Techstrong Gang – March 25, 2025

Hey, everyone. So can you store everything? Does it pay to store everything you're watching?

Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Alan Hummel here on Happy Tuesday on Textron Gang. Uh, as usual, we've got a good show, some interesting topics to talk about with some interesting people to talk about them with.

Let me introduce you to our interesting people today. First of all, from, uh, I guess he's home in Hudson, Ohio. Steven, I know you're moving, are you still gonna be in Hudson?

Yeah, I'm, I'm moving about, um, you know, uh, eight tenths of a mile. Um, that's, um, I don't know some other number for people in other countries. You know, they, there used to be a thing that a lot of people are born, lived and die all within their own little town or area there.

That ain't me. No. Okay.

Anyway, I was Born in Connecticut. What are you, what can you Say? You, you're in Connecticut, Yankee.

Um, anyway, uh, he, he is the CEO of Tech Field Day Futu Company and bonafide gang member Steven Foskett. Hey, Steven, thanks for joining. Moving over from Steven to New York where by the time we record this, I'm trying, no, it's still not, it's tomorrow.

No, it's not opening day yet, Mike. It would be Thursday, Thursday's opening day. Thursday's opening day three O'clock Eastern.

To be specific, That was a great video with the backup catcher who used to drive Uber, making the team kind of got you right here, didn't it? Um, anyway, he's our chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, welcome.

Happy to be here. And yes, half my friends in New York would qualify as people who were born here and never moved. Katie, Me too.

I have a lot of friends who grew up in Long Island and will die in Long Island. They haven't even been on vacation out of the United States, because after all, we are the greatest country in the world. Why go anywhere else?

Let's not go there today. Joining me here in our studio is our Echo Insights analyst and editor, sustainability, green author of Climate Change books, meteorologist and Gall about town. Bonnie Schneider.

Hey, Bonnie, how are you? Great to be here. Great to have you here.

Um, all right, let's dive into things today, guys. So, Mike, a block cloud sticker shock. I, I don't think it ever went away, but go ahead.

You, you kick it off. This has been one of those, uh, slow moving crisis that everybody kind of saw coming, but did nothing about. So now we have our survey from Wasabi talking about how 62% of folks are exceeding the amount of money they allocated for clout storage.

And we are now storing more data than ever in the age of ai. And it looks like a lot of organizations are starting to choke on it, and I just can't quite figure out how much of this is the responsibility of the cloud service providers, or how much of this is kind of just bad habits and we don't manage this stuff effectively. I don't, I know you've been kind of looking at this and frankly, paying some of these bills yourself.

What's your take? Yeah, No, you know, so look, I've been following this particular issue for years and years and years, to tell you the truth. You know, to me, the poster child of this, and I mean no Bill Wonder or anything to them was, was, uh, Splunk, right?

That was the knock on Splunk. Splunk had an amazing ability to, to, you know, cash and store everything. You tell it what you want.

If there was any kinda log or, you know, any kind of data metric, it could store it, but it quickly, the, you know, it, it was a poster child for just because you can, doesn't mean you should. And the cost of storage for a lot of enterprise Splunk installations gave rise to a whole cottage ecosystem of companies who said, we could store your stuff cheaper than Splunk or other companies that said, Hey, we'll go through your data in real time and pick out what you really need to store and chuck the rest so you don't have to pay for it. The whole finops movement, you know, when you look at people's bills for, for cloud and stuff, a good chunk of it is, is storage.

Now, couple of things have happened, right? Number one is what I mentioned before. We, we've, we've come across and said, okay, we don't need to store everything.

There are some things maybe you don't wanna store. Now that goes against the hoarder in us. Um, and, you know, I don't mean hoarder from the Star Trek original series creature that sparked mind milled with, I mean Hoarder, H-O-A-R-D-E-R.

You like that Steven, right? I I did get the reference, yeah. Yeah.

You've gotta be a stock check original pronounced Horta. Yeah, that was pronounced Horta paint paint. Anyway, um, so, you know, you, you, you don't have to store everything, but people do wanna, you never know what you're gonna need.

