Hong Kong as Epicenter of Spatial Computing with Nils Pihl

From the bustling streets of Hong Kong to the cutting-edge advancements in spatial computing, join us as we explore the differences in doing business in Asia compared to the West, the concept of ‘Urboreal Cities,’ the absence of large urban centers in the West, and the critical importance of privacy and decentralization in the age of spatial computing.

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[00:00:00] Episode 428 of the Global from Asia Podcast, spatial Computing and Why Hong Kong is positioned for, for the growth there, talking some new tech blockchain and more. Let’s tune in. Welcome to the Global from Asia Podcast, where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down into straight up actionable advice.

And now, your host, Michael Micheli Global from asia.com/spatial-computing as our url as [00:00:30] always, 428 shows numbers keep going up. And this show is going up. We’re talking about spatial computing going vertical. Nils, he’s founder and CEO. Of AKI labs and building amazing things. We’re diving into the history also Hong Kong and Asia.

We crossed paths a lot in the startup ecosystems in Beijing and then is down in the south in bang, uh, Bangkok. I’m down here, he’s in Hong Kong building an amazing new tech and. We talk about why, why Hong Kong [00:01:00] and why, why Asia, and I think him and I are similar paths here with the Asia position. Also, of course, talking about new things and blockchain and new things, and just technology and spatial computing, this hot keyword.

We have a fascinating discussion. After the interview, I’ll give some of my insights as well about. What I think is the future here in Asia and more, and just some fun stuff at a blah, blah, blah session. But let’s go into the interview with Nils. Thank you so much for coming on, and I hope you enjoy this show.[00:01:30]

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Thank you everybody for tuning into. Another Global Esia podcast. Over 10 years doing these, and I [00:02:30] think even before this show started, I came across NS and his, some of his partners and team there. It’s really great to come have him on the show. He’s co-founder, CEO of a very interesting spatial computing project.

Walkie Labs is the operating and then it. Mesh, which is something I’m gonna learn about and I think a lot of us are gonna learn about. But it’s, it’s very much into the future. And I think Hong Kong, we wanna talk about why Hong Kong, why, why Asia? The, the whole [00:03:00] structures, the her real cities and other things.

But before we get into it, you, you are, you’re from Switzerland, I believe. Almost, I’m from Sweden, a long time. Sweden, excuse me. Yeah, the other one. Okay. Yeah. I blame, I always joke about my American background. That’s, Europe is like one country basically. Yeah. But yeah. You’ve, you’ve been in Asia for quite some time and you are, it is.

Project’s great with industry leaders. You have great backers. You’re, you’re really working hard to give real. [00:03:30] Utility with, with what’s happening in, in AI and, and blockchain to, to basically do augmented reality and giving AI robotics machine the, the, the new world. Right? The new world where robots, andis will be talking to each other, right.

I still think. As we record this show, at least for me, I still haven’t gotten my mind around that kind of a world where humans are not even involved with interactions. Still, I think we’re in the middle of these interactions, but also it’s just amazing. So you’re looking to, [00:04:00] I. I have a whole bio here, but you guys are doing amazing things.

D pin is a big hot keyword, so you’re right in the middle of D Pin, which is basically decentralizing these physical items as far as I understand. I’m gonna learn from you today and we’ll link up on the show notes, but, but do you wanna maybe give a little bit of a, a background about how you, how you got started in, in business and in in Asia and then I think we’re gonna focus on Hong Kong and, and Asia as like startups and tech.

Sure. [00:04:30] So I came to Asia back in 2009. I moved to Beijing. I didn’t know that it was a long-term move. I was gonna do a semester abroad. My then girlfriend was American born Chinese, and I. Wanted to visit China once she signed up for a semester abroad. I was taking a sabbatical at the time, so I thought, nice.

Why don’t I go finish my book in Beijing? I thought I was writing a book. I ended up not writing a book, but I thought I was writing a book. I came to [00:05:00] Beijing and immediately fell in love with Beijing and became convinced that this is the Asian century. I was just completely struck with how quickly things move.

Mm-Hmm. How editorial people were, the just extreme grind that people have. And I kind of fell in love with the, the ecosystem and the, the kind of people that you would run into, [00:05:30] people that had come to Beijing from all over China and all over the world. I came there ’cause they wanted to accomplish something and it was a very captivating kind of environment to be in.

