 Aloha, and how are you doing? Welcome to Ibachi Talk. Gordo, the tech star here. I'm here with my good old buddy, Andrew, the security guy. Aloha, everybody. Nice to see you. Welcome back. And we have our guest today who's read Brio, or you can say Brio, but that's not as Brio, right? Brio. Yeah, PhD. Nice to have you on the show, man. You're the first PhD we've had on the show. It's pretty courageous of you. Maybe I'm... Well, the show's leveling up. Yeah. Yeah, maybe, maybe. So anyway, please grab yourself a libation, pull up a chair, or a beach towel, and join us today for another exciting episode of Ibachi Talk. You're looking pretty cash today, dude. It's your birthday. I didn't work. It was your birthday yesterday. I leveled up. So your birthday yesterday, kinda nice. I was. 53. Ooh. Guess who else's birthday it is? I don't know. Hamish McGullible's birthday today. Actually, today. So one of our viewers, we have a viewer read, his name is Hamish McGullible. You're internationally... Yeah, he's... Yeah, there he is right there. There's his picture of him right now. He's sitting there right now in his back shed having a beer in his chainsaw. I thought he says beer, but it's beer. It's beer. Yeah, so there he is, Hamish McGullible enjoying his birthday. Happy birthday, Hamish. When's he coming on? We'll have to get him on. It's his fifth year anniversary of his pacemaker, too. How is he? You know, I have no idea. Better he's still working? It must be. He's still... It's your brother. Well, he sent me a text this morning. He's a loyal... He's a loyal, like, viewer. He's younger than I am, so that's all I am. Okay, good enough. I'm glad. I'm glad. So am I. I love that. So, we have come some segments. A couple of shows. A couple of bits. A bit and you know got one tech job. We have some news and stuff like that. Let's do it. I'm going to change things around. I like changing things around to make Zuri and Nick go crazy. Okay. So the script that you write, we never follow? Okay. I like it. Thank you. So, Brad, tell us a little bit about yourself. I moved to Hawaii following my previous job from Minnesota. From Minnesota? I can tell you're from Minnesota. Oh, Zuri's from Minnesota. She loves Minnesota. Hi, Zuri. And then I came here for, initially I came here for a project. Okay. And ended up falling in love with Hawaii. Oh, yeah, right on. And then I met my wife and we have kids now. This is home. This is home now. Amen. Love that. Been in technology for a while. Where'd you go to school? I went to school in Minnesota and then HPU, then Argus University. That's right. So he's alum like you and I. So we got three HPU alums. Three HPU alums. We love HPU. So, and I met you decades ago when you were with Sprint. Was it Sprint? I was with Sprint for a while. I think that we've worked on a project for the Syrian county. Yeah, police department. Police department. Which they're still using, I might add, today. They're still using to this day. Yeah. And fire department and EMS as well. Yeah. That was a great project working with Gordon. And I mean it. Yeah, right now. We all like working with Gordon because he's demanding, but he actually finishes things, you know. That's one of the goals of life, to finish things. That's right. What made it easy for us is he got it. Each time we said something, he got it. Yeah. So we did not have to. Man, he's got to suck it up big time. I may have you on next week. He's not in charge of anything anymore, you know. You're looking for a coho spot. He never gives you anything nice. So what's our tomorrow? Tomorrow. You guys, don't work on weekends. Not the weekend. Not this weekend. Hey, so we got a little bit of background on red. So we have like some of our segments. So let's, we have this thing called, you know, got one tech job. So we find things that are happening around town or our friends sent to me. So what we got today, you know, got one tech job. So this is a shipment of meat that came to Hawaii. It's boneless pork rectums. I think they lost something in the translation. Isn't it called, isn't it called pork butts when you bite at the store? When I go to Safeway. They're inverted. It says inverted. What? Inverted. Oh, they're inverted. That makes it even better. I don't, I don't even, I don't, I'm at a loss. That's even funnier. I think when I finish here, I'm going to run and buy me some of... It's Chinatown just up the street. Wow. I'd like to see the recipe first for, you know... I'd like to see it. And it's a presentation, you know, like... That's what I eat. It's, half the meeting is about presentation. I mean, good lord. Oh my goodness. Okay, okay. So anyway, that wasn't very thematic about digital signage. Yeah, I'm not. Well, that was about signage though, because you know... So it's about signage. If you're reading that in your local grocery, keep moving down the aisle maybe, or maybe you have an affinity, I don't mind. That's content, and that's content. That's the point. Good point. Content has to be thought, well thought of. Yeah, that's it. So you're the president of 212 Communications. So tell us what, and I got news to do, but I still like to, I'm changing things around. I like this. So 212 Communications, so what is that? So 212 Communications is a digital signage company, but it started 2010. Okay. We approach this as signage from a different perspective, not like just content and displays, just to display that content. We look at it more from analytics perspective, from Internet of Things perspective, and how to make the digital signage also work for you. Almost, if you look at it just from a display and content, that's the basic. That's the basic. Yeah, like a menu at a store. So when you're talking