 Hi, Beth. It's Jay. I'm calling you. I want to talk to you about your product, JamBios. That's Beth Carvin. Hi, Beth. Yeah. Beth, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Thanks, Jay. Good to be here with you. Oh, good. Okay. So, here we are. We're talking about JamBios and a couple of thoughts. It's right. Any other CEO of JamBios? Where's your headquarters? I know you're focused in Hawaii, but where's your headquarters physically right now? Our headquarters are in Honolulu, and in the Harbor Court building, I happened to be in Kauai and split my time back and forth, but our headquarters are over in Harbor Court. We got a great spot and a wonderful team. Oh, great. Great. So, I wanted to tell you two short stories. One short story is when I was a kid, my buddy lived in the same apartment building in Queens. His father was into technology, and we were looking at television. Television had just come out one day, and his father was sitting there with us, and he said, you know, someday the television will talk to you and you'll talk right back. Whatever he says, you can respond immediately. I said, nah, that never, no, that can't happen. And look, we're well into that now. The second short story is, as I told you before, I was sitting with my buddy like 10 years, 15 years ago, and it was probably, maybe the late 90s. And I remember where we were sitting when this conversation took place. And we were talking about, you know, maybe a time capsule for individual use, a time capsule where you could, you know, put your thoughts down and, you know, the experiences of your life down for future generations to look at, because otherwise, you know, it gets lost. And you don't know. I don't know what happened to my grandparents. I have no idea. And wouldn't it be great if they could talk to me now? So that's what you're doing with Jambios, isn't it? That is exactly what we're doing with Jambios. And back when you and your buddy had that discussion, there probably wasn't a really great way to do something like that. And now we have the internet and all these things become possible. Yeah. Well, how did you get into such a thing? Because it is, it's ambitious and creative. And it really, as far as I'm concerned, on the social, you know, the social aspect of it, it really meets a need, not only for me, but for everyone. But how did you get into this? What's your, what's the track of your career in terms of technology and entrepreneurship? Yeah, that's a great question. And my background is as an entrepreneur. For a number of years, I moved to Hawaii in 1990, however many years that is now hard to keep track, and started a recruiting business there in town and did that for a number of years. And when the internet started coming up in the late 90s, well, commercial for commercial business use in the late 1990s, I was really excited about that to see how we could apply that to business and started a business called Mob Scott Corporation, which is a more of a B2B company with enterprise software for human resources and still run that today, more of a mainland focused for large organizations. My team is mostly on the mainland. And now we've started Jambios to really see what we can do here locally as a local Hawaii company and something in the consumer side and something that I just think would be a really great thing for people to have. Hey, I love the name. And I suppose just guessing now, if I went on the web and I typed out jambios.com, there you would be, am I right? Oh, there, yes, there we would be. We've actually been developing this for a number of years. Being an entrepreneur for an older entrepreneur, I guess I'll say, really wants to spend time getting the product right and creating a really strong platform before we released it. And we started doing some real advertising and marketing toward fourth quarter last year. And just like you, there are so many people out there that really understood that idea of this online memoir, being able to tell that story of you and being able to pass that, pass that along and kind of build it out together. You mentioned the name of the company and the jam in Jambios is about the possibility and the opportunity to do this together with other people that were a part of your life. So as you're telling your story, there are so many people that were involved with your life. It's quite amazing when other folks start to tell their side of the story or what they remember about your life or where your life intersected with them. Why do I feel that someday it wouldn't surprise you to get a call from Ancestry.com? And they would say to you, I would say to you, Beth, you know, we'd like to buy your company for a billion, zillion billion. What would happen then? Well, we'll have to see what kind of offer they make, Jay. It really does seem like this. That would be an interesting match because we're really talking about ancestors here, forward and backward, mostly forward. And, you know, it's great to connect all that up. But I'm just thinking loosely that's all I'm trying to be creative here. If I had to guess on how you're doing this, I would guess that, A, this information resides in the cloud. And that I and anyone else who I authorize can get the information down off the cloud. And I can not only look at it, but I can comment on it, I can add to it. It's kind of a maybe this is the wrong analogy, but it's like a Wikipedia for me and my family. How close am I to say that? You're pretty close. We have a couple of different ways that people can use Jambios. And one of the things about when you're writing or telling stories about your life is that there's a lot of private information in there. And there are some things that you're wanting to share with other folks. And there's other things that