I ended up staying for, for seven years in Beijing. Now I’m in Hong Kong, which is my, my, my new great love. I used to be extremely loyal to Beijing, but I have to say, after having lived in Hong Kong for a [00:06:00] while, I’ve, I’ve seen the light and. Now when it comes to, to spatial computing, the, the field that I’ve been in since 2019, I think you can make a very, very compelling case that Hong Kong has the perfect set of circumstances to really come out as the global leader in spatial computing, not just competitive with Silicon Valley, but outperforming Silicon Valley when it comes to spatial computing for a couple of reasons.

One place where I like to [00:06:30] start, especially for an English beating, English speaking, perhaps western audience, is to talk a little bit about scale in three dimensionality. If we look at the greatest city in the western world by size, the the biggest city in the western world, infrastructure wise is the city of New York.

Yes, New York has over 900 buildings. Taller than 100 meters, which is very impressive until you consider that. Hong Kong has over 4,000 [00:07:00] buildings taller than 100 meters. Mm-hmm. And this has a, a big impact. On the need for spatial computing. Actually, the GPS, even though people don’t think about it, is actually a kind of line of sight technology.

Yeah, yeah. You’re right. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t work up and down. Yeah. In big Asian cities, by the standards of this century, the Asian century, all of the big cities in the world or in Asia. GPS is not a good way for moving around. [00:07:30] Partially just because of the poor signal, but also because GPS is made for, for 2D navigation.

Mm-Hmm. Hong Kong is not a two dimensional city. So when we started showing off our spatial computing capabilities to investors globally. We very quickly noticed that when we showed it to Asian investors, they thought about things like navigation, and when we showed it to Western investors, they thought about entertainment and gaming, and I [00:08:00] think it is what’s gonna make someone wear a pair of AR glasses.

1. For several hours every day. I don’t think it’s Pokemon. I think it’s going to be solving some, some real problem that people have and things like navigation and communication. Putting digital information is correct. Physical context language is the killer app of AR and Hong Kong gets it. Not only that, but a huge part of spatial computing, especially in the current paradigm, [00:08:30] is computer vision and.

The best computer vision people out there today are, are Chinese, and a lot of them are here in Hong Kong. HKU in particular is just killing it with banger paper after banger paper. It’s remarkable how often I’m, I’m sitting reading the latest paper on scene reconstruction or something like this. It’s it are either some very experienced people here or even some kids here in Hong Kong that put out [00:09:00] this amazing material.

And then third, Hong Kong is incredibly close to your old stomping ground. Shenzhen. Yeah. Kong closer to Shenzhen than San Francisco is to Palo Alto. And Shenzhen is the undisputed king of hardware manufacturing. And when you finally tie all of these advantages together with Hong Kong’s local government who takes geo positioning and smart city as one and the [00:09:30] same thing, they, they recently said that the, the way you get a smart city is through geospatial data.

Like that’s how you do it. The Hong Kong government has put together an. Open source data set, or actually over 500 different geospatial data sets that they’ve open source to make it possible to do cool spatial computing things and smart city things in Hong Kong. When you put all of these things together, I find it very hard to believe that there’s another place in the world that is going to be more impactful for the development [00:10:00] of spatial computing, and that means that Hong Kong has a very big role to play in artificial intelligence as well, because spatial computing.

It’s the ability for computers to understand their physical surrounding. Mm-Hmm. Without spatial computing, artificial intelligences are confined to the internet and can only understand what’s on the internet With spatial computing, artificial in intelligences can join us on the front lines of physical workspaces as well.

Mm-Hmm. And that’s what we [00:10:30] are doing at AKI Labs. We’re making applications for retail staff, for example, to use reality for communication and path finding. To make their day-to-Day more efficient. Yeah, there was, there was a lot there. But I think you, I put a note that spatial navigation for ai, right?

It’s like, and you’re saying like Asia’s about navigation, the investors where West is thinking about it as like a game. Yeah. Like there was that Pokemon crazy, I don’t know. I felt like it was just like a week long, or at least on the [00:11:00] news for a week where people were going all over the world, like trying to get the Pokemon on the, there was that first application like many years ago.

You probably know, uh, I forget. It was like a Pokemon app where people were trying to get the. I think it was Japan or something. There was like a whole bunch of people just like in traffic, like running through traffic to try to get something. I forget the Pokemon go by man. Yeah. Was a global phenomenon.

