 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Autotech Council Innovation and Motion Mapping and Navigation Event in Milpitas, California at the Western Digital Offices here. Really interesting conversations going on in the breakout rooms and the keynotes next door. Now there's so many layers to this navigation thing, which is just one component in kind of the autonomous car story. That is just, you just keep peeling back the onion and there's more and more and more, which is really fascinating. We're really excited to have Christian Cotcher join us. He's the CEO of MetroTech, first of all Christian, welcome. Thank you. So for those that aren't familiar, what does MetroTech do? So MetroTech is a Smarter City data exchange. So we use maps, we write on top of maps, but what we basically do is go to existing cities and counties and metro areas and take their existing sensors and the new ones they deploy. We bring that into our cloud-based system where we convert it into real-time traffic data. So if you've ever had Google Maps or Waze or some of these others, you've used real-time traffic data. What we do is we enhance that by giving them real-time data. So using the actual video, turning it into actual speeds, actual counts, actual density, and then you can do more than just real-time, you can start to do predictive because we take so many different elements like the lane level, the density. So it's really big data for traffic and then what we do in the exchange is we publish it out then. So we don't think it's just the cities, but it's the people driving on their streets. So we've got to find a way to get it out for multiple use cases. And I'll talk a little bit more about the wrong-way driver and safety alerts, but how do we get it out to somebody using Waze as well as somebody using InRex, somebody using TomTom, somebody using Telenev, somebody using their Ford in-car vehicle. So we're basically setting up that necessary data exchange that allows smarter cities to speak with autonomous vehicles and connected cars. So that's what we've been building out in some key major cities and now we're working on some major alliances to make this a de facto standard. So our goal is to become the verisign of the smarter city, if you will. So somebody's got to organize this and somebody's got to publish it out and it needs to be in neutral trust at third party and that's what Medrotech's building. Fascinating, because there's so many elements both on the input and the output side, right? So as you said, if they have existing sensors, so we've all seen the cameras on busy intersections, so you use that data, you use, probably I'm sure they have new and better and faster types of sensors and stuff under the concrete, so you're using that. Are you putting in your own sensors as well? We're agnostic and we don't want to be in the hardware business, so software is a service only and it's a data exchange. So you've seen exchanges in the past, right? In the advertising world, online traffic world, so we're now building an exchange for the smarter city and the autonomous world. And in the meantime, there's this connected world where we've got a bunch of us silly humans driving along with these smart cars and that's gonna be, sure we might have autonomous the next couple of years, I believe we will, but that's gonna be for a very small part of the population. We've got to deal with erratic, ridiculous, fallible human input for driving for the next decade, the very least, if not even further. So during that time, rather than have a probe sample set of what speed is going on and what drivers are doing, there's very key elements like right out here in front of you guys, it's a busy tech corridor. Why wouldn't you want to have perfect information on that? We can provide that very low cost, very easily, and then we will send that and basically publish it to all consumers. So Verizon and an AT&T and a Sprint and a T-Mobile and all the other carriers could consume that data and put it into their connected cars and into their mapping apps. So is there a standard definition, so you take from all of the variety of sensors, you're converting basically raw video data and some other raw data into some machine readable, what's actually happening, and then publishing that out, as you said, to two variety of potential sources as an exchange, could be to Google in Waze, could be to Ford in Toyota, could be to the fire department and the UPS FedEx. Think how many millions of dollars a day they waste when they wait traffic the wrong way. So is there now, or are you creating kind of that standard definition of what is happening that can then feed all these other things through the APIs? Yeah, the standards have not been written for this yet. We're literally writing the standards as we launched these first pilots. So we just rewarded yesterday a USDOT granted project down in Florida where we're taking LiDAR data and publishing it to DSRC. And then the next, so I'm sorry, DSRC is Direct Short Range Communications. So, and this actually, thank you for asking. So 15 years ago, the USDOT and the FCC created the space of a bandwidth that's kept aside for cars to talk to each other. That was 99 that Congress wanted. They set it aside in 99. They set it aside, but we haven't used it. Now they're about to take half of it back. Who is the ingenious person that set that aside in 1999? I know them, I'll let them be with you too. There's some good folks, and they're still waiting. Think it ahead. The vision was there, but the execution was not. So I, at IBM, I started an intelligent transportation practice. I had three friends, my family. So you keep saying smart cities, you got the IBM? Well, we called