about digital signage, we see things like that when we go around, right? We go to office buildings now, and they got digital signage with some stuff maybe on the bottom. Waikiki, I see a few in Waikiki that now are more, they do some advertising and they push some things at you, but there's nothing that says that it's related specifically to me. So are you saying that what you're doing is if I walk by your side, it's going to read my card off my wallet and say, hey, Gordo likes to go scuba diving, and boom, we're going to nail him with that? Well, we could do it, but now the security part of it does not allow us, because it may be illegal. But what we do is the user, the end user, or the customer or the guest that is using that digital signage, the experience for that particular person, we try to enhance it, try to make it better. We try to make the information that that person provides just by touching a screen, useful to the organization providing that digital signage. Instead of, I'm just reading the menu, if I have an interactive application that gathers in data and analytics, and I can take that information and present it to decision makers in a form of business intelligence, then it becomes more useful than just a display. So you're tracking where people are touching or where people are going. That's what we focus on. And you give that to the client. They say, hey, they're going to this particular location a lot. Now, why are they going there? Well, I love it first from the security perspective, because lobbies are an interesting place. People that are coming to a lobby need to be able to go where they're going, get that information quickly, maybe in a couple of different ways. Maybe they're hearing impaired or sight impaired, and so they're able to interact and get the information they need to go. But if a person who is just loitering in my lobby, he could be a problem from a security perspective. You're so paranoid. Yeah, I'm paranoid. A lot of times we have digital signage solutions and technology, but we also rely on the human factor to read and maybe take action. With the integration of Internet of Things, we can remove that human factor. For example, if there is a smoke detector integrated with digital signage, the minute the smoke sensor detects smoke, it changes the content, instructs people to leave the building, gives them the directions, and that way there is no panic. If there is another example, if there is an intruder, an active shooter, he can change the content from a safe and secure place and the student can go to the nearest room and lock yourself into security. You've got me thinking about this. It's brilliant when you think about it. If there is an active shooter in a particular location, boom, you change the signage and you tell everybody to go in that direction or where the active shooter or shooters are not happening. Some people shelter in place. Some need to egress. That's the good thing about having location tied to it is that it's cool. Now, we imagine if our police department, if our sheriff department have access to those signage... Before they get there. ...and the crime... See, it's a small thing that we never think about from a digital signage perspective. Now it's... It's a sensor. You mention safety and that's very, very important. So you get all of the organizations that are having digital signage participating in this... this effort to make things... Yeah, because it can become a sensor, right? It's gathering information as well. It can gather the analytics of how many people pass through. You can get traffic data. So now I'm taking this, the digital signage, we're going to dig deeper into it. My news segment has a little interesting overlap on that and I'm thinking of it now just as a result of our conversation. So, you know, Powerbox sends me information on these new things that they see happening. And one of the things they talked about was wearable trackers. So digital signage is kind of a form of wearable tracker except you're not wearing it, right? You're just going through it. But they were saying that the mobile health apps like your Fitbit, your Apple Watch, your Microsoft Watch, all those kinds of things that are tracking all of that healthcare stuff are somewhat behind the game when it comes to security. You've got non-HIPAA compliance and things like that. So these kinds of things are happening. So developers need to start looking at bringing that up. They've been kind of exempt from it. But I'm thinking now if I'm walking by a digital sign, if it can read my Fitbit, I mean I'm going extreme here, but if it can read my watch, which has my credit card and up comes an advertiser for a golf club or something like this, these are all kinds of things that can start happening with the Internet of Things. The other thing we also noticed is a lot of the stuff that gets bought, especially with the older people, they don't use it because they can't comprehend it. So the application developers have to move that up a bit. I think for a dead space, if you're waiting in an elevator, a lot of those are going to interact on the elevator. Some things you can gather data about other services that are available in the building that you might need or avail yourself of. I'm seeing in elevators, now you're walking in the elevator, they've got the video display up there. There's places for rent, suites for rent in the buildings. If there's a restaurant, they talk about the restaurant. It makes the perceived wait time a lot. It alleviates that perceived wait time. People don't like, they're quick and they have their phone, but if you can get them off their phone, they look up at the screen. They did a best study that said