Discussed startup process of LocalMind, a social/mobile/local company that moved from Montreal to San Francisco a week before the interview
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:So low about, that's the hot new buzzword in the bay and it refers to the social, local mobile apps that have exploded onto the scene due to the birth of aeration of smartphones over the last few years. Today on method to the madness, we interviewed Lenny Richie, whiskey, founder and CEO of local mind and upstart in a solo most space stay with us.
Speaker 3:[00:00:30] So I start, uh, let's see. Seven months ago I started a company called local mind. And the basic idea of local mind is people are sharing their location all the time, all over the world. Right now there's millions of people checking in on foursquare, on Facebook, on call, all across the world. I heard a stat, there's 3 million chickens a day [00:01:00] on, on foursquare, and people are checking in and the value of that check in is pretty low. Still. Your friends know where you are, you get good, they get notified, you get [inaudible], you get badges, you get some points. And it's really not that much value out of all this effort that we're putting in as we're going out. And so I basically realized there's a lot more that we could do with this data and we don't really have to ask anyone to do anything more to give us that data.
Speaker 3:And so the basic idea of local mine is let's connect someone that's interested in knowing what's at a [00:01:30] location with someone that's actually at that location in real time. And we do that by using the data that people are already sharing, like checking in at foursquare or checking in on Google or Facebook and when you check in, if for your user of local mine, you become available at that location to be sent a question by someone that's interested in knowing what's happening at that location. And the use cases for things like for a local line for a to like local mine is I'm going out, should I, we get in my car and drive 20 minutes and park and then go to this [00:02:00] bar that ends up being full or closed or not fun or they don't have a drink that I like or not kid friendly and I'm bringing my family.
Speaker 3:And so local wine aims to solve that problem. Of removing any reason to be disappointed about a place that you're thinking about going to and on a broader scale gives you this kind of, the way I look at it as creating kind of this hive mind of humanity that you can connect everyone to everyone else in real time on demand to get information and to kind of get a little piece of advice [00:02:30] from someone that's knowledgeable about either location or a topic and then disconnect kind of this little on demand warm hole into other people's worlds with their permission obviously. And then you disconnect, then you go on your way. And so that's a local mine is all about. And so in that, in building the company and in exploring the space, I've learned a lot about the social world. There's kind of this social low como acronym.
Speaker 3:People are using social location and mobile and so we're right in that space. And so yeah. [00:03:00] Okay. And in that space there's a ton of players. Right. Um, and is it really been, it's been the technology that's really gotten to the point where it's exploded or why is it exploding the way it is right now? The wave I've been thinking about it is there's 10 trends that I've noticed that have converged at this moment in time. And it's kind of random that they've all happened. They've been a long time coming, a lot of them, but the fact that they've all, the fact that [00:03:30] they've all converged, the way I look at, it's kind of this big crushing wave of all these little waves have been coming our way and all of a sudden these 10 things are, are collapsing in each other. And I'm trying to remember what the 10 are, but number one is, um, is the privilege proliferation of mobile phones and smartphones.
Speaker 3:Everyone's got these smart phones that are in our pockets with us all the time and they can do amazing things. Um, so that's one. And corollary to that two is always on location data. We always have data. We're connected to [00:04:00] the web. We can do stuff, not just on our phone, but kind of this little portal into the cloud that the phone gives us access to. Then there's things like gps as part of these phones. There's things like, um, sharing our location, which I talked about or sharing a location much more. There's the cloud in cloud computing, which makes it a lot easier to start companies and to do, to try things. That's the way I look at is the cloud makes it really easy to try a new idea, not spent a lot of money on it. See what happens. It doesn't work out.