it, so it first was called Community Wide Broadband, and I own that globally at IBM. Worst name, I didn't pick it. Within my rate of digital cities. It was a lot more about fire and police response and those types of things. So as it, as I was leaving, they sort of the smarter planet thing, and it became smarter cities after I left. But smarter cities the last 10 years, eight years at least, have been kind of dictated by solar, LED lighting, smart grids, and electric cars. It hasn't been what I traditionally thought, when we founded Smarter City and Digital Cities, was it's how do I get people routed home, routed to work, routed to the fire? How do I get the goods delivered in the most efficient manner? How do I measure it? And my old boss, when I was at, boss's boss way back, went to GE up the chain, but Jack Wells used to say you can't manage what you can't measure. You can't measure it, right? That's what we do is we give you a more accurate measurement. Right now you're kind of got to guess. It's kind of like managing by, you know, your blindfold on. So this is the whole idea of measuring in great detail and publishing it out so people can actually make decisions for themselves. Right. So one of the key themes we see over and over again, not just in this space, but all over the space, right? Is you want to use a combination of your proprietary data, existing open data, and then apply your proprietary algorithms to that data to get a competitive advantage. And that's really what you're talking about here. So, but on the standards parts, the other big thing obviously is open source, right? And there's a conversation about open contributions to these mapping projects in the other room. Is this kind of an open source kind of initiative, or is it more kind of a standards initiative to get that definition of the thing that you're going to be trading on your exchange? Eric from Mapbox just opened up with a, and he always does a great job, but he talked about open is not free. And what you see is- Free like a puppy, we like to say. Well, yeah, that's a good way to look at it. If you look at open data initiatives in New York City and San Francisco and a lot of these places got out early, what they were doing was just putting a bunch of spreadsheets online, right? So that's open, but it's not useful. So why not have a monetized organization, a way, a mechanism to be able to make that usable? So if they've got servers in their basements of City Hall full of data that you and I could use, but they have no way how to get it out, that's what we help them do is we help them get it out. They might have censored data in their cabinets that we're going to help get out, and we're going to release. So that's why it's an AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and kind of a network thing, is that there's data we've got to get out of the cabinets back into City Hall, back into the traffic management centers, but then we've got to publish it out. And those standards have not been written yet. Well, I was thinking more on the standard side. So yeah, it's open, it's available. But then in terms of kind of a methodology for creating standards, we've seen this rise of open source software become really more of the mechanism that defines the standards versus, say, a regulatory body. But we still have that, right? 5G, they're still arguing about what the 5G is going to look like. So in your case, is it going to be more, you think, the community coming together and defining this open standard API that we can all share to our benefit? Or do you see it as more of a regulatory kind of a, or a trade association or kind of a thing? At best, what trade association's helping us out, but I think it'll be the industry coming together and doing it. So for instance, we've got in one of our major metros, we've got a wrong-way driver system where we're using the existing cameras and we're just watching for wrong-way drivers with machine vision 24-7. Then when we get out of the wrong-way driver hit, we take it to machine learning and we start using AI to try to get rid of the false positives. Because sometimes the truck's shadow going down a road on the other side of the road could look to machine vision like another truck. So it's how do we break that out? So we have those algorithms. Then it goes to a human where they say yes or no. This is a wrong-way driver. If it's a no, that goes back into the AI to make it better for next time. But if it's a yes, we don't think just trying to put on flashing lights for the drunk or the suicidal person driving down the road is what we want to do. We want to get a hold of the UPS truck, the Uber drivers. You're ford with connected car through AT&T, right? We want to get it out to the people coming down the road and warn the innocents. So that's standard. We're literally writing now and publishing. And then the more people we get to consume that, you know, we'll try to get a blessing or a USDOT thing on it later on. But right now, we can't wait for them to make a ruling. We're just publishing that out. And we've already integrated to Ericsson and AT&T. That alert is going out right now. Does it go out via like the Amber Alert system? Yeah, it's a great way to put it. It's the exact same type of a system. But the nice thing is, instead of It's that car coming at you. Right, but we can localize it. Because if it's in my connected car, my connected car knows where it is. So I can send it out with a fence around it, with a road. So it's not waking you up when you're sleeping in a hotel next to the road, right? It's not going to wake you up at three in the morning because there's a wrong-way driver. It's going to know that your phone's sitting in