Then the other, I think, big sort of, uh, uh, you know, feature that came to this space was, well, not all storage is created equal. If it's something that I'm gonna pull up frequently, I want it right here, you know, in my right on my cloud infrastructure, and boom, I'm getting that. If it's stuff I may only pull up once in a while for an audit or something, I could offload that.

And if it's something that's even worse than that, heavens forbid, I could go to the tape, assuming those tapes work. Remember all those big machines, they would pull the tape out, like the robot arm would pull the tape out and pop it in. Anyway, that was kind of the low level, you know, the cheapest storage.

But no matter how you slice and dice it, we are storing everything, right? Your MRI films and CAT scans, you know, they, they say that within a couple years, 40% of all the storage on the internet will be medical imaging if we keep this up. Do we need to store all those?

Yeah, well, probably. So this is not a new problem. This is another one of these vendors who, you know, put out a survey to get the attention of a steam journalist in the tech space and, and highlight an old problem.

What's the new solution? There is none. You gotta make it a, a decision here.

What do you wanna store? How do you want to store it? And when budget becomes an issue, you've gotta make hard choices.

Steven, Steven is there hope for us, though, because can we have better smarter data management? Is there new storage technologies in the world? Well, like I was, yeah, PE people are, people are naturally pack rats.

I mean, you're talking to the guy whose personal blog is called the Pack Rat Blog, because I am in fact a storage nerd. And, um, you know, the thing that the, the sad truth of it is, at least for my entire career, people don't delete stuff. They don't eliminate data.

They just store more and more. Um, a few years back, I, I coined FSTs Law, which is the next storage device you buy is gonna be bigger than every storage device you've ever bought. Doubled.

And, um, and, and, and that's held true for a long time. Maybe it's not true now, but the, the, the truth is people just keep storing more and more. And that has worked to the favor of the cloud storage vendors, because essentially by making it very easy to store more and more, they've made it very easy for people to, you know, they're kind of feeding this, um, this trend of, of, of Pack Rat is in it that, that we've been fighting for a long time.

But the thing is, now that we've got an infinitely scalable storage system that charges you as you go, maybe you don't notice it until it's too late. It is a little self-serving. I'll point out for Wasabi to be talking about egress fees, because wasabi's, one of their things, one of their pitches for their product is their no egress fee policy, essentially, if I'm reading it right, um, if you egress less than your volume of storage every month, then you don't have to pay for egress fees, which is a big differentiator for them.

It's a big positive for them. I, I love the, the, the aspect of their product. But that being said, to have somebody go out there and say like, Hey, you know, egress fees are the bane of your existence, and that's why you're storing too much parentheses, where the company without egress fees is kind of like, you know, any other company going out there and saying, you know, Hey, um, you know, uh, McDonald's is great, but, uh, you know, don't you wanna have, um, I don't know, a better burger or something Hot, hot juicy, hot and juicy?

It's their pitch, right? I mean, so basically the survey is their pitch. So to, so to be fair, a lot of the cloud service providers are branching down those egress fees, right?

They've heard people and they're getting beat up about that. So I don't know how much of that is the core differentiator going forward, but there is criticism, and I'll toss this down, that says, the way that cloud services are priced is misleading, and people don't know what they're getting into because, you know, they're showing a base level price and, and then they wake up one morning and they're three quarters of their cloud bill is storage. And so, uh, do we need more transparency?

Didn't know we used to have like a consumer protection kind of thing. Oh, no, they got rid of that. They got rid of that, that, Yeah, but we don't need that.

Man. Don't need that. We don't that, that's just standing in the way of business.

We need, we need a corporate protection. I'll talk to her, Senator Elizabeth, uh, Warren about it. But look, I, you know, cloud, cloud, cloud bills are the way they are on purpose.

I think they purposely, uh, unduly, uh, uh, not transparent, opaque, I guess is the word, and the opposite of transparent. And, and that's what a lot of these finops programs do, is they, they, you know, they, they, they shine a light on these dark corners of your cloud bill. So you could see where, where your costs are, I'm sure somewhere in the fine print that you just hit, accept, accept, accept six times on the cloud.