maybe you don't want to or some things you might want to share with some people and not with others. So we've really built it with privacy in mind where everything starts very private by default. And you as the owner of your Jambio open things up as you choose to do so. And so I might invite you to see some of my stories or contribute to some of my stories when I write about being on Think Tech Hawaii. And I hope you will. And so many memories. And other things. So similar to what you say. And then we also have a group Jambio, which we call our Jambios, where you can set it up more as a group, sort of similar to like what you're talking about, where you can invite friends and family to all be a part of that particular group. And then all add different stories. It's set up like a book with chapters and sections to make it really easy and understandable. So when you're doing a group Jambio, anyone that's a member can add different chapters and such. And we have a new product that's product is the right word, but we have a new version that we're working on now, which is going to be more of a public take Jambio. And it's interesting that you said Wikipedia, because that's sort of the vision there around saving the world's memories, and being able to have the one big great book of memories, that sort of a cultural piece where everyone can add memories, whether it's you know, about where you were when certain historical events happened. Sure. Right. Or maybe just as you know, your memories of different of your favorite dogs and things like that. So we're starting from the my Jambios to the our Jambios to this sort of one big public Jambio. Well, you know, it's kind of like a diary, I suppose, in the sense that sometimes we don't want to do this, but fact is that life is dynamic. Life is changing all the time. The thoughts I might have had in 1995, I would be really refreshed to go back and find out what I was thinking in 1995. It would be refreshing to see the track of my thoughts over all the years since 1995. I'm just picking that year. So you know, what you have is not only a static recollection, not only a static statement of life at a certain time, you have the possibility of of connecting the dots. Well, how how fascinating would that be just from me alone? Not even family already. I mean, family even more so. But I could I could give you the track of my life when I was stinking when I was younger, and how my views changed and how the circumstances I could major diary, but it's personal. And that is so interesting. So is that possible on Jam Bios? Yes, it is. Certainly we have some of our users that do use it sort of like a journal, but there are frankly a lot of different online journals out there. So we don't I don't go into technology and things that are already available. I like to film niches that are not there. And so we're looking at a little bit more from that perspective of memories because not only is it interesting what you say about going back and reading those thoughts, but there is some magic when you're writing them. And there's so much enjoyment to go back and you're thinking about I don't know just these stories that you're telling. And sometimes we do this just around the dinner table or a Thanksgiving or whatever and you go back and you talk about but it's especially today where things are so challenging in the world and the news can be really ugly and stressful. And I find for me personally, I really enjoy just going into my Jam Bio and just whatever I'm writing about, it's just so much fun. And then it gets even more fun when I invite others to participate in those memories and I get their additions to it. And I'm sure there's some brain chemicals that are coming out when. Oh, absolutely. I'm sure that's true. Writing, as you said, writing is a really important experience. And you learn learn about yourself from writing, you learn who you really are, because you're forced to express yourself. And then you can look at what you've said. But you know the thing about other people that also fascinates me. And that is this, you know, so you go up and you go down some days are better than other days. Some days are really awful and some days are great. And some days you really need support. And you know, in the nuclear world, we don't get a lot of support. We can't talk frankly with our fellow workers really and and friends are sometimes shallow. I mean, our relationships with them. They're not really intimate. And so you don't you don't have a place where you can have intimate, you know, connection. I mean, it's not so easy in these days. So that so you know, this this offers the possibility that I can express my personal thoughts and my memories and my experiences that are very personal to me. And then I can let somebody in on it. And I can say, would you would you look at my my thoughts and memories and give me your feedback? Give me therapy, if you will. Give me reaction. Give me comfort. Give me support on what I perceive my life to have been like. Is that happened to? Yes, there's actually that brings up a couple of thoughts in my mind. One is about this social media today has become very curated for people. And they're presenting themselves and how they want to be seen. And it's not always your real self. And it's not always authentic. And you see the kids today with their Instagram and having to be a certain way. And that may not be real for them. And that's difficult and stressful to maintain that. Whereas when you have that space and that privacy of something like a jambayo to really reflect, you are it gives you just a new opportunity to be who you are. Put that out there and only share it with those who you feel safe with. And that you would like to have them see that the other part that came