It's pretty rare, I think, that a tweet encapsulates a chunk of web history so nicely. But this one does. I found this while I was prepping for this presentation. This is Vlad Vakiciewicz, who helped to create WebGL at Mozilla, saying, in April 6, 2014, I've been hacking with this new Oculus virtual reality thingy. And then Brandon Jones of Google says, like, OK, interesting. Maybe I can get that working in Chrome, too. And that tweet triggered three and a half years now of what is called WebVR, virtual reality on the web. And over those three and a half years, we've seen this explosion of developers using a new breed of tools to create experiences that don't look like the classic web, but they are the web. All built on WebGL, on frameworks such as 3JS, running in the browser with all the things that we love about the web, loading instantly, you know, forkable from GitHub repo, something anyone can publish. And we've seen in the last three and a half years all these new tools emerge, tools like A-Frame, 3JS, which we already mentioned, BabylonJS, adding WebVR support, and then WYSIWYG tools such as Visor, PlayCanvas, Hologram, there's a whole new generation of tools making it fun to create virtual reality content on the web. And we now stand on the cusp of 2018, and one of the messages is I was thinking about what to talk about today was really to hammer home this message. It's been three and a half years of gestation, but this is the year that WebVR goes mainstream and this is what I mean. Virtual reality is a pretty fragmented landscape. But the one constant across all of it will be WebVR. Running from cardboard to daydream to gear VR, Oculus, Vive and Windows Mixed Reality, WebVR will run and in some cases on multiple browsers. And not just desktop mobile browsers, but a new generation of browsers designed to be used inside of virtual reality so you can put on a headset and view any website ever made, including new 360 experiences without taking your headset off. So what we want to do today is tell you a little bit about what's coming next in 2018. First we're going to hear from Steve who's going to talk to us about what it's like to make WebVR content today and to build a business around that. And then from Brandon Jones, who's working to define and implement the next version of the WebVR API. So first up, Steve. Hi, everyone. I'm Steve Thompson. I'm the founder and CEO of Pausta. We're a creative studio based in Los Angeles and London. We work with the movie studios creating ticketing destinations and showtimes and we also have a labs component which has lots of experimental stuff going on. WebVR started out in labs and we're really excited to turn it into a viable product that we actually sell to the industry. Cool. So here's an example, a video of what we're up to. We create these immersive experiences designed for the web where you can watch the trailer in 3D, which is a unique case for WebVR. You can also see the showtimes and tickets directly in front of you in 3D space. And the cinemas actually geolocate and space themselves out really nicely based on how far away they are.  And it's quite immersive. So we build these with the studios and the reason why is because we get amazing data back, we get amazing information on the consumer, but more importantly, these actually perform more successfully than our general ticketing pages. So users are more engaged. They're checking out more cinemas. They're looking at more showtimes. And that makes a really great business case. I think wherever you can find a really unique thing that only WebVR can do, that's where you can build a business off of it. So we've identified that you can watch the trailer in 3D, which normally you'd have to go to the cinema to do that. And only when you're watching a 3D movie. So that's like you already converted at that point. So it will help the 3D upsell, but it also allows for the studio to really sell the movie in an immersive environment, which is pretty nice. And so how did we do this? It's obviously a little bit different to your usual prototyping and building phases. You're designing on 2D paper for then 2D wireframes to go onto a 2D website. Whereas we did initially have a look at different methods of prototyping WebVR. And sketches and wireframes are actually really important still. And it's amazing for the UX and UI designer to dive into them.  But then when he wants to communicate that to other people, how do you jump from those wireframes, those 2D illustrations, and actually convey VR? It's definitely a challenge. And this was working on our website, trailer.com, which displays all the movies and cinemas around you. And actually one of the great ways to show your colleagues how it all works and how it looks is to jump into VR. So actually drawing inside tilt brush or, yeah, it's like an amazing way to communicate it, just jump in, sketch it out, put the headset on, and you can see it in 3D space. It was kind of a bit of an aha moment for us where we discovered how to actually do it. And it's something that you can add to your toolkit, just jumping in, trying it in real VR, and then taking it to your production afterwards. Nothing beats previewing VR than doing VR, so that's why we've done it. So yeah, that's a really quick intro to what Paus has been up to in WebVR. Hopefully you can identify in your vertical a unique business case for it and then be able to present it and pitch it to your clients and make business out of it. And now I'm going to hand over to Brandon that's going to take you through some coating stuff. So I'm Brandon Jones, and I'm the spec editor and one of the primary engineers for the WebVR API on Chrome. And I wanted to catch everybody up on where that API is at, where we hope to go, and then talk through some best practices to tie into the type of content that's stayed in his team or building. So first off, we've been running WebVR in an origin trial for a little while. And this has proven to be a massively helpful thing for us as the developers of the API, because we've gotten incredible feedback from the community, both individual developers and larger studios, about what's working, what's not. We also kind of get some feedback on the side about seeing where developers are doing things that we'd rather not have them be doing and designing ways to then go and discourage that kind of behavior. And so we've been able to collect all of this information together and we've been using it to build what we refer to internally as the WebVR 2.0 API. Now eventually, when this does come out, it's not going to be 2.0 product, it will be just WebVR, but that's how we disambiguate it internally. And the big focus here is that we're going to try and enshrine some of the best practices that we've found through all of the origin trials that we've been running and just bake them into the API and make it wherever possible impossible to do the wrong thing. We're going to be hopefully starting the origin trials for that version of the API in early 2018. And while there will be a little bit of overlap to allow for developers to transition their titles from one to the other, or their pages, we'll be retiring the current version of the API sometime after that. It's available if you want to see what the API looks like. It's available as an explainer today and we have a spec in progress. And the nice thing is that every browser vendor who has shipped a WebVR 1.1 implementation in the current version has committed to transitioning to the new version at some point. Now, when I talked about enshrining some of the best practices into there, I wanted to go through over a couple of examples of what we mean by that, the first of which being what we call Magic Window. Now, Magic Window is kind of the staple of content like Stace team was doing, where it allows people who don't have the VR hardware or simply don't want to use it right now to still peek into that virtual world and see what kind of content they could see if they bothered to get their headset out or had the hardware available. But in the first version of the API, this was kind of just a side effect. It wasn't really something that we designed for specifically. And as a result, it was kind of easy to get wrong. So in the new version of the API, we're making this a first class citizen, allowing it to use the same render loop as the normal VR content and really trying to drive home the fact that you can build the content once. It will work in VR and in Magic Window. And we really want to encourage people to do this. Tying into that in order to allow us to use a single render loop for both VR content and that Magic Window style content, we're switching over to what we call a prescriptive rendering model. Whereas in the old API, you would generally draw a WebGL frame and then tell the browser how you drew it. In the new version of the API, we're going to have it tell you what's required for drawing the frame and then you do it. This sounds more restricting, but in the end, it will actually allow the browser to make much more intelligent choices about how your content is shown and automatically increase the number of devices that you're included on. If you have a stereo display that comes out in the future, that's not necessarily VR, but could still show 3D imagery, we have the potential under this model to automatically upgrade your content to support it. And then finally, one of the things that we heard a lot of feedback from was input. We were previously exposing everything through the GamePad API and found that a lot of developers were reinventing the same wheels around that API to try and make the input a little bit more palatable. One of the most common things that we would see is people doing what we refer to as ray-based input, where depending on if you had a actual controller or gaze-based input or something like that, everybody was having a system where you would have a pick ray and then some basic button to actually select the thing at the end. So we're taking the models like that that we saw everybody doing and actually enshrining them into the API and making it something that just works by default. Here's a quick example of how that particular item would look, where we have a single select event that then would come in and you'll be able to get some information about the ray that is actually projecting off into the scene and use that to pick geometry out of your scene. And this would work across both high-end and low-end VR hardware and Magic Window. Now, anytime we change APIs, it's a difficult thing to get people to migrate. So we're doing whatever we can to help that migration be easier. There's going to be a period of overlap, as I said before, between the two APIs so that you can test both versions at the same time and make sure that you're getting content parodies you go across. We're working with Mozilla to develop a polyfill that will not only allow content to work on devices with no support for the API, they'll be able to use your phone's accelerometer to create kind of a fake best effort implementation on devices like iOS. But we'll also help map from the old API to the new and vice versa so you can use it as a method of easily porting over content. And then we're going to be working directly with libraries such as A-Frame and 3.js to ensure that they have support right out of the box. Now, there's a couple of best practices that we found that we can't really encode into the API itself, but we do want to encourage developers to continue using. One of those is splash screens. Now, this is something that Chrome is actually going to sort of force people to do because what we don't want to have happen is for people to say, hey, I want to view this VR content, put on the headset, and then just stare at the black void for multiple seconds. So we're going to have a requirement that says, once you go into VR, you have to show the user something, anything, within about five seconds. And the best way to do that is to have a static splash screen as it's shown in this animation here. Now, the splash screen itself doesn't have to be anything fancy. It can just be a single image that you draw one time and then just let the system automatically re-project it. If you draw the frame once, the head tracking within most VR systems will allow it to stay stable in spaces as users