July 11, 2024 • 43 mins
In this engaging episode of TalkingPointz - Talking Headz, hosts Dave Michels and David Danto chat with Kevin McMenamy, the CTO of Neat, to delve into his fascinating journey through the video conferencing industry.
Kevin shares insights from his early days at Cisco, where he contributed to pioneering video technologies like IP telephony video and telepresence, to his current role at Neat, where cutting-edge video solutions are developed. The conversation covers the evolution of video conferencing, the challenges and triumphs of integrating multiple firms into Cisco, and the vibrant, innovative culture at Neat that keeps Kevin passionate about his work.
This episode offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at the industry's transformation and the key players driving its future. Tune in to hear about the technological advancements that shape how we connect globally and the personal stories of those at the forefront of this revolution.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Dave Michels (00:21):
Welcome to Talking Heads, the informative,
entertaining and brilliantpodcast on enterprise
communications from the team attalking points.
Okay, Hi, Steve Michels fromtalking points. Welcome to
another episode of talkingpoints, chats, Dave. Dave Danto
(00:44):
and myself will be interviewingKevin from Neat. Kevin, you're
in a brand new role at neat, andI just saw you change seats. I
know you wear multiple hats. Ididn't know you said multiple
seats exactly. I
Unknown (00:56):
just wanted to be a little bit closer to all the
equipment.
Dave Michels (01:01):
Brief introduction, a quick
introduction of your role. At
Unknown (01:04):
me, yes, I'm a CTO and run the software engineering
team here, and
Dave Michels (01:10):
you've been there for how long? 10
Unknown (01:12):
months. I joined in September of 2023, all
Dave Michels (01:16):
right. Well, that's going to be a part of our
conversation. We've got a wholelot of history to cover before
we get there. So, Kevin,
Unknown (01:21):
first of all, what equipment are you using right
now? Where are youso I'm in Oslo, first of all,
meets headquarters, and I'm on abar pro with three screens. I
see both of you reallyfantastically well. We're using
meet center here for themicrophone array. And also, if I
sit and, you know, look at youguys this way, which would be
(01:44):
awkward and uncomfortable, butfor demo purposes, but you know,
if I was talking to somebodyacross the table, then, you
know, within a few seconds, theneeds center would detect, oh,
I'm looking here, and switch tothis camera view. And then if I
turn and talk to you guys, youknow, this way on the screens,
then it's going to detect thatI'm looking there. We can't
Dave Michels (02:03):
see that meat center. So let me just ask it a
curiosity. Is that sitting onthe table or hanging from the
ceiling?
Unknown (02:10):
It is sitting on the table right?
Old school. When you get up andwalk over to the screen, we will
see it in the foreground there.
So, so let's, let's go backwardsa little bit. You were, you were
lucky enough or unlucky enough.
I don't know how you want tophrase it, to be at Cisco when
video actually became a thing,working for, you know,
ultimately for John Chambers.
You know, what was thatexperience like? I know that the
(02:31):
Cisco vision originally was, youknow, the Kuva, the Cisco
Unified video advantage, right?
Gotta remember that that's,yeah, but
actually that came after, yeah,you know. So I've been doing
video conferencing since 96 I'msuper, you know, privileged to
have been a part of the industrysince then, back in the days of
(02:52):
ISDN, H dot 320 and then H dot321 ISDN, or, I'm sorry, H dot
320 over ATM at a company calledfirst virtual and then I joined
Cisco in 2000 working on H dot323, video conferencing. And
then we came up with the ideafor Kuva and IP and video
telephony as part of theenterprise PBX solution, Call
Manager. Back then, peoplenowadays know it as Unified
(03:14):
Communications Manager. So, sothat
was the idea, again, for peoplewho aren't familiar with that,
is like you would pick up aphone and call somebody, and if
you had it, and they had it, allof a sudden, you see their face
on the screen when you'recalling. So just magic, a bolt
on to the to the IP telephony.
And then, you know, CharlieGiancarlo and the team, you
know, around telepresence thatthat sort of became a thing,
(03:35):
right? Yeah,exactly. And then we pivoted,
you know, really big from, from,you know, desktop communications
with with Cuba unified videoadvantage and and IP phones, to
high end, 10 ADP, 30 frames persecond, immersive telepresence.
And that was an incrediblejourney, really privileged to
have been a part of thatgive us some color that we may
(03:57):
not know about, that you know,obviously, you know, those who
people are familiar with thetechnology, we get the
technology. But what was it likeinside Cisco, around trying to
kick that off, around thebandwidth, around the network?
What was that experience like?
Yeah,it's a lot of fun. And, you
know, we were essentially like astartup inside of, you know,
Cisco. So it's like, fantastic,right? We had all this funding
(04:19):
from Cisco. But we were, wetreated ourselves as like a
seconded, you know, often inanother building, working on
this Skunk Works telepresencething, you know, small team,
completely focused, you know,working like startup hours, you
know, we're out there in theparking lot, you know, cutting
up a table and painting it, youknow, and security guard came
(04:40):
driving by, what are you guysdoing? Oh, we're doing this
telepresence. It's gonna beamazing. He's like, You guys are
crazy. And he drove off. And,yeah, bringing telepresence to
market was, was a thrill, justthe immersive experience, right?
You know, sitting across fromthe table from somebody on the
other. End of the planet, justgoing, my God, you're aware.
(05:01):
You're in you're in Hong Kong.
Holy You look like you're rightthere across from it. It's
amazing. And you know, weweren't the only ones doing it,
as you know, tanberg had theirt3 and Polycom had their RPX and
HP had Halo and such. And thatthe success of telepresence
really set us up to then startto think seriously about we need
(05:23):
to triple down on this market,you know? And that led to the
acquisition of timber, whichbrought me to Oslo. Well,
that's actually a great pointtalk a little bit, because you
were there for tanbergacquisition and you were there
for kanos acquisition a fewyears later. You know, those
product lines probably wasn'teasy. Anything you want to tell
(05:43):
us about the that joy or thosescars,
I would say very few scars, alljoy, but, you know, I tend to be
an optimist, so yeah, first ofall, on a personal level, moving
to Oslo was a phenomenalopportunity for me and for my
family, my wife, my daughter,our daughter was seven at the
time. She loved it. My wifeloved it. I loved it. Working
(06:06):
here, you know, the timber teamis phenomenal. It was a joy to
work with them. And I was got towear many hats. You know, it's
kind of like part productmanager, part architect, part
janitor, part whatever you needhelp with getting to understand
how to operate within Cisco, youknow, all all. And what do you
call that? Master of jack of alltrades, master of a couple, you
(06:30):
know? And just, just here tohelp, right? And so I think the
timber team really appreciatedme as an asset. And yeah, we
Dave Michels (06:37):
went through another transition too, because
when Rowan came in, everythingshifted to spark
Unknown (06:43):
the cloud. Exactly right. That's right. That's been
a journey. But yeah, the youknow here working with the
timber team, is all aboutgetting all the timber endpoints
to register to communicationsmanager, so lineside SIP
integration, getting the codingMCU and telepresence server to
act as conference bridges on, oncommunications ventures really
like bringing telepresence andunified communications together
(07:06):
and integrating all of thatwhole, you know, all three,
right, Cisco TelePresence,tanberg and Cisco UC altogether,
and then, and then we acquiredecono in 2015,
Dave Michels (07:17):
where were you working? When? When meat
emerged?
Unknown (07:23):
I was in London, so fast forward, 2015 Cisco
acquired acano. Fast Forward,three years later, 2018 I moved
to London to act as Director ofEngineering for what was born
out of the coding acquisition,which became the tele
transcoding back end of WebEx,and the on prem conferencing
(07:46):
portfolio, which was the econoportfolio. And those two teams
both very close to each other,about 15 minute drive away from
each other, our 15 mile driveaway, depending on traffic, that
can be anywhere from 15 minutesto an hour and 15 minutes in
London. And you know, so I tookon both of those teams and
brought them under, you know,common leadership and common
(08:06):
vision, common goals and allthat, even though one team was
focused on prem and the otherand cloud really doing very
similar things, transcodedconferencing, applications,
servers and such. So that was areally fantastic journey, and
that that was after Cisco Spark,Dave, because Cisco Spark
started around 2014 or so, and Imoved here in 2018 sorry, so the
(08:31):
coding acquisition was afterCisco Spark, but then I moved
here in 2018 trying to put thetogether when
Dave Michels (08:37):
Nieto merged, that was, yeah, It was after. It was
after after Spark, you're right,but where were you working? Were
you? Were you still at Cisco atthat time? Or were you I was
Unknown (08:47):
at Cisco? Yeah, when neat started in 2019 I'm sorry,
that was the question you hadasked. So neat started late 2019
as they announced themselves atzoomtopia. So I was still at
Cisco, very much competing withme and watching them, uh,
succeed, and knowing all ofthem, right? They're all former
colleagues from tamburg. So Iwas like, Oh, that's a great
(09:08):
bunch of people. Great products.
Uh, super amazing industrialdesign. The user experience team
does industrial design team thatneed is top notch, best in
class. So seeing the productsthat they came out with, knowing
the people, knowing that theirability, you know, all of us
were watching me closely, ofcourse. And then fast forward to
2023 I had been at Cisco for 23years. I was 47 years old, and I
(09:33):
thought, Jesus, that's half mylife, almost. And so I thought,
you know, geez, maybe I shouldconsider, for the first time in
my career at Cisco, considerleaving Cisco. And I love Cisco.
I think the world of Cisco greatcompany. It always has been.
I've had so many opportunities.
