How Nordian’s Platform Enables Long-Haul Autonomy with Michael Schramm

Joe Lynch: [00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome to Logistics of Logistics. My name is Joe Lynch. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today’s topic is how Nordian’s platform enables long-haul autonomy with my friend Michael Schramm. How’s it going, Michael?

Michael Schramm: Joe, it’s going great. Thanks for having me here today

Joe Lynch: I’m excited to talk to you. This is a very cool topic. I d- I’ve done 800 episodes, and I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone doing what you guys are doing, and it’s foundational w- to what our future is.

Michael, please [00:00:30] introduce yourself and your company and where you’re calling from today.

Michael Schramm: Yeah. So my name is Michael Schram founder and CEO of Nordian. We’re based here in Austin, Texas. We are a positioning and connect-connect-connectivity platform for physical AI. So autonomous devices, machines all require three things. They need to know where they are, they’ve gotta stay connected, and there’s an intelligence component where it needs to be able to manage [00:01:00] a large fleet in the thousands of these machines. So

Joe Lynch: I’m gonna be asking you a whole bunch of dumb questions as we go.

Michael Schramm: No, it’s great

Joe Lynch: So when you say edge computing, what is edge computing?

Michael Schramm: So you have as we transition to this AI and autonomy you have to be able to do things in real time. So there’s this concept of inference at the edge that is required. So right now, you, via internet, cellular, some kind of [00:01:30] connectivity, you’ll send it to some back end. We’re finding specifically as it relates to autonomous vehicles, buses, freight, a lot of these decisions need to be made in absolute real time. No delay, no latency. And what it does is it takes the compute and a lot of what we call inference from happening on a server in the background, and it needs to happen in real time on the device

Joe Lynch: Yes. And I think most of us who are, who [00:02:00] originally had received a CD and loaded Microsoft Word or whatever to your computer, that meant the work was being done right there. And then later on they said no, you don’t need the CD. All that happens in the cloud.” But now every once in a while there’ll be what I think they call latency, which is a d- delay.

So when I go to open that document, it th- it’s, it thinks for a minute, and that’s fine for a Word document. It’s even fine for an [00:02:30] Outlook. It’s not fine for a truck rolling down the expressway that needs to make a split se- second decision

Michael Schramm: Yeah, you’re talking a 25-ton machine barreling at 90 miles an hour. It is of critical importance that 100% of the mission-critical applications need to occur on the device itself. There, there is no room for latency, but there are still benefits of latency, which is that second leg [00:03:00] of what the Nordean platform provides beyond just the precise positioning is that connectivity. Is so yep

Joe Lynch: So I know you guys come not from trucking. You guys come from a different place. Talk about that place and why it’s important to what you guys are doing now.

Michael Schramm: Yeah, we had talked a little bit about our pit stop before Nordian. There was actually a pit stop before that, which was really the catalyst for knowing this problem and [00:03:30] experiencing it firsthand, was we had started a micro-mobility company back in 2015, 2016, in the very early days. And like anything specifically with Nordian, as we’ll get into it, we don’t like to assume anything, typically because we were industry outsiders.

So for multiple reasons, we come from a first principles on how we design hardware, build products, and a lot of times that industry knowledge is beneficial, but [00:04:00] it’s also self-limiting because, and you know this, Joe, with your background and coming from… It’s always been done that way. And I’m, as a consultant with your background, I’m sure that was an argument you had to come into when you wanted to change things.

And so for us, there is no, “We’ve always done it that way.” It is, “Let’s look at today’s technology and how would we build this today from scratch?”

Joe Lynch: and you guys are coming from ag, right? Agriculture

Michael Schramm: Yeah. Originally we started in micro mobility, dockless scooters all across Austin. [00:04:30] We were the third in the, the US, we were the first in Texas, and we had s- in building this device we were the first to partner with Segre- Segway.

We actually flew out to Segway HQ there in China and worked directly side by side in building the technology, which now Segway is probably one of the largest, most common dockless scooter platforms. But we had to build a lot of the precise positioning ourselves using components, which it sounds everyone does that, but we were the integrator at that point from what we would [00:05:00] maybe from an OEM perspective or the actual product creator, and it was wildly frustrating.

And then it was also understanding the importance and difference between precise positioning and GPS. A lot of people think of GPS is good in meters but again, they, the outcomes are only as good as the inputs, which I think I’ve heard you say a bunch of times. And so when you have three meter inputs, you’re gonna get three meter outputs, and that’s no longer acceptable.

And we experienced it [00:05:30] firsthand, and we understood this precise positioning problem from the OEM perspective personally. But that was about 10 years ago, and that was a problem we sat with as we transitioned into– We started a sensor development company working specifically with Ech- it’s called Echo54, still operates today at scale with large government agencies, defense organizations in the most extreme, intense environments where they are absolutely mission [00:06:00] critical.

And in a lot of these environments, they’re also air-gapped. And so we got really good at bu- building precise highly efficient and effective hardware at scale in the most critical environments now indoor and outdoor. So you think these austere conditions in the Middle East down at the border here in Texas, Austin, Texas, is where we’re based out of.

