Welcome back for the final episode of our three-part TechCrunch Disrupt series about the latest trends out of Silicon Valley. I'm your host, Paul Matzko, and today I want to talk to you about the way that venture capitalists and startup engineers at TechCrunch Disrupt talked about the state and regulation. The shortest possible summary is less than you might think, but in interesting ways. Let me start by saying how refreshing it was to be surrounded by folks who are fixated on what they can do rather than what they should do. Now, there is a conversation to be had about how blinkered tech culture can be, how they can inadvertently, more inadvertently, cause harm because they don't think through the social ramifications of the tech they are developing. For example, when social media engineers invented the quote-unquote infinite scroll, you know how you can keep flicking up indefinitely on Twitter, Facebook, or Insta, they didn't think about how addictive it would be. Indeed, now the big social media companies are scrambling to undo some of that damage by building in time use monitors and controls. But even Silicon Valley types have to take heed of what regulators are doing. The difference between a successful startup and a failure is as likely to be bureaucracy as a flawed monetization plan. So there was a panel at TechCrunch, for instance, discussing the difference between how car share companies like Uber and Lyft were received by regulators and scooter rental companies like Lyme and Bird more recently have been received. Despite having essentially the same it's better to ask forgiveness than permission approach to municipal regulation. They've had very different outcomes. Now, in this case, you know, transportation regulators are coming down hard on scooters because they kind of got pantsed by the ride-hailing corporations. But while that's kind of a libertarian friendly way of thinking about regulation, like let's let's break things and if we break enough things we'll show how we can improve society, none of the people I interviewed or met while at the conference was formally libertarian. There is a general ethos of annoyance there at regulators who won't let them do cool-tech stuff. But it's too in co-eight to really be considered proto-libertarian in any kind of systematic way. But one thing is very clear from spending time at TechCrunch, and that's that the U.S. is being bypassed by other countries in part because of the difficulty and the increasing difficulty of doing innovative work without falling afoul of local, state, and federal regulators. One of the exhibitors on Startup Alley was a company named Wingley, which is essentially applying the Airbnb business model to private planes. So let's say you own a half a million dollar private plane, should we all be so lucky, and regularly hop over the English Channel with it. You know, it might be faster than taking the train or flying commercial, or maybe you just like flying. You love seeing the, you know, cliffs of Dover. But it's expensive to own and operate a plane, and jet fuel ain't cheap. So rather than flying alone, the idea of Wingley is that you would use their app to offer one or two of your seats in your plane for passengers, who would then help you defray the cost of fuel. It's a win-win. Your maintenance cost, your operating cost is lower, and the passenger gets the convenience and luxury of a private plane ride. That sounds great, right? So what does regulation have to do with this story? Wingley is a French company. Aviation, despite the reputation of regulation on the continent versus the U.S., aviation is actually significantly less regulated in much of Europe than in the U.S. By contrast, a U.S. company called FlightNow, that essentially wanted to do the same thing, was just shut down this year by the FAA, which ruled that the fraying fuel costs made FlightNow pilots commercial rather than private pilots. And thus, they'd be subject to all the training requirements, all the labor organization rules that applied commercial piloting. Why did they do that? Well, part of it's lobbying from pilot unions. They don't like the competition. But also, because if there's one thing that bureaucracies abhor, it's risk, risk of any kind. They don't want passengers taking the risks involved in flying on a private plane, which are real.  At the same time, that risk, while it's larger, is not as large as dying in a car crash one mile from your home. So risk is always relative. But the FAA has essentially a zero tolerance policy towards risk when it comes to new innovative business models.  We're essentially making access to private plane rides accessible to the upper middle class and not just the upper class. And that's an incremental upgrade. But on the other hand, there is a developing niche that falls under transportation regulation that has the potential to transform the lives of everyone, regardless of income or ownership. I'm talking here of autonomous vehicles. And they're coming very, very soon. I mean, in fact, depending on what you count, they're already here in the sense that most of us, if we buy a new car or buying a car that parks itself, it does its own cruise control. It has emergency braking if we can't stop quickly enough on our own. And features like that are becoming the new standard for vehicles. That's what's called level two automation on a level five scale. They're all techs that assist a human driver who's still responsible to keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes looking out the windows at all time, but levels three to five all involve increasing levels of driver free automation with level five being a car that has no steering wheel at all. Our next interview is with a car, autonomous car company called Byton, which is developing a level three car with hopes for a level four car in the near future. Listen in. I'm here with Florian Bauer, who's the head of product management for a car manufacturer called Byton. They do some autonomous vehicles. It's an electric vehicle. It's designed to be shared. We're going to talk a little bit about more of that together. But thanks for coming on with me, Florian. I appreciate it. Sure. Thanks for having me. So to kick us off, I should mention that Byton is literally around the neck of every attendee of TechCrunch Disrupt. They, they're on our lanyards for our, for our name tags. I hadn't heard of Byton until this conference. So tell me a little bit about the company. When our, our listeners here, Byton, they're thinking probably, or think of car company sponsoring major tech conference. They're probably not at this point thinking about Byton. So tell me why they should be aware of Byton. All right. So Byton is a company that was founded about a little bit more than two years ago. It was founded in Hong Kong and one investor had an idea and started recruiting people for about one or two years until he found the perfect team from different spaces to actually pull this off, right? So we're a bunch of ex-BMW people who worked on the BMW i sub-brand. We have a lot of people from who used to work at Tesla before. We combined this knowledge with the tech knowledge from other companies from Apple or Google and you name the company and we probably have an ex employee in our company now. So we started off very small with just an idea on a blank sheet of paper. We understood that the future is going to be electric. So it had to be an electric car, right? That was no question. The future is going to be connected. That's what we knew. So we had to do something to leverage technology, to actually connect things to things, right? And also develop a car as a device. So as one additional smart device in your ecosystems of devices that you just add to your other devices. And then, of course, we had to tackle the question of autonomous cars. We all know the future is going to be somewhat autonomous. So, of course, we want to play in that field as well. And we need to consider the changing customer habits of maybe not even owning a car in the future anymore, but using it on demand in a shared vehicle. So we also tackle that space a little bit. And the idea was from a blank sheet of paper to keep all these things in mind and design a vehicle architecture that is scalable to multiple products and future proof for the next 10 years. So you don't necessarily need to be at the kind of maximum future capability in any of those regards. You just have to be, but you need to build in the capacity to get there in the future. So like with the self-driving bit, my understanding is the prototype that's out on display here on the floor in the exhibition hall is like level three autonomous. Yeah. So basically these things come step by step. The first car will be super focused on the user experience, on the new way to interact with the car. We have a 49 inch screen built into the dashboard. It's quite impressive. I'll say that as someone who sat in the car, it's all surrounds you in the front. It's probably going to be the biggest screen you see on the market. And the differences we're not just talking about it, we're actually doing and developing it. And we're adding a driver display that we call driver tablet that is a touchscreen right in the middle of the steering wheel to sort of prepare for use cases that will be eventually enabled by autonomous driving or by more and more situations in which you can give control to the vehicle. So the goal is to to develop everything with the future in mind. So we're not dependent on autonomous driving. You can still drive the car yourself. It still has a steering wheel because the risk would just be too high that at some point it's a legal issue and you can't offer the car because it doesn't have a steering wheel. The screen offers you endless opportunities for services based on your personal profile that you bring to the car. It recognizes you with a facial recognition camera. It knows exactly what seat you're taking to bring your content onto your