 Hey, hello everybody and welcome back to the Think Tech away studio for another exciting episode of security matters today. Pito Dell is with us from Swan Island Network. Some of you may have played with some TX 360, but we're going to we're going to get into what situational awareness is all about why it's important. And I hope you all had a great holiday weekend. I hope you didn't run into some situation where you wish you had more information about where you found yourself. I hope everybody got through the weekend safely. I just got back from Florida. It was pretty calm down there. I wasn't sure what to expect. I went down spend some time with my grandkids and I'm happy to be back back in the studio today. So, Pete, I really appreciate you jumping in here. I know the holidays just ended kind of hecky for us all. But thanks for joining us today. Oh, thank you. Happy to be back to work actually. Right on. Well, just for our audience who may not know you and know of your work piece to CEO of Swan Island Networks. He's got extensive history and I'll let you get in. I'll let him talk about his history. But I think when we get through that, you'll understand why we've got him on here today and why he's a great guy to lead this charge into situational awareness and what he can do to help our communities. So, Pete, with that, go ahead and give us your bio. And I know we don't give it all away on social media these days. So, as much as you care to share, I appreciate it. No worries. I'm both a business anti-tech guy. I've written a couple books on cyber and interoperable data. So, and I've worked for a number of companies, big and small. Everybody from being a veteran in the U.S. Army to working for startups with three people. And about 20 years ago, after 9-11, we decided to start Swan Island Networks. We're based in Portland, Oregon, although I'm in Washington, D.C. Because for the first seven or eight years, we tried to help the federal government with some of the issues after 9-11 being information-sharing, situational awareness, real-time alerting, connecting the dots. And we did a lot of work. We won a lot of awards. We won a few little, tiny federal contracts. But we ultimately, we could never help the federal government solve their problems. And you saw a lot of them reappear in the capital insurrection on January 6th, unfortunately. So, we moved back to the private sector. I left the company. I stayed on the board of directors and then came back to the company as a CEO in early 2017. And since then, we've grown the company to about 22 people. We've got a worldwide set of amazing customers that we don't talk about because we help them keep things quiet. But, and we work with Allied Universal, which just became the largest security company in the world. They bought G4S and now spend 95 countries with 800,000 employees. And so they resell a version of our software branded as an Allied Universal product. That's awesome. I didn't even actually know that they were, that you had like a reseller partner. So that's awesome, too. Anyway, we can get these types of tools into people's hands, I think, super important. Let's step back for people who may not think about now. I don't know where our audience gets their information about what's happening. I'm a pretty cynical critic of most information that comes my way. I find it needs to be checked, checked and rechecked many, many times. And even the reason why the information was provided sometimes intended to drive some sort of response or some sort of thinking to benefit someone, perhaps not me. So when we talk about situational awareness, Pete, what's the one thing that the one glaring thing that you see for let's talk about our North American friends, our community and security. What's the one real problem that you identified or that you guys have come across with situational awareness for companies, for their employees, for business owners, whether they're traveling or rather than just sitting on the house on their front porch at home. Sure. So the problem we've seen, this is, you know, when I was a kid, the issue of not enough information was a big problem. I remember in 1963, I think it was reading about the Alaska earthquake that had happened when I was in New York state. The Alaska was a life, you know, thousands of miles away, but they had this huge earthquake that buckled roads. And, and, you know, today I could go to a website and 50 websites and read stories back then. We had one paper that came out, you know, once, once every couple of days and where we live and you saw one picture of this earthquake and you had to imagine the rest of it. So today what we find with our customers is they have this ocean of information. I mean, even calling it an ocean anymore is almost too small, right? It's just this universe of information. You got video, you got social media, you got news, you got real time alerts from the government. And it's coming at you 24 by seven, so it's these mountains of information. And reality of it is a tiny, tiny portion of it applies to your particular business. So if you're running, you know, a mall in Dallas, you suddenly are like, I don't care that there was a shooting in New York. I'm sympathetic, but it doesn't affect me, right? What I want to know is what did my local police department put out on their Twitter feed? Do I have access to their 911 feed? You know, what am I seeing that might make me safer on the mall to protect fundamentally my, you know, my people, my property, my reputation and reputations can go down the toilet fast these days. And and my continuity of operations, how do I stay in business? So having being able to sort through that incredible array of information down to what you really need is