(09:56):
And, you know, I debt agratitude to Cisco for all the
opportunity. Opportunities it'sgiven me, but it was the right
thing. It was the right time forme to think about a change and
what
Dave Michels (10:05):
I was trying to get to. And I guess it's kind of
tricky for you, because you kneweverybody at neat and you had a
lot of respect for them. But Iwould imagine that when meat
popped up, that that a bigcompany like Cisco kind of
probably was kind of dismissiveof them. I would I would imagine
that, oh, you know, they're afly on the wall, whatever you
know, but, but you knew allthese people, so you probably
(10:28):
had a little more respect forthat.
Unknown (10:30):
What they were, yeah, yeah. I think you're right,
Dave. I think lots of otherpeople at Cisco knew all the
people that need as well. Ithink we all had a healthy,
healthy amount of respect forthem.
That's that tanberg DNA that ifyou really take a step back and
look at it, in the industry it'sin so the diaspora, there's so
(10:51):
many different companies thathave a little bit of that piece
of tanberg. And obviously, youknow, at the time, you know,
you're essentially, you know, OJstarted it. You know, OJ was
running this. It was a lot ofback and forth. It's almost like
a volleyball game where peopleare coming in and out. So, so
it's interesting. So tell us alittle bit about what you do on
a daily basis. At neat, what'sthe, what's, what's the, the
(11:13):
magic sauce there that that gotyou to come over? Well, yeah,
so maybe those are two differentquestions. So what got me to
come over was, as we've bothbeen talking about just in the
last couple of minutes, as thepeople, the talent, you know,
the products are phenomenal. Youknow, they're so simple,
elegant, easy to use. You know,the out of box experience is
(11:34):
best in class for anybody whohasn't experienced taking a new
product out of the box. Pick anyone of the products that could
be a neat frame, a neat frame, aneat bar, it doesn't matter, a
neat board, 50 is, you know, areally, truly magical
experience. And just, you know,plug it in and walk through the
setup process, and you'll befloored at how simple it is.
(11:55):
And, you know, all themicrophones are built in, so you
don't need cables, you know,stringing across the floor onto
a microphone on the table. We dohave a pad for control, and that
does have a cable, of course,but that just plugs into an
ethernet jack on the floor. Sothere's no, like, cables
running, you know, between thedevices. It's all over IP. We
talk about more that thetechnology side of that a little
(12:16):
bit later. So that's what youknow, attracted me to neat. And
then the first part of yourquestion about what my role is,
you know, it's really a dualrole, right? For as leading
software engineering, it'sreally execution oriented, is
getting it done, getting allthose features done, chewing
through our backlog, delivering,you know, high quality software
on time, you know, consistently,reliably, etc. And then there's
(12:39):
also the CTO hat, which youknow, is much more outbound,
talking to customers, going totrade shows, meeting with you
guys, which I love. So it's,it's a joy for me to be in this
role and have the opportunity todo the more of the outbound
stuff. Again,
Dave Michels (12:54):
everyone enjoys meeting with us. That's
understandable. But I wasthinking about, I was thinking
about when neat launched. It wasa zoom play. It was all about it
was, it was focused 100% onZoom. And of course, Cisco was
always 100% focused on on Ciscothe whole time you were there.
(13:15):
And both company, or both needand Cisco now have moved into
the Microsoft ecosystem, muchbigger opportunity and a whole
new set of requirements and userbase. Yeah, is it was that hard
for for you, because you for somuch of your career, you saw
Microsoft as the enemy, and nowall of a sudden it's an
opportunity and partner? Wasthat? Was that a hard shift, or
(13:37):
is that pretty easy?
Unknown (13:39):
Yeah, no, it's a really good question, because I think,
you know, in some ways it washard, like, personally, I was in
engineering, so it's not like Iwas spending a lot of time, you
know, evaluating thecompetitors, right? Like, like
somebody in more of a customerfacing role would do, so I
didn't have a whole lot of handson deep hands on experience with
(13:59):
either Microsoft Teams or zoom,living in the WebEx bubble for
several years. But so that partwas a little hard, you know, a
bit of a learning curve for meto, you know, instantly be an
expert in, you know, oh, let meintroduce you to our new CTO.
And, you know, you feel like,oh, I have to be able to answer
all the questions. So, so thatwas certainly a bit of a
learning curve for me. But, youknow, it's all the same stuff,
(14:21):
right? Whether it's teams, zoom,WebEx, Google, meet, whatever,
it's all the same technology.
We've all been working on itfor, you know, the last 26
years, or whatever, my career.
So, you know, it's picking uppretty quickly. It was easy in
the sense that, hey, you know,this is just the role. The
transition to the new role, newbusiness Microsoft is now a
(14:43):
partner. Embrace thatrelationship. You know, I get on
really well with everybody atMicrosoft. Ilya and I have
regular sync ups. We meet withIlias team on a weekly basis.
You know, they were just outvisiting us about four. Weeks
ago here in Oslo, and I alsovisited Cisco and pexip and
(15:04):
other players here in the what'scalled Video valley here in the
Oslo Lee soccer for Naboo area.
So yeah, from from thatperspective, it's been no
problem, seamless transition. Solet's take advantage of the fact
that you're sitting in thatroom, and while you're there, I
want you to show us some of thestuff that's in there, and then
maybe later on, on the call, wecan get you to disconnect and
(15:26):
reconnect from one of the otherdevices. So you said you're a
bar Pro, now I see you've gotsome bars behind you. I see
you've got the board behind you.
You want you as long as thecamera will track, which I
assume it does on the bar. Pro,why don't, why don't you get up
and just really quickly walkaround and show us what's in the
room. Yeah,and the reason I set this up is
I wanted to talk, and it kind ofties into what you wanted to
talk about, Dave, about what'scoming in the next year, what's
(15:46):
coming in the next 10 years. Youknow, our needs vision is to try
to keep things super simple. Soreally, we strive to reduce, you
know, cabling complexity. Youknow, lots of nerd knobs and
tweaks and like, just make itwork. Users haven't, shouldn't
have to think about it. Havingtons of options is not
(16:08):
necessarily, you know, sometimesa bad thing. So we try to try to
give flexibility withoutintroducing complexity, and not
just clutter the user interfacewith a bunch of options and nerd
knobs and things like that.
Things like that. And to dothat, we're doing everything
over IP. So the bar Pro, whichyou can't see because you're on
(16:31):
it, is mounted on top of threetelevisions, and that's just
connectedto right behind your head. Oh,
yeah, exactly.
Thanks. Here, let me grab it.
Good suggestion. So, yeah, theVAR Pro is what you guys are on
there. And that's just connectedto an ethernet jack, right?
(16:55):
Power Ethernet HDMI to the TVsand then over IP. It's pairing
with the neat pad, you can seethat and with the neat center.
And, you know, the neat pad is,you know, one thing you could
think, Oh, well, that's justcontrol signaling, right? But
the neat center is somethingelse, right? The media is
streaming from the neat center.
(17:18):
Microphone array is doing allthe neat audio processing, like
D reverberation and noisesuppression and so forth, and
streaming that to the bar Pro,and then the bar Pro is
deciding, is that microphonebetter, or is that microphone
better? So we're doing dynamicbeam selection, which is when we
(17:38):
met Dave, yeah, yeah, a coupleweeks ago in Las Vegas, sorry,
Dave, the we had announced andwe were demonstrating there the
dynamic beam selection, which wejust released in our 24 dot pre
release a couple about a monthago. So when
Dave Michels (17:59):
you do that dynamic selection, is it one or
the other? Or do you use both?
Is the other might become anoise cancelation, or does it
explain that a little moreclearly? Yeah?
Unknown (18:12):
Yeah. It's a great question, because that's that's
why I started calling it dynamicbeam selection, because we're
not actually mixing just yet.
That's the next step for us.
Right now, we're selecting whichbeam is best. Every single audio
frame on a frame by framebracelets. We're switching to
this beam or that beam, or thisbeam, or that beam or this based
on who's speaking. That meansthat if two people literally
(18:33):
speak at the same time, one willwin, and the other will be
slightly attenuated because wehaven't selected that beam. So
we're attenuating the otherbeams to reduce, like air
conditioning noise and you know,so that's how beamforming works,
right? You select a beam thatyou want to gain in, gain up on,
to enhance that the volume ofthat speaker and attenuate the
(18:53):
others. Right? In the future, wehope to literally mix. If
there's two beams that bothhave, you know, energy on them,
attenuate the others, and mixthose two. But the reason I
brought all that up is, if youthink about technologically,
these devices now are streamingover IP, doing real time media
in a distributed architecture,right? And you could start to
(19:17):
think about scaling that out toother use cases in a distributed
architecture, and that's whatbrings me to the board. So if
you don't mind, I'd like to showyou so you know, as as people
might be able to tell from theuser experience, we're using
zoom for the meeting we're on.
This is Microsoft Teams on aneat board 65 and our newer,
neat board 50. And one of thefeatures that we have, we're
(19:41):
it's not fully shipping yet, butwe're coming out with it is
called neat share, and it'sanother example of how we're
doing this distributed mediaprocessing and distributed
architecture that, let's pretendthat we were in a meeting on
this Microsoft Teams device. ButI wanted to share. Something
that I'm working on in like aMiro board or some other
(20:02):
collaborative application on theknee port, 50 if I just swipe
out to get the neat menu up andhit Share, instantly you see on
the knee port, 65 everythingthat's on that screen today,
it's only video. In the futurerelease will include audio as
well. So you can, like, watch aYouTube video, for example, over
this and on this side, we'reessentially treating it as like
(20:25):
a virtual HDMI input. So theMicrosoft Teams application
thinks, oh, a user just pluggedin the PC. Do you want to share
that into the meeting? Yes, andthat is configurable on the
Microsoft Teams application,whether you want it to auto
share when you plug in acomputer source, or whether you
want it to prompt and you haveto hit Share, right? That's
configurable by the user, soeither way you know it would
(20:47):
either automatically share intothe meeting, or you'd have to
click on your Microsoft app tosay, yes, I want to share this.