Yeah. Yeah. That paid I believe $5 billion in revenue. It’s the most successful augmented reality [00:11:30] application. Uh, by far, like arguably there hasn’t been another successful application. Yeah. It’s like the only thing I think of, right. One. And I think that has really, the success of that has really colored the imagination of the Western vc.

Whereas the problems that are, that you face in these, we like to call them her Orreal cities. Yeah. These dimensional tall cities. Her Boreal being in Port Manco urban and Arboreal tree-like Mm-Hmm. Uh, the [00:12:00] VCs here see a different set of needs that need to be addressed. So I. Would be willing to bet several tos that Hong Kong is going to be the first city where a third of the population, something like this, wears AR glasses daily.

It’s going to be Hong Kong. It’s definitely not gonna be New York. It’s definitely not gonna be Silicon Valley. It’s gonna be Hong Kong. Because like yeah, like you said, like up and down. Although I have to say it happened to me in, well, I wasn’t as familiar. I’ve only been in Japan a couple times, but I was trying to use Google Maps [00:12:30] and I went to an intersection and I couldn’t cross and there was a bridge and I had to walk like half a block back to get up, up the bridge to cross the road.

Like I don’t know if I couldn’t. Yeah, like there was a lot of this and so like. Yeah. So I could see people wearing these AR glasses and, and using this technology, like you say, just to know what level right up. ’cause they, oh, like these buildings are all so tall, right? So it’s, yeah. You think about Hong Kong, right?

Even those kind of like old industrial buildings have like huge amount of floors and Yeah, [00:13:00] you have that long list of like a menu on the lobby of what floor? And there’s like five, there’s like 10 things per floor, 10 offices, right? And you’re trying to figure out where to go. Yeah, I could see, I could see that.

And then you made me think of those. I think it’s like a Tom Cruise movie with self-driving cars that goes up a against the, up, up along a building, up building, I’m forget, minority report, maybe movie. Mm-Hmm. And so, like you said, the AI needs that to go, to go up or down, right? Like not [00:13:30] just left or right, like three, three dimensional and yeah.

It’s really cool. I, I can think all these futuristic movies becoming true now with this. Spatial computing is spatial awareness for computers, meaning it’s spatial awareness for. ai. Mm-Hmm. Literally, without spatial computing, AI has no understanding of the, the physical world. One way that we, we highlight that with our own products right now is retailers have been using computer vision for a, [00:14:00] a long time.

They might put up physical cameras in the store that look for things like an empty shelf. And if that computer vision detects an empty shelf, it detects that empty shelf in screen space. What does that mean? Well, a camera has no depth perception. It doesn’t understand how far away something is or something like that.

So it’s really just telling you in what part of the picture, where in screen space is the empty shelf? Mm-Hmm. Now, then you have to, as a [00:14:30] human, do a mapping of which camera is this? Where in the store is this camera? And you have to have some kind of. Human readable translation of if this camera can see this empty shelf, then I need to go to this part of the store.

Quite complicated. But once you give the camera an understanding of its own position in 3D space and what the 3D space looks like, our computer vision can actually tell you directly in a 3D map where is the [00:15:00] empty shelf. So what we demo here in our, our demo space is that when. Our little robot that drives around looking for empty shelves, finds an empty shelf.

Then I get a notification on my phone that will guide me directly to the empty shelf in question. And of course, a phone in my hand is just an AI being carried around by my human legs. A the, the difference between a robot and an iPhone is the amount of legs it has. Mm-Hmm. The iPhone is just using me for locomotion.

So [00:15:30] if you want a robot that can go and restock the shelf itself, it needs to know where in the store is it, and that’s a lot harder problem than people think. It’s not something you could just use to GPS for. I think it’s another point worth noting for those that don’t know, but Hong Kong is also super expensive in real estate and every square inch is valuable.

Right? So like for your, like another point is like an empty shelf space at a store it’s much more valuable and cost, I guess it’s losing money ’cause they gotta make as, they gotta [00:16:00] make as much sales as they can to pay that rent. And that cost of is I think another factor probably right? For the requirements and needs of this.

Absolutely. The cost of real estate here. Makes the retail behavior quite different. Without naming names, I can say that one of our, our, our clients, they don’t even have a warehouse. Like having a warehouse is too expensive. Mm-Hmm. So they only carry in their store what will fit in the store. And this means that the store layout has [00:16:30] to change all the time to accommodate new shipments.

