Proudly, we hail. New York City, where the American stage begins, here is another program with a cast of outstanding players. Public Service Time has been made available by this station for your Air Force to bring you this story, as proudly we hail another airman of the United States Air Force. Hundreds of years ago, the poet said it when he wrote, Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. We're going to tell you about three men who believe just that in a story titled, Mission Accomplished. Our first act curtain rises in just a moment, but right now, here's important news for all ex-servicemen. You may be qualified to enlist in the United States Air Force at a higher grade and at higher pay than you realize. The Air Force needs men who are experienced in critical skills required to keep America's air defense strong. If you have training in these skills, the Air Force wants you, and they'll put you right on the job. For full details, write or visit your nearest Air Force recruiter right away. Today and tomorrow, you're better off in the United States Air Force. And now your Air Force presents the proudly we hail production, Mission Accomplished. It is the year 1951, and three members of the United States Air Force are prisoners of war in the Nagin compound in North Korea. Some 400 miles of hostile territory separate them from their outfits. Sit down, Jeff. Where are the rest of the guys? The butcher boy was here, rounded everybody up and marched them off to a class. And what? The usual? Re-education? How'd you get out of it? I didn't. I saw him coming and hit out in the back of the shack. You're going to catch it later on. I guess I will. Well, what'll they do? Take away another handful of rice? It's worth missing a meal if you can call it a meal. Listen, from now on, I'm not going to do anything to call attention to myself. I'm not going to miss any more meals. See, I'm going to save everybody's strength I have. Come here. Let's stand by the door so we can be sure none of these punk guards come strolling along. Yeah, I'm going to bust out of here. You're crazy. Oh, sure. Got to be just a little bit crazy. It helps. But you don't have a chance. When you and I got into our ship back at the base, we had a mission. It was to bomb our target and return. We didn't get back, Ed. Our mission hasn't been accomplished. It wasn't our fault, Jeff. We knocked off two of them before they shot us down. All I know is I won out. You're thinking of trying it alone? Yeah, if it comes to that. Although I'd prefer to have one guy or maybe two with me. Three's a good number. Who's the third guy going to be? You sure you want to do this? I decided I'd do it 34 days ago the minute we had to hit the silk. You got any kind of plan? No. All I know is we're going to do it. That's the beginning of every escape. A desire, a longing, a decision. And Captain Jeff Ellison and Lieutenant Edward Rackley had already jumped the first hurdle. They had made the commitment. Each had made the most binding agreement a man can make. An agreement he makes with himself. Quartered on the other side of an agent compound was Staff Sergeant Maurice Crane, two months a prisoner. He'd been a tail gunner. He knew Ellison and Rackley had been in the same squadron. One afternoon, he made his way over to their shack. Hey, I see where you picked yourself up a little cough, Captain. Yeah. Take this little bottle. It's cough syrup I swiped in. I've missed sweeping out the guard's barracks. Oh, thanks. I can sure use it. It's okay. You took a big chance just to get this. I had my eye on a couple of other things, too. I got some sulfur powder, some canned fish and a pocket knife. Hey. The biggest prize is a map. It's not much of a map, but you'll find a kid's geography book, kind of. I see you got ideas. Yeah. I keep getting more ideas every day. Any practical ones? Not yet, no. Maybe if I can pull mine with a couple of other guys, something might turn up. Look, I gotta beat it now that God is sure to be looking for me. Listen, I can let us have a volleyball game later this afternoon. Can you get out to watch it? Yeah. Because you and I and Lieutenant Rackley have a lot to talk about. And now the trio is set. Now there are three men ready and willing to undertake one of the most hazardous assignments known to man. Escaped from a prisoner of war camp. This is the beginning. Three men against an entire nation. Three men, unarmed, equipped only with willpower and their wits. Listen, guys, it couldn't be rougher. We're up in the northeast corner of the country. Just above us is the Chinese border. We're eight miles from the coast, but that's no bargain either because it's a good 700 miles to Japan. Well, we can't swim that far. That's for sure. Wait a minute. That guard doesn't like this conversation. I can't believe we're watching again. Hey! Now the way to go, boys! Back it down, man. Where do you think the front is now, Jeff? I don't know. I think we took Seoul back from him. That's 300 miles from here. That's air miles. I think you're another good 100 across country. Every inch of the way, hostile too. We got an idea of what a lot of the country looks like from there. It's not going to be much help when we're down on the ground. We can spend the next couple of months finding out about the country. We don't have the time. What we have now so far is our health and strength. A couple of more months on this diet, we're going to take losses in both. Okay. You guys are right. All right, then this is it. Look for a way out of here, grab the first chance we get. General direction south. Basic idea, hide by day, travel by night. Step number one. How do we get out of here? No one has to say anything, but word gets around. A man here and a man there gets an idea that an escape is being planned. Before you know it, there's a little group of friends willing to help with ideas and supplies. Because the trio will need all the assistance it can get. Tiny, almost inconsequential things on the face of it. But in the grim world of a prison camp, things that are worth a king's ransom. Some tins of meat and fish, a small bag of rice, a few precious cigarettes, a fish hook, some aspirin tablets. But just as important, advice and information. Jeff, 20 miles do south of here they got about 20,000 guys in the training camp. It's in a valley marked by six distinct mountain peaks. Circle it. Hey Ed, we got our hands on some money, you fellas better take it. And we got a compass for you too. Crane, listen, it's not so good. Andy, me and George have cased the whole perimeter of the fence. It's not a single weak spot. You can't break through anyways. No, I'm against a tunnel. It'll take forever to dig and who knows where you can come out. We can forget about trying the fence. It gunners down in 15 minutes. Hold it guys, hold it. The way out is staring us right in the face. All we have to do is grab it. What do they do twice a month? That's it. Sure, when they take us out of the compound of the river so we can wash our clothes. Look, we'll have two of the guys start a fist fight to distract the guards' attention. Then we run for it. That sounds like the best chance we can ever get. Well there's one thing wrong with it. They take out a different group each day and I'm not in the same group with you two. I'm with the enlisted man. Jeff, we've got to figure out a way for the sergeant to be with us. Wait a minute, wait a minute. I've got an idea. It'll take some cigarettes. Can we spare about six of them? Sure, take them. That's what they're for. Hey corporal. Hey, listen. Next time I go to wash clothes when officers go, okay? Can I? We're done. Well, officers want me wash clothes for them, huh? Rules say no. I wash clothes for officers. They give me cigarettes. Hey, I'll give you cigarettes. How much cigarettes? Three. Make six? Okay, six. Can do? Can do. Our group goes out to wash clothes a day after tomorrow. Then that's it. Frank and Bob are going to stage the fight. It should be a real Pier 6 brawl. They know we need every minute we can get. One little detail can blow the whole thing up in our faces. Like you say, we need time to make for cover. I suppose the guard doesn't let him fight. I suppose he steps in with his rifle butt. Maybe he blows his whistle for quick help. This thing will never get off the ground, you know. Crane's right, Jeff. This whole ball game depends on the attitude of the guard. That's one thing we can't figure on. Maybe we can. Of such tiny imponderables has made the stuff of escape. The personality of a sentry, for example.  You can get to know him better than his own brother because you've got nothing to do all day every day except to watch him. You know his every move, his every expression. You know, for instance, by the way he walks in in the morning, what kind of night he had, and therefore what kind of day you're going to have. He comes on shift holding his rifle, look out. If it's slung over his shoulder, breathe easy. Would he step in to break up a fist fight? There's only one way to find out. Stage one the day before. On I shoot! Oh, no, no, wait a minute, wait. Let him settle it. This has been boiling up for a long time. Oh, say no. Well, look, what do you care if a couple of Americans beat each other up? Sergeant, come along. I pay.  