Eric Wagner - A Pioneer In Tech Shares His Journey To Creating Multiple Companies And An AI Startup Ecosystem

Ever wonder how a tech visionary turns innovative ideas into practical tools used by the military? Join us on this exciting episode of Midwest Momentum as we sit down with Eric Wagner, a key figure in the Midwest Ohio tech community. Eric shares his journey from the early days of computer science to today when he is helping to create an ecosystem for AI startups in Hilliard, Ohio, called Hilliard City Lab. This episode contains valuable insights about seizing opportunities and taking decisive action.

Eric shares about the birth of the Center for Design Manufacturing Excellence (CDME) at Ohio State, co-founded by Eric and his partner, John Baer. The CDME became a hub for bringing brilliant minds together to work on commercialization and applied engineering. Hear how this venture paved the way for Converge Technologies, an engineering design and development firm, and Converge Ventures, a startup incubator. Despite facing venture capital funding challenges, Eric and John’s persistence and adaptability fueled their success, providing a supportive ecosystem for nurturing startups until they are ready for investment.

Finally, we plunge into the future of AI and its transformative impact across various sectors. Eric elaborates on his current work with UbiHere, focusing on geospatial analytics and environmental tracking and how these innovations revolutionize industries from fast food safety to employee performance. Additionally, get a sneak peek into his involvement with Lighthouse, an aerospace management company for drones and air taxis, and the obstacles faced in Ohio's drone delivery logistics. Entrepreneurs and small businesses looking for collaboration opportunities will also find valuable information on connecting through Hilliard City Lab. This is an episode brimming with inspiration, practical advice, and forward thinking.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Time to hustle America, Roll up our sleeves and make dreams happen. Midwest Momentum brings you stories of CEOs, startups, product development and founders doing whatever it takes to make their big idea happen. Midwest Momentum is supported by Big Kitty Labs and produced by GNR Media. Here's Midwest Momentum hosts Dan Rockwell and Michelle Gatchel.

Speaker 2: 0:32

Hey everybody, thanks again for watching and listening to Midwest Momentum. I'm here with a great friend of mine in Columbus Ohio. He is a legend in the tech space here in the Midwest Ohio tech community, my good friend Eric Wagner in the house. Eric, my man, how you doing? Eric? Let's talk a little bit about. I want a quick origin story and then I want you to race up to the point where you meet me. So start with how you start and then where did you meet me? And then we'll pick up from there.

Speaker 3: 1:01

I was born, I went to college, I joined a research institution, I joined another startup, and then my life wasn't fulfilled until I met Dan Rockwell at the tech commercialization office at the Ohio State University, where I shared an office immediately next to him. So Dan and I were essentially roommates for what? Two or three years.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Yeah, we were two, three years there at commercialization at Ohio State. I liked it because when you came in you were like pretty serious about you know, for those that are listening that don't know what commercialization is, every university gets a lot of government dollars, right. We all hear about the government dollars that come into a university to do what? To do innovation, right, to change science and research and things, and that takes a whole group of really crazy people. It needs the people that actually work on the thing, but then it needs the people that think about how it goes to market and, more so, how it really can get to market. And that, I feel like, is one of your specialties, eric, is that. You know, when I met you, you were really on the hustle, like you arrived and like, all right, what do we got? What we selling, what's the deal, what you know? And it was like it was for me, it was like a moment where we like walked up to the back of the semi and opened it up and there's a bunch of what?

Speaker 2: 2:14

what do you got? You got tvs. All right, I can move those, you know, and it's in. That's actually part of that. Culture is to understand what's there and then assess it. What's your background in that?

Speaker 3: 2:27

I mean it's funny, you always joke about that. You know I'm going to sell you. So you used CPUs out of the back of a truck but the defense contractor I joined out of out of so I was in Ohio State computer, computer science, computer engineering. I went to Southwest Research which is kind of like a Battelle except for defense and then joined a DOD tech startup company called DNS Consultants, but it was out of New Jersey and it was right outside the city and it had that feel of something just fell off the back of the truck and we're going to sell it to you.