Like, oh, we just ordered a pallet of potato chips. And each one of these bags has to be in the store. So it’s a constantly changing layout. You, you can’t even rely on a traditional map ’cause it’s constantly changing. Yeah. And the reason why is it would be too expensive for them to have a warehouse. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean we, we talk about Amazon a bit here in e-commerce. Yeah. Like we all try to also, nobody wants to have debt inventory. Right. Or, or extra cost [00:17:00] warehouses. Just extra cost. So that. Yeah. I just know how serious it is in Hong Kong. I just wanna make sure people also put that into account in my local grocery store where I buy my eggs and milk, the aisles are so narrow.

Exactly. Not pass each other right? Yeah, exactly. They’re less than a meter wide. And again, it’s ’cause real estate is so expensive. So if I go shopping with my, with my son, when I have him on a, on a carrier, on my, on my belly, I literally have to [00:17:30] wait for the aisle to clear before I can walk in there. I. I mean, it’s also the, so, so this future is Yeah, like an AI bot carrying restocked items into an empty shelf, going down that narrow aisle, like going up to shelf five, and then dropping the cereal there, and then going back to the dock, I guess.

Right. And then picking up more. It’s, it’s a wild world. Yeah. Yeah. I think within this decade in Hong Kong, we [00:18:00] will see ceiling mounted robots that navigate the store upside down so they don’t compete for floor space with us and handle restocking tasks. It’s like a spider. It makes me think of a spider stuff on the ceiling kind of going around area.

That would be a great product. Name the spider. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So. So, yeah. I know you talk a lot about retail, right? And retail’s under, under threat from e-commerce. It’s been a story we talk about here. We’re more [00:18:30] e-comm sellers in, in, in here. ’cause that’s where the entrepreneurs are making their money.

But you’re, you’re trying to help retail, right? Like get. To become e-commerce? Or, or, or, or compete with e-commerce or, or if I recall some of your work, I think we talked about this, I think, in the age of AI that we’re entering now, we’ve been touching on already in this podcast that computers don’t have spatial awareness.

Another way that we can think of this is an AI has full access to your e-commerce business ’cause it’s completely [00:19:00] digital. Mm-Hmm. Like it’s very easy for e-commerce to involve ai. And that’s meaningful because AI is, if it’s not already today, it’s very soon going to be both the best and the cheapest worker available.

True. And that labor enhancement is not available to retail without spatial. Got it. So without spatial computing is just a complete walkover ai, all the benefits just go to e-commerce unless the retailers [00:19:30] adopt spatial computing. So I think already e-commerce has had. A couple of fantastic advantages over retail for some time now.

Three things that I like to highlight are discovery, search, and personalization. What do I mean by that? Well, discovery is how you get exposed to different products, right in, in physical retail discovery can be described as eye level is bi-level. The retailer has to figure out what products to place at eye [00:20:00] level where you’re more likely to see them, and that doesn’t shuffle around or anything like that is what it is.

Mm-Hmm. Whereas in e-commerce discovery can be context based. It could be based on time of day. It could be based on, on, uh, your personal preferences. So discovery is just way, way better in e-commerce. And then we have search, right? And the the obvious thing that, that everyone understands is like, oh, you can search in e-commerce, but you can’t search in physical retail.

And physical retail search means walking around [00:20:30] or asking a staff member that’s gonna ask another staff member. But there’s actually a less obvious thing that disadvantages retail, which is when I search for something on your, your e-commerce site, even if you don’t have it, that I looked for it. That’s super valuable because you can use this information to change what items you have in stock.

Mm-Hmm. But when someone looks for something in physical retail and they don’t find it, you had no idea that that happened. And [00:21:00] that is a huge disadvantage for retail. And then finally, obviously personalization, e-commerce, you can completely personalize everything. And even though my local grocery store knows that I put oat milk in my coffee, they can’t advertise oat milk to me when I’m in the store.

They’re gonna show me sausages like they show everyone else. But in e-commerce, it can be perfectly tailored to me. And I think that spatial computing, I. Changes these four things. One is the access to [00:21:30] ai. The other is the ability to improve discovery through augmented reality and search augmented reality and personalization through augmented reality.