Speaker 3:[00:04:30] Start over, not mortgage your house on it or not spend $1 million. And so the more times people try an idea, the more likely they're going to be hitting on something that's actually successful, failing fast as the, as the Buzzword, um, other trends or things like venue databases, there's all this free information about all the places that exist in the world when they're open, where the addresses are, pictures of them, um, information about checking date and things like that. Um, that's [00:05:00] kind of the basic idea of the trends that have been seen and all that is in the other one. The other important one actually is a, the social graph. The fact that there's a quantifiable social graph that we can all plug into and use. Facebook's created that Twitter has got that Foursquare's getting that now. And so we don't have to learn who your friends are.
Speaker 3:We can feed off of existing social platforms. And so these turn 10 trends, I dunno if I listed all 10. Um, we've kind of allowed us to do amazing things and being in the startup world, on [00:05:30] the one hand, it's a lot easier to start something really, really interesting because you don't have to do a lot of these things yourself. On the other hand, there's a lot more competition because everybody else can do these things too. And so you have to work really hard to differentiate and to move beyond that kind of pre chasm world.
Speaker 4:You're listening to k a LX Berkeley 90.7 FM streaming on the worldwide web@kalxdotberkeley.edu. This is method to the madness, a 30 minute show about the innovative of the bay area.
Speaker 5:I'm your host aliene Huizar [00:06:00] and today we're interviewing lady Richard Ski CEO of local mind.
Speaker 3:And the precursor to local mine was this app that I wrote. So for squares API came out about two years ago in 2009 I think. And that was the first major new platform that came out after Twitter and Facebook. And those were extremely successful in creating an ecosystem around their data and around the rapists. And so I knew something big was going to happen with Foursquare's data as the first time that we had access to location data. And [00:06:30] yeah, location data was really the thing that was really interesting to me. And so there's this quote that the McClure Dave McClory uses the best companies and easiest companies to help succeed are ones that get you either paid to get you made or get you laid. And so I focused on the last part. How do I get users late? Because that's lot, that's easier to market to people.
Speaker 3:And so what I did is I built this app called assisted serendipity that uses sports score data to notify you when the male to female ratio tips in your favor [00:07:00] at any bar or any restaurant or anything that you're wanting to watch. Let's say you pick 10 places in. As soon as there's more girls than guys, more guys than girls, you get alerted and it's still running. It's out there. You can use it still uses foursquare data. And while I was building that, I kind of realized there's a lot more we can do with this data, not just how many girls and guys that are, but what if I want to know other stuff about what's happening there? Why can I contact one of those girls or one of those guys and find out number one, is this true? Are there a lot of girls? There are a number. [00:07:30] So that's the basic idea. But what about if I want to know, is it, is it fun? Is there room to sit? Is there beer that I like? And so Mike came out of that.
Speaker 5:Okay, cool. So, um, do you have any quantifiable statistics about the number of people who've gotten laid? It's just a serendipity, your metrics guy, right?
Speaker 3:It's hard to track. The only thing I'd been able to track is at the bottom of the notification, you get an a have an ad that says if you'd like the service to buy me a beer [00:08:00] and people donate $3. And so I've had like five people donate $3. Oh Nice. So maybe something's happened there.
Speaker 5:That's something there. All right. So, um, you know, one question I have is about these, these mobile apps, the social, mobile, local stuff, there's so many of them coming out and there's a really important, um, launch strategy that has to be in place, I think, you know, because the key is to get to a tipping point, you know, especially if something like your app where, [00:08:30] and I was playing around with and I'm looking on a map and there's a few people in Berkeley, there's a few minds that pop up. And so that's good to see. Yeah, it was an empty, but you know, worldwide people can use this app anywhere. Right. So how do you, how do you plan to get that kind of adoption that you need for such an app? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And if I, if I had the, the answer to that I would, I would, I would be very rich. It's a hard problem to solve and every, like you said, everybody's trying to tackle that and there's been a, a few successes. Instagram somehow figured it out and they're not so much location but they did something right for square. [00:09:00] It took them a while to get through there, but they figured it out. And so there's a models you can follow. Yelp kind of did that and they built a very kind of location specific service that IX exploded. And so we're, we're honestly in the center of that kind of storm is solving that problem. The, there's a few typical things you do. Number one, connect and tap your social graph as much as possible. Get everyone to tell their friends about it as much as possible.