Speaker 3: 2:55

So, it's funny you always allude to that. However, the general mentality for us at that company was we are going to do fundamental research, so with universities, with federal labs, but we're going to be the application end of it, right. So we're going to take the good ideas, turn them into something, and then field systems for the warfighters primarily the Army at that time, but some for the Navy and the Air Force as well. We built everything from big full motion simulators, helicopter simulators that trains pilots, to free space optical systems that they use to communicate overseas, to SATCOM systems, and so really just taking good ideas, good innovation, and turning them into fitable, you know, value added solutions.

Speaker 3: 3:36

And when I left that company, I took an exit. We, we, we had a liquidity event. I came back to Ohio or I was living in Ohio and spent most of my time road and overseas, settled down back in Ohio and looked for what was next. And for me, I always wanted my own startup. So I was a very, very small owner of that company, enough to give me a little bit of bankroll to get started when I left. But still not the man right, and you always want to be the man. I always joke around with my son. He always says what's it take to be the man? I always tell him well, just be the man, right.

Speaker 1: 4:07

Do the thing.

Speaker 3: 4:08

If you say you're going to do the thing, do the thing and that applies gender neutrally across the ecosystem right, you want to do it, do it. Stop saying you're going to do it and do it. And so I was looking for where I could in quote, quote, do it, do a startup, and for me it was either the alma mater at Ohio State, in the TCO office, or Rev 1. At the time it was Tech Columbus, and so I knocked on both of the doors. Tech Columbus actually was going to give me entry, but I really wanted to be at the TCO and I was told no four times. So four times I tried to join Ohio State's commercialization office and four times I was told no.

Speaker 3: 4:45

Uh, and then brian and ray came on board. I, I know, you remember them. Uh, ray atalano was a a in and around dod community for quite some time and he's like we need this guy and so so I don't care what you say, he's joining us. And so I joined, kind of under under, under ray's wing, as it were. Uh, the tco office, which was primarily all really good people, but but phs, patent attorneys and then Dan Rockwell.

Speaker 2: 5:08

I always did feel that, you know, I loved it when you got there because it was, and I never I don't mean that in a derogatory way on my track. I mean, that's like to me, that's like honesty, that's like that's like. Is that's the people that I kind of want to protect me? You know, the people that are wise, right, the wise guys, the ones that understand things and and can work the deals and really work the math and stuff, because, honestly, I didn't know any of that.

Speaker 2: 5:36

So, like tco was like a short course for me to see everything that would occur, um and on deals, and at the same time, I was just wildly passionate about every day learning like 16 different contexts. It was just, it was wild. And yet you still meet in the afternoon and talk about the money that you didn't have. You're talking about the resources, which you would not have any. Now that's not to say, well, I'll see, it doesn't have resources. They've changed a lot and they have a lot of stuff now. They have a Techstars program, they have the Boost program. There was a lot. The time that I met Eric was just a time where they were trying to reboot that effort.

Speaker 3: 6:17

I will say that what they have now is the result of people like Cheryl Turnbull and Aaron Bender and you and myself and the whole crew down there, who really kind of changed the attitude and mentality around things. Right, ohio State does have massive resources. They have a huge endowment, they have, you know, active investors, a huge alumni network that was never kind of brought to bear on anything other than giving right. And when you start turning it against commercialization, good things start happening. And you know we're still not there, but but it certainly it's. It's much better than it was.

Speaker 2: 6:47

Yeah, that's what I felt like. I feel like you know, we both had a great. I mean, it was like it's behind enemy lines. It's not easy. It's not an easy thing, but the cool thing was is that, uh, I'm I felt like when I left there I kept doing commercialization. You know, I kept.

Speaker 2: 7:02

Well, a lot of the things you learn in commercialization you kind of take out and this is not talk about that, but that was a part of your life. And now what have you done since you've been working? Last thing I heard you've been working on drones. You've been working on a lot of really cool. I know you can't talk about them in terms of government contracts, cause I know big kitty is, is is sort of, and again, I can't talk about that either, but I just know that there's people I know and love in town who are doing really cool work for veterans and doing really cool work for that. I'm excited about that piece because I see the drone activity, I see the flying cars, I see all the innovation, I see the Intel plant, I see the epicenter expanding and Columbus, and really the Midwest, is a huge part of that.