Providers are giving you what, you know, the pricing is and all of these things, but we don't pay attention. And it's not until, you know, we've grown from, uh, you know, 10 gigabits to all of a sudden, holy macro or up to petabytes. This is costing me a fortune that people get freaky.

Um, I just wanted to add something that, uh, in that report that I did about sustainability, storage costs were go hand in hand with a lot of sustainability issues. And Sure, you mentioned data tiering as well, like the cold data that you're not using that, that helps, saves energy. But what's interesting is Delphix, um, it might also spark innovation with Delphix because they are doing kind of a virtual store, like a virtual replica of your storage, and that's how they can save their customers money, where they're having almost like a storage stand-in for, for their, um, for the amount that they're storing.

And that, uh, virtual storage placeholder has made a difference in some of the costs. Steven, do you think we could use AI to help us with any of this? Because I would sorely love an AI agent that would send the message that said, you realize that you're storing 97 versions of the stain image, and that maybe you don't need that.

That's actually a great, that would be a great use of, uh, of an AI model. Sure. Um, yeah, and I mean, that's, you know, to your point about finops, absolutely.

Um, I mean, the problem is that people tend to fill up whatever space they have. I mean, you know, I'm moving house right now, and, uh, we are fairly clean people, and yet we managed to fill up the basement of our giant house with basically garbage that we ended up throwing out when it's time to move. It's the same for storage, uh, you know, data storage.

Uh, I will point out that, um, deletion is free on every cloud platform, and in fact, uh, pays you back. So, you know, if you're, if you're worried about egress, maybe say, do I need this at all and delete it? But what to, to, you know, what we really need too is we need, um, help uncovering the storage that we're using, because sometimes it's not obvious.

Um, I, I think I have like eight AWS accounts, and one of them is charging me 34 cents a month for S3, and I don't know where that data is. I don't know what that data is. The only reason I know that it's even in the cloud is because it costs 34 cents a month.

Um, I would very much like, uh, an AI to help me locate that 34 cents, uh, before I freak out. Yeah. Steven, I'm sorry.

Go ahead, Mike. Steven, just one quick question about your move. How many times have you moved that same box now?

Um, the embarrassing thing is we do have, um, I have many boxes that are labeled from my last move that I haven't opened. And I even have a couple of boxes labeled from two moves ago that I haven't opened. And if that's not a, um, a perfect metaphor for what we're talking about, I don't know what is.

Yeah. So, you know, we have a rule. If we haven't opened a box or used something in three years, two, two to three years, get rid of it.

Get rid of it. But, you know, there's, there's another, you know, we'll take this to a, a personal level Email. Email.

I, I recently, we, we had the pleasure and I do emphasize pleasure. I've Had that pleasure at the, of the same thing. I know where you get Yeah.

Of a Google migration here. And, um, it caused me to look at, so my, my Google account, you know, from Textron Media ops is, uh, probably 12 years old. 13, yeah.

12 years old. And I'm looking back, I still have every piece of saved email from 12 years ago. Like once I had saved, I didn't, if I didn't delete it at the time, I read it and it went into scene or saved, it's still there.

Now, people may say, well, that's a good thing because it's good to have those records, but oh, Contrera, if you speak to attorneys, they will tell you that there's not a lot to be gained by saving older emails like that. Like law, the law says, I think you gotta keep your mail. Is it three years or something?

Is, is good Practice. There aint no law that says how long you gotta keep your mail. Well, Best practices, they say three years or something like that.

Right? I'm saying if you got like IRS audited or something, you're supposed to have your mail from a certain amount of time. So er, in between being a storage consultant, I was a consultant to general corporate, general counsel on data retention policies.

And that was a real eye-opener for us. Pack rat nerd like me, because what you just said is a hundred percent correct, Alan, when I talked to general counsel and I said, how long should we retain data? Well, their first reaction was, delete, delete, delete.

Then I explained, well, when it comes to email, you have to understand that you have a copy. But the, the other person has a copy too. And there's effectively no way to delete that because somebody else has a copy and they realize that that could be discoverable.