They must settle one steel girl from other back home. You know how he feels? Anybody ever one-time steel girl from you? But no fight here. Settle tomorrow, when no one else see. And so that all important little detail is taken care of. The guard will be distracted for at least a few minutes. The rest of the group will be sure to block his vision. The escape will begin. The jumble will be made out of the frying pan into the fire. That night the tiny horde of supplies is wrapped into an extra shirt. Short quiet goodbyes are said to good friends. The prayers and hopes of so many men ride with three. The next day passes slowly. Finally late in the afternoon the group is assembled. It is marched out of the compound down to the river bank. Better make believe you're washing that shirt. Oh, yeah. Where are they going to start the fight? When I give them the high sign, three of us better start moving off to the left. We'll head for that bend in the river that gets us out of his sight. That's back toward camp. That's north. Yeah, I know. Okay, watch out. Here it goes. Oh, when I was a lad, I started to care nothing about... This way, this way. Come on, it should be right here. Just past those bushes. What? Crying out loud. Where is it? It's supposed to be behind these bushes along the side of the hill.  What are you looking for? Oh, yeah. He was right here in his... Looks like a cave. I give that man a prize inside fast. Sit down and relax. I can't stop now. He'll be after us in a couple of minutes. Look, Captain, you're in charge, okay, but when you change plans like that, you ought to let... I know, I know. I should have told you about it. I didn't find out about this cave till a half hour ago, and then there was no chance to talk. Well, yeah, but they'll search and find this cave and then goodbye. But they won't figure that we'd run back toward camp. They won't start any real searching until they get past the river, which is where they know we started from. All right, look, I admit it's a chance. If you guys say no, we can still get out and run. Oh, this way makes sense to me. We're playing the whole thing by ear, Jeff. One way's as good as another. The guys brought us all the time they could. Okay. We'll just sit tight and hope we did the right thing. Got the rations crane. Yeah, wrapped up in the shirt. Okay. We'll divvy them up. Three tins of sardines apiece. Ten tins of meat for each.  I'll carry the blanket. Nobody can say we're not traveling light. All right. You have absolutely no reason to start searching around here. No reason at all. Yeah, that's what I keep telling them down at the office. Well, just sit tight. We'll be okay. I hope. You're listening too proudly we hail. We'll return to our second act in just a moment. When you make an investment, you wanted to pay off, right? Well, man, how about those years you invested in the armed forces, learning skills, gaining experience valuable to yourself and your country? You can make those years pay off in big dividends today by becoming a member of the United States Air Force. Your Air Force recruiter has a folder full of details, so write or visit him right away. Ask for the prior service man's folder and you'll know why today and tomorrow you're better off in the United States Air Force. And now for the second act of the proudly we hail production of Mission Accomplished. The sky's overcast, there won't be a moon. It should have a good eight hours before daylight. Take a look outside the cave, Ed. Can't see a thing. How do we know about directions? We'll have to keep checking the compass every few minutes. It should be southeast. Keep your eyes and ears open. If it's in the cards for us to be captured, please don't let it happen here within sight of the camp. At least let's give them a run for their money. And so they set out, stumbling through the darkness to a goal so far away it might just as well have been on another planet. At any moment they might stumble into a patrol. Through rice paddies they struggle through underbrush. They have to fight to gain every precious mile of ground. Every hour they stop and fall to the ground, breathe deeply, try to relax for just a few minutes. And then they journey forward again. After what seems an eternity, there's a faint light in the east. And now a problem. Where to hide through the daylight hours that will soon be on? Directly ahead they can make out the shape of the hillside thickly covered by bushes. And where they must take cover. Make sure you keep low and out of sight. We can eat one tin of meat apiece and chew a handful of rice. Somebody's coming. I see him. It's an old guy. Looks like a farmer. Is he alone? Yeah. What's he doing? Seems like he's looking for something. Hope he's not looking for us. Why should he be looking for us? Probably rewarding and foreign. Hey, he's headed this way coming right at us. What are we going to do, Jeff? Can't be. He knows we're here. I can tell by the way he's standing there. Jeff, his lad will go back and get help. Americans? Uh-oh. Americans, you come quick with me. I have house. I am alone. No one see. No one know. You hide. Soldiers, come here quick. Look all over hillside. Can we trust him, Jeff? I don't know. If it are dark, we could take a chance and run for it, but now in the daylight... Hey, look, way off there in the valley. Soldiers heading this way. Quick. Come quick. Fellas, we have to take a chance. You safe here. Soldiers search last night. They not come again. Here. Think more tea. Well, thanks. You know, I feel a hundred percent better. Tell me, why do you do this for us? You can get shot for it, you know. Uh, hey, bad people. Promise peace. They take away my two sons. Make them soldiers. I'd never see my sons again. Where'd you learn how to speak English, old man? Oh, high school teacher. They not like me. Call me re-actionary. Because I know teach what they say. Take away job. You think tea, eat, seep. I stand guard. I watch. He was a very old man, with a deeply lion face and troubled eyes. Perhaps he would betray them in the end. Perhaps this was just a trick to detain them. But an escaping prisoner develops a sixth sense. They felt they could trust this man. Besides, they had no other place to go. Finally, they fell asleep in the warm heart. You must go now. I think soldiers are coming back. Okay, pal. Thanks. Go east toward Seashore. Tomorrow, holiday. Fishermen stay home. No work tonight. You find boat, maybe. Yeah, that's an idea. Beats walking. All right, guys, we better get out of here. Listen, pal. We, uh... Why don't you take this money? No. Come on, pal. You can use it. No. I do this for my sons.  Tore, strong. Not afraid of anything. Please. No money. Bless you, pal. Go east toward Beech. It is still light as they walk through the wooded and hilly terrain, and suddenly their hearts beat faster because to the rear and approaching toward them, they hear voices, many voices. This must be a patrol, and it seems like a large patrol, one that means business, and it's spread out beating the underbrush. Their only chance is to out-distance it, and so they move faster. But up ahead lies a new peril. Hey, wait a minute. Listen. It sounds like a convoy, then, must be a road we're coming to. Patrol's in back of us, a road with a convoy on it ahead of us. Which way, Jeff? That's probably their strategy. They've beaten the bushes hoping to flush us out toward the road.  Jeff, do you hear that convoy? We haven't got a chance in a million at getting across the road. It's our only chance. Keep hoping it gets good and dark before that patrol forces us to the road. It's not a chance. I can hear him coming now. Okay. Convoy will be moving fast. Let's get to the road and make a dash for it. What else can we do? Hey! It's the 26s. They're strafing the convoy. Yeah. Hit the ground! This should take everybody's mind off us for a while. After this pass, get across the road quick. It had been right. The shoreline was deserted. They saw the dim outlines of fishing boats, but no people. Most of the boats were too big to handle, but finally they found one that seemed just right. It was about the size of a lifeboat. It had a mast in place for oars. They pushed her into the water. None of them knew very much about sailing, but they were able to figure out how to raise the sail. After considerable trial and error, they were able to set a course and hold her to it. Then everyone seemed to remember something no one had taken into account before. Water. But their luck was still in. There was a locker in the stern and the inside had a huge earthenware jar. It contained about a gallon of water. I estimate daylight in about an hour. Should we look for a place to put in, Jeff? We can do that. Or we can stay out here. During the day if we head south by east and lose the coastline. We can keep moving 24 hours a day that way. Yeah, for how long? Till our food and water give out. We also stand a good chance of being spotted. Well, our chances are no better on the land.  