 here it is, the 3 o'clock block. I'm Jay Fidel. Welcome to Think Tech Talks. Our show today is called JamBios, creating a collaborative writing platform. I'm gonna find out what that is. We're gonna talk to starting up startup culture in Hawaii and address the issue of whether JamBios is starting up startup culture in Hawaii or what. If you wanna ask a question, participate in discussion, you can tweet us at Think Tech H.I., write that down, or call us at 415-871-2474. We will take your call. So our guests for the show are Beth Carbon and Rudy Menon. JamBios is a locally-owned early-stage startup that's created a collaborative writing platform for users to preserve their memories in one place and provides the ability to invite others to contribute their stories to that memory. So we're gonna talk to Beth and Ruby about this now and find out what they're doing. Welcome, Beth. Hi, Jay, nice to see you. Hi. And Ruby. Hi, Jay. Good to see you again. Yeah, great to see you guys. So we're always interested in startups, especially the ones that look like they're gonna make a lot of money. All right? That's us. So JamBios, what is it? Keskase Kusah. Okay, JamBios. Well, it's all about memories. It's about remembering. It's about, it's an opportunity to look back and think about those different times in your life and save those and preserve them and bring in your friends and your family and start to create these life memories, biographies, if you will, but together with your friends. A reverse time capsule. Yes, in a way. Well, right now everything is getting so transient and impermanent. You know, you've got your Snapchat and it's like everything goes in and comes out. I go to stress management classes and zone out, you know, like yoga zone. Okay, and when I do, sometimes I fall asleep, but that's another story. Other times I go on trips, like Proust, my favorite French author. I go on trips back into the past and it all reveals itself, you know, from 30, 40, I'm not gonna tell you how many years ago. Well, these memories come back to me. Memories I would never otherwise be able to call up and there's value in that, at least for me, anyway. So are you saying there's value for that in everybody? Well, I don't know for everybody, there may be some people out there who don't find this joy in looking back in the memories, but there is a- Maybe they had a tough childhood, you know. It was possible too, and yet in that case, sometimes it can be cathartic to bring up those memories. But for most people, there is a sense of joy in remembering and looking back in those times and like you said, you think back and it feels good to do that. And we even have a, within Jam Bios, we have a prompter, we have our digital biographer. His name is Monty. I guess you could say a digital biographer, what is that? He asks you questions. So if you, Jam Bios is set up like a book with chapters of different types of chapters. So whatever you feel like writing about or thinking about, Jay, if you want to think about, like what was the first car that you ever had? What was the first car that you ever had? Do you remember? A Dodge. A Dodge. A Dodge, something. I can't remember the name of the model, but it was a Dodge. All right, was it? And when I was in college, I drove it off a small cliff. Yeah, I remember that pretty well. Well, there you go, see there's a story in that. And in most memories, there is a story. And so Monty is there to just help prompt you. You can pick whatever chapter that you'd like, whether it's your cars or whether it's something, you know, your great grandparents or, so from the, you know, more trivial types of things. So that's real time. Monty is not a computer person, it's a real person. No, no, no. Monty is just, we just call him Monty. He's like an avatar. It's like a series thing. He's just a character. He's an avatar, so he asks you questions. He's just a character, he's a bot. He just asks you questions that relate to the particular topic. And this goes somehow like artificial intelligence into the database, yeah. Well, I'm not gonna call it artificial intelligence, but Monty's pretty smart. Okay, all right. It's like, what's the name, Liza? Back back in the 80s, in the days of DOS, there was a DOS line and you would say hello Liza. That's great. And Liza would say, how are you feeling today, Jay? And I was feeling fine and then she would say, what makes you say that? And it was all canned responses. It was like, supposed to be like your friendly therapist, it sounds like. It's like Siri's sister, something like that. It's just great grandmother. Siri's grandmother, exactly. Well actually, what we tried to make sure we didn't do with Monty is to make sure that he didn't come out like Clippy. Do you remember Clippy? Clippy was a Microsoft. Clippy was a Microsoft and he was a little figure, a little of a paper clip. And if you wanted help, Clippy would bounce around your screen and he was quite annoying. So we said Monty has to be wonderful and helpful but not Clippy. So that's pretty sophisticated stuff with Monty I think, yeah? I don't, I don't even say it's sophisticated but it's useful. Yeah. Okay, so when I answer Monty and I put my data in, you probably have a bunch of forms I should fill out and all this and I sort of invest my memories into this system. And it's just mine. And I have to have a login and all that gets back to my thing. Then it has my memories all lined up somehow. How do I access my memories? Do I have to have a drink beforehand or what? It helps. It's a great question actually because one of the things that we really have aimed to do with Jam Bios is to help organize your memories in a way that's useful because right now if you think about it, people use all these different social media. You post here and you post there and you write emails to people. And memories come up but they're all scattered all over the place. They're not in any one place. So with Jam Bios what we've tried to do is create it in a very organized way. So we use a literary format. So it's like a book and different chapters. Well, you know, that's actually when I