And if it was then, and they didn't have a copy, then they would be kind of up a creek and they would be on, you know, having to ask the other party for a copy of that email. And we explained that with all sorts of digital documents. And it was amazing because these general counsel immediately went from delete, delete, delete to save, save, save.

And they basically said, save everything. It was a real eye-opener to see once they, once they learned what the technology can and can't do in terms of, you can't delete it everywhere, that they just wanted to save everything. And the other thing that they, that they taught me in return was all of these guidelines and rules and laws that we in that in tech think we know are just a bunch of hooey.

There's no law, there's no rule, there's no guideline. I mean, they're all just sort of fuzzy. Like the seven years, you have to retain your, your records for seven years.

That comes from the Bible. That's not a law. There's no law that says you have to retain your records for seven years.

There's no law. It depends. If it's a jubilee year mm-hmm.

It Exactly, what is it? 49 years? I'm supposed to forgive all debts.

Well, after 49 years, I wanna forgive all storage costs. How about that? That if you've stored something in the clock for 49 years, you shouldn't pay for it.

Absolutely. They should give me a medal. Absolutely.

All right. I Think we need more efficient storage. That's what I think.

This is a technical problem that needs to be solved. Save all the data, just save it someplace affordable. I Just wanna point out that there are two good articles in our notes on this one.

Both are tech strong. ITS M1 is about this survey that Mike mentioned. The other one is key strategies for mitigating cloud storage costs that you could check out.

Speaking of Techstrong, ITSM, though we have some big news coming this week, right? Gestalt it, I'll, I'll, I'll give you all a preview right here. If you promised not to tell anyone, gestalt it, which Steven, you've had, you've been running for, what, 14, 17 years?

Something like that? Yeah. Some, some number of years since, since the, since since the year began with the numbers two zero and zero.

Yep. That long. That's it.

That's a whole other era. And, and Text Strong. ITSM are actually merging.

So you'll have all of the, we're not like Steven, we're not getting rid of one article. All the articles from all these years will be there and available. Um, talk about storage, but they're all available.

The, the new site is gonna be called Techstrong. It Hmm. In, in, oh, deference to, it's, it's predecessor, G Gestalt, it.

Um, but it's Text Drunk. It, it has it, SM and it. There'll also be a whole section dedicated to semiconductors and infrastructure.

It'll be infrastructure's the game there at Tech Drunk It. And, and if you play that game, you check out the new That's great. The newest edition to Text Drunk I In including cloud storage, Including cloud storage and, and including articles written by a lot of Textron gang people.

I gotta say I am now, I started that website. I am blown away by the quality of the articles that are going up there now that it's part of the Textron world. I mean, having John Schwartz writing things on there is just incredible.

Um, you know, a, a real journalist. Journalist. And, um, I also wanna say, um, the traffic to that website is already doubled since it became part of the Textron family.

And as soon as it gets rebranded and rolled in with Textron, ITSM up until the Right, right, that's what all the Silicon Valley bros say. Well, we're not, we're not deleting one article. All right.

Or a video. Let's take a break. We're gonna come back here on Textron and talk about networking a little bit.

Steven. Well, you weren't there, I don't believe, right? Yeah, I was there virtually.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Techron Group. So, uh, last week we were in, uh, California for our next networking field day event, which you might have seen on the Textron websites. We were pretty excited to bring together a great group of, um, independent delegates, of course, for, for this event, including, um, some familiar faces, uh, from Textron Gang and, uh, Futurum Group, including, uh, Ron Westfall and Tom Hollingsworth and, and others.

Now, that event is always interesting because networking is such a broad topic. We kind of never know what you're gonna get. It's like a, like that metaphorical box of chocolates, except in this case, I guess it's a, a box of wires.

Uh, the first presentation up at networking Field day though was really blew me away. We had bt like British Telecom, uh, BT group presenting, and they talked all about quantum computing and quantum networking and the development of a quantum wan that would allow us to communicate over distance with quantum technology. They talked about the rise of quantum computing and how that's gonna affect cryptography.