And then everybody in themeeting sees whatever this
whatever's on this screen. Sothat's an example of us pairing
and associating multiple devicesin a distributed media
architecture, and that's ourvision of how we go forward, is
(21:11):
rather than having complexcodecs with lots of inputs and
outputs and wires runningthrough ceilings and floors and
to get multiple cameras in alarge auditorium style room.
Well, what if you could justtake multiple neat products,
arrange them in the room the wayyou want them to to be. You
know, a neat bar Pro on thatwall, maybe another meatball Pro
on this wall, maybe a neat board65 in the back, you know, neat
(21:34):
Center, which can provide, likea presenter camera, because if
I'm standing, you know, morelike up here in this position,
talking to an audience, youknow, you're looking at the back
of my head, but with neatcenter, you know, then you're
going to see me from thisperspective instead of, you
know, from that perspective.
Does that make sense? Did thatflow
(21:58):
great? And the idea that thesecameras and audio pickup devices
are talking to each other. Youknow, that's the the AI that
that's hidden in plain sight, ifI quote my buddy Kevin again,
that talks about that, that it'snot, you know, generative AI,
it's this machine learningalgorithm, yeah, smart enough to
recognize your face, smartenough to switch, smart enough
(22:19):
to do everything else, and youexactly into all your products,
I guess, exactly. Well,
Dave Michels (22:24):
that was a very neat demo. I have to say, You
did a good job there. Kevin,great, very easy. You can't see
all the little munchkins, kindof behind the behind the scenes,
making it all work. I,
Unknown (22:36):
you know, I literally am here by myself. And I did not
rehearse that. I rehearsed theneat share bit, but the getting
up and doing the presentercamera thing that was totally on
the spur of the moment. Hey,are you able to connect from one
of the other devices, like theneat frame, and give us that
experience while we finish thisconversation? Absolutely.
(22:57):
Yeah. Tommy's perfect. Let mejust drop here and I'll jump
over to another room and dial infrom any friend.
Okay, there'll be a magic edithere so people won't have to
wait only Dave Michels and Iright?
Yeah, you're gonna play like thedoo doo doo music, right?
(23:21):
Welcome back now that Kevin hasrejoined us from a different
room. You're in one of yourlittle demo room. So lighting
might not be perfect, but you'reon a neat frame, right? Tell us
about that.
Yeah, that's right. It's aportrait mode. You can look on
Nita. No, you'll you'll see it.
It's a great product, superportable. You can literally,
there's a little handle builtinto the top of you can just
(23:42):
pick it up, carry it around justa single power cable, Wi Fi, or
Ethernet, if you want to, youknow, connect it to the
corporate network via Ethernet.
But, you know, I use Wi Fi on mynew frame at home all day long,
and it works fantastic. And the,you know, microphone array and
the camera built into it and thespeakers built into it. It's
(24:03):
beautiful. You can pinch tozoom. You know, if the
somebody's sharing contentthat's a little bit hard to
read, like a PowerPoint or,sorry, like an Excel spreadsheet
or something, you can just pinchto zoom, and it's a great
experience. Sitting on a neatframe behind me is some of our
engineering desks, so forgivethe clutter, but I'm here at our
neat engineering headquarters inOslo Norway.
(24:24):
Okay, I
Dave Michels (24:24):
got a, I got a specific question about the
frame. And you don't have allthe history and baggage of meat,
and you're the new guy. So thisis, this is a, this is a tricky
question, because the first timeI saw the frame, I said, Why
don't you stick a handset on itand make it a phone. And I think
Simon was going to start crying.
I think, you know, it was like,it was like, Oh no, don't go
there, whatever. So, so let meask you, have you thought about
(24:47):
making that a phone? Or, doeszoom have any excuse me, does
neat have any thoughts aboutexpanding into telephony?
Unknown (24:57):
That's a great question. David, especially, I
think, in. Contact Center right.
Video is increasingly becomingimportant in contact center
products, right? If you thinkabout, like, Cisco's contact
center offerings, and five, nineand and others, you know, video
is, you know, still sort of aminority use case, but it's, or
(25:17):
like a niche use case, I guess,but becoming more prevalent,
becoming more of a requirement.
So I could definitely imagineuse cases with agents sitting in
front of a neat frame withheadphones or a handset plugged
in. But I think in general, thesentiment of the phone business
(25:40):
is not really the growth market.
It's not really where we want tofocus video telephony, as we
spoke about earlier, was, youknow, back in the 2004 2006 time
period, until we then, we kindof focus more on the high end,
immersive stuff withtelepresence. Although, having
said all that, I mean, Ciscojust came out with a brand new
with 8800 series phone, I think,with, you know, beautiful camera
(26:02):
in it, and beautiful screen. So,you know, video telephony is
still a thing. It's just not themarket that need wants to be
focused on.
Dave Michels (26:13):
All right? Broader picture, I would say, the past
year or so, the story has reallybeen about multi camera in the
room. You just demonstrated thatin the other room with all these
different cameras, and they werealso showing multiple
microphones. Do you see multiplemicrophones as expanding as a
(26:33):
concept?
Unknown (26:35):
Well, we do, yeah, absolutely. So I showed you
earlier neat center that's got a16 microphone array, and the top
of it, phenomenal micro. And weimagine I don't want to set
expectations. I want to setexpectations appropriately. Here
I'm also responsible forsoftware, so there's an element
(26:55):
of, once I say it, I have todeliver it. So we envision
adding multiple neat centers ina room that's that's one step.
But we also envision, as Ialluded, building can't
Dave Michels (27:07):
be called centers.
If you do that, then you'recentered, or something like
that.
Unknown (27:13):
And center, yeah. But also sort of in if you read
between the lines of thedemonstration I showed you with
neat share, and I mentionedaudios coming as part of neat
share in a future release aswell. Is you know that those
boards that I was showing youthat demonstration on of neat
share had microphone arrays inthem. So imagine the microphone
(27:36):
array in the bar Pro that wewere talking on, plus the
microphone array and the neatcenters in the room, plus the
microphone arrays and the boardin the back of the room, we can,
you know, wire all this up in adistributed IP based, you know,
distributed media architecture,and be able to do dynamic beam
selection and mixing and and sowe can't do that today, but
(27:57):
that's absolutely where we seeit headed. You
Dave Michels (28:00):
didn't even mention the pad. What about the
pad? Oh, yeah,
Unknown (28:03):
thank you. I skipped that one in my mental map of the
room there, yeah, on the neatpad. Neat has always had two
microphones in the pad, andwe've talked about doing
enabling those microphones. Thefeature is known as mics in the
pad. And I'm super excited toannounce that in the upcoming
(28:23):
release, 24.4 which we'reliterally putting out to beta
imminently, like in the nextlike, by the time you watch this
recording, it'll be out. Mics inthe pad are enabled as a beta
feature. And the only
Dave Michels (28:38):
reason that's a really bad idea, because you
hang those pads outside the roomon the wall. So, so that seems
like a really bad idea to haveactive mics outside the
Unknown (28:48):
room you want, you want. We wouldn't activate
those. Those are, those arerunning in scheduler mode. Mics
are never enabled in schedulermode. The way that it works is
they have the knee pad has to bepaired with, like a board or a
bar or whatever parent device,and then they, you know, know
(29:11):
about one another and the bar orthe board, or, you know, bar,
bar, pro, board, board, 50,whatever, whichever model you
know, activates the microphonesin the pad. And we're using,
you'll find this probablyinteresting. We're using the
IEEE 1588, precision timeprotocol for clock
(29:32):
synchronization between them,which is why we say you have to
connect them by Ethernet. Wi Fiis harder to make that work
right, because of thevariability of the you know,
transmit, receive, on Wi Fi. Sowe're for now, we're saying they
have to be connected onEthernet, and we negotiated P to
(29:55):
P, and then we take themicrophone and. A signal from
the knee pads, stream it over IPto the to the bar on the board,
and then we do all theprocessing there.
Dave Michels (30:07):
Seems like a lot of things are going back to
wired Ethernet just because ofthe Poe standard.
Unknown (30:12):
Yeah, yeah. Poe is another reason why you'd want
the Ethernet on the especiallyon the pad, because you can
power the pad through Poe. Soyou just need a single ethernet
port under the table for the padto plug into power IP, and then
it pairs with the bar over IP.
Well,
Dave Michels (30:27):
you've been been extremely open and transparent.
Tell us something confidentialthat hasn't been announced yet.
Unknown (30:38):
I just did actually, you know, the fact that we're
shipping mics in the pad and thenext release coming out like,
literally, as soon as I, youknow, walk out of the room here,
I think we're pushing we'regoing to do three weeks ago. Go
now. Do it now. No, the let'sforget NDA for a second, forget
(30:58):
current releases, our currentroadmap. Think in your head, as
I said when we were talkingbefore, five years from now, 10
years from now, What? What? Whatare your as the CTO of the
company now? What's your visionfor the collaboration space?
I've always envisioned that whatyou described with your
microphones is something we'regoing to do with cameras, more
(31:19):
than just a front, center back,but, you know, a little, cameras
around a bezel, and all beingbrought together by a processor.
Maybe it's a holographic in someway. Maybe it's 3d in some way,
without glasses, with lenticularscreens. We know, you know that
project is going on right now,and we'll see if that has any
What do you see happening in thespace to be cutting edge and
(31:39):
ahead. Yeah, youknow, 10 years is a long time.
So it was safe. From an NDAperspective. Nobody's gonna come
back and ask why it wasn't done.
