moves so if you think about I mean how did I show up in the New York Times it's because I created content that moved all right and that is the source of a lot of people's power today that could be the source of power and influence for companies for brands for nonprofits even for government here's an example of I didn't realize this till I was almost through with the book but I highlight a number of people in my book who are what I call the new citizen influencers this is the era of the citizen influencer and influence has been democratized now because anybody has the ability has the opportunity to publish and have their voice become known this was a young lady who lives in natural Tennessee and she started blogging after she had her first baby she actually became was suffering from depression so she was blogging to overcome her depression and just like Robert her her authentic voice just connected with thousands and thousands of people who just it should she was just very honest this is how I'm struggling this is what I'm going through but it wasn't just other mothers that paid attention to her it was organizations like World Vision and World Vision said her name actually is Nish Nish from Nashville I couldn't make that up so they said you have something special here you have a special voice we would like to fly you to Bolivia and write about what's going on with our work there and the orphanages in Bolivia and through her blog again never went to college and I didn't discover this until I was almost through the book that all the people I profiled in the book none of them in college not a single one and now she helped get 150 children sponsored through World Vision organization just to the words that she's writing on her blog so this is a very important point that content that moves and this is the difference it's a big difference though a lot of organizations understand the idea of content we need to block we need to do videos we need to have photos but igniting that content that's the more difficult part how do we get that content to move through the network how do we attract a group of people around us to help share that content content how do we even ignite the people in our own organization to help ignite the content so this is a legitimate source of influence and power it's unique to the internet it's unique to now now the other interesting thing that's going on is that companies are beginning to actually figure out or trying to figure out can we measure this so the first idea is can you measure content that moves okay so this is Peewee Herman he's kind of an obscure American comedian he's kind of a silly guy and I'm embarrassed to say that the most popular blog post I ever wrote was the 20 stupidest things you can do on Twitter now I'm an academic and I try to write really smart things on my blog but I got silly one time and I wrote this blog post the 20 stupidest things you can do on Twitter and it was whoops it was tweeted by Peewee Herman he has two million followers it crashed my servers my blog my website went down so can you measure how the content moves yes you can look at the numbers you know I knew that day he brought the Peewee to my blog and and the content moved you can measure that okay then the other idea is how do you create a reaction are people reacting to this well what about if your content gets tweeted or posted on Facebook or retweeted or someone clicks on a link or someone comments on your blog those are all discrete activities that can say someone is reacting we're having an impact in you know through our content so the second big idea is that if you could if you can to the extent that you can measure how the content moves and measure these reactions you could measure influence not all influence it doesn't measure how influential you are at work doesn't measure how influential you are at home it doesn't measure how influential you are influential you are with your 12-year-old daughter which is your but it can look at one sliver of influence can you move content and if you think about business today if you think about our world today isn't that an increasingly important activity that we can demonstrate we create content that spreads and shares people share and create a reaction okay so this is a quite an interesting concept that for the first time we can begin to measure influence on a mass scale and that's what companies are doing and you're probably thinking how can this getting more exciting it is going to get more exciting because I'm going to talk about these companies who are doing this so we have one actually based in the UK pure index is based in London cloud is in San Francisco and then Craig Craig Craig and opinions is based in New York but and they're all basically trying to do the same thing there are many companies they're doing this they're slicing and dicing all this data all these billions of pieces of content and they're looking at three things is this a person or is this an organization that can create content that moves is the content moving are we measuring this what are they talking about so what are the topics of influence is it economic policy is this when this person tweets or posts or blogs about economic development does it get a reaction and then they're also looking at who is reacting are you influencing the influencers are other people who are influential about economic policy sharing your content so that goes into the formula as well and they come up with a number so some companies have two numbers some companies have three numbers some companies have multiple numbers based on your different topics of influence but they're all basically doing the same thing it's almost like a credit score for influence