 Okay, it's 5 p.m., 5 o'clock rock. I'm Jay Fidel on Think Tech, and guess what? We're doing Think Tech Tech Talks today, and we're doing that with Kevin Miyashiro. He is one of the principals, the co-chair of the IMS 2017 conference, and that's the International Microwave Symposium. You got it right in the first try, Jay. Yeah, well, Symposium throws you off a little bit, you know. You know these engineers. We like big, fancy acronyms, yes. And we're going to call this show IMS 2017 Men's Business Technical Tourism. I love that term. That's Kevin's term. Welcome to the show, Kevin. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So here we are, and it's, what is it, June 2nd today. And the rest of our lives, you know, the rest of the world goes forward from here. But what I want to know is how you got here. Don't tell me taxicab. I drove. How did you, what did you do in your life to deposit yourself here in this place at this time? So I give a lot of credit to my dad, you know, as a kid. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Apparently he made a decision from my sister and me before we were even born. You guys are going to be engineers or technologists of some kind. I have so decreed. And you know, him and my mom, both, I mean, they shaped us kind of towards that goal. And then lo and behold, I became an engineer, went away from... That's so easy to be an engineer. Did you sail through school? Is that what you're saying? No. I mean, you got to work hard. It's a tough degree. But you know, you get through it. You enjoy it and everything. Went away to work for a while in the LA area. My game plan was to get my doctorate and come back to UAC and teach. Completely didn't happen. Got my matches and said, I'm out, forget it. But then, you know, my wife and I, who we both grew up here, we decided to move back to raise our kids here and everything. So we've been back for 15 years, give or take. We first hosted this show, the International Microchip Symposium here in Honolulu for the first time. It ever left the continental U.S. here in 2007. So I was 10 years younger, a little bit less wise and a little bit more open-minded about things. And so we had such a good time. We said, hey, why don't we do this again? So we put in a bid in 2008. You're a founder of the show, then. You know, Wayne Shromer deserves really the lion's share of the credit. He's the one that made the first move to bring it here in 2007. The joke that we all have is, Wayne was 30 in 1998 when we first bid it. When the show came, he was 40 in 2007. I was 30. And so it was sort of my turn to kind of come help do things. So I served as the pitchman to convince the deciding committee to bring it here. Wayne really is the brains behind the operation, so he helps make everything happen. I am now in my 40s, so to speak. And so now it's our turn to kind of pass the baton into the next generation to find the next young, unsuspecting person in the 30s to go bring it back again. And then every 10 years, it'd be beautiful to have this cycle repeat over and over and over again. Let's do a shout-out to Wayne. You could use his last name because I don't know his last name. Professor Wayne Shromer. I mean, like... Oh, that Wayne. That one. Oh, wow. Yeah. You know Wayne. Yeah. We've known each other a few years. Okay. So what are you doing now? This very moment I'm talking to you. Thank you. Good. Very metaphysical answer. So I run my own business. It's called Terrace Technologies. It was started on Maui. We moved it here to Oahu in 2009. It is a wireless business, so it's related to this conference. We do a lot of defense work, but we've actually been moving into a lot of the commercial space. So we combine wireless technology, software stuff, if you hear about all this cloud software, we do that. And so we're just trying to build as many things as we can to get them out there in the world. That's what we do for a living. That's great. But don't you... And this is digression from what we plan to talk about, but I need to ask you. Don't you feel... You're going off-script, man. That's all right. That's okay. Think, Tech, you know. We follow our intuition and our curiosity. That if the world is going to public nodes where everything is going to be free, somebody has to hook it up there, but after that it's going to be free. This is what I think is going to happen. Are you still relevant then? I actually think more so. Just because the infrastructure is free, so let's say the day comes where the information highway is as ubiquitous as the physical roads that we all drive on, right? I as a regular citizen, do I pay for that road? No, and yes, I mean, I don't, I don't write a check, but my taxes pay for that, right? So why couldn't my taxes pay for that same information highway that's spewing these ones and zeros all over their place? But still, there are services that I need to buy my soda from, I need to get my gas from. There's all these stops that can come all over the place on this information super highway. So companies and vendors like mine wear the services and the capabilities and the products that ride on this information highway. We live in America. It's a capitalistic society. We get to make profits off of adding value added services, even on this free backbone. So in a way, the more free they make it, the faster they make you, they help you go. I think the more businesses can benefit from offering services on this super fast highway. You want to build that highway? I don't want to build a highway. There's a phrase in Silicon Valley that they said, don't ever be the gold digger. Be the one who sells the shovels and the pails to the gold digger. So you want to arm people who want to go do things as opposed to building out the rail roads. I'll leave that to better and more talented people than me. That's not going to fly. Okay. Wow. Now, how did you get from all of that to being the, what, co-chair of this whole big important conference? I mean, right now, this year, with all these 8,000 people plus their families coming around, you stayed in with it and you're part of it. Is that what it is? As long as it lasts, you'll be involved. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, you give credit to the team. I mean, you look back in 2008, kind of after we finished, as the saying goes, it takes a village, right? I mean, so it was weighing me in a handful of volunteers that really said, okay, we want to do this again. It took the convention center's leadership to come in and help us craft the story. Debbie, at the time, we had some other folks running the center. We had the key anchor hotels and Waikiki that had to muster up. So it's sort of like a Waikiki-wide pitch that we had to put in front of this decision-making committee and it literally feels like a lifetime ago. It was 9, 10 years ago when we did that. You were one of the early science conferences at the convention center, weren't you? Yeah, we were one of the first ones. Breaking ground there, effectively. We were trying to show this idea of this technical tourist that there's a demographic that could be valuable to the state that presumably has a higher income level because they have a higher education or whatever else you want to call it and they bring their families along. So the net economic impact per family of these technical tourists is potentially greater than just randomly pulling whatever tourists we can bring into the state. So trying to get over the branding bias of, well, you can't possibly come to Hawaii and do real work because you're going to be sitting at the beach. We had to overcome a lot of those biases and show, well, you can bring people here, have a great technical event, and then they go get to have fun after that. It's actually possible to do both. Tell me why this is a great technical event. Well, I mean, so you think about it this way. The way we see it is we are hosting 8,000 of our best friends from all over the world. The IEEE Society is the world's largest electrical engineering society in the world by far. We have a few dozen sub-disciplines. Our wireless stuff is one of those sub-disciplines. So this IMS is the flagship event for the whole year. It goes somewhere in the country every year. It happens to be here in Hawaii this year. So this conference represents the best and brightest in research. So we have people that have to submit research papers. We only accept about 40%. Really? So for every two that comes in, only one actually gets accepted. You sit on that committee? I don't. We have about 80-some-odd people that actually review papers, tons and tons of papers. And so you have the best and the brightest in terms of new advanced research. We have about 450 exhibitors, literally from all over the world, not only from the continent to the U.S., but from Asia, Korea, China. That's Lee Wood. He's doing exhibitions, exhibits, yeah. Right. Showcase scene. A lot of times they actually release products here at this show because this is the flagship show. So if there's any show to launch your brand new product, this is the show to do it at. What kind of product are you talking about? Is it a product for consumers or a product for the industry, for researchers? What is it? Typically, the target audience are other industry members. The vast majority of our vendors are what we call component vendors. They build the things that go into your smartphone. They don't build the smartphone. But we also have, one of our big pushes this year in particular is the 5G market. The 5G market is a next-generation market for your cell phone to actually help you download like a whole 8G video phone in a few seconds. But is it soup? It does it taste good? It sure does. No, no, no. Is it ready? Oh, not yet. Can I go out and buy it? Why can I not yet buy it? There's a global release that's actually getting ready literally right now. And so there are some early releases. You'll see some commercials from Verizon and Sprint I think is pushing that. So they're getting ready, but prepared to see in the next three years, the whole world is really going to change. In my opinion, 5G is the tipping point where the speeds are so fast, I don't know why you'll ever want to plug a wire into your wall ever again. I mean, is that much of a game changer? So that's here. We actually have, I want to say, three, maybe four of our local companies here showing what we have to sell to the rest of the world. So everybody's bringing their wears out to show for the party. But when you say that, it makes me think that this conference, IMS 2017 actually accelerates the speed at which we are going to have 5G. Is this true? Yes. I mean, like I said, it really does feel like your friends from all over the world are coming because the people that are pioneering things and are pushing the envelope, they're all here. Sometimes this is actually the only time throughout the whole year that you get to see some of your colleagues. Everybody's busy. Everybody's running around trying to email and all that. Yeah. So this is like face-to-face time, quality interactions, quality exchanges. It only happens at symposiums like this. What about trade secrets? Can you talk freely? That's up to you. It's up to whatever your competitive strategy is. Some folks are very open. Some folks are very not. I mean, literally you walk on the show, sometimes they have these silence booths. Right? Is that right? They look like these booths. There's