Can you take us out daytime and bring us closer at night? I'm not that kind of navigator. Send me upstairs with my instruments. I'll navigate you anywhere in the world. Right here I'm navigating by the seat of my pants. Okay, new course for the day. South-east. They made distance that day and night and in the three days and nights that followed. But on the fourth day their food was about gone. And on the fifth day, there was no water left in the jar. Then they got water, more than they had bargained for. A heavy wind sprang up and lashed the seas into gigantic waves. The angry wind and water hurtled the boat forward at a frightening speed. Wave after wave threatened to engulf the tiny craft. What miraculously, each time she would write herself and plunge forward again. They had no way of knowing how far they had come. Finally a huge wave lifted them out of the water and sent the boat crashing onto the beach. The bottom of the craft splintered from the impact. Slowly, painfully, each of them rose from the ground and started walking. It was broad daylight. Easy, Jeff. Try to find a place to rest. Any idea of where we are at? No, I don't know. That storm knocked out all my calculations. I don't know how far we came. What's that over there? Looks like an old storehouse of some kind. Should we take a chance? Yeah. Looks kind of deserted around here. The sides are starting to rain again. We need shelter. We better help them in. I'll be all right. They might just lean on us. The door's open. The place is deserted. What floor, Jeff? Sorry, we lost the blanket. It's a stove over in the corner. Maybe I can get a fire going in. I don't know if we should take a chance. The captain's pretty sick. It's a well outside. Here's a tin can. Just got a little bit of rice left, but we'll boil it up. Yeah, we could only do something hot. What we need right now is to rest and get warm. Boy, that storm ruined us. I'll get the water. See if you can start a fire. How is he? Sleeping. You don't look too good yourself. I got a fever. How about you? I don't know. All my bones ache. I feel a little bit dizzy. None of us in too good shape, are we? Well, we can get some rest. Keep warm in here so far. But if we don't get some chow soon, I don't know. It's been days since we really ate. You still got that fish hook? Yeah. Let me have it. I can use my shoelaces for a line. I'll try to dig up some bait. Maybe we can catch a square meal. Better go right now while I fill up to it. Wait a minute. I hear somebody coming. Sounds like a lot of people. Jeff, Jeff, come on, wake up. I think they finally got us cornered, boy. Fellas, I, uh... I just about had a... Help him up. Try to get out the back way. No, I don't want to hold you back. Two of you run for it. It's no good. The three of us started. The three of us finished. Come on, hold onto me, Jeff. Let's go. Out that back door. Hey, hey! What do you think I am? What's your idea? Slug me. Ed. Ed, look, he's an American. Crane. Ed, Americans. We're prisoners of war. We've escaped from an agent compound. An agent compound? Holy mackerel, how'd you guys make it all the way down here? Uh, where's the... Where's the 12th Bombardment? Who can get a message through to Colonel Downing? We'll notify your buddies, sir. I guess we'll need a couple of days in the hospital. The old Colonel will be back in a week. Ed. Crane. Let's get a little bit of sleep. We earned it. Oh, and, uh, listen, when you get word to the Colonel, don't forget to say mission accomplished. There were three men, and they decided to buck the odds and make their escape. It took a combination of many things to make it. It took courage, luck, ingenuity, determination. But most of all, it needed the spark. The spark which makes so many men keep on going until they can say the most satisfying words in any language. Mission accomplished. Today and tomorrow, you're better off in the United States Air Force. Right now, plenty of former servicemen are discovering the truth of that slogan. They're taking a look at the new advantages available under the Air Force's liberalized reenlistment policy, and they're signing up for a profitable, interesting tour of duty with the Air Force team. You see, the new Air Force policy offers a choice of U.S. and overseas assignments, plus a paid 30-day delay in reporting if requested. And listen, even before you enlist, the Air Force may be able to guarantee you technical training in critical skills. So remember, veterans, regardless of your former service or how long you've been in civilian life, you'll do well to find out about the new liberalized reenlistment policy of the United States Air Force. Talk it over now with your nearest Air Force recruiter. This has been another program on Proudly We Hail, presented transcribed in cooperation with this station. Proudly We Hail is produced by the Recruiting Publicity Center in New York for the United States Air Force. This is Ralph Roland inviting you to tune in this same station next week for another interesting story on Proudly We Hail.


What does happy belated birthday mean? Hmm, of course, you know what happy birthday means, right? But what happens when you add this weird word belated between happy and birthday and it becomes happy belated birthday? This is a question I get from my students a lot because they see this all the time on Facebook comments or on YouTube comments or online in general. They see this expression happy belated birthday in this video. I'm going to tell you exactly what it means, how you can use it, and we'll review the pronunciation as well. Of course, I'm Jennifer from J4sEnglish.com and we have a birthday celebration to get to. So let's get started. You can see I'm wearing this beautiful sparkly ribbon here, a birthday ribbon. Today is November 15th. Of course, you might be watching this video a little bit later, but that's OK. This video was published on November 15th. Now, my birthday was past tense. My birthday was on November 7th. So just over a week ago. Now, imagine it's November 7th today. It's my birthday today, if it were November 7th. Of course, today, November 7th, you could say happy birthday teacher. But it's not November 7th, right? I don't have a time machine. We can't go back in time to November 7th. I can't relive my fabulous birthday all over again. Today is November 15th. Because of that, you can still wish me a happy birthday. But because my birthday is over, you have to say happy belated birthday. So that's it. It's a very simple expression. Happy belated birthday. And you use this if it's the day after somebody's birthday. So on somebody's birthday, of course, you say happy birthday. But after you say happy belated birthday. So right now, because it's November 15th, and my birthday was just over a week ago. And did you wish me a happy birthday on November 7th? Don't worry if you didn't, because you can still do it right now. Just write in the comments, practice this expression. Write in the comments, happy belated birthday, Jennifer. Happy belated birthday, Jennifer. And make sure you get the spelling right of belated, OK? So make sure you get that spelling there as well. Now, you might be wondering, is it rude to say happy belated birthday to somebody? Because doesn't that mean you forgot their birthday? And won't I be offended that you didn't say happy birthday on November 7th? And in fact, you're saying happy birthday now. Happy belated birthday, correction. You're saying happy belated birthday over a week later. No, I won't be offended. And no, it isn't rude to say happy belated birthday. It's totally acceptable. In fact, we even have an entire section of cards at your local drug store or card store that say happy belated birthday. It's just such a common thing because there could be so many reasons why you have to say happy belated birthday. For you, most likely, you didn't know it was my birthday on November 7th. I didn't tell you, right? So because of that, it's not your fault. You didn't wish me a happy birthday, right? So it's not rude. Or for example, you might have been out of town. You were on a business trip or something else was going on in your life and you just weren't able to. So it's not rude, but of course there are certain people that probably should not say happy belated birthday, right?  But in general, no, it isn't rude. So go ahead, wish me a happy belated birthday. But let's say it's December 5th, December 5th. We've jumped forward into the time. Right now it's December 5th.  So you don't know my specific date for my birthday, but you do know it was early November. And right now it's early December over a month later. So would you wish somebody a happy belated birthday over a month later? Most likely not. Generally there's about a one to two week window where it's acceptable to say happy belated birthday. After that, after one to two weeks, your birthday is over, right? And you have to wait until next year to get your birthday wishes. Now finally, let's just go over the pronunciation because this is definitely an area where pronunciation and spelling are not the same. So look at the spelling. Happy belated birthday. But then listen to the pronunciation, belated, belated, did, did. And do you hear how soft it is? I'm saying belated, belated. So the syllable that stressed is the middle syllable, belated. And I'm saying this did, did, very softly. So the pronunciation is very different than the spelling. So repeat after me, belated, belated, belated, very good. Now repeat after me, happy belated birthday. Awesome. Great job. Now you know a very useful expression that you can use with someone the day after their birthday for about a one to two week window. So remember, if you haven't already, wish me a happy belated birthday in the comments. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you found this video helpful. And remember, I promised you a little gift because we're talking about birthdays, right? And everybody deserves a gift on their birthday. So I'm going to give you a little gift, even though it's my birthday. So here I have this free speaking guide that you can download from my website, jforceenglish.com, totally free, and it will give you six easy tips to help you speak English fluently and confidently. So as a little thank you for you and a little birthday present, go download this free guide and also let me know in the comments if this was helpful for you as well to help you improve your speaking skills. All right, so hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please give it a thumbs up, tell your friends and don't forget to subscribe. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, happy studying.