It was, it was one of those, um, one of those cases, I dunno if you guys watched lost, but that one time when they found the videotape and the bunker and, um, and, and the guy looks at the camera and says, whoa, I'm gonna have to watch that again. He was speaking for me. 'cause I was one of the people watching loss.

It's the same thing. So I'm watching this presentation, I'm just like, I need to watch this on slowmo with, with subtitles, because there's just so much to get here. Um, so, so that was a real, real eye-opener.

Um, have you guys heard of this whole idea of quantum networking? Yeah, no. So that's where, like connected particles or whatever, I forgot the, the term, you know, that, but these, if this one turns right, that one will turn left and, and that kind of thing.

I, so I read that for sci-fi stuff, Stephen, much like you do, right? We, we we're into that. Um, but here's the thing.

When you've got a company like BT talking publicly at an event, like a field day event, tech field day event, don't tell me this is 2035 anymore. It's not. I I think Quantum is coming in ver I mean, we already have post quantum algorithms on the cryptography that are NIST approved and being implemented.

Yeah. DigiCert doing it. I mean, I, I will tell you again, don't tell anyone.

Um, I think it's October, mid-October, we are doing Quantum Leap, the first text strong virtual, uh, event on quantum. I've lined up, uh, Nicolo Desi from, uh, he's chairman of your chairman, but he's also CEO of a quantum company. Now Nicolo's gonna speak.

I've got the, uh, Dell CTO for EMEA who kind of heads a lot of their quantum stuff speaking. We're looking for more speakers. The, the, uh, page will be up for a call for speakers shortly.

I, I think this is fascinating and I think this is coming faster than, than we, than we, you know, even thought it was. Steven, do you think the networks that we have in place are gonna be able to support? Well, two things.

One is the applications are more latency sensitive than ever out at the edge. And secondarily, we're moving more data over these pipes than ever, especially in the age of ai. And, and I just wonder, you know, how long it would be before all that legacy and gear we have just basically kills over?

Well, we'll see. Uh, I mean, the, the WAN links are just absolutely massive. The, the, you know, again, talking to companies like bt, you learn just how big, uh, how much, uh, data throughput they're handling and how much they're looking to expand this stuff.

Um, you know, and another, another topic that we got, um, as well was this whole idea of, of data sovereignty. Um, that was kind of the big, the second of three big takeaways. Um, and that, and that kind of is, is related in that, you know, as we've had this, this global expansion of networking as we talked about in the last segment, you know, people storing more and more data, we have to start asking ourselves, uh, where are we storing data and how is that affected by the politics, uh, you know, geopolitics of, of different regions.

That all seems to be exacerbated by our current political system as well, where we could be in a situation where companies suddenly are hit by a, a, a real data sovereignty wall or crisis. Agreed. Agreed.

It's, I kind of look at that topic though, and I go, well, how granular is it gonna get? I mean, how long will it be before my local mayor tells me I gotta store a copy of the data in my city? Because, you know, they want to be able to access it.

I always look at data, data sovereignty, and I'm like, well, I, I get that you need legal standing, I guess, for something, but it kinda seems like a silly way of well, spending more money on storage. Well, I think a lot of it comes down to fears of, uh, the o the other problem essentially, um, fears that if you store your data in a certain region, that the local government will figure out a way to get visibility into that. Somebody that you don't want.

I mean, that's been, you know, one of those, one of those concerns. Of course, uh, with, uh, as we learn more and more about what happens in the us, uh, I guess that's a concern as well with the spy craft and, and, and, and, and Snowden and, and all those sorts of things. Uh, we do learn that, uh, that data sovereignty is maybe a concern even among allies like Europe and the United States.

We're Still allies. Well, you're going there next week. We better be.

Yeah. Um, so I, you know, so there is the, the access to data issue, right? That, uh, you know, a particular jurisdiction, they, they can have access to your data.

I think there's also the possibility of, and as stupid as it sounds, but this is the world we live in today, where you're gonna have tariffs if you're storing your data outside of, of a given jurisdiction, whether that's the US or eu, you know, you are gonna store your datar in a red state. You pay a blue state tax, you store your datar in a blue state, you pay a red state tax. Um, don't store your datar in Greenland or the Gulf of, uh, whatever they're calling it now.

