Elumicate: Building The World's Largest Decentralized Outdoor Capture Network
A conversation With Jason Bernard, Founder and CEO of Elumicate
Today’s conversation features Jason Bernard, founder of Elumicate a web-3 protocol that bills itself as the world’s largest decentralized outdoor capture network. Jason has been in the IT industry his entire career before making the switch to web 3 last year.
We discuss the powerful and slightly creepy billboard sensor elumicate developed and how a web3 platform can distribute the control and profits of the world’s camera and sensor networks. We discuss the deflationary token model Jason envisions for the platform that could give miners six thousand times the token rewards in year 1 than in year three.
We discuss how governance decisions might work, we discuss the smart city boom of a couple of years ago and the distinction between web3 and crypto. All this and much more.
Dean: [00:00:00] Jason, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Just talk me through your background and what led you to web 3.0.
Jason: Sure. Pleasure being here. I guess background depends how far we wanna go back. I've always been a bit of a tinkerer at a really young age, I was the guy who took apart the binoculars and the telescope, and this is the age of nine or ten years old. Just to see how everything works, take it all apart, put it back together. And that's just how I've been with everything which translates into kind of the professional career where I got into technology IT servers and digging into everything and trying to optimize everything.
And so that's really what makes me tick is finding optimal ways to do things. And that's where the startup life for me is great. Finding product market fit, finding niche areas where optimizations can happen and things are not being done efficiently. So I guess through, throughout everything I've done, that's where I've found my niche. [00:01:00]
Trying to troubleshoot and find these niche areas that need fixing. So I guess throughout all of that's what brought me to elumicate. So elumicate is actually a company that prior to my arrival designed a really cool product. It's for billboards. So if you think of a billboard and what they did is they created a camera that you put on that billboard that looks at the traffic.
So when BMW drives by, Mercedes can put up their ad on that billboard
Dean: It's that responsive? So you can see a car and immediately respond?
Jason: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's real-time. So just as soon as the car goes by, see it from a distance coming in, change that video. So with that, they could do things like you record the regular traffic that's going on throughout the day. This time of day, you have a lot more Hondas or whatever it may be. These are the people you want to advertise to. The technology goes much deeper than that. We can see how many people are in the cars, male, female, and kids.
Now, when you start going into all that you get [00:02:00] into what are the privacy laws? Are you allowed to do this? Now so there's a lot of things going on there, but when I came into the company, it was to go, okay, how are we gonna deploy this product and get it out there into the hands of the advertisers and marketers and billboard operators?
So that was my job and kind of having my history of digging in and going, what's the real problem here? I started digging in asking the key questions to the marketers other industries as well. So cities governments and going, what does a device like this counting traffic looking at this, what's the real problem, what are we solving with this device?
What we found is that marketers, billboard operators, they all want to know the traffic. They all want to know what's going on. They think that what elumicate built at the time was really cool, but selling it's a different story, right? So now you're going okay, are you gonna buy one?
You're gonna set it up and actually put it out there. And that [00:03:00] starts to be difficult. So now you're getting into, hardware ownership, all of that. So anyway, all of that that came out of it was the data everybody wants? And owning the network? Nobody really wants that.
That's just the cost of doing business and nobody really wanted to do that. And that's where Elumicate 2.0, comes into play which is essentially what we're building is the world's largest decentralized outdoor capture network. So we're doing that in three phases, but essentially mostly it's web three, which means people will own these devices that will look at the traffic.
And we're focusing on traffic to start. But they'll own these devices that look at the traffic, count the traffic, and there's already a whole industry around this. There's already multiple players buying this data. So we know there's great value in the data, but we're doing web three style so that [00:04:00] the people not only get to own part of this network they also get to decide what gets captured and not because there are a lot of privacy issues.
There's a lot of comfort level things here where people don't wanna be on camera. They don't want facial recognition happening or things like that.
Dean: So it sounds like what you had is a classic network effect scenario where at the individual level, it didn't really make sense for someone to purchase this camera because the benefit wasn't really outweighing the cost.
But when you scale this network and you create an actual data set that you can then run algorithms on do data science on you start delivering insights that are tremendously valuable, but aren't really individually incentivized in order to get to that scale. And so immediately you're thinking, all right, web three is where this needs to go because there's a lot of privacy violations potentially here, and you want to avoid of web two platforms where [00:05:00] it's a black box. This is very intimate data. That's, potentially gonna be abused. And so how can you create something very beneficial, and how do you preserve the upside, share the financials and make use of this wonderful technology that's also a little bit scary. What's the timeline here? Did you join elumicate prior to even knowing about crypto? what year was that and when did you actually find out about crypto and make that switch to elumicate 2.0 as you say?