it's an indicator of how well you can move content so we can also get other insights about this and I use kind of a benign product like Listerine which is you know the mouthwash okay to kind of to give you an example that there are influential people out there even talking about Listerine and we can start to now monitor this to see well look here is the conversation about oral care there are actually experts out there talking about oral care and there's some people talking about Listerine and to the extent they overlap Listerine is part of the conversation but look how much of the conversation they're not part of and one idea might be 75% of conversations are taking place on blogs 82% of the conversations about Listerine are taking place on Twitter so as a manager of this company is we can now see maybe we need to be spending time with blogs and you can do this type of analysis for any type of topic any type of organization and we can do it very inexpensively and very quickly so it's a new opportunity we can then click down to see who are the people actually having these conversations we can then click down even more and see a profile of these people we can see what are they saying where are they saying it what is the sentiment about this so if you want to if you want to look at a certain industry you know like high-tech or software development you can even find the influencers in Europe in the UK in Ireland and wherever you know whatever subject that you're interested in and then you can I what if you had content that you wanted them to spread you'd build these relationships to help do that you can even see over time and in this example both the volume of the conversations about Listerine and oral care have gone up and the sentiment has gone up so as a company I'd want to know why what happened why are people all of a sudden talking about Listerine in a good way maybe we can capitalize on that so again this is a kind of a simple example and a silly example but shows the power now we have to look at this big data and start to distill some interesting things out of it so a big idea is that you know we don't have to be celebrities or movie stars or athletes anymore this is the era of the citizen influencer this is a guy a profile in my book I said this is the new face of influence he's a graphic designer works for the city of Los Angeles he's very very shy 42 never went to college learned how to do his coding at a trade school he described himself as a social media hoe because he tweets for the 200 times a day he's like a human RSS feet but his 80,000 followers on Twitter love him because he says I just want to help people if I find someone who's suffering I want to find someone that can help if someone is needs exposure for their charity I want to help spread their content so in a world where the average cloud score is 40 he is an 80 and as you can see by his new avatar it's starting to get to his head so now brands and companies are reaching out to him when Audi introduced their new a8 into the United States they didn't call Brad Pitt they didn't call Angelina Jolie they called Calvin Calvin take our car try our car and what's he doing the whole time he's posting he's tweeting he's taking pictures I've learned that Instagramming is now a verb he's Instagramming all along he's driving it up and down the west coast of California coast of California he was invited to a big celebrity auction at the house of blues they caught them a room in a casino he got to hobnob with all the celebrities the VH1 awards sent a limousine for him and seven of his friends to attend the VH1 awards he's getting so much stuff from companies and brands who want to tap into him he's created a Pinterest page called my daily swag and one of the things I talk about in the book is that this is going mainstream that brands and companies are now starting to figure out we need to tap into these people who can spread content and one of the things I mentioned is that even I experienced clout envy for the first time who got tickets to CJZ it's out by Southwest and who didn't so now I want to tell you a little bit about the formula this is not the formula on how to increase your influence this is what you get when you Google complicated looking math formula but there there's lots of academic research about this right now because it is such a hot topic and this is the end of my conversation and be happy to take your questions but if you look at the academic research there are basically three things that you need to do three strings that you can pull to increase your influence and you can't do one of them or two then we have to do all three now as we talked about most people get the idea around content content is the catalyst that makes things happen one of the nice things about this organization is your rich in content you have it your website is amazing you have so much wonderful content which is a good thing because I go into a lot of companies and organizations and they look at each other and they said how do we tell our story we're not generating content you are generating content so that's usually the hard part but you have lots of you have a great story to tell you have lots of great content the piece that a lot of people miss is this idea about the relevant audience so you've got the content but are you actively systematically connecting to people around the world who would be interested in hearing from you are you building relationships with people who would be interested in your content and interested in sharing your content so a lot of people overlook that and in in my books I spent a lot of time with lots of ideas on how do you find those people how do you connect with those people but you're