saw what you were doing and thought about this show that's exactly what I thought about. Because for example, you know, I read on the teleprompter our little opener today, right? How do we get that? Well, it's automated. We just know the data for the show and I push a button and it generates all the texts for the teleprompter introduction. So the same thing with the book. I mean, the book, all the data you've collected about the memories. You could have a button like that and then you could generate what amounts to an autobiography, couldn't you? Yes, you could. And that's why our company is and our product is called Jam Bios because of the bios. Biography. Yes, that you're doing and we call it Jam because it has a collaborative component. What's collaborative about it? So what's collaborative about it is when you're writing about that Dodge vehicle that you had, you know, maybe you went on a great- Dodge Coronet. That was the model I knew would come up. Maybe you had a brother or sister or a friend that you went on some great road trips in that Dodge Coronet and wouldn't it be nice if you could write out your memories of your Dodge and then click a little button and invite some of those old friends to add their memories of your Dodge. You can find them. You have to find them. You can find them. Yeah, yeah. Does it integrate with Facebook or any social media? It will. So yeah, you're going to be able to place memories into Facebook that you just want to get some of that quick kudos from your friends but also the other way around and bring them in if you want to explore a little bit. I have a bigger vision though. I tell you, it comes to mind in my push button idea. Push button, okay. I push the button and it not only prepares the book but it sends the book to my editor. That push button and or it goes straight to Amazon for publication, vanity publication. I have something for you, Jay. Really? Yeah, so we're not doing this just for fun even though I love to use my JamBio myself but it's also a business and we're looking to make some money and we have three different revenue opportunities but one of them is around books. So we feel like as you create your, you're having fun remembering and reminiscing with your friends but at the same time you are creating this biography so why not be able to pick parts of your stories and compile them in a book that you can then purchase for a gift book either for yourself at keepsake or for your family or for your friends or for presents or whatnot. So one of our revenue models is around book publishing. Ah, so but it's, well maybe it's just the beginning but it's a book for you. It's a book for your coffee table or your friends about your whole life. Your kids. They're gonna be very interesting but you have to keep that in mind when you wrote the pieces of it because there's maybe you tell too little, maybe you tell too much. Well the beauty of JamBio's is that we believe that our audience will have a lot of private things that they wanna write as well and so for every section that you write in your JamBio, you decide. So you write and then you say, okay for this section who do I wanna invite to contribute to that and who do I want to be allowed to read it? So I might write things that I said there's no way I'm gonna let Jay see that but there might be something else that I say, ah Jay will really enjoy this. Let me bring him into this. Contribute, you said contribute. Yes. So that sounds like you say, well I've written this section about the Dodge Coronet, whatever and I was getting feedback from other people who might have been aware of that experience and I put their email or their social media address in there and it goes to them and it says, if I dealt talking about his Dodge Coronet what can you add to that discussion? That's correct. Correct statements that he made. Yes and so then you or whomever would write your contribution, push the button, it would come back to me but I might read that and say, this is great, I love that story. I didn't even remember that. We went on that trip, I forgot all about it. I love it, let me add it to my JamBio, click the button and add it or I might say, Jay, I don't want that part of the story out. I may click a different button and say, hey could you please revise that because I really don't want that particular story but could you tell that other story? It's a conversation then. So you want to really make sure your JamBio's is yours, it's personal and you want to have some degree of control of what's in it. But somebody who contributes or gives you additional data or correction whatever and what you said, that would not be a correction of your copy. Your copy remains in violin as you wrote it as you spoke it. Well that's correct but you could change it yourself. So if someone said, hey Beth you spelled this wrong or you did this wrong I can go in and change it. But that person's comments would be there anyway. And I could look at Joe Dokes, knows about my Dodge Carnet, he writes up something, he says no it was not a small cliff, it was a big cliff, something like that. And now his comment is there for me to access right alongside my original copy. That's correct and how we place it in your JamBio is like a sidebar. So if you picture a magazine, you know if you read old school magazines and there's all the text and then there's the sort of green sidebars, it's like that. So you have your JamBio with all of your stories and memories and then you have all these lovely sidebars of stories from your friends and your family and their contributions. Ruby actually had a great career as she came up with. That's Talmudic, you know. That's the way the Talmud is written, okay? You have the original copy and then you have people commenting on the original copy and then you have people commenting on the comments on the original copy and all the comments are written around the margin. Nobody ever touches the original copy but if you bought a classical Talmud book, they would have all these comments about the original commentary. It's very interesting. So you're making my JamBio very