 Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Western Digital Offices in Milpitas, California at a really interesting event. It's put on by the Autotech Council Innovation and Motion. It's all about mapping and navigation. So you might think the mapping wars are over, but we're just hearing in the keynote presentation, it's a multi-billion dollar industry, a big part of which is driven by autonomous vehicles and all the things that are happening there, but it goes well beyond that. So we're excited to be here and talk to some of the principles about what's going on in this space. So our next guest is Mirko Kershbaum. He's the CEO and founder of Pegaza. So first off, Mirko, welcome. Thank you. So what is Pegaza for people that aren't familiar? So Pegaza is a consulting company and I started this company about two and a half years ago because I realized that a lot of companies want to come into Silicon Valley, but they don't know what to do here. They don't know who to meet with, who to partner with, and they don't have experience in this whole ecosystem, and I'm helping them because I've been here for almost 10 years and I know the industry really well. So do you focus on a particular type of company that wants to get here, particular type of a vertical? Who are your clients? It's mainly the transportation automotive vertical. That's my background, that's where I have expertise. And we've seen all the car companies are here. They've got offices all over the place of NO101 and Palo Alto. What other types of automobile industry players are trying to either set up a presence or at least a connection with Silicon Valley? So initially it was just the car makers, then you saw the big tier ones, the automotive suppliers moving in for companies like Bosch and Continental. Now you're even seeing tier two companies, tier three companies coming in, companies that want to get into the automotive space. So it's an entire ecosystem that's moving in with the car makers. Right, it's kind of interesting to note because there was a similar wave 20 years ago, 30 years ago, into LA for design and we saw a lot of the car companies set up their design centers down in Los Angeles. So when they're coming here, are they looking for specific technology? Are they looking for engineering? Are they looking for just kind of the innovation juju that we have going on here? What are their objectives when they come here? I think it's a combination of all the things that you just mentioned. So one is just everybody is here. If you want to have meetings with five, six companies, you can do it in one day. We're all within half an hour, 40 minutes distance. You have car makers, you have chip makers, you have telecom companies, you have IT experts. It's all in one spot. And I don't think that exists anywhere else, maybe in Tel Aviv to a certain degree. And then it's also just the education that's here, the mindset of people. You have very smart people that have worked in different jobs. It's just a perfect setup in every way. Right, and the thing you just touched on too, which I don't think a lot of people think through all the components that are involved in a self-driving car. You think of sensors and maybe a little bit of mapping and does it stop or not when it's supposed to? But there's a ton of different technologies. I saw some video, a professor was giving a kickoff on his autonomous vehicle class and he had this laundry list of all the different types of technologies and things you gotta think about that all come together as this thing is rolling down the road. Yeah, what you're seeing is I mean in the old days, the car was a separate system. It was pretty much owned by the car makers, so fewer T1s, fewer T2s, that was it. But now with connectivity and data and cybersecurity, I mean there's connections to almost any other vertical and that's what makes it so exciting. You have machine vision companies coming in, we're looking into biometric technologies, monitoring what you're doing, what your health is. We have camera sensor companies that you never even had heard of. We're now looking into sensing smell because you don't have people in the car anymore, you need ears outside of the car because people will not be in the car. So those are all new technologies that are making their way into the car and that's just really exciting and new. Pretty good times for you. So mapping and navigation, what brings you to this event today? So mapping and navigation is gonna be very critical for autonomous driving and a key enabler is obviously either having machine vision systems that help you capture the accurate information all the time because the car will need to know is your construction, are there potholes, are there any obstacles, so it might be crowdsourced and then the other thing that's really important is there's gonna be a lot of data being generated. How is it gonna be managed, how it's gonna be analyzed, how you're gonna store it in the car, in the cloud, who's gonna store it, who's gonna own it? So it's gonna be a big, big market battle around this data and who will have an edge on it, right? So it's really interesting. Yeah, the whole data, not only is there a lot of data that needs to be processed, but you bring up a whole another kettle of fish which is who owns the data, who has access to the data, who can build, evaluate algorithms based on that data. There's an interesting thing I saw once on some of the Google cars is there's not only the data of what that Google car does, but the environmental data as it passes through the environment for things like where the bicycle riders ride on the edge of the street and all these factors that this collecting data far more than just its performance as a self-driving car. So who does own that data? I mean, it's traffic signs. When's the street cleaning coming because then you can park? Is there an open parking spot that you could put on an app and then guide people into it? It's potholes, it's construction. It's other things that are critical if you have autonomous cars and just in general, even today now, I mean, cities wanna know where the open parking spots is there any damage to the road? Are there any other things in the way? So it's huge having access to the data. Yeah, it's interesting because you can really crowdsource it with this mobile sensing machine that can pull in all types of data to feedback. I hadn't even thought about it how they get the data for the self-parking apps. You'd get it from other cars that happen to be driving down the street. That's great. All right, super. So you've been in the business for a while as you see kind of this crazy acceleration of compute and storage and networking. How long do you think this is gonna take before we see a lot more of these vehicles on the road? I mean, you see them today. Right, I live in Palo Alto. So we see the Waymo cars all the time. We used to them already. I mean, there's Fords and there's Waymo cars and other companies are trying them. I mean, there's a long list of approved companies now on interesting names. But I think to, and you'll see it in phases, it's gonna be very limited and also it's gonna be very weather-dependent. Here's perfect conditions. It's nice and dry and warm. For Montana and other places where it's a little bit tougher on the weather, it's gonna take longer time because there's some problems there. So I think it's gonna come in waves. So here will be a launch now. But to see it fully deployed, not just in the US, I'm also thinking about other countries like Brazil and India with totally different problems to solve. It's gonna be much more longer time. So there we're talking decades. But then again, you also have to think about can you set aside certain areas or lanes for those cars? Because you'll have an interim phase. The interim phase, you will have non-autonomous vehicles, semi-autonomous vehicle, and fully-autonomous vehicles. So how are all those cars working with each other with drivers, with a driver's license, maybe drivers without a driver's license? Because they can only ride in an autonomous vehicle. So how is it all gonna work together? That's gonna be a very interesting time. Once they're all autonomous, I think it's gonna be easy. But then it's just gonna be like in an airplane. You have an air traffic controller, somebody's managing all those cars, they talk to each other, there's vehicle to vehicle, communication, but having them all together, that's gonna be an interesting time. And again, that's before we, again, all these second-order impacts of parking structures that are no longer needed in the city because you have these things parked off-side. The watches. Car insurance when these things don't crash so much as we do when we're distracted by whatever. So pretty exciting times. All right, well, Mirko, I'll let you get back to the conference, a lot of stuff going on next door. And thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. You're welcome. All right, he's Mirko. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from the AutoTech Council Innovation and Motion event. Thanks for watching.