screen or your area of the screen that is most convenient to you, which as both of us as parents of young children will appreciate. Exactly. You can just send something to the back and make sure they are. They're happy. Number one priority for every parent quiet or one of the two, ideally both. And yeah, so advanced levels of autonomous driving will enable more and more use cases for these for the content on these screens. And the goal is that the user interface will just grow with these use cases and not have to be rethought after after level four and level five will come. So the first guy, as you mentioned, will have level three capabilities. So which highway pilot and other individual situations in which the car will be able to take over. So remote parking and all of these features that that add convenience to your daily life, but it's not like this on and off switch that level four is, let's say it's either completely autonomous or not. It's more situation adequate, right? Also in line with the legal requirements that you have to fulfill in all the markets. Then the second car we're developing on the same platform, by the way, is equipped with level four technology. We're partnering with a company called Aurora in this space. So Aurora was founded by, let's say, the head of Google's activities in the self driving space, teaming up with the person at Tesla and the person at Uber, who developed autonomous driving technology there. And they created their own company and they provide the hardware and the algorithm and we act as the vehicle integration company for them to be able to hand in hand. Be quick to market because one thing is the system and another thing is application on each car that is different because every car has different geometries and just different is engineered differently. So the same system might work differently or needs to be adjusted for every car and we need to bring some of that integration knowledge to this partnership to get some traction and speed to the development. No, that makes sense. So that there we have the user display. We have the software of the car, which I imagine, again, you can push updates remotely wirelessly or which is something that other companies are doing as well. Now, is there any concern with having a big dashboard display like that? I know this again, isn't unique to Biden, but is there concern about, you know, viewer attention that folks looking at their screens rather than how is there a system for discouraging that? So the first thing I can say there is that the screen is not impacting your field of vision. That was the number one importance for us in the design of the car. So we move the dashboard as low as possible to move the screen down as low as possible. So the top of the screen is actually at the same height as your windshield wipers. So it's not impacting your field of vision. And then when it comes to driver distraction, of course, we will not be able to allow moving images in a driving situation at first. We're looking at different opportunities to sort of to put additional coding on the screen, for example, to enable the passenger to enjoy some of the video content while a driver is still driving. But again, the hardware setup is ready for autonomous driving. Autonomous driving might not keep up the pace, right? But when it's there, the car is already perfectly designed for that. And the you still have a lot of content that you can display on on that 49 inch screen without being too distracting. The main goal should be to reduce the number of inputs you have to give to the system. So the more you share with the vehicle, the more data the more knows about you and the more can anticipate what you want to do next. So we can prompt you messages and you just have to say yes or no. All right, either using a hand gesture with the gesture control cameras or in your driver tablet, just have a touch button, say yes or no. Right. Yeah. And the more you you use the car and the more the car learns about you, the better these suggestions will get. So actually in terms of the usage of the car, we're already let's say we're already quite certain that it will be more intuitive and less distracting than finding a button somewhere hidden in some some menu or so. But then when it comes to content, of course, we're very careful as to which functions and features and services and products we actually enable in a driving situation and which ones do we actually disable when the car is driving and only allow in a heavy traffic situation or when you're when you're having a quick charging stop. Right. And you can charge the car up to 80 percent in about 30 minutes. That's enough time to watch an episode of your favorite Netflix show, for example. Right. Yeah. And it's much more convenient than using your tiny little iPhone screen or smartphone screen, not to mention any brands that smart enough to know that it's your your part. So you're not it's no it's no danger to the. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Is there I mean, if there's facial recognition software and driver cameras, can it can it tell if you're going to fall in the sleep? Yes, track eye movement. I like so that's called a driver monitoring system. We need that for certain functions and autonomous driving that still require the driver's attention legally. Yeah. Right. So we we have to track your attention and we're further developing new functions and features around that topic to also contextually be able to display some information on the screen or even get around today's legislation in the future potentially. Right. Yeah. For example, imagine you could have the passenger watch a movie and keep track of the driver's attention. And if the driver looks at the movie content, you just warn him to not do it anymore or you just turn it off. Right. Yeah. So so we're playing a lot. We're playing around a lot with these, let's say use cases that might enable more features without being dangerous. Right. Safety is the number one concern. And of course, we want to comply with all the legal requirements and all markets. But we also want to help shape legislation in the future to make sure that legislation will keep up with all the technology development in this highly regulated autonomous automotive space that slows down innovation a lot. Yeah, this we'll get to the kind of regulatory angle here, I think in a minute. But first, so we've talked we've talked electric. We've talked AV. We've talked about the screens. We've talked about the cargo bit. How are you looking to build car sharing into, you know, into into biting now? Yeah, so the car is potentially a preferred solution for an for an Uber driver or a Diddy driver in China or a Lyft driver, right? Because you can make every bite and you could turn every bite into your bite and by just bringing your face. Right. So so it doesn't matter if it's my car or your car, you sit in your seat, whatever it is, the driver seat or the rear right seat, right? And you bring all your content there. So yeah, so it could potentially be a preferred choice for a user to take me as an Uber driver with a bite and car because you can be more productive. You can be entertained. You can you can continue whatever you are doing outside of the car in the car knows that you're in season two of whatever exactly the third episode kicks on for you while you're while your drivers tearing around or we have, you know, we have this selfie camera there so you could you could record your important presentation that you're about to have and play it back to you.  And we treat every passenger as relevant as the driver. Okay. So so the experience on every seat is the same. And this is also one aspect that prepares us for the, you know, shared bit of mobility is even in a car with three strangers, you would still have your own zone and your own seat with your content and basically make it your car. And you're not sort of you're sharing it but you still have your own space, right? Yeah. And we're already thinking about the second and the third car. And we have a lot more to share in the next 12 months. Oh, what's the so what's the timeframe for like, I see the prototype out here from the website. I can, there's another model, another variant for like 2022. This one on the floor out here. When are you expecting that to be in production? So we're kicking off production end of next year for the China market first. And then six months later, we'll bring it to the US. So by mid 2020, you'll be able to get it here. And another three, four months later, we'll bring it to Europe as well. And then 18 months after the start of production of the first car, we'll release our second car, which is a sedan concept. We call it K-Bite and the SUV is M-Bite. Also priced very similarly and derived from the same platform. Now when you say price similarly, where is the slotting in? Yeah, so it's still early stage. We can't really share the details for the second car but our aim is to be an approachable brand to not start high end and then slowly move down the ladder. We want to go where the volume is. Also to have an interesting business case for our investors because it's such a heavy upfront investment to develop a car. You would like it to be scalable and applicable to multiple different products and not just one. And that's what we're doing. And then another about one and a half, two years later we'll bring the third car out on the same platform again. And we're already thinking about a second platform, which is very early stage right now. But as you can see the stuff that we're showing here is already old for us, right? There are very long development cycles in the automotive industry so you have to think ahead. And you have to match it with the shorter and faster developing cycles and tech companies. So we have the unique challenge to synchronize the mindset between the people with a tech background and the people with an automotive background. Both have their pros and cons. And we're