What’s the connection? Jonathan Strickland reflects on a season full of Restless Ones.

With the end of another great season of The Restless Ones, Jonathan looks back on some of the guests and conversations we’ve heard from. With some truly inspiring leaders, driving change at the intersection of technology and business, he reflects on the common themes throughout these discussions and the consistent thread that connects them all -  connectivity.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
As always, my focus is on exploring the intersection of
technology and business by having conversations with the most forward
thinking leaders. Throughout my career, I've covered everything from massive
parallel processing to advanced robotics, but what truly inspires me

(00:24):
are the stories of innovation and transformation. We've arrived at
the end of another season of The Restless Ones. I
thought it would be a good idea to look back
on some of the guests and conversations we've had this
year with some truly interesting leaders and to reflect on
some common threads throughout these discussions, and clearly a pivotal

(00:49):
connection is well connectivity itself. We cover that topic a
lot on this show, not just because of our partner
T Mobile for Business, but because I really do believe
connectivity is one of the foundational pillars for modern technology,
along with processing, power and data storage. You need to
leverage all three to use technology effectively and efficiently, and

(01:13):
with the proliferation of cloud services, the Internet of Things,
and now an explosion of artificial intelligence implementations, connectivity plays
a critical role in operations, but not everyone is using
it the same way, and that's what I found really interesting.
For example, in our conversation with Sonya Kasner, the CEO

(01:35):
and founder of Panoai, we learned how her company is
making strategic use of cell tower locations in remote areas
by installing cameras to monitor for wildfires. By collating the
camera and communication systems with the cell tower, Panoai can
take advantage of both the connectivity provided by the tower
and the vantage point. Then Panoai software analyzes the incoming

(01:58):
images gathered from these towns and flags any that may
indicate a fire so that a human can review the
imagery and take a look at a live feed from
that camera. In crisis situations, information is critical and can
save lives and help responders mitigate fires early on. But
that's just a high level view. Sonia explained that on
a technical level, a lot of pieces have to be

(02:21):
in place to make this work.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Behind the scenes, the whole system is incredibly complicated. So
it starts with a piece of equipment that we design
a manufacturer called a pano station. This includes about forty components,
including two high definition security cameras. These are off the shelf,
top of the line, six megapixel security cameras designed for
ruggedized environments, and about forty other components. We assemble them

(02:49):
in our factory in San Francisco. The systems also include
an edge computer which has logic on how we control
the cameras. We also include networking equipment so we can
send the data up to the cloud over cellular broadband connectivity.
We have power management. Sometimes we need to include a
backup battery. Sometimes we need to include solar panels. Every

(03:09):
site is a little bit different, so it's a configured
order supply chain, which is not for the faint of heart.
And we mount these systems typically on existing structures like
cell towers, water tanks, government communications towers, sometimes even private
homes or chairlifts at a ski resort. We get really
creative on where to put these and we've actually found

(03:30):
five G to be a really great technology for us.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Then there was our conversation with Mike Onondrash of Avontour Sciences.
Avonteur is a biotechnology research and development company. Avonteur produces
materials needed for high end scientific and medical applications. The
company also carries out bleeding edge lab work to create
the building blocks that other companies use when they produce
pharmaceuticals like vaccines. Wireless connectivity gives a Vontour freedom to

(03:59):
adapt to new situations, which the company had to do
during the outbreak of COVID nineteen, and with high speed,
low latency connections of Ontour, researchers are able to share
work quickly to get results faster.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
I think the largest opportunity when we think about our
customer is the lab. I think the evolution of how
quickly can we take advantage of the data coming from
equipment in the lab into laboratory information management systems LIMB
systems to do correlation analysis? How can you accelerate trials data?
How can you do compound analysis. We produce very high

(04:37):
specification products to very narrow tolerances, so how can we
do that quicker? How can you identify which of the
raw materials are commodity and which have direct influence to
the specification of the output. So I look at what
connectivity can do for that and the ability in real
time to make those adjustments that will have direct impact.

