 Welcome to the two-wheel revolution here on ThinkTechHawaii.com. I'm Peter Rossick, your host. This is where we talk about what's generally called micro-mobility or personal mobility. Bicycles, e-bikes, e-scooters, e-skateboards, unicycles, the whole works. Eventually we're even gonna get to electric wheelchairs about the time that I'm ready to use one. So without further ado, I want to get started. Our guest is Brian Ovale. And I think we're gonna have a very interesting conversation. Hi, Peter. Great to be here. Appreciate it. Hey, Brian. Brian is one of the founders, I think, of a company called HelloLama. So let's start, Brian, just very generally. If you can tell us a little bit about yourself. You and I met at the micro-mobility conference in San Francisco last September. One of the nicest guys I met there, I will say. And that was an eight a bunch of very nice people. But Brian, tell us about your background, Rick, briefly. How you got to be, to form HelloLama. Sure. Well, I originally went to school in Carnegie Mellon, which is a very tech-oriented school. And I'd always been interested in engineering and technology. But that really solidified my love of technology, but then also my passion for business and trying to pursue and melt both those things. Then I started my career in aerospace, which is really great for learning structures and process, but not so much for speed and innovation. And then so I wanted to do something new. And I got a flavor and a taste for startups working for SpaceX back in the early years when they were transitioning from R&D to serial production. And that's when my love of startups and tech development really came together. Then I went to work for a company named Romeo Power Technology, where we were designing and manufacturing custom with my own batteries. And that was a small garage startup that ended up scaling to 220 people and the 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility. So the kind of really from soup to nuts and cradle to grave, we've done it. And that's where I met my partner, Arun Genesakran, who's the CTO of HelloLama. And Arun and I decided to go and venture out on our own. And then we were fortunate enough to meet with some seasoned executives and other entrepreneurs in the micro-mobility space that had been in the space and had launched multiple companies early, probably about maybe before even kind of the electric bike share, they had launched even regular non-electric bike share. So they were seasoned execs. We came together actually at micro-mobility about a year ago. We started to canvas the conference and see what's really missing from the industry. I mean, we're all real believers in Modeshift and trying to promote LEVs. But what were the issues facing the industry and where do we see there was opportunity to help promote the proliferation of LEVs and other micro-mobility type vehicles? And we realized that while people were designing- When you say LEV, that means a light electric vehicle, is that right? Yes, sorry about that. I'm sorry, just as long as we spell out the acronyms, we'll be fine. So then we realized that if you, we saw that people were building purpose built vehicles. More load capacity for cargos or faster speeds, more rugged terrain, different kinds of upgrades and purpose-driven designs like that, but we didn't see things really being done from a safety perspective. And that's when we developed the thesis that a lot of the early enthusiasts, a lot of the early adopters, they're already incorporating micro-mobility and light electric vehicles into their transportation habits. But we really felt like the majority, if you really want everyone to be looking at these as not just hobby devices or just like fun devices, that actually, these are devices that you can incorporate into your daily travels and can replace so many car trips a year, we realized that safety is an issue. We, the percent, and after doing a lot of discovery, we realized the perception of safety around these vehicles is not strong because the roads are built for cars. Right. And if you've ever been on a scooter when the cars go in 40 miles an hour next to you and you're not in a protected lane, it can be pretty scary. So a lot of the masses we felt like we're not comfortable riding because the infrastructure is lacking and in total honesty, the actual devices themselves have not onboarded the safety features that will convert this population of people. I see. So, and that led to the formation of Hello Lama. I'm sure you're asked this question all the time. What's the significance of the Lama? How or where does that come into the picture? Yes, I've asked many times. So it's two-fold. One, we actually did, we were looking for kind of a different kind of representation of the company that was fun. And, but then we were looking at different animal types and other kinds of things. And Lama's actually, they have a unique ability where they have very keen eyesight and they have a great memory. So as they're experiencing something, they're able to incorporate that knowledge, which really fit well with our computer vision and our AI technology that continues to improve as it's being used and it continues to improve the detection, accuracy and speed. And then the other reason was that people always ask. Go ahead. People always ask, why Hello Lama? And it does stick. And I've been in many- I'm a patient starter every time, huh? Yeah, and people are always like, Hey, are you the Lama guy? And it's like, yes, I am. I am