Yeah,you know, I think, I think our
focus at need is definitely onthe multi device, distributed
media kind of architect, becauseyou're exactly right. What you
said is exactly right. I talkedabout doing using the microphone
(32:01):
arrays, but absolutely, there'salso the cameras in all of those
devices and the intelligence tobe able to select the best
camera based on where people arelooking today, with neat center,
we if the majority of people arelooking towards neat center, we
select that camera view. If themajority of people are looking
at the main front of room screendevice, then we, you know,
(32:21):
select that camera view. But weabsolutely don't want to stop
there. We want to be able toselect the best view of each
individual from that camera, orfrom that camera, or for that
from that camera, from thatcamera. So you can, you know,
imagine the products around theroom and all working in
conjunction with the bestmicrophone beam for that person
who's speaking in the bestcamera based on where people are
(32:44):
looking.
But video processing is a thingnow where you can, you know,
open up some some apps and have,you know, virtual cameras do
things. Oh, sure. And have deepfakes go on and and there have
been a couple of companiessuccessful and unsuccessful that
take, you know, a camera viewand kind of stretch it or
unstretch it, or do things withit. I'm of the opinion that you
(33:05):
know, if you if you use, youknow, telephone size 816, 20
megapixel cameras around thebezel of a screen or around the
table or wherever you do it, andthe camera might not have a shot
to go to that camera. But theremight be some intelligence in
the back end that takes a pieceof this, a piece of that, a
piece of this, reassembles theroom, right, and creates some
(33:29):
so, I mean, I've got to thinkwe're going in that direction,
because the processing power isthere at this point. Yeah,
I would say, you know, like, ifyou look at some of the
holographic offerings that areon the in the market, you know,
from Google, from Cisco, etc.
That's essentially how they'reworking, right? Multiple cameras
in an array, you know, generallyspeaking, in a horizontal line,
because the application isvideo, so you kind of want to
shoot that the scene, like, fromthat perspective, right? And
(33:52):
then interpolating betweenmultiple cameras, so you get
that 3d effective, you know, ifyou know, David sees me looking
from this perspective, and theother day sees me like it from
this perspective, because basedon where my head is, you know,
based on where you're sitting,you know, you want to, you know,
a system makes you feel it makesit feel like you're looking at
(34:15):
me from that perspective, right?
Because there's an array ofcameras.
Dave Michels (34:21):
I just want to clarify that the other David is
damn good,
Unknown (34:27):
right? So, so, yeah, I think I think you're right. I
think you know, those are twokind of different things that
right, like a an array, a cameraarray, doing stereoscopic
holographic telepresence, videoconferencing. Telepresence,
whatever you want to call it, isone application, multiple
cameras around a room is acompletely different thing. In
(34:49):
both cases, you know, there'ssome selection of which camera
is best, and then compositingthat into a view for the far
into, you know, for the remoteparticipants. To see and whether
that compositing is done locallyon the device. Because, as you
said, processing power is alwaysincreasing, Moore's law, but
(35:10):
also in the cloud, right? We seeincreasingly, like Microsoft and
teleframe, a lot of thatprocessing is being done cloud
side, right? And you know,there's, there's a pendulum
there as well, because doing itall in the cloud means, you
know, well, that means you're,by definition, decrypting,
decoding, processing,compositing, re, encoding, re
(35:32):
encrypting. So what about end toend encryption? Right? And
versus doing it on the device,you can maintain that end to end
to end encryption all the waythrough. So there's pros and
cons to those two approaches. Soyeah, I think the next 10 years
will be a continued advancementin all of these fronts, right?
And like you talked aboutearlier, David, the actually it
(35:55):
was before, before our session,but you and I were chatting
about center of room cameras,like the need center and outside
in cameras that othercompetitors are doing. And
there's not a right answer or awrong answer right there's
there's sort of advantages anddisadvantages. We chose to
approach it from the centerpoint of view. But I think
(36:17):
ultimately, in 10 years timeframe, the right answer is a
combination of both right whichis kind of what I alluded to,
with multiple needs, neatdevices around the room. So then
you have a combination of centerof camera looking out at the
table, people at the table, butalso the bar, the board in the
back of the room, the bar in thefront of the room, you know,
maybe another bar on the side ofthe room, and being able to film
(36:37):
the room from either outside inor inside out perspective.
All right, one last unfairquestion before we end this. And
I'm pref No, no, I
Dave Michels (36:45):
have the last question, but go ahead.
Unknown (36:48):
So my last question, the unfair question, is really
simple. If you take any of theneat products and you use them
for Microsoft Teams, they workbeautifully, and if you use them
for zoom, they work beautifully.
And every end user on the planetis saying, Why can't that be a
button? You know? Why can't I doa zoom call and a teams call?
And the answer is that there'sno technical reason why you
(37:09):
can't provide that. Will we eversee that? Or do we think
companies like zoom andMicrosoft are going to be
preventing that capability toswitch for as long as they
exist.
Yeah, that's a, it's a goodquestion. It's a tough question,
because it's a politicallycharged question, right? Yeah,
you're right. Technologically, Imean, technologically, there's
(37:30):
no reason but, but the honest,you know, let's, let's, you
know, dig into that a little bitmore that, you know, Scratch one
layer beneath the surface onthat one. Technologically,
there's no reason why, why wethey couldn't or we couldn't as
an industry, but there is workthat would require be required,
right? The Microsoft Teams roomapplication is not designed as
(37:54):
an you know, think about it likea software app, any software
application running on them, onan iOS or Android phone mobile
platform. It's designed to beforegrounded at background,
right? It's in the softwaredevelopers who developed that
app did it with knowing thatit's going to be backgrounded.
And they built the softwareapplication to to be, you know,
(38:16):
accepting of that. MicrosoftTeams, rooms, Zoom rooms, you
know, WebEx on the Ciscodevices, Google meet on Google
meet devices, the applicationsweren't built to be foregrounded
and backgrounded. They expect tobe running all the time. They're
registering back to they'recalling home, back to Microsoft
(38:37):
attack, or Zoom's EDM, or, youknow, WebEx control, hub, etc,
when the the app isbackgrounded, oh, in your
control, in your attack, or ZDm,they look like they're
disconnected. That's not good.
So there is some softwaredevelopment required to make it
possible. But technologically,there's nothing stopping it and
and then politically, you know,charged because, you know,
(39:01):
what's in the best interest ofMicrosoft and zoom, you know,
did that? Do they want to enablethat? You know, lots of
customers are, are begging forit. But the current, the current
approach, is the direct testjoined using WebRTC is sort of
the industry standard for anyapp to talk to any other back
end, Microsoft can talk to zoom,WebEx. WebEx can talk to zoom,
(39:22):
Microsoft. Zoom can talk toMicrosoft, web and Google and
those combinations as well asneat, we're like, hey, you know,
we're a hardware platform. We'rehappy to support all this stuff.
So not only can you runMicrosoft Teams and zoom on our
devices and in the future,perhaps others like my like
(39:43):
Google meet, for example,potentially in the future, but
also our whole app hub strategybuilt on top of neat pulse,
where neat pulse becomes like anapp store for collaboration,
apps like what I demonstratedwith the. The the sharing Miro
board into a Microsoft Teamscall, right? So we have 50 plus
(40:04):
partners signed up to partnerwith us on Apple to be able to
run, you know, we don't wantpeople running Angry Birds on
meat boards. But you know, anyapp, unless
you're sitting on a train showfloor
Dave Michels (40:18):
is a really good point. Though, a lot of
customers are asking for but alot of customers aren't asking
for it, and that's a trickyline, and I'm often says, don't
listen to your customers,because they'll scare you down
the path. And so it is a it is abalancing act. I have a question
for you more on a personallevel, because I'm aspiring to
be more like you. Amount of theworld traveling all the world I
(40:40):
was last summer. I'll be back inSweden soon, and I was just in
London. When you travel around,I want to ask you each city, San
Francisco, London and Oslo, whatis that? What is the one meal
that you not necessarily thename of the restaurant, but what
is the one meal that you try tohave? Like, for example, when
(41:01):
you're in Oslo, one of yourfavorite things when you're in
San Francisco. Give us a littlebit of a world menu here.
Unknown (41:07):
I wish you really put me on the spot there. Dave,
because I am not a foodie. Dave,sorry, I am not a foodie. I wish
I was. I have lots of friendswho are foodies. I was in Boston
a few weeks ago with you know,my great friend and mentor and
former colleague, JonathanRosenberg. He's a he's a big
foodie. We've gone to michelstarrestaurants together. But that's
(41:30):
not what. That's not my personalthing. No, I would say, you
know, California, London andOslo are all incredible places
for different reasons, right?
And one of the things that Ilove about London is, you know,
the variety of of restaurants,the variety of evening, you
know, entertainment, but also,like the the the amount of green
(41:51):
space, the public parks, everypark in London has a cafe in it
where you can get great food,like food, not Michelin
starfish, you know, great beer.
You know, you can hang out inthe grass. Have a beer. Have,
you know, have your pub food. Ilove it. I love lemon. That's
incredible.
Dave Michels (42:11):
Yeah, London, I always try to get Indian food in
London. This is harder to findbecause the London is having
such a food scene right now thatall these new restaurants are
opening up. And yeah, so anyway,we can talk about, I'll talk to
Jonathan to call and ask,
Unknown (42:29):
I have to say, coming from California, I love Mexican
food, and that is hard to findin London. And Oslo, sorry,
yeah, I'mjust kidding. It doesn't.
I have a lot of respect for whatyou've done in your career, and
all you know, your the patentsyou've created and the products
you've helped bring to market. Ihope you're smart enough in Oslo
to have not bitten the line anddrinking drunk the Aquavit.
(42:50):
The Aquavit. Yeah, I have, ifyou go to a really good
restaurant, like a Christmasdinner, for example, up in
Holman calling by the ski jump,there's a fantastic restaurant
up there, and they did like afive course meal for Christmas
dinner, and they served Aquavitwith each one like a pairing.
And it was actually, it wasactually good.
(43:13):
Now I don't feel like you're assmart as you were when you
started.