what we see is the biggest problem. And it happens to also be the one we address as a company. Is is it just the is it like you think like human fallibility that that maybe people would tend to rely on maybe like their Twitter feed, for example, some source of information that they identified with or identified the people with without really questioning the information that might show up there versus, you know, you've got a curated delivery system where you've got analysts that are looking at this and aggregating and correlating and finding what, you know, is it low, medium or high? Like, what is the reality of the situation? What I guess, what do you think about the? Well, I know that the Zuckerbergs of the world and these social media platforms would say that their content is curated. Let's let's without being overly critical, let's just talk about the level of curation that you're able to provide that brings real, you know, situational awareness from all of those information sources. And is that was that even possible without the power of the cloud and the way that you're able to aggregate all this data? Give us a sense of where that, you know, how that's evolved and, you know, what's possible compared to, you know, five years ago or 10 years ago? Well, it's a lot better, but there's a lot more to process. So it's kind of a race every day. Let me let me use Twitter as an example, because we, you know, Twitter has unfortunately become the world's, you know, primary, real-time alerting network. So if you want to find out something that happened, you're probably going to see it on Twitter first, right? And that's unfortunate, especially in the U.S. Our 911 systems ought to be, and I'm talking about businesses, our 911 systems ought to be able to send a business an alert that said, hey, there was a shooting two blocks away from your business. You might want to take protective measures by locking your front door, right? You did your data in LA, there was a shooting locked your front door. Well, that doesn't happen, but you can find it on Twitter. The problem with Twitter is there are trusted sources on Twitter. So the, you know, New York fire department, you can probably take their Twitter feed to the bank. And if they say there's a fire on 26th and Lexington, there probably is, right? Whereas some other guy going, oh, you know, there's, you know, there's a, except for very unfortunate situations like your little alert in Hawaii with the inbound nuclear missiles, right? So except for little things like that that happened once in a while through just unlucky nits or a little bit of, you know, I made a mistake, you got to verify the Rothware, right? You got to look at the Twitter and go, oh, they say there was a fire. Well, let's, let's go, you know, let's go check two or three news sources. Let's see if there are cameras in the local area. Let's try to find a way to verify that information or at least to the customer, call it out as this is, this is an obstantiated threat, right? You know, we'll follow up and try to substantiate it, but you might want to know, right? And that's going to get smarter and smarter over time. One of the things we're looking at that we think is really important is intelligent video cameras. So today, for example, video cameras might take pictures in high definition. You got this great video, but, but they're after the fact, right? It's like, oh, we had a shooting and now we can look at the camera and see where we made all the mistakes because we streamed it into the video management system. The new generation of cameras are going to go, hey, that bad guy, the guy that you said, you know, threatened marketing last week, his license plate just pulled into the parking lot. So heads up, we got, we might have a problem, right? And the other camera goes, oh, look, he just got a long rifle out of his trunk. That's probably another bad sign, right? But he's still in the parking lot. So suddenly the situational awareness for the security people are such that it's like, well, you know, unfortunately for the people in the parking lot, we're at least going to lock the front doors, right? But you've got options and you've got extra time. And what we find is buying time for our customers, getting them more time to be proactive, it has a huge impact on whether they can prevent something or minimize the impact of something that happens to their organization. Yeah. And I think that's so important. And I first kind of came across this with sort of the ideas of duty of care that some of the larger enterprises were working on, specifically was at Microsoft and, you know, I think they had 5,000 people around the globe in motion at any one moment or something. There's a baffling stand. I was like, wow, how do you alert, because you don't want them flying, you know, they're sort of everywhere. You don't want them flying into towns or cities or villages across the world that are having some eruption of a social problem or an earthquake or the towns on fire or whatever it may be. So that idea really, it brought it home to me how, you know, we could stay, they might have to turn and get right on an airplane or maybe they were going to get off the plane and drive south. Instead, they go north, whatever it may be, but the ability to get them something that was actionable quickly, that was reliable. I thought that was so important. And to your point, the validation of the information that we're bringing today, is this a trend? You know, let's just talk about machine learning and cameras. As an example that you brought up, are these, let's just, I know that like NEST was feeding into police departments and things like that. And I don't know all the, you know, back into that read about it, but