So spatial computing really levels the playing field. We believe for retail and without spatial computing. These four things will just make e-commerce dominate retail. That makes sense. So then the, so the solution would be, I’m wearing an AR glass or the Apple vision in a store, and then I would, it would do these different features [00:22:00] because it has spatial compute enabled store.

You can even do it with your phone. It doesn’t have to be a headset. What we are doing with our customers now is completely phone based. Your iPhone is a part-time spatial computer. You flip the right switch and it does spatial computing. Mm-hmm. So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve done really cool things both for, for staff, which is the main thing we focus on, but also for the shoppers themselves, where the shoppers themselves can find what they’re looking for more easily.

And see, even if you want to be completely privacy preserving and [00:22:30] not personalized, you can still do day parted. Advertising, which is really meaningful. Some products sell more in the evening than it’s morning, and when you’re doing augmented reality, you choose for every, every part of the day what is the most reasonable item to to show.

Yeah. Like even here in Thailand, I went, it was raining and I ran to a corner store and I asked for an umbrella. They don’t even have an umbrella. How does a store on the side of a road not have an umbrella for the rain? We imagine. [00:23:00] Have maybe even your phone, like you say, I have to try that myself. But you have some AR headset on and you’re like, you could just see where the umbrellas are, right?

Yeah. Like, this store has an umbrella. Go in here, get an umbrella. You know, it’s pretty amazing. Yeah. I think a good way to think of augmented reality, it’s not that it’s disruptive to Google Maps, it’s more that it’s disruptive to search, actually. Mm. Because it can help you find things in your vicinity that you can buy.

A lot of [00:23:30] why e-commerce has been doing so well is that it’s so inconvenient to go physically look for something, but if you can make it a lot more convenient to physically look for something and I can get that umbrella or coffee machine or whatever it is I’m looking for and get it straight away, the the fastest way to get same way delivery is to just walk me to the store and I’ll, I can pick it up for myself.

Yeah, I wanna get into, of course, privacy and decentralization, which I think you’re, you’re, you’re doing right, but before, I just wanna maybe from my own [00:24:00] personal request or knowledge, but hopefully helpful for others. Is it like gonna be something I call static? Like if I’m selling a bike in my house, like a secondhand bike and somebody around my area could see I’m selling a bike, would I be able to like share it to those people like it?

Is it like a platform, like I’m still not sure what’s the medium of this information. Maybe that does lead into this privacy decentralization, but what is, what is, where is this data and how is it served and how is it shared to those [00:24:30] in my vicinity? I’m still not grasping that we have to separate the underlying positioning protocol, the post mesh from App Logic on top of it.

So in a scenario like the one you described where someone makes an app where you can list your, your bike, that app may have some data about you and your bike, et cetera, but the positioning system should not know that. The positioning system just needs to be a reference for your app to use. Mm. [00:25:00] Why is this a concern?

Well, okay, the way that post GPS positioning is done by seven out of 10 of the biggest companies by market cap in the world is through this thing called visual positioning. And the way visual positioning works is essentially your comparing. The sensor information from your camera to a digital representation of the world that lives on their cloud.

Basically, the trade off is if you tell me what you’re [00:25:30] looking at, I will tell you where you are. That’s how these centralized visual positioning systems work and what’s scary. Like we don’t think about that when we have phones, like whatever. But if you’re wearing a pair of next generation AR glasses and whoever provided them for, you know what you’re looking at, at all times.

That becomes pretty scary. And the way we are approaching this is to decentralize the visual positioning. So instead of us operating a cloud that does positioning [00:26:00] for you, we wanna make it possible for a. Local spaces to host their own interoperable visual positioning so that when you walk into the mall, ’cause the mall already knows you’re in there, right?

The mall can provide visual positioning for you and the mall will know that you’re in the mall like they already do. There’s no new information there. But we won’t know and Google won’t know, and that’s important. No one company should be aggregating. All of the information of what everyone is looking at.

Instead, we can have much more [00:26:30] intimate relationships with the physical spaces that we visit. Hmm. Um, they already know, like when you, when you walk into your local grocery store, they have CCTV cameras, et cetera. They already know you’re in there. There’s no, there’s, there’s no surprise there. A lot of them can even figure out where people are looking.

Things like this. Yeah. It’s not that scary. To imagine that your local grocery store is doing something with that information. It’s easy for you to switch grocery stores if you think they’re abusive, but if there’s one central company that provides positioning for [00:27:00] everything and knows everything you’re looking at, that’s, that’s too much power, I guess.