Business news now. The importance of collaboration in business lies in the belief that together more can be done. Progress and giant strides can also be achieved through synergy. Well, this was the thrust of one day seminar organized by Amplify Your Purpose Business Mixer for emerging African business leaders, entrepreneurs and C-suite executives by reputable and platforms. Speakers at the event emphasized the need for entrepreneurs, African leaders to collaborate and foster relationships to amplify and grow their businesses. A lot of businesses, people die solo because they want to shine alone, because they want to be the only one that is being talked about, they want to be the only one that is being recognized, they want to be the only one that is being awarded and rewarded. But you find out that when you collaborate you make more progress, you make more giant strides. So the beauty of collaboration is synergizing with your strength, right? And then you can win more. It's better to win 50 percent off your success rate than to lose 100 percent because you're doing things alone. Most of them think it is about social media. It's not about social media. It's about very many things that come into play. So it starts from, yes, the idea, it starts from the concept of what you want to do. But what you want to do must be predicated on something that you want to solve or a need that you found, a solution that is coming to a challenge, a problem. And in that lies the opportunity to understand not just the end users, what the motivation is. And so you go craft whatever service or good is for them. Then you start the process of brand building. Every business owner needs to be nurtured, right?  American economy is built on small businesses. And that is also possible, yeah. But what they've done over there is that they've ensured all necessary infrastructure that would enable businesses to thrive. That is the same thing we need to replicate here. We need to be able to create platforms and opportunity for young businesses to thrive. You need to believe in yourself. You need to believe in the beauty and your innate potential. You need to believe in your brand before you start thinking of how to put it out there. You cannot just wake up tomorrow and you want to be famous. It's not microwave generation. So you have to believe in the beauty of your innate potential. You have to believe that you can offer something. You have to believe that I have found a problem. I want to create a solution. And in creating that solution, I intend to amplify my purpose so that other people across the continent can see and understand what I'm trying to do. So first, you must believe in your brand. You must have something to offer before you start thinking of giving you some global visibility or international recognition. What they need to do is to exercise patience. They need to understand the essence of getting professionals to help you on the journey. And once that happens, your chances of eating the target is so, it's a lot more than just going blind, I mean, in the dark. There isn't a system where you have people who have done it, create a system where young people can be mentored for, which is needed. One of the things I like to say is that yes, they are challenging. Yes, there might not be a mentorship system in place. However, the innovative spirit of the young African will always find a way and most times they'll learn along the way. So my mentorship is needed for young people who will always find a way.


Okay, folks, welcome. Thank you for joining this session on backstage. I'm Suzanne Daniels, I work at Spotify and I lead our developer relations efforts on backstage, both externally and internally, because we're quite a bit adopted of backstage. But yeah, before I start, I already asked, but now there's like double the people, so I'm really curious. Who heard before the session about backstage? Okay, cool. Who already tried out backstage? Okay, who has many questions? Cool. Let's do my best to answer that. So another question, who in the past few years onboarded at a company in an engineering role? Who thought that was a great experience? Who can actually find, not search, find the information they are looking for when they start a new project? They're trying to work with an API? Okay, that's zero hands. That's not too good. But unfortunately, it's the reality. It's also something we experienced at Spotify. So what we're going to discuss in this session is a few things. The first thing is, what did we experience at Spotify? And how did we solve that? AKA, how did backstage come to be? Spoiler alert.  So we'll go over all these things in just 30 minutes. So I'm going to keep the tempo quite high, hopefully. If I stop talking, I might be a bit jet lagged because I was with the backstage team in New York just a few hours ago for my feeling. Okay, let's start. So Spotify, a lot has been written about Spotify, about the agile ways of working. Like each conference I go to, there is mostly a session of somebody talking about something related to how Spotify works internally. We really embrace autonomous teams and think that there is this power they should have to really innovate and to bring things super fast to market and have not a lot of friction. So they should be able to organize themselves. But that comes with a few challenges. Then add to the mix that Spotify is quite a huge organization. There's tens of thousands of microservices we have. There's over 2000 engineers. So what happened is we weren't always that big. So that's a good position. But at some point we grew. So people were not able to find the information they were looking for when they, for instance, onboard it. Why is that? Well, because there were many teams and it is just not easy to find the right information, especially when that's outside of your knowledge domain. It is at some point that you can add engineers to your organization to speed up, but you will actually, you will slow down. And over the time, there were more and more new technologies as well that people needed to learn and they needed to share knowledge about. And well, okay, it was also difficult to find out who was running a call for a certain service. So something needed to change. It was at some point it was so slow that the number of days it would take an engineer to get to the 10th pool request went up to 60 days. Just imagine you're onboarding at this super hip company and you're that super, you know, you're going to learn new things and get to learn a team. But then you want to be productive at some point. And it takes 60 days to do 10 pool requests to get to that point. That's not so satisfying. So we tried to fix that. And one of the ways to fix that is to create a portal where you can find that information, where you can find out who is owning a microservice, who's working on what who's running on call. And that grows into a developer portal. The developer portal was named system Z and it was built and maintained by one team. And we've learned a lot of things about that by doing it in that way specifically. The biggest learning was that if you have one team maintaining that one portal for your entire engineering organization, which one, which wants to move without friction as soon as possible, shipping stuff out and learning new things and collaborating. And you depend on one team for a feature request or for adding maybe a new domain. For instance, ML. The team had a huge backlog. So we knew that that didn't work because if you can't put in the features fast enough to lighten the work for other people, they will find other ways because they're autonomous and you just want to get your stuff done. Like how many of you installed a tool in their company to remove friction for their day-to-day work? I see a lot of people nodding. I see hands. Yes. So that happened within Spotify as well. So actually instead of taming that chaos, it became even more fragmented. So we knew that we needed to change that. So we went back to the drawing board.  It is that people cannot collaborate easily with you. So one of the basic fundamentals was that they created this plugin system so that everybody could create functionality within that portal and could extend it and that they would not depend on just those six or eight people who are working on that project. So we set out to prioritize the developer experience and that was quite a hit because if you can create your own plugins, if you can create pieces of your own experience, you can maybe create a self-service portal for the service you're maintaining and delivering to the internal developer community. There's many different things you can suddenly do. So in the portal, there's this philosophy because you want to have speed, but you also want it to be somewhat safe. You want to scale, but you do not want to lose the quality and you want to control that chaos that you can't have not chaos. And in the middle of that is backstage. It was a huge success. The developers really liked it. Over 80% of the plugins were contributed by people outside of that core team. This is just within Spotify. Backstage currently has over 120 plugins, which are being maintained, built and maintained by the developer community. And yeah, at some point people asked us about it. Well, how do you work then? How do you solve the problem? And well, backstage was mentioned more and more, and we got a question like, can we use that? Why not? So at some point we decided to open source backstage. It was during the hack week a little over two years ago actually and quite soon after it was donated to the CNCF. We have recently a few months ago became incubator project and hopefully at some point we will graduate fingers crossed. But we have a thriving community. We have over a thousand people contributing to this project and a large sum of those people actually contribute code as well on a regular basis. Over 250 companies adopted backstage. A few are mentioning it publicly, but we know that there's also many, many more. If you've, by the way, adopted backstage or will adopt backstage at some point, we really value you putting your names in the adapter adapter list of the project. And that is super important, of course, because if you bet your developer experience on an open source project, it is great to know that other companies bet on it as well and are actively members of the community and maintaining their plugins that have been submitted. Over 60 plugins have been made available open source for many different tools and hopefully more will come. Because if you work on a project or if you are at the company and you are dependent on the project or on a commercial service and you create a plugin and you contribute it back, you know, the community will be really happy with that and probably will want to work with you and help you improve that plugin or be very thankful and use it. But that's really important for the success of backstage and for the success of your company, where you work for or you work with and you want to improve the developer experience there because everything that is available there, you do not have to build necessarily yourself. Okay, I think that's that's enough of the history or do you want more history or do you want to see backstage? Okay, great. I'm happy. Oh, it would be so difficult if you're with some something else. Cool.  