are, do you think this is a valuable resource like community, communities of business owners, whatever, allowing their fees to be part of these tool sets that give us more information or give us a little bit of predictive analysis, even if there's a, you know, a moral owner up the street and something happened at the mall down the street, you know, to your point, the ability to lock down it and take some proactive action away from predictive analysis. And how much of that's going on today in the world that you look at, you know, on the back end? We find there's lots of talk, it's tough to do, but for businesses, you know, I really understand, you know, how you can do it, right? And if you're like the Nike campus in Portland, you know, you own that campus, you own the activities that go on there and you're responsible, like you said, for a duty of care. So, you know, that's, and you've probably had most of your employees sign some kind of waiver that says, yeah, I know there's cameras and I know there's painful recognition, but I got an employee badge on and it's okay, right? When you suddenly go, when you suddenly go, you know, to downtown Detroit or downtown LA and you start taking everybody's picture like you see in China and you're recognizing images and you're feeding it back and there's no, you know, surveillance reason, then it makes that makes me a little nervous. And I can understand why people people worry about it. But but when when it actually becomes an incident, and you're able to proactively, you know, stop that, we had a customer ask us if we could predict or see on New York City streets with a camera, if we could tell the difference between a mob and a third group. And you know, and it's like, it's it's not just the person leading it with the umbrella, right? There's more to it. Somebody giving somebody a hug versus somebody mugging somebody, right? It's pretty close. And so there's a lot of nuance. And the technology is way different than the policy. So I'm a technology guy. The policy is is much tougher to figure out. Awesome, I agree. Fascinating conversation. We are already at the one minute break. So figure out where with Pito Dell, we're talking situational awareness, and we're going to get into the TX 362 in just a minute. So we'll see after we pay a couple of bills. I'm Mitch Ewan, host of Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii. Hawaii, the state of clean energy is about following the many clean energy initiatives in Hawaii. Hawaii, the state of clean energy appears weekly on Think Tech Hawaii at 4pm on Wednesdays. Thank you so much for watching our show. We'll see you then. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, and welcome back to Security Matters. We're with Pito Dell today, Swan Island Network, TX 360. We're talking about something that's very near and dear to my heart and the situational awareness idea. You know, we were good at it when I was in the Navy, he was in the Army, but a lot of people in the community go out there in the world, they walk around with their face buried in their phone, and they really don't know what's happening. They don't know what could be coming their way. They could walk right into a problem. And so the situational awareness is critical and business owners need to sometimes, you know, train employees about it, but also provide tools that can help them, especially if they're traveling, you know, globally and even around the US. We saw an incident in DC back in January 6th that went from what looked like, let's just say a gathering, a political gathering, it became a very insurrection. That thing escalated very quickly and changed. And so if you had people there, maybe you didn't want them there. I mean, I hope you didn't want them there. Let's talk about that capability of changing, of dynamically alerting, monitoring a situation, you know, because you've got probably literally tens of thousands of inputs to your systems, right, that you're looking at. But then you talked about the human element who can maybe take a hug apart from a mug, right? Or something like that. So, you know, these are important, important distinctions to make. So what do we gain? I mean, I know we gain time, response time, but that ability to notify groups of people in an area that something has changed. What do you think that that savings is that net? Are we talking tens of minutes, 20 minutes? Sometimes, you know, being able to get out of an area, you know, what if it's going to become congested because everyone's fleeing, a few minutes could make a massive difference. So give us some insight on that, that sort of that escalation, the escalation capability of the tool and then how you've seen organizations use that to help their staff, you know, in the field or folks that are out working or traveling or don't know what's going on around them. Yep. Well, like so many things, there's a continuum. So if you think about an active shooter, you know, even five seconds becomes vital, right? Yeah, it's like, man, I locked the door, I got under my desk, those five seconds made a world difference to me, stay alive, right? On the other hand, we were heavily involved with the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. And Superstorm Sandy was a slow, we had a we had a network in New York for the Metropolitan Resilience Network with 400 companies sharing information. Superstorm Sandy was this slow rolling emergency that came over the horizon, showed up, and then all kinds of things happened afterwards. So situational awareness, you know, before, during and after was critical. And it was even in the recovery phase was even more important, because suddenly it's like, Oh, where do I get gas? When are my lights going to come