So, you know, this is the, we live, we are living in a pre-World War I, nationalistic, orgy. And so data sovereignty becomes a real, a much bigger issue than frankly it should be. And, and from a technical perspective, you have to figure out how do you store your data in one location or another?

And that's what, uh, versa was presenting at. People are screaming right now going, you had to give him that idea, didn't you? Yeah, I don't like share.

Yeah. Well, It was in Project 20. Oh, he didn't know about that.

I'm sorry. So the third topic, uh, the third topic we got Moving along Was using ai. See as you see how nicely I smoothly moved right on by there, Alan.

Mm-hmm. It's, that's, that's me while driving. Uh, drive right on by.

Don't look at that car crash truck. Um, the third section, uh, that, that, that I wanted to focus on, uh, was using AI to do data management. To Mike's point about, um, you know, data management, network management, all these other things, you know, selector is, uh, putting together, uh, AI based, um, assistance for network management.

I have, um, seen the demos. It's pretty amazing what you can do when you are smart about using ai. And they're not just throwing a chat GPT at it, they're using different AI algorithms to actually be useful as, um, managing networks.

And, um, you know, that goes to the point of, of what I've been hoping for from ai, which is let's, okay, the chat bots are exciting, generating images of people with sometimes five fingers is great, but what about doing something practical with all this and that, and that's the thing that I love about these solutions that are, are, are, are doing practical, you know, helping the system admins, helping the IT staff manage data to the point of the data sovereignty question and the, and the data storage question. How are we gonna figure out all this stuff? Well, maybe AI could help.

Okay. I I think it can, it should, I mean, to a certain extent, you know, like you look at, um, like QOS right? In networking, it's been a sort of ai, maybe it's more of a machine learning AI there with, you know, some algorithms and rules, but it should get a hell of a lot better, I would think, right?

Absolutely. I would think so. And, um, and we're already seeing some of that.

And I wanna point out too, that, yeah, we live in this world where large language models and, and you know, this particular flavor of AI is in vogue. That doesn't mean that that's all AI can be an expert system. Is AI a set of rules?

Is ai And, and many of those are already what we're doing, you know, when it, like, when we were talking about QOS and so on, that's AI too. It's just maybe primitive AI or maybe AI that's different, you know, you can't talk to it, but, you know, I, I think that that's, that's all valid. Um, and, and one more thing I wanna say before we go.

We also did some community sessions, uh, with Com communities, uh, groups that are doing network user groups and, and, and getting people together. Anytime we can get people together, I love it. And I love see what, what happens there.

So, uh, you know, check some of that stuff out. Um, there's actually networking, uh, user groups coming, um, uh, appearing all around the country. So, uh, we, we had a session on that too.

And I, and I think that's worth, uh, worth audiences looking into. Absolutely. All right.

Good update from there, Steven. What's the next, uh, field day event? Well, the next one we've got on our list is actually something that I'm leading.

Uh, we're going down to Houston and we're gonna get, uh, inside, look at all the next generation, uh, HPE, ProLiant Compute Technologies, everything from their ILO management to liquid cooling to networking. And, and, and I mean, the coolest thing that they showed last time I was down there was like the, the physical engineering of like fans and, and power and all that kind of stuff. We're gonna have a whole day of that, which is so much fun.

And then later in April, we've got our AI infrastructure Field Day, which is, is gonna be a four day event. Uh, we just confirmed, this is the first time I'm announcing it. We've got Google Cloud doing an entire day of AI infrastructure at AI Infrastructure Field Day.

Uh, they just signed the p paperwork, so I can say that. Uh, so, so it's just gonna be a really cool event. com to learn more.

Hey, Steven, how Does somebody become a delegate from one of these events? Because I know a lot of folks are interested. com and, uh, we'll, we'd love to hear from you.

You know, I, I, I spoke to some of the HP people when I was up at suson a week or two ago, and, you know, HPE, what did they tell me? They have four of the top 10, uh, supercomputers in the world, or HPE, and then they run Seuss, by the way. Yeah.