not really leveraging the value of the content unless you get it to move unless you get it to ignite it's just sitting there it's not creating conversations so you've got to find the relevant audience that will help you move it then the last part is consistent engagement is that social media is social they want to know about you they want to hear from you you've got to be out there you've got to be connecting you've got to be part of the conversation maybe you need in addition to them coming to see your content maybe you also need to go visit them wherever they are to and build those relationships so that is really the end of my talk I wanted to end with one last story it's one of my final stories to illustrate this power of the citizen influencer and this is a young lady who had graduated from college her name is Molly catch pole and just like you know we have here in Ireland we've got an unemployment problem in many parts of the United States as well she could not find a job so she was really struggling and her struggles turned a crisis when it was time she had to start paying back her student loans so she was just taking any part-time job that she could she became a part-time nanny and then one day she got a letter in the mail from the Bank of America one of the largest banks in the world and said dear miss catch pole thank you for being a loyal customer we'd like to inform you of a new policy unless you have an average daily balance in your account of $20,000 we're going to assess you a $5 a month monthly fee just to access our money and she just thought this was so wrong and she felt disheartened and she felt angry and she felt tired and she started tweeting about this she started blogging about this and one of her friends on Twitter said you know there's this organization called change.org where you can create a petition and get other people to know that this what this bank is doing is wrong so she created this online petition and the content began to spread in fact in two weeks she had 300,000 people sign a petition and in three weeks the bank reversed the policy this 22 year old part-time nanny had stopped the biggest bank in America in its tracks this couldn't have happened five years ago it's a new time it's a new day she had found her return on influence this was her time this is my time this is your time there's there's an opportunity for all of us and every organization to capture this opportunity and find their return on influence too and here is my contact information if you want to stay in touch with me I'd love to hear from you on Twitter or my blog and if I went too fast if I have any questions that I don't get to today I'd be delighted to stay in touch with you you can drop me an email and let me know how I can help you so. Thanks very much.


Hi, folks, welcome to another episode of The Economy and You. And today, of course, is an interesting day. It's the day after the most scary day of the year, which is, of course, Election Day. So I'm everybody out there that's suffering from PTSD. I totally understand. So today, we're going to be talking about entrepreneurship. We're going to sort of move away from politics now since the election's over. And today's guest is Richard Vubrigi. Richard is an entrepreneur in the greatest sense of the word. He started his own online website. And Richard, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yes. And I'm getting over a cold, just so you know. OK. So it makes you feel any better now that you've shaken my hand. But welcome to the show. And you have started to come. You were an entrepreneur in the true sense of the word. You started several different companies over the course of your life. Yes. And then your last venture, which is when we're going to talk about today, is a platform called AutoRepairConnect.com. Yep. Now this is an online business. First one? First? First online business. First online business that I've done. Yeah. Why? Well, it all started from an automotive background. I had an auto repair shop in Cupertino when I was in the mid-80s. And then I had a truck accessory store. And I spent a lot of money on advertising. We used to spend $6,000 a month with YellowPages.com. And when it was still the print book where you had the big ad. So we were in five different books. And it was just a lot of money. And so you ended up paying a lot of rent, $10,000 a month in rent, $6,000 a month to the Yellow Pages, $30,000 a month in payroll. And at the end of the month, you've really worked to make everybody else a paycheck, to give everybody else a paycheck. So the business I wanted to start, I went to the internet, was I wanted no rent, no advertising, and no employees. And so that's why I ended up, and the only thing I knew was automotive repair. Oh. And so I thought, well, I'll build a directory for automotive repair shops in the auto body, window tinting, we have almost 20 categories, and covers everything from auto repair to window tinting and everything in between. Okay, so you started this how long ago when did this adventure start for you? Well, I had the idea maybe 10 years ago. And I hired my first website developer right out of college, he had him on an H1B visa when I was living in Sunnyvale, California. Let me guess, and he had an accent. Oh yeah, yeah, his name, he was from India. His name was Atul, he graduated as master's in computer science and came to work for me. And we spent about eight months together building out the platform, the dashboard, just the whole product we built in about eight months. And this was your first iteration? Yes. Yeah, and how that worked out for you? Well, he didn't have a, even though he had his master's in computer science, he didn't really have enough experience to build an enterprise level platform. So the caveat here is just because somebody has a big fancy degree doesn't necessarily make them a great coder. Yes, yes, he experienced counts for a whole bunch in this business. That's true, that's true.  