to mind when you were talking is that we we created something that we added not that long ago called the community bookshelf. So when you're writing any jambayo section that you write any memory any story that you write, you can choose to put it on the bookshelf the community bookshelf. And then any jambayo's any person who's a registered member of jambayo's, which is by the way, it's free to use. Free. You say free. I said free. It's worse dwelling on how you do that. I mean, and why? We can talk about our revenue model. Since we're talking about the business and entrepreneurial side. But yeah, so you can you can put the information out there and have it on the community bookshelf. Other people can read different memories from different people. They can comment and you can get feedback. And that's been really fun. We just started doing that and allowing people to follow other people on the community bookshelf. So you can take it even beyond your own family and friends if you choose to, or at least for certain of your stories. Well, just suppose, just suppose. And I mean, I don't really want this to happen or care that it happens. But suppose I get to be a global figure. Me. All through tech, right? Oh, wow. In conversations with people like you. Okay, and I get famous. And now somebody wants to write a biography of me. What a trove of information. All I got to do is turn over the keys to my jam bios. And this person is, you know, he's three quarters the way done with the biography. What do you think about that? It's done. I don't know if our users will find themselves in that particular circumstances, but we do hope that they will be able to do that with their family and their descendants and pass that along. And like you said, if you had the opportunity to find your great grandparents, parents journals, what a treat that would be. And we're trying to create that opportunity. And I'm thinking especially about our newest, I think our folks had sent over some information to you about what we're calling legacy jam bios. And the legacy jam bios is our opportunity for folks that we noticed that we have some older users who were kind of worried about how far that they would get in their jam bio if something happened to them. And what if this information didn't get to their kids where they meant it to get to. And so we thought, you know what, we really need to create a way that they can kind of pre-purchase into this legacy plan. And with the legacy plan, they don't have to worry about quote finishing. They can write as much as they want, whatever they want. If something happens to this, if they sign into the legacy plan, we then send them a nice beautiful document that they would keep with their special papers, those insurance papers, their trust documents. And when that eventuality happens and the kids, you know how awful it is having to handle your parents' estates and all of that, you go through your documents, you find this lovely piece of paper saying, here's a secret code where you can get this. You're grieving, you're doing all this stress and trauma and you find this beautiful day, you come to our website, you enter the code, and you put in your mailing address and now we've taken all those stories, we've cleaned them up, we've proofread them, we've added them, we turn them into a printed book and we send them out to, based on whatever you purchased into your legacy plan. So we're really excited, we're just starting that now as we speak. And we've got a great opportunity for some of our older users. Oh, I totally agree. It's like a will. It's a will of information. You know, wills generally involve property, there's not a lot of communication of thoughts and advice and suggestions, what have you. But this is a will of information, it's a will of thoughts and advice and suggestions. And can you imagine the thrill of the recipient? I mean, I assume it's a positive legacy for the recipient. It could be a negative one just as well. Who gets that key and who opens it and we hear what the decedent was thinking about, that particular individual and others in the family. Because you could go through your whole life and not be square and honest with your family for one cultural reason or not, you never tell them how you feel, it's all covered up. And now you have a chance to really tell them. You tell them what he did right, what he did wrong, your hopes, your expectations. What an amazing moment that would be. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And I'll tell you an experience that brought tears to my eyes. That we had a, we have a user who was working on their JamBio and she asked me if I would look it over for her. I said, yes, sure, I'd be honored to do so. And I started reading it and she wrote about her growing up and her parents and some things with that. And then she, her husband and all of that. And then she got her kids and she wrote about each kid and all the things that how she felt about them and all of that. And we get to the end of the story. And then she wrote about her and all of that. And we get to the end and I'm at the end of this JamBio and she reveals, if you will, that she has a terminal illness and that this was her message of love this was her message of love that she wanted. Yeah, it does. Yeah, that's powerful. Yeah. Oh my god, you know, all kinds of things come, come flooding into mine. You know, yes, I've had this illness. Yes, I have a couple of children I didn't want to mention to you before. And here's some stories about the family I didn't want to tell you before. And here's, you know, here's my thoughts about, you know, about you and about things in life in general that I didn't want to share with you. Now I'm sharing with you. Oh, that would be just kind of my powerful