Dave Michels (43:17):
The call. Was a fantastic conversation. I have
to say, Kevin, your rival atneat raises the bar need and
really exciting to see that needis so committed to this. You
bring such a pedigree ofexperience and expertise. We I
know we can talk for hours onthis stuff, but it's just, it's
just great to see what you'redoing. Great to great to
(43:38):
continue to follow what you'redoing. So thank you Dave, Daniel
for setting this up, and thankyou Kevin for participating. And
we'll be back soon with anotherepisode of talking points
checks. You.
Welcome to Talking Heads, the informative,
entertaining and brilliantpodcast on enterprise
communications from the team attalking points.
Okay, Hi, Steve Michels fromtalking points. Welcome to
another episode of talkingpoints, chats, Dave. Dave Danto
(00:44):
and myself will be interviewingKevin from Neat. Kevin, you're
in a brand new role at neat, andI just saw you change seats. I
know you wear multiple hats. Ididn't know you said multiple
seats exactly. I
Unknown (00:56):
just wanted to be a little bit closer to all the
equipment.
Dave Michels (01:01):
Brief introduction, a quick
introduction of your role. At
Unknown (01:04):
me, yes, I'm a CTO and run the software engineering
team here, and
Dave Michels (01:10):
you've been there for how long? 10
Unknown (01:12):
months. I joined in September of 2023, all
Dave Michels (01:16):
right. Well, that's going to be a part of our
conversation. We've got a wholelot of history to cover before
we get there. So, Kevin,
Unknown (01:21):
first of all, what equipment are you using right
now? Where are youso I'm in Oslo, first of all,
meets headquarters, and I'm on abar pro with three screens. I
see both of you reallyfantastically well. We're using
meet center here for themicrophone array. And also, if I
sit and, you know, look at youguys this way, which would be
(01:44):
awkward and uncomfortable, butfor demo purposes, but you know,
if I was talking to somebodyacross the table, then, you
know, within a few seconds, theneeds center would detect, oh,
I'm looking here, and switch tothis camera view. And then if I
turn and talk to you guys, youknow, this way on the screens,
then it's going to detect thatI'm looking there. We can't
Dave Michels (02:03):
see that meat center. So let me just ask it a
curiosity. Is that sitting onthe table or hanging from the
ceiling?
Unknown (02:10):
It is sitting on the table right?
Old school. When you get up andwalk over to the screen, we will
see it in the foreground there.
So, so let's, let's go backwardsa little bit. You were, you were
lucky enough or unlucky enough.
I don't know how you want tophrase it, to be at Cisco when
video actually became a thing,working for, you know,
ultimately for John Chambers.
You know, what was thatexperience like? I know that the
(02:31):
Cisco vision originally was, youknow, the Kuva, the Cisco
Unified video advantage, right?
Gotta remember that that's,yeah, but
actually that came after, yeah,you know. So I've been doing
video conferencing since 96 I'msuper, you know, privileged to
have been a part of the industrysince then, back in the days of
(02:52):
ISDN, H dot 320 and then H dot321 ISDN, or, I'm sorry, H dot
320 over ATM at a company calledfirst virtual and then I joined
Cisco in 2000 working on H dot323, video conferencing. And
then we came up with the ideafor Kuva and IP and video
telephony as part of theenterprise PBX solution, Call
Manager. Back then, peoplenowadays know it as Unified
(03:14):
Communications Manager. So, sothat
was the idea, again, for peoplewho aren't familiar with that,
is like you would pick up aphone and call somebody, and if
you had it, and they had it, allof a sudden, you see their face
on the screen when you'recalling. So just magic, a bolt
on to the to the IP telephony.
And then, you know, CharlieGiancarlo and the team, you
know, around telepresence thatthat sort of became a thing,
(03:35):
right? Yeah,exactly. And then we pivoted,
you know, really big from, from,you know, desktop communications
with with Cuba unified videoadvantage and and IP phones, to
high end, 10 ADP, 30 frames persecond, immersive telepresence.
And that was an incrediblejourney, really privileged to
have been a part of thatgive us some color that we may
(03:57):
not know about, that you know,obviously, you know, those who
people are familiar with thetechnology, we get the
technology. But what was it likeinside Cisco, around trying to
kick that off, around thebandwidth, around the network?
What was that experience like?
Yeah,it's a lot of fun. And, you
know, we were essentially like astartup inside of, you know,
Cisco. So it's like, fantastic,right? We had all this funding
(04:19):
from Cisco. But we were, wetreated ourselves as like a
seconded, you know, often inanother building, working on
this Skunk Works telepresencething, you know, small team,
completely focused, you know,working like startup hours, you
know, we're out there in theparking lot, you know, cutting
up a table and painting it, youknow, and security guard came
(04:40):
driving by, what are you guysdoing? Oh, we're doing this
telepresence. It's gonna beamazing. He's like, You guys are
crazy. And he drove off. And,yeah, bringing telepresence to
market was, was a thrill, justthe immersive experience, right?
You know, sitting across fromthe table from somebody on the
other. End of the planet, justgoing, my God, you're aware.
(05:01):
You're in you're in Hong Kong.
Holy You look like you're rightthere across from it. It's
amazing. And you know, weweren't the only ones doing it,
as you know, tanberg had theirt3 and Polycom had their RPX and
HP had Halo and such. And thatthe success of telepresence
really set us up to then startto think seriously about we need
(05:23):
to triple down on this market,you know? And that led to the
acquisition of timber, whichbrought me to Oslo. Well,
that's actually a great pointtalk a little bit, because you
were there for tanbergacquisition and you were there
for kanos acquisition a fewyears later. You know, those
product lines probably wasn'teasy. Anything you want to tell
(05:43):
us about the that joy or thosescars,
I would say very few scars, alljoy, but, you know, I tend to be
an optimist, so yeah, first ofall, on a personal level, moving
to Oslo was a phenomenalopportunity for me and for my
family, my wife, my daughter,our daughter was seven at the
time. She loved it. My wifeloved it. I loved it. Working
(06:06):
here, you know, the timber teamis phenomenal. It was a joy to
work with them. And I was got towear many hats. You know, it's
kind of like part productmanager, part architect, part
janitor, part whatever you needhelp with getting to understand
how to operate within Cisco, youknow, all all. And what do you
call that? Master of jack of alltrades, master of a couple, you
(06:30):
know? And just, just here tohelp, right? And so I think the
timber team really appreciatedme as an asset. And yeah, we
Dave Michels (06:37):
went through another transition too, because
when Rowan came in, everythingshifted to spark
Unknown (06:43):
the cloud. Exactly right. That's right. That's been
a journey. But yeah, the youknow here working with the
timber team, is all aboutgetting all the timber endpoints
to register to communicationsmanager, so lineside SIP
integration, getting the codingMCU and telepresence server to
act as conference bridges on, oncommunications ventures really
like bringing telepresence andunified communications together
(07:06):
and integrating all of thatwhole, you know, all three,
right, Cisco TelePresence,tanberg and Cisco UC altogether,
and then, and then we acquiredecono in 2015,
Dave Michels (07:17):
where were you working? When? When meat
emerged?
Unknown (07:23):
I was in London, so fast forward, 2015 Cisco
acquired acano. Fast Forward,three years later, 2018 I moved
to London to act as Director ofEngineering for what was born
out of the coding acquisition,which became the tele
transcoding back end of WebEx,and the on prem conferencing
(07:46):
portfolio, which was the econoportfolio. And those two teams
both very close to each other,about 15 minute drive away from
each other, our 15 mile driveaway, depending on traffic, that
can be anywhere from 15 minutesto an hour and 15 minutes in
London. And you know, so I tookon both of those teams and
brought them under, you know,common leadership and common
(08:06):
vision, common goals and allthat, even though one team was
focused on prem and the otherand cloud really doing very
similar things, transcodedconferencing, applications,
servers and such. So that was areally fantastic journey, and
that that was after Cisco Spark,Dave, because Cisco Spark
started around 2014 or so, and Imoved here in 2018 sorry, so the
(08:31):
coding acquisition was afterCisco Spark, but then I moved
here in 2018 trying to put thetogether when
Dave Michels (08:37):
Nieto merged, that was, yeah, It was after. It was
after after Spark, you're right,but where were you working? Were
you? Were you still at Cisco atthat time? Or were you I was
Unknown (08:47):
at Cisco? Yeah, when neat started in 2019 I'm sorry,
that was the question you hadasked. So neat started late 2019
as they announced themselves atzoomtopia. So I was still at
Cisco, very much competing withme and watching them, uh,
succeed, and knowing all ofthem, right? They're all former
colleagues from tamburg. So Iwas like, Oh, that's a great
(09:08):
bunch of people. Great products.
Uh, super amazing industrialdesign. The user experience team
does industrial design team thatneed is top notch, best in
class. So seeing the productsthat they came out with, knowing
the people, knowing that theirability, you know, all of us
were watching me closely, ofcourse. And then fast forward to
2023 I had been at Cisco for 23years. I was 47 years old, and I
(09:33):
thought, Jesus, that's half mylife, almost. And so I thought,
you know, geez, maybe I shouldconsider, for the first time in
my career at Cisco, considerleaving Cisco. And I love Cisco.
I think the world of Cisco greatcompany. It always has been.
I've had so many opportunities.
(09:56):
And, you know, I debt agratitude to Cisco for all the
opportunity. Opportunities it'sgiven me, but it was the right
thing. It was the right time forme to think about a change and
what
Dave Michels (10:05):
I was trying to get to. And I guess it's kind of
tricky for you, because you kneweverybody at neat and you had a
lot of respect for them. But Iwould imagine that when meat
popped up, that that a bigcompany like Cisco kind of
probably was kind of dismissiveof them. I would I would imagine
that, oh, you know, they're afly on the wall, whatever you
know, but, but you knew allthese people, so you probably
(10:28):
had a little more respect forthat.