Jason:Yeah, timeline-wise. It's funny you say that, last summer I ran into a neighbor who was talking about helium, I bought a few devices, set them up and I thought, this is awesome. This is a great way to have people own part of the network and also just to build a business in general, but then you have the governance part where people actually get to vote on what's happening and all of that.
I had already known about elumicate prior to that [00:06:00] being an outside investor, looking at the company. and later on last year around October is when I actually joined the company and started asking the key questions to people who could, buy and use these devices. And I think it was what was it December?
Beginning of December that just clicked. I just went. Whoa. I actually got an email an alert from helium because they, I think it's great. Whenever there's anything wrong with the network, they automatically alert everybody. And they're very open about that. And I just got a ding on my phone and I just looked at it and I went, this is awesome I love that they do this. And then I asked it just clicked. I just went. Wow. Whoa, wait, wait a minute. This product done in web three fashion, something similar to helium, not obviously all the same, but something similar. Just makes so much sense. Yeah, that was last December, but I joined the company in October.
Dean: So this is all very recent. And when you talk about elumicate’s technology, video sensors within billboards, is any given billboard near a major city gonna be using that technology? Or is this just in a very small area?
Jason: Actually, there's a big distinction there between elumicate one and 2.0, so the device that they built was actually an external device, so it wasn't built into the billboards or anything. But the original founder of Elumicate had a background in billboards. So that's why he was building something specifically for that industry, because he knew that there's a need for the data and also that this could really help them out.
But what we've done with Elumicate two is, you hit it the nail on head earlier when you said this network and ownership of the network becomes costly when you're just dealing with one use case, but this network can address so much more than that. That's where it gets really interesting and where this network gets to be [00:08:00] worth a lot more. But, yeah, so we're definitely not looking at billboards at this point, elumicate 2.0 building, the world's largest decentralized network for outdoor capture is focused on people just taking these devices, setting 'em up in their homes and pointing to the street, homes, businesses top of trees, wherever, they just point these devices to the road.
And that's it. So from there through machine learning, AI through a whole whack of technologies, we're actually grabbing the data that we need, but to start that data is traffic. So we want no privacy concerns. We don't want, any of that. We wanna make our code easily verifiable by any outside parties that are coming in long term.
We want this to be open source so that everybody can, see exactly what is being tracked. But yeah it's doing it in three phases. So phase one, we're actually using public infrastructure that's already out there. So people just [00:09:00] download a piece of software to their computer.They run it and it grabs the camera feed automatically and just starts mining.
Dean: So someone will just point their webcam out their window sort of thing.
Jason: Phase one is actually easier than that. So phase one, download a piece of software and run it on your computer. That's it. That piece of software connects to a public feed camera.
So a camera that's already broadcasting online, so that software just connects to that and it starts counting traffic. So phase two people can use any webcam. So any webcam they have, they just pointed outside their window, throw the software on the computer and it's automatically gonna start doing the work.
And then phase three, mid-2023 is the all in one device. So you don't need software running on the computer at that point, it's just gonna be one device. It's gonna have LIDAR as well as camera in it. Because LIDAR has some advantages over camera, such as seeing in pitch dark. [00:10:00] as well as measuring we're in Canada here.
So extremely harsh winters. But because of that, things like the snow plows in the winter time, they have cities have to deploy snow plows based on how much snow has fallen on the road. Currently, they just have snow plows doing a cycle, a loop. With our technology, we can actually see exactly how much snow has fallen on the street.
Therefore alert snow plow drivers to go into one specific area to clean out, the larger accumulated amounts of snow in, on those specific streets and things like that. So just making a lot more efficient operation.
Dean: Yeah. What I notice here is you actually have an inversion of the traditional web three business. It's a network of supply looking for demand, right? Let's take the example of file coin, right? They have this incredibly potent incentive with their file token where there's a massive data centers getting built up and not a lot of demand for it.
[00:11:00] And so it's basically using these supercharged crypto incentives to create a bulk supply. But what you've actually done is you've identified a problem and need a demand, and you're actually creating a solution for it, like a traditional. You're introducing the web three components to distribute the financial return, which I would argue maybe is the next evolution of web three and maturity into something that's actually aligned with real business needs, but then has as a cherry on top, or maybe even more than that this web three financial layer.
So that's pretty exciting. And when you talk about the phase. What exactly are you running on your computer? Why do you need to run software locally on a computer? Is that just so you can manage that camera or just set up the dis the distribution of the network?
Jason: Yeah. So I guess just going quickly back to what you were saying on kind of web three and the evolution. I couldn't agree more looking at kind of the industry and everything, and there's a lot of chatter around web three. What is web-3? I think it's a little bit different for every anybody you talk to.
But in, in my eyes, web three [00:12:00] is simply, a decentralized ownership of the entire network. We're using things like blockchain and crypto in order to reward. But these are just tools, that those are tools that enable web three, some people blend that in and, “oh, web three is crypto.”