stuff. Yeah, we've seen some people to write about lessons learned that they want to pass along. One of the things with the jambiles is to help people. We have all these different chapter types so they can scroll through if they're not sure what they want to write about, they can scroll through the different chapter types to get ideas and then we have question prompts that match each chapter type. So if you're whatever chapter you go into there'll be a number of questions that come up to help you think about what you want to write about and just giving them some guidance along the way. And so we've seen people use it in many different ways. I don't know why, but this reminds me of Oahu Cemetery. I'll tell you the short story. Oahu Cemetery has a play done by the Mission House Museum and you walk around the cemetery and somebody is sitting there at a grave and the person stands up and he's an actor and or her and tells you the story of his life and how he, you know, had a business experience with Smith and Smith's screwed him in one way or another and he's mad at Smith and they got into litigation and so forth as part of his life. Then you walk down the other side of the cemetery and there's the grave for Smith. Now an actor stands up for Smith and he tells you, you know I had this fight with Jones and he's a bad guy, they're both dead understand you, 19th century but you know it's this thing. I really wonder, this leads me to my question I really wonder if you can compartmentalize the Jam Bios so and I want to I want to send a message to Smith but I don't want Jones to know about it or I want to send a message to Jones but you know I want to compartmentalize that so Jones and Smith doesn't know about it. Can I do that? Yes, that's in fact the primary feature and why we have something like created something like Jam Bios as opposed to someone just writing in a blog or on a Word document or something like that because it gives you that opportunity where Smith can, you can give Smith access to these six chapters and you can give Jones access to these 12 other chapters or sections and kind of mix it up and even when you're if you're creating a printed book or Jam books it's not just everything you wrote goes in the book. That's too basic. So how we do it is that you can pick what you want so all of your chapters everything you've written all your stories show up and then you just tick them off, just check which ones you want for this particular book. So if you're giving a book to your kid and you want him to see all of this but maybe you don't want him to see these six things then just leave those out, print that book for them and then print a different book for somebody else with those in them. So it's all about that control and in today's world you talk about the beginning where it fits in the landscape of social media we've come to this sort of crisis and privacy And I want to talk about that right after this break I was reserving myself to ask you about that very question right after this one minute break. Beth Carvin, Jam Bios will be right back. Aloha and welcome to At the Crossroads. I'm your host Keisha King. I'm live at five every Wednesday where we have entertaining and educational conversations that are real and relevant both here in Hawaii and across the globe. I'll see you at the crossroads. Aloha Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence leadership and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports and life which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha We're back for live with Beth Carvin She joins us by remote from Kauai He's the CEO of Jam Bios So let's talk about privacy, Beth because that's really important because we've seen so many breaches of privacy. I am not going to share my internal thoughts, my personal legacy information with anyone if I feel it can be compromised. How can you assure me it won't be compromised? Yeah, I mean it's all about privacy today and especially when we're dealing with something like people's personal information and these very, very private stories that they're writing and again the reasons that we want to create Jam Bios because there is no good way to do that right now where you can be assured of that kind of privacy. So my background working in the enterprise software space is all about secure has to be about security when you're dealing with enterprise software you have to have the most secure data center where you have to pass all of these different security audits you know I'm an older entrepreneur not a young kid school who doesn't realize the importance of security and privacy and so that's job one and all of the Jam Bios from a security standpoint we utilize the highest level security data center on the mainland where all the data is kept we utilize software engineering technology and practices for security and in terms of privacy as well our privacy promise to our users is that we promise not to use this information for our own purposes the users remain the owners of this information our job is simply to store it safely and securely for them and then from a user standpoint there's the whole aspect of like we were just talking about of you choosing to share what you want to share with whom you want to share it well you know even assuming now assuming that I'm satisfied that this is not not going to be disclosed revealed to others my privacy will be respected I care a lot about that in this context assume that what about the concern I might have about how long Jam Bios will last because we're talking about by definition this is all multi-generational this isn't a five-year plan it's more than that I'm speaking to generations unborn I'm speaking to my great great grandchildren who I want to have knowledge about me I want to talk