the best thing you can do in lobbies is put in mirrors because people like to look at themselves. That's not wait time because they're looking to see how stylish they are. Interesting. It depends on the industry where the digital signage is, hospitality, healthcare, and the privacy and ethics part of the technology has to be addressed. You're completely right. Let's hold that pause because we have to take a break. We've got to get Angus. He's got the security minute, but at the same time we can talk about that privacy and what's happening in the different audiences. We're talking about content. We'll grab Angus off the beach. He's at a new beach as you can see. We'll be back in a minute. Aloha, I'm Chantal Seville, the host of The Savvy Chick Show which you can watch every Wednesday at 11 a.m. on thinktechhawaii.com. On The Savvy Chick Show, we are all about inspiring and empowering women and girls to be the best they can be by having amazing guests from all around the world. So we hope you'll join us every Wednesday at 11 a.m. Aloha. I'm Jay Feidell and I'm here with Pete McGinnis-Mark to talk about HIGP and research in Manoa. What about that show, Pete? Research at Manoa really provides faculty members at the University of Hawaii with an easy way of explaining some of the research activities we're conducting on the campus. For example, I do a lot of space research, whether it's the moon and Mars, but many of my other colleagues do other interesting kinds of work, whether it's exploring the ocean floor in submarines, studying earthquakes and tsunamis or other activities. So research at Manoa really provides us with a way of telling the general public some of the activities which we're involved in, as well as communicating to our colleagues and students. This is a fun science and we really appreciate the activities which Research at Manoa enabled us to talk about. I love Research at Manoa. Come around, join us. It's Monday, one o'clock p.m. every single Monday. Be there or be square. Hi, my name is Justine Espiritu. This is my co-host, Matthew Johnson. Every Thursday at 4 p.m. we host the Hawaii Food and Farmer series. This is the place you can come to for insight on the perspective and history and passions of Hawaii's farmers and all folks involved in Hawaii's local food system. What kind of folks do we have on? So we have everyone from local farmers. We have foodies, chefs. We also have journalists, researchers, anyone who's actually working to help make Hawaii's local food system that much better. So join us every Thursday and tweet in the us and ask us some questions and leave your comments as well. Thank you. Hey, Aloha, and welcome back to Hibachi Talk. We found Angus on his... I don't think he was at a nude beach. I think it was just a nude beach. Angus, what's going on, buddy? How you doing, Erru? I dressed up today because we have a PhD in the house. You're looking good. That means you're a smart lad, right? Thank you. Nice meeting you. Nice meeting you, too, that, buddy. You look very nice. Very stylish. Did you wear a suit in Thailand when you did your thesis? I wish I did. I wore an Aloha shirt, which I like. Awesome. Way to go there, lad. Anyway, I got a couple of wee things for you. We're ready for this. So anyway, I got my... Since we're doing signage and we're keeping thematic, this is the Scottish soup of the day. Oh, the sign of the day. Yeah, the sign of the day. It could be that, too, lad. Anyway, the Scottish sign of the day is like daily soup, whiskey. Good look. I love your people. It's similar in Inba. Heal Billy loves them, too. Anyway, I got a wee gadget. Kind of thematic, a wee signage thing. So have you seen these laser projected keyboards? I have, but I didn't think they worked too well. Anyway, it's a pretty cool thing. You know, it provides fully functioning 63-quadity keyboard. You can, you know, you put it on your compact, the portable, it puts it on your desktop. That's awesome. It's got built-in batteries. It's got all kinds of really cool things. It works for your iPad, an iPad 2, an iPhone, and all the other kind of things. I gotta try that. It's not bad. I'm gonna go out and spend some money. We've been on my Bitcoin. How much? $39.39. That's not bad. Not too bad. I'll give you a wee shot when we're out there. All right. There's no whiskey for you today. It's gonna be coffee. What do you mean no whiskey? What do you say no whiskey for me? Get this guest off the show. Sorry, sorry. I forgot about the priority. Yeah, yeah, please, please. My goodness. Anyway, everybody, remember you two read Aloha. Nice. Nice. All right. Angus, thanks for that. I don't want to check out the keyboard. Give us a shout. Let us know if it works for you. And whiskey for soup of the day. I don't know. Chancell. I got a little bit of security, man. We got a sign with some content on it. These things are so easy to break into. And I want you to understand that when you're reading a sign, still use your brain. Because humans in the West, we tend to think that the stuff we read is real. And it maybe isn't necessarily so. These devices right here that you see on the highway all the time, made by ECHO, realistically have a little keypad on a cord on the side of the sign. It should be locked. It may or may not be, but obviously it's easy to get in. And the password is DOT. You can find this anywhere on the internet. Department of Transportation. And so they're supposed to put another password in. But to reset the device, is two buttons that you hold down, which you can also find, which will reset the password to DOT. So, just be aware that signage is critical. So pay attention to signage in emergency situations, but also understand that some signs