No, I had been out of, I had been, oh maybe three years out of that business and I traveled a little bit in the motor home and tried to figure out what I wanted to do. And for some reason I came up with this idea and said, I'm gonna give it a shot. Okay. And I've been doing it for a few years now. Had the website built twice and then had it redesigned once. And now I'm just getting ready to start marketing it. We marketed it a little bit earlier in the year, but now it's time to really push and do a hard launch and really take it across the United States as a nationwide platform. So an online directory like this, it's a nationwide directory? Yes it is. Okay, so if I'm in the automobile repair business, there's yellow pages, there's Yelp, there's lots of others Craigslist. Right. So why would I want to be listed with you versus as a directory rather than those guys? Well, we're doing things a little bit different. Yelp, yellow pages, they have hundreds of categories, maybe 500 categories. And Yelp has great reviews. The users love them. Sometimes some of the businesses aren't as much in love with Yelp as the users because it is an expensive platform to be on. How much do you pay for like a Yelp ad? I think, well, they started about $300 a month and I have no people that have paid up to $800 a month. And so the biggest problem is, are you really getting your money back? And that's where in any business, Yelp, yellow pages, my business. Or Google even if you're advertising to Google, yeah. You really need to know as an advertiser if you're spending hundreds of dollars or $1,000 a month, you want to know that your advertiser is working. And so this is the big problem that online websites have is to be able to show the results to the people that are paying them, their advertisers. You need to bring them new business or your platform doesn't work. Well, you know, there's an old expression in the world of advertising, right? Half the money I spend on advertising, I waste. The problem is determining which half it is. Right, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now you started this platform.  You had some challenges with programming? Yes, it's when you build something like this to really make it so it can be done, you need the advertisers to be able to sign up online. So there's a lot of admin dashboards, advertiser dashboards, manager permissions, and there's a lot of pieces to it. You have a Google Maps API, and we have a Yelp API. We show Yelp reviews on our sites. Oh, you have Yelp, Yelp reviews. Yes, we do. Okay, all right. And then we have an API for data and another API for Facebook. And so there's a lot of pieces to it. You have email integration, a lot of integration. And so you have a lot of people that have done some coding, but they really haven't done the integrations. And so until they've done one, it is a learning curve and everything that needs to be done. So sometimes I heard somebody the other day, they asked him what was the toughest part of his seven years in business. He says every part of it, and that's how I kind of feel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Every step of the way it's been. It's a slog. Yeah, it is, it's a challenge, but I'm kind of stubborn, very stubborn, and I just want to do it. You must be a former Marine. I gave that away. Yeah, yeah, because Marines tend to have a tendency to be fairly tenacious. Yes, yes, we do. And in business. Uh-huh. Yeah. So now what is the end game with this for you? What do you see as the end game? Is the platform done, or do you still have more to do with it? Well, the platform, we're getting ready to market it. Of course, on a platform like this, you never really finish. You're always doing work on it. You're getting feedback from the business owners, your advertisers, and feedback from the users, and you want to make sure that you're building the best product. Yelp has 300 programmers, and they're always new iterations of the new products, new features. So it'll never really be done and built where you can just kind of walk away and say, okay, we did a great job. But we just want to provide the best advertising. I've got kind of a catch word I use. We want an affordable, an affordable long-term advertising solution for our advertisers. We don't want them to come in and pay us $500 a month, which we're not even close to that. Our platform, I won't say the price, but it's very, very reasonable. And we have to prove to our advertisers, to the shop owners, that this works. If it doesn't work for them, why would they pay us? And then I think that gives us the advantage compared to some of the larger companies, where they've got Yelp has 300 engineers every day working on their product, and they need to pay these people big money. But Yelp has a bit of a reputation of being kind of a bully. That's, yeah, I've- You know, if you don't do advertising with them, and you can sort of get bad reviews, and it makes it very difficult for you to sort of get out from underneath that. Yeah, there's been a few things with Yelp, a few lawsuits and stuff. Nobody's really won the lawsuits, but there's been some unhappiness with the Yelp, the advertisers. And so we don't want to be in that situation. We want to make sure that we put our advertisers first. We want them to get business, because if they don't get business, there's no reason that they should be on our platform advertising, giving us money. And that's, when you've got 300 people working for you, you need to get money first. Money first and worry about getting them business second. That's really the difference between a funded startup like Yelp and some of the other larger companies, and where we call it bootstrapped when you started on, you're not funded.  