Unknown (10:30):
What they were, yeah, yeah. I think you're right,
Dave. I think lots of otherpeople at Cisco knew all the
people that need as well. Ithink we all had a healthy,
healthy amount of respect forthem.
That's that tanberg DNA that ifyou really take a step back and
look at it, in the industry it'sin so the diaspora, there's so
(10:51):
many different companies thathave a little bit of that piece
of tanberg. And obviously, youknow, at the time, you know,
you're essentially, you know, OJstarted it. You know, OJ was
running this. It was a lot ofback and forth. It's almost like
a volleyball game where peopleare coming in and out. So, so
it's interesting. So tell us alittle bit about what you do on
a daily basis. At neat, what'sthe, what's, what's the, the
(11:13):
magic sauce there that that gotyou to come over? Well, yeah,
so maybe those are two differentquestions. So what got me to
come over was, as we've bothbeen talking about just in the
last couple of minutes, as thepeople, the talent, you know,
the products are phenomenal. Youknow, they're so simple,
elegant, easy to use. You know,the out of box experience is
(11:34):
best in class for anybody whohasn't experienced taking a new
product out of the box. Pick anyone of the products that could
be a neat frame, a neat frame, aneat bar, it doesn't matter, a
neat board, 50 is, you know, areally, truly magical
experience. And just, you know,plug it in and walk through the
setup process, and you'll befloored at how simple it is.
(11:55):
And, you know, all themicrophones are built in, so you
don't need cables, you know,stringing across the floor onto
a microphone on the table. We dohave a pad for control, and that
does have a cable, of course,but that just plugs into an
ethernet jack on the floor. Sothere's no, like, cables
running, you know, between thedevices. It's all over IP. We
talk about more that thetechnology side of that a little
(12:16):
bit later. So that's what youknow, attracted me to neat. And
then the first part of yourquestion about what my role is,
you know, it's really a dualrole, right? For as leading
software engineering, it'sreally execution oriented, is
getting it done, getting allthose features done, chewing
through our backlog, delivering,you know, high quality software
on time, you know, consistently,reliably, etc. And then there's
(12:39):
also the CTO hat, which youknow, is much more outbound,
talking to customers, going totrade shows, meeting with you
guys, which I love. So it's,it's a joy for me to be in this
role and have the opportunity todo the more of the outbound
stuff. Again,
Dave Michels (12:54):
everyone enjoys meeting with us. That's
understandable. But I wasthinking about, I was thinking
about when neat launched. It wasa zoom play. It was all about it
was, it was focused 100% onZoom. And of course, Cisco was
always 100% focused on on Ciscothe whole time you were there.
(13:15):
And both company, or both needand Cisco now have moved into
the Microsoft ecosystem, muchbigger opportunity and a whole
new set of requirements and userbase. Yeah, is it was that hard
for for you, because you for somuch of your career, you saw
Microsoft as the enemy, and nowall of a sudden it's an
opportunity and partner? Wasthat? Was that a hard shift, or
(13:37):
is that pretty easy?
Unknown (13:39):
Yeah, no, it's a really good question, because I think,
you know, in some ways it washard, like, personally, I was in
engineering, so it's not like Iwas spending a lot of time, you
know, evaluating thecompetitors, right? Like, like
somebody in more of a customerfacing role would do, so I
didn't have a whole lot of handson deep hands on experience with
(13:59):
either Microsoft Teams or zoom,living in the WebEx bubble for
several years. But so that partwas a little hard, you know, a
bit of a learning curve for meto, you know, instantly be an
expert in, you know, oh, let meintroduce you to our new CTO.
And, you know, you feel like,oh, I have to be able to answer
all the questions. So, so thatwas certainly a bit of a
learning curve for me. But, youknow, it's all the same stuff,
(14:21):
right? Whether it's teams, zoom,WebEx, Google, meet, whatever,
it's all the same technology.
We've all been working on itfor, you know, the last 26
years, or whatever, my career.
So, you know, it's picking uppretty quickly. It was easy in
the sense that, hey, you know,this is just the role. The
transition to the new role, newbusiness Microsoft is now a
(14:43):
partner. Embrace thatrelationship. You know, I get on
really well with everybody atMicrosoft. Ilya and I have
regular sync ups. We meet withIlias team on a weekly basis.
You know, they were just outvisiting us about four. Weeks
ago here in Oslo, and I alsovisited Cisco and pexip and
(15:04):
other players here in the what'scalled Video valley here in the
Oslo Lee soccer for Naboo area.
So yeah, from from thatperspective, it's been no
problem, seamless transition. Solet's take advantage of the fact
that you're sitting in thatroom, and while you're there, I
want you to show us some of thestuff that's in there, and then
maybe later on, on the call, wecan get you to disconnect and
(15:26):
reconnect from one of the otherdevices. So you said you're a
bar Pro, now I see you've gotsome bars behind you. I see
you've got the board behind you.
You want you as long as thecamera will track, which I
assume it does on the bar. Pro,why don't, why don't you get up
and just really quickly walkaround and show us what's in the
room. Yeah,and the reason I set this up is
I wanted to talk, and it kind ofties into what you wanted to
talk about, Dave, about what'scoming in the next year, what's
(15:46):
coming in the next 10 years. Youknow, our needs vision is to try
to keep things super simple. Soreally, we strive to reduce, you
know, cabling complexity. Youknow, lots of nerd knobs and
tweaks and like, just make itwork. Users haven't, shouldn't
have to think about it. Havingtons of options is not
(16:08):
necessarily, you know, sometimesa bad thing. So we try to try to
give flexibility withoutintroducing complexity, and not
just clutter the user interfacewith a bunch of options and nerd
knobs and things like that.
Things like that. And to dothat, we're doing everything
over IP. So the bar Pro, whichyou can't see because you're on
(16:31):
it, is mounted on top of threetelevisions, and that's just
connectedto right behind your head. Oh,
yeah, exactly.
Thanks. Here, let me grab it.
Good suggestion. So, yeah, theVAR Pro is what you guys are on
there. And that's just connectedto an ethernet jack, right?
(16:55):
Power Ethernet HDMI to the TVsand then over IP. It's pairing
with the neat pad, you can seethat and with the neat center.
And, you know, the neat pad is,you know, one thing you could
think, Oh, well, that's justcontrol signaling, right? But
the neat center is somethingelse, right? The media is
streaming from the neat center.
(17:18):
Microphone array is doing allthe neat audio processing, like
D reverberation and noisesuppression and so forth, and
streaming that to the bar Pro,and then the bar Pro is
deciding, is that microphonebetter, or is that microphone
better? So we're doing dynamicbeam selection, which is when we
(17:38):
met Dave, yeah, yeah, a coupleweeks ago in Las Vegas, sorry,
Dave, the we had announced andwe were demonstrating there the
dynamic beam selection, which wejust released in our 24 dot pre
release a couple about a monthago. So when
Dave Michels (17:59):
you do that dynamic selection, is it one or
the other? Or do you use both?
Is the other might become anoise cancelation, or does it
explain that a little moreclearly? Yeah?
Unknown (18:12):
Yeah. It's a great question, because that's that's
why I started calling it dynamicbeam selection, because we're
not actually mixing just yet.
That's the next step for us.
Right now, we're selecting whichbeam is best. Every single audio
frame on a frame by framebracelets. We're switching to
this beam or that beam, or thisbeam, or that beam or this based
on who's speaking. That meansthat if two people literally
(18:33):
speak at the same time, one willwin, and the other will be
slightly attenuated because wehaven't selected that beam. So
we're attenuating the otherbeams to reduce, like air
conditioning noise and you know,so that's how beamforming works,
right? You select a beam thatyou want to gain in, gain up on,
to enhance that the volume ofthat speaker and attenuate the
(18:53):
others. Right? In the future, wehope to literally mix. If
there's two beams that bothhave, you know, energy on them,
attenuate the others, and mixthose two. But the reason I
brought all that up is, if youthink about technologically,
these devices now are streamingover IP, doing real time media
in a distributed architecture,right? And you could start to
(19:17):
think about scaling that out toother use cases in a distributed
architecture, and that's whatbrings me to the board. So if
you don't mind, I'd like to showyou so you know, as as people
might be able to tell from theuser experience, we're using
zoom for the meeting we're on.
This is Microsoft Teams on aneat board 65 and our newer,
neat board 50. And one of thefeatures that we have, we're
(19:41):
it's not fully shipping yet, butwe're coming out with it is
called neat share, and it'sanother example of how we're
doing this distributed mediaprocessing and distributed
architecture that, let's pretendthat we were in a meeting on
this Microsoft Teams device. ButI wanted to share. Something
that I'm working on in like aMiro board or some other
(20:02):
collaborative application on theknee port, 50 if I just swipe
out to get the neat menu up andhit Share, instantly you see on
the knee port, 65 everythingthat's on that screen today,
it's only video. In the futurerelease will include audio as
well. So you can, like, watch aYouTube video, for example, over
this and on this side, we'reessentially treating it as like
(20:25):
a virtual HDMI input. So theMicrosoft Teams application
thinks, oh, a user just pluggedin the PC. Do you want to share
that into the meeting? Yes, andthat is configurable on the
Microsoft Teams application,whether you want it to auto
share when you plug in acomputer source, or whether you
want it to prompt and you haveto hit Share, right? That's
configurable by the user, soeither way you know it would
(20:47):
either automatically share intothe meeting, or you'd have to
click on your Microsoft app tosay, yes, I want to share this.
And then everybody in themeeting sees whatever this
whatever's on this screen. Sothat's an example of us pairing
and associating multiple devicesin a distributed media
architecture, and that's ourvision of how we go forward, is
(21:11):
rather than having complexcodecs with lots of inputs and
outputs and wires runningthrough ceilings and floors and
to get multiple cameras in alarge auditorium style room.