So I'm this engineer. And I just onboarded at this company, which is called rocket rockets. It's an interplanetary sort of uber. You just have this rocket and you right share it and go somewhere. Long story short. This is the company and I onboarded there. And as part of my onboarding, they have this this best practice. And that is that they have these these golden pass. And the golden pass are actually are actually a set of so set of documents, which will guide me as an engineer through a whole workflow, which starts at setting up your dev box. Then it will let me learn more about how this whole engineering organization I'm part of works and how things relate to one each other. It will learn me how to create how to create an API. For instance, it will learn me how to spin up the services I need to build my application. And there's like all these steps I go through. So within one week, when I'm working through this document, I get to learn the actual organization, how it is to work there. How it is to search for stuff at this company, how to set up an environment, which is pretty much like the things like the way I would be working later when I'm done onboarding, if there's such a thing. And this will build up my confidence. Confidence. So just imagine that at the end of that golden path, I would like have created my first microservice. And it's actually working. Sure, it won't probably be the million dollar application they were waiting for. But at least I've achieved something. Just imagine how powerful that is. And I get to learn to know the platform, which they work with, which is backstage. So after that week, I feel confident and I've had my first weekend, which was also good. And I come back and the next thing is I want to know the actual stuff that my company builds, that my team builds, that my team maintains. So here comes in the catalog. So in this catalog, in this catalog, I can see what my team owns, but I can also see all the components they have with this company. But let's just stick with my team. So this is the application I was hired to work on. It's the launch application. It's an application to order lunch while you're in this patient, because it takes a long time. Well, this is basically the homepage of microservice. You can find here all the information that might be relevant for you. For instance, how does this service relate to other services? Where does it depend on? What does it provide the service to another application? There's a link to the dashboard. I can create an incident or see current open incidents, only 23 days open, what could possibly go wrong. There's some other plugins like here. It's a Prometheus graph I have. And I can immediately click to my Grafana dashboard and show how my service actually is doing. All these cards you see here, they are actually plugins. So this could be anything that might be useful for the engineering organization or in the context of a specific service you're looking at. The cards you might have for a data pipeline might be totally different than one for a website. That's possible because you can show the plugins depending on the type that you are viewing at the moment. Let's discover a bit further. So there's some tabs here at the top. Also a great example is the GitHub plugin. This might show me how this was running and I can dive further in there and look at the log files. What is important to notice is that when I have a problem with my pipeline, I will still go to the tool I was using for that. So if there's a problem here, I will go either to get up, look at my action. I would go back to my IDE because I know that I probably forgot to run some command before I push my code. It just shows you the information. But in itself it's really powerful because if I would deploy something and I would have to look at all those tools and look at the status, I would have like 30 tabs open at some point because I'm not only looking, of course, at my GitHub actions. No, I would be looking at every single step in the pipeline. So I would open all these portals to check on the status if I wanted to know that. And now I can see this in one overview. It saves me a lot of time and a lot of frustration. And when I will actually open that portal is when I actually need to do something there. Yeah, there's over 60 plugins. So this is just how relevant this is. It might differ for you. So this is also a good example of something I really like. It's unknown. Come on. Why? Okay. I have so many questions now. Oh, great. Got a lot of live demos then. But anyways, so you can just imagine that those plugins would work and that would be we'll look at another one which I think will be better. But so yeah, also important to know is how does it actually work? Luckily, it's something we might not all love, but no, it's YAML.  And that defines where it's what information it shows. And in the case of the plugins, it will determine where it gets the information. I have to change the integration key. Okay. But this model might look familiar because this is basically the Kubernetes object model, which we borrow because we think it's quite familiar and a good way to note this. So every plugin you have and you want to configure that, that will be in the annotations and all the core functionality would be in the YAML. So these dependencies, that's just the rule in the configuration. There's many different ways of generating this information. You could write a script, you could do it by hand, or you could get it from another system using a custom processor, which is something that either exists or you have to write it yourself. So that's what shows these beautiful graphs. Okay. So let's take a look at the API I'm using, which is the FlightInfo API. Other team manages that. There's two applications using it at this moment. And I can here find all the relevant information. But what I'm of course interested in is the documentation. So I just want to get going with this API. This could contain many different plugins. Am I using Postman? Maybe I want a plugin with a way to invoke Postman. Could all be possible. Keeping your documentation with your software is always a smart thing to do. So the same is with this API would just keep the documentation there. But it could also contain the tests and that sort of stuff. Okay. Let's move on. Because now I know a lot about how it actually works, what has been created, what happens when I add something to backstage. I know where to find the documentation. I've read about the API. So I know how to invoke it. I know how to build actually a bit of software already. So I feel a bit confident today. And I'm going to create a new project. Now, what is the fastest way to create a compliant app, which is according to the latest best practices? Most of the time, it is by copying an existing project and just yanking everything out you don't need. And tada, you have your repository. I see somebody nodding. Yes. No shame. This is the scaffolder functionality in backstage. We call it software templates. And with software templates, you can create your project within minutes. So for instance, I'm going to create a new React app. And I will get some questions. This is all configurable. You can determine this whole wizard. You can ask as many questions as you want and make it as complicated as you want. So I'm going to give it a name, give it a very meaningful description and the owner. The owner is not a person. It's always a team. That's a good thing to keep in mind. And I'm a part of the travel X group. I go next, next finish. Look at that. So some kind of enterprise. As you can see, there's a few integrations already configured, but there's many more possible. It's just that we have these available. And let me give the repository also a very meaningful name. So what this will do, it will populate the scripts with the information from the forms. And it will kick off everything that that is needed to create my skeleton application so that I can actually start working on the code. This is a way to ensure that the best practices in the organization are followed. This does not only need to be about creating a repository and putting in, for instance, the configuration for your Grafana dashboard and that sort of stuff. This is also possible to extend it by creating a ticket within the same workflow. Just everything that you need to do, which creates friction, you should get out of that workflow and put it in a software template. We're not going to wait for this because GitHub Enterprise is super slow today. I've tried this. But what will happen after this is done, it will create the repository with the skeleton files. According to my standards, it will create the stuff for my monitoring systems. It will make sure that everything is there and I just need to publish my code to the repository. And when it's done, it will also show up here in the catalog. Luckily, because otherwise, I would need to type YAML, which I do not like. So it will show up automatically, be registered here in the application. If you wonder, can I import also an existing one? Yes, you could do that totally. Or you can do it here and just put the repository URL there and it will find the file and you can have it within seconds in your catalog. But yeah, there's, of course, many more things you could do. There's some fun plugins. This is a good way of determining which technology I should use or which ones I should not use. So if I'm at the beginning of a project and I need to think about which technologies am I not going to use, there's the TechRadar and I can see what is frowned upon and what is totally exciting to go ahead with or what we are just figuring out if it's useful. Maybe I want to refrain from the technology if the consensus is that that's not a good idea. Another one is a plugin which was created by students. They added this very interesting internal marketplace before COVID even. Why is this so useful? You're working on this project and you need knowledge. You need somebody who is good at, for instance, CSS because help. I know. There you go. I need somebody who knows CSS, help, need someone to do CSS stuff. And I would just post this on the marketplace internally. And there you go. Well, let's take the marketing website. It must contain a lot of CSS. And there you go. I can put in a star date and an end date and that sort of stuff as well. And there it's on the board. So if somebody would have the skills to solve this problem, they could find it here. They could discover it. They could say, hey, I want to join this project or I want to first take a look at how they are doing with this app. Maybe also take a look at the pipeline because that's always an interesting indicator if it's a great project. Not so much maybe. As you can see, I just pressed the CI CD tab, by the way. And it shows GitLab instead of GitHub. And that is because there's just an if statement like, hey, if this entity has a GitLab slot, then, well, show GitLab and otherwise do GitHub. But also, I could also be Jenkins. Okay. This is an interesting one as well. Showing your costs for your project. We like to put it with the number of engineers. It would on average cost you. If you're launching a new project and super successful and you see that the cost of the