Yes, and hard work. And so we have to prove to the people that are paying us, we need to send them business every month. We can't just say, oh, thanks for your money and not send them business. That's our, our business is sending them new business. That's really our business. So what are the things that your site talks about is having an active referral service? Yes. What is that? People come to our website, there's a lot of auto repair shops.  We have about 500,000 auto repair shops in our database. Well, no, we think about auto repair shops. That's not just auto repair. Auto repair, auto body, window tinting, auto glass. Yeah, towing in there. Towing, auto detailing. We have, I can't even remember, old radiator shops, auto glass. I think in muffler, yeah, in muffler. In muffler, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's like total of half a million companies in there. Yes, yes, there is. Wow, that's a lot. And so you basically, you've covered, you sort of built out a platform. Right, we are the only people that have, we're the only. It's nationwide, it's communities across the United States. Yes, we're the only website like it. There's a few others, there's Repair, Pal, Open Bay, and a couple other ones, but they've got one category. We've got the full spectrum, everything automotive. So when you come to our website, you can find anybody that you're looking for. So where did this sort of epiphany come from, that this was the thing that was missing? Well, nobody was doing it. And I saw the need for it because the people that were doing it are charging $500 a month, $300 a month, and it's just as a former business owner, I know it's not easy to, you're making money, but to just keep on paying for advertising and enriching somebody else when you're still just trying to pay your bills. And so it came out to make a better solution for the advertisers and for the users. Because the users, since we are a platform where they can come straight to our website and find anything on auto repair, we have a much better search feature because we're just automotive. And we have everything in the right category, they're not searching the whole web for it. They can write to our website, we have all 500,000 of every business in the United States. Now, so when I took a look at the site, one of the things that I noticed, like with Google, you sort of get, you get sort of auto repair, but then you get other stuff sort of intermingled in with it. And then some of the stuff, the data's good, some of it's not, but of course, with your platform, one of the things that I noticed is that it seems to be fairly coherent whatever shops are in specific category, it lets you find it more easily. Yes, we spend a lot of time cleaning our data and we make sure we get the radiator shops under radiator and the auto glass under auto glass and by every category. So when you are a user and you come to our website, you find what you're looking for and you're not calling, we can also search by vehicle make, so you can work, you can search by auto repair. Oh, that's right, you can search by the type of vehicle. Or BMW, Mercedes, so you can find, I actually find a specialist on our website too. Oh, I think they're scrolling our website now. Okay, now I did notice like you've got things on here, like collision repair, transmission repair also. Yes. Emission testing, okay. So you've got all this stuff on the site and then it also has all their contact information. Yes, it does. But not just like on Craigslist where you get a sort of Craigslist email. Right, oh, good. And maybe somebody will get back to you. You asked me about the phone number on the website. That's where I got off the... Well, I'll tell you what we're gonna do. Let's talk about that. We're gonna take a short commercial break and then we're gonna come back and let's talk about the phone number and how people can contact you. I'm Chris Letham and this is The Economy and You. Today's guest is Richard Vubregi and we're talking about his company called AutoRepairConnect.com. We'll be right back. Aloha. Hey, Standard Energy Man here. Make sure you tune in on my lunch hour every Friday from noon until 12.30 at least. Maybe I'll go a little long if you got good stuff to share with you. But we'll talk about energy, all kinds of energy. My favorite is hydrogen and my other favorite is transportation and hydrogen. But we'll talk about all kinds of energy. Be with us every Friday at noon, Standard Energy Man, aloha. Hi, I'm Stacy Hayashi with the Think Tech Hawaii show Stacy to the Rescue, highlighting some of Hawaii's issues. You can catch it at Think Tech Hawaii on Mondays at 11 a.m. Aloha, see you then. Aloha. My name is Reg Baker and I'm the host of Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're a show that broadcast live every Thursday from two to two 30. We highlight success stories in Hawaii of both businesses and individuals. We learn their secrets to success, which is always valuable. I hope to see you on our next show. Aloha. Welcome back. I'm Chris Ethan with the Economy and You. Today's guest is Richard Verbrugge with Auto Repair Connect. He is an entrepreneur, an online entrepreneur. And you know, we love people who are doing e-commerce here at Think Tech Hawaii. So Richard, we were gonna talk about, when we left, we were gonna start talking about this sort of phone number or active referral service thing that you do. Why is