the Lama guy. Right, none of this Steve Jobs black t-shirt thing, right? You're the Lama guy. I'm the Lama guy. So I now have to ask one dumb Lama joke question. What is the Lama's favorite drink? I'm sure you know. I don't actually. What is it? It's Laminade. Oh man, that's great. All right. I am definitely going to borrow that. All right, all right. That will be until the very end when I have perhaps one more, that'll be the last Lama joke. But let's, before we're gonna talk about the technology. Think tech is a technology platform primarily, although these shows get into a lot of different areas. And I wanna talk about your technology in particular and what you see, it's possible to get an e-scooter or an e-bike to do. But before that, and I wanna reinforce what you just said in one respect. Safety is probably the biggest perception problem that scooters and even e-bikes to a large extent, but certainly scooters and e-skateboards and so forth represent, but it's not just safety for the rider. It is safety for pedestrians and it is safety for drivers who may survive the crash, but may regret it for the rest of their lives. So we're all in on the safety thing. Since I've started doing this program just about four or five months, I've gotten so many horror stories, very frankly of people who have collided or who have been collided by e-scooters or e-skateboards or whatever and both parties suffered. But so I think the safety thing is just so important, just so important. And that's why I wanted to get you on the show. But let's take the step back and you started to talk about this. I think you're right. I think if you look around most metropolitan cities right now, you'll see people on skateboards and people on scooters and so forth, e-bikes are coming in, but how do we get to the next level? What is it gonna take to move this space? Cause I'm sorry to be talking so much, but we see pushback in many cities. We see Paris talking about outlawing them entirely or regulating them severely or requiring licensing for riders and so forth. There's a lot of pushback right now and companies are going out of business and conglomerating and so forth. So, but how are we gonna get to this next level of use of these mobility devices? Yeah. I mean, you started to talk about it. We really feel safety is the enabler and it's not just safety from the technology side of the vehicle side. It is a collaboration between infrastructure and policy changes, a further understanding of how these modes can be incorporated into the urban landscape and promoted for daily use within people's lives. And then we combine that with tech and safety enhancements. So at Lama, what we're able to do is we have a system that we use a suite of sensors. Every technology has its positives and its negatives and an example would be computer vision. That's really great technology. Super, like you can do so many incredible things with it, super flexible, but it's not really good for certain types of jobs. There's other things like radar and other kinds of technologies, actually physical sensors, they all have their pluses and minuses and what they're able to do to be used in order to detect things or in order to create different kinds of capabilities. But when they're isolated and by themselves, they have a lot of limitations. Lama actually combines computer vision, AI, physical sensors and radar to create what we like to call the Lama safety halo. And this is a perception bubble that is created around the vehicle in order to completely enhance all of the perception and detection and the abilities of the device. So we use computer vision for sidewalk and parking detection and compliance. A lot of cities are mandating that. And then we, so those are the kind of the basic table stakes at the very bottom level of kind of assistance features. But Lama, we are an active safety technology company. So while we have those enhancements, we also have other enhancements such as we have active helmet detection. So where there's capabilities with a system, if a city wants to demand helmet riding, we can actually monitor during the ride that the helmet is continuing to be worn as opposed to something like a helmet selfie where you can remove the helmet after you take the selfie. This is continuous checking during the ride. So policy makers, regulators that wants a helmet detection, they can have that now. And that's part of the, that's part of the computer vision system. Additionally- Can I use my own helmet or do I have to use your blue, your hook-in helmet? Just- Yeah, the beauty is it will detect any helmet. We've trained the detection models to be able to detect the helmet covering from any different kind of helmet. So there's a lot of flexibility in terms of where it can be used and what kind of helmets it will detect. And over time, it will continue to get even stronger. And then we also have features like dual riding. So a lot of emergency room visits are a product of two people riding on a vehicle, a scooter that's only designed for one person. And when those people go down or there's an incident and it throws off a lot of the dynamics of the vehicle and it really ends in a lot of serious injuries that people end up in the emergency room. We have the ability through the footboard to implement a part of our system where we can actively detect that at all times. So we have the ability, again, to either slow down the ride or flag the rider. We have a whole new window of ability to look into the risk of certain riding