To me, they're very different. They're separate. Yeah. They're tools that enable us to do what we need to do, but you're, you gotta dead on when you said, we've identified a key problem that people need access to this data, many different industries do they can't get it today. So we're fixing a real problem with web three.
And like you said, I think this is the future of web three. On the other question, or I guess your question was for the. So the software, the use of it is that's where the AI comes in. So the tracking, so the software runs and it actually grabs traffic events as well as pedestrian events. So how many people are walking by and how many cars there are on the street?
That's what the software does. So whether we're talking about an all-in-one [00:13:00] device or having that software on a computer, the software is always doing the same thing. So it's doing machine learning as well as identification of different events what is capable of doing versus what we're actually gonna be doing, to start?
We actually, just, this week our lead blockchain engineer got hit by a car, so hit and run. So he's in the hospital, fever that kind of smacked his head. It's a big deal. Luckily he didn't die or, anything bad, really bad, but these are the kinds of things that in the future, we're hoping the network will vote on where we can actually take care of these things.
So the technology is not what's holding us back here is gonna be more of, being in a gray area in terms of laws or in terms of privacy concerns. So we wanna be on the right side here. We don't want to be pushing into that. But at the same time this network's gonna be able to deal with those things.
So for example, we can easily set the AI to say, when a car and a pedestrian collide, we're gonna take [00:14:00] a picture of the license plate, or we're going to take a short video, or there's many things we can do there. We can automatically dispatch to 911. all of this can easily be done.
It's just a matter of who's comfortable with it and do they want it. So that's where having this in web three form, a DAO, a decentralized organization voting on this to me makes a lot of sense. I don't think this power should be placed in the hands of any corporation or any government, exercising their power over the citizens.
I think this is something the citizens need to vote on. So when they own the network, they're the ones that have the cameras in the window. They get to decide on this, but they're also getting rewarded with the tokens at the same time.
Dean: Right. And I want to go back to how this actually works, because what I think you're saying is that right now the camera infrastructure, obviously this is just a raw camera feed that doesn't have any CPU locally on the camera. So it has to send that data to a computer or [00:15:00] CPU to run the algorithm, and anyone's home laptop is more than capable of doing that.
And then as you get to phase three, you're gonna actually introduce a proprietary device. That's gonna have a CPU on the camera that can run what's called on-the-edge computation, right? Where you don't have to send that data anywhere. It can just happen locally on that device. And it's much faster, much more responsive, and much more secure, because there's not a data feed getting sent between two machines that can be intercepted.
You don't have to worry about encryption key handling necessarily. So there's a lot of benefits there and just, that's what you're referring to right by phase three. Is that an accurate portrayal?
Jason: Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. Yeah. Phase one and phase two will have computing on the computer where the computer's doing kind of that identification, all of that work and then uploading the data and phase three. You're exactly right. Everything's being done on the edge. So it's all on this one device.
At that point, even [00:16:00] having a device with cell phone connectivity is not a problem because we're only gonna be uploading maybe 500 mgs per month. It's gonna be very little meanwhile, when you're actually doing the computing on your computer, you need a live stream video of consistent feed, right?
So you're dealing with probably 50 gigs per month, depending on the quality of the video.
Dean: So this is a use case that I think will wrinkle a lot of feathers in the sense that it does have a privacy component to it. We've seen in the news ring camera is the most flagrant example. How a corporation, that has issued very intimate devices.
They sit on your doorbell can send that data feed to police departments without the homeowner, even knowing. And so I think the point is like the cats out of the bag, right? This technology is coming there are there already are cameras everywhere, and there's gonna be even more cameras everywhere that have the ability to do on the edge [00:17:00] computation.
The question is who's gonna own this network. So it's not a question of whether this. Is gonna exist. These cameras are coming. I think we have to accept that as a society. There's not really a way that we can see a future where, we're camera free, which I think people in crypto, many people in crypto maybe would prefer.
There's a big overlap between privacy and crypto for whatever reason. So can you just talk about the, how this network will actually look in your vision? Obviously it's all a vision it's not actualized yet, but how is it actually gonna work? How are decisions gonna be made? Who's gonna own what, what’s the financial reward to users?
Can you just speculate on what that might look like?
Jason: Speculating on the token price is obviously tough to do. Yeah, we haven't launched the token yet, but when we're looking at I guess amount. Okay. So owner. Is gonna be, it's gonna be owned by the people. So people are gonna have these devices. The computer's gonna be mining the public data fees, or sorry, video fees that are already out there.
Those [00:18:00] are, owned by the people. They're gonna buy NFTs to be able to mine. But yeah, in terms of the whole network, that's gonna be owned by people. The voting will also be owned or the voting will be done. It'll be a mix of people. I guess, token ownership, because you will stake your tokens in order to get voting rights on the network.