only successful if we listen to all of them and take the best out of each and every one's experience. Well it's a reminder like with a bite and competitor with a Tesla they ran into some of that with their production line where there was the Elon Musk brought that tech sector mindset which is why can't we have a quick product cycle and we just disrupt new things, new ideas, layer them on. Whereas the traditional car production line is whoa, you need precision, you need a level of, everything has to be carefully fought through in advance because if anything in the product supply chain or on the production line goes just a little bit off, everything can just fall apart really quickly. And so they had issues putting those two pieces together. Exactly, you have to find the right balance and this is key. And I mean what other players in the industry have done is remarkable in this short time and it opened up a lot of opportunities for the new players. But I think there's, I mean a strong debate about strong leaders who are very influential as opposed to maybe listening to the experts to make the best possible product, right? And we're trying to really set a freeze date to a certain hardware component that needs a freeze date and then we don't talk about it anymore, right? We don't go, we don't walk in a week later and say oh I changed my mind, right? And this is one thing and the second thing is we don't do innovation for the innovation sake. We don't do crazy door concepts or anything that might potentially give you problems with water leakage and things like that. We use all of that knowledge from the more boring automotive world and then we focus our attention on where the faster cycles actually allow us to be innovative and to keep the product fresh. And this is connectivity and this is the user experience that is much more valued by the consumer than an incremental 10th of a second acceleration improvement or a unique door concept that only you have invented or. So we're taking a lot of off the shelf components that have proven to be safe and also accepted in the market. There's a supply chain for it, it's all there and it's all optimized in terms of cost so that we can position the car at an accessible price point too. So we can't go too crazy, but we want to go crazy where the customer expects us to. And I think you can see a lot of this here in our first MBA concept. Yeah, no, it's an impressive prototype. So I mean, I look forward to seeing it on the roads or on the lots come 2020. One more thing I was gonna ask about during a panel yesterday, I think it was a robotics panel on the main stage, they ended the session by asking make sure I get the criteria right here. At what point do you think level five vehicles, so level five automation like full, no hands on, no steering wheel, nothing, will be at least 10% of the vehicles, consumer vehicles on the road. And the panelists range anywhere from 10 years at the lower limit to 30 years at the upper limit, but notably two of them mentioned 10 to 15 years, but in China first. And now Biden has some China roots, you're coming out with the first car in China first. From your perspective, why does coming out in China first make a lot of sense? What role does China play in the AV space more generally? And then do you think that those are, what would your estimate be or answers that question? Okay, there's a lot of. Yeah, lots going on there. Different elements in this question. So first of all, the electric vehicle market in China is twice the size of the electric vehicle market in the US and Europe combined. So this is where we have to absolutely be quick to market there, to capture some of that market share before it takes off without us, right? Yeah, sure. Of course the US is a very important market too, so we don't want to have too much time in between. But then shifting to autonomous driving, I think when China and the Chinese government is committed to something, they actually do everything to achieve that target. They did it with electric vehicles, they took it very seriously. They started subsidizing a lot of companies and in the beginning they were only very cheap players popping out but now we have more and more technology focused companies as our competitors out of China already that will first hit the Chinese market and some of them are also planning to go global. I think China has understood that you can only survive as a global company. So you have to go where the talent is. We're going to Germany for vehicle design because the design infrastructure is best in central Europe. We're going for tech development and serial development of our first car to the Bay Area because that's where you find the best people for that space. And we're going to China for manufacturing because that's where you get the best opportunities and the talent to actually get the best quality in production. My previous company, BMW, has the most advanced factory in China. And not in Germany. And so you have to go where the talent is. And China is very open to the collaboration and appreciative of the global talent that comes in. And I think this is a major difference to my home country Germany but also to what I see here in the US is that other areas in the world are getting more and more protective of what they have while China is opening up more and at the same time gaining speed. And I think if you have that mentality of not being able to do the stuff alone, you have to partner with the best. And it doesn't matter whether they're in Scandinavia, whether they're in Antarctica or in the Bay Area or in China, right? You just have to go there and convince the best people to work with you and collaborate on the best possible solution for the consumer. So with consumer relevance, right? Not just for the technology sake. And I think that's best understood in China right now. And of course you have 1.3, 1.4 billion customers potentially, so it's a huge market in itself. So there's a lot of money for subsidizing and incentivizing companies to build up their R&D or production facilities in cities that have been super small in the past 100 years and now are growing at a rapid pace, overtaking major European cities already in two, three years time. And they already start building cities with full connectivity of everything is connected, like internet of things and stuff. So- They're building cities from scratch. They're building the infrastructure ready for autonomous driving. And this is why you'll see that autonomous driving space will grow in these areas with these cities. And I think that's the unique bit about China. China is still very hungry. You walk around in the Bay Area, everyone has already collected enough stock options. I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's the general vibe that you feel in the Bay Area. There's contentment. Exactly. And people are more focused on their work life balance here.  And they're hardworking and they're committed and they're listening. And they're appreciative of, as I said, the expert knowledge that you bring. They're no longer here to copy. They're now here to really think about solving real problems and how to bring an existing product or an existing service to the next level. And I think it's super enjoyable to work in this global setup with the best people from anywhere in the world. And yeah, I hope I answered some of the questions.  Well, I think one of your fellow Biden representatives mentioned that there were some 400 plus AV companies or AV adjacent companies operating in China right now. I mean, it's the single biggest locus of AV development. I mean, so it's truly remarkable what's going on over there. There was actually a really good, we did an episode four building tomorrow for this podcast about the transformation of China and the ways in which the country is leapfrogging the US. I mean, the tech adoption rates on everything from digital payment systems to, you know, it's just drone deliveries. Exactly, they didn't have PCs for a long time, but now they do mobile payments in, you know, every, let's say, segment of the society, right? Yeah, yeah, it's truly remarkable. Well, Florian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, and I think our listeners will understand a lot more about what Biden's doing and a little more about the AV space, so thanks for your time. And please tell your user or listeners to download the Biden app, it's free, and they can bring our Mbyte concept into their living room if they have a dual camera phone because we have an augmented reality feature on our app. And if you want, you can already sign up and get more information, get invitations for our upcoming events in your area. And stay tuned. Great, thank you so much. As you listen to this interview, you might've been thinking of episode nine of Building Tomorrow, is China beating the U.S. innovation? We recorded that episode prior to TechCrunch, but everything I saw at this conference confirmed that yes, indeed, China is in pole position to be the site of the next autonomous vehicle-style Silicon Valley. Now, even though there's always the chance that the authoritarian central government could shoot itself in its economic foot, tech startups that do have the favor of the Communist Party on their side can innovate mostly free from regulation. They don't have to deal with the welter of regulatory bodies that a startup has to in the United States, from the San Francisco City Council deciding they don't like scooters or the federal aeronautics administration deciding they don't like flight sharing. And that's it for this week. And in fact, that's it for our TechCrunch Disrupt series of episodes. Thank you for listening. And until next week, be well. Building Tomorrow is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoy our show, please rate, review and subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn about Building Tomorrow or to discover other great podcasts, visit us on the web at libertarianism.org.