special. Well, I think it is special. Okay, Ruby, your involvement now? Well, my title is product manager but because we're such a small team, I guess to do a whole bunch of different things, product management, project management and I also hold the fort down in operations because we have our office over here at Harbor Court. And so as a product manager, I work closely with Beth and make sure that we're always thinking about the user, what's the user experience like? And even fine-tuning things like what's the psychology of color on the website, making sure that we're kind of keeping up with all of those trends and keeping everything up to date. Working with a small team, which is a couple of developers and a creative designer who actually does all of the design work and then hands that off to the developer for coding. So we're very closely with them and make sure that we're meeting all of our timelines and executing on time. And then from the operation standpoint, I helped Beth with recruiting, with just office management stuff. So got a little bit of everything. You like startups, don't you? You're a startup kind of person. I actually do, you know. I came from the corporate world. It's very different. But what I love about startup is, you don't, like in a corporate environment, you're highly specialized. Like when I was in HR, that's all I did. And I always had interest in everything else, but I never got a chance to do any of it. And startup, I get to do a whole bunch of different things and I can learn stuff if I want to. If I'm interested in marketing, I can learn about that. I'm not pigeonholed into one space. No, you're not. I'll vouch for you on that. Yeah, you know me from a lot of different things. So you both mentioned the HR world. You both mentioned that. Is that part of your orientation in this matter? Human resources? Well, Ruby and I met sort of around that in that in addition to running JamBios, I am the CEO of Nobscot Corporation that I've been running for 17 years. Nobscot? What a great name. You're from the Northeast. Yeah, well I know, Penobscot. Yeah, in Maine, wasn't it? It was, it was. Anyways, so Nobscot Corporation that I also manage is a HR software company. And so I've been in the HR business for years. And still are. And still am. Yeah, so I'm a vendor on the technical side. And Ruby has been working in HR for years and she was getting involved in doing some, creating some software. So what's the relationship between human resources and this program about memory? There's not. It's just that Ruby and I knew each other. So I hired her. She was my mentee and I was her mentor. And so someone had introduced us and I was her mentor and I invited her to, I was so impressed with her, I invited her to help us on this new venture. Good move. Okay, we'll take a short break now. When we come back, we're gonna talk about the fact that there really is a relationship between human resources and what you're doing. I will explain what that is. We'll also talk about how you're gonna make a million billion on this program. Excellent. Let's explore that. You'll see. Ooh, you're gonna be so rich. We'll be right back. We're all part of your community. We all play a role in keeping our community safe. So protect your everyday. If you see something suspicious, say something to local authorities. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, which streams live on ThinkTechHawaii.com, uploads to YouTube.com and broadcasts on cable OC16 and O'Lello 54. Great content for Hawaii. Okay, we're back for life. Beth Carvin and Ruby Menon, we're talking about JamBios. It's a great name for something about bios. What's the jam about? The jam is the jamming together. Jamming, like a rock band, you're jamming. So you're jamming when you're doing the collaborative nature of JamBios. So my thought about the connection between human resources, although you said that was really what brought you together, rather than what created the program, but I think this is an orientation. It's about people. It's about trying to rationalize social science. It's about trying to rationalize what people are and what turns them on and what doesn't turn them on. And so you have to have that kind of orientation if you're gonna make a buck, hopefully, you know, sort of coding, characterizing, categorizing their lives, their memories, and thus their lives, their individual persona. That sort of sounds like human resources somehow, doesn't it? In a way it does, and it's people issues, whether it's people issues in the workplace or people's issues in their life. And it's very similar, whether you're talking about a corporate space or human space. So how far down the trail are you? I mean, we start with an idea and we end with a product that everybody wants. Where are you? Well, we're getting there. So the idea had been floating around in my brain and in a few other places for a couple of years, actually, and decided as I started looking at the business opportunity and really taking the pencil and looking at numbers and so forth to really go for it. And so we had been building the product for a couple of years very slowly and turtle-like. But we decided to really ramp it up. We saw the opportunity. And so the end of last year is when we got the office space here in Honolulu, hired employees and decided that, you know what? We need to do this and we need to do this now. And so the program just launched publicly. And so... So it's out there right now. It is out there. I can go jambios.com and there it is. There it is, www.jambios.com. Let's look at the website. We have it. And you can explain it. And we'll get the idea of what it is and how to use it. Okay, go. Or somebody go. Oh. Well, that's how you register. That's the website. You're putting your email address in your register. What is that all about? Yeah, so if you'd like to get started with it, if what we're talking about is of interest to anybody, you know, I don't know our audience here, but if you would like to think about your memories and go back in time, go ahead and sign up and register. And when you do, you'll have the opportunity