project, well, the infrastructure would be two or three engineers. You might be extra motivated to tackle the problem and to bring the costs down. And yeah, so there's the error again. You don't believe this. So that's a really, really quick overview of backstage. That's trying to switch back. Okay. So why? Because great Spotify, great demo, maybe not. This, the ecosystem is super complex. And this is just the CNCF landscape map. And I know it's maybe a bit, you know, everybody shows this thing if they want to talk about complexity. But it is complex. It is hard. It is so hard nowadays to figure out what is it I need to solve my challenges with? How does it work? And then when somebody figures it out and says, hey, this is a great idea, if you look at the research and you look at the reasons why people have a problem with adopting open source projects, it is a lot of the time about people. It is a lot of the time about the knowledge. So if you have this platform where you can make at least sure that people have a smoother and less difficult experience using projects or using tooling, you may be solving an adoption problem there. Other reasons, we learn more and more about what makes developers tick. Smart people do research. And I read it and I'm like, oh, well, that's smart, which I thought about that. This is coming from the space framework. I don't know who's familiar with that, but I think it's a really interesting document touching upon a few things. And I wanted to share those with you. So what makes a developer happy? Well, it's a combination of a few things. It is the satisfaction and the well-being, which it might sound logic if you talk about happiness. Basically, this is happiness. But how do you get happy? Well, by feeling a sense of purpose, by being able to have great tools, by feeling that you're part of a community. Speed or productivity in general does not really equal happiness. There's a lot more to it. So you need to be able to collaborate better, have a better experience, performance, that's outcomes. Dashboarding, being able to visualize how you're doing might all help with that. Tech insights, the activity, that's the output. Dora metrics, maybe. This is a thing that we are mostly looking at because it's easy to look at measurements, like what is the output? What's the number of things we've done, the number of lines of code? And that goes up and then we're happy. But when that goes up, it doesn't necessarily mean that the developer is in a good shape. Maybe the developer is running straight to a burnout. You don't know if you only look at the data. But it is important to look at it. And collaboration and communication. So as you've seen in the demo, if you're able to find actual documentation and if you're able to share stuff with each other, if there's transparency and awareness of what's happening in the organization, then you're in a better shape. If you're able to contribute to each other's success, if you can solve the onboarding problem, which will also have a positive impact on your retention, and then the flow. Each time you need to go to a new portal or another framework learning a new language to do XYZ, yet another tool to deploy something, the infrastructure, and then another tool to deploy my code, and then the portal of my cloud provider, don't get me started. So if you can make sure that people stay in the flow, that makes a huge impact as well. And the sum of these things is what you need to do to make a developer happy. Because, very cheeky, but happy developers make happy code, which is our tagline. Even if you think like after this session backstage, I don't know, please take this home. Make your developers happy. It's so important. Because if you do not make them happy, they will be at some point happy, but like walking out of the door with yeah, but this is happening, folks. This is happening. You don't want that. You just want to, you know, make a great product, have fun together, code stuff. So to summarize, backstage is one front end for your entire infrastructure. Backstage is there not to replace your existing tooling, but it is to aggregate it, to beat that single pane of glass. You just use your tools, you're used to, but make it more easy, make it better, make it a great experience. You do not want to search for documentation, but you want to find it. You have the Google Docs, the Confluence. You have it like with your project in Markdown. You just want to be able to search that and to find it. Backstage is an interface. It is built for autonomy and for ownership. So each component is owned by a team, right? There's no single source, not one single source of truth, but one point to find it. And you might be wondering, like, how many people do I need to maintain backstage then? Well, that's about six people that we have within Spotify. And we have quite a few engineers and a lot of plugins. The architecture for the plugins, there you go. That's mostly TypeScript. So if you're good with TypeScript and JavaScript, you will be in a great shape. And it is something which is not probably the most difficult big investment you need to make. So there's three types of plugins. It can be from a webpage showing information, like the TechRadar I've shown you. It can be really with a backend system with business logic or with logic in there, like the documentation site you've seen. But it can, and that's the, I think, the biggest use case at this moment. It's leveraging an API which is already existing from the tooling or the service you've bought or the open source project you've installed. And that goes through the three-part proxy visualizing information. And that is how you can make developers happy. There are plugins. You can create new ones. You can put the power in their hands. It is work, but it's totally doable. So, yeah, that sounds great, but I have, like, a gazillion components running in the wild. It's a mess. I need to onboard new engineers. I don't know where to start. So, yeah, what do I do? Do I build that whole portal? No. Just start with one thing. Try to solve that. Do that great with a small team and expand from there. Share that knowledge. Build that internal community, because that is in the end what is really necessary for success with Backstage. And because I'm at time, I'm just going to show you the links. If you want to get started with Backstage, you want to try it out, you can set it up in a matter of anywhere between 20 minutes and 40 minutes. There's a great Getting Started guide on our newly launched Backstage Learn site. And at the end of this month, which is already in two weeks, no stress. There will be the Plugging Creation guide as well. There's a lot of documents, of course, but we think that these experiences might help you get started even better. So, check back in a few weeks. And if you want to create a plug-in, there's a great workshop available for you. And now I can maybe take a few questions. Yes? So, two questions. So, as far as hosting, is it basically we have to host it ourselves, or is there, like, Spotify or something else for us on Backstage? So, yes, there's an option to get Backstage as a SaaS solution. There's a partner called Rody, and Rody offers hosted Backstage. They're a great partner to the community, and we're really happy with that. But it's not a Spotify business model to offer a SaaS solution. But luckily, we have a great partner. Yeah, so the best way is to start small with a team dedicated to figuring this out from there, sharing those successes, sharing the learnings. And for instance, if you have an internal tech meetup, it's a great way to share that knowledge and to distribute that knowledge and share the value of what you've created. It is all about community, because you can implement a tool, but if no one's going to use it or invest time in it, it's just a waste of time in the end. So, it is an investment, but it's something you need to carefully think about. It depends also really on the culture you already have. So, if you have a culture of learning and sharing knowledge and collaborating at InnerSource, then you're set up for great success already. If you're not, you're also set up for success, but it might take a while longer. So, yeah, there's, so if there's interest in from the CNCF to put projects in there, yes, there is a lot of interest from the projects itself. So, there are plugins coming, there are a few already available, but yeah, I really hope that more projects will invest in this to create a plugin and to add the value, because in the end of the day, it will both be great for companies using this. It will really make the lives of engineers better, but it will also make the lives of projects better, because it will be more visible and they can drive better adoption, which is what we all know is a challenge. Now, it's happy little accident. Now, we noticed that this really worked, and we figured, like, if it works here, it might as well work anywhere. And well, given the number of adopters and the feedback we get, it is the case, yeah. What we also see is that, like, the whole loop with the external community works pretty well for a lot of plugins as well. And for Backstage itself, yeah, there's like so many contributions coming from outside of Spotify, which is so good for the project. We're really happy with all the attention and the investment companies make. So, yeah, you don't know what to expect, and this is like the best thing you can have, I think. Anyone else? Oh, yeah, one more. So, if you have like an organization of, say, 100 teams and thousands of components, how do you get the teams to put their information out there in a coherent way, so that not everybody invents their own way of naming it, and then describing information, and so on? It needs to be coherent in some way. Do you have any tips on that? That will always be a challenge, because, well, we all know naming things is hard, and providing barriers is also, yeah, but not maybe getting you to the result you might want. So, to give an answer, yes, you could maybe do that with software templates. Make sure that there's just a record looking at if it is according to the naming standard. That's a great way. Maybe it will be, if your naming standard is, for instance, the team, the platform it runs on, and the type of service, then you could maybe just make a few checkboxes, and it also generate the first part, or whatever you have prefix suffix. That might help a little bit, but the most important thing, of course, is trying to get that community to go for it and understand why it is necessary to do these things. But yeah, this is like the most easy way is to enforce it in your software template, for instance. But yeah, your cloud provider can, also, put in these mechanisms. But yeah, that's already one step further. Place is always better, I think. Yeah, it's time to round up. So, I want to thank you for your attention. And once again, just give it a spin. If you're stuck somewhere, or you think it's really good, or you think it's really bad, let me know. We have a very active Discord channel, and I'm there too. And otherwise, you can always just stalk me on Twitter. I'm really active there, more active than on my email, according to a lot of people. So yeah, thank you, and have a great day, and enjoy the rest of Dublin.