behaviors and certain riders themselves. So from an insurance perspective, operators now have data and they have the ability to really not just monitor their fleet behavior, but also influence the fleet behavior in real time. So can I, I do want to go back to the visual for a few minutes, so maybe we can make sure we've covered all the various things that are on there because it's a fascinating picture, but let me ask you a couple of more general questions. So your business is basically a business to business system, right? You're looking for fleet operators who are ready and willing or required to put in more safety to their scooter fleets. Is that about right? Yes, that's where we're starting. That's definitely our beachhead market. We're also looking, we're also in talks and looking for additional OEM partners to integrate the technology at the factory. OEM, original equipment manufacturers. So the people that are developing and building and designing these vehicles, we're really looking to work with them as well to getting at the ground floor. So it's the cheapest from an integration perspective. It's also the best from an aesthetic perspective to just incorporate that, these kinds of advanced features at the factory level. Just to give us an idea, I have no idea what a factory level e-scooter actually costs, but I think it's probably fairly low. How much would it cost to implement your full suite of safety devices onto a typical scooter? Round figures? Yeah, no problem. So what we like to do is we have about 10% of the bomb that we've allocated for different vehicle types, depending on the complexity of their electrical system and how we would have to integrate the vehicle. But that's pretty much like a rough target. As we get to more expensive vehicles like a golf cart or something like that, the percentage drops down because we don't need that extra overhead in terms just because the vehicle is more expensive. So on something like a scooter that might be $700 from a factory at scale, we're looking to deliver the system for no less than $70 or no more than $70. So yeah, I mean, we've really drilled down the system to make sure that there's no technical overhead in terms of, do we have more fat in the system that we don't need or hasn't, but we do not. So we've drilled it down to having a very purpose-driven system and it really does what it's supposed to do very well, but it doesn't have an onboard computer. We don't provide IoT services. We don't do any kind of the ancillary operations around it. It's, we really focus on detection and making sure that we have sufficient power on board because we do everything on the edge. It's all calculated on the device in real time as opposed to having- So on a device, is this a box that's attached or is it wired into the baseboard or if I were looking at a scooter, would I be able to tell if it has your kind of technology on it? Yeah, it's a, I get that question a lot. So if we've done our job really well, you actually shouldn't be able to tell that it's, that Lama is on there, which is something that is an interesting problem as well from like a marketing perspective. Yeah, right. You're gonna have to have a sticker or a label or something, you know, like an Intel. Right, protected by Lama. It's because we're in time. Lama on board. Lama on board, yeah. We need something like the Intel inside, exactly. So yeah, I mean, the operator or the OEM, that's their product and the silhouette of the vehicle, the, you know, the aesthetics of the vehicle, that's part of their product. That's part of their brand. So we don't want to necessarily completely upset that aesthetic. However, we do need to make sure that we're in the proper locations. And so for a vehicle like a scooter, you might notice a very small box, right by kind of the handlebar and where the stem meet. For the radar detection and the blind spot detection part of the system, it actually would be incorporated near the rear reflector on the back wheel. So, you know, perception-wise, you might walk up to a Lama scooter and have no idea that it's in there, you know, unless there was some outward marketing or. And these, these warning or these things that are monitored, are they monitored just on your scooter or does the, is there a bigger system, a Bluetooth or a wireless system where the operator or the whole system can see you or see where you're riding or so forth? What amount of it is on board and talks to you, the rider and what amount of it is off board and is monitored by the, by the operator, I guess is my question. Rick, yeah, great question. So the detection is happening in real time and we would alert the rider in real time to, you know, give them the warnings they need or to try to influence their behavior. Let's say they're riding on the sidewalk, we want them to move off. So those can be in the form of audible alerts. They can be in the form of visual alerts. And we even also are working on haptics as well, where, you know, we can, you know, just vibrate the handle bar and other methods like that in order to send someone an indication of something they need to correct. And then that information is stored locally and then during recharge events, that data is uploaded in bulk to a central server or the operator or whomever is in charge of that fleet could be looking at the data on a anonymized but also like user ID kind of perspective. So again, they would have fleet intelligence and be able to look at what the behavior of these rides are. So, I mean, I have