maybe one window, there's a door, one way and one way out for you to have these very private conversations right in the middle of this floor where there's thousands of people walking around. Nobody can hear them? Yeah. So it all depends on the strategy of the business. That's so interesting. So when you start a conversation with somebody, I mean, somebody you've dealt with, you can lay the foundation for that. You can say, how free can you be? Can we talk? Can we talk? Yeah. Come over to the side here and step into my office. You know, so, I mean, there's two very different ways to look at it. The research side is very, very open on principle that the goal and the obligation of a researcher is to spread knowledge, right? You're rewarded on publishing, presenting and teaching others what you know, very, very open, right? It's gratifying. Correct. If somebody is giving you gratification, they're giving you a nod, they tell you you're doing a good job. Correct. And you've come up with a great idea that we haven't thought of good job. Yeah. We have other folks that are, well, we want to grow our business, maybe a little more close-hole. You know, it just depends on what they want to achieve, right? Yeah. That would be interesting, though. And deals. There'll be deals. There is a lot of deal-making that goes on. What's a deal like? Can you give me an example of a deal? So to buy a 10-by-10-foot booth costs, after it's all said and done, runs you about $4,000 to $5,000, okay? So in order to make it a successful event for you as a vendor, including the time and cost of travel here, payroll and everything else, you want to be about 10x that. So you want to be able to walk away feeling like I've got at least 50 grand of pretty darn inked deals by the time we pack up when we go home. Is that gross or net? That's gross. Okay. And many of the vendors actually far exceed that. I mean, it really depends on what your sales price is for your product. I mean, if you sell something that's, you know, $0.25, that's a lot more hands you got to shake to get to that number. But some of our vendors, we have vendors that sell very high-end test equipment. Some vendors that sell very high-end software. Each one of those is tens of thousands of dollars. When it takes one or two sales for you to go, okay, I made my numbers, we're good. And you get brand awareness. You know, a lot of times you just need to remind customers, I'm here, what can we do for you and everything else. Just those soft touches sometimes pay off. Maybe not today, but tomorrow they can pay off very well. Case study. And whether we have a public conversation on the floor of the convention center or one in the little booth, you and I, we get together and I've had an idea. We've exchanged email. You have something that I need. I have something that you need. So we make a little partnership. We make a deal. And it is a piece of technology that will fit in the next version, maybe made the 5G version of my Samsung phone, which I love the early Samsung number eight. Great, great phone. So where do we go from there? How do we make the big bucks? What do we do? Lift the phone up, this phone or any phone and call Samsung. Excuse me, Samsung. We got some technology for you and we like, you know, millions and billions for our technology because we know you can't get it anywhere else. So, I mean, that would be awesome. I, you know, I, I still long for the day where I go into a business meeting for the first time and I walk away with a million dollar check. I'm still waiting for that to happen. That will happen before I retire. I want that to happen for you, Kevin. But, you know, usually it's a process, right? But the beauty of a show like this is actually the diversity of attendees. You have some of the largest manufacturers like Lenovo is here. Samsung is actually here. And you have some of the smallest vendors. And, you know, if you run the stereotype that most of the innovations come from the smalls and the big acquire those, this is the perfect place to make those deals happen. You at least start it, right? You know, as a saying goes, you do business with those that you trust. And sometimes it takes that handshake, you got to look them in the eye and just feel them out to go, do we, do we want to work together? It's unlikely to, you know, people are walking around with checkbooks and everything. But this is where the relationship starts. This is the guanxi thing, right here. And I agree, certainly you have to have that trust if you're going to make a long-term and heavy-duty deal with, with anybody in this incredible pipeline that you, that you're involved in. Let's take a short break, okay? And we'll come back and we'll talk about the larger economic issues around this kind of conference symposium. Now that's Kevin Miyashiro. He's the co-chair of IMS 2017. And he's telling us about how it's going to work. Next week I'll be there. I'll see you there. We'll be right back. I was like bingo. Bingo, we're back. Kevin Miyashiro, he's a co-chair of IMS 2017, begins next week at the convention center. And what's extraordinary about this is, you know, there's a lot of scientific conferences coming down the pike. And a month ago, so Debbie Zimmerman and the LLA meeting, you know, involved, oh gee, hundreds of researchers from UH and, and elsewhere and the hotels and everyone who is interested in and wants to, you know, encourage scientific conferences here. And there are plenty of them coming down the road, really. Yeah. But what's amazing about this is that you guys were among the first to do it here. So you understand this whole economic connection to have scientific conferences here. Why do I like a scientific conference better