that, say, different than Yelp or some of the other services? What does that entail? We're the only one that is doing that because you get a lot of people that they own a car, they don't really know a lot about cars. And so your car breaks and you're not sure what it is. So we've got a phone number on our website where the people that are looking for auto repair or window tinting or transmission repair, they can actually call us and we have an expert on the phone that will talk to the people and say, what's your problem? They won't diagnose your car and fix it for you over the phone, but we can refer you to one of the shops, even if they're not... But you call the shops first. We call the shop and make sure that they can do the work. We vet the shop to make sure that they're capable, They're capable and able. Capable and able and they have, that they've worked on a Volvo before. You don't wanna take your car to a shop that hasn't seen a Volvo in two years. You wanna take your Volvo to somebody that works on Volvos, you're Toyota to somebody that works on Toyotas and every make. I think that's the biggest problem with poor repair jobs is a mechanic. As a former mechanic, I've worked on a couple cars in my time that I wish I wouldn't have taken the job. And that's where I got myself where I had an unhappy customer. So we're trying to alleviate that. So the customer calls us, we refer them to a shop that we know that can do the work, that has good reviews, that has been in business quite a while. Cause that's the difference between you. Yelp isn't necessarily gonna say, oh, he did a great job on my Mercedes or my Jag. It just says it's sort of a general sort of, we liked you or we didn't like you or satisfied or we're not satisfied. What you're really talking about is a more definitive statement of yes, this is somebody that can work on this type of vehicle and has experience or certification and or both. Exactly, we know who's a member of the Automotive Service Excellence, the Mechanics. We know who is a member of the Automatic Transmission Rebuilders Association. We know the member shops and all the associations across the United States as far as auto body associations, iCar, all of them. We know, so we know what the best shops are and we know the shops that are fair, that price are, they're do great work and are fairly price fair. We don't, you know, nobody's, there's might be a very small percentage of auto repair shops that aren't scrupulous or that are unscrupulous, but what we find is usually if somebody is getting, they take in a job they can't fix and that's where the problems arise. So we're sending you to a place, to a shop that we know can fix your car. Okay. So that's the bottom line. You want your car fixed and our repair shops want a job that they know how to fix, so. So that's, I think one of the values of what you're trying to offer here is that you try to have a value-added service. Yes. To beyond, say, just an online directory. Right, yeah. We don't like to be called an online directory. We're more of like an act of referral services. So an act of referral services may be a better way to refer it. But you do have the ability, people do have the ability to go on the site and search for whatever it is that they're looking for. Yes, they can search, read reviews. They can call the customer, the advertiser, the auto repair shop owner themselves. Okay, all right. And so, what is the sort of the game plan then after you sort of get this thing going? Because you said this is just in the beginning stages? Yes, it is. Okay. And so there are other things that you intend to add to this platform? Yes. In the beginning right now we're, we have 23,000 cities in the United States and there's about a thousand major cities in the United States with more than 35,000 people in it. So our first goal is to get one auto repair shop, one auto body shop, one window tinting, one radiator shop, one of every, one of every city. So we have, so we have a good vetted repair shop. And then as we vet more shops, we put them on our site. So we have on our shop, we have ones that are verified and ones that we haven't verified yet. Okay, can you share with me your secret marketing strategy? Your super secret marketing strategy for your business? No, I can't. Okay. We're working on that. You're working on this super secret marketing strategy, okay, all right, okay.   Cause you know, so many companies will start here and then as they start to grow, they find themselves wanting to get more financing so they end up back in the Bay Area. Well, I just moved from the Bay Area. I lived in, born and raised in Cupertino and I lived there my whole life. And I moved to Hawaii. I needed a change. And as far as funding, there's, you can do a lot more when you're funded a lot quicker. But if this was a big money-making business, there would be people already funded in doing it. But it's something that I plan on keeping as large as we can make it because we're just automotive. And be able to be the premier site where people, a household name, where they say, oh, check out Auto Repair Connect. That's where you go to look for it. Well, and being able to give people expert advice, I think one of the things we talked about earlier is be able to give people more expert advice and or solutions to say everyday problems maybe to do with weather or maybe you're hearing something new or what do the lights mean when the little lights go on? Right, there's all kinds of information. We're gonna be putting it on the website as far as some do-it-yourself fixes and that type of stuff.  