So we’ve and then of course, indoor inside some of these facilities where you don’t get the benefit of the backend. There are tons of [00:06:30] advantages, Joe of being able to access the cloud and be able to host and run these large models. But in a lot of these enviro- mission critical environments, that is not an option.

And so we’ve spent the better part of 10, 10 years, the better part of a decade, building these sensors for the US government in predominantly air-gapped environments

Joe Lynch: What’s an air-gap environment?

Michael Schramm: Yeah, so just no internet connectivity whatsoever. And then the other piece is they can’t be sensed. There’s– we don’t get the advantages of Bluetooth, [00:07:00] Wi-Fi.

We don’t get any of that because we’re in these, think SCIFs, these extremely secure facilities and environments. And so you’re very limited in technology and, you’ll, you always see it’s obstacles or what is it? The challenges or like the, the mother of invention is the same. And so we got really good at building edge intelligence, edge hardware at scale obviously within even managing supply chains with TA compliance, a lot of these things.

[00:07:30] But we did that for the better part of a decade, and then we saw consolidation happening within Brazil, and long story, where we’re coming from, not the, the freight industry and transportation. We focused first on Nordion, on agriculture in South America. And the reason why we did that was it was the hardest environment, not just from the infrastructure didn’t exist. So we’ll talk a little bit about the Nordion platform, but [00:08:00] we approached even the core stations themselves, the actual reference stations, the network, the infrastructure that in the US we take for granted, it’s all here on the ground. You go to South America, it’s not even there.

Joe Lynch: Especially on a farm.

Michael Schramm: Especially on a farm, but we have to have coverage across the entire continent. So we spent about two to three years just building these stations, the reference network, which Joe, we also approached that from a first principles

Was well after the fact. Yeah and that [00:08:30] kind of is a story of why we went to Brazil and South America, and why we focused on agriculture first. It, it– Joe, from a numbers perspective, if you were to sit down, you’d be like, “These guys are crazy.” Because the infrastructure investment before we could even build the product was a multi-year, in the, the high seven, eight digits investment to get the network up and running. But again we’re crazy, but we’re not dumb. And we also [00:09:00] knew there was a lot of other movement in the space. So the the question I get a lot of times is: Look, so you started with a micro-mobility company that was acquired, and then you transitioned into this extremely complex, high-level kind of defense sensor development company. Why Nordian and right now? And really, there’s a number of reasons, but the big catalyst was there was significant consolidation in the space. So for us, there, the market needs to ex- there needs to be demand [00:09:30] within the market. There was a huge barrier to entry in that you had these incumbents, but they had all moved a little too far downstream, and for good reason.

A lot of these guys are fantastic organizations, been around decades. And when you have shareholders, you have to move somewhere. You gotta keep moving the revenue num- the needle. And so they became competitive with a lot of these OEMs. And so for us the opportunity presented itself to be a true independent [00:10:00] provider of really what I would say is this mission-critical core infrastructure required for the next era in autonomy and really any, any intelligent machine

Joe Lynch: And so what you’re envisioning is that you guys are the platform that o- other businesses will be built on

Michael Schramm: Yes. And we had talked about a little bit about this before we hit the record button, but what happens is we’re building this, this abstraction layer. We’re building a layer where OEMs no longer need to piece [00:10:30] together different chip providers, different… They’re, they are no longer the integrator themselves. What– we take care of the integration piece. So what we do is we take precise positioning, connectivity, and machine intelligence, and we incorporate it into a single plug-and-play device on the factory line. So when you’re rolling out thousands, hundreds of thousands of machines, whether it be autonomous tractors, autonomous semis, [00:11:00] vehicles, drones, any one of these machines, robots, and I know, Joe, you’ve had a lot of these guys on here and so with, like MyBull, right?

I think was the name of it with Ian. It they have an… Everyone needs this, and you had even mentioned on that podcast the, the need to go outdoors is when you lose a lot of them because it’s th- it’s such a mission-critical piece, even when you’re, 1,000 yards from the actual building, of knowing exactly where you are and being able to communicate with the device in real [00:11:30] time. And we abstract that layer. It’s no long- It’s an afterthought

Joe Lynch: Yeah. This is, if you look at supply chains and the history of supply chain, you’ll see the industry can’t mature until the supply chain grows underneath it. And you go back to the original Henry Ford did everything, complete vertical integration. He cut the trees down. He ma- he even had a rubber factory down in Brazil.

He did everything because he- they were running [00:12:00] so far in front of the rest of the world when it came to manufacturing efficiency. We saw the same thing when the computer started. The guys who were making the computers, HP or whoever they might have been, they didn’t have “Oh, we’ll go buy this from somebody else.”

They had to do it all themselves. As the industry matured, you started seeing companies like Intel say, “We’ll do that.” And then all of a sudden you and I could start a computer company and say, “All we’re doing is assembling it and selling [00:12:30] it. We’re a platform company at some point.”

And that’s the same as, as this autonomy, which is more than just autonomous trucks. It’s, it needs a foundational piece

Michael Schramm: A foundational piece. Whether it’s even– Well, even that, so even, double-clicking into the My Bull pod interview that you did with Ian, with y’all actually, you went on this conversation around efficiency for the sake of inefficiency. In a lot of cases, you have to roll it back.