back on? How do I know? You know, how do I know, you know, what to do? Where can I find food? I mean, all kinds of issues. And then they also had problems, which is part of our modern day society, which is an idea of cascading failure. So it's like, Oh, I had this hospital, and I knew I'd need backup power. So I put in a lot of generators. Well, I put the generators in the basement, which is where you think to put them. But then the storm surge showed up, flooded the basement. And now that my best of intentions for that backup power are gone because the saltwater came in or the storm surge saltwater whatever did came into the basement, the generators out of power. So we know we had one of our customers move their generators to the sixth floor. Because suddenly it's like, well, the water is going to get to him there. And so it's just, it depends on the emergency, you know, it depends on how many people you want to get in the loop, you know, you know, how do you, you know, how do you coordinate? And in today's world, we have a lot of customers where their, their response capability might be 1000 miles away. They have a chain of stores across the country with 1000 stores in different parts of the country. They're being all being serviced out of bocan, right? A command center in Spokane. We don't have any customers in Spokane, but but but it's done from there. So they've got to suddenly be able to assemble across all those stores, they got to bring information in, they got to be able to figure out what to do and get it back out to their, to the people in the, in the area where the event is happening. And, you know, last year, and we had a lot of civil unrest, that was a huge issue. And so we were, you know, we were trying to identify protests ahead of time, or gatherings ahead of time that might turn into protests, and then update them as they, you know, as they happen. So businesses could take, you know, proactive measures to, you know, either board up their stores or things like that. Yeah, it's amazing. So the the TX 362, I know that recently I want to let's make sure we plug this. I think you got to you set up a deal for InfraGuard National for our members of InfraGuard. I'm not sure if it was it was a beta test for a while or what the give us a little bit about that program. Sure. So we actually did a very large job. This is our TX global product. And our TX 32 products, our TX global product is cost as low as $99 a month. So even a small business can afford it. We took that product and we did a major, a major exercise with the inauguration where we had about 50 DC based businesses getting real time alerts every day between the capital interruption and the and after inauguration. And out of that came a a relationship with InfraGuard where we sponsored their National Congress. And then we give all InfraGuard members 50% off of either the single user TX global or the five user global, which is the five user one is very capable. Five people can use it. It gives you global situational awareness. You can you can tune it so that instead of getting if you watched everything, you'd be like sitting in front of Netflix all day long, right? You can you can tune it down to I don't want Asia. I don't want Australia. I do want Europe. I don't need Africa. I want cyber. I don't want active shooters. You can tune the alerts that you get and then they'll show up in your in your email and text or you can go in and look at these very rich dashboards. And so one example that you know, for InfraGuard, all the people in Florida yesterday, the big storm coming in from the Caribbean was going to hit the keys and then it was going to peter out to a tropical storm and it was just going to rain. Well, couple hours ago, all that change is as it goes out into the Gulf, it's actually re strengthening to at least a category one. So suddenly Tampa is not going to get hit with a bunch of rain. It's going to get hit with a category one hurricane. So big change in situational awareness, even a few a few hours. I was happy to get out of there myself. I just left like 20 hours ago. But anyway, yeah, so this so we've got these tools and we've got them deployed. I know I think you I'm getting the my alerts in particular via email. I think they could also come in via text. The the urgency that they come in at visit. Do you have a see how would I how would I frame this? Do you have a a mission, let's say to get information out and just let's categorize it as low as possible to get it out there. And then if it you know, then let's escalate it as needed. You know, first thing, hey, we got to let some people know, for example, there's a storm coming. And then, you know, how bad they're going to be and how quickly can we ascertain that you know to to add that time savings that we've sort of been talking about is there is that driven by like sort of like an algorithm or like maybe that says could affect a population of 2,000 versus a population of 200,000. What what all goes into I'm one of these guys if we save one life, you know, we did our job. So talk talk to us a little bit about the sort of the back end of that and you know what what goes on there. So we have it we have an algorithm we and we just about 12 million pieces of data a month right right now. So you know we look at 12 million things and we apply you know all the things we look at to about 100,000 customer assets so customer locations across the world on six confidence. We don't have anything in the authority yet we're still we're still working on whatever is no malls no you know no companies no manufacturing companies but six confidence we've got this incredible array of alerts and but the algorithm so the algorithm knows what to do but then the customer has on