looking around. And this gives you a little bit of leeway where the user can actually see something while you're doing heavier weight loading in the background. Next, we really, really want to encourage people to design your experiences around the idea of, or around the limitations of the mobile platform. Certainly, with WebVR, we're going to have access to both the highest of the high end, the Oculus Rifts, and the HTC vibes of the world, and then the low end with hard board and everything else in between. But if you want that right once run everywhere magic that the web promises, you really do need to focus on developing a great experience for mobile first and then ensure that you can spiffy it up a little bit for the high end. This seems kind of obvious, but we do see developers who build something on desktop and then despair when they've only left a week behind to actually optimize for mobile. So we want to encourage people to get away from that. And then finally, we want to really encourage people to think of VR not as the main course for any given web page, but as kind of the dessert, the thing that you really want people to go the extra mile to see, but most people will not see it that way. The fact is that there may be a few million VR devices in the world, but billions of people can still reach your page through standard web browsers. And we don't want to hang a sign on the door that says no VR, no service. So by relying on the magic window modality and allowing people to see and interact with these virtual scenes through their normal screen, you get to invite that much larger audience in. And then for the lucky few who actually have the appropriate hardware, you can give them the best experience possible. A few other updates for web VR as far as the ecosystem goes. One thing that I know a lot of people are going to be excited about is we are bringing desktop support to Chrome, not the little experimental versions that have been floating around on the web for a while, but actual stable Chrome. That'll be coming in origin trial form in early part of 2018, probably roughly in coinciding with the 2.0 API being available. And then the other thing is that we're making web VR experiences accessible on the Daydream home screen through what are called discovery tiles. And they just transitioned off there. But those are the large tiles that if you're familiar with the Daydream, those ones. You can swipe through them, and it highlights new experiences and interesting experiences that are available on the platform. We're enabling developers of web VR content to highlight their experiences there and link directly into them. A couple of other things I want to highlight really quickly is that we also have some great support libraries from Google, such as Songbird, which is a high quality, spatialized audio library. It boils down your spatialized audio into an ambisonic audio stream that takes into account room modeling and all sorts of other cool audio buzzwords. And Draco, which is a 3D geometry pression library that does a spectacular job of shrinking down the amount of data that you actually need to send over to the user's system. I've heard the number 20x smaller meshes being thrown around in relation to that, so it's definitely something worth checking out. Now, VR is great, but we also don't want to ignore the upcoming trends in augmented reality. And so to talk to you about that, I'm going to pass it over to Josh Carpenter again. Thank you. Because when one thing hits the mainstream, you get bored and start working on the next thing. And we've talked mostly about virtual reality, and virtual reality is about transporting you to a different world, feeling like you're 10,000 feet up and getting sweaty palms. So then what's augmented reality about? Well, augmented reality is about bringing the digital into the real world. So you have a seamless blend of the two. And right now, if you've been paying attention to anything in technology, you know that you can talk to anybody and get a different opinion on when we're going to get to walking down the street with a pair of glasses and the inability to distinguish the real from the virtual. But I think it's safe to say a couple of things. As you're walking down that street, sometime in the future, you're going to be seeing a sea of information all around you. Tons and tons and tons of information, billions of nodes of content. And as you walk down that street, that content is going to come from a ton of sources, tons of very different origins. As you walk by the subway, you want to get the information for the subway just in time, not by pre-installing an application. You just want to get it serendipitously and instantly. And with all those different origins, you want that to be safe and secure. And you want your privacy to be maintained. If you're driving down the street, you don't want someone to put a billboard in the middle of the freeway in front of you and cause an accident, for example. Sounds silly, but I don't think it will be. And lastly, not everyone's going to have these fancy glasses. And this information is important. If it's the subway or the airport or the hospital, that information has to be accessible by anybody who walks through the front doors, whether they have fancy glasses or they have an old iPhone. Now call me crazy, but this sounds a lot to me like the web. And if you're sitting in this room, I'm going to assume that you probably wish the web had been a little bit stronger in mobile. I mean, we've done a lot of work as a community, all different browser vendors, everyone who builds tools, since 2007 and before, to make the web amazing on mobile. But now I've been there, it felt like trench warfare at times. You know, wouldn't it be nice to get ahead of the next big thing? We believe that that is our imperative. If we care about the web and if we think the web is going to be an amazing fit, maybe the fit for the future of augmented reality computing. So we have to start now. And in August over the summer, smartphone AR had a moment. We've been waiting for glasses and it turns out the beachhead was in our pockets. And by this time next year, it seems like we're going to have hundreds of millions of devices in our pockets, small supercomputers, that can do entry-level augmented reality. So motion tracking, composing the virtual in the real world, exposing basic features of the world, such as like horizontal planes. And when we saw that, we wanted to make sure the web was there from day one. And so in August, Google announces ARCore. ARCore is designed to bring smartphone augmented reality to Android, all those Android devices out there. And the team that I work with inside of Daydream worked to create prototype browsers that are built on experimental pre-standards APIs to expose the power of ARCore, but not just ARCore, also ARKit on iOS, to web developers. So we can begin to explore what the use cases and what the prototypes are of this new computing platform to inform future standards, to inform future APIs. And we release these open source, and you can get them at the URL at the bottom there. Release them with a 3GS library. So a lot of the experimental bits are abstracted away from you, and hopefully you can continue to use that 3GS library in the future once real standards emerge. And they expose all that stuff I mentioned before, like six degrees of freedom, positional tracking of the device in space, positional and trational tracking, rendering the camera, exposing horizontal planes. And what's really cool, I think, about web AR, and I'm a UX engineer for background, and so I'm not a software engineer of any means. I kind of pack my way through 3GS, but I've done a lot of web VR now. And I was able to pick up the web AR tools made by my colleagues and begin to start creating content the same day, because web AR is built in large part on web VR, including a lot of the same tools. So these are some of the things we've been creating in-house. The hello world of AR right now seems to be six-to-off graffiti, playing around with 2D to VR to AR controls, playing around with seamless transitions between states, and also CSS3D transforms. You don't need to use WebGL, which I'm really excited about. We've also seen the developer community respond to this. Again, taking tools like React VR and then putting them into these AR browsers or friends at Archaeologic, who you may have seen demoing today, exploring what it looks like to purchase furniture by drawing a space and then telling it what style you want and having that space fill up with that furniture. So there's just one rub right now, which is that these are an experimental browser's web AR and AR kit, which is a great name. Requires you to build from source using Xcode. We're not gonna see a lot of uptake so long as that's true, so we need to get to real standards. So the next step for that is we're going to publish an explainer, we being not just Google, but Google and the other key browser vendors, publishing explainers soon, talking about what is AR, what is intersection of AR and the web, and how can we move forward together. I wanna call out some really amazing collaboration between the browser vendors to make this happen. It's really, really exciting to me. Having been there for the duration of web VR, the degree to which web AR is getting traction from the get-go is pretty mind-boggling. It's very exciting. And then second here, and this is I think where we all come in, more experiments, because to make those eventual standards better, we need to build things, try things, learn from each other, and so I would encourage you to start creating and experimenting with the tools that are out there. Hit us up on Twitter. Brandon and I are very available, we love to talk, we love to see what you're making, and let's build the next generation of the web starting now. So thank you very much.


I'm not used to special excitement for my talks, so let's see how I handle it. Today I'm going to be standing here on this stage kind of thing, also first time on the stage actually, usually it's another stage, but just to be in the room. Revolutionizing identity. So I'm going to talk about digital identity, what it means, the definition, where we come from, where we are right now and where we need to go to kind of improve on this, that's why Revolution is in the title. And then I will show how we, as you'll look from, which is a start-up that is represented today for me and Joachim, the founder and Kasia from our debt team here at the MEDA, and how we kind of solve it and handle it. I don't know, is this time okay or is it way too loud? Just, yeah, cool. Nice. So digital identity, just to give you a quick intro to what it actually means is basically a digital representation of you as an individual, of an organization or even of a thing. Okay, so it's just a representation of this kind of person, organization or thing in the digital sphere, cool thing, right? Not much more. But what does it actually contain or what is it made out of? And that's actually attributes. So your identity is unique to you, right? Like the identity as such just stands there, but it becomes meaningful through attributes, through things that make you up, right? Like your size, your name, your university certificates or any other kind of information that is connected to your identity. These things are all called attributes. And these attributes, just like assuming that they are kind of trustable and trustworthy, they enable you to get into relationships with people, right? Because when I have an identity that is trusted and you have an identity that is trusted, we can interact with each other in a completely new way because I don't have to worry about you being new.  