So anybody who accumulates tokens, whether they're mining or not will get voting rights there. So any miner will end up with all these tokens. They can then apply to voting on any of these if all of a sudden we're going, Hey let's introduce gun recognition to the network. So any firearm that's detected, we will do X with it.
We'll notify the authorities that would go to a vote for the entire community to say, yeah, I'm comfortable with that. Or, no we shouldn't do that. It's completely gonna be in the hands of the network owners. [00:19:00] This is a big deal. It's funny, I got an email last week or the week before from a Jane Doe and the email was interesting. I found it dead on. It started off a little bit nasty with, you guys are terrible. I can't believe what you're doing. You're gonna, take over our privacy rights and you're gonna set up this network.
And it was funny because it was also of positive for us. Whereas saying of course, you're gonna succeed. The governments want this data. The authorities want this data. Nobody is going to stop you. The level of the rights that you're gonna be able to take away, it is just crazy.
And I'm reading this going, what this person didn't understand is we are doing what we're doing because of that. This network's gonna exist either way. The benefits that are gained from this network are much too great for this not to exist in 10 years from now it’s gonna be there.
China already has over a billion cameras. They've done it because there's huge benefits to having that. [00:20:00] So this Jane Doe is pointing out, all of these concerns that are completely right. Nobody should have the right, including governments or the authorities to put such a network in place that they can actually do whatever they want with. What we're building is a network where the people decide.
And at any point, a vote can be put in place to revoke what they've already done. So it’s not like, Hey, okay, we've introduced facial recognition. And then all of a sudden we go, no, we shouldn't have, we're actually seeing things that are happening here. We don't like, it goes to another vote, it gets removed.
So I mean that, that's the vision. That's the dream here is that this network is owned by the people it's decided upon by the people. So you also asked about kind of compensation or rewards, that's all through the token. So the way that the network is set up is everything's token based.
So the value of the data is reflected into the [00:21:00] token. What I mean by that is when you're actually wanting to purchase data, you're gonna have to first acquire tokens. So the only way to get data is to burn tokens. So when this data is being accumulated, the people will receive. tokens So essentially when you're mining, you're receiving tokens for doing the mining work and these tokens, what they get you is data.
So now from there if you're a miner, you can choose to hold on to that token, to in the future, get access to the data, or you can down the road sell it to somebody else who wants access to that data. In terms of how much they're gonna be getting, when we're looking at, these are rough estimates on the numbers, but during the first year of mining, we'll estimate that people will probably get maybe 6,000 tokens for that first year of mining.
By the third year, they'll probably end up with maybe 200 tokens per year, by the 10th year, they'll probably [00:22:00] end up with one token per year. So generally It's similar to helium in that way, where at the beginning, what you can actually mind, because there's a lot less miners, a lot less people on the network, they're gonna get a lot more tokens in comparison.
But also in the future, when there's only one token mind per year, you can imagine what happens to the tokens value. It just goes up accordingly.
Dean: Highly deflationary. I think it's fascinating that we're talking about you swimming with the stream of governments and technology and not trying to push against it, not trying to create, we see this where, ICP a lot of these web three companies, protocols making basically web three versions of web two protocols, trying to basically go back in time and say, Hey, let's remake
these super successful social media companies but in a web three way where they're distributed. And it's difficult to see that taking off because you're competing with an [00:23:00] established behemoth that's so entrenched. It's a part of everyone's consciousness. Our habitual behavior is to use these web two platforms.
It's very difficult to imagine a startup in web three overcoming that incredible lead. But if you're actually looking at a network that doesn't really exist yet. At least the data network of this camera infrastructure, you actually have a chance to, from the get go build it as web three, which is a much more realistic way to scale a web three native business.
So I like this a lot. And I just wanna ask you about the IoTeX integration. So how exactly are you using IoTeX in your stack? What technology from IoTeX’s code base are you using? Just talk about that, if you will.
Jason: Yeah. I guess the, for IoTeX the choice to go with them, we were looking at a few technology at first. IoTa, Constellation, a couple more. So what really [00:24:00] got us interested into IOTeX is the team. I think the team is very responsive, just going back and forth with them. They want their partners to succeed.
Which is something we didn't feel from the other guys. The other guys are just “Hey, we're building something here. If you wanna be part of it, figure it out.“ IoTeX I would say that they're more of a sound, startup mentality where it's we're still doing product market.And we're gonna make this work. And I love that about them. They're actually pivoting a bit and they're making things make sense.
For us, we're using them as the blockchain part of it for our token and everything, but they also have a layer-2 to their stack where it allows the integration from our hardware devices, which right now is the computer software, but that doesn't really change anything in terms of whether it's hardware or a computer.