The digital transformation is happening all around us. Information and communication technologies sustain life, work, health and learning. But these are challenging times. In the COVID-19 crisis, ICTs ensure access to healthcare, education and essential goods and services for billions of people. Radio communication, telecommunications standards and telecommunication development. All support, growth, inclusiveness, sustainability, innovation, partnership. The Connect 2030 goals of the International Telecommunication Union, ITU. Today, ITU calls on its unique global public-private membership to further accelerate digital transformation in challenging times. Today, our members can adopt a digital agenda and strategy, offer government services online, strengthen cybersecurity, develop national emergency telecommunication plans, foster innovation and infrastructure, build effective partnerships. Together, we can make humanity safer, stronger and more connected in this decade of action for sustainable development. Digital technologies are vital to fulfill the promise and build resilience against future challenges. And yet, nearly half the world's population remains unconnected. ITU fosters international cooperation and supports universal connectivity to make the transformation equitable, safe, inclusive and affordable for all. 17th of May is World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. Keep on sharing your stories. Find out more.


I hopefully have convinced you by now that the Master's Organization Studies here at Tilburg University is a great program, but now you'll wonder what are the requirements to be admitted? What do I do or what do I have in order to be able to study here? First of all, you should have a Bachelor or a Master's in Economics or in the Social Sciences that could be, for example, in Political Science, in Sociology, in Psychology or in Organization Studies or Management. Since the program is located in a School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, social science theories are an absolute must, so you should know something about these theories. In addition, theories on organization and management and practical knowledge about organization and management helps. Furthermore, since the Master's thesis is such a big part of the program and since research is very important, you should have a sound knowledge in research methods and statistics. However, in our philosophy, the methods follow the research question. So, you can do quantitative analysis, you can do qualitative analysis or you can do mixed methods. It very much depends on the research question and the research context that your research is located in. Further, strong interest in organizations and organizing and eagerness to further develop your analytical skills and to work on your skills and competencies is an absolute must.  We actually designed it in a way that it very much resembles your working environments where you will find employment after you have completed the Master's Organization Studies. Also there, you will have a mix of short-ranging project and long-ranging project and you should learn how to reconcile the two and be successful in completing both types of projects simultaneously. Last but not least, since this program is in English, we require a certain level of English written and oral skills. Here you see the possibilities of what tests you can complete in order to be admitted. A lot of students do the IELTS, but also the TOEFL. If you need more information or if you want to look more into detail into the program, please go to our website and have a look. There you can also find additional information about the admission requirements. Thank you very much for listening. I now hand over to Olga, a student of ours, and she will tell you a little bit more about the program from a student's perspective, which hopefully will make you a good choice if you decide to come here. I look forward to meet you next August here in Tilburg.


Good afternoon and welcome to likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us today. Likeable science is all about how science is a vital and interesting part of everyone's life, scientist or not, how we should all embrace and enjoy science. To help me explore that today, I have with me via phone Dr. Marco Rolandi, the co-founder of a group called CruiseFoam. Welcome, Marco. Fine. Glad to be on the show. Well, thanks for taking the time to join me. I know Marco's a busy guy. He's a head of the electrical engineering department at UC Santa Cruz. I knew him back in Seattle at the University of Washington there when we were both there. But he's also started this group called CruiseFoam. So maybe just start us out, Marco. Tell us a little bit about what CruiseFoam is. Oh, I see. So that's a very, very admirable mission. You take essentially crimp shells and that kind of stuff and process it so it's not rotting away and smelling and turning it into a packing material that you can then use to shipping materials back and forth and all that. The polysaccharide is called chitin and it does have many properties in common with cellulose. It comes from trees and we actually purchased chitin as a commodity and we transform it into a packaging form, fixate nitrogen in the soil. Wow. So that's got a lot of advantages then, particularly advantages over the plastics. We normally use their fossil fuel-based packing materials. So that's right. So where did this interesting idea arise? How did you come up with it? Material for implantable devices, for example. And among other things it won't because it has hemostatic properties. Absolutely. It's a huge problem. I know I had a guest on a few weeks ago who was talking about the issue and pointed out that there are estimates now that by about 2050 there's going to be by weight more plastic in the sea than fish, which is sort of frightening to think about. That means there's a huge amount of plastic and a lot of it, as you say, comes from just odd little sources like packaging material, which because yes, because we're now buying everything online and it's being shipped to us, there's more and more packaging material being used. So that's very interesting that you sort of found an interesting niche. So you say you buy chitin. So somebody's already collecting sort of shrimp shells and everything and producing chitin or do you have to process the shrimp shells yourself or some facility? Yeah, we purchased and there's a fair amount of production transforming it into... Interesting, interesting. I'd never, of course, heard of chitin in terms of a product I had heard in terms of, yes, insect exoskeletons mainly, but so I must have other uses too if somebody has bothered already to set up processing plants to recycle out of seafood waste, right? Yeah, no, it's very viable chitin. The one there is not very pure to make packaging because obviously we need the... Sure. So without going into too much technical detail or revealing any of your patentable secrets, what do you do to turn this chitin into this packaging material? Chitin comes in what form? I suspect our viewers wouldn't know that. That's our fool with the powdery... That sounds great. I mean in fact it sounds like a relatively straightforward and hopefully not too energy-intensive process, right? Right, right. I mean it's a classic issue with the water bottles that they actually use more water and making the water bottles and the water bottle holds, right? Right, right. One reason we should be avoiding that use. I see, so this is great. This sounds very exciting then. So you've just been really getting this going in the last couple of years, right? You said you started this process about two years ago. That's great. It's sort of been a business out of your lab and out of very much out of your research group. That's wonderful. It's sort of unusual. I don't think many lab groups have done that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. That sounds like a really, what they talk about, the triple bottom line, right? That you're looking for something that's doing good for yourselves, doing good for the earth around it and filling a human need, right? That's so good. That's right. Yeah, that's incredible. So you said this cruise phone is biodegradable. So at some point after it's gone through perhaps several cycles of packaging, somebody just can take and sort of throw it away and put it in their garden or what's the deal with that? Yeah, that's right. And I would say so we are, there are many ASDM standards that need to be met in order to be compostable, either what's called industrially compostable or we are in the process of obtaining these certifications because they actually take time. But what we've done are worms eating it. Yeah, that's great. But I assume it can go for several different uses. I know I typically will take that kind of packaging and get something in a package and when I'm sending something back I would all use that packaging again and go through several cycles, right? Yeah, I can see that might be a thing to look at in the future. I'll tell you what, I think we're going to have to drop off to a quick break here. I'm talking to Dr. Marco Rolandi, the co-founder of Crews Zone out of California here and this wonderful