And that's kind of where we come from, right? We want to be sure that we don't talk to the dog. Well, sometimes we might actually don't want to be sure. But just as a kind of introductory figure and 293, there's no context given, which is a bit boring, so you have to give me the context. Any guesses in the audience? What could it stand for? Attributes? Oh, yeah, that could be. Very good one. That's the first time I hear attributes as a guest. But another one, maybe? They say you're drunk every year. They say I'm drunk every year. No, no, no. That goes up to 365, I guess. As you can see, I'm bouncing on the stage a bit here. So it's actually 293 identities because of Yahoo's sitting in the room. We kind of at one point went through emails to see how often you got this account confirmation notice, I guess, and counted all the digital identities he kind of accumulated. So in this case, we understand digital identity as the account you create to identify yourself towards the service, right? And right now we live in a web where services are centralized institutions that are represented by a website or a service based on a server, and you have to address the server and you have to identify towards the service. And usually you do this with a unique identity created for this interaction.  And this causes problems. So the problem in today's identity setting is that you collect all these different accounts and it becomes terrible to manage them because you have several passwords or maybe just one, but that's a problem for itself. You should have several passwords to keep all these different accounts safe. You also have different kind of login names, nicknames, username, email addresses, and so on. And this is a kind of usability horror in itself, right? And it can become a privacy barrier as well. But on the other hand you also have this problem that you have a lot of repetition, right? Because for each and every account you enter your information again and again and again, right? Like you enter your email address every single time you log into something. If you have to pay there, you also have to kind of give your payment details and maybe pay a call to your credit card. It doesn't really matter that you have to put them in over and over again. So not that just that there's every single time the potential for failure. So you making something wrong or there is something going wrong. You also always trust the entity that you give this information to. And this brings me to the next thing, your data is spread all over the net, right? In this server client centralized infrastructure, you basically kind of have to trust your data to the other.  And from that moment onwards you have to trust somebody else.  And that might be fine right now if you say I trust Facebook and Google because they're huge and their whole business model relies on protecting the data and blah blah blah. But there's other services and even for Google and Facebook where there's just huge data breaches happening over and over again. I'm not sure if you know about the Yahoo data breach that was expected to be 600 million identities stolen. It turned out to be 2 billion.  And it took them 4 years to discover. So this is a huge problem, right? And it actually doesn't go away if we don't change the way we think about identity. And that's actually what it all comes to in the end. We want to regain control of our identity and enable people to regain that control for themselves. I mean truly for themselves. So in the past we had this digital identity or also called user-centric identity depending on which specific concept you look at. And in the future we plan to have self-sovereign identity. And here I'm not just talking about YOLOCon but I'm talking about a general movement to change the idea of how we use digital identities. I'm not just making start-up kind of pitch commercial here but I'm just describing the general concept of what self-sovereign identity can be for us and mean for us.  Just as today you have your physical wallet, right?  This kind of thing has to become digital to some extent. And to have it digital but still secure and still controllable you have to carry it with you and it has to be controlled only by you. So it doesn't make sense if let's say Google just says we create this wallet for you and now we happen to use it. That's not really the kind of point because you can still have the problem that you give all this trust and information away. And the idea is that you kind of have it with you and if you give it away you're the one deciding it. So personal information in this world where you carry information with you and bring it to the service instead of leaving it there and going away again basically allows you to have all this repetition that I talked about, gone.  So for you as an individual it is just a really, really nice and easy way of switching between services. Because whatever amount of accounts you might create you don't give away your data to these accounts. You just create the awareness that you might come back at some point and you kind of have an account but it's not an account in the sense of today where you give all your data away to the service. And what this allows you to do is that if your data changes and that's the third point on the right side is that you can update it and you can be sure that every service you interact with from that moment onwards actually knows it, that you have updated information. I don't know who in the room like moves every now and then to new places, new addresses. Like I moved several times in the last few years and it happens that eBay and Amazon don't know because they forget to tell them.  These kind of things happen because we don't have a unified cell software identity. These things happen because we are not able to fully control that everyone we interact with has actually kept up the date and it's all on us today to kind of fix this. And at the same time it allows you to control who you interact with and who you share the data with. So just to kind of come back to this question of don't we really have this yet? I mean you can already have this user experience perspective of it because you can log in with Facebook into 15 million websites right now, 15 million services. And it's 10,000 every day that come on top. So if you fully trust Facebook and if you find that they know everything you do you can already have that usability. You can have all your data just residing with Facebook and then you go from one service to the other. But it doesn't really end the same for Google right? I just don't know if the details there but it's the same concept, social login. The problem is you don't really control what's going on. And we all know that then Facebook changes their terms of service and you might be the kind of person that updates that and that takes the right boxes to keep their privacy. As soon as they change their terms of service you have to do it over and over again because they don't keep your old choices. They always go to default which is everything goes to them. And the solution is YOLOCOM or another self sovereign identity solution because that allows you to be the one that has the data and control who gets access to it in which case and in which transaction. So in the current world it's basically others own your data. You don't control it, you pay with your privacy. If you change your data you have to change it in many many many places and user names and passwords are just a usability horror. In the self sovereign identity world and I know I think I said it a few times so repetition helps to remember.  So it's just the only person having access to it is you. It's not YOLOCOM actually as soon as we ship the product to you so to say so as soon as you download the app you're the only person knowing what's going on on this app. It's not the kind of cloud hosted service that you might know from today. And then from this moment onwards you decide who gets the data. So when you log into the service, when you start to interact with another kind of organization or individual you always see what kind of data you share and also on which kind of terms. So that's a pretty important point. You can see on which terms you give your data away and we envision a kind of future product based not on the alpha version that we have right now but on a future development point where you just like give some information away with your data where you say you're allowed to keep this for two weeks or you're allowed to keep this as long as you're required by law because there's some interactions like with insurances and so on where they have to keep data for a certain amount of time. And this allows you to kind of fully execute your it's called in German Informationales als Bestimmung unfortunately I don't know the exact term for this but I think it's a really, really important basic right that you can decide who knows about you, what you actually do or not to. And then this is kind of how it looks. So this is the YoloCom Smart Wallet and the YoloCom Smart Wallet really is just an app on your phone and it's a bit of a special app because the only way to get into the app is with this magic key that only you know. So it's not the kind of super random app it's more like it's the simple, lovable tool that you use to get to where you want. It's not the final service you interact with but it's the way you choose to get there. That's a really important thing you have to kind of make up in your mind. And what it helps you with is that it stores the data for you that all your private keys and all important information doesn't really leave your phone right like your private, secure key doesn't ever leave your phone and at the same time it abstracts all the different problems of key management for you so you don't have to figure out this whole PGP mess that you know from any mail or emails, okay? This problem that you might not really know which key you have to use here or there and if we imagine that you can use the cell software identity for all of your daily interactions you might not want that your public key is shared with everyone, right? Just imagine you have a public key that you kind of do all your data and identity and kind of interactions with and it's always the same public key and you use it to talk to your doctor and you use it to talk to your e-commerce shop and you use it to kind of talk with your car sharing service and then for some reason all these kind of other services look at the data they have and they share this data amongst each other like they do today, right? Services share data with each other to give you better advertising, it's called then they could find out that you're actually the same and kind of similar person and they could do the same thing they do today even though you have this advanced kind of new way of identifying yourself on the web so what we do is that we basically create new public keys for you for the different interactions you go about so you don't risk being found via your metadata and we try to figure out ways how we can kind of avoid these kind of reverse engineering attacks on your identity that can come from releasing particular kinds of metadata with your identity and the interactions you go into and another really important part is that we're non proprietary and that we are fully open source because I mean it's always nice if you have a product that is closed source and you can sell it, especially if it looks nice because that's rare for open source products but then can you trust it, right? Like can you really look at it? Can you see if you can make it also better? I mean do you always want to rely on YOLOCOM that YOLOCOM is going to do the job perfectly fine or do you also want to have the control to maybe tweak it a bit, make it better, improve it, contribute to your community, right? So what we envision is an ecosystem for identity we just do the first step, right? By setting it up and by working with other startups to build the basics of these ecosystems for identity so we figure out what kind of standard can emerge for exchanging things about your identity, right? And then we try to figure out what other startups do as well to kind of align to their expectations and our expectations. But in the long run we envision that everybody can freely opt in and say, hey, I want to contribute. I want to also have this kind of wallet app but I want to make it a bit different, right? I want to make it for people that have a different kind of design attitude or I want to make it for people from a different cultural background that might want to have a different UX because they go about thinking differently because they're used to a week differently, okay? And you can't expect that Unicom does all these things. So why shouldn't we all kind of work together based on the same open source kind of libraries and products? And that's kind of just what the kind of philosophy behind the Unicom identity system is. And here we just see how it works. So you enter your personal data and you get it verified. It's the most important step and we want that the information we put there and the information we exchange with others is true, right? Or is trusted or is verified by people that you can trust. So that's why I talk about an ecosystem, right? It's not just the identity itself but it's other organizations like for example state organizations or private institutions that verify the different kind of attributes that you give about yourself. And this whole system builds up a kind of interconnectedness, right? And through that interconnectedness and through the reputation that is built up and through the trust that is built up between the actors the whole thing becomes valuable. And then you use your identity. And right now this looks kind of like this. So you have a service and this service allows you to either log in the old way so you have these five different kind of fields where you have to enter information and then you press create account or it allows you to just say, hey, what's the problem? And then you get a little kind of pop-up on your phone that just says, oh yeah, this site wants to give you access but they want this kind of information from you. And in this case it was from our old alpha testing so we wanted to allow you to pre-order a hoverboard. And for pre-ordering a hoverboard the service needs to know your phone number so they can notify you your email address so they can also notify you and your hoverboard driving license.   You know that they don't get whatever else as well. And in the kind of provision we have you will also say that if you can't fulfill the order in a year please delete the data. And you can send this information with it as well. And yeah, I think that's basically what I wanted to present to you. This is just kind of a really busy slide of things where you can use the software identity and there's really just as many use cases as you can imagine where individuals, organizations or things have to interact with each other so basically every single use case that meets this identity protocols that are currently developed and this is for example data marketplaces pretty popular right now places where you can rent or sell data packages that you produce or that you co-produce KYC business models currently they are really hard to run especially when it comes to setting them up easily and to have the onboarding taken care of. But just imagine you have your KYC done once and then you can just do it again and again. I mean talking for the context of ICOs just imagine you don't have to go through each KYC process for each ICO but just go through one ICO KYC process and then take these kind of verified things with you and then blockchain business cases and use cases I mean in many cases you want to trust enabled by the blockchain and business models where the intermediary is missing but even if the intermediary is missing you want to know that these other two actors that remain can be trusted and for that you need to have sovereign identity especially if you don't want to just have an anonymous wallet, talk to another anonymous wallet and then voting also classic kind of blockchain use case then reputation building like these kind of identities can build up reputation over time and then the last point is GDPR so there's new privacy law coming into place coming to force on the 25th of May this year that is basically forcing every company that is making business in Europe so not just the situated Europe but making business in Europe with the laws that allow users to have more control over their data and meaning that you have to minimize the amount of data you send to the necessary information that is required to actually run the service this means that you don't have to provide 10 different details about yourself if they just want to send you an email just because that doesn't actually match to their service this is also causing problems because there's also the right to be forgotten and the blockchain is a mutable lecture so we have to figure this out but that's the part of the stuff and things we also think about whoa now it doesn't move anymore sorry but I'm actually at the end so thank you very much I'm happy, sorry I'm happy to have any questions being asked I can't hear you very well but I don't know how is it for the live stream? are you still running in the room? there is another mic I can hear you better and also the people in the live stream can hear what the audience is asking me that might help my question was having multiple identity in a way it increased also the privacy I'm not giving the same email because you're all coming alone to have multiple identity it's like all that and they share a different identity it's also like an idea it's not like giving the whole like or like I said I can give this email that email is it like an allow? absolutely I mean that's something that I kind of touched on in the presentation but maybe not in enough details I'm just happy to explain it now there is this statement from Zuckerberg it says a person that has multiple identities it's just a sign for lack of integrity which I don't agree with at all I think it's important that we can have multiple identities but this doesn't mean that you don't have one self-sovereign identity it just means that from this self-sovereign identity so from this unique you like you're a unique you and just because you present yourself as different kind of personas out there doesn't mean that your identity itself isn't unique so you can go as a pseudonymous actor into a conversation and still be sure that these people you interact with know that you're an actual human being so if I interact with you in a forum and this forum allows you to come blogging and the only thing they want is to know that there's humans engaged in the conversation I could just go with a very viable claim saying hey this person is a human you don't have to give your email you don't have to give your name the only thing you go and do to enter the forum is to say hey I'm at least a human okay so this is kind of what we're talking about it doesn't mean one unique single identity it's a very old Belgian Chinese shit but yeah so just like you have to think about having a public identity which around which would be like a trust or like a reputation etc what would happen if I would lose it like is there a way that I can easily recover it or I'm just like a sucker that I need to create so described so the idea of self sovereign identities is that they remain stable over time so that we want to provide an identity solution that is constant and that can always change throughout your life in the sense that new attributes can be added and attributes that don't really they're not really necessary anymore or that might change can also be changed but how we secure that your self sovereign identity is going to be there in the long run is that you can either have a backup is it ending up to be an encrypted file that also only you can open knowing your private key so it all comes back to you have to remember your private key exactly what happens if I just like lose it like when you lose your identity then you lose your whole reputation then you lose your identity for a short moment in time if you took care in advance because that's the whole kind of splitting your identity like splitting your private key into different pieces and storing them in different places so either telling some of them to your friends in a secret or storing some of them in a Swiss bank account and storing some of them in your grandmas closet and storing some of them under your back and then when you can at least give it 10 different secrets you can combine 9 of them or 8 of them put them together and you can get your private key back so you have to push to the dev team because I'm not into the technological kind of execution of this but I know that it's been done in other identity projects and that it's not too hard to actually do this so you can recover private keys but yeah this always imposes a risk the human risk of like digital security is always there so you have to kind of take care and you have to do it in advance so there's some kind of and that's a problem of self sovereignty you don't as a self sovereign identity holder there is no one there for you that is going to say hey I'm the state I give you your identity back because I have your birth certificate in some central registry if you kind of lose this identity that you created for yourself in the moment you create the identity in this app it's created within that and it will send some kind of information to the app and then out of this something it creates but it's really just you controlling this so it's also you who actually has to take care of it and that's a problem right like we have to design the interface the app with which you manage the identity in a way that everybody gets this in a way that everybody is really aware that they have this responsibility for their identity and that's a new kind of concept so you don't have to worry about this like 60% of help center requests are password requests and this doesn't work with self sovereign identity you can't write an email to your local and say hey guys I lost my private key and then we go like yeah shit what shall we do that was the purpose of the whole product yeah you have to start all over again the good thing about self sovereign identity is that you create a new identity and then yeah it's a lot of work building up the reputation again verifying your ID because you still have an ID given by the state that you verify on your self sovereign identity or you still have the driver's license that you can get from the public service and then verify it and so on so you can kind of rebuild it but to avoid this whole trouble and also to kind of keep the reputation that is associated with your self sovereign identity it is actually worth to say okay another backup this or like we imagine currently that in the moment of onboarding you create the first backup right because then it is not something that you can push to the end and yeah this is how we currently think about this but it's a work in progress and we're always in this really important mention here we're an open project so we're happy everyone here in the room and also your friends so like go to the person that is most important you think and tell them you should join or help and because we want to see this evolve as an open source project and this doesn't just mean code but this also means thinking philosophy like just ideas right so the worst and most tough questions are the best ones to ask for us and if I can't answer them I'm just happy because that's the moment where I start learning right so please just like push hard questions so when I think about identity it feels like it has to be something like TCP IP like it's not something ABC it's just a protocol that everybody uses that don't as an owner so as a start up okay you are open source but what do you imagine what do you become like because I don't think it becomes something like that it won't probably it will have a name but it will be something like protocol again but as a start up like how do you see yourself like are you business how do you make money or do you become that yeah thank you for that question that's important yeah we see ourselves as a business but we don't see identity as a product so and that's kind of tricky thing to explain maybe but we are as YOLOcom we have the kind of shape of a company like we are at EMDH and we too kind of also kind of reassure ourselves that we are a trustable body that people can trust in that we build like the product we claim to build so that we don't build something kind of sneaky in is open source that's one way of kind of making sure that we don't build shit and then sell it as good the other way we try to fix this is by having a foundation having a veto right in our company so the moment our company would go away from actually delivering the product we want to deliver this company would basically kind of use their veto right like this foundation so that's a kind of legal standpoint of which we as a company sit but just as I said before we wish that this is an open system right like we right now we use the DID spec that is developed by the Decentralized Identity Foundation which is a kind of global foundation that is like came together last year to start bringing the standard debate on right and there's different other self-sovereign identity startups involved there there's also Microsoft and IBM involved there and many many others because everybody understands that identity can't be this kind of close product or one company or one name right it's about having a protocol and the same is true for verified claims verifiable claims are also kind of open process that everybody co-designs the challenge is to build something right from the start that incentivizes the whole ecosystem to basically work together and also to make use of this new possibility for identity and we're still trying to figure out which way of incentivizing different actors within the ecosystem works best especially as we say it shouldn't be a product right so we don't want to become an identity marketplace like I think that is one of the big problems that right now many people understand self-sovereign identity as a product that you kind of create or keep alive by just like moving tokens around necessarily work like the identity itself should be completely independent from the market logic and the protocol itself should also be independent from the market logic but at the same time the ecosystem provides value right and this value in some way has to be kind of yeah like paid by something and then you can either have payments the old way so you get your passport verified and you just transfer classical currency to that service or you can have a system in which more complex relationships can emerge so imagine you have a driver a car sharing service right right now they pay 10 euros to onboard customers because verifying the driver's license and other stuff just actually takes them a lot of money because real human beings have to click okay that they see your driver's license next to your face in this funny video that you have to film and this is an investment that they have to pay upfront before knowing that you will use their service often enough to get this investment back and before knowing that yeah basically like that they had you as a customer at the same time for you as a user it keeps you away from registering to other services as well like you just enter the part like you exit the party where you didn't dream because you use a car sharing service and so you exit the party and you see a car to go car but you only have the driver now account right and in the system that we imagine just like getting an account for this new car sharing service would trigger an event in the background in which the first car sharing service that paid this upfront cost can say hey I have this thing verified once that I paid for a visit that amount of money so can you reimburse me for a part of it and this way your onboarding costs go down and my onboarding costs also go down so these kind of new more complex relationships between services in the background they could be imagined right and they should be built in a way that really truly disconnects the identity from the market level service interactions going on because the main challenge and that's important for protocol thinking right is that we stay on high level with services and verifiers the moment verifiers and services get too much power over our software identities we kind of back up a start so we're kind of really like right now trying to figure this out and also happy about any thoughts on this because it should be a collaborative effort just another follow up question so again when you lose your keys you say yeah it's a hard situation why not connect the keys to ourselves like kind parameters like your finger your voice and if you have two of them is that a process like that I mean this could be a thing right now we as YOLOCOM decided that certain level of like yeah let's say biometrics are not for us yet just because we want to look into it deep enough to say okay we see this as the solution right now I would say like I personally don't trust most biometric systems out there and I don't want to just like put my whole identity to having my face, my finger and my eye or whatever being kind of known but yeah probably I mean this is just a way of also kind of kind of connecting these parts of the secret to your personal kind of characteristics but I yeah I don't know I don't have an opinion of this so I could just make something up now but I don't alright I have several questions the first one is about one identity why have only one identity for example more and more people for example I asked him for my first date I signed up on the PlayStation Network the other day they won my first date why so of course I like but at the same time I need to remember my life I need to remember because he asked for my if I forget my password I also like the password if I need to remember that you see takes forever I would like to have several virtual identities I think I get the question you have and this is a challenging thing right because what we currently build and the kind of ideal situation we build this perfectly true system where you only build everything and you interact based on the truth but societies live from the ability to lie to some extent I mean there is interactions like buying a house or marrying someone where you would probably like to know that it's actually the person you marry and this identity is kind of true I mean there is these interactions where you just don't say I don't give a fuck but does the PlayStation Network have that kind of proper interest in knowing your real birthday I mean they just want to send you a 10 euro voucher on this day or maybe they want to find out if people born 40 years ago have a different playing behavior than people born 30 years ago but this kind of level of detail of having your personal birthday known isn't important to them so the question is if the identity system we build allows for these kind of little lies if they allow for these unproblematic inaccuracies I would call them PlayStation needs to know your proper payment address and they need to know that you're an actual human and maybe in order to have law enforcement go against you if you don't pay they need to know your actual address but everything beyond that could be subject to yeah, lying why not that's just the question of if the system is designed well it allows you to have this kind of eye level interaction with the services and then kind of protected by the GDPR if you stick to your European citizen or engaged with the thing you do inside of the European market you have the protection that they're only allowed to take as much information from you as they actually need to provide their service and then they have to actually really provide a good reason why they need your exact birth date otherwise you can sue them because then they have to pay 4% of their annual turnover which is a hell of a lot of money that's why I disagree my birth date is actually very valuable to them because they can do analytics and things like that and this is why Google is free Facebook is free because this kind of detail lets them run different kind of algorithms and then they can sell this algorithm to interested parties and that brings me to the core of the question which is really how do you plan to push back because more and more people if you have this app that has a lot of information about me ok, admittedly available mostly I'm in control but I will be forced to share and I will be always like they will try to entice me with sharing more and more data if I cannot have a way to lie in the application how can I safeguard that privacy while still enjoying their services this is kind of a prisoner's dilemma situation because in the first place you might agree to some extent of cooperation and then you're in this lock in where you in the long run basically use because you're powerful within the clients and I totally understand and I think in a non-GDPR world this would be the case and outside of Europe I'm not sure how you can technologically solve this I mean I just really don't know how you can technologically solve this problem of this balance of power that we have here but having the right of the GDPR in place that requires a service to really just use the information they need to provide this service they give to you this is not, and that's the problem in business models like Google and Facebook that you're not the product like you're not the customer you're the product you're basically a harvested piece of data that produces more and more pieces of data like you're like a cucumber on the field that is just like growing over time and then it becomes hard to argue for someone like Facebook and Google that to provide their service to you the cucumber they need to know everything about you I mean this is just a question of how it evolves over time but as here product and service and these kind of things kind of mismatch I think there's a strong argument there as soon as the law is in place yeah so I mean I wish I could share your optimism about the said law I, you know privacy laws existed before that never prevented other people from going around that in fact you can be sure that Google's lawyers helps to break this law so they are like workarounds the last question let you go this is a mobile app which means you are running a platform that cannot really be trusted do you plan to do something more like for example in blockchain technologies you have what's called hardware wallets something that is secure actually yes so we just did this last week like the first integration prototype level that we have a hardware token hardware wallet that keeps your product key and also doesn't actually move it outside of the hardware part this is totally there the question is can you convince every single person to use a hardware wallet I mean right now the kind of challenge we have is that we need to incentivize the ecosystem and get people like random everyday people to use that sort of identity and to benefit from it and to start getting used to it for this you can't make everyone like you can't force everyone to have a hardware wallet that's just really really a high entry barrier I mean we had an earlier kind of version of our solution where we required a personal server and you had to set up a personal server and even kind of made it really easy for you right like we made it super easy to set up the server very easy to also do the payments for it which is like I think it was 3 euros per month or something so it was very cheap as well but at the same time it was clear that only if you're super super concerned you can actually like you will actually use this service but we as you look home we said whatever emerges in the self sovereign identity space it has to be usable by everyone and it has to speak to everyone and it has to speak clearly to everyone and has to like while using it educate people about the potentials of it about the risks of it the kind of responsibilities that come with it and so on and this as such is already quite a heavy task right so we offer and in the long run that's going to be the case and we already kind of tried it out just last week that you can have this extra security like this extra piece of trust that you have in the sense of a hardware wallet but we don't make it a necessity like it's kind of the extra security at all that you can have like LED panels or LED panels are really really bright sorry but I'm kind of in this direction everything else is not possible I have a little disability question so your on the website you would want to access or the service whatever it requires your application or requires an application on your phone where you have this private key what if you use your phone or you don't have it with you in a foreign country and you want to access some services like your email or your bank account how to do that in that moment where you don't have access to your phone you just forgot it at home and you want to go to an internet cafe or use a service very interesting question I must admit I haven't thought about it one way of thinking about it could be that you have the hardware wallet and you have this with you sorry easy answers to kind of hide no, I haven't thought about it I guess by accepting security problems you could kind of just run your backup that you might have stored in the cloud and activate it with your private key and then you also have to trust the device you run it on so if you trust the computer in the internet cafe then it might work otherwise there's this kind of lock-in like your identity is found to your phone so services you interact with your identity require you to have your phone around otherwise you might still have your copy in the form of a regular passport or a private license as a plastic card from your old school wallet and then you can use this instead I'm sorry, I don't know the question was to create some kind of web-based solution where you can access that's the whole point of having a non-cloud-based sovereign solution sorry, the data is stored on the blockchain or some ledger, right? no, the personal data is stored on your phone we strongly encourage everyone into identity to not store personal information on the blockchain it is useful to use the blockchain as a public storage for parts of the interaction going on, right? but it's not very useful to have it as the storage of the attribute so I wouldn't put my bank details encrypted on the blockchain just because there are still risks associated to it and it's not worth taking these risks okay, then my question would be how do you communicate or which parts of the transaction that transaction require the blockchain? if it's okay, I would give this question to the DEF team that is present today it doesn't happen any time so this time I will use it the opportunity to have Casillas speak about this if you like so basically what we store on blockchain is so the identity actually consists of two parts the first is identifier which identifies all the other data about you so what we store on blockchain is basically the reference with the DAT and the reference to all your other data that's it that's the answer to your question maybe but if it happens also do all the ecosystem that's another reason but you don't want it there yeah, the private information that I shouldn't be at least right now what we do is we only store the public part on the blockchain and we store the rest in IPFS which is like a database is our blockchain going to be updated or are we going to do more of it? yeah, but every time I mean it's a miserable part like every time you change something it's going to be updated in your implementation how can you talk about blockchain in a way I mean the data for example we store on blockchain it can stay there it's just a reference that becomes invalid until you update it so I wouldn't say it's like it's not a correct thing so I guess it depends on how safe I store it so what I would like to say is keeping the data from the blockchain that the guys are actually suggesting in a way it's immutable, it's going to be always there it cannot be easily updated but if you like storing it in IPFS in your solution you can easily update it and you can easily remove it that's why storing the data on a blockchain is not something like that the reason I'm bullish on the data on blockchain is that I don't see a future where we still use hardware books like we don't it's definitely from let's say five years, ten years so our identity will be defined by our physical body or some method that we're going to store so at that point we're going to have to store something other than an O or a key but at that point somehow you'll store some stuff so it's not a matter of if but then at least from my perspective that's why I was just trying to that's a good point but I would say that for now we just focus on a solution that can be easily adapted and like biometrics for example is something that we might think about later because for now we just need to be in the end there's just one more point of biometrics so with the solution we currently have or envision and build the really nice part about it is that you can leave it home and forget it when it's your biometrics and when you can rebuild your identity based on these kind of different things like thumb, the nice and well then if you get into a situation where you don't want to disclose your identity you can't so you still have this like bit of autonomy to just throw your identity away and get it back at a later point just imagine you're fleeing from a country and your identity is found to fully your biometrics shit I mean just like that's a problem so it might be useful to have these two things separated to give you the freedom of not always being your biometric in every situation you might encounter might be a strong argument against biometrics I'm not sure I think now any last question or should I just say thank you for some quite challenging questions today thank you for your time


Today, I am with Robert Middleton and I'm honored to be with Robert because he's been teaching self-employed professionals how to do marketing for 35 years. And he started his weekly newsletter 22 years ago. So he is really one of the first, if not the first in our industry to start talking about a small business or particularly for self-employed professionals, which of course is a lot of you on how to attract clients. This company is called Action Plan Marketing, so you may have heard of it. And Robert, it's great to have you here. Thank you very much, George. I appreciate you interviewing me. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this. So there's so much we can talk about, but one of the things that you help a lot of self-employed professionals with is getting clients. And one of the things you talk about is how if we can have more conversations, connected conversations, we can have more useful meetings with potential clients. So maybe we can start there is how do we interest people in that conversation with us. Okay. So, you know, some of this is tricky and some of it is very simple and common sense.  And what I mean by a selling conversation, it's not a high pressure thing that I'm trying to convince you that I should work with me. But it's usually a conversation about, tell me about your situation. What are you looking for? What do you need? What results would you like, et cetera, et cetera. So a conversation, a selling conversation happens. But there's usually some, there are things that usually happen before a selling conversation. So people meet you somewhere through networking or they meet you online or they hear about you or, you know, there can be a lot of different ways. But often there's sort of, often there's an initial conversation. Sometimes they call that a pre-selling conversation. So for instance, if you said, Robert, I've heard about you and you sent me a quick email and say, and I wonder if you can help me. Well, I don't do a selling conversation first. I do a pre-selling conversation. I do a short conversation. I phone them up. We figure out a time and said, so you were referred by so-and-so or you heard from me from such and such or you saw me from the website or somebody fills out a form on my website sometimes. And so I had that first conversation. And so there's three purposes for that first conversation. The first purpose is to establish the beginning of a relationship. Like, who are you? What do you do? You know, what are you about? How did you get into your business? A little bit about them. And I'm not, I'm not talking about myself. You know, we often, when we think of selling, we think it's well, I have to have a perfect spiel and a silver tongue and tell people all about what I do and how great it is. And in my experience, effective selling is the exact opposite of that. Completely the opposite. So I'm just, you know, who are you, George, and what's going on? And what are you looking for? So the first is just, you know, start to establish the relationship. The second to see is, are you somebody I can help or not? So we call that qualification. Qualification two ways. So you're a good client for me. Would you be a good client for me? Do you need the, do you have problems, issues, concerns that I've helped people with before? Because sometimes people say, well, I have time management problems and that's not what people hire me for. So you wouldn't be the right guy. So I find out that. And then, and then if that goes well, then the purpose of the pre-selling conversation is to set up a selling conversation. That's how I do it. I found it effective. So I usually say, so based on what you've said, George, I think there's a good chance I can help you, but I really like to have a more in-depth conversation and learn more about you, your business, what you want to accomplish, that kind of thing. And then if it all fits, I'll explain my business in more depth and we'll see if we can work together. How does that sound to you? Most people say that sounds good. Because, see, if I go right into a selling conversation after the initial thing, I haven't really set the groundwork very well. For instance, I like someone to know quite a lot about how I work before I have a selling conversation. So I don't know where they came from. You know, let's say it was referral, but they haven't been on my list for 20 years. Someone's been on my list for 20 years. It's a different conversation than someone that just heard about me yesterday, but whatever. So I usually say, so George, let's set up a time to have that conversation. Okay, sure. And then I'm going to send you to my webpage and you can read about how my one-on-one coaching works or my group program works. And I'd like you to read that in depth before we talk. So you really know a lot going in. And man, does that help? Because when I have the selling conversation, I've let the printed word on a website do a lot of the work for me. You know, this is who I work with and these are the issues they have. And this is what they're trying to achieve. And this is what I've achieved with my clients and here's some examples and here's how I work. And it answers all the questions. And so then in the one-on-one selling conversation, I can get deep in. And the purpose of that selling conversation is to, for me, to really feel that I can help this person or not. I can't help everybody for whatever reason, you know? It can be a lot of different things. But anyway, and with that, I have a very high closing rate. A lot of people work with me that way because I take it slow. So, you know, once you've learned that basic process of having that conversation, achieving those three things, relationship qualification and setting up a meeting, sending the information and then having an in-depth conversation, after a while, that becomes very easy. There's no pressure. There's no, you know, there's issues sometimes. There's objections. There's this, there's, what, but I won't get into that. But once you've handled that, I find the hardest part for most people is how do I get that in more of those initial conversations? And there's a lot of ways that I'm not going to talk about all the ways. I'm going to talk about really one thing.  Or I've gotten lots and lots of clients from speaking. I go into a speaking engagement and after the speaking engagement, I say, I have a report for you. If you'd like it, give me your business card. I'll send it to you as a PDF usually. And then I have a dozen or sometimes hundreds of business cards. And all of those people are prospects. So I email them and say, thank you for attending my talk. And I hope you got some good ideas. And hey, I'd love to chat with you a little bit and learn a little bit more about your business. Who knows, there might be some ways I could help you. If you'd like to set up a short conversation, I'm happy to do that. And that's the initial conversation, which sometimes leads somewhere, sometimes doesn't, but it fills my pipe one. And then people find me on the internet. Or I do a webinar which is like a talk, you know, so I do something. But there's sometimes, you know, all of those things, most of those things take a fair amount of time to get rolling. I say to do a whole speaking thing where you get booked for a talk, it's a 27 step process, you know, I have to put together my package and call organization and send stuff and follow up and prepare my talk and give my talk. It's worth it. I've gotten tons of clients that would, and it's worth it for sure.  And it's something you can start to do today and get two or three meetings today. So I guess we're out of time, so let me take it. Well, that was great, Robert. Thank you for that. So that was great. Yeah, looking forward to hearing what this method is. So I divide people, potential clients into three categories, category one, two, and three. And category one are people you've worked with before. But maybe you could work with them again. Maybe there's other services you could offer. Category two are people that you have some connection or affiliation with. Through a referral, you belong to the same organization, professional group. You go to the same church, you have some affiliation, you have something in common. And you, but you don't really know that person very well, but you have some connection. I'll give an example in a minute. And the other is that is the third level connection where they're pretty much a stranger, but they'd be a good potential client for you. Those are obviously the hardest people to get meetings with, but there's ways to do that. I just got off the phone with a client and we were talking about stuff like that. For instance, he said, I know this guy who was a famous sportscaster. And we really know each other well and we have dinner every year and we catch up. He says, but you know what? I've never asked him if he knows anybody that I should be talking to about my business. So those are really second level because they're in the network, they're a referral. So there are so many people out there that were connected with closer than we think. People we know that they know, et cetera, et cetera. So first level connections, for instance, I've been getting tons of meetings with first level connections in the last few weeks. And I just, I'm looking at people that have done my past programs. And I just call them, I just send them a really simple email. I mean, this does not take any skill. If you've got a good relationship with them, you did good work with them. They know, like, and trust you already. But maybe you have a new service, like my friend, Al, my client, Al. He's done a lot of leadership coaching, but he wants to offer a new service, which is helping companies implement big projects that often get stalled or don't get buy-in from the employees. He's done that with 11 companies over the year and is 100% success rate. We're talking about big things. And if it doesn't succeed, the company's in trouble. And something like 60% I've heard of company initiatives like this fail because they don't know how to get buy-in from the employees. So he's got a great service. So those are first level connections of people that have been clients with his leadership consulting. So he emailed them and said, hey, I'm doing something new. I'm helping companies do blah, blah, blah. I think you might be interested in knowing a little more. Can we chat? Or the emails that I've sent to my people, I was just thinking of you. I was. You know, when I think of somebody, I jot their name down and then I send them an email and say, hey, I'd like to catch up with you. Some of my best clients, people I really like working with. And I'm not, I'm sort of indirectly, I'm not even trying to sign them up for a new program. I'm looking more for ideas, testimonials, references, resources, stuff like that. Because that can lead to the next thing as well. So I've had these wonderful conversations with people. I had a conversation with someone that said, Robert, someone approached me before I started working you with a $128 program. I said, nah, that's too much for me. Someone offered me a $79 program. That was too much. And then I went and saw you give a talk and saw what you did. And then you were promoting your program. This was 10 years ago. And I said, I don't care how much it costs. I want to talk to that guy. So anyway, she gave me a testimonial to that effect and said it was the best money she had ever spent in her life in her business. She's making hundreds of thousands of dollars now because of our work together. So her name is Sharon and we had a great conversation. And she gave me a lead to something and she gave me a testimonial. And so the first thing that I recommend people do is just connect with people that you know and request something from them. Say, look, I'm looking at getting more clients in this area. And I don't know if it's right for you or not, maybe not. But I'd like to have a conversation with you and just tell you what I'm doing and who my ideal clients are and what I'm looking for and the kind of results I'm doing. And any way you can help me would be greatly appreciated. If you have a few ideas, if you have a resource or two, anything, that would be great with me. And most people will meet with you very willingly. Now, just a few days ago, I read an amazing article that was, you know, it's funny. You know when you focus on something, stuff comes into you that's just totally appropriate for that, like all the time. So I found this article on a social media thing and I went, this might be interesting click. And it was an article called 50 cups of coffee. This is a guy that wrote an article about a strategy for meeting with a lot of people. And the strategy is you work in getting 50 people to meet with you and have a 20 minute cup of coffee with them. Sometimes it'll go longer. I won't get into all the details, but he says, you know, it can be the very best way to get out, to get whatever you're looking for. If you're looking for a mate, if you're looking for a new job, if you're looking for whatever or new clients, just meet with people. And then of course, after you've met with them and said, here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm looking for. Number one, some of them might say, I'd like to know more for myself. And then you set up that longer selling conversation. That sounds good. In some cases, I know someone that should know about that or I have an idea or I know a networking group or I know an organization or do you know about this online community? All you gotta do is talk with people and we sit behind our computers, doing social media and email and stuff like that. But we're never having these real conversations. And nowadays with Zoom video, you don't even have to have a cup of coffee. You can have a virtual cup of coffee, a cup of water. It's almost as good as being in person, not quite as good, being in person, there's energy that's there that can't be. That's how I don't go anywhere. All I do is meet with people on Zoom, pretty much. I'm a little po-dunk town at the top of a mountain, hardly anybody lives here. I have no clients here. But anyway, so the number one recommendation is get more meetings, get conversations, talk to people, sit down, tell them what you're doing, tell them what you're working on. And it's a kind of, it's prospecting in a way, but you shouldn't, when we put, you know, the label of prospecting, there's so much pressure and so much whatever. And you're just having a conversation and telling them what you're looking for and asking for some help. I connected with some people I hadn't met in 10 years. And they were so excited to hear from me. Cause everyone else is sitting back, sort of waiting for people to reach out to them. We're so, you don't reach out. People like it when you knock on the screen and say, you know, which we do with you do with email and say, hey, I've been thinking of you. I'd love to catch up with you. And I get enthusiastic responses. I'd love to do that. And then we set up a time and I have a calendar system makes it easier to do. And that leads to stuff. It leads to the next conversation, which leads to the next conversation. And not only that, it leads to new ideas. Like the second guy I talked to, his name is Dan, he gave me two books that I should read. And he said, I know these people that wrote these books. And he told me stories about them and how he meant them and some funny things. And I immediately bought both books. And one of those books is about education and the future of education and teaching adults. And it's like right up my alley. And it's just, and it's giving me ideas. It's expanding my mind and possibilities. I hadn't talked to Dan. I would never have known about those books and read those books. So. Yeah. This is fantastic. I am full in full agreement with you. It's true. This is actually something I've said to my clients as well. Like I use, of course, I'm most familiar with my own example. And I say, well, I know a lot of people. I've had a lot of people on my network, but almost nobody keeps in touch. And so, and I try to, I'd be honest with you, in the years I've been in business, most of the time I haven't been very good about keeping in touch. But kind of more recently, I've started to reconnect and I'm aiming to have this habit of connecting again with people like the way you're saying. And which is why you and I, we are sitting here today, right? Well, it's funny that all of a sudden, I'm in this process of making connections and out of the blue, he says, hey, I was thinking of you and I like to interview you again. Yeah. So here we are. Here we are, yeah. Yeah, exactly.  So I wanna ask you a little bit about each category here. Sure. So, previous clients, tell us more about how you breach that conversation because I wonder if some people might be concerned that, oh, I don't wanna reach out to previous clients because I don't wanna make it sound like I'm trying to sell them on my services again or tell us about that. Yeah, but if you don't reach out, nothing's gonna happen. So what's the worst that can happen? Yeah. We have a lot of mindsets that stop us. I'm afraid of being rejected. I'm afraid of people feeling un-pushy. I'm afraid of asking for help, whatever it is. And if you really investigate that and look a little deeper, most of it, there's not a lot of validity to it. It's not really very useful. So, you wanna catch up with them. I can't control what they think. You know, but if I sense something, hey, John, we worked a while ago and I have a perfect service for you. It's only a million dollars. Let's talk. No, it's not that. You're not doing that. But you say, I have some ideas for you. I don't know if it's right for you or not, but let's chat. Not everybody will get back to you. Yeah. The other thing is when you ask someone to meet or try to connect with someone, almost nobody tries a second time. Like 80 to 90% of people may be more. Never even try a second time. Whereas- You mean following up? Yeah, it's like if I send an email and try to get a meeting and I don't hear from them, they're too late or say, I didn't hear from you. Maybe you're on vacation or something. Just wanna touch bases again. And, you know, here's the way to do it playfully. Have fun. These are people that you know, like and trust. Have fun. It's not a series.  You know, if you go online and do cartoon for X, maybe it's their profession and click on images, you will find a thousand cartoons like that. That's a great idea. You can copy them and then paste them into the email. Just something funny. It's a little tricky with someone you don't know. It's like, I don't know what this is, but you know, it's a little trickier, but someone that you know, something a little funny. Like one guy said, you know, I haven't been in touch for a long time. I've been, I know something about cleaning his gutters. You know, his picture, cleaning his gutters and following on or something. And it was just funny. Got right back to him. And it's turning into like a $50,000 project, that follow-up. I mean, really, you never know. And I'm talking to Al, he reached out to 20 people, seven you've set up appointments with already and one he's already got a new client. And that's just in a few weeks. Yeah. So stuff happens. Now, so I don't think they're the easiest one. If you're making that hard, go to a therapist, work it out. I mean, it's really, I'm afraid they'll reject me. I mean, there must be a lot of stuff because people don't, or often people have a lot of people they could reach out. You know, were they really happy with my work before? Well, why didn't you stay in touch? Blah, blah, blah, blah. Just reach out. The worst that can happen is they don't get back to you. The best that can happen is, you know, you can get some new work. Right. Second level connections. Like in the early days of my, of my business, I lived in San Francisco. That's where I started and I belong to the Chamber of Commerce and they had a printed directory back then. Everything's online now. Right. And so I went through the directory and circled all the companies that were small professional service businesses. There was a guy who there's an auto broker. There was a publicity expert consultant. There was a management psychologist. I remember those three right off the top of my head. And I sent a letter to them and said, hey, I'm a Chamber of Commerce member as are you. And I don't know if this is an issue for you, but I help people like you with their marketing and attracting more clients. And maybe it's something that's worth a conversation. And because they're a Chamber of Commerce member, I'm not a stranger. So I sent the letters out and then I followed up by phone. I said I would follow up by phone. See, sending stuff out and waiting for people to get back to you, the response is never high. I promise you. If they get back to you and said, I got this letter, I'm interested. Well, that's obviously a good sign, but better to follow up. It was a small number of letters, maybe 10 letters. I called them all, everybody took my call and everybody, I had a good conversation on it. And some wanted to know more and I had a meeting with them. And four or five or six of them, I can't remember was over 30 years ago, became clients. It was like, it wasn't that hard. I used my affiliation. So, you know, if you belong to, I once gave a talk at a, it was a construction company, professional organization, everyone that belonged owned a construction company. And then I was giving a talk there and I met a woman there, most are men. And I said, what do you do? She says, I'm a financial planner to people who own construction companies. So that's interesting. And so is this been good for you? She says, half the people in this room are my clients. So she networked with those people. And, you know, I have this sort of model, affiliation, connection, familiarity, you get to know them, information, you know, they know more about me, experience. They really have a sense of who I am. You give a talk, you network a lot with people, you develop that no-like trust factor through affiliation, familiarity, information and experience. And I can't remember what she did. Maybe she just met people, they asked her what she did.  She didn't look like anybody else. And well, I help construction companies manage their finances. So, blah, blah, blah. And then she probably followed up with them and got meetings and got them as clients. I mean, it was, so that affiliation through networking, I belong to the Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco. But, you know, if you can find a niche like that, it's even more powerful. I'm thinking also, a lot of those who are watching or listening to this may be part of training programs, you know, online and offline. They've done some kind of training or some kind of, they've gone to a workshop or retreat or taken a course. And that's also an affiliation, right? It's like, oh, we were in the same course together. We were in the same program. Oh, we were both, we're both in Robert's group. Yes. Right? And, right? Yeah. And they may or may not be a prospect, but funny thing, when you talk to people, you'll discover that they know other people. Very rare that they don't know anybody else.  And another great thing comes out of that is, like I said, not only do they find out about you and also you get ideas, but you get better at talking about what you do. Like anything, if you practice for a play, you know, if you go into a play as an addition, and they say, okay, we've given you a part, give it to us. And you say, well, I haven't read it yet. They say, bye. We go out and we talk about our business as if, and we're terrible at it. We haven't thought it through. We haven't practiced it. We don't have a good value proposition. We don't make it simple. It takes 20 minutes for them to understand what the hell we're doing. So it makes us, it puts some pressure on us to talk about our services coherently. So I always start with, you know, what I do is I help self-employed people attract more clients with better marketing. Let me give you an example, blah, blah, blah. And people can get it pretty quickly. People struggle to get clients because they don't know how and I show them how to do it. And I coach them and I've worked with thousands of people over the last 35 years. Yeah.  And I don't know if you need my help, but I'd love your help. Who do you know is helped with that? Any ideas that you could give me of how I could connect with people in this community? People love to help people. It's true. People love to help people. And we usually don't give them the opportunity, right? And we don't give them the opportunity. I want to ask you also, you mentioned one of the ways that you really kind of have these conversations as you do speaking. You, and I know some of the people watching this are like, oh, I would love to do some speaking as well. Do you have any words of advice on how do we get more speaking opportunities? Well, I'll tell you a story and I'll tell you what I did. When I moved from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, you know, I've been in the U.S. I'm Canadian citizen. I moved to San Francisco in 1979. I lived in San Francisco for 17 years. Then I moved to Silicon Valley. And my client load kind of started to light. No one was gonna drive an hour and a half to meet with me. I was mostly doing in-person meetings, but I'd given a lot of talks. I have to turn on my speaking marketing machine. And so I did. And this was just on the KIT CUS pre-internet. There was no Google, there was no nothing. There was email. So I went to the library and I got some directories and I found every professional group I could. I came up with a long list of names. Not only that, in the famous Robert Middleton archives, I have a folder that goes back to 1995. And in it, where's my list of all the organizations I reached out to? And I always say it's the easiest call to make because if it's a group that has speakers they're looking for speakers. So why not you? So I found out the person who booked the speakers took a call or two. And I said, I give talks on marketing for self-employed people. Do you think your group might be interested? And some said, no. And some said, maybe. And if it was maybe, then I sent them some stuff and followed up.  Now that's not gonna happen. So then you have to have some materials to send them. And you have to have a speaker's kit. You have to have a writeup of your talk or talks. You have to have a bio. If you've spoken anywhere, a list of those. You know, these days it's mostly done via PDF. You can get a designer to put together something like that that isn't gonna cost you thousands of bucks. It doesn't have to cost. But it has to be well written, relevant, interesting. You have a cover letter that says, here's what I do, got that done. And then you follow up. And I found it was extraordinarily successful in doing that, you know, just reaching out, getting meetings, getting conversations and then getting booked. And then I put together a presentation and I practiced it out loud several times. And, you know, it wasn't new at it at that point. I'd been in business for 1995. I'd been in business for more than 10 years. I'd given a fair number of talks. You know, there's, despite the fact that so much is online these days, there are still professional groups that get together and speaking is still a huge industry. And these were free talks. Every once in a while, I'd give a pay talk at a conference but I never really pushed that as a business. I don't like to travel too much. I want to be in my office because I have client meetings all the time. And if you travel, it's a day there, a day back, et cetera. Not the kind of lifestyle I like, but I love giving talks. So I gave talks to writers groups and consulting groups and technical groups and human resource groups and anything that would have self-employed professionals, organizers, national association of professional organizers. And, you know, they're all on my list here, association of national association of accountants. Actually, the one group that doesn't seem to understand marketing as accountants. I talked to this one group of five times and I didn't know what I was talking about. So market for accountants, why would they need to do that? We don't understand this one. And then some people, you know, it's perfect for them. Career action center, chambers of commerce. Things like that. So with a little research, these days, you can go to Google, put in professional groups in your area and you'll find a lot of stuff and look on their websites and see if they have speakers and see if there's a phone number or email and try to reach that person. Yeah, and sometimes they do webinars, right? And you don't even have to go anywhere. You could just do the Zoom webinar for their group too. I really like that you've kind of shared these ideas from a spirit of it's kind of very, you're bringing it down to the basics and it's very human. It removes the anxiety of marketing.  I had to do a lot of stuff to finally get over the anxiety. You know, I rehearsed what I was gonna say. I, you know, I'd pick up the phone, I'd break into a cold sweat.  But I haven't found that anyone that has died from prospecting, getting meetings with people.   It'll be okay. Yeah. Yeah, you'll do it bad to begin with. You get better. I'm still terrible at some things. Yeah. Well, maybe we could end on this little topic. It could be a big topic, but- I'll give it your- How do you, yeah, how do you deal with failure or that necessity of practice in order to become better at, for example, reaching out to people? Okay, three words. Deep spiritual work. Yeah. So what do I mean by deep spiritual work? Well, you know, I've done a lot of things. I've done a lot of things and read a lot of things. I've studied Byron Katie. I've worked with spiritual teachers. I've worked with non-duality teachers, all this stuff. But you know what it really comes down to? Accepting that whatever is happening right now is okay. I'm reading, I started reading a new book today by Joan Tollison. Have you ever read her? No, I haven't. She's the book called? It's, I don't have it in front of me. It's about, I probably have it on my iPad here. It's called Death. I say death and then I laugh, right? Death, the end of self-improvement. Okay. And she's one of the best writers on non-duality.  Our bodies are gonna break down. Things are not always gonna be perfect. And yet, you know, we can have joy in the moment. Whatever is happening.  A lot of good things are gonna happen to us too.  It's like, oh, well, I think I'll survive that. It'll be okay. Doesn't mean anything about me. People are crazy busy.  Before it was a lot harder, but it's sort of like whatever happens must be what's supposed to happen because it just happened. And it's too late to change it. It just happened. It's over. Yes. So on with the next, you know? I love that. That's a very good way for us to kind of close that conversation because that is, that's it. And I think if we can reconnect with the source of our eternal security, you know, then we can make experiments and reach out. Well, Robert, how can those watching this learn more about you? Is there anything you want to offer us? Tell us more. Well, I just wrote a report called Get More Meetings, Landmore Clients. And it's what we talked about today in more, you know, all about that. So if you just go to my website, it's obvious there's a form right there and you can get it. And then you'll be added to my e-list. If you don't want to be on the e-list after you get it, you can unsubscribe right away. But don't you dare. But you get the report and you go to actionplan.club.com, C-L-U-B, actionplan.club. And I actually have actionplan.com but I have different stuff on that site. So that's what to do. And then we'll give you some good ideas. I will be sure to put the link in the notes of this video. So look for the notes here. Sometimes it's above, sometimes below. And thank you, Robert. Thanks for this very helpful conversation. Thanks, it was fun. Thank you. Yeah, thanks.