than a conference of say, I don't know, postmen. By the way, the postmen are also coming. Thousands and tens of thousands of them. Just don't make them mad, right? We don't want them going post on us. No, you hold on. Yeah. It's all about postal. So, you know, you look at the numbers, right? We, we have 8,000 attendees coming. That those are the people that are registered to come to the event. What do you think the chances are that an attendee is going to get to come to this event and their family is going to say, have fun without us. We'll just stay home, right? Very low. So actually we have a lot of families that tag along for the ride. So first of all, even though the event is only about a week long, they tend to stay beyond that either before or after. So the average stay is closer to a week and a half. They might even hop to the neighbor items, right? You encourage them to do that. Oh, absolutely. And so let's say there's 10,000 total bodies conversion of the state, right? In addition to that, most of them are going to be engineers, managers, supervisors, something like that. So running the stereotype, their income is higher than the average American household income, which means that the spend per family is higher. They buy the nicer rooms. They go to the nicer restaurants. They stay longer. They can, they have more residual income. So from an economic stimulus perspective, it's a great way to go, right? We, the impact that we forecast for our event alone is about $35 to $40 million and a week and a half's worth of time. It's not a bad day's work, right? If you could have one of those a month, and you think about how much that could change the tax base for the state, what we could do to reinvest those taxes into redoing our sewage system, redoing the roads, whatever it is, it's a great way to go to couple the fact that we still have to this day one of the best brands in the planet as the Aloha State, combining that with very high spend families. I mean, it's a great win-win for everybody. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I absolutely agree. It's free money almost. You know, in a sense that we wouldn't have it otherwise. We wouldn't have any of it otherwise. So the idea is you'd much rather have it than not have it. And it's good for the university. There's a connection there in the research side. College of Engineering, for example, be down there in force. I know it will. Wayne, we're not kidding. So, you know, the thing that strikes me is that this is so good that somebody, maybe you or your cohorts are going to figure out, you can do this in Asia, too. So, I mean, actually, the reverse is actually already true. So I refer to IMS as the flagship conference. It really is the big show for the year for this society. But we also have a lot of smaller conferences in some of the emerging areas. Asia is one of the biggest emerging areas. When we track our demographics, our membership demographics year to year, the biggest percentage growth for the last, I want to say, eight years in counting is always Asia. It's one of more of the countries in Asia. And so we have smaller, but if emerging conferences that go through China, India, Japan, Korea, and it is keep rotating, do we want to pull those here, maybe? Or do we want to actually send more things there? We don't really know yet, but we know that Asia as a hub is growing really fast. And Hawaii has always been touted as we are that great bridge between the continental U.S. and most parts of Asia. Yeah, we want to be that. And so we can be central to that conversation. Yeah. And we could be the hub. I mean, in a sense, in the scientific sense. You know what strikes me? There's not too many places in the country, you know more, but where you can say that it's a hub of scientific conferences. If we could achieve some notoriety in that department, it would really change the way the world looks at us. First of all, we wouldn't be grass skirts and hula, which is very nice, but this is better. And it would be something that brings people in, not only from the U.S., mainly the regular market for what I could keep, but the whole world. Right. And the more conferences, and each conference feeds the other conferences, they're all, some of the parts is greater somehow. Yeah, absolutely. And so you're in a movement. This is a movement. In a lot of ways, it feels like it. I mean, I don't know the specifics, but I have a sense that as the years go by, we are having more of these technical type conferences coming here to Hawaii. So it feels like something is changing. We're being able to shed that perception that you can't work hard and play hard here when you come to an event like this. Yeah, that's what Debbie Zimmerman is doing with the LA thing. And it's impressive because there are so many conferences and maybe they, if one scientific organization sees another scientific organization out here and says, well, I guess it works for them. It must work for us too. So you have a snowball kind of effect. And our event, I think, is particularly notable because we're a two-timer. It's one thing to say you did it once. If you never do it again, the question is, why? Maybe it wasn't something good to success or something. The fact that we can do it two times in a row, I would hope that that would give a lot of confidence and motivation to others to say, wow, they really did do it twice. Hawaii has the capacity to support an event of that magnitude. We can do it too. That would be an awesome measure to send out to people. So I can see the convention center, which is just one structure in this schematic somehow. The convention center wants this, obviously, because they need business. They want business. That's a given. And