an Apple watch. If I fall down, my Apple watch automatically calls someone and tells them, you know, first of all, it calls me or it messages me. So this is the kind of thing we're talking about, right? They were, it messages me and said, you seem to have fallen, are you okay? And if they don't get an answer, it calls my emergency contact. So, and when I had a first segue or a long ago if you started going too fast, it's simply the handle bar simply shook. So that's the kind of, is this the kind of thing we're talking about here in terms of interacting with the rider? Similar. I mean, we want to give you, we want to give you the awareness of your environment. So if someone is behind you or closing in on an angle towards you that might intercept and clip you, you know, we want to be able to give you that information in real time so that you can actually do something with it, right? So that has to be very quick response. It has to be noticeable immediately in order to actually be a value to the rider. And additionally, the audible alerts and the other indicator alerts, we can also do so where like you mentioned earlier, do we make it, how do we make it safer for cars as well? We can also do things with signaling of vehicles that are around you. So pedestrians and other kinds of, there's actual other vehicles can hear your presence. They can understand that you're, that there's a potential interception path that's going to occur or something like that. We really, we really are trying to take into account not just how do we make the vehicle safer but how do we make the coexistence of all of these vehicles and pedestrians safer? Yeah, that gets to my earlier point about, it's just, it's not just safety for the rider. And then I guess the operator who downloads all this equipment, all this information can then turn around to the city, which is licensing them or regulating them and say, look, we, you know, only 10% of our riders wherever on the sidewalk or, you know, we have these figures that show what the level of the safety of our operations are. I would assume that's an addition, but could they also, you say it was anonymized, but they could say, oh my God, this guy's crazy. We're not gonna let him, we're not gonna let him run any more of our scooters. Is that a possibility if they see somebody? That is a possibility, yes. We wouldn't know who that person is. We wouldn't have any personal identifying information, but the fleet operator would know that that's user 12345. And whatever they have in their background of their fleet management tool, that they would be able to marry that information together and create, you know, some kind of profile for their users, which also, you know, that from a safety and data perspective, being able to tell the city, not only did we only have, you know, a sidewalk riding this many instances, but we're able to correct that behavior and on average it took two seconds or something like that because we have the time data of how long it takes to correct the behaviors that are being indicated or the warnings that are being given to the rider. We also track near misses for insurance purposes as well. So, you know, you'll be able to demonstrate and actually show data to your insurance carrier about your ability to increase the safety of your fleet. So from how do we proliferate micro mobility even further? We kind of bring insurance costs down because if you've talked to any operator, you know that they are astronomical and they can be a business killer right off the bat. It really prevents a lot of entries into other markets just because the insurance premiums might be too high. Interesting. So if I'm not a fleet operator, obviously, I want to have a scooter and I want to have all these features on my scooter. How do I do that? Yeah, that's definitely something that we are looking into that's on our product roadmap to use the initial success from the fleet deployments and the commercial deployments in order to create a suite of consumer products as well. That's something that we're looking at probably in the 2024 timeframe, but there has been high interest in being able to implement some of these features onto consumer devices and we are looking into that and it's definitely on the roadmap for us. So talk to me in 2024 and we can get you some sample product. You're going to Amsterdam and next year and well in June of this year, I'll expect something by then. So... I love it. So at the moment, in other words, short answer is at the moment, if I want to go to Amazon.com or Segway or any of the other places where I might buy any scooter, I can't have the option to say, give me the Lama infused, the Lama onboard version because you're not out there yet. Not yet, no. No, we will be launching some deployments of product at the end of Q1 this year and then we'll continue to increase the deployments as we go forward. And but we're definitely happy to let you know once we have the first fleets deployed and then where you can test the product in those markets. I'll go to Kickstarter and I'll send you your first dollar on Kickstarter. I love it. Okay, so and to be clear again, this is something that could be used on an e-bike or an e-scooter or an e-scapeboard or one of those unicycle pieces that scare the daylights out of me personally among the many things that scare me. But this we're talking about a technology that could be used across the board of electrified transportation. Is that about right? That's correct, yes. The systems are built to be