biodegradable packaging material. And we'll be back in about one minute. Until then, I'm your host Ethan Allen and join us when we come back. Aloha and Mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii. With Think Tech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, Mabuhay and Aloha. Aloha, I'm Gwen Harris, the host here at Think Tech Hawaii. A digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii non-profit that depends on the generosity of the supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to ThinkTechHawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Good afternoon and welcome back to likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for coming back and joining us for the second half of likeable science today. I have with me on the phone Dr. Marco Rolandi, the co-founder of Cruise Phone. Welcome back Marco. Doing good, doing good. So the first half, Marco was explaining to us about what Cruise Phone is, how it's made from shrimp shells. It's this wonderful biodegradable packing material that has a lot of the same properties as polystyrene or polyurethane structural foams, but is made not from a fossil fuels, but rather from a waste product from shellfish and talked about how we got the ideas going in his lab and brought some of his lab folks on in and they're making a nice go of this in a good company. So plastics get used for a lot of different things and the polystyrene they use for packing has to have certain kinds of mechanical properties, right? It has to be a bit compressible, but not too compressible. Yeah, expand the polystyrene for different uses. As a matter of fact, there's like this up, there's like polystyrene 2, 4, 15, and 9. The polystyrene that we try to match is the polystyrene used for packaging typically. And our material has the same compression strength, which is basically like how much can you push the material by until it breaks, right? Which kind of is an indication of how good of a packaging material it is as the expanded polystyrene. And we also, we can tune the mechanical properties of the material by changing the formula. And one of the things we can tune is how cushiony it is in that like for certain packaging application we need the material that is a little bit firmer, if you will, for other packaging you might need the material that feels a little bit more like a cushion. And so we can we can tune that to adapt to different applications. That's very interesting. And of course, it makes it much more valuable if you if you can make it variable like that and change its properties a bit without too much trouble at that gives you I would expect more sort of more markets for it more different uses for it, right? Oh, hey, one of these days you'll be putting it in surfboards again, right? Yeah, yeah, that's our dream. I think we're still we're still going to eventually we're going to do that. But for now, you know, you want to make sure that next time we go surfing, we don't find any spent any polystyrene packaging material floating around our boards. And so we want to tackle that problem first. Yeah, absolutely. So what happens, since you say it's compost, what happens if stuff gets wet, you know, packages being sent and it gets left out and you get some rain on it? Does your stuff hold up? Oh, that's great. So if it is water resistant like that and the properties can be adjusted, it would seem there must be essentially almost then a number of different sort of applications for it potentially, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's critical as you start up a business that you keep it all focused on on a predictor niche and get that up and going well. So that's an interesting that brings up an interesting point. How how are you approaching companies who buy packaging materials or use packaging materials? How are you sort of selling this stuff to them? Because I'm sure they basically are like all the companies they want to do things the way they've always done them because that's a known trusted process. In the scale up process? What are you coming out to work? Oh, that's great. No, it seems very, very timely then because yeah, I know there is there's a huge movement these days to be on single use plastics. Hawaii recently has been plastic drinking straws. There's a constant battle here going on in Oahu right now about getting rid of styrofoam containers and making those illegal. More and more groceries or grocery stores and various other kinds of stores are of course stopping distributing plastic bags of any sort. So yeah, interesting timing that you found when this issue is reaching into broad public awareness and plastics are sort of getting it almost a bad name in a way, right? Plastics are amazing for many things, but plastics last for a very long time so those applications where they need to last for a very long time I think for a while it's going to make the entire ecosystem more sustained. Yeah, I mean that's interesting that you say there's a whole what we call a hui here in Hawaii a whole group of companies all focused around that issue of reusable, sustainable packaging materials. That's good to hear. Again, I'm often appalled that you get a product and yeah it comes in a plastic container and within that there's cardboard and within that there's still more plastic and you know humans sometimes it's quite a bit of overkill in the packaging. Yeah, that's right. We package everything with a lot of material and so we want to make sure that the material we use is sustainable and ideally compostable or anything like ruin the environment. Right, right because so many of those packages there isn't anything to do with them what you've used at once you know it is basically as you say it's a throwaway idea and we do have a society where that's pretty much been our go-to mode. You just use something once and toss it away so you're developing you're sort of working with people rather than trying to change their behavior exactly and get them to reuse things giving them something they can use once and throw away and it's not doing any harm. Indeed from what you said it's that serving as actually a fertilizer and actually help help their compost, help their lawn, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm testing out to my tomatoes right now and I'll call you back in a few months and let you know whether they're better than last year. That's great, now it is. As long as I don't taste shrimpy, right? That would be too weird. So where do you see this going? I mean what do you if looking down in a sort of an ideal world, looking down five years, ten years down the road, where do you see Cruz's phone going being? Well, I hope it's going to go. You know, substitute every piece of expanded polystyrene packaging with our material. That's what I think we can do and I guess the time will tell whether we're going to be able to do it but as you said the market seems to be ripe, there is customer demand and our material performs well and of course, you know, we started a company so we have to dream big and our dreams are big and I hope they can really make, you know, hurt the better place that already is because the less plastic is in the ocean, the better. Yeah, I mean this is actually, you know, a really sort of interesting story because when I knew you back at University of Washington, you weren't working on, I mean you may have been working on chitin but you weren't sort of thinking along these lines, right? You weren't talking about making packaging material at that point at all particularly so it seems like, you know, it's a very interesting illustrative study or case study of how you know, science research can find new applications, find new directions sort of. No, that is true. I mean, I think like, you know, what just sort of like the opportunity is like E1 wants to be ready for the opportunities that come about and if you know, when in science, science is knowledge, right? And knowledge lets you understand the opportunities or makes you ready for the opportunity when they present themselves. That's really what the power of science and knowledge is that if you understand things well then you can find a way to use them to solve big problems and sometimes these problems can be in very desperate fields like packaging or biomedical engineering, for example. Right, that's a great takeaway message right here is you had this stuff that you were working on for biomedicine, rather high-tech, fancy sounding enterprise and here you found this great use for it in a very sort of, seems like a pretty mundane thing is this packaging but it's potentially a tremendous good to the planet. It really, you know, can, as you say, replace all the styrofoam, all the polystyrene foams that are being used for to wrap and protect and shelter so many of our things. This has been just really wonderful to talk to you, I've learned a lot and I'm sure our audience has too. So I thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to me here and it's been a wonderful truly likeable science experience that you've given us here. Thank you so much Marco. All right, you take care. Okay, bye-bye. And I hope you, our audience, will come back and see us next week here on likeable science, here on Think Tech Hawaii. Until then.