that you start by picking a few chapter, whatever chapter types you'd like to write about to start with. So if you do want to do write about Jay's car, or if you want to write about musical influences, musical memories, or if you want to write about your great grandfather, or if you want to write about your college time. So you pick your chapters and sign in. And once you get in there, you can start writing. And I think the exciting part, the exciting part for me when I stopped using on a test case and started using it for real, was after I'd written some things, I asked for a contribution from I have some relatives in Australia. That was a branch of our family that we did not know about. They came over from the old country and they were not able to come to the US. They ended up in Australia. And I asked them for a contribution. I got my first contribution was from my Australian relatives telling me these amazing stories of just things I did not know about the family. And when the contribution came in, it was the most exciting thing. So I'd welcome people to sign up for the website and just start writing. You don't have to be a great writer or anything. Just put those memories down and get them out there. And you'll start to really experience. So I write them up in my own way. I push a button and submit that memory. This one memory. What happens to it? What happens then? It will display in a book format in your JamBio. So there's a table of content. So each of your chapters that you pick will be in your table of contents. And you'll start to fill that in as you go. A little at a time. A little at a time. So I have a glass of wine. I sit, I make a memory. One memory at a time. Yeah, yeah. And the beauty about it, too, is that it's there. It's permanent. It doesn't get pushed down in a feed. You know, like if you're in Facebook, for example, and you've maybe had this great conversation with a group of people, and you try to look for it two months later, it's gone until the algorithm decides to fork it up a couple of years later to you. So I think this is the beauty of this particular product is that you get to preserve everything in one place. And it's a repository of all your memories and in all the contributions, it's all packaged and beautifully packaged as if it were a book. So that way, you don't have to go hunt and peck all over the place with stuff, you know? And I think a lot of times how people maybe preserve their memories or keep their stuff, they probably tend to use a bunch of different tools. They might use like a Word document or a Google sheet. And then all of a sudden, they've got stuff all over the place. So how wonderful would it be to keep everything in one place so you don't have to go looking and searching all over the place? So where is it living on your server or my laptop? It's living on our servers. Yeah, so we have a very secure server system since these are people's precious memories. And we use a data center that's actually on the mainland and the Baltimore. Yeah, so I can go from one computer to another, log in and I can sort of moveable feast sort of thing where I can enter memories wherever I am in the world. That's correct. I live on Kauai now, most of the time. And so when I'm home. All the most creative people are on Kauai. Ruby, when are you moving to Kauai? I used to live on Kauai. Oh, that explains everything. I'm a city girl. I have to come back to the city. So if I'm on my computer in Kauai, I can write my down bio from there. If I'm here, I have my little travel computer. You want to do it by phone, you can. Although writing a memory seems a little bit more than just phones, but these days. I want to ask you about that because you know what's interesting about it is, you know, for me anyway, that I can have very creative moments where I'm not near a computer and I remember something, you know, for about, maybe the Dodge Coronet, what have you. And I need to get it down because I forget those memories, they come and they go, like the Zen, they come and they go. So if I had a like dictation system on the phone, you know, voice through text or something, I could throw in ideas on the fly and not lose them. Is this in the works? It is, we're not, at this point in time, it would all be typing in, but we do have a lot of plans around audio, both from a standpoint of you being able to speak in. And these days too, the ability for the technology to take voice to text is actually pretty accurate. So we think it will work out well. And then also the reverse where we can have your JamBio speak back to you, if you want to, if someone wants to. Oh, read from the text into audio. Yeah, so you want to show it to, you know, grandma wants to kind of see it and hear it, things like that. How about pictures from the album? Yeah, you can add photos, you can add photos, we're working on creating, uploading videos and various things like that. Yeah, so it's totally multimedia is the goal, like where we're headed. Videos too, hmm? Yep. So I can really make a terrific book out of it and send it to some relative and they will really know more about me than they ever, ever, ever did, yeah? Well, you get to pick which parts you want to include in your JamBio too. So when I was talking about that you could purchase books, it wouldn't have to be everything you wrote. When you create a book, you pick exactly which chapters and sections you want to include for that particular book that you're creating. You know, I mentioned before, just as a kind of reverse twist, it's kind of a time capsule in reverse, but you know, let me suggest a scenario to you. I have family, lots of things I'm not gonna tell them. I mean, I personally would, but there are people out there who are not gonna tell their family, their background, their sordid past, okay? But I make one of your JamBiospiosis, right? I make that, I put it all in there, okay? And what is this? This is sitting by itself alone until I die. And when I die, it is released to my family and they get to know everything about me, things they would never have otherwise known. And this is my legacy to