your bedside table is not moving. But when you're moving down the road, and I can now say it's on that street, and there is a danger. And a wrong-way driver is just the first. I mean, how many times you come over, he'll go around a corner, all of a sudden there's a stop. And one of the interesting things we've been working on our research is they got this idea that the cars will do it themselves, right? This car will do a fast break. Right, they'll all talk to each other. Well, so we had this great example of this. It was a busy, busy four lane intersection, and there was a truck up ahead that I just happened to spot hit its brakes, and that would have triggered an alert had this system been deployed. And the particular carry I was working with on this project to say, well, if you had sent this back over the hill, you would have caused me to hit my brakes for absolutely no reason. So this whole idea that hard braking always indicates that you should slow down or there's an accident is false. Yes, it's a leading indicator. It can help us say, OK, let's look maybe a little bit tighter and see. But what happened was I saw the smoke come up. I saw him brake, and then I saw the lucky Prius driver. He slammed on the brakes, he blocked up. And then this silly Prius driver comes out on the other side, who was the luckiest Prius driver in Nashville that day because he cut in front of him and fought for that guy. But in that speed with that density of traffic, if you send back that alert, you're just going to cause that wave going back. So what you'd rather do is say, it's getting a little bit tight. What if you as a paid you drive insurance user say, I want a lower rate if I drive safer? And what if we could publish through your, let's say, all state or progressive or state farm? What if we're publishing out to your page you drive and you get a warning saying, if you want to keep your low rates, we'd like you to take it down to about 50 right now because you're about to come into an area where we've looked at the predictability, so there's likely to be an accident within the next few minutes and we'd like you not to be that person, and that you adjust your speed according and you keep your low driver. Sure, and your phone and the thing just does it automatically, right? When it drives itself, it'll probably do that automatically. And we're looking forward to that too. This is really some really interesting examples on the tying these things together for a real specific benefit. I'm just curious to get your perspective on kind of how much of the infrastructure is in place at the cities in terms of the sensors and cameras, and I'm sure the red light cameras were probably a big motivator to get some of those things in. And I don't know, are we 20% of what they would like in place for you to do what you want to do? Are they 50%? Are they 80%? Kind of where is that? And who are the leaders, city-wise, with the infrastructure where you can deploy to the best benefit of your vision? I'll say every city has a significant amount of infrastructure already out there, especially in the way of cameras. There's literally millions of cameras deployed. And what are those feed mainly now? So right now the police will use them for stakeouts, for looking in. Traffic will use them to respond to accidents, but what people don't understand as common drivers is that it's not that they're looking at the cameras to try to see where there's traffic, they're getting 911 calls and they're using the camera to replace the helicopter. They're using the camera to see what do I need to dispatch? Do I need to dispatch an ambulance? To get eyes on. To get eyes on. But they're not, and there's some analytics out there for certain, and we take those analytics in as well. There's already a video analytic on it. We'll take that video analytic into our engine and that works just fine. We've got examples of that in a couple of Smarter Cities. So there's Smarter Cities in Atlanta and San Francisco and Chicago. Columbus, Ohio, obviously is great. Austin, Dallas, Miami, Jacksonville. I mean, there's a lot of interesting cities that are doing some great things that are not as much in the spotlight that are wanting to really jump ahead and leap ahead. So we're working with some key alliances, some majors, right? Our platform runs on Microsoft Azure. We select it very specifically because it works so well in the IoT world. We actually have their IoT platform that we've built this on. So our platform will basically, if you call me tomorrow and said, here's a video feed in Minneapolis, we'll have data pumping through our Smarter City exchange. It's called the Digital Streets platform. We'll have it pumping out tomorrow. And so then if you've got a Ford car that's on the other side of that, it'll have data, whatever city it's in. So that's why we say it's an exchange. And should it be open, absolutely. But there's got to be ways to monetize it. So it might be ad sponsored. It might be subscription based. It might be subsidized by your car or carrier or your insurance provider because they want you to have a safer ride or better ride. Crazy times because the whole thing's flipping up. I mean, new models, new forms of transportation, new forms of propulsion. That's why the autonomous vehicle and just the mobility space in general. So exciting right now. Well, Christian, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I'll let you get back to the conference. There's some great presentations going on. Looking forward to it. All right, he's Christian Katra. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We are at the mapping and navigation portion of the AutoTech Council Innovation in Motion. Thanks for watching.