Speaker 3: 7:49

You know, dan, I think that when I left the TCO I did that little student CDME and that's you know because of my current partner, john Baer. He had come in previously when you and I were at the TCO and asked to do a number of startups. He's an alumni electronics design development manufacturing guy who built his own company, took a public, took a private, was retired but was helping out with the business plan competitions and the commercialization efforts as a volunteer right, was the dean's external advisory chair for a college of engineering and really just wanted to help commercialization too. And you see, all these people who want to help, but it's always in this fragmented, siloed, individual kind of way that was never kind of poured into the cohesive ecosystem, right, I think that's at the TCO what we try to do more than almost anything else was pull those passionate people together and actually have them move forward in some common direction. And I got suckered into joining John and creating a center over on Kinnear called the Center for Design Manufacturing Excellence, which I know you're aware of, but had wrote out my non-compete.

Speaker 3: 8:50

So I was coming to Ohio State to write out a non-compete for my other company, which apparently Biden says now is illegal. So I would have been lucky back then to not have to do this, but I wouldn't have met you. Wouldn't have met you. But I was writing out a non-compete. I wanted to learn how to do startups in Ohio. I came to TCO I was getting really close to the end of my non-compete. I was going to go do a startup. My partner, john Baer, who was not my partner at the time, was doing startups at Ohio State.

Speaker 3: 9:16

You and I both helped them get up that includes Nikola Labs and Care Batteries, which Care Batteries fell fast, like you're supposed to. Nikola Labs is still ongoing and a growing concern with Will Zell and those guys. Good results, bad results that were done the right way, Fell fast, fell honestly. If you way you know, fell fast, fell, fell, fell honestly. If you make it more than three years, you're a successful entrepreneur, whether your company ever succeeds or not. Right, if you can collect the paycheck that sustains you for three years, plus owning your own company, you have. You have succeeded. Congratulations. Plus owning your own company, you have succeeded.

Speaker 2: 9:53

Congratulations, are you?

Speaker 3: 9:55

aware, is the question At the end of the day, if you don't go home and cry in a pillow every single night, you have succeeded. And so John had convinced me that I had been preaching and you had been preaching that, hey, listen, if we bring all these resources together into a common environment and we row in the same direction and we row at the same speed when we're going to go somewhere, right, and and so we, you know, he said hey, the Dean told me to build this outward facing center center for design manufacturing excellence. Myself, john Nate Ames, glenn Dane and a couple other folks founded it I on a model that you had student resources that you could get applied engineering very cost effectively and give them student experiential learning. You could bring technologies out of the university and mature them to the point where they're ready and you can bring industry and entrepreneurs in to do all that commercialization around that right, um, relatively large success that the center is still growing every single year. From what I understand, I've been down there in a while.

Speaker 3: 10:48

I, but john made me join that because he said you can't practice what you preach and if and if you're going to be the man, be the man. And you've been talking about pulling all these things together in a common ecosystem and making sure that this model works Right, and now you have to do it. So I joined them. We built that for two and a half years and then we finally just said, hey, listen, the model we know works. It's going to be a uphill slog, but we're going to go do it and going to go do it. And so five years ago maybe six, almost six now geez, we started Converge Technologies, acquired a building over in Hilliard off 270. It was one of the old Ray Hall buildings it's 621 Lyman Drive, if anybody wants to ever come visit and created a two-person company in a 27,000 square foot innovation center. And so you know, if you want to talk about taking leaps of faith, you know there it is right.

Speaker 3: 11:41

I subsequently grew Converge to be an engineering design development services-based company and then we were going to do a startup incubator and the startup incubator was going to be called Converge Ventures. You know, aligned very well with the namesake, but fell into the trap that so many folks fell into with VCs that, hey, big promises, big commitments, big demonstrated commitments. You know they had docked up this whole, this whole thing, only to have the entire billion dollar fund not make it at the end Right. So the fund never launched and after two and a half years of heartbreak and bootstrapping our business and partner businesses, we finally just say listen, we're not taking VC, we're bootstrapping from here on out until they're Series A ready, or at least pre-seed like really well-defined pre-seed ready, before we take any investment at all. So launch the incubator on our own, have a number of companies kind of resident under the roof. We're expanding that operation and that's kind of where we're at.