it will get started. Hey, recording is on. Good morning. Welcome. Just all of you are doing good. And you're having a good week. All right, good. Sorry, could somebody just pray with us and we will get started. Kanan, is your mic okay? Can you pray? Okay, maybe Kanan's mic may not be okay. Dave, would you be able to pray with us and we'll start? Sure. Father, we thank you Lord God for this day. Once again, Lord Jesus, as you come, learn, Lord Jesus, I pray that your spirit will be with us, as our pastor teaches everything with Jesus, happens to us. Happens to usually in our ministry for your glory. Amen. All right, so media and technology and ministry, we were talking, we started by talking about digital engagement, that is how do we engage people digitally, using media, media, using technology, we can serve people, we can engage people, we can minister to them. And we started last week talking about websites and just sharing some practical ideas and thoughts that we can keep in mind as we get websites built for our churches and ministries, some practical things to keep in mind. I'll just quickly review and I'll finish part of what I was talking about towards the end of the class last week. I want to finish that up today, but that we will close and then we will get into the next topic tomorrow. So let me go ahead and just share the same PDF that we were looking at last week. All right, so just a quick review. We said websites are very important tool these days to engage with people. Everybody expects a church or ministry to have a website, but they go for information about the church, about the meetings and maybe even get some resources about the church.  One of the leading ones is Joomla, it's open source, it's free, you could use that. And then you select a domain name for your website, try to find something that's short and easy that people remember they'd be able to associate with your church or your ministry. We spoke about that and you can search, but that's available. And then you register your domain name with a hosting provider, right? So we tried to explain a little bit about what happens when you register your domain name, it will be, if you register directly with a hosting provider, the domain name will be registered with the international registrar. And from there they will point to the server where your website is going to be hosted. So that when people search online on the internet, they'll be able to find your website. So that's, that's how generally it works. And, you know, you could register with different hosting providers, you may have hosting providers in your own country, or you can use international. Now, we use hosting, our hosting providers, one that we use hostica is actually based in the US. So our, our website is actually hosted in the US, then we also for other things like our eLearning portal and all and other things we use Amazon web services. So again, it's US based. Now, of course, some of them may have, you know, redundant servers in other parts of the world, but technically that the main server will be in the US. Now, some things to keep in mind, which I will say later on is where your website is hosted, like which country with geographical location will determine whether it's easily visible there. So there are some, the ways, the way the search engines work in some ways are also connected to where your website is hosted. So the visibility of your website is determined by that as well. So I will mention that a little later. Right. So the next thing is to build your website. And you can decide, you know, how do you want it depending on whom you're trying to reach? And what are the objectives you want to achieve through your website, whether it's content or, you know, whatever, you want get people to respond to certain things, typical pages that would be there in websites, and some useful thoughts here we shared on websites and so on. And then, so having said, you know, shared this, I just explained that, you know, for us at ABCWRG, our church website, we wanted it to be like a resource center. So we're trying to build it into a resource center where people will come to this place because there are sermons, there are free books, and there are sermon series, all those kinds of things. So it will draw people there. So it's not only serving our immediate church community, but it's also going to be like a resource center for believers anywhere in the world. They can come. And so we intentionally have designed it like that. And also we are providing all our resources for free. So, you know, we're not charging for any of the sermons or the books or anything like that, make it free. Just people can come and use it and be benefited. So that's our motive or our motivation. That's how we are trying to position our church website. Now what we were talking about last week towards the end of the class is, of course, you can, you know, link your website with all your social media accounts.  People will know that. But this is what we were talking about.  But you need to be searchable online. That means when people search, they should be able to find your website. Okay, so that's important. And so part of doing that is search, what is referred to as search engine optimization. That means there are certain things that you do in your website and certain ways that you build your website, so that search engines will be able to take them or find them. Okay, I just want to share some things, some simple ideas with you, so that when you build your website, it's a good thing to have a website, but also think about these things.  So when you are putting up content on your website, on the various pages, you need to be thinking about some of these things. Okay, the developer, the IT people or the media team may not be thinking about these things, because they are busy, you know, they want to build a website and they want to do all the graphics and they want to do that work, they may or may not be thinking about this. So you need to be thinking about this and also, you know, there are people who are specialists in search engine optimization, that means they specialize in improving the visibility of your website. So if you have such kind of people who can help you, that's wonderful. Otherwise, there are some simple things you can do. So one, and I'm just going to talk about some of them. Okay, one of the simple things that we can do to make our website visible. Okay, let me just back up a little bit and share a little bit about how, you know, how does search, how do search engines work?  So nowadays we just say Google it, you know, now how does Google search engine work? Now, just in a nutshell, right? So one, the place where the person is searching from is important, because Google shows its results. Firstly, in relation to the location of the person. So you're not always get the results that you see when you do a search are not always global. No. The results you see are, it's a blended thing. First and foremost, it is specific to where you are searching from. So if you are in the city of Bangalore and you do a search, Google is going to first of all look up for things in your city or in your geolocation, wherever you are searching from.  You're in Bangalore, so okay. Now, and then after that, it will it will expand it into churches that are, you know, spiritful church that are from other locations that are ranked very highly. And there are certain reasons why those churches are ranked very highly. But first, it's showing you results that are specific to your location. And then makes it goes global by ranking. Okay, so that's how the search results that people see are influenced. So if you have a website that is hosted, so this is where where you host your website comes into play. If you host your website in the US, you know, so it will be picked up there also. And then although your church is in Bangalore and you're giving your address in Bangalore and all of that, both those things are there. But if you want your website to appear in another part of the world, some of the things is you may have to have an address in that part of the world, or you may have to have a domain name that's specific to their region. Like, you know, if you're if you wanted to show up in France, you may have to have a domain name that is .fr with that, you know, countries in geolocation.fr or .uk or whatever, whichever part of the world you wanted to show. So your website, if you are a church in Bangalore and your website is hosted in the US, it will show up here, but it won't show up in UK or France or, you know, some other part of the Netherlands or, you know, some other part of the world, because there's no relation with your church that's in Bangalore, that's hosted in the US, no relation to France or UK or other countries. Unless your website has a high ranking globally, or you have a region-specific domain name like .uk or .fr or .Netherlands and so on. Okay, so those things come into play. So, you know, so if you're not getting into those things, you know, we'll just talk about, okay, if you want your website to show up in your region, and technically people in your country or in your city or your country are searching and you want to appear there, what are some of the things you have to keep in mind? First of all, keywords. That means there have to be words in the content in your website that match the words and the phrases that people use to search. So, you know, suppose you create a website for your church, say Hope City Church, and Hope City is based in Bangalore, but for some reason, and now let's say Hope City is a spirit-filled church, now it's based in Bangalore. So, in the content, in the text that is used in the website, it's important to use those keywords like spirit-filled church, you know, church in Bangalore. It's important to use those words in the text in your website so that it gets picked up. So, Google has what it's called as web crawlers. That means these are scripts that are running in the background that they'll read through all the pages of all the websites. That's really huge amounts of data that are being crawled every day, right? So, it is reading through, and these are engines, so it's not humans, but it's all software, they're reading through all the content that's on your pages, okay? And they're looking for words that are being used often.  