These devices still need to talk to the blockchain. The data still needs to be uploaded and verified in order for these tokens to [00:25:00] be awarded. So that's where Iotex is helping here is with that layer-2. So it's a data oracle that validates. And that's where a saying that you need to acquire an NFT earlier.
That's part of that operation. So the NFT is used to secure that data connection that goes up to the webstream layer, which is an IoTeX layer which then gets deposited into our database. And from there, the users are rewarded with tokens based on their participation. It's maybe not completely straightforward.
Maybe I'm not completely explaining it. But but yeah, the IoTeX integration is great. What we love about it is also that we're not reinventing the wheel. They're already building something great. Their vision for these IOT devices I think is dead on the future is these IOT device delivering this data. I hope that future is mostly web three, where people get to benefit from this not huge corporations. And that's their vision.
Dean: Yeah. So I want to go back to how the governance is gonna work. Let's imagine, [00:26:00] five years down the line, you have major saturation, you have several million miners. There's an issue in web three where maybe t's more decentralized than a corporate alternative, but there is an oligarchy that emerges where early adopters or major financial players, a16z is the main culprit here typically, especially in defi.
Where they'll come in and they'll just swamp. They'll be the major financial backer they'll own 30, 40% of the tokens. And they'll basically just get to muscle any governance decision that they want through, because they're such a dominant player and maybe they have 30% of the tokens. And then there's another 35% that just follow whatever a16z does.
So effectively they have a majority. And there's, less extreme examples of that, but you're you do recapitulate inequality, right though. It's impossible to create a totally democratized system, especially when you have a financial element. So have you thought about going forward, maybe if somebody misses the first three or four years, and [00:27:00] now you're talking about a distribution rate of the token that's one 1000th of, or one 10,000 of what it was at the beginning.
You're talking about major distributions of inequality that are, you have this fat long tail of owners. That were early and they're of able to muscle everything through. It's a highly influential, powerful network, and maybe you have a dozen people that are at the top. Maybe these are too long term to think about, but the decisions you make now will have those implications.
How do you think about that? How do you think about preventing early adopter financial oligarchies forming within your DAO and your governance?
Jason: Yeah. I That's a very good point. So far we've had I guess financial offers people come to the table and the reason we've actually pushed them away so far is be because of that.
It is funny because everybody wants that initial fundraise so that you can see that, this project's successful because so-andso has put money [00:28:00] into it. Even though, in most of these cases they're throwing darts at a board. They're going, how big is your idea and how is exciting is it?
And as long as you hit that, then you are one of those guys. You're one of the 10. And as long as one to three of those 10 succeed, they're happy. They end up owning a big portion of that company. So that's something that we've definitely considered. And when we're talking to these guys, it's kind of like, I don't feel that we're there yet. We've bootstrapped so far. We wanna make sure that this network is for the people
So it's funny because we've had people come forward and go, who's your backer. I'm looking at this network. I really love the idea and everything, but we need to see that somebody's backing you.Is that really what you want? Or do you want a network that's truly run by the people where the governance is actually by the people, because they're the ones that are owning most of it. Still doesn't stop somebody from coming in and buying out all the tokens, let's say, but by doing so, they're actually raising the price of the token at the same time.
And if people are selling their token, [00:29:00] it is something you can't control. But at the corporate level or at, being the guys that are building this out from the beginning, that is something that we are keeping an eye on. And we do want to alleviate that as much as we can, in our case, the beauty of it is the network is owned by the people, which is they own the devices. So you run into a situation where somebody ends up owning 30, 40% of the company, and they're making decisions people don't like, they'll just rip their devices out the window and the whole network crashes, which means that the people will still ultimately control no matter what, because they're the ones that have those devices in.
So if they're not getting where they want with the vote, then they'll vote with action and just rip that device down. So there's more than just the voting structure. It's also, you own the device. That is the network. But no, we're looking at having the voting rights based on device ownership on NFT ownership, as well as tokens.
And with the NFT side, [00:30:00] nobody could actually, buy all these NFTs because they can't possibly have that many, 30% of the devices when we're talking about a network that can certainly grow into the hundreds of millions, if not billions of devices having one player coming in and saying, I own 300 million cameras. Good luck.
Dean: there's an intrinsic barrier to swamping the network. There's a friction where even if you're a major financial player for example, whoever the whale was that brought down Terra USD they were able to do that essentially instantaneously there's no friction.
There's no. Shipping devices, setting them up, creating, buying the real estate necessary. There's a major friction that your network introduces with IOT that makes it a lot more decentralized, which is actually pretty cool. One more thing that could be an issue.
There's many things that could be an issue it's a startup, but one thing that comes to mind is you have a DAO, which historically DAO are not [00:31:00] move fast and break things. They're maybe they break things. They break themselves. DAO in 2016 was a fiasco. It was basically a tragedy of the commons where you have a lot of distributed governance players.