Speaker 3:The key is to create critical mass, as you said, in a specific region [00:09:30] up to now. We've been very organic across the world. Tell your friends, see what happens kind of thing. Not focused on any specific area. The next big phase for us, and actually just two days ago, we hired a head of community development who is number one job is acquire users and retain users. And the strategy is specifically focused on the bay area and get critical mass in the city because number one, it's easiest to do to get critical mass in people like new things, um, especially social, mobile location type stuff. [00:10:00] And um, and two of them were here and so it makes sense to launch here. We actually tried initially to launch in Montreal, which is where we launched the company, which is unusual, but, but that's where we launched in it. It worked out really well. Unfortunately there's not enough for square attraction there. People use it, but it's not as kind of regular day of life as it is here. And so our big push right now is let's get on the ground, start doing meetups, start doing happy hours, let's get local press, let's get people that are kind of influencers interested in local [00:10:30] mind and talking about it. Um, so that's really the big strategy in right now.
Speaker 5:Okay. And um, tell me a little bit about, you went through a, um, an incubator process in Montreal ride this shows about innovation. And so that's very much, you know, when are not within our realm of interest is how do, how did that experience go down for you about getting into it and going through it?
Speaker 3:Okay. Well first I'll say that if you're starting a company, I would 100% recommend finding some sort of incubator to be involved [00:11:00] in because especially if it's your first company, it's like a startup on training wheels or a startup with a rocket engine strapped to the back. It accelerates everything that you would organically do by tenfold. And there is no reason not to do it. You give up equity and you have to listen to people all day to give you and giving you advice. But it's so worth it. It's, it's unbelievable. Unfortunately, there's kind of this incubator bubble happening now where there's hundreds and hundreds of incubators out there and you can't trust them all to do a good job. There's the common ones, y Combinator, [00:11:30] techstars and guys like that. But um, so I just wanted to kind of say that up front, the way that we got involved with them, it was very serendipitous.
Speaker 3:I was up in Montreal for a conference conference called bit north, but I'm going to again a month from now, which is a very small intimate conference, 50 people in Montreal in a cabin for a weekend. And everyone that comes there has to do a talk, five minutes talk. And the Tedx talk that I ended up doing came from that. So there's a lot of serendipity involved. And so the guys that were launching this incubator happened to be at the conference [00:12:00] and they knew about me from assistant serendipity actually and from web metrics, the company I worked for. And so we just started talking and we kind of went to lunch after the conference was over and local mine came out of that. We're sitting around and talking about all this data that's out there, location data and foursquare and assisted serendipity and what else could we do with that?
Speaker 3:And local mine came out of that. And so the fact that the idea was kind of this mutual idea across a bunch of people and can we can incubator, I had to move up there to do it and I don't regret that for a second as is the best [00:12:30] experience of my life. Um, but that's how I got involved with them as, you know, it was almost too easy. I didn't have to go and pitch a hundred incubators or anything like that. I just met these guys and then picked up my life, left my job and moved up to Montreal. Yeah. And the, the um, simpleness of the is really, I think, really exciting. Um, so how many ideas did you kick around before you got to that one? That was, that was the only one that made sense. So, yeah. You know, that's, I'm kind of in the mode of my life or I don't want to think about any other ideas.
Speaker 3:[00:13:00] Every, every kind of new idea. Urban new app. I look at it second, we take something from here, from the kernel into local mine. How do we make local money more useful? And so I'm trying not to avoid any sort of new ideas. The incubators themselves have a lot of good ideas and so if you're not sure of a company, you want to start finding incubator, I'm sure they have some ideas that they've heard that other people have abandoned or that they've kind of come up with as they hear other people's ideas. Okay. So you go through the incubator process and um, do they provide seed funding for you? Yeah, and I think [00:13:30] most of them do that. This one provided a more easy funding than most, but they take a more, the bigger chunk of equity and that's their model. And their model is very unusual.