Well, I found online, I found a video, it says this is a certain place, if you pop it with your fist, like that, just so, it fixes the window and the window works, oh my God, it works, it's so crazy, it's the most crazy thing, yeah, it's just like I blew my mind. I paid a mechanic $100. The first time it went wrong, like that, and I'm saying, I'm not paying $100 or telling the window it doesn't work. That's crazy. And I went online, I found a video. That's great. Figure that, just where to smack it and it worked again, it was crazy, yeah, this is terrible. So I could see the value of these sort of do-it-yourself kind of fixes. Yeah, yeah. Now we wanna, there's other things we can do to drive, our business is driving traffic to the auto repair shops, bringing them new customers. That's our business and finding the right repair shop for the customer that's looking to get their car repaired. And one of the challenges, of course, with an online business is showing up on the first page of a search engine. Right. There are sort of those most powerful words which everybody's fighting for. But one of the things I know, having been a search engine optimizer kind of guy, is that there's also lots of words that aren't necessarily as popular, but it's much easier to show up under the search terms. Like showing up under mufflers is gonna be a lot easier to show up, muffler repairs are a lot easier to show up than auto repair. Auto repair is a sort of big word where a muffler repair would be more specific and muffler repair in Honolulu is a much easier search term to show up under than muffler repair in, say, San Francisco. True, true. Yeah. So one of the keys, of course, to successfully showing up on the first page of any search engine is not necessarily trying to fight for those bigger words. Yes, that's true. And we aren't on the first page of Google. We need to be on the first page of Google for every city, every category in the United States. So that takes time to build up there. But what we're doing is we're integrated with Facebook. And so we, the average Facebook user spends 40 minutes a day on Facebook, which is 242 hours a year. So we're doing a lot of marketing on Facebook because we know where your customers are. Your customers are on Facebook 242 hours a year. And so we're marketing our business on Facebook. So we're getting a lot of traffic from Facebook. Now what about YouTube? YouTube, we've done some videos. And we haven't really, since we're kind of a small company, we haven't had the resources to put into making a lot of videos. We've only made a couple. But we do have, get some traffic from YouTube. And that's another avenue to market the business as is Pinterest and Tumblr and all these, there's so many social media sites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's gotten a little crazy. It's confusing these days. So what do you see as, if you're gonna keep working on this, do you think, but do you see yourself staying in Hawaii? Oh yes, definitely gonna stay in Hawaii. Okay, so do you think you'll be able to employ more people to come and work for you doing the marketing and such? Yes, we probably once we have this thing up and running within the next year, I expect us to have at least four or five people, at least four people full time working on the project as self. And then we're gonna be needing telemarketers, email marketers, social media people.  We need to, we need some people. Now what is your platform written in? What is the, what is it, .NET, it's PHP, right? It's PHP. It's PHP with HTML. Yeah, PHP and Codigniter and the JavaScript and. All that stuff. HTML. But it's a pretty site. It's very pretty. I mean, you look at it, it's done well. Yeah, yeah, that's a second. That's actually the third redesign we've had. Oh, okay. It's been built twice in three redesigns. Now it's also, you know, one of the things, of course, is sites also need to be able to work on mobile phones and things like that. They have to be able to conform to the screen. Yes. Now did you have some challenges with that? Yeah, we hired a guy that does nothing but front end work. So it took, when we coded the front end for the web, you'd have to check it in, it has to work on the web, it has to work on the iPad, the iPad Mini, it has to work in three different phone formats. So it works in every format. And so every time you make a change, you have to make sure it works in every format. So that's... It's a big job when it's all hand coded. It's not like we did a drag and drop type website. This is built from scratch and it's enterprise level. So everything, every page we create needs to be, every new page needs to be redesigned. So if you're an auto repair company out there and you wanted to get a hold of you, what's the best way to reach you? So there's a phone number right on our website. It is<PHONE_NUMBER>. That's a lot of eight. That's a lot of eight. That's a lot, like a Chinese, good luck. That's very good luck. Very good luck. Good luck. Yeah. Well, I really, I think this sounds like an interesting venture. And I want to wish you all the luck in the world. Well, thank you. I know this, you must put in a lot of, you have a lot of sleepless nights and or nights where you get very little sleep. Yes. But this is the world of e-commerce, right? Yeah, it's, I've had this project for a long time and I just gonna see it through because I still believe in it. And we wanna be the best auto repair site on the internet. And I think we're gonna do it. All right, awesome. Well, thank you, Richard, for coming on the show. Thank you. Here at Think Tech Hawaii and the economy and you. I'm Chris Lethem and I, next week, well, in two weeks, I'm sorry, we'll be, we'll be looking forward to having one of our candidates from this last election and we'll look forward to seeing you then. So have a great weekend. Aloha.