Speaker 2: 12:37

I mean. Well, first of all, there's a lot there.

Speaker 3: 12:40

You and I have ADHD, dan, in the worst kind of way. We have what we have ADHD really badly, that's true. Listen, if you just focused on this, it might be really successful. Yeah, but what about this?

Speaker 4: 12:52

What about this?

Speaker 2: 12:56

You know it might be really successful, yeah, but what about this, what about this? It's not a disorder, though, quite frankly, it's the fact that you go that fast and you can. You have that gift. Same thing with John Bear. One thing I've always really enjoyed about John in a lot of ways is he added up the patterns really quick at OSU. In a lot of ways, it's kind of added up the patterns really quick at OSU. In a lot of ways, we have to engineer the bulls in our own china shop. You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 3: 13:25

Roger that Make sure they knock down the right shelves.

Speaker 2: 13:28

Yeah, and not only that, but make sure that our own personnel knows what to do in the bulls china shop and everything else. So it's important to do in the bull's-eye of China and everything else. It's important to do that. I really respect John for that, because he had the Parallel Company he did that. I don't know if it was Parallel, I forget the name of the company he did that it's pretty cool. Then he came in and then the center of design, Chris Sess, where Camp went, and of course Camp went in his direction.

Speaker 3: 13:53

Listen, and the ecosystem hasn't changed. Dan, I'm doing shit with Camp now too, and Lee Mosbacher, so we'll touch on that here in a second. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:59

So I love that it kind of keeps going and everything and converging. I love what you're doing with that, Because that's taking the leap of faith and doing the incubator, knowing that it's going to be filled. Right, you had to build church knowing full well there was people there at some point and we're going to share those. But when we talk about AI and this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about we have another podcast where we talk about it too. What's your feelings on AI and how it's coming in? You're in the Advanced Manufacturing Center. You got IC3D right next to you. There you guys are doing some really cool stuff. Do you feel like the DARPA, the sci-fi of our dreams and our movies, is on. Is it right at our front door or what? What's going on?

Speaker 3: 14:44

You know, dan, I have been a big vocal person on the fact that AI for years now, and you've known this is going to disrupt the entire ecosystem, right, not just manufacturing, not just tech. It's going to disrupt the human population, right, and when you look at it, the two possible outcomes are utopian and dystopian. Right, utopian is, you know, dan can now go play the ukulele because he has time to play the ukulele, because we have much, much, much higher, higher levels of efficiency and productivity. Right, the dystopian is everybody's on the job, and you know you're not seeing that yet because the economies are growing relatively well. Democratization of it, if you want to call it, of this software that enables you to rapidly harness the knowledge and resources of the world into an application. It's profound, right, it's going to be a profound shift, and I think what we've seen so far is some of the things that we have been contemplating for the last couple of years. And so you know Yubi here. You know Dr Alper Yilmaz, and he's the founder of you be here and a computer vision specialist, and so he's he's one of the kind of front runners of AI. I'm lucky enough now to be the CEO of his company, so Alper and I work quite a bit together, thank you.

Speaker 3: 16:05

We have focused from the very beginning, on the fact that YOLO and these large models are going to do all of the things right, but they're not going to do the specific things that add value for very specific customers, and so we built a platform which allows you to do very efficient customization of computer vision and business intelligence and any type of intelligence generation using computer vision in a very targeted, very directed manner, right.

Speaker 3: 16:30

And so we have pilots, like you said, with the Army, we have some with the Air Force, but we also have some with the city of Hilliard, we have some with some retail manufacturers, we have some with direct consumer companies, and all of these use a common set of AI tools right, on a common platform. What you're seeing for, like the LLMs and other stuff, though, dan, is ridiculous. You know, I have a friend who works in the energy sector and said that energy is going to quadruple in the next decade strictly because of AI, right, because of the data centers associated with AI. Now, what will the increases in productivity be? What will the outcomes be? I don't know, but it's going to be profound, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:05

It's simply a it's. It's the elephant in the room and I'm glad you brought to the forefront first, because it's always it's kind of like when do you bring it up? When you bring the job, you bring it up at the beginning of the conversation and bring it at the end because it's going to be part of the narrative.