Speaker 3:It's a year long program up to a year. You don't have to stay there for year. You work in their office space. They're there every day across the desk, meet with you a few times a week. Um, it's a very lean startup oriented, you know, kind of that whole, that whole methodology. So it's very, the funding is based on these milestones and trenches of lean startup philosophy. First you get, [00:14:00] so it's a 50, you get $50,000 for this incubator, you get $10,000 up front, you get another 20 when you've made your MVP and then you get another 20 when you gotten product market fit. And so you have to kind of convince them that you've got those things and yeah, they're there every, every day giving you advice and telling you how, how slow you're working terribly. Your ideas are, that's interesting. So it would almost seem to be somewhat of an advantage to be outside of the bay areas bubble in that kind of [00:14:30] scenario because you're gonna get more attention.
Speaker 3:That's, that's exactly how it worked out for us. Nothing I planned and we're kind of actually caught in this little, um, I dunno, story around people leaving Canada companies. Why are they leaving Canada? And so it's kind of an interesting kind of circle of stories around us right now. But, um, um, yeah, the uh, what was your question again? I'm sorry. Say maybe it's an advantage was already statement. Yeah. Well I guess that [00:15:00] my question would be is why did you move to California? Yeah. Well, so let me address that real quick is I totally, we found that to be very true as launching outside of the bay area. Not that I know, but it would have been like to go to start from scratch at launch year, but it ended up being really, really helpful for us is in a Montreal for example, as soon as there's an interesting idea or something people like and See a vision for it, they completely supported and love it and do everything they can to help you, which isn't gonna happen here because there's so many other people doing the same kind of thing.
Speaker 3:And so you kind of raise [00:15:30] rise right to the top if you have anything worthwhile. And so that helped us tremendously. We had a lot of great attention and press, made some amazing friends and contacts there and now we kind of are riding that wave into the valley here. Hopefully it works out. Um, yeah, so launching here would be much more difficult. There's a lot more competition and especially in Montreal where they're creating through really, really focused on creating an ecosystem there. There's a lot of support, there's money, there's advisors, there's office space, there's a lot of, there's a lot of talented people there. So they worked out really well for us. But [00:16:00] then what we're seeing here, yeah, so that's, that's, that's the story we, we keep running into, you know, the way we look at it as you need a reason not to move here.
Speaker 3:This is the center of gravity for our world, especially mobile, social location type stuff. You're at a disadvantage not being here, not being able to go get a coffee with an investor and a partner or employees they might want hire. And so the entire time we had, we were looking for reasons not to move here. We're like going to New York and if there was a good, a strong investor out [00:16:30] there that really wanted us to move there, we would've moved there too. But it was really the default for us. And really the decision was between the valley or or the city. And we decided in the city
Speaker 4:you are listening to k a LX Berkeley 90.7 FM streaming on the worldwide web@kalxdotberkeley.edu. This is method to the madness of 30 minutes show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host Ali Nasar and today we're interviewing lady Richard Ski, CEO of local mind. [00:17:00] Tell me a little bit about, you talked about the social graph, um, you're not going to accessing it. Um, so is it a big abstract data set or are there visualizations that you can use to really understand it better or how does that work?
Speaker 3:The simple way to look at it is you ask Facebook, who are this guy's friends who are Lenny's friends? And it just gives you this big list of all my friends on Facebook and their Facebook ids. [00:17:30] Other services like foursquare gives you all their names and their email addresses and their phone numbers if they haven't been foursquare and where they've checked in. And so that's kind of the data you're playing with. And with that you can figure out number one, who of your friends are also members of the service. You can figure out when you sign up for the service, how many of your friends are already members. So we could show you here's who was already a member and maybe you should think about signing up, kind of the social proof idea. That's the first layer. And then you could figure out who's your friend, who's a friend of a friend.