I mean, they do an amazing job. And they are all now, you know, liquid cooled and everything else. But yeah, HPE is, you know, we, we tend to forget them because HP is, you know, in the woodwork, but good stuff.

All right, let's take a break here on Text Strum Gang. We're going to come back and Steven, to your point about AI actually doing something good. AI animal assistance.

Mm-hmm. Bonnie has a feature on this. Yeah.

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Welcome back to the Techron gang. Well, we've been talking about AI and innovative uses and also using AI for good. Google has made some interesting announcements in the area of biodiversity that will help preserve ecological systems across the planet from animals to plants and how they interact.

But on the animal side, they're doing some really cool stuff that I wanted to share with everyone. Specifically three initiatives right around biodiversity. Google is leveraging AI to tackle biodiversity loss.

The company recently announced three distinct projects focused on conservation and sustainability. First, the Google for Startups accelerator, AI for Nature and Climate offers technical resources, mentoring and strategic guidance for young companies driven to protect and restore natural ecosystems. org has committed $3 million to Brazilian nonprofits to reverse biodiversity decline, stimulate growth, and advance regenerative farming tackling.

Biodiversity also requires analyzing thousands of wildlife photos taken by motion sensor cameras, a time consuming process, but an open source AI model called species net speeds up animal identification. Google now offers this model free to researchers worldwide. Together, these biodiversity initiatives underscore the growing role AI plays in addressing environmental challenges.

You know, I didn't realize that there were thousands of these animal trap cameras all over the world. That was really interesting. Yes.

And, and to identify this species by AI is going to save researchers so much time and energy. So it'll be really interesting to see where these projects go and what they are working with, um, folks in the rainforest in Brazil to preserve biodiversity as well. And finally, it's always interesting to follow the startup and the startup community.

So the ones that are also, um, using AI to advance biodiversity is fascinating. So they have the whole nature category for the Google Startup facility. I, I love it.

I, and I think, look, I think we're just scratching the, the surface here, because even with all of those animal traps out there, you know, when you talk about like, let's say underwater or rainforest versus let's say Himalayan kind of, there's still, you know, it, I forgot I used to track this stuff 'cause I was into it, but I forget how many new species are discovered still to this day, every year. Mm-hmm. Of, of animals, not just plants, but of animals as well and, and species that haven't been seen in a hundred years that we thought were extinct, you know, discovered at least, you know, some pocket of them somewhere.

So I, I look forward to that. And, and also it, it this kind of feel good kinda human, not human interest, animal interest story, you know, it, it feeds people saying, Hey, we should preserve our biodiversity. We should preserve habitats.

I I'm not, you know, the idea of resurrecting the woolly mammoth, I have to admit kind of, I'd like to see woolly mammoths or Tasmanian tigers or, or, you know, some of these extinct animals that the Dododo bird. But I mean, you know, that's Jurassic Parkish. I I also think we, especially with what's going on climate change wise, we have to Yeah.

Do stuff now to, to preserve so many species that are on the brink because because of our own a, you know, our own initiatives and what we do with fossil fuel and everything else, Yeah. It's important to track. And it's, and not just because we, you know, we wanna care about the animals, but a lot of the research that goes into solving diseases and, and, and medical issues, that's all related to this.

So biodiversity is really important. Should think about all of the anti-cancer drugs Yeah. And stuff like that.

And One, one of my favorite things is when they discover some species that they thought was extinct but is not, and there's like three or four of 'em left, but we can actually do something about it. Exactly. Well, we hope, you know, but you know, it, it's the canary in the coal mine, literally.

Right? But if you're not even looking in the coal mine, you don't know about the canary. And I, and I think that that's the coolest thing here is, is, you know, from a nerd perspective, from a technical perspective, you know, we, we, so we, we do an edge field day event, and one of the things that came out of that was talking about the fact that, um, smartphone technology has led to a proliferation of, uh, sensors in IOT and industrial iot and these kind of sensors that you're talking about here in the, in the rainforest, in, in Brazil, that wouldn't have been possible if not for people's insatiable appetite for the latest iPhone.