I guess the answer is Apple knows all of that with, especially with their new, new hardware, but even with their current hardware, they probably know all that. Right. You may have heard that the company iRobot recently had a merger struck down. One of the Big 10 companies wanted to buy iRobot. iRobot is the company that makes the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot.

Yeah, the robot now. Yep. Who it was that [00:27:30] tried to buy the Roomba? Probably Apple. I dunno. It was Amazon. Oh, Amazon, okay. Yeah. That’s how scary this gets. Why does Amazon wanna buy Roomba? Well, because they wanna know how big your living room is. That’s what they wanna know. It’s not that Amazon is getting into the vacuum cleaner business.

They’re in the business of knowing everything about you. So they wanted to buy the robotic vacuum cleaner. Scary. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I’m happy [00:28:00] to, happy to know you’re, you’re, you’re working on decentralizing this versus Yeah. ’cause I’m on the same side as you with decentralization of data and. Privacy. So I think most users need that, but it prob, does it trade off on the usability?

It’s probably harder to use, right? I mean, that’s kinda one of negatives. Decentralization usually. I mean, I’m not saying your solution is, but usually people still, like I even say I like MySpace. I honestly like MySpace over Facebook and I like eBay over Amazon. But most people liked Amazon or Facebook ’cause it was easy [00:28:30] to use.

Right. I could just. It was a standard layout and a standard data could be inputted and blah, blah, blah, like, but people like easy, so I always have these arguments about people, about decentralization in general, and they, they think it’s just usually too difficult, especially like, but hopefully. But it seems like your solution’s somewhat, somewhat straightforward.

Right? You have the application level and then the data level, and they’re separate, and then we just access it and then just. So, yeah, I’m, yeah, I’m good. It [00:29:00] makes it harder for us. It doesn’t necessarily make it harder for the end user, ’cause the end user doesn’t see any of this complexity. Hmm. But it’s hard for us to make this interoperable protocol that works just as well with the robot As with your headset, as with your phone, there’s a lot of complexity that we have have to handle, but.

Luckily, a couple of interesting trends have, have made it possible to compete with Big Tech now, and [00:29:30] all of them are loosely tied to blockchain. So on the one hand, it’s now possible to do deepen, which is a huge part of, of what we do. What’s really cool with Deep End is that people can now fund, operate and maintain civilization scale infrastructure.

And that’s meaningful on a moral level, but it’s also meaningful technically because there are many scenarios, not every [00:30:00] scenario, but many scenarios where decentralized infrastructure will outperform centralized infrastructure. So, for example, one of the things that’s very important for us with collaborative spatial computing is network latency.

And the best thing to do to reduce network latency is to make sure you have the shortest possible path over the internet from point A to point B. And our, the networking layer of the, the post mesh. Already has more physical [00:30:30] touchpoints than any of the major cloud providers, meaning that we can, at least in theory, for almost any scenario, provide lower latency on average than any web two provider could.

But we can also do that at a. Lower cost because it’s increasing the utilization rate of computers that already exist. Just like Airbnb and Uber increased the utilization rate of our homes and our cars. [00:31:00] Decentralized infrastructure networks and decentralized sensor networks increased the utilization rate of hardware and compute that’s already out in the world.

Can be very competitive in that sense. The other way, or, or rather, the second part is really just an emphasis on the, the fund part. One of the things that the bull run of 2021 demonstrated with this massive investment into the Metaverse hashtag [00:31:30] is that we now live in an era where the people can fund the things that they’re interested in.

Of course there were a lot of things that went wrong with the 2021 bull run and a lot of misallocation of funds. Sure, there’s a lot of things that need to get ironed out, but it’s clear that the financial plumbing for people to come together and fund things together exists now and they can own and operate infrastructure networks together.

Now, [00:32:00] these are two massive software updates to our civilization that I think we haven’t really come to terms with yet, how disruptive that is going to be and. We believe at AKI that it will allow us to really compete with someone like Apple or Microsoft because we can build it with the power of democracy in the free market.

Yeah. And that’s amazing power to the people. Yeah, I’m a big fan too. I’ve, yeah, I’ve been studying this, [00:32:30] but also I mentioned a bit about load pipe and chat about a show. We’re trying to kind of decentralize the marketplace of Amazon e-commerce ’cause. We’re all sick. We’re all sick and tired of, I think everybody, but especially on the, the seller side or the on the business side, people are just tired.