Speaker 3:And so [00:18:00] I sign up and I can see who else is on the system that's across. So let me give a concrete example. When you open up, look in mind and you sign into a local mine, you're not only see every other user that's a member of local mine. You also see all your friends that are on foursquare that aren't necessarily users because foursquare gives us access to that data. They tell us where your friends have checked in, even if they're not members of local mine. And so that allows you to send questions to friends of yours that aren't necessarily users, [00:18:30] if they provide their phone number, if they provide force with their phone number. And so that's a very concrete use of the social graph data that without that you sign up and we just know eighth Lenny, great. Now what do we do with your social graph data? We can send an email to your friends, hey, your friend signed up, you should join or allow you to invite your friends, things like that. Um, and then you know, there's Twitter too, which has a tremendous amount of social graph data.
Speaker 5:So what's the um, security policies for accessing those graphs? Can anybody do it?
Speaker 3:You as a user, [00:19:00] you authenticate. So you sign in and you say local Wayne is asking for permission to access this data with foursquare, sorry, with Facebook is very granular. There's trying to remember how many permissions there are. There's like 20 or 30 permissions that you asked for and so when you [inaudible], you've probably seen you sign up for an app and you say like login before scoring. It gives you a list of things that they're going to have access to and so you read through that and you're like, all right, sure. And it's an all or nothing kind of situation. You can say, look, I'm mind can only get access to these things because we require [00:19:30] all that data that we asked for it. It's all or nothing kind of kind of thing. And different services have different permission levels, Twitter and foursquare, all or nothing.
Speaker 3:There's no real granularity. It's everything or nothing forced Facebook gives you very granular permission metrics, which honestly, I don't think anyone really understands. Probably from the user's perspective, they just see a big list and then I see a big allow button and I think most people just click allow, which is, it's a tough position for Facebook to be because they, you know, they're like, yeah, we're asking you what's the problem? [00:20:00] Because if you get this off down the road, you've approved it. What are you going to do? Yeah, it's like the iTunes terms of service that no one reads. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5:Okay. Um, another thing I wanted to ask you about was, um, you're obviously about solving a big data problem, right? Right. Huge amounts of data that you're trying to do. Analytics, awning, and to extract some kind of knowledge, right? Location aware knowledge. So how do you go about [00:20:30] architecting the system to do that? Did you, you mentioned cloud computing platforms. Who using someone like that or did you have to hire architects to build you up
Speaker 3:for database or? So my general philosophy with starting any sort of project is do as little as possible upfront because you have no idea where it's actually going to go. Don't waste your time architecting it over, architecting it early because you may end up realizing this isn't exactly what I wanted to build. And you spend six months building this amazing architecture, amazing data, data store [00:21:00] that you're not, not gonna end up using. And so my philosophy has always been do the bare minimum actually released something, see how people like it and iterate on that. And so we're still in that mode of let's just keep iterating and evolving from a very simple design until we've got this product market fit, which is kind of this tangential concept. What is bragging market fit? You know, it's when your users are signing up like crazy, maybe no one really knows what that means.
Speaker 3:But anyway, um, [00:21:30] so we are built on the cloud where all Google app engine, which is a platform as a service, I think that's very clearly the future of software development. It's the natural evolution of assembly language to c type code to Java c plus plus to Ruby Python to platform as a service where instead of dealing with tiny registers and memory memory buckets and when you're doing assembly now you're not even dealing with servers. You just write code, [00:22:00] you say put something on a database call URL and you upload it into the cloud and it manages scalability for you, manages performance and manages servers going down over heating power being cut out. And from the perspective of an entrepreneur or a programmer, anytime you spend on something that's not a core competency is a waste of time because everybody's doing that and it's not going to differentiate you unless you're infrastructure company or you figured out a way to make it really cheap like Google, Facebook, they've kind of got to the point [00:22:30] where they have to worry about that stuff because it's a differentiator for them.