flexible and we actually have it integrated right now on a mini bike, like a wheels mini bike. And we also have it integrated on multiple different scooter types right now. We're in the conversations with e-cargo vendors and also e-bike vendors as well to implement the technology on those vehicles as well. So 2023 is going to be a very busy year for us. Lots of different product deployments, but yeah, we're really happy that we're going to get some of the system out in many different flavors so that people can really see the flexibility of the technology and how it can be incorporated into these different kinds of vehicles to really promote a whole new swath of capabilities. Yeah, that's very interesting. I guess if we look at the automobile paradigm, I mean, we start, you look at a Tesla today and it's got a screen which shows you the other vehicles around you, shows you pedestrians. It's got all kinds of monitors on it that for safety features. And then eventually you see those kind of trickle down to a little less expensive and eventually less expensive vehicles. And then finally, they're in my little Toyota Celica. So do you see the same kind of evolution in terms of these safety systems? Absolutely. And I think you can see it even with the products, how they're being upgraded now. Segway has released a computer vision module with a scooter with a computer vision module on it in order to do sidewalk detection and other kinds of AI powered capabilities. And they're one of the largest OEM manufacturers in the globe. So there's already been validation that the market has demanded additional safety features and cities also are looking for ways to decrease the risk of allowing these types of systems. So I think it's the perfect storm of people wanting different kinds of options, cities understanding a little bit more that there are new available technologies and options that where they can dramatically increase the safety of these systems beyond what they've been told or what they've seen in the past. And we also have a huge policy regulatory title of happening where cities are getting redesigned. There's more car free zones. People are looking into different kinds of infrastructure and how we can promote bike usage and other kinds of other alternative means, micro mobility, et cetera. So it's kind of the perfect timing for all of this to really come together. And if we can get the right people in the right room and because we all want the same thing, right? How do we have more micro mobility? How do we have increased usage of LEVs and electric vehicles across the globe? We can do it right now. It's available to us. It just requires the right amount of coordination, the right amount of collaboration and we can really see drive impact to really converting the masses in a very short amount of time. One of the things in some of the discussions of self-driving vehicles, autos or trucks, there's some talk about having the infrastructure with some built-in electronics that would be used to guide or to control the non-driverless or vehicles. Are there things like that that could be, we're here in Honolulu, we're very slowly, but meaningfully adding to the infrastructure and having bike lanes that are not just paint on the sidewalk or on the street, but protected and so forth. But is there gonna be, do you think an electronic component to that that's going to, I mean, you could monitor speed, I'm sure right now with the very cops do it all the time for cars. So are there things that as we look at expanding the infrastructure that we ought to be thinking about in terms of this safety factor and the technology that we can use? Well, I think one really compelling technology that is going to really change like the shared micro-mobility space in the not too distant futurist is teleoperations. The ability to move and steer these vehicles through the air, through your computer, from the operational metrics around running a fleet are very thin margin. It's very difficult to make a profit. And the biggest expense is the manual labor and logistics behind the repositioning and the recharging of vehicles. It also removes the asset from the field unless you're doing solvable batteries. But if you enable the ability to move these vehicles as you need them to be moved from high from low demand areas to high demand areas throughout the day, when they meet when there's certain recharge when there's at a certain battery level to bring them back into the depot all those things can be automated or at least highly automated from a tele-operation perspective. And you can really achieve a lot of operational efficiency and scale very quickly with that at low costs. There's actually a couple of top watch that does that. One of the concept vehicles, I guess, that was shown that the micro-mobility conference was that wheel, W-E-E-L which has got to be the worst possible name, worse than llama, you know what I mean? Cause how do you look up wheel on the, anyway, it's W-E-E-L and it was basically a self-driving bicycle. And are you talking about that in the future I would go out to my neighborhood bike path and there would be empty bikes moving around to get to their correct stations? Is that what I'm hearing you talking about? It's possible right now and wheel, yes, they're fully autonomous, but if a tele-operation there's a human controlling it with like, you know, a controller or joystick they could be sitting anywhere and they're able to move multiple vehicles at the same time. So that technology exists today, it's not available at scale, but you know, the right partner can, the right partners can get together and they can bring that to market very quickly because like I said, the technology already exists. It just has not been deployed. And I think over the course of the next probably five years or so as people are really looking at how to make this industry profitable from a shared perspective, they're going to be looking at more advanced technology because the costs are coming down the demand for profit and having a sustainable business model is going up and the biggest linchpin is really manual labor for these shared fleets. So I think it'll eventually come to a head and then the technology will be adopted and I think you will see scooters with no riders moving around and being repositioned in your lifetime. Whoa, you don't know how old I am, but then thank you very much for that mode of confidence. Okay, so in general, is this what we call AR AS, Automated Rider Assistance Systems? Is that the generic term? I read, keep reading it and I just want to make sure that's what we're talking about. Yeah, that's kind of the generic umbrella term is ARAS. But again, we really like to promote the fact that we're mostly interested in active safety. So not just these assistance devices, but things like blind spot detection and collision avoidance, things that are going to prevent crashes and falls. We really want to prevent any incidents and protect people from hazards. Lama's dream is to make sure that everybody that's riding these vehicles gets home safely and that will continue to promote the usage of these vehicle types beyond that individual rider as they have great experiences and the perception of safety is strengthened. Let me ask you another question about acronyms basically, but your site is called hellolama.ai, Artificial Intelligence. And I don't understand the difference between what you'd say is an algorithm inside a device that has certain functions and AI. In other words, are these things you're talking about AI and why are they AI and why are they not just programs or algorithms that do certain kinds of things? Yeah, the AI component is that they continue to improve as they're used more. So the accuracy and the speed of the detection models that we use for the computer vision system and things like that, they're continuing to improve themselves as they're acquiring more data and then the models are reconfiguring themselves for improved performance. So that's that continuous improvement element. Interesting, interesting, very interesting. The bad joke I was going to tell you is Brian, this has been a very illuminating discussion. Oh man, that's bad, that's terrible. It's been great. I want to thank you so, so much. I'm glad we finally got it together. I want to say when you were ready to come back and show me your home model that I can invest in or show me the scooter that I can buy that's got it built in, all of this good stuff built in, people who want to learn more can go to hellolama.ai and see what you've got there and follow you. I think that's, I think as you say, this is going to be a very interesting year. So I want to go to my little micro mobility moment here, but I want to thank you tremendously for having been here and being such a clear speaking, you know, to a novice like me. So thanks again, Brian. I hope I will see one of the micro mobility conferences in the future. Absolutely, Peter. It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Now I want to go, Eric, if you'll put up the other slides, I want to just talk briefly about our micro mobility moment and what we are, what today's micro mobility moment is just one of the many trends of the future kinds of things that you can read on the site right now. This one comes from PBSC, which happens to be the company which provides Bikki or a local bike share, which operates the hardware for them. You can see, and I'm not going to try to read these to you, but they'll be on the twowheelrevolution.com website for you to look at. But the interesting thing is they talk about mobility hubs where a lot of different kinds of technologies are brought together, bikes and scooters and so forth, it enacted close access to the, to other kinds of transportation. This multimodal thing that we've been talking about. And on the next slide, they're just two of them. There are some more things that kind of fit in with that. And one of the main ones is electrification of bicycles, which we really want to see more of here in Honolulu. It's happening everywhere. Bike share fleets are going electric and that enables technologies like, Brian's to be incorporated relatively easily if it starts out at the beginning, at 10% of the cost of a device to make it 100% safer, seems like a very wise investment to me. So there are a lot of articles online right now if you're interested, trends in micro mobility, I'll put this up on the website and you can read it in greater detail. But this is what we're all about here. We're all about trying to figure out how to get from here to the next level, how to get from here to increased use of micro-obility of all kinds, also some more walking, because we could all stand to have a little more walking in our lives. And I really appreciate your spending time with us today and we'll have a new show in a couple of weeks. Again, thank you to Brian O'Vallee of HelloLama.ai who was a great guest and we'll see you next time. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.