Waikiki, they want it. The hotels want it. The restaurants want it. But in many ways, that money, that gross, that net that results from scientific conferences like IMS goes to those guys. It doesn't go to... Why do I care about IMS? So I don't know that I could make a direct, clear correlation to... Start by saying I'll get a better phone out of it. Cliff, did I mention we're giving away free iPhones? I'm just kidding. I don't know that we can make a clear economic correlation to everybody that lives here. As somebody that's grown up here, my kids are both born here, my wife grew up here too, that I actually feel like a big part of it is this is our opportunity to show the world what the aloha spirit really means. I am amazed to this day in the modern 21st century that some people still go, do you guys have electricity in Hawaii? Are you kidding me? Right? I mean, so to show... Okay, we're a bona fide big city. We have all the things that you can expect. But you can read about the word aloha in Wikipedia. You can't quite get it. You need to feel that. And so I actually feel a certain amount of pride in being able to host all these people here. And it's something that you have to feel. And it's a great way to extend that aloha spirit to all these people that, for many of them, this is actually the first and potentially the only time they're going to come to Hawaii in their lifetime. And the fact that we get to be the reason why they come here, I think that's awesome. Yeah, but they're also emissaries. Everybody you run into in the mainland, you tell them, I'm from Hawaii. Everybody has the Hawaii story. They know somebody. They came to Hawaii. And it's always with a smile. So now we have 10,000 sales people going back to wherever they are to tell somebody else to come back here. All right. Well, the other thing is, as mentioned before, the university, because I think the university benefits by this a lot. Even if it's not a, you know, I mean, this is obviously associated with the university, but there are other conferences that are not necessarily. And the point is, the university can get grants out of this. Their research money can come in here. People can see once we identify as a franchise in science and technology and bring these conferences in, then we can bring grant money in too and bring researchers from far away who don't mind spending time here. You know, they believe they're in a place where there is excellence, so they need to have intellectual excellence. And so, I mean, any contact we have with any scientific organization helps build our reputation and our potential in that regard. I mean, you know, there's interesting serendipity that can occur. And a lot of times, you just can't predict when they're going to happen. An interesting example of that, you know, back in the 70s, a guy by the name of Professor Norm Abranson hanging out in Stanford said, hey, I kind of like that Hawaii weather. And that surfing thing looks pretty cool too. Packs up, moves out here. He and a bunch of colleagues at the university. And the internet. Right. I mean, a lot of people don't know that that actually has a lot of its roots in Hawaii, right? So having those kinds of events occur, start from the research end. They start from these serendipitous meetings that happens here. It's really hard to know and predict exactly how these things can show up, but you have to have enough swings at bat to have that serendipity show up. So the more times you have these events here, the more likely you are to have something great and profound happen a few years out from that. Yeah. And of course, people in the street do benefit. I do benefit because there's more money, you know, flowing through our economy. Right. And it filters out and down and all over the place. And as you said, you can collect greater taxes. So I have to pay fewer taxes in order to get that same infrastructure. No, I'm happy about that. But let's talk about you again. Let's talk about how your week is going to be. I like to know what happens when you wake up in the morning, you know, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and you have to make sure this thing holds together. What's it like for you? You know, it's an interesting thing. I liken it to getting married. So you have all this prep, getting ready for your wedding, right? You're stressed out. The car's got to be right. The food's got to be right. Everything's got to be right. And then the actual day comes and then you just let go. You're there with your friends and then it just sort of happens. And the most interesting thing about being an event planner is you see all the things going wrong. You know what's supposed to happen. But the key to success, as long as your guests never know that it was a miss, you're good, right? So it's very easy to get stressed out about this. I mean, you basically have 8,000 moving pieces and then some. Signs could go wrong. We could run out of food. The lights could go off. Who knows? But we have a committee. Our steering committee is about 200 volunteers deep. We have paid staff of about 20 to 25 people. We have all the people at the convention center. So you've got an army of people ready to deploy at a moment's notice to any one of things. So by basically today, let it happen. I mean, it's so yes, we could lose sleep. There's kind of no point to losing sleep. What's going to happen is what's going to happen. And as long as we see enough smiles on the floor at the end of the week, we're good. Let it happen. Kevin Miyashiro, letting it happen tomorrow and through the week for 10 days, it's going to be great, Kevin. Wish you well. Thanks for having us, Jay. I'll see you on the floor. I'll be there. Aloha. Aloha.