They can just feel the, the stronghold of these large tech companies that control our life and can turn us off any time for basically any reason that they come up with. So it’s really, it’s really great what you’re doing and I’m happy we got [00:33:00] you on the show. So yeah, Alki Labs. Com is the best place is also post mesh.org foundation, which is the protocol, right?

Where should people, is there something people can take action with today or go to or learn more about? Or what’s your plans this year? If people wanna participate in the post mesh, they should definitely go to post mesh.org and follow at post mesh on, on Twitter. Okay. You can already participate in our network and be part of our [00:33:30] networking infrastructure layer.

Later this year, you will be able to be part of the compute layer and the storage layer as well. So if you wanna be, be part of the decentralized positioning system of the future and machine proprioception for ai, yeah, go to post meash.org and follow us on Twitter at post, meh. Awesome. Thanks so much, Neil.

This is, this was fun. Thank you, Mike. Save the date Cross Border Summit. 2024 is coming back. 2020 threes was epic. Never [00:34:00] got such great feedback in all of our events. Cross Border Summit 2024. We’re planning already a year in advance. Save the date. November 14th and 15th will be the core event. But of course it is a full week, uh, of amazing things.

There’s pre-event, post events, workshops, trainings, elephants, sanctuaries. We have a lot of amazing things here in Ang Mai, Thailand. Again, so I would love to see you there. We’ve already pre-sold some tickets to previous people. We will be opening [00:34:30] up tickets soon. Subscribe to get updates at 2024 dot cross-border summit.com.

Also, check out videos and testimonials from last year as well as all of our years we did ’em in China, and this will be our sixth one. It’ll be great to meet you there and network and make some great relationships. I can’t wait. November, 2024. Thank you, nis. That was fun. I’m happy we’ve been crossed in paths around in Asia and in the startup space and common common friends and everything, so it’s just [00:35:00] amazing to see him grow and, and this in its new and abundant ecosystem and, and a world of spatial compute and blockchain and everything.

So I’m really excited to see how this continues to grow. Have to stop by in Hong Kong. I have to get there. I haven’t been there a while, so I said I would blah, blah, blah, about why I think Hong Kong as well as Asia. I’ve been out here. In Asia since oh seven, which is getting crazy, can almost say 20 years soon.

Time is just flying like they say in life. But basically what is [00:35:30] why? Why I actually, I recorded this honestly without my microphone, so I’m rerecording and the main point is I think diversity in competition with cultures and governments go where you’re treated best is what I always think of with our buddy Andrew Henderson, a nomad capitalist.

But it’s true if there’s only one government and these huge governments that are existing, these mega governments and maybe the new world order, I think that stuff kind of stifles competition, especially within some of the newer industries growing now, [00:36:00] like in in blockchain and, and the Web3 space. Some of these bigger countries don’t like it.

So I think because we have this competition for innovation, it’s, it gives more opportunities. If everybody spoke the same language, there was one country, one government, it one currency. I think that’s one of my favorite things about Asia is all these currencies, all these languages, all this chaos and energy, honestly, is one of my favorite parts, and this growth and this development, and this insanity in a way.

But like he [00:36:30] says, Neils in the interview, like this very compact, high density place in Hong Kong. Needs is technology more and is using it more practically than just video games in the West. But this is just what’s always been exciting to me is high, high impact, high density, new developing technologies and new developing markets.

This is what’s always gotten me, I think maybe with some movies I watched when I was a kid. But it’s happening here. It’s happening here and I think it’s gonna continue to happen here in in Asia, [00:37:00] and I’m excited to be part of it. I hope you are too. And. But I mean, you shouldn’t just based on where you’re born and based on what you do, you shouldn’t, shouldn’t really control your outcome in your life.

I hope this show or other shows I’ve done is maybe educated you, empowered you, motivated you to take action. I think many of us building are just building, right? We, we, we don’t have to get permission. We don’t have to hope that somebody allows us to do something, and that’s what’s really fun. So I hope you [00:37:30] enjoyed this show, global information.com/spatial computing.

Till next time. See you later. Bye-Bye. To get more info about running an international business, please visit our website@ww.global from asia.com. That’s ww.global from asia.com. Also, be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed. Thanks for tuning in.