And we've developed these incredible sensors, these incredible processors, uh, the ability to run, um, AI at the edge. I mean, Google has their coral, TPU, um, in fact, we just launched today, um, the, uh, next season of utilizing Tech, which is our podcast. We do a seasonal podcast about a series of topics.

This one's focused on AI at the edge, which is exactly what you guys are talking about. Um, essentially the, the incredible potential of doing, um, having, having advanced sensors and doing AI processing at the edge with low powered devices, um, it, it really is a transformational thing. And, and it is the antithesis of what we always gripe about with ai, you know, these nuclear powered mega data centers.

Well, there could be nothing different than maybe a solar powered, uh, camera with like an AI processor that's saying, Hey, I see a giant armadillo down there. By the way, there's one in your video. Um, I I see a giant armadillo.

Isn't that cool? You know, I've even heard about these things, these sensors being able to identify specific individuals like, like I know which Siberian tiger that one is, because I can recognize his stripes. Um, we can do that with ai.

We can do that low powered with, with solar panels, with, with, you know, these, these, uh, you know, sensors, uh, cameras, processors. And none of that would've happened if not for the consumer tech splurge that we've been through in the last decade. Hey, Bonnie, how many of these discoveries are actually new species?

Or is it more like we're just realizing that Steven is a different species than everybody else and we're putting that label on it? I think it's, yeah, I, you know, I just know that there, there's thousands and, uh, the purpose of it. Um, I think finding the new species or rediscovering a species we thought was extinct is, is almost like a byproduct.

I think a lot of the research is into how much, um, climate change is impacting these particular species as they track them year to year. And also the migrations of the species, which is something I've written about. It's fascinating because of climate patterns.

We're seeing, for example, um, up, up in the Northeast lobsters that were once only in certain cold waters are migrating a little bit further south. You know, we're seeing these changes in where different species go because of warmer waters. And I'm sure we're gonna see that across forests as well.

So it's all connected and it's an interesting, um, and useful use of ai. I think those are pronounced, uh, lobsters until they move south and then they're pronounced lobsters. But I, I think you're right though.

Mike Homo Fasque gray subspecies. Yeah. The gray rough lemur here.

Yes. All right, Bonnie, that was a great, a great piece though. Thank you.

Uh, you can find all of Bonnie's Echo insights over on Techron tv and then Bonnie next week. Yeah, we're down in Miami, right? Yeah, I'm excited about it.

And speaking of Quantum, it's a major track for this conference. Emerge Americas in Miami. I will be there on Thursday interviewing, um, founders and, and really some interesting folks right on the cutting edge of quantum ai, um, and cloud.

And, uh, I, I can't wait to get those interviews out there. They will be on Techstrong tv and next week I'll show some previews on the tech strung gang. Very cool.

Mm-hmm. You know, Imer Americas has grown up really quickly to be probably the biggest tech related conference down here in Florida. It's run by Manny, um, Medina, Manny Medina and his family.

Manny of course, was the founder of Terramark, which got sold, I think to Verizon for Billions. And, and Manny has invested a lot of that money mm-hmm. In the Miami tech ecosystem.

Yes. And um, I think it's his daughter Now. Yes.

Melissa Madina, who I interviewed last year, and she'll be, um, running things again this year. But it's a bigger turnout to watch the growth of it. And also that track of what's popular has really shifted that Quantum is now the most dominant one this year.

Goofy. Yeah. Quantum, that's what you talking about.

Alright. Hey, this has been a great text on gang, Steve and Mike. Thank you Bonnie.

Thank you. Thank you for watching. We hope you've enjoyed it.

Uh, as usual, we've got a lot of text drunk TV immediately following, so stay tuned for that next week. Mike and I are out in CubeCon in London, and we'll be reporting from there as well. Um, we might even have a preview this week.

Let's see. Excellent. We might, we might, we might rob it as the Elmer used to say.

Um, but until then, this Allen Schmo for Text Drug Gang, we're outta here.