So, you know, those things, and it's reading through that, and then it's indexing it. It's putting it in some sort of a you know, cataloging or an indexing system so that when people search, you know, the websites that have a lot of the content related to those keywords get higher, right? Not exactly, but there are other issues, other parameters as well. But one very important thing is those keywords must be in the content of your website, right? So, if you are running a children's home, state that, you know, children's home, children, ages so and so, or you know, of what kind of children now, how are you going to help them? The phrases and the keywords that people use to search must be used in the content of your website, right? And these keywords are also put into the, what are known as the meta-titles or they're used in the URLs. That's important, okay? So, the person who's doing your website, you can tell them, hey, make sure you put these keywords in the title of my webpage, in the URL of my webpage. They use these keywords because that will make your website more visible. Another thing that increases your visibility is when you list your organization on Google Business. So, you simply have to go to googlebusiness.com and you list your website there and then put in information, a lot of information related to what your organization does, right? So, when people search, Google usually shows up first, you know, the directory of businesses it'll show usually in relation to that search phrase. And so, if your business is listed in Google Business and it matches those phrases or search keywords, then your business is going to show up in the result, in the business listing. So, that is very, very useful.  Another thing that influences the search results is how many links are there to your page from other places. So, they call it citations or cross-linking, right? So, here's your website. But are there other websites also referencing or providing a link to your website? And are they providing, you know, the name of the address? Are they referencing your website? The more such references are there, the higher your website is going to be ranked. It increases the ranking of your website in the search engines. Okay. So, some of this you can do intentionally, right? So, you have a website and if you have other online places, like example, it could be your social media, your Facebook page or Instagram page, it could be other places. You may use some free portals that are available where you can write content. And from there, you intentionally link to your website, right? So, sometimes there are a lot of yellow pages and other directories where you can list businesses. So, you intentionally list your business on these other places and you provide a link back to your church website. So, eventually what happens, the ranking because of these citations or these crosslinks, the ranking of your website goes up. It becomes more visible in the searches that take place in the search engines. Okay. So, some of the places that you can list your website, of course, Google Business, then you can use Facebook, Ping and Apple and several other places and there are many more where you can list your website. But remember, do this intentionally because if you have more references, more links to your website from every other, you know, as many places as you can, your ranking will go up. Okay. Now, in order for Google to actually crawl through your website, there is a place and I can't show it to you now because I'm logged in as a different account. But if you go to Search Console, Google Search Console.   You can give your domain name for Google to index your website, to crawl through your website and to index the pages of your website. So, you should make sure that whoever is managing your website does this. Now, I can't log in there because I'm logged into the APC Bible College on Google Meet. But otherwise, I would have logged in to using all people's Gmail account. I would log into search.google.com search console and I can show you how we have submitted all our different websites. We have about six or seven different websites that we are maintaining. And we submit all our web, we have submitted all our websites to the Search Console, Google Search Console, so that they will, it will in turn crawl through our websites and index all the pages.  It gives a lot of information. So, you can really see how your website is doing and look at ways to improve it. So, you can have somebody do that for you. So, optimizing a website, make sure you use keywords.  Some people search for a church that has a good family ministry or a good community or, you know, so all those words, keywords are being used intentionally in the content of our website because when people search, they need to be able to find us. And so, of course, we have been, we list ourselves there in Google Business Listing. We keep building these cross links, references back to our website and we are listed on these various places that we can get references back. So, other things that you would want to keep in mind to improve the visibility of your website is you must keep the website content updated. So, what happens is, over time, if you don't update, the pages are going to, you know, just then they're indexing the ranking is going to drop. If you don't keep your content updated, slowly the website ranking will begin to drop. So, the important thing is to keep content fresh, keep it updated, and keep it growing. So, that requires, you know, a bit of work. So, you have dedicated people, you have people who can help you with that to keep the content fresh, keep it updated and that will improve or make sure that you don't at least lose your ranking or your visibility through the search engines. Okay. So, just to give you some examples, right now, our ABC Bible College website, it's a simple HTML website. It's being changed, actually. It's going to be, it's actually, we have an under the back end, it's being moved to a content management system, but initially we wanted to build something very quick so we built something with just plain HTML. Our APCW.org website is built on Joomla, which is a content management system, and APC Music. It's right now just a simple website, simple HTML website. It's not on a content management system. So, we have different websites built on different things, but eventually all our websites are going to be moved to this content management system. All right.  Yeah, we did that last week.  If they are looking for a spirit-filled church, they would search. What are the spirit-filled churches in Bangalore? Now, you're looking at the search results. This section is basically Google's business listing. Right? So, this is here, Google's business listing. So, the reason we are shown up here is because we've been listed in Google's business and the map. So, it's showing the map and so on. And then, of course, these are the actual search results. Right? Now, why did it pick up all people's church? You will see that in the description of all people's church, the word spirit-filled is used. All people's church in Bangalore is a spirit-filled church. So, we intentionally used that word spirit-filled. Right? And we also used it in the title of that page, All People's Church in Bangalore, Spirit-Filled. Right? So, when you use those words intentionally in your website, the chances of those pages or that website getting picked up is higher. Right? So, when somebody searched spirit-filled churches in Bangalore, the reason this website got picked up is because we are used that word spirit-filled. Right? So, using those words intentionally are important. Now, you see, we also used the word word-based. Word-based. So, intentionally because sometimes people may search, you know, they want a word-based church in Bangalore. So, they will search word-based churches in Bangalore. So, here you see there are some other churches that have been listed based on the comments. But in the search results, again, ABC is listed high or number one because we used that those words intentionally word-based. Word-based. Right? So, just how do you want to position your church? You use those keywords. Right? Now, since the time of the lockdown, online church became very, very big. And so, people were looking for online churches. Now, so when you search for online church, the first in the search result is life church. Now, why is life church here? Because life church is very highly ranked globally. Right? I think they have the largest online church presence in the world. I think that's what it is. So, they're ranked very highly. So, life church is listed number one in the search result for online church. But, you know, you see, just go down a little bit. And of course, you have the videos of online church services. And then first in the local site is All People's Church. Now, why is All People's Church picked up? Because we have intentionally used the word online Sunday church service, online church, online church in the text of our webpage. Right? So, because we've used those words online church service, online church, this website has been picked up and it's, you know, showing up on page one. And then you have other international like Hillsong and Church of England. So, these are global sites, they're ranked highly globally. Right? So, but it's interesting that, you know, this would come here because we intentionally use those words online church. Right?  