Speaker 3:No one's going to be able to scale up to Google's level because they've done so much innovation on that. So I'm all about platform as a service. If I couldn't use Google app engine and I would do something like Amazon or Rackspace and I would never think about using my own hardware unless there's a really, really kind of monetary justification for that and there's not just money. It's also the opportunity cost of operations dealing with servers, waking up in the middle of the night, Google app engine. I love it as [00:23:00] it pretty much been universally adopted by this wave of entrepreneurs. Is there anybody who's like old school, I'm going to build it myself. I would say it's been almost exclusively cloud-based now and it's really, are you gonna go with Amazon or are you going to go with Rackspace or you're going to go with Google app engine and then there's, there's Heroku, which is a very popular too sure.
Speaker 3:But there's still definitely a shift. There's still a kind of a divide between the regular cloud like Amazon and on the platform as a service. And I think platforms and service clouds are still very [00:23:30] early, but I'm a huge fan. I would 100% recommend using them. Okay. So one thing, an interesting quote I read from Richard Scoville last week was about, um, he's getting tired of checking out all these new apps that come out and people talking about all the users they have. Right. So you said that the real metric isn't how many users do you have? It's your attrition rate. That's what he wants to talk to people about. So how do you make it sticky? Yeah, yeah. I call it retention, engagement and retention. And I totally [00:24:00] agree. It's, it's kind of tricky. It's, as a company, we're always focused on user acquisition. And retention and you always have to figure out which one's more important.
Speaker 3:When we talk to investors, they seem to be really fixated on users. How many users do you have? You know, if you say have 20,000 users, that's one thing. If you have 200,000 they're excited. If you have 2 million, they're really excited. Even if 1% of them, I wouldn't say if it's that bad, like say 5% are retained, if only 5% are actually active, it's fine for them in [00:24:30] a lot of cases, which is sad because that's not really a product if no one's sticking around. And so we as a company have to decide what's more important and where do we put our resources, because you can always only focus on a couple of things. And so yeah, so retention, that's, that's the product market fit is people are coming back to your product. They're just signed up. They actually find it useful and keep coming back.
Speaker 3:And especially on the iPhone platform, like you said, there's a thousand apps coming out every day and there's only so many apps you can fit on your iPhone. It's front [00:25:00] page or first few pages. And so it's a battle for that kind of territory warfare on the iPhone. And there's a lot of tricks that you can use and you have to balance tricks between, between tricks and actual value in the product. And so some tricks, something I've been noticing is there's kind of this tragedy of the common situation around email. It's been there for a while where you want to bug your users as much as possible, as much as possible to remind them that you exist. And so email was the kind of the original version of that. And now push notifications [00:25:30] are becoming that people want to, apps want to notify as much as possible to be like, oh yeah, I exist.
Speaker 3:And so, so that's a, so that's a tricky uses. Every time a user of yours joins, you notify all their friends, hey, this user's joined. So they remember, Oh yeah, local mind exists or whatever app exists. And Oh, people are joining. That's awesome. They're doing really well. So that's a trick. People use emailing users every week with some interesting information. Um, so those are tricks. Then there's actual value, you know, just make an app useful. Like [00:26:00] Facebook. People come back to it five times a day. The value is I want to know what's going on in my world, which is a really important need that we all have. And so, but that's a hard problem to solve until you get everybody on it. That's that critical mass problem, right? You're not going to know what's going on until everybody's on it. Um, so in the end, the answer to your question is to make a product that has actually useful to people.
Speaker 4:Yeah, this is the mighty 90.7 FM k a l x Berkeley. You're listening to method to the madness [00:26:30] at 30 minute show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host Aliene Huizar and today we've been speaking with CEO Lenny Richard, ski of local mind.