Speaker 3: 17:19

And I think it has to be right. I mean, you know, you, you, you, you, you humans are inherently emotional.

Speaker 2: 17:34

Emotional, yeah, and I. I see that too. I know when I um.

Speaker 3: 17:38

I listen, I, I, I, I agree, I agree. And if you're not continually expanding and innovating and growing, and and again, uh at at at, at its core, at its core. I hate to always joke around with this, but but, but financial institutions are construct right.

Speaker 3: 17:58

Money is a construct and, at the end of the day, as long as we keep expanding that construct in a positive manner, to do whatever to get on Mars, to, like you said, starfleet right, or to become a better, more rounded society that takes care of their people, I don't care what it is, but as long as we're moving in a positive direction.

Speaker 3: 18:11

The financial mechanisms around that are constructs, right it's. It's the human, the human evolution into the next thing. It's is really kind of me. The big thing and I joke around my son, who somehow ended up being in like a documentary film and international affairs when, when his mother wanted him to be medical and I wanted to be an engineer, and he's he's over here doing his own thing, that that he better get on board because, at the end of the day, I appreciate intellectual property and I appreciate creativity of humans and whatever. But if other people have access to those tools, they're going to use them right, and so you either need to learn the tools that are available to you and utilize them to the fullest potential, or you're going to get pushed by the wayside.

Speaker 2: 18:48

Yeah, the construct is a really great word to use, because you know money is a construct, even the business is a construct. But you are not a construct, your wife's not a construct.

Speaker 3: 19:00

I always talk on. He jokes around about the snowflake generation. Right Now I walk the road. I'm again not to get into politics, but I'm kind of a centrist Democrat Right, and so you know we're part of that little snowflake culture or whatever and he jokes around. He's like I'm not a snowflake, I'm not like the snowflakes. Buddy. There's 8.2 billion snowflakes in the world. Everybody's unique. Everybody's a snowflake.

Speaker 2: 19:24

Well, everybody wants to get along and try to get out of the building alive.

Speaker 3: 19:27

Listen, I just want to make sure that we don't melt before the next ice age, right?

Speaker 2: 19:32

No, totally. I mean, that's the thing it's. And it's not just that too, it's just that you're wildly passionate about the science man. I mean, I tell friends like so you know, folks will ask me why don't you do what you do, Is it? You know it's? It's like I'm bragging right. Maybe someday, maybe someday, maybe no, it's it's. It's, you're right, it is definitely um, but it's more about being at the intersection.

Speaker 3: 19:58

You were there even the money, dan, even the money I, I preach and I I live. You know, and, and my son will tell you this, it's, it's a tool, it's a you know, it's a tool to do things.

Speaker 2: 20:06

Really, it's part of that construct. That's awesome. Yeah, all right, we're wrapping up here a little bit. What can you give us on? Wait, before I jump to that UB. Here is that entrepreneur in residence.

Speaker 3: 20:19

So UB here was one of our startups that we looked at when we came out of Ohio State to do as part of this startup fund that we're going to do in this incubator. Alper had started it with Rev1 and the folks on Airway and Embry and those guys it kind of stagnated a little bit. John and I, when we were leaving, were asked to come and look at it. We spent about six months looking at the tags and the computer vision pieces of UB here, found that there probably was market there. We just had to push it into the market, adapt it for those specific markets. We took equity for sweat for over the first two years and then I put about I don't know probably seven or $8 million of federal funding behind you be here so far to develop the solutions that now we are actually launching commercial pilots for both tags and and the computer vision this summer, dan. So I'll make sure you get the first. I'll make sure you get the first implementations of them and first maintenance of them and away you go.

Speaker 2: 21:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, michelle's got a few questions, she's joined in now I will.

Speaker 3: 21:18

I will say real quick for entrepreneurs, michelle, before you jump in there um, one of the things that we did do uh is one of the things that your old bkel partner, uh, too, sure is helping with too is we partnered with the city of uh hilliard to start what they call well, well, they have CityLab. They started CityLab, which was a we're going to help small businesses and entrepreneurs figure out how to do businesses with municipalities, right, kind of like the AFWERX programs for the Air Force, and then asked us to be the tech innovation partner for CityLab. We agreed to it and, as a function of that, we found a number of we'll call them public-private partnership opportunities to advance technology for entrepreneurs. One of the big ones is a BKL UB here and CityLab opportunity that they call the AI Sandbox.

Speaker 3: 22:02

And the AI Sandbox came about then because, as you know, amazon Web Services and Azure and OpenAI and whatever they're these huge monoliths, right, and at the end of the day, especially the AWS guys they charge you a lot, these huge monoliths, right, and at the end of the day, especially the AWS guys they charge you a lot of money for computational power, right, and when you're developing a new model, a new agent, a new agent's form, or whatever it might be around.

Speaker 3: 22:23

Ai testing the value add to a particular customer application while not incurring hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of compute costs from Amazon Web Services is a big deal for entrepreneurs, right? And so we created a replicant cluster that's going online here at the end of May that gives entrepreneurs the ability to schedule time on big GPUs with big net storage that run localized models that are trained, you know, by the big guys, but being held locally, right, to ensure what the compute cost would be when you migrate to the cloud. And if, at the end of the day, you only produce seven cents worth of value, but it costs you 25, you probably shouldn't do it, right, yeah yeah, oh, that's good.

Speaker 2: 23:02

You know, I was telling Shashar I think hardware concepts are really right now. Hardware concepts are very cool, especially in again you'd be here, especially in again you'd be here because you're going to get to analog AI hardware.

Speaker 3: 23:13

Listen, the small guys are pushed out too right. I mean, at the end of the day, the big guys will always go for the biggest, most stable contracts. The small guys will always get pushed to the bottom. If you're not doing bare metal applications or scalable applications of hardware, you're doing a disservice to the entrepreneurs and that's what we're trying to do too.

Speaker 2: 23:27

You're not Taking a lot of federal dollars are probably on the table. Looking for aspects of that, I'm sure.

Speaker 3: 23:33

The nice thing is the federal dollars are available for helping build those systems out to support entrepreneurs.

Speaker 4: 23:38

So we pursue that too.

Speaker 2: 23:39

Yeah, michelle jumped in.

Speaker 4: 23:41

Hey, hey, hey, hey, Michelle, hey, aaron, I was going to ask you specifically about the Hillier Lab and what kind of young entrepreneurs you're seeing come through there. Right, now?

Speaker 3: 23:52

That's a great question. The first ones that we're seeing come through there right now are some of the ones that have been referred by folks, like Align AI. Right so, they have large language models that are going to create agents that make your inbox more efficiently maintained. Right so, virtual assistants, if you want to call them that. Right, we've seen ones where they're doing agent swarms that are doing optimization of process because they have very keen insight and intelligence around the physics, the math, the whatever for certain parts of process, but can't figure out how to create new complex process chains that are either better, more efficient or whatever. And that's the case for companies like Voxel, and Voxel does new designs of additive manufacturing, medical devices and other things.

Speaker 3: 24:42

So very complex geometry, very complex parts. But if they can model that before they actually do it, they can determine if there's value there versus traditional manufacturing methodologies. And that plays into what IC3D and some of those guys are doing as well. So really, the sandbox is open for whatever It'll be. It'll house, you know, kind of all the large known LLMs, some of the computer vision systems, the open CV systems, but hold those all resident so that we're not eating up compute costs and dollars on the cloud for these entrepreneurs.

Speaker 4: 25:16

And so what's next for you?

Speaker 3: 25:19

So I've had to I've had to, sadly, start focusing a little bit. You'll be here is getting to the point where that eats up a fair amount of my time. I'm still helping with, like Dan said, we have a company called Lighthouse which is aerospace management for drones and air taxis. I still do a little bit of consulting for the Air Force and some of the people who do work with the Air Force on the side, but it's really kind of boiling down to UB here. We had a nonprofit student experiential learning program that we brought an executive in residence in to lead it, dave Nestick, if you know him, dan. So Dave came in to run the OMIC. We're looking for a CEO for Lighthouse. We're raising capital for Lighthouse right now and so we're starting to not divest but change leadership in some of these things that we started building.