them. I'm telling them the whole story about everything. This is a great thing. I gotta tell you something, Jay, because we've only just recently opened it up to the public and only recently started getting users, but we actually received an email from our user the other day and it was a woman and she had written about how she was actually quite ill. She had a number of different illnesses and she is a writer and she said she had thought that her books would be sort of her legacy and how her children would know who she was. And she started using JamBios and she said what a wonderful thing that now I can write about each child and say my memories. I remember this wonderful thing about you and this about you in my JamBio and I will be able to leave that for now. It is a great gift. It is a fabulous gift. A gift, unfortunately, that most people don't leave for their kids. They never have that final moment where they can express exactly how they have felt about those kids. You know, another angle to this too is that kids could actually use it as a tool to interview their parents. Because, you know, like, I mean, I wish that this had been around when my parents were alive because I would have been able to have used it to ask them certain questions about their lives and then documented all of that. And, you know, just in that particular, that whole connection piece really is so valuable because now you're taking a whole different interest in your parents' lives more than just being parent-child. Now you're really interested about what are they really like as people, you know, other than just that relationship. And you get to interview them and record all of those memories and what a special gift that is, you know, in terms of creating a deeper connection. So you're playing in the interstices of the psychology of the family, of the individual. You're playing with feelings, you know. This is a way to characterize and memorialize your feelings. But I can tell you, one of the... There were a number of things that inspired me about to create JamBio's, but one of the main factors was my family had a Google group email that was going around and my father and my uncle were talking about the bar that they grew up in in Boston. Their father owned a bar. And they were telling the stories in this email. Cheers. They were telling the stories of the old barmaids and they were doing all of this and that and my cousins and I were just fascinated. Every day a new email would come in and it was just the greatest thing in the world. It takes you back. It takes you back to a time maybe you didn't know. It gives you a historical context on your own heredity. So let me ask you one other question. So we're talking about where you are on the line between conceiving of the idea and making it a million billion. Okay, so you gotta have some capital. So what, are you independently wealthy? What happened? We are self-funding it. So I'm fortunate enough to have this other business and I've got cooperation that I talked about and so at this point we are self-funding. We've been talking to some of the local venture capitalists, a few of the nice people in town and discussing some things with them. But we feel too that we can get, we have three different revenue streams that we're looking at and we think that, I mentioned the books. We think the books can happen pretty quickly. So I think we'll be bringing in some money fairly quickly on that. But we also have a whole concept for corporate, the corporate space and what we'd like to do is be able to help companies be able to interact with consumers on a deeper level and with their nostalgia and memories of their products. So we talked about your dodge, but what if the company, whose dodge is dodge dodge or is dodge GM? So GM, I think. So if GM wanted to run some kind of sponsorship or campaign and say something like a contest with what was the best road trip that you ever took in dodge and everyone could put in their great memories and what a wonderful way for these old nostalgic brands to be able to connect through their nostalgia with consumers. So we are looking at that. And they can use that material and going public on the brand. The best testimonials with these memories that they have. The other corporate thing that comes to mind is the relationship of the individual with the corporation. In other words, you have memories about the dodge, but also memories about the corporation, especially if you're senior and you've been around for a while. You may have an historical context there, memories of how it was in the early days. And that would be very interesting. And even going further, you could go even further to the human resources aspect of this, how do you feel about the company? And that would be valuable if you could develop an environment where the employee would be candid. But I think you could do that because you guys have the skill. So we're out of time. I'm so sorry to say, this has been really interesting. Ruby, I'm gonna let you close, okay? Cause you know how to do that. What have we learned today? Summarize, all right? Well, we've learned about JamBios and then we've also learned about how important memories are as a part of our lives and also how that can also create deeper connections with people and amongst peoples, especially when people are starting to collaborate and remember the memories together. And I just told Beth that I kind of viewed it as crowdsourcing your memories, because sometimes you'll have a memory but when somebody else comes in, they may have had a totally different experience of it than you did. And now all of a sudden that story starts to build out and becomes wonderful. I mean, not that yours wasn't wonderful but it becomes more rich and varied because now you have other people's perspectives. Yeah, it's the intersection of computer science and sociology, fabulous idea. Well, I wish you well, you guys. It sounds very enriching and valuable as an experience we could all have. So, good luck. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Jay. That's Carvin and Ruby Menon. Thank you so much. Aloha.