Well, what if you could justtake multiple neat products,
arrange them in the room the wayyou want them to to be. You
know, a neat bar Pro on thatwall, maybe another meatball Pro
on this wall, maybe a neat board65 in the back, you know, neat
(21:34):
Center, which can provide, likea presenter camera, because if
I'm standing, you know, morelike up here in this position,
talking to an audience, youknow, you're looking at the back
of my head, but with neatcenter, you know, then you're
going to see me from thisperspective instead of, you
know, from that perspective.
Does that make sense? Did thatflow
(21:58):
great? And the idea that thesecameras and audio pickup devices
are talking to each other. Youknow, that's the the AI that
that's hidden in plain sight, ifI quote my buddy Kevin again,
that talks about that, that it'snot, you know, generative AI,
it's this machine learningalgorithm, yeah, smart enough to
recognize your face, smartenough to switch, smart enough
(22:19):
to do everything else, and youexactly into all your products,
I guess, exactly. Well,
Dave Michels (22:24):
that was a very neat demo. I have to say, You
did a good job there. Kevin,great, very easy. You can't see
all the little munchkins, kindof behind the behind the scenes,
making it all work. I,
Unknown (22:36):
you know, I literally am here by myself. And I did not
rehearse that. I rehearsed theneat share bit, but the getting
up and doing the presentercamera thing that was totally on
the spur of the moment. Hey,are you able to connect from one
of the other devices, like theneat frame, and give us that
experience while we finish thisconversation? Absolutely.
(22:57):
Yeah. Tommy's perfect. Let mejust drop here and I'll jump
over to another room and dial infrom any friend.
Okay, there'll be a magic edithere so people won't have to
wait only Dave Michels and Iright?
Yeah, you're gonna play like thedoo doo doo music, right?
(23:21):
Welcome back now that Kevin hasrejoined us from a different
room. You're in one of yourlittle demo room. So lighting
might not be perfect, but you'reon a neat frame, right? Tell us
about that.
Yeah, that's right. It's aportrait mode. You can look on
Nita. No, you'll you'll see it.
It's a great product, superportable. You can literally,
there's a little handle builtinto the top of you can just
(23:42):
pick it up, carry it around justa single power cable, Wi Fi, or
Ethernet, if you want to, youknow, connect it to the
corporate network via Ethernet.
But, you know, I use Wi Fi on mynew frame at home all day long,
and it works fantastic. And the,you know, microphone array and
the camera built into it and thespeakers built into it. It's
(24:03):
beautiful. You can pinch tozoom. You know, if the
somebody's sharing contentthat's a little bit hard to
read, like a PowerPoint or,sorry, like an Excel spreadsheet
or something, you can just pinchto zoom, and it's a great
experience. Sitting on a neatframe behind me is some of our
engineering desks, so forgivethe clutter, but I'm here at our
neat engineering headquarters inOslo Norway.
(24:24):
Okay, I
Dave Michels (24:24):
got a, I got a specific question about the
frame. And you don't have allthe history and baggage of meat,
and you're the new guy. So thisis, this is a, this is a tricky
question, because the first timeI saw the frame, I said, Why
don't you stick a handset on itand make it a phone. And I think
Simon was going to start crying.
I think, you know, it was like,it was like, Oh no, don't go
there, whatever. So, so let meask you, have you thought about
(24:47):
making that a phone? Or, doeszoom have any excuse me, does
neat have any thoughts aboutexpanding into telephony?
Unknown (24:57):
That's a great question. David, especially, I
think, in. Contact Center right.
Video is increasingly becomingimportant in contact center
products, right? If you thinkabout, like, Cisco's contact
center offerings, and five, nineand and others, you know, video
is, you know, still sort of aminority use case, but it's, or
(25:17):
like a niche use case, I guess,but becoming more prevalent,
becoming more of a requirement.
So I could definitely imagineuse cases with agents sitting in
front of a neat frame withheadphones or a handset plugged
in. But I think in general, thesentiment of the phone business
(25:40):
is not really the growth market.
It's not really where we want tofocus video telephony, as we
spoke about earlier, was, youknow, back in the 2004 2006 time
period, until we then, we kindof focus more on the high end,
immersive stuff withtelepresence. Although, having
said all that, I mean, Ciscojust came out with a brand new
with 8800 series phone, I think,with, you know, beautiful camera
(26:02):
in it, and beautiful screen. So,you know, video telephony is
still a thing. It's just not themarket that need wants to be
focused on.
Dave Michels (26:13):
All right? Broader picture, I would say, the past
year or so, the story has reallybeen about multi camera in the
room. You just demonstrated thatin the other room with all these
different cameras, and they werealso showing multiple
microphones. Do you see multiplemicrophones as expanding as a
(26:33):
concept?
Unknown (26:35):
Well, we do, yeah, absolutely. So I showed you
earlier neat center that's got a16 microphone array, and the top
of it, phenomenal micro. And weimagine I don't want to set
expectations. I want to setexpectations appropriately. Here
I'm also responsible forsoftware, so there's an element
(26:55):
of, once I say it, I have todeliver it. So we envision
adding multiple neat centers ina room that's that's one step.
But we also envision, as Ialluded, building can't
Dave Michels (27:07):
be called centers.
If you do that, then you'recentered, or something like
that.
Unknown (27:13):
And center, yeah. But also sort of in if you read
between the lines of thedemonstration I showed you with
neat share, and I mentionedaudios coming as part of neat
share in a future release aswell. Is you know that those
boards that I was showing youthat demonstration on of neat
share had microphone arrays inthem. So imagine the microphone
(27:36):
array in the bar Pro that wewere talking on, plus the
microphone array and the neatcenters in the room, plus the
microphone arrays and the boardin the back of the room, we can,
you know, wire all this up in adistributed IP based, you know,
distributed media architecture,and be able to do dynamic beam
selection and mixing and and sowe can't do that today, but
(27:57):
that's absolutely where we seeit headed. You
Dave Michels (28:00):
didn't even mention the pad. What about the
pad? Oh, yeah,
Unknown (28:03):
thank you. I skipped that one in my mental map of the
room there, yeah, on the neatpad. Neat has always had two
microphones in the pad, andwe've talked about doing
enabling those microphones. Thefeature is known as mics in the
pad. And I'm super excited toannounce that in the upcoming
(28:23):
release, 24.4 which we'reliterally putting out to beta
imminently, like in the nextlike, by the time you watch this
recording, it'll be out. Mics inthe pad are enabled as a beta
feature. And the only
Dave Michels (28:38):
reason that's a really bad idea, because you
hang those pads outside the roomon the wall. So, so that seems
like a really bad idea to haveactive mics outside the
Unknown (28:48):
room you want, you want. We wouldn't activate
those. Those are, those arerunning in scheduler mode. Mics
are never enabled in schedulermode. The way that it works is
they have the knee pad has to bepaired with, like a board or a
bar or whatever parent device,and then they, you know, know
(29:11):
about one another and the bar orthe board, or, you know, bar,
bar, pro, board, board, 50,whatever, whichever model you
know, activates the microphonesin the pad. And we're using,
you'll find this probablyinteresting. We're using the
IEEE 1588, precision timeprotocol for clock
(29:32):
synchronization between them,which is why we say you have to
connect them by Ethernet. Wi Fiis harder to make that work
right, because of thevariability of the you know,
transmit, receive, on Wi Fi. Sowe're for now, we're saying they
have to be connected onEthernet, and we negotiated P to
(29:55):
P, and then we take themicrophone and. A signal from
the knee pads, stream it over IPto the to the bar on the board,
and then we do all theprocessing there.
Dave Michels (30:07):
Seems like a lot of things are going back to
wired Ethernet just because ofthe Poe standard.
Unknown (30:12):
Yeah, yeah. Poe is another reason why you'd want
the Ethernet on the especiallyon the pad, because you can
power the pad through Poe. Soyou just need a single ethernet
port under the table for the padto plug into power IP, and then
it pairs with the bar over IP.
Well,
Dave Michels (30:27):
you've been been extremely open and transparent.
Tell us something confidentialthat hasn't been announced yet.
Unknown (30:38):
I just did actually, you know, the fact that we're
shipping mics in the pad and thenext release coming out like,
literally, as soon as I, youknow, walk out of the room here,
I think we're pushing we'regoing to do three weeks ago. Go
now. Do it now. No, the let'sforget NDA for a second, forget
(30:58):
current releases, our currentroadmap. Think in your head, as
I said when we were talkingbefore, five years from now, 10
years from now, What? What? Whatare your as the CTO of the
company now? What's your visionfor the collaboration space?
I've always envisioned that whatyou described with your
microphones is something we'regoing to do with cameras, more
(31:19):
than just a front, center back,but, you know, a little, cameras
around a bezel, and all beingbrought together by a processor.
Maybe it's a holographic in someway. Maybe it's 3d in some way,
without glasses, with lenticularscreens. We know, you know that
project is going on right now,and we'll see if that has any
What do you see happening in thespace to be cutting edge and
(31:39):
ahead. Yeah, youknow, 10 years is a long time.
So it was safe. From an NDAperspective. Nobody's gonna come
back and ask why it wasn't done.
Yeah,you know, I think, I think our
focus at need is definitely onthe multi device, distributed
media kind of architect, becauseyou're exactly right. What you
said is exactly right. I talkedabout doing using the microphone
(32:01):
arrays, but absolutely, there'salso the cameras in all of those
devices and the intelligence tobe able to select the best
camera based on where people arelooking today, with neat center,
we if the majority of people arelooking towards neat center, we
select that camera view. If themajority of people are looking
at the main front of room screendevice, then we, you know,
(32:21):
select that camera view. But weabsolutely don't want to stop
there. We want to be able toselect the best view of each
individual from that camera, orfrom that camera, or for that
from that camera, from thatcamera. So you can, you know,
imagine the products around theroom and all working in
conjunction with the bestmicrophone beam for that person
who's speaking in the bestcamera based on where people are
(32:44):
looking.