to them how can I be sure that your company will be around that the cloud will be around that this information will be available to them well you can't if I'm going to be honest with you and obviously if I said otherwise I would call me out on that because it would be ridiculous so the goal is too for people to have ways along this journey to be able to have control of that data I'm taking care of it while you have it with me but beyond that you need to look out for how are you going to handle that as things change and things migrate we've built in some different things and certainly we have our print books but we also have ways to turn into PDFs along the way so you can be saving it in a formatted way where we take all of your stories we put it in the form of a formatted book with all your contributions from your friends and whatnot so I'm not going to say that I'm going to be that time vault where you can open magically open that up in the future I can't speak to that although we have been toying around with the idea of creating a physical library where people could choose to have a copy of their jam book so they'd purchase an extra jam book that would go into a physical library somewhere I don't know where that would be where then their future generations could actually go and visit their jam book sort of like Salt Lake City in reverse the Mormon library in Salt Lake City in reverse that's just something we're toying around if people are interested in us actually storing that for them in a long-term basis I will take care of your data while it's with me and make sure that you always have it but I wouldn't want people to rely solely it would be silly I can't say what's going to be happening a hundred years from now if I get anxious about this it sounds from what you said if I get anxious about this I can print it out or I can download it I can download it as a PDF I can print it out I can put it somewhere safe that's my way of having a super backup just in case it's ever necessary can I go ahead we would encourage people to do that can I delete my account can I wake up one morning and say gee I really don't want to have this around anymore maybe the feds are going to get me can I delete the whole thing you can you can delete all of your stories within it and then you could if you want to really make sure you contact us and we'll delete it from all the backups and there will be no trace of you no trace of you last last question I love this conversation last question and that is this I mean I can open a Word document or I can do a blog I mean it's free no problem I still want to ask you about your business model why don't I do that instead isn't it just as easy for me to type this out my little fingers and I don't know put it somewhere safe why do I need jamb bios when I have all these other word processes and storage devices around me you could and it depends on you and what you're looking to do the reason people use jam bios would be if they want that opportunity to share easily different sections different stories with different people and if they wanted that kind of um collaboration in terms of getting other people to add to their stories make those stories richer that's not something you're going to do with a Word document in terms of taking care of that data as I mentioned who knows what happens to the Word document I might all go into some black holes oh yeah we know about that so we can we take care of that we're taking care of all of that data for you while you're using this very valuable now we get to the last question the ultimate question is your business model why do you do this I mean are you doing it for love because if that if that were the case um it would be a wonderful gift to the community but tell me about your business model uh well I am an entrepreneur and even though I am doing it that I I love this and I'm passionate about it but I am a business person and we just see a number of different ways of creating revenue for us to be able to continue this without money we can't continue this and maintain your stories so we do need to make money we have our printed jam books of course and we have premium features where we have different covers that you can use and purchase that we've put together and created we have proofreading services we have other add-on services but ultimately Jay this is going into that we're also going to be building out corporate jam bios we want to work with companies that have nostalgic brands we want to intersect our nostalgic users with those nostalgic brands and be able to allow people to think about their memories of their favorite brands and a great opportunity for companies to be getting testimonials of really big fans everybody loves a story everybody loves memories and we have a lot of stories about different brands of our favorite things that we've used so it all intersects we see a wonderful opportunity lots of different ways that we can make money and we hope people will give Jam Bios a try and help us build this community. That's great that's great the one thing that I want to ask you about is testimonials but when you're talking about companies it could be testimony too perhaps so you have to keep that in mind you have to keep that in mind maybe what you need is a lawyer on your staff and you can with the company bios you can say it's all attorney client privileged there you go I need a lawyer who really understands time capsules and all of these things time capsules in Kauai it's so nice to talk to you about this it's so nice to see entrepreneurs creative entrepreneurs and software especially this kind of software this is all positive to software being developed on Kauai so good for you Beth, Beth Carvin of Jam Bios thanks so much thank you Jerry, very pleasure