Speaker 2: 26:05

That's really cool. Can you give us just a snapshot view of like you'd be here again? I think it was yeah listen.

Speaker 3: 26:12

so Alper Yolmez, Public concept. So give be here again, I think.

Speaker 2: 26:14

Yeah listen.

Speaker 3: 26:14

So so for you, ole Miss, public concept. So give me.

Speaker 2: 26:16

Listen.

Speaker 3: 26:16

I'm going to boil it down to a sentence for you. They do geospatial analytics. And geospatial analytics means how do people, objects, things move, or detected or tracked move and interact in three dimensional space? Right, you know, even you and I, if we're in the same room and my body language is doing this and this and this, and you know, maybe Eric's briefing Dan on a new thing, right, but how those things are moving.

Speaker 3: 26:42

So Ubi here has these scalable we'll call them Lego blocks of tracking tags. They're environmental sensing tags, they're movement tags, they're GPS tags, which allow you to have environmental awareness and tracking in three-dimensional space. But we also have computer vision systems which allow you to do things like event detection, event tracking, process management, but do it in a we call it storyboarding, do it in a storyboarded manner, that's storyboarded specifically for customer applications. And so, for example, if you think in fast food, maybe safety is an issue, so make sure that only people who can use the fryer are certified to use the fryer, or actually touching the fryer, maybe also timeliness of preparing the things are important for employee evaluation. So you watch an employee how fast they make this or that or the other thing, and so we can create these custom analytic generation tools for customers that, from what we found, a fair amount of value, um, and then do that for a low cost. It would have been the equivalent of a manager sitting there watching his team for the whole day and doing an evaluation, right, yeah?

Speaker 4: 27:41

that is awesome yeah, it's really cool and like I said I'll make sure dan you get first copies of this and then with the lighthouse, the drone delivery logistics is amazing to me. I know was it Kroger down south has been trying.

Speaker 3: 28:00

Kroger did it. Yep, absolutely, kroger did it. We had a couple other folks. We have the corridor. Ohio doesn't do nearly as much as everybody else does, though, and we've been trying to push on that.

Speaker 4: 28:08

Why is that? Is it we don't have the airspace?

Speaker 3: 28:12

I think it's more that there is a there's a lack of coordinated communication between the FAA and the state of Ohio to determine what we're allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do, where some of the other states are a little bit more proactive about hey, this is what we're going to do. Faa, you have to work with us to figure out how to do it. And you see like South Carolina is flying first responder activities and you see like South Carolina is flying first responder activities, texas outside Dallas, are actually flying package delivery with, with, with Walmart. So Walmart has outside Dallas, has 25 square miles that they do package delivery on. And so Ohio we got oh yeah, we did a test flight or we did this, but we're not actually actively operating autonomous systems.

Speaker 2: 28:50

And we have any final questions. Michelle, I think we're over.

Speaker 4: 28:53

I have a million questions.

Speaker 3: 28:56

I'm happy to come back or send somebody else back for another show.

Speaker 4: 28:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good, good, good. So how can people get a hold of you if they want to connect about any of those jobs you mentioned?

Speaker 3: 29:09

We are, like I said, a partner of Hilliard City Lab and that's probably the easiest way to come through. So if any of your viewers or listeners want to find us through Hilliard City Lab, it's probably the easiest way. If they're an entrepreneur, if they're a small business, if they want to do work with some of the things we're doing, coming through the city of Hilliard is probably the easiest way.

Speaker 4: 29:27

Okay, all right.

Speaker 2: 29:29

Awesome, Eric.

Speaker 3: 29:29

Thanks and big shout out to Huard Michelle Crandall, dwayne Powell and David Meadows for CityLab. I've got to throw them in now that we're talking about sending people to them.

Speaker 2: 29:38

Absolutely To Sharan, the gang over at Big Kitty, for helping you.

Speaker 3: 29:43

To Sharan, the gang over at Big Kitty, including the Big Kitty himself, excellent, excellent.

Speaker 2: 29:48

Eric.