No one individually has an incentive to do that much work, to move the network forward. They're just one of thousands or millions. How do you imagine maybe streamlining governance. There's gonna be, is there gonna be elections, is there gonna be a delegation you're basically gonna have to have a form of government in your DAO to make it function at scale?
Have you thought about that?
Jason: Yeah. That's probably one of my things, I think too much. no, we've definitely considered a lot of different ways of doing this. And ultimately what we've come down to is we currently, we're not really focused as much on it because it's down the road.
So being a startup you find that, or personall, at least, I find that I start digging in and I wanna make sure that everything is aligned before going forward. But at a certain point, you need to pull back [00:32:00] and go let's first start building this network and getting that, that traction going.
And the, in terms of governance, we're looking at probably a year down the road, by the time we actually introduce governance anyway. At the beginning of a project like this, you have to have a team that is responsible for making these decisions. In our case, we're making sure that we're tracking traffic.
That's it, we're not gonna introduce facial recognition and gun detection and accidents and 9 11 alerts or anything like that prior to having governance. But there will definitely be significant thought and effort put into the governance structure to make sure that this is something that matches the vision, which is that the people will get to have the vote. And also we can only implement it once we have certain scale, certain size, otherwise you're throwing the vision into the hands of people that don't share that vision too early. So there's, yeah, there's a tipping point and we need to make sure that we reach that prior to implementing governance.[00:33:00]
Dean: and I think that's right. You can't just on the whiteboard solve every future problem before you even launch, that's how startups work is uou just, you're experimenting. You're just actually getting feedback from the world and responding to it and growing and interating. And that's one, that's a challenge, an additional challenge that web three founders have that web two founders don't is you have so many more things you have to think about, not just the technology.
You have to think about managing a community. And building a governance model, which, you're, so you're supposed to be a political scientist, a technologist, an executive, it's a crazy responsibility. So more power to you. That's a, that's a lot. And I'm a huge fan of, what you're working on.
It's that's an incredibly inspiring vision. So if you're just speaking to, the average crypto investor out there, maybe somebody who's used helium before is a helium contributor. What is the way to get involved right now?
Jason: So yeah, right now we've got elumicate.com our website. We have a wait list there to sign up. And that will be for phase one. So phase one, [00:34:00] we are extremely close right now to having our beta released. And from there that wait list will be the next up on the list to actually acquire in an NFT and to start mining.
So the mining is gonna happen very quickly here. Best way to do that is just to get on the wait list on our website, elumicate dot vom.
Dean: Awesome. I will be doing that right after we hang up here.
Jason: yeah, I hope so. It's what gets me excited about this project is there are a lot of use cases for it.
There's a lot that we can do to help. We're looking at things like saving lives, where literally the AI, the algorithm can actually see somebody having a heart attack or anything, and automatically dispatching 911 or automatically sending, an image so that they can actually look at what situation's going on things like that. Reducing pollution reducing congestion. So no more two hour drive to work. Sure. It might still be an hour. It might be an hour and a half. Not two hours. So there's a lot that this network can really do. So to me, that's the biggest [00:35:00] advantage is for people to actually own a part of that.
And to have a voice in that on the crypto side, I don't wanna speculate because that's not good. But to say that this data is not gonna be worth a lot of money, would I think be wrong. This data is gonna be worth a lot. And even if it's not financial. It is worth a lot in terms of of just helping humanity, I think.
So I think people should get involved mainly for that reason to just contribute to what this actually can do, but the crypto side of it's still extremely attractive.
Dean: And in terms of your partnerships with data, so who's gonna be your early buyers, is it gonna be governments?
Jason: Yeah, cities would be the early buyers as well as marketers. There's a lot, there's a few different industries that already have entire systems around this. They're already acquiring data. So they're currently buying data that is not accurate. A lot of this data's cell phone triangulation dara.[00:36:00]
so these are based on sample sizes that are then extrapolated. So based on this amount, this many hours, we're now gonna say, this area gets approximately this many cars but they don't know what make the car is. There's a lot of things they don't know, but also these numbers are not accurate.
They're also old. Speaking of cities, so in, in Canada here, if somebody makes a traffic complaint in the city, then the city has to send out an engineer. So not just a summer student, they send out an engineer to count traffic. All the amount of money being wasted on these efforts is crazy.
And you also see summer students constantly parked counting cars with a counter. These are all things that we can have instant data. _ercentage wise, we're not quite at a hundred percent. I do believe that the AI will get there. But to have, numbers that are that close to the actual real life numbers as long as we're probably over 96%, then [00:37:00] everything's good.