there and they have a way to tweak it and they can say oh look for my for my stores in New York City I want a you know 50 foot radius around the store for my alerts downtown in New York City but for my one in Kansas you know I'm happy to have a two mile radius because you know it's not that dense and it's okay if I know you know something happened right. So we give we give the customer a set of information and then they have a way to tune around tune it into their into their security personnel. And have you have you seen the guy who's too afraid he doesn't want to miss anything so he starts off too big you know and then he's getting he's just getting too much information he's like Pete Pete help me so the the tuning piece I think is critical and that's where aligning it to your company policies perhaps your insurance coverage if you've got some of these other types of insurance that will allow you to cover trap people that are traveling in a Paris phone area things like that so there's a lot of other other maybe factors that weigh in um uh do you what's the sort of best practices you might give us some of our users some of your users to get started. Well we we give we give people we have that problem happen all the time so what the way our product works is we have what's called a smart alert to where we give one or two people inside the company a wide aperture so you know it's one thing if 300 people in the company are looking at 500 alerts a day that's really bad right a huge waste of effort cost you a fortune and the reality is if you don't have a system like ours that's probably what's happening everybody's googling stuff and they're doing any of the ops department's doing a different than the sales guys and so everybody's doing it um we we have what's called a smart alert to you where one or two people can look at a very wide aperture of what's happening and then it can selectively forward those alerts to the right people in the company so that you avoid everybody getting 200 alerts because it's a it's a big problem but by the same token you know missing something important really is a problem for the security guys it's like oh man we we uh we were we were doing a demo once a live demo when we set up a feed and and literally there was a shooting in one of the company's stores right there in demo and they're like wow is that real and we're like let's check and it's like oh yeah it was they're like okay we want this just the yeah well that's it you know you made a great point i know during january six people my officer on all different types of media tasks like work stops and they're just everyone's reporting stuff reporting to each other what's going on we have you know customer concerns there as well so you know it was just um it it to your point of having a at least some authoritative guidance for what's important and why and where does it fit with the policy within the organization um i hope some people are taking away some of the things that may be missing out of your own organization you don't have to be a global enterprise to need this you don't need to be a national enterprise small businesses should pay attention and take away kernels of this type of information because you really never know what's coming your way and it's important to be alerted with an authoritative source like tx 360 that's got a bunch of other uh algorithms running but also people doing that intelligence analysis and and getting you information that should be important to you in your operations and we've got we're getting down i'm yacking too much people let's um we got a minute or so left what's uh what's the one takeaway on situation as you share with our business community um and then we'll we'll check out after that sure what's important to look at tools i mean what one not one you know hyper local problem that's happening right now is california is a tender box there's going to be a ton of fires a bunch of people with with property and business at risk so the important thing is to pay attention whether you use our tool whether you use somebody else's tool it's like look somebody's got to be standing guard because this business is important to you and your shareholders and your employees so somebody's got to be watching and when the way somebody can watch can vary and you can you can watch a little you can watch a lot but the key is somebody's got to be paying attention because the world is expanding so fast that the threats are showing up in so many different ways that you just gotta gotta be ready and then once you're um once you're ready then you also have to be resilient right because bad things are going to happen and now you got to know how to recover you know the cyber area is a perfect example you're not going to fix the cyber problem because it got 70 years of bad code that i helped create when i was younger and all these other people they got 70 years of bad code you can't you can't patch that into it's impervious right so bad things are going to happen you've got to be ready to recover and that applies for physical security events as well i love this because you're on the the front end helping people be alert but you're letting them know hey bad things happen to good people so plan for that soon don't just act like it won't happen to you because everyone gets bit um i love that that's great advice peter i really appreciate you spending time with us today um as these platforms of all i'm sure we'll get you back on to talk about you know what's the what's the growth of ai going to be in this market and um i it's amazing what we're doing now to keep people safe so thank you again for that and uh we will see you again soon sir super great chatting with you all right thanks so much everybody aloha