Speaker 3:So let's talk about local mines use. So
Speaker 5:tell us some stories about, you know, some anecdotes about people have used it in cool ways. [inaudible]
Speaker 3:sure. So one, there's a few stories that I, that I like to tell the one is someone was sending a question to a concert venue. I think it was a girl talk [00:27:00] concert, I think it was actually in San Francisco and they wanted to know if it was, if there's a long line to get in and they wanted to kind of buy ticketed foods, not too crowded and they got an answer back where the guy said that's not so crowded, just getting rolling but I have an extra ticket and if you want to come by I'll give it to you. And they ended up meeting and got the ticket. So that's a great story. You know, that's, that's local. Mine is built on this theory that people have intrinsic desire to help people and they're intrinsically helpful and they enjoy helping. And [00:27:30] not to say people are intrinsically good, but that people like helping other people.
Speaker 3:And so that's a great example of that. You know, you got nothing out of it. He met some guy and gave him a free ticket. Another example is when the tsunami hit Japan a few months ago, we saw a bunch of questions being sent to people in Japan about how are things going? Is there anything thing we can do to help you as the water reached the certain point. And what's interesting about local mind is he opened up the app and you see this map of the world and you can zoom [00:28:00] around and you zoom in to Japan and you see markers lit up in Japan, all over Japan. And you kind of realize I can contact some guy in Japan just from random guy, you know, either I want to go to Japan and I'll ask a real question. Or You just talking to some guy in Japan.
Speaker 3:How else do you contact someone in Japan? There's no, yeah, in Japan, guy@japan.com and so look at my, allows you to do that. And so we saw people doing that, clicking on markers, reading it on the news, and then clicking markers and sending questions with what can we do to help what's happening? So that was a [00:28:30] great story and it was great to see that kind of thing. There was um, after some big lawn died, we saw people sending questions to downtown New York asking like, how's the party? And kids pay my respect. So that was really cool. And Ground Zero. Um, yeah those are some of the interesting stories.
Speaker 5:Cool. So what about um, does my, you know, always ask this question to every entrepreneur I talked to you five years from now. What does it look like?
Speaker 3:The Vision, I always come back to you with local mine is this kind of ammunition [00:29:00] to the service where you can see and you can know what's happening anywhere in the world in real time right now. Right now it's through other people. You ask a person a question, they give you an answer and you can see through kind of their eyes metaphorically. I think in the future we're not going to have to rely on people for that type of information. I think we're going to have a lot of interesting API APIs and sensors that are already integrated around the world that we can tap through API APIs. We can figure out how crowded is a place, have noisy as a place, how much parking is left. [00:29:30] Um, how many seats are left at a restaurant without actually having to ask anyone. We're just going to have the data available and local mine is built on this premise that there's all this stuff that people are doing that together creates this amazing products.
Speaker 3:We're sitting on top of four square go all of Facebook. We use simple Jia, we use urban airship, we use, you know, we're sitting in apples, the apples marketplace, all these things that connect, that save us time. We don't have to worry about them and we can iterate and innovate a lot more quickly. [00:30:00] And so I see the same thing happening with the world tomorrow. Riley talks about sensors in the world in this kind of Internet of things where the world becomes more connected to the digital world and once real world sensors are are in place, we can do amazing things with them. Like the kind of what I'm describing, we're local mind is going, so the nerds will rule or I think everyone will will benefit to, I don't see it just being the nerds, but you have to be able to access the API to really see what you're saying. Well, it's nice as we're building this on [00:30:30] top of all that stuff so you don't have to worry about it as leisure. Ask a question or find whatever you want to know, but yeah, in spite of that, the nerds will rule. We're all over that. We're the new rock stars, right? We're changing people's lives.
Speaker 4:You can check out local mind@localmind.com or check out their app in the iTunes app store for iPhones. Just go to iTunes and type local mind. This has been method to the madness. You can check us out@methodtothemadness.org have a great Friday. Everybody.
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