Dean: It's funny that you mentioned cell phone triangulation. My last conversation was with a co-founder called tool to tour who has a company called roadrunnr. He was describing the privacy violations of basically cars sharing their data with data brokers famously there was one called otono, which had a major class action lawsuit leveled against it just, I think two or three months ago that basically brought the company to its knees.
And but there are 20, 30 billion car data brokers in Europe and in the US that are in the business of collecting data, both from car sensors directly and cell phones in cars and selling it presumably to cities and whoever else, advertisers, marketers. So this is going on, the question is who's gonna be financially rewarded for it.
Who's gonna be in charge of this network. It's an interesting kind of comparison. There may even be a opportunity for a partnership between you and roadrunner down the lines. It's interesting actually. [00:38:00].
Jason: You mentioned the kind of cars tracking data, things like that.
And we've had that question from community members and they're going what you guys are doing already is gonna exist and Tesla's gonna do this. And with that one, this data should be owned by the people, not by a corporation, but two for us the data we're collecting isn't really the same because when you're talking about the data in a car that's driving, you'd have to have every car having this technology of uploading. So yeah, 50 years down the road that might exist, even then you'll still have some old muscle cars, or you'll still have a bunch of people that are driving something that doesn't have this technology in it.
Our cameras can see all of it. So with our cameras, you see every car go by, you see the make and model of it. We can extrapolate even more than just what it's seeing. We can go with this make and model this car is producing this much carbon. There's a lot. We haven't talked about like a lot that this network can influence and can make better.
So you're looking at the city. You can, all, you can go, okay, the city [00:39:00] has implemented these efforts. It's cost 10 million. What actually happened to the carbon, are electric cars taken over or not? What moved the needle, which project moved the needle at what time? So a city can go: We spent two months with this marketing budget to try to make our city greener.
They don't really know what happened within those two months. There's a lot going on where they don't understand. With our technology, we're keeping track of everything. We can actually see how many fuel guzzlers got taken off the road during that specific timeframe. And even past that, you can go, okay, this city opened up at McDonald's in this area.
What happens to the traffic when that specifically happens? Did it deflect fuel guzzlers did it deflect Hondas or civics or BMWs, or what happens in cities? Because we can now start going throughout all these different cities, the results always the same in this specific case, so that also blends into use cases for retailers, for restaurants, for marketing.
McDonald's [00:40:00] putting up a sign saying two for one nuggets and then going, when you put that sign up,, this type of vehicle turned into your driveway. But when you put two for one big macs, then this type of vehicle turned into your driveway. Just that's worth a lot to McDonald's because now they can go, this specific store has a lot of civics in front of it. And we know that civic drivers, as a majority like to eat Big Macs or they like to eat fries or whatever it may be. And you don't big differences in numbers to make huge differences in the bottom line. Yeah, there's a few use cases, but there are a lot of them and they're not all financial.
A lot of them are actually more of a cleaning up the world, making it greener healthier, saving lives, automatic dispatch of accidents. That's another thing just locally here. One small city. 30,000 residents is spending over a million dollars per year dispatching fire trucks [00:41:00] because around here, when there's an accident, the fire truck has to go.
So for them, they're going, if your solution is less than a million dollars a year, we'll pay that. Because if we can actually have something where an accident's detected and we can actually get an immediate response of this is a situation where we don't have to dispatch a fire truck, then that's huge.
And that's just, again, one small example of a use case, but there are many.
Dean: yeah. It's almost infinite. Really, if you think about it. Yeah. And everything from climate to marketing to city planning to optimization of city resources based on what's going on. Yeah. It seems like the opportunity for highly lucrative and generally beneficial outcomes are almost endless. The privacy issue is certainly the number one, but when you talk about the difference between this being a city run initiative and one that's, in the web three private sector, [00:42:00] there's no comparison.
Jason: Yeah. And that's the thing too, is a lot of cities have invested heavily into this already. A lot of the largest cities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars putting up cameras to do what who knows it's in their control. Nobody has a right to have to say or do anything about this one.
It's a gray area where everybody knows that there are some things that are being shared that shouldn't in terms of privacy. But another one of those things. When you're actually on the road, you don't have much in terms of privacy. And that's something that a lot of people don't realize is when you're in your car driving, you're not, this is public space, it's not a right to drive.
It's a privilege and your privacy goes out the window so they can legally track a lot of things. But they don't share it necessarily. Cisco last year I think it was wrote off a billion dollar investment within the space within the smart city sector where they were trying to do this, put cameras up to help a plethora of use cases [00:43:00] red light management systems, congestion management.
So all of these things that they're trying to do, but what ended up happening is the cities are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into this network. They get it built. They have it set up. The citizens are upset because the city spent all this money on something used to track them and they don't know what's being tracked.