And it will cause your website to be ranked highly, along with the other criteria, other things that I had mentioned. Okay. And why is this important? Because ultimately, when people are looking for something, they go and search online.  So, if somebody searches for free books, right? So, you look for free Christian books, we are ranked here. Number one. Now, this is local, right? I mean, it's bringing it, it's, this is not global. So, if somebody from Australia is searching free Christian books or they may find other links. But in our, in this geolocation context, when somebody searches for free, free Christian books, they get to our, ours is listed here first so that they can then go to our page and make use of the Christian books. And notice, we have used intentionally free Christian books, in the text of our page heading and the text of our page. So, it gets listed. And then there are, of course, other websites that are available as well. Okay. Now, I don't want to brag so much about ABC. I'm just showing you, you know, how we have worked through this. Any questions so far? Are you all with me? You're understanding it? You're good? Okay. Now, okay. Are others understanding? Sit down, Thomas. You're following me? Is it? Okay. Okay. All right. So, Kanan said, Kanan said free books and he found ABC website. Okay. So, Kanan is in Tamil Nadu. So, even there, he's able to, you know, see. So, I think in this geolocation with maybe India and around, you know, ABC website will have a good ranking, but it may not be the same, you know, in other parts of the world because it'll pick up those websites. Now, there is a way by which we can see other parts of the world. Okay. This is a little side journey, but I want you to understand from a search perspective. So, okay. I'll just show this to you then we'll close. So, basically, you understood, right? When you build a website, use keywords in the content of your website. Yeah. So, okay. Thanks, Kanan. I see Kanan saying on the first page, rank number two, he finds it in Tamil Nadu. So, maybe there's something else that's ranked one over there. Okay. Yeah. So, what I was saying is to summarize, you know, you're creating a website, but you also want your website to be visible to search engines and simple tips, right? One is to use content in your website that people will search. Now, we have a team of people, this again, who are building content for a mental health, a Christian mental health portal. So, Christmas Life, which is our counseling website, it's going to be changed into a mental health portal.  So, we're building content. So, once we release it, when people search, hopefully we will be ranked high so that they will find content that will help them but it'll be Christian-based. So, there will be a chance for them to be exposed to, maybe there are people looking for Christian-based help with mental health problems, right? And they will find our website resources useful. So, again, that content is being built with that intentionally to use those keywords by which people will be searching and it'll help provide the content for them. So, that's one thing, use keywords. Second is, list it in Google Business. It is free, very simple to do, go to google.com slash business and list your church there, you know, put it as a church, give it a link to your website and then use other keywords like, you know, Spiritfield or Assembly of God or Baptist or Methodist, whatever the denomination, whatever you want your church to be visible by. Because sometimes people will search, you know, Baptist Church in Bangalore or people will search Methodist Church in Bangalore or Pentecostal Church in Bangalore, you know, people search by those terms because they're looking for that kind of a church. If you use that word in your website, then you are likely to be visible, okay? So, I'm listed in Google Listing. Thirdly, we said, link to your website from other places. So, through your social media accounts, link back to your website, gives you more visibility. Okay. So, these are some simple things you can do. And of course, if you get somebody who knows search engine optimization, they will give you a lot more ideas. I don't want to get into too much technical things, but things that you as a pastor or as a leader should be informed about so that, you know, you can make sure that what you do is visible. Okay. Now, just a little side thing. If you want to know whether, you know, there is something called Google.com Advanced Search. Okay, let me share that with you. I didn't start the sharing on my screen. I'll just share this quickly before we close. So, there's something called Google.com Advanced Search. Okay. That means you can search how, you know, what is seen by somebody in a different part of the world in a different language.  Okay. Language, of course, is going to be in English. I don't have to do it, but that's language. All right. So, suppose somebody in the United States searching in English and they search, okay, will they be able to see all people's church? Example. Okay. So, I just, just to see this, let me see all people's church. Okay. The people's church is visible. Okay. In the United States. Now, why is it visible because, and of course, it's giving us, giving the information here and all the YouTube channels. The reason is because it's hosted. This, this, this thing is hosted in the US. But if you want to say, okay, what about, you know, will it be visible in some other country? Let me say, suppose somebody is searching in English, but they are searching in, you know, let me just pick up Albania. Will they see all people's church? Most likely they won't. They are saying locally. Okay. So, it's showing the, the, the results of videos here, but you see all people search website is not visible here. Okay. So, you see Albania, all these are Albanian sites. They, you don't see all people search. Now, this section, I think it's being listed here. This is the Google business listing. Okay. So, this is picked up based on my, where I'm searching from, but the actual results here, Albania results, you don't see all people's church, except for somebody has shared a link on their Facebook page. That's why this is showing up. But otherwise, you don't see all people's church. Okay. This is one way to do, to find out if your website is being visible in other languages and regions. And there's another way more, you can actually shift your location to another part of the world, you know, and you can search as though somebody in, in that country is searching. I don't want to get into it, but you can actually do it and search. But that's just for interest. Okay. So, I'll pause here. I hope I didn't overload you with technical information. The basic thing I wanted to get across was, in addition to building a good website, make sure it's searchable. And there are some simple things you can keep in mind. And you can do because you'll be providing the content for your website. Make sure you intensely use phrases and words that make your website visible. Okay. So, that's kind of the main message I want to get across here. Now, what we will do get into tomorrow is other, other areas of digital engagement, which you may be a little bit more familiar, things like email and so on. And just quickly run through it. Nowadays, especially in India, WhatsApp has become a very common, you know, digital engagement platform. Now, I'll just share with you what we do using WhatsApp, where you can actually set up an account with Facebook or with Meta, and you can do broadcasting through WhatsApp. So, I'll just share those things with you so you can make use of those, you know, the email, the WhatsApp messaging to engage with people, keep people connected to your church and ministry. Okay. So, we'll cover those kinds of things tomorrow. And those will be a little bit more familiar to all of us. Okay. We have five minutes. Any questions, any things you would like to clarify? Fine. I don't see any questions in the chat. So, we will close. But think about it. You're welcome to ask questions anytime. Okay. If you're working on a website and you need some guidance, you know, you're welcome to ask. Okay. I see Aaron's comment. Okay. It's clear, trying your best to understand. Okay. And, you know, keep these thoughts in mind. You know, sooner or later you'll have to build something for your organization, for your church. And you can share these ideas with them as they work on their content. Okay. All right. Let's wrap up. Can somebody close in prayer? And we will connect back tomorrow and take this forward. Prince, would you close and dismiss us in prayer? Please? Prince connections. Okay. Anyone else? Siddharth, Aaron, just pray with us and dismiss. Well, thank you for your guidance in understanding throughout the class. And Lord, whatever we have learned so far and whatever we can learn, Lord, Father, help us all to be a good influencer in this digital world so that God, Father, so that we can reach out many for your kingdom. So Lord, please, everyone, and submit rest of the day into your loving and into this name I pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. All right. Thank you, everyone, for being on the class today. We'll continue this tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye now. Thank you. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you, Pastor.


Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. I'm here with Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa, from our beautiful Palo Alto theCUBE studios and we're talking a bit about some of the trends and most importantly, some of the real business value reasons behind some of the new network virtualization technologies. But before we get there, Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get here? Okay, thank you, Peter. Thanks for having me in today. I am CEO of Pensa. I've been there for about six months. Company's about three years old, so I joined them when a lot of the engineering work had already been done. And I've been around the tech industry mostly on the enterprise side for a long time. I worked with Hewlett Packard in a number of different roles. I worked at Dell, I worked at EMC and a number of startups. So I've been through a lot of different transitions in tech as you have over the years and I've got excited about this because I think we're on the cusp of a number of big transitions with some of the things that are coming down the road that make a company like Pensa really interesting and have a lot of potential. So it's been a tremendous amount of fun working in startup land again. So what does Pensa do? So Pensa is a software company and again we're based here in Mountain View. Most of our operations are here. We also have an engineering team over in India and they're all people that are focused on networking technology. They have a long history there and what we do is help primarily service providers. You can think of the classic telecommunications industry but also other modern service providers build modern networks. We're very focused on network functions virtualization technology or NFV which is about building network services that are highly flexible in software that you can deploy on industry standard server technologies, kind of cloud native network service development as opposed to what many folks have done with hardware based and siloed networking technologies in that industry for a really long time. So what we help them do is use intelligent automation to make it easy to build those things in incredible combinations with a lot of complexity but do it fast, do it correctly every time and deliver those network services in a way that they can actually transform their businesses and develop new apps a lot faster than they could do otherwise. So Tom, I got to tell you I'm an analyst. I've been around for a long time and every so often someone comes along and say, yeah, the telcos are finally going to break out of their malaise and do something different yet they always don't quite get there. What is it about this transition that makes it more likely that they succeed at becoming more than just a hauler of data to actual digital services providers? Yeah, I mean it's an excellent question. Frankly, it's one that I face all the time as you traffic around Silicon Valley, people are focused on certain hot topics and getting folks to understand that we are at a cusp point where this industry is going to fundamentally change. There's a huge amount of money that's actually being spent and a lot more coming. A lot of folks don't necessarily, we don't spend their time there every day realize what's happening in these communication service providers, which we used to call telcos because what's happened, and I think you're interested in your perspective on this, over time you see long periods in that industry of things don't change and then everything changes at once. We've seen that many, many times and the disruptions in that industry which were very public 15 years ago and then another 10 years before that, those were trigger points when the industry had to change and we strongly believe that we're at that point right now where if you look at the rest of like enterprise IT where I've spent most of my career we've gone through 15 years of going from hardware based proprietary siloed to software based industry standard servers, cloud and cloud native. And service based. And service based, right? And the formerly known as telco business is late to the party, you know? And so it's almost like that industry is the last domino to fall in this transition to new technology and right now they're under enormous pressure. They have been for a while. I mean, I think if you look at the industry it's a trillion dollar plus business that touches basically every business and every person in the world and every business and every person has gone to wireless and data from wire line and the old way of doing things. And these service providers have pretty much squeezed as much as they can possibly get out of the old technology model and doing a great job of adapting to wireless and delivering new services. But now there's a whole new wave of growth coming and there's new technologies coming that the old model won't adapt to. And so frankly the industry has been trying to figure this out for about five years through standards and cooperation and investment and open source stuff. And it's kind of only at the point now where a lot of these technologies work. But our job is to come in and figure out how do we make them work in production? How do we make it scalable? And so that's why we're focused there is because there's an enormous amount of money to get spent here. There are real problems. It's not crowded with startups. We have kind of a free shot on goal to actually do something big. And that's why I'm excited about being part of this company. Well, the network industry is always unlike the server and storage industry has always been a series of step functions. And it's largely because of exactly what you said that the telcos, which I'll still call them telcos but those networks of service providers historically have tied their services and their rates back to capital investments. And so they would have to wait and they'd wait and they'd wait before they pulled the trigger in that capital investment because there was no smooth way of doing it. And so as a consequence, you've got these horrible step functions and customers, enterprises, like a more smooth set of transitions. And so it's not surprisingly that more of the money's been going to the server and the storage guys and the traditional networking types of technologies. But this raises an interesting question. Does some of the technology that you're providing make it possible for the telco or the network service provider to say, you know what, I can use NFV as a way of smoothing out my investments and enter into markets faster with a little bit more agility so that I can make my customers happier by showing a smoother program forward, make my rates, you know, adjust my rates accordingly, but ultimately be more likely to be successful because I don't have to put two or three or $10 billion behind a new service. I can put just what's needed and use NFV to help me scale that. That's exactly right. I mean, we're really bringing software programmability and DevOps kinds of capabilities to this industry. Us and other folks that are involved in this, you know, this transition, which we think is enormous. I mean, it's probably one of the biggest transitions that's left to happen in tech. And the old model of set it and forget it, I put in my hardware based router, my switch, build out my, make a big investment, that step function you talked about and depreciated over a long period of time, doesn't work anymore because during that long period of time, new opportunities emerge. And these communication service providers haven't gotten all the growth because other people have jumped into those opportunities, the over the top people, the Netflix's probably increasingly cloud players and saying, we're going to take that growth. And so if you're one of these, you know, there's a few hundred large communication service providers throughout the world, this is an existential problem for them. They have to figure out how to adapt. So when the next thing comes along, they can reprogram that network. You know, if there's an opportunity to drop a server in a remote branch and offer a whole range of services on it, they want to be able to continually reprogram that, update those. And you know, we've seen the first signs of that with software to find advanced, right, as an example of that. But not just take a hardware approach to adding new services and improving the quality of the experience that their customers have. That's exactly right. They want to have software programmability, they want to behave like everybody else in the world now and take advantage, frankly, of a lot of things that have been proven to work in other spheres. So the fundamental value proposition that you guys are providing to them is, bring some of these new software disciplines to your traditional way of building out your infrastructure so that you can add more, add new services more smoothly. Grow them in a way that's natural and organic. Establish rates that don't require a 30 year visibility in what your capital expenses are. That's right. So one of our, you know, our flagship customers is Nokia. Nokia you can think about as kind of a a classic network equipment supplier to many of those service providers, but they also provide software based services through things like Nuage that they own and some things they got from Alcatel Lucent and they do system integration. And they've been kind of on the leading edge and using our technology to help with that of saying, look, let's deliver you industry standard, you know, Intel based servers running network functions and software. And what we help them do is actually design, validate, build those capabilities that they ship to their customers.  Somebody has to really understand how to make these different parts work together. I've got a router from one place. I've got a virtual network function from someplace else. Interoperability is a challenge. We automate all of that. And we're using intelligence to do it. So you can kind of go much faster than you otherwise could. Which means that you're bringing value to them and at the same time essentially fitting their operating model of how they operate. So you're not forcing dramatic change in how they think about their assets. But there are some real serious changes on the horizon. 5G, net neutrality and what that means and whether or not these service providers are going to be able to enter into new markets. So it does seem like there's a triple witching hour here of the need for new capital investment because there's new services are going to have to be required and there's new competitors that are coming after them. We like to think that, or we think in many respects the companies that are really in AWS's crosshairs are the telcos. And you guys are trying to give them approach so that they can introduce new agility or be more agile, introduce some services and break that bond of rate based capital investment based innovation. Yeah, exactly right. And also frankly break the bond of having to buy everything from the same telco equipment provider they've done for the last 20 years in extraordinary margins. People want to have flexibility to combine things in different combinations as these changes hit. 5G you mentioned is probably the biggest one. You know and I'd say even a year ago it was clearly on the horizon but way out in the distance. And now almost every day you're seeing production deployments in certain areas. And it is going to fundamentally change how the relationship works between businesses and consumers and the service providers and the cloud people. All of a sudden you have the ability to slice up a network. You have the ability to program it remotely. You have the ability to deliver all kinds of new video based apps. There's a whole bunch of stuff we can't even conceive of. The key thing is you need to be able to program it in software and change it when change is required. And they don't have that. Without technology like this. That's right and 5G provides that density of services that can actually truly be provided in a wireless way. All right so but this raises an issue. Look we're talking about big problems here. These are big, big, big art problems. And no company let alone pens is unlimited resources. So where are you driving your engineers and your team to place their design and engineering bets? Yeah I mean look there's clearly a set of problems that need to be solved. And then there's some things that we do particularly well. We have some technology we think is actually unique in a couple of areas. Probably the heart of it is intelligently validating that the network you designed works. So let's say you're a person in a service provider or you're an SI providing a solution to a service provider.  