(05:00):
And then I think, secondly, it's your footprint. I think
you know having five G and these non teathered technologies
allow you to think pretty dynamically about what's the right
footprint for this capability, whether it's an office footprint, a
lab footprint, DC expansion, a pop up facility with a customer.
If suddenly you know, I'm call it byon bring my

(05:23):
own network, i just slap a five G spot up,
or I'm putting five G in every single one of
my devices laptops or mobile devices globally and it's inherently
part of my extended network.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
We also met with sunder Sebastian Agora, CEO of Cleven.
Agur's company is working on what has traditionally been a
challenging and time consuming issue for delivery companies, getting a
payload down that last mile of delivery. The company has
developed autonomous robot carriers that can store and deliver packages
for customers. Recently, Cleven completed a one year trial with

(05:59):
da HL Express Estonia, demonstrating that the autonomous vehicles can
reduce the workload of delivery companies by automating the last
mile component. The vehicles maintain connections with Clevin, allowing for
real time monitoring and fleet management and even operations, all
made possible by powerful and fast wireless connectivity.

Speaker 4 (06:21):
Connectivity is crucial for our services. We definitely need a
wide network coverage, especially in the US. We've been really
lucky to have a partnership now in place with T Mobile,
and this partnership enables us to expand rapidly in the States.
So the big question always is to we have the

(06:42):
necessary latency to offer our services in a safe way,
and the results so far are great. Our latency today
is around one hundred milliseconds, which is actually faster than
any person who takes decisions in the real car. So
I would say that our solution is actually as safe
or even safer than any normal person driving on the roads.

(07:07):
And by establishing those connectivity partnerships, we are partnering with
the best in class wireless providers and they are crucial
to enable us to scale our mission to deliver the
most reliable, safe, efficient autonomous delivery platform.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
And we had a couple of great conversations with leaders
in retail who talked about connectivities part in creating a
true omni channel experience for customers. It's amazing how quickly
we've become used to interacting with retail on our own terms.
We might start a transaction in one context, such as
on a smartphone and complete it in person at a
retail location. The experience, if done right, is seamless. It

(07:54):
can actually convince you that it's all pretty simple, but
it takes a lot of work with interconnected systems to
provide that kind of service. So Monte Gobolet of Lows
explain to us how connectivity powers this experience both for
staff and customers by making sure those connections are as
close to them as is possible.

Speaker 5 (08:16):
We have really created a mini are a micro data
center in each of these stores, so that way we
are closest to the customer wherever the customer is. So
if you are online, you're connecting to the cloud. If
you walk into the store, you're connecting to a server
which is in the store itself. And then if you
are sitting at one of our store support centers, which

(08:37):
is like a headquarter, and you're let's say a merchandising analyst,
you're connecting to our data center. So we are trying
to connect you to the closest location, and then everything
you mentioned comes into picture in a big way. For example,
if you're in a store and you are an associate
or a customer, you're connected to the WI FI, you're
connected to the server which is very close, and what

(08:58):
we are doing is with our caching st strategy and APIs,
we are making sure that the data is staged closest
to where you are.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
And then Rob Mills of Tractor Supply Company told us
about how connectivity has created incredible business opportunities in the
form of those powerful omni channel experiences in places you
might not expect, like rural communities.

Speaker 6 (09:24):
When you think about tractor Supply mission and to really
focusing on that to end customer experience from an omni
channel perspective, the advances and wireless and broadback technologies has
been a huge enabler for us. And what this has done,
It's opened up customer access to our digital channels, especially
in rural America. It's allowed us the ability to move

(09:45):
data much more efficiently between our stores, our cloud, our
data centers to be able to make more of those
real time insights and decisions. I think back five years ago,
it is far more difficult to move data through these connections,
and when we think about where we're at today, it
is very robust, especially when you think about images, video,

(10:08):
deep product content, and even customer data. To really drive
a level of personalization when you're in this store. The
advancement of connectivity, especially in rural America, has been significant
over the past couple of years.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
Time and again, our guests talked about how high speed
connectivity plays a crucial role in achieving business results in
line with the company's mission, and we know this will
become an even larger piece of the puzzle as we
find new ways to leverage maturing technologies like the Internet
of Things and bleeding edge technologies like the new implementations
of artificial intelligence. We've seen leaders like our guests push

(10:50):
companies to adopt a nimble approach, and that's made possible
through high speed, low latency data communication systems. I'm excited
to see what develops over the next few years. Already,
we've seen incredible transformation across multiple industries, sometimes by necessity,
but always made possible by the incredible leaders who are
not content to maintain a status quo. They're far too

(11:14):
restless for that. Thanks again for joining us on this
season of the Restless Ones. We look forward to bringing
you more great conversations with incredible leaders very soon. Until then,
I'm Jonathan Strickland,