And now the city has this infrastructure that they can't really do anything with. They're getting all this data coming in. And that goes back to what we were saying earlier, where when you have one use case it's pretty expensive to do all of this, just for that one use. When we have a network of what we're talking about, that's actually owned by the people and they're the ones investing their time and energy into building it. On our side as elumicate, we're putting all of our time and effort into getting the data into the right hands and then partnering with third parties for them to deliver that data for specific use cases. So it all starts to make sense.[00:44:00]
This works because the benefit far surpasses the investment and time that people are putting into it because there's so many use cases, but what was happening with the cities is now they're stuck with all this data coming in.
They now need to hire engineers and put more resources on top of this to figure out what to do with this data, because that they didn't really think of that. At the beginning, there was this big smart city push two, three years ago. It's kind of just, yeah, let's do it. But they weren't addressing specific use cases.
They were trying to be a smart city. and anybody who's good at the startup world. That's not how you do things. You don't build it first and then figure out things, you go with a specific use case. How do we fix that? So for us, yes, we are building the network, but we're gonna partner with third parties that will fix specific use cases with the data.
Dean: that makes a lot of sense, but it seems to me that in terms of public opinion because there's plenty, many places, especially here in the IS. Where if there's every, [00:45:00] red light cameras, there's lots of counties and cities across especially Texas, Florida, that just had a fit about red light cameras.
And there's a public relations problem. It almost seems to me like a critical mass of a municipality would have to be on the people's network that you're building. To swing the direction of public opinion, right? If there's a few technologists who are managing the network, I don't know if that would make a difference in the minds of the vast majority of people.
It'she government, it's, few people in the city. I guess we'll see how it plays out, but that's interesting. Do you have thoughts on that?
Jason:. I've talked to quite a few officials on this and that's one of the things that scares them is, in their term, are they going to be the ones that actually put these cameras in place and that everybody hates them because, are they gonna get re-elected?
So they have a lot of fear around this. And that's why, with what we're building, we want complete transparency on what this network is [00:46:00] tracking. So then when people are going, red light cameras are in place, currently really people have no way of knowing what this red light camera is actually tracking.
Is it just the license plate when somebody does an infraction or is it everything you're doing while you're driving? Did they catch you texting on your phone? Who knows? There's definitely a trust issue when it comes to, governments, large corporations. A lot of people have concern.
So in our case, that's what we wanna do is we wanna make sure that people don't have concerns on what's being tracked because it, it will be completely open. We wanna be open source where people can actually look at the code and go, yeah, they're just tracking cars. The number of cars that went by, is that really a concern?
If it is, we will address it at that point, but I think there's gonna be a lot of people put at ease to know what is actually being tracked or not. But from there we also want to, one, if you have people that are concerned with red light cameras, let's say, and [00:47:00] there's been a vote. People want to enable this within the system.
Everybody can vote. Everybody can, get a token, set up a device. And they'll get a vote in that. Whereas currently the only way to do it is to voice your concern with city hall or to raise as much noise as you can and go to the news stations. But you can still do that with our network.
You can still put your voice out there in newspapers to say: people please vote against this. And that is something that down the road we do wanna look at being location specific as well. Cause when you're talking about networks like this that's of world. Again, one of the reasons that we're going just traffic is it's an easy one.
Nobody has an issue with counting traffic. But as soon as you get into facial recognition or red light cameras, things like that, then those are gonna be location specific votes. And that'll be another governance thing that we need to figure out, how do we make it so that only people within this area get to vote.
Those are big problems that we need to think of kind of start thinking of [00:48:00] now, is how do we build a network that will enable us to do that in the future? Like I said, there's a lot that we've, been thinking of very deeply because if we don't build it the right way, now we won't be able to easily address those things down the road.
So we want to build something the right way now. And that's where we've been a little bit delayed on our beta launch. And it's because we're implementing some of these things in there to make sure that we don't just build a product that we completely have to redo in a month or two's time.
Dean: No, there's so much that goes into a beta launch. And there's so much here that is speculation just given how early you are. And it's been a fascinating tour through kind of your vision and there's so much more to discuss. Especially once you guys have launched and you've started to get some of that real world feedback.
It'd be awesome to have you back talking through what you've learned, what's crystallized for you. So I really look forward to following up on this conversation maybe in a year or two's time, because this has been fascinating. So thanks so much for your time, Jason, if there's anything else you wanna leave people with.
Any other calls to action, you can go ahead and say [00:49:00] that.
Jason: Yeah. Sign up through the wait list right now. elumicate.com. Otherwise anybody can get in touch with me through our discord server, which the link is also elumicate. Our Twitter account is on there too.
I'm more than happy to answer, any questions or concerns. And yeah, enjoy the talk. I'm more than happy to be on here again, next year to, to discuss our expansion and how large the the network's gotten by that point. Everything's been extremely positive so far.
Dean: Good. And hopefully the show has a similar expansion in listeners.