But video processing is a thingnow where you can, you know,
open up some some apps and have,you know, virtual cameras do
things. Oh, sure. And have deepfakes go on and and there have
been a couple of companiessuccessful and unsuccessful that
take, you know, a camera viewand kind of stretch it or
unstretch it, or do things withit. I'm of the opinion that you
(33:05):
know, if you if you use, youknow, telephone size 816, 20
megapixel cameras around thebezel of a screen or around the
table or wherever you do it, andthe camera might not have a shot
to go to that camera. But theremight be some intelligence in
the back end that takes a pieceof this, a piece of that, a
piece of this, reassembles theroom, right, and creates some
(33:29):
so, I mean, I've got to thinkwe're going in that direction,
because the processing power isthere at this point. Yeah,
I would say, you know, like, ifyou look at some of the
holographic offerings that areon the in the market, you know,
from Google, from Cisco, etc.
That's essentially how they'reworking, right? Multiple cameras
in an array, you know, generallyspeaking, in a horizontal line,
because the application isvideo, so you kind of want to
shoot that the scene, like, fromthat perspective, right? And
(33:52):
then interpolating betweenmultiple cameras, so you get
that 3d effective, you know, ifyou know, David sees me looking
from this perspective, and theother day sees me like it from
this perspective, because basedon where my head is, you know,
based on where you're sitting,you know, you want to, you know,
a system makes you feel it makesit feel like you're looking at
(34:15):
me from that perspective, right?
Because there's an array ofcameras.
Dave Michels (34:21):
I just want to clarify that the other David is
damn good,
Unknown (34:27):
right? So, so, yeah, I think I think you're right. I
think you know, those are twokind of different things that
right, like a an array, a cameraarray, doing stereoscopic
holographic telepresence, videoconferencing. Telepresence,
whatever you want to call it, isone application, multiple
cameras around a room is acompletely different thing. In
(34:49):
both cases, you know, there'ssome selection of which camera
is best, and then compositingthat into a view for the far
into, you know, for the remoteparticipants. To see and whether
that compositing is done locallyon the device. Because, as you
said, processing power is alwaysincreasing, Moore's law, but
(35:10):
also in the cloud, right? We seeincreasingly, like Microsoft and
teleframe, a lot of thatprocessing is being done cloud
side, right? And you know,there's, there's a pendulum
there as well, because doing itall in the cloud means, you
know, well, that means you're,by definition, decrypting,
decoding, processing,compositing, re, encoding, re
(35:32):
encrypting. So what about end toend encryption? Right? And
versus doing it on the device,you can maintain that end to end
to end encryption all the waythrough. So there's pros and
cons to those two approaches. Soyeah, I think the next 10 years
will be a continued advancementin all of these fronts, right?
And like you talked aboutearlier, David, the actually it
(35:55):
was before, before our session,but you and I were chatting
about center of room cameras,like the need center and outside
in cameras that othercompetitors are doing. And
there's not a right answer or awrong answer right there's
there's sort of advantages anddisadvantages. We chose to
approach it from the centerpoint of view. But I think
(36:17):
ultimately, in 10 years timeframe, the right answer is a
combination of both right whichis kind of what I alluded to,
with multiple needs, neatdevices around the room. So then
you have a combination of centerof camera looking out at the
table, people at the table, butalso the bar, the board in the
back of the room, the bar in thefront of the room, you know,
maybe another bar on the side ofthe room, and being able to film
(36:37):
the room from either outside inor inside out perspective.
All right, one last unfairquestion before we end this. And
I'm pref No, no, I
Dave Michels (36:45):
have the last question, but go ahead.
Unknown (36:48):
So my last question, the unfair question, is really
simple. If you take any of theneat products and you use them
for Microsoft Teams, they workbeautifully, and if you use them
for zoom, they work beautifully.
And every end user on the planetis saying, Why can't that be a
button? You know? Why can't I doa zoom call and a teams call?
And the answer is that there'sno technical reason why you
(37:09):
can't provide that. Will we eversee that? Or do we think
companies like zoom andMicrosoft are going to be
preventing that capability toswitch for as long as they
exist.
Yeah, that's a, it's a goodquestion. It's a tough question,
because it's a politicallycharged question, right? Yeah,
you're right. Technologically, Imean, technologically, there's
(37:30):
no reason but, but the honest,you know, let's, let's, you
know, dig into that a little bitmore that, you know, Scratch one
layer beneath the surface onthat one. Technologically,
there's no reason why, why wethey couldn't or we couldn't as
an industry, but there is workthat would require be required,
right? The Microsoft Teams roomapplication is not designed as
(37:54):
an you know, think about it likea software app, any software
application running on them, onan iOS or Android phone mobile
platform. It's designed to beforegrounded at background,
right? It's in the softwaredevelopers who developed that
app did it with knowing thatit's going to be backgrounded.
And they built the softwareapplication to to be, you know,
(38:16):
accepting of that. MicrosoftTeams, rooms, Zoom rooms, you
know, WebEx on the Ciscodevices, Google meet on Google
meet devices, the applicationsweren't built to be foregrounded
and backgrounded. They expect tobe running all the time. They're
registering back to they'recalling home, back to Microsoft
(38:37):
attack, or Zoom's EDM, or, youknow, WebEx control, hub, etc,
when the the app isbackgrounded, oh, in your
control, in your attack, or ZDm,they look like they're
disconnected. That's not good.
So there is some softwaredevelopment required to make it
possible. But technologically,there's nothing stopping it and
and then politically, you know,charged because, you know,
(39:01):
what's in the best interest ofMicrosoft and zoom, you know,
did that? Do they want to enablethat? You know, lots of
customers are, are begging forit. But the current, the current
approach, is the direct testjoined using WebRTC is sort of
the industry standard for anyapp to talk to any other back
end, Microsoft can talk to zoom,WebEx. WebEx can talk to zoom,
(39:22):
Microsoft. Zoom can talk toMicrosoft, web and Google and
those combinations as well asneat, we're like, hey, you know,
we're a hardware platform. We'rehappy to support all this stuff.
So not only can you runMicrosoft Teams and zoom on our
devices and in the future,perhaps others like my like
(39:43):
Google meet, for example,potentially in the future, but
also our whole app hub strategybuilt on top of neat pulse,
where neat pulse becomes like anapp store for collaboration,
apps like what I demonstratedwith the. The the sharing Miro
board into a Microsoft Teamscall, right? So we have 50 plus
(40:04):
partners signed up to partnerwith us on Apple to be able to
run, you know, we don't wantpeople running Angry Birds on
meat boards. But you know, anyapp, unless
you're sitting on a train showfloor
Dave Michels (40:18):
is a really good point. Though, a lot of
customers are asking for but alot of customers aren't asking
for it, and that's a trickyline, and I'm often says, don't
listen to your customers,because they'll scare you down
the path. And so it is a it is abalancing act. I have a question
for you more on a personallevel, because I'm aspiring to
be more like you. Amount of theworld traveling all the world I
(40:40):
was last summer. I'll be back inSweden soon, and I was just in
London. When you travel around,I want to ask you each city, San
Francisco, London and Oslo, whatis that? What is the one meal
that you not necessarily thename of the restaurant, but what
is the one meal that you try tohave? Like, for example, when
(41:01):
you're in Oslo, one of yourfavorite things when you're in
San Francisco. Give us a littlebit of a world menu here.
Unknown (41:07):
I wish you really put me on the spot there. Dave,
because I am not a foodie. Dave,sorry, I am not a foodie. I wish
I was. I have lots of friendswho are foodies. I was in Boston
a few weeks ago with you know,my great friend and mentor and
former colleague, JonathanRosenberg. He's a he's a big
foodie. We've gone to michelstarrestaurants together. But that's
(41:30):
not what. That's not my personalthing. No, I would say, you
know, California, London andOslo are all incredible places
for different reasons, right?
And one of the things that Ilove about London is, you know,
the variety of of restaurants,the variety of evening, you
know, entertainment, but also,like the the the amount of green
(41:51):
space, the public parks, everypark in London has a cafe in it
where you can get great food,like food, not Michelin
starfish, you know, great beer.
You know, you can hang out inthe grass. Have a beer. Have,
you know, have your pub food. Ilove it. I love lemon. That's
incredible.
Dave Michels (42:11):
Yeah, London, I always try to get Indian food in
London. This is harder to findbecause the London is having
such a food scene right now thatall these new restaurants are
opening up. And yeah, so anyway,we can talk about, I'll talk to
Jonathan to call and ask,
Unknown (42:29):
I have to say, coming from California, I love Mexican
food, and that is hard to findin London. And Oslo, sorry,
yeah, I'mjust kidding. It doesn't.
I have a lot of respect for whatyou've done in your career, and
all you know, your the patentsyou've created and the products
you've helped bring to market. Ihope you're smart enough in Oslo
to have not bitten the line anddrinking drunk the Aquavit.
(42:50):
The Aquavit. Yeah, I have, ifyou go to a really good
restaurant, like a Christmasdinner, for example, up in
Holman calling by the ski jump,there's a fantastic restaurant
up there, and they did like afive course meal for Christmas
dinner, and they served Aquavitwith each one like a pairing.
And it was actually, it wasactually good.
(43:13):
Now I don't feel like you're assmart as you were when you
started.
Dave Michels (43:17):
The call. Was a fantastic conversation. I have
to say, Kevin, your rival atneat raises the bar need and
really exciting to see that needis so committed to this. You
bring such a pedigree ofexperience and expertise. We I
know we can talk for hours onthis stuff, but it's just, it's
just great to see what you'redoing. Great to great to
(43:38):
continue to follow what you'redoing. So thank you Dave, Daniel
for setting this up, and thankyou Kevin for participating. And
we'll be back soon with anotherepisode of talking points
checks. You.
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