Whatever that combination is. I've got my network service. Very often they don't have a way to figure out that it's going to work when they deploy it. And we build effectively models for every single element and understand the relationships of how they work together. So we can pretty much on the fly validate that a new network service is going to work. The next thing we do is go match that to the hardware that's required. I mean servers they're not all the same and configurations matter. I mean we know that obviously from the enterprise space and we can make sure that what you're actually intending to deploy you have a server configuration or underlying network infrastructure that can support it. So our goal is to say we do everything frankly from import network services or onboard them from different vendors and test them from an interoperability standpoint to help you do the design. The real heart of what we do is in that validation area. I think the key design choice that we are making and frankly have had to make is to be integrable and interoperable. And what that means is these service providers are working with multiple different other vendors. They might have two different orchestration software platforms. They might have some old stuff they want to work with. What we're going to do is kind of be integrable with all of the major players out there. We're not going to come in and force our orchestrator down your throat. We're going to work with all of the major open source ones that are there and be integrable with them. We believe strongly in kind of an API economy where we've got to make our APIs available and be integrable because as you said it's a big problem, we're not going to solve it all ourselves. We got to work with the other choices that one of these customers makes. So we like to say at Wikibon that in many respects the goal of some of these technologies, the NFV software defined networking technologies needs to be to move away from the device being the primary citizen to truly the API being a primary citizen. People talk about the network economy without actually explaining what it means. Well in many respects what it really means is networks of APIs. Is that kind of the direction that you see your product going and how are you going to rely on the open source community or not to get there? Because there's a lot of ancillary activity going on in creating new inventive and innovative capabilities. Yeah, I think that's a really big question and to kind of tackle the key parts of it in my mind. Open source is extremely valuable and if you're a communication service provider you may want to use open source because it gives you the ability to innovate. You can have your programmers going and make changes and do something other folks might not do. But the other side of the coin for these service providers is they need it to be bulletproof. They can't have networks that go down and that's the value of validation and proving that it works. But they also need commercial software companies to be able to work with the major open source components and bring them together in a way that when they deploy it they know it's going to work. And so we've joined the Linux Foundation and we're one of the founding members of Linux Foundation Networking which now has open NFV and has ONAP and a number of other critical programs and we're working with them. We've also joined OSM which is part of the European Telecommunication Standards Institute which is the other big standards organization. I'm not aware of another company in our space or related to NFV that's working with both. And so we feel positively about open source but we think that there's a role for commercial software companies to help make it bulletproof for that buyer and if you are a very large service provider you want somebody that you can work with that will stand behind it and support it and that's what we intend to do. Well as you said the fundamental value proposition sounds like yeah you're doing network virtualization, you're adding the elements required for interoperability and integration but also you're adding that layer of operational affinity to how telcos or how service providers actually work. That is a tough computing model. I don't know that open source is going to do that. There's always going to be a need to try to ensure that all these technologies can fit into the way a business actually works and that's going to be a software, an enterprise software approach whoever the target customer is. It's a great partnership between the open source community, commercial software companies like us and the service providers. To build this thing and we've seen that happen in enterprise. DevOps was that kind of a phenomenon. You have winning commercial software providers, you have a lot of open source and you have the users themselves and we think a lot of those concepts are going into this service provider space and for us it's all about at the end of the day we want to have the ability to get people to do their job faster. If things change in the industry a service provider using Pensa or an SI using Pensa can design, validate, build and run that next thing and blow it out to their network faster than anybody else. It's time to value and certainty that it'll work. And in many respects at the end of the day we all want to be digital businesses but if you don't have a network that supports your digital business you don't have a digital business. That is correct. All right, so last question. Yes. Pensa two years from now, what does it look like? Yeah, I think our goal right now is to line up with some of the leading industry players here, folks that service those large service providers and help them build these solutions and do it faster. I think our goal over the next two years is to become a control point for service providers and again folks like SIs that work for them and sometimes help run their networks for them give them a control point to adapt to new opportunities and respond to new threats by being able to rapidly change and modify and roll out new network services for new opportunities. You know, the thing we learned in the whole mobile transition is you really can't conceive of what's next. What's next two years from now in this space? Who knows?  We want to be. You do know that. We know that. We want to be one of those control points that helps you do that quickly without having to go wade into the code. So our goal is to allow, our whole tagline is think faster which means use intelligent technology to drive your business faster and that's what we intend to be in two years. Excellent. Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you very much. And for all of you, this is Peter Burris. Once again, another great CUBE conversation from our Palo Alto studios. Look forward to seeing you in another CUBE conversation.


Addiction has a way of impacting your life in one way or another, whether it's a family member, friend, or even yourself. You may know someone who has struggled with an addiction to alcohol, drugs, gambling, or sex. But what about the addiction no one seems to be talking about? The one we have normalized and promoted in our society and are failing to see the harm it's causing. Let's talk about that addiction. The Addiction of Overconsumption The dangerous activity of over-consuming material things, binge-watching, and repetitively checking your notifications brings only temporary pleasure that you constantly need more of. How often do you feel overstimulated? Do you ever feel like you need all the outside noise and busyness of the world to just stop for a second and slow down? If you're feeling this way, there's a biological reason. Our brains weren't designed for the overstimulation of the modern world. In fact, they're being harmed by the contemporary world. Professor of Neurosurgery at Harvard and Christine Duhame explains, Our brains evolved to be rewarded by novelty, a tendency exploited by the present times. Your brain craves novelty, which is why having something new or pleasurable feels so good. This natural drive kept your ancestors alive, inspiring innovation and better living conditions. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, it's also what can lead to addiction in the destruction of our planet, especially when talking about the addiction of overconsumption. What happens to your brain when you live in today's world that is so different from your ancestors? Your distant ancestors relied on word-of-mouth, or snail-mail, to hear breaking news. But you're fed the news 24-7. Psychologist Dr. Grant warns that this media saturation overload can lead to headline stress disorder, doom-scrolling, and headline anxiety. Things that previous generations never had to deal with. And it's not just news that you have to deal with. TV used to be a special event that brought your grandparents' generation together because it only aired once a week at a specific time. Then came Blockbuster in 1992. A magical store where you could find thousands of movies to watch on DVD and VHS. Cotton candy. And the smell of popcorn filled the store. There was something to be savored about these experiences before pay-per-view TV and now streaming. You can now binge watch an unlimited amount of content whenever you choose, which can create a high similar to drugs. Northwestern medicine psychiatrist Dr. Alam warns that this can create a pseudo-addiction to our favorite show. It's no wonder that the market research firm Nielsen found that from 2019 to 2020, the amount of time people spent each week streaming went up by a staggering 75%. The modern world is a never-ending source of digital temptations, especially with the development of the smartphone, made famous by the arrival of the first Apple iPhone in 2007. Ever find yourself poking fun at your friend who can't put their phone down?  Well, you're not alone. Medical news today has coined a term for this behavior. Constant checker, associated with a staggering 43% of the US population. Despite joking about not having enough time for anything, you make time for what you desire. And nowadays, humans are making more and more time for shopping, as our society's need for consumption and overconsumption has skyrocketed. Shockingly, Americans now buy a new piece of clothing every five days on average, and we create a staggering 750% more textile waste than we did in 1960, as reported by The Atlantic. While shopping addiction isn't yet recognized as a condition in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, it's been recognized as a psychiatric disorder since the early 20th century. Very well-mined even calls it the most socially acceptable addiction, and everyday health confirms that research shows shopping addictions are increasing worldwide. There's something sweet and almost serene about savoring a moment of pleasure, knowing that it's something to be treasured because it doesn't happen all that often.   The next time you feel overwhelmed, try muting your phone notifications and checking your phone when you choose to, instead of urgently or anxiously picking up your phone at every ding. And if you find yourself always wanting the next best thing, consider saving up for something you'll treasure for a long time, maybe even something that will create memories and not just a temporary and fleeting high. Addiction is a real thing and is nothing to be ashamed of. If you feel like you may be struggling with an addiction, please reach out to a mental health professional for help. And if you found something that helps, please share it with us in the comments. 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