that you see, especially temporary signs, question that content, perhaps, if it seems odd. Because I don't think there were any zombie attacks. So we were talking about your two on two communications in your digital signage company and how different it is from a lot of the others, because of the analytics things that you're doing. What are the latest challenges? What are the fun projects you're working on? Some of the new projects we're trying, speaking of HIPAA. We're looking at a lot of in-home care, a lot of a lot of technology going all the way to following the patient. So we're trying, one of the fun projects is to a marriage between healthcare and digital signage. Although it's been around for a while. Another fun project, it's been also around for the last three years, location-based content. When you have tourists on a bus, or you have just a passenger in a cab, if I pass by an amount of shopping center and there is something going on in an amount of shopping center, the content will change automatically, let me know. I saw something like that in one of the Trump Towers in New York. I think Sprint was behind it way back in the day where I walked by a digital sign and they based, they would be able to determine where you had been in the shopping area and I was looking at lower shirts or whatever, and then there would be an ad that would come up on a trip to Hawaii. It might have been some facial recognition or something. So there is that's another fun project also is to just keep track of returning customers. You really get Facebook, right? They look at the face and then next thing you know you've been tagged in a photo somewhere. They've gone dual times, right? How long did you look at an item and then walk away and they track that and so then they'll offer you, they'll send you a price to your phone, you know, the lower price and that kind of stuff. I think when going back to what I said in the beginning of the segment is just making the experience of the end user better. We have new technologies in the digital signage industry, facial recognition, beacons, analytics and all that. At the end of the day if I as a user have a good experience at a retail store at a restaurant, at a hotel because of the digital signage then I think digital signage reaches its goal or reaches its objectives. If I walk just to the retail store and the minute I walk the digital signage because the motion sensor senses that I walked in and greeted me like welcome, we have this or if I'm standing in front of a product and the minute I pick up the product the content that pertains to that product started explaining to me then the experience becomes much, much better. So if you don't buy it or you do buy it then you start doing the analytics was the price or was it the packaging? And how long did you pay attention to the video and all sorts of things? There's a lot of that in retail I picked up the product, I listened to the information but I still did not buy it. That business intelligence based on analytics based on the technology based on the customer customer experience becomes very, very important. Just like we talked about in the beginning of segment is no longer just between with the picture and the price and it's definitely expanded beyond retail, so like I said health care is into it, even the financial centers everyone's worried about that customer experience because they're trying to keep their customer. Well I remember when Samsung came up with a TV and then the EULA they said that they were going to track every TV show you watched and whatever but no one reads the EULA and then everybody got really upset hey you're literally in my living room tracking everything that I do on your TV show. So you must wow how do you deal with the ethical ethical things that are ethical? When it comes to the legal side of it is a clear line. Either you're breaking the law or not breaking the law when it comes to the privacy and ethics then it's the responsibility of the service provider which is like us providing digital signage service to an organization and it's also the responsibility of the organization getting that information asking for that information. So you must have a lot of smart people within your organization that are sitting looking at not only the technology but then the application of that technology. I started the digital signage it was a friend of mine and I started it and we were both engineers. And to your point Gordon we needed to understand the business side of it, the privacy the security, the marketing all of the things that we did not stop and think about and my first step is to go back to school and get a PhD in business administration. And it seems like ever since I've known you you've always been learning and getting better. So believe it or not with all of that we have now burned through 30 minutes. I told you this would go fast. So 212 communications you got to check it out digital signage it is the wave of the future I can tell you right now you can bury your head in the sand and say it's not going to happen but it has already happened. But you take it to the next level someone like Reds Company would be pretty awesome. Anyway we also no guest goes unrewarded you get an autograph solo cup you know and I expect to see that on a digital signage somewhere down in the corner you got number 78 in the series. Episode 78 in my on our website and it's also going to be on our Facebook page. There you go, perfect. What more can we ask for? Anyway we want to thank everybody for joining us today on Think Tech and Hibachi Talk. Hamish happy birthday, Andrew happy birthday. Thank you. And as we say at the end of every show one, two, three. What are you doing?