[00:13:00] So a lot of times when you think about automation, a lot of people will automate for the sake of automating, and that’s not the approach here. You get… And this is the same problem with AI, and when you start thinking about a lot of just from a coding perspective or even I gave even an example of me watching my son this morning for 10 minutes in his tennis lesson that he had. He’s four years old, and he keeps just wanting to hit the ball as hard as possible. Automation, AI, a lot of these things are about you just trying to hit the ball harder. But if you have improper form, [00:13:30] you’re just gonna mess up harder. You’re not actually gonna do anything better. And, and you guys actually and again, I don’t wanna harp on past podcasts that you had, but if you think about the Toyota Production System is a beautiful example.

If you go back and read this or read the, one of the books was Seven Powers. And in it they talk about it’s a, I think the, the power was process power is one of the seven. And in it, it digs deep into the Toyota process that they had. I think it was TPS, so maybe production [00:14:00] system

Joe Lynch: Toyota production system, yep

Michael Schramm: Yes. And so they, in, in 1984, I think they had owner- entered some kind of an agreement.

They actually came here and held GM’s hand and taught them everything. They published everything. Everything was pretty much open sourced for whatever the term was at that point. And nobody saw the returns that Toyota had. And what a lot of people realize, and when you segue this back into what we do, is you can’t im- it’s, you have to have your [00:14:30] core data in place.

You have to have your culture in place. You have to have a lot of things in place before you try to accelerate with automation or even just autonomy. And so if you go back into, again, another podcast that you had before that with Eric from Tetra, which was awesome, and Eric, and the whole core is, it’s quality of data in is equivalent to what you’re gonna get out of it.

And in that case where you’ve got 60% instead of trucking time completely wasted, [00:15:00] you have to be able to dig into the specificities of what’s going on. And some people call it telemetry, some people will call it analytics. And, but precise positioning that we provide as one of the, the core components of Nordian is, even in that aspect with Eric, where you know if the truck is, being unloaded or if the truck is still in line, and that’s a difference of three feet to three centimeters. And so you have to, before you can [00:15:30] start focusing on these improvements, before even with autonomy, I know you’ve got these trucks that are already, “Michael, we’ve already got autonomous semis on the highways.” No, they’re on very specific highways, and they’re on… The demos are fantastic,

Joe Lynch: in Texas, they aren’t in Michigan.

Michael Schramm: They– But if you look at it, Joe, I think 71% of the roadways in the US are in rural environments

Joe Lynch: I always say I, I’ve, I have interviewed the autonomous vehicle guys, and I always say, “Yeah, as [00:16:00] soon as there’s, as soon as there’s snow coming down and or leaves blowing across the expressway, we’re in a different biz.” We’ll come back to all this in a minute. Tell us a little bit about you Michael.

Where’d you grow up? Where’d you go to school? Some career highlights before you started this… It’s not one company. It’s a number of companies you guys have started. So give us that background.

Michael Schramm: Yeah. A lot really led to Nordian. A lot led to our culture from the way that we approach the hardest problems first and then [00:16:30] everything else is easier of really starts from when I was, where I was born. So I was born and raised here in Texas. I grew up in a small town way out in the middle of nowhere, right outside of Austin, Texas. Graduating from high school wasn’t a thing so that, that made me unique in my family. We were lower income. Somehow I managed to get to Texas A&M, where I graduated with a degree in economics. So not even technology, which also seems a little… But I actually think economics is [00:17:00] fantastic for entrepreneurs and building businesses. But and the only way I was able to do that was I managed to convince my grandparents to co-sign on some student loans. And and then from there, I was stocking groceries. I was knocking door to door multiple summers, which was really a catalyst for a lot of who I am. This person sitting across from you today was built during those summers of working 80 hours a week. And growing up, I was very– I was undisciplined, like any, any normal person. I was [00:17:30] undisciplined, always looking for the easy way out. And then you realize small, consistent actions done repeatedly over long periods of time, Joe, can just have these absolute mind-boggling outcomes. And I found the spaces where that mindset is most powerful are the hardest environments. I told you before you hit record, I don’t like competition, and so I love to go after [00:18:00] any space that I go into is what are the hard parts? What are the barriers to entry? And if there’s not a significant number of them, I’m just not interested

there was a monster gap as it related to the hardware and infrastructure. The towers, we had to build the towers, the reference stations, the core stations, all from scratch for two to three years, and then we had to build the hardware and then going into these OEMs. But again, we saw consolidation within the space.

We are now ramping up with about 80% of the top [00:18:30] 20 ag OEMs in South America today. And then we’re operating across the entire continent. We’ve got our reference stations. Yep

Joe Lynch: So when I look at like agriculture, and I s- I… We talked about this before we hit the record button also. I’ve seen these giant tractors that go down these fields, and they know not to crush the beans or the soy beans or whatever they’re growing. So they have to understand, they have to position exactly perfectly.

So they c- the wheel cannot [00:19:00] be six inches f- to the left ’cause it’s crushing it’s

Michael Schramm: two or three, and we’re talking these farms that are thousands and thousands of acres. And so now as we move into– And this didn’t just start now. So a lot of people don’t realize agriculture has been technically advanced, and I would even argue ahead of freight and logistics and transportation for decades

ahead of it . and it’s equally mission critical. The farmers’ wellbe- wellbeing, and that was one of the big things that we also– [00:19:30] another reason why we approached agriculture in South America is, one, there’s also a mission critical nature to it. It’s iron sharpens iron, and– or is it steel sharpens steel?

But we– there is zero room for error

Joe Lynch: You can’t crush a line of crop that they spent the last y- the last few months growing.

Michael Schramm: And because of that, the design-in process, the ramp up, the sal- the sales process on these OEMs are multi-year, [00:20:00] extremely gradual because their well-being depends on the success of it. And, you’re talking about either wor- regardless of whether you’re running robotics in the field to shoot lasers as an alternative to glyphosate application or if you’re running a, a picker, it is just absolutely zero error.

Everything requires a level of precise positioning, connectivity, and edge [00:20:30] intelligence

Joe Lynch: Yeah it’s funny. This is a few years ago. I was talking to a friend of mine, we were driving somewhere, and he’s talking about automated vehicles. And he said why can’t we do it right now?” And we were on the expressway, and as we were getting off, I said, “Just imagine right now that I was a foot off on this turn, one foot off.

I hit the oncoming traffic. I hit the curb. One foot.” And I said… And, y- he says that’s what LIDAR is for.” And I go LIDAR does certain things, the [00:21:00] satellites do certain things.” But it’s the idea of saying that it’s easy. There’s a reason we’re not all the way there yet.

Michael Schramm: Joe, that, and that’s a perfect example. And I’d actually, I think that’s a really good point to make, especially for a lot of your viewers here or listeners, is AI, we’re their AI. And, the individual you were riding with is right. AI is capable today of full autonomy across the board. This is not an AI problem anymore. It’s a [00:21:30] connectivity and processing problem. And that is what Nordian is solving, is guaranteeing connectivity, the precise positioning required. In a, a perfect example of giving an exit, you’ve gotta be within centimeters of taking that exit, but not on I 95, or was it I 94? Or IH 35 down here in Texas. These are the extreme 71% of the roads out in these rural environments where you have to have that centimeter [00:22:00] level accuracy. But then even the lidar input, the camera input, all of the inputs, like you had said, it’s multifaceted. There are a number of inputs and sensors that need to be di- ingested into the whatever model or system you’re using for navigation, driver feedback or operator feedback or even just machine feedback. That all needs to occur locally on the device, which, not to sound repetitive here, all three things [00:22:30] of any, any podcast that you can reference that you’ve had in any of these interviews, and I’ve gone through a significant number, Joe, they all route back to three things. It’s positioning, precise centimeter level accuracy, connectivity, having full– And we’re not just talking like being able to connect and send up like kilobits of it. We’re talking, heavy video streams and having constant real time large packets of data, and then the management of all that data and the [00:23:00] processing of that data locally in the tiny fraction .0001% of the time that you, worst case scenario, lose everything, you can still operate independently and autonomously in a safe way.

All three of those things, you always come back to them, and that’s what Nordian packages into a plug and play, simple, on the factory line solution that everybody needs.

Joe Lynch: Yep. So who are your customers? Who are you selling to?[00:23:30]

Michael Schramm: Yeah. So right now we, again, 80% of the top 20 OEMs in South America are ramping up with Nordian. This is a highly contiguous environment that we’re in from a competitive view

Joe Lynch: So you s- you mentioned OEMs that you sell to. Who are those OD- OEMs of what kind of equipment?

Michael Schramm: Yeah, so agriculture equipment and transportation. So– And then there’s also a communications OEM that we’re ramping up with. Now, Joe without, trying to avoid an answer to [00:24:00] the question, this is a highly contagious environment that we’re moving into with… Or contentious, sorry with these OEMs.

So they’ll be announcing as we ramp up. This is mission-critical solution, and they’re ramping down, which requires some of the largest alternatives right now from a positioning perspective in the world. These are very large incumbents. As I had mentioned, there was a lot of consolidation within the space. And so it is over the next six months, these will be press [00:24:30] releases and a lot of the information disclosed. But these are very large organizations that we have been effectively designed in. We are now integrating into the factur- factory deployment of, tens of thousands of these devices. And but we are, and it just speaks volumes to your podcast, where you’re very early in this, and you’ve managed to pick up some signal in a very noisy environment with Nordian. But Nordian is the new entrant, and we are rethinking from the ground up how to approach a [00:25:00] decades-long problem, where you’ve got these OEMs and these manufacturers which isn’t just from an agriculture perspective, one of the largest kind of transportation and fleet vehicles integrating in one of our devices.

We have an ultra antenna, and then we have an what’s called Ultra Link device, which inc- incorporates satellite connectivity high bandwidth. In Brazil, we have a integrator reseller agreement with Starlink directly integrated [00:25:30] into the Ultra Link device in Brazil

Joe Lynch: And Starlink is one of the Elon Musk’s companies that that… And I think we’ve seen how critically important that has been in that war in Europe. It’s unbelievable. You listened to the same book I did. That has allowed Ukraine to be in that war. It’s the difference between being in and out.

Michael Schramm: In and out. Connectivity in, i-industry wide that we have here, right? So we entered with [00:26:00] agriculture because to your point you made earlier, it is the har- there are no roads. There’s nothing mapped. You’re in a random field in a mission critical situation, and these tractors can run overnight. So you had talked about kind of the laser weeding.

You’ve got a lot of these robotic solutions, and Joe, even from a trucking perspective, I was actually talking to somebody, they’re like, “Michael, why don’t they just add more storage onto these trucks?” But what happens is by default of you just simply y- instead of having to work [00:26:30] just daylight hours, you can now work 24/7.

These, these autonomous tractors can run, but you’re in these extreme remote areas. Again, just kinda digging into why ag first, why South America first is but you have to be able to have a, a lot of these things, and then you’ve gotta be able to remotely access those devices and if you have problems, troubleshooting them, things like that.

But yeah

Joe Lynch: I think when we think about autonomous, the first thought is, okay, you’re talking about autonomous vehicles of- au- autonomous [00:27:00] trucks. But I think you’re also talking about autonomous forklifts, autonomous yard management. So if you go to a big automotive company any of the OEMs, any of their suppliers, they have massive yards.

And by the way, I was down your way. I was in Laredo. Laredo has… I- I’m thinking it’s miles and miles of FEMA trucks, just a trailer sitting out there. It say FEMA. You go, “What in the world?” Somebody is [00:27:30] trying to manage all those. So I might just have a tugger that I need to have a tugger that goes down and again finds the right trailer and hauls it back.

Somebody has got to create the autonomy infrastructure, the platform to make that tugger work. Unless you say, “I’m gonna go hire a guy to ride around on that tugger,” which by the way, it’s pretty damn hot in Laredo and windy, really windy. And we have [00:28:00] a labor… We’re gonna have a labor shortage. It’s… And there’s not enough people having all those kids like you and your wife.

And even, by the way, as it we’re a wealthy country, and this is not just here, the whole world’s getting wealthier. Who’s encouraging their kid to go drive a tugger around Laredo? So these jobs we want autonomy. We want this to be an automated process. And the guys who make the forklifts or the tuggers, they might say, “We’re really good at [00:28:30] that, but we don’t know autonomy.

We’re not a tech company. We’re using existing technology. Help us. Help us. Help us, Nordian.”

Michael Schramm: Help us, Nordian. Yeah, and Nordian will be a component in… and this is the thing, is you’re gonna have a lot of these technologies and solutions built on top of the Nordian platform. And, and this kind of brings me to another point that we have with Nordian, which is, like I had mentioned, even with some of these OEMs, we provide an SDK

Joe Lynch: [00:29:00] Wait, where does, what, where does SDK

Michael Schramm: Yeah, so it’s a software developer kit, but it’s it’s a set of rules, parameters.

Think of it if they wanted to build a, like a software layer on top of the Nordian platform itself. So right now we’re working with one of the largest bus manufacturers in the world. Again, an OEM of buses, large buses. And they’ve got a bunch of use cases for insurance, analytics, a lot of these use cases where not– when I talk [00:29:30] about us providing edge intelligence.

So we’ve talked a lot about the precise, the, the benefits of precise positioning and the benefits of connectivity, which are very obvious, and you can have a lot of these vendors that you can piece together and get that. Now, while we provide that in a singular holistic plug-and-play solution for OEMs at scale, we also provide this edge intelligence aspect where you can build additional software or applications on top of it. So as we’re in conversations with these [00:30:00] OEMs, they all, based on vertical agnostic issues like theft, insurance being able to access and ingest a camera feed and be able to detect anomalies with movement or accelerations or jamming and spoofing. So you get a lot of these edge things, but really I think, and, even beyond just… And we’ll talk a little bit into the labor thing. Joe, I wanna double-click into that. I know you had talked about that, and I know that’s a big [00:30:30] topic specifically within the trucking industry. But we had talked about what Nordian’s doing, and it’s really hard to describe, but we’re adding a layer of abstraction of you no longer need to piece together three or four, five vendors where you, and a lot of these OEMs are, have historically, and they don’t realize it, they’ve taken on the free job of being an integrator, of bringing in these.

And then now with the advancements in technology and then the high [00:31:00] bar of efficiencies and autonomy and a lot of these other things, they all need to work together in a way that you can’t do it by piecing it together and piece by piece. But then when you couple in kind of all the inputs and the complexities of what I’ve described here We now provide a platform where you can build on top of. I don’t wanna skip ahead, but Joe, when we talk about where do we see Nordian in three to five years, I don’t have a clue. I have no idea what [00:31:30] services and what outcomes Nordian will pr- be providing in three to five years. What I can tell you within the next three years, we will be the default de facto go-to for OEMs or any autonomous machinery or devices or anything that requires intelligence or moves. We will be the plug-and-play s- platform for anything that requires precise positioning, connectivity, and intelligence.

Joe Lynch: And let’s talk a little bit about some of these [00:32:00] problems that are out there. So right now, I know we have some vehicles that are autonomous out there. And by the way, th- this is another challenge. There’s accidents, unfortunately, every single day in trucking and, passenger vehicles.

People are killed, unfortunately, every single day. And yet, if there was an accident the other day with an autonomous vehicle, and now it’s front-page news for a week. So in a lot of ways, the bar has not become as good as a human. It’s become [00:32:30] better than a human. Be able to prove that we are safer than the safest, which is an incredibly high bar for the industry, but it’s just the re- this human nature that we’re talking about here.

But what are some of the issues? I’m, I’ll I know some of the issues ’cause you gave me some of them, but the one of them is the connectivity gap. Talk about that. I think you touched on it already, but ta- touch on it again.

Michael Schramm: That’s a huge part to this. So one, Jo- there’s a human aspect to this as well. Understand maybe an improper use of [00:33:00] like human in the loop, but even in like the ecosystem where these autonomous vehicles and things are operating, you still have human error, and human error is very difficult even for the most brilliant AI to adjust for. Humans are incredibly unpredictable in their driving or actions or, there’s– it’s multifaceted. But I’d actually argue without, understanding the specificities of these very minor outlier examples of these autonomous [00:33:30] vehicles that have wrecks or collisions, which is significantly… And I think it’s gonna be one of the greatest benefits to humanity when we start moving towards a-autonomy or automation like this, but is the connectivity gap. And right now it is in and out. It is very difficult to– because Nordian doesn’t exist as an vendor across because you, you can’t just be precise positioning. You can’t just be connectivity, and you can’t [00:34:00] just be… Because in the absence of either of those two not being just ubiquitous and reliant, and it– we’re talking like N plus three, so we work across multiple bands, backhauls, satellite connectivity, L band, just everything you can imagine.

We also still work off cellular connections. We– This is not either/or, this is everything in just providing an N plus three solution on each of these aspects. But to your point on kind of these [00:34:30] collisions and a lot of the issues that you’re seeing right now, I’d actually probably guess it’s a connectivity issue.

And what happens is it’s unexpected where a vehicle is put into autonomous mode or it is lacking connectivity and then in, in its lack of connectivity, it then went to the edge. And we had talked about this kind of edge compute, edge intelligence aspect of Nordian, where the cameras, the lidar, the inputs need to be able to operate and make [00:35:00] intelligent decisions in real time when, again, connectivity and precise positioning for some reason isn’t working. And we do that through the combination of like IMUs and without going too kind of complex here, but these these, these components that we, the devices that we provide specifically with UltraLink is just chocked full with sensors, and it doesn’t even matter what we put in it. What matters is the outcome that we give, and the outcome we give is you have [00:35:30] full reliance and abstraction of these mission-critical pieces that, again, are just now plug and play on the factory line, and these OEMs can focus on the important things

Joe Lynch: Yeah. And you think about, you’ve, we all, we’ve all been somewhere where you’re driving out in the country and you go, “Oh, a, a dead zone.” It happens less and less, but that dead zone can’t happen to your systems, and that’s… and we’re in the United States where we have pretty good [00:36:00] connectivity.

There’s parts of the world where connectivity is a lot s- is little, lots more sparse than it is here. So you guys are not only connecting to GPS, but you’re also connecting to satellites, and the, I guess that’s your Starlink connection. And satellite isn’t exactly f- 50 feet above the world the planet.

It’s many miles above the planet.

Michael Schramm: Yeah, and then you have layers in the orbit, right? So you have like these, like we talk about LEO satellites, like these [00:36:30] lower Earth orbit satellites, which you have certain benefits, but we work with different constellations. We work with different satellite satellite constellations at different l-layers within the Earth’s orbit. But that’s a, a good piece to even come back to, Joe. So let’s just say you’re talking to a provider, right? And they’re like, “Hey we counter some of the…” Which again, I think 99.999 is unacceptable for autonomous vehicles. It’s [00:37:00] unacceptable. And right now we’re nowhere near that prior Nordian.

Nordian gives you that 100%. Now, in, again, going back to the conversation of why we focused on agriculture in South America was there’s a big issue along the equator of scintillation. And scintillation, so within the ionis- the ionosphere within the within the Earth, there’s a ton of interference, but specifically along the in- equator, it is [00:37:30] significant, the in-interference, which is another monster barrier to entry. And so you need ex- these, these algorithms, AI on the edge in order to adjust, ingest. Also, we have proprietary technology that we’ve built into, again our reference stations and our cores network that we have distributed across all of South America, special technology that will help with scintillation as a problem.

But let’s just remove kind of the technical term of scintillation and just for [00:38:00] like your listeners who… Scintillation, imagine when you look up at the stars and you s- you use like twinkle, twinkling stars. The stars aren’t actually twinkling. It’s interference that you’re actually seeing as that light travels in. And so you get varying degrees of that everywhere. But when you start moving into, and we’ve talked a lot about these rural roads, but when you move into dense urban areas where, again, you talk about like GPS through even like you’re traveling from, what’d you say, like Detroit, and you hit Chicago, [00:38:30] and the interference is significant in these dense urban areas as well. And so what Nordian has also built into our platform is dealing with interference. N- now it’s why can we deal with interference better than historic providers or any alternative is we’re in the most highly interference area dealing with extreme scintillation building these ag solutions at the equator

Joe Lynch: Yeah and just from our own, from a layman’s [00:39:00] perspective, there’s dead zones. We understand why they’re dead, but you just can’t have it here. And, you mentioned the 99.9%. A- anytime somebody talks about that level of quality, somebody says that’s not possible.” But we all get on planes ’cause we know it’s basically 100% chance my plane takes off and we land safely.

That’s the acceptable risk we’re all willing to take

Michael Schramm: We’re all– and so we’re– And then also if you think about another argument you’ll get is these 5G [00:39:30] towers are going to, from like connectivity and bandwidth and throughput and as you increase these frequencies the actual range decreases, and so you need more towers to accomplish the coverage of these particular zones.

So even as technology advances from a cellular perspective, the actual dead zone and density problem gets a bit worse. And so it’s counterintuitive to as that particular technology. And so cellular is not the way. I know that’s an established belief now. [00:40:00] But, three, four, five years ago, I would have to– there’d be a big education piece on why cellular is completely unreliable as a comm-

Joe Lynch: I was– Now, do you guys use cellular towers and low Earth orbit satellites or are you using just satellites?

Michael Schramm: Yeah. Let me explain a little bit about from just like a precise positioning perspective. So what happens is you have a corrections applied. So I’m gonna try to just keep this as simple as possible where [00:40:30] we use satellites, but the issue is you have interference. The satellite can tell you where you are, but– And think about GPS right now. GPS is that. You are communicating directly with a satellite, what, like 20,000, whatever, up in the air. And on its way down, that signal, it gets bounced around and jumbled a bit, and it’s why right now if you look at your phone it’ll maybe show you in your neighbor’s house, or it’ll show you in the building next door, and then it’ll maybe zero in once it gets a little more of a [00:41:00] good feel.

And GPS is fantastic for navigation but it’s not good for control. And when you’re controlling a device, you need centimeter-level accuracy. Now, the question is, okay, Michael, if you can’t rely on these satellites to get precise positioning, how are you better than GPS? And what we do is you have to have what are called reference stations. And these reference stations, they are distributed all over the place. And going into South [00:41:30] America, in the US, these reference stations already exist. These are not cell towers. These are purely for precise positioning applications and a number of applications, but it’s– They are towers, and what they do is those reference stations, they don’t ever move. You put them in a single spot, and then what happens is it is communicating with that same satellite. So you have to be within a distance of that reference station so that you’re looking at the relatively the same sky. And then what happens is it [00:42:00] communicates with that same satellite all the time.

And what it does is it’ll give you a s– it’ll tell you where you’re located, but the reference station knows where it’s located, so it applies a differential. It applies a difference. It says, “Oops, you’re wrong.”

Joe Lynch: It’s not either/or, it’s both and s-

Michael Schramm: It’s both. then it sends that correction to it– So we use our Nordion reference station that is fi- a fixed point on the Earth. Our refer- our Nordion devices will [00:42:30] communicate with a satellite or network, whatever it may be, and then it gets the like lat, long, and then the reference station goes, joe that’s actually not right. You need to change it a little bit,” down to the centimeter accuracy. Now, another problem, and this is just a core point I wanna make without just, I don’t wanna bore anybody, but this is a ve- this is a very important part when you start thinking about rolling out machines and monster scales, is you have convergence [00:43:00] time. So I made it sound simple, where I was like, “Hey, where am I?” Satellite says, “You’re here.” You get a correction, you apply it together. “Joe, you’re actually right here within a centimeter level accuracy.” But in order to be able to do that, there’s a c- there’s– it’s convergence. There’s a… It takes time to do that. And the historical standard that you see, I had talked about, and the question is, Michael, why would you guys go and reinvent the reference stations when that’s not even your product? Your product is an [00:43:30] ultra-link device that’s integrated into these OEMs and, it really boils down to the convergence time as well. And this is why we’re not interested in playing, making side bets, why we’re not looking to compete with OEMs or… This is a full-time job, a full-time solution where we think through every aspect of the user experience. We didn’t talk about this, but I came from consumer space. We had built out an anonymous social networking application in the millions of user. We’ve [00:44:00] really thought through this from a consumer perspective of thinking through every aspect in your product. When you go and sign up, the way that you activate these devices, we have thought through, Joe, and we’ve redesigned by hand everything. We don’t subcontract anything. Now, we rely on partners for connectivity and things like that, for redundancy and components, obviously, but our business is building the ideal user experience.

And the biggest problem that a lot of these ag OEMs face are convergence time. And when you lose connection, [00:44:30] getting it back historically have ranged anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. And imagine you’ve got a device that, oops, we lost connection. Joe, you have to stop the tractor for 15 to 30 minutes. Now, this is gonna sound crazy, and the only way to do this is when you control and build from scratch every aspect of the entire, from the board to the satellite, we can do it in less than 10

seconds

Joe Lynch: No, one wants to do what you guys are doing. It’s hard

Michael Schramm: Yeah. Yeah, so [00:45:00] our convergence time is less than 10 seconds

Joe Lynch: Yeah. S- so let me ask you a question. I the Tesla vehicle I know Musk always said, “I want it to run on GPS. I don’t want it to run on LIDAR.” And I think seem to remember his team saying, “Man, you need b- you need LIDAR. It’s the it knows things that the GPS doesn’t.” Right now, does a Tesla vehicle run on GPS or is that running on LIDAR?

Michael Schramm: No, I would imagine Tesla runs on some level of [00:45:30] precise positioning. These are two different things. So there’s the location, and then there’s the understanding your environment broadly. And LiDAR is fantastic for giving, vision to the models. But what Elon actually does, and for this very specific example, the alternative to LiDAR wouldn’t be GPS.

The alternative for LiDAR and what Elon is very big on is computer vision using cameras, and so these camera-based solutions

Joe Lynch: That’s, that was it, yeah. So y- and I think that’s part of the [00:46:00] reason he started Grok, because when you have all that information

Michael Schramm: And you feed these into a model locally, but again, the Teslas have to work offline, which is an edge compute problem, which is the third leg of what we’re talking about here, is edge intelligence. There needs to be compute capacity for local inference. And then also it just not just from a security perspective, but [00:46:30] then whenever you’re ingesting and you’re collecting this data on the edge, and then you provide a software layer for OEMs, third parties to build on top of the Nordian platform locally, you are going to open up a door of capabilities that we just couldn’t have comprehended. And I like to describe this where to start, if you go back to the mid-’90s and someone said, “Joe, I want you to build amazon.com,” right? When they’re just selling these [00:47:00] books. What was required to build an e-commerce storefront in 1995 was wild. You had to build it– You had to build the server in-house. You had to be able to code everything yourself, host it yourself, and then just think about payment processing

And Nordian is that monster abstraction layer that nobody know they needed. And now that we’re– there’s a reason why we’re able to go into South America, get 80% of the top 20 ag OEMs in an industry notorious for never [00:47:30] switching, never changing, and mission critical. Every obstacle you can imagine was because we came in and we just showed a glimpse into what the future is going to look like with autonomy, autonomous applications and machines, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh.” We are all being caught flat-footed in this new AI era, and we need an app, we need a solution like Nordian

Joe Lynch: Yep. This is, and I said it earlier and I truly believe it’s true, is that as i- [00:48:00] as industries mature, you need supply chains to develop, ’cause you don’t wanna have to. So I don’t, right now no one’s… I think 30% of the websites on the internet are on WordPress. Why? It’s easier. It’s better. And I, all the, I didn’t hire seven coders to create my website.

I’ve used WordPress and I got a guy who says, “Yeah, it’s easy. All you gotta do is give me this.” We can train somebody overnight. And yeah we’ve seen it in industry after industry, and again, if you’ll just look at [00:48:30] Silicon Valley, which really isn’t, shouldn’t be called Silicon Valley anymore ’cause they aren’t building hardware out there, but that, k- kind of the computer space kind of developed all of this, all of these suppliers, the tier ones, the tier twos, the tier threes.

Same with automotive. I came from automotive, and when I first started many moons ago, you had tons of suppliers, and when somebody says, “Who are your tier one?” There wasn’t really a, that wasn’t a thing. They’re all suppliers. And then some are bigger, some are [00:49:00] smaller, some are more strategic. Now they say, “We work with three interior companies,” probably Magna, j- TRW, maybe Johnson Controls, and that’s it, and then there’s a million who work with them.

You guys are a tier one for a whole bunch of different industries. I- I’m assuming that’s the way it’s gonna play out. And they will never understand fully how you’re doing it. They just know they need it.

Michael Schramm: They’ll know they need it. And this is the thing, th- when you [00:49:30] think of other tier ones and the incumbents in the space, and again, consolidation was really the catalyst for opening the door for us to enter South America like we did and do what we do and gave us kind of that, that velocity into the space.

But

Joe Lynch: So when we start to see more autonomy, and we’ll see it obviously… i, by the way, when people ask me about when will we see all au- you know, autonomous vehicles, I always say, “You’re already seeing it.” So I can park my car, parallel [00:50:00] park. I just say, “Turn it on.” That’s autonomy. We’ve had cruise control on cars for 40 years

Michael Schramm: Which I’d classify as augmentation just for today’s conversation. You’ve got full autonomy, and then you’ve got human augmentation, which I think is a super interesting topic to just dig into.

Joe Lynch: So it’s just slowly but surely. I heard somebody make the point that the majority of traffic in major cities is people looking for parking.

Michael Schramm: Yes

Joe Lynch: so if I could just pull my car [00:50:30] up and say, “I’m going here,” and rather than me parking… I live in cold weather sometimes. Say I pull up and say, “Car, go park,” right?

And it drives 15 miles away. I don’t care where it parks. I just know it dropped me off at the front door, and I don’t have to worry about it. So they– I think we’ll see bits and pieces of autonomy that make sense. It’s not necessarily tomorrow you wake up and go, “Now I have an autonomous vehicle.”

It’s it’s not gonna be that scary so one of the things we talk a lot about in our industry is we have a [00:51:00] driver shortage. Now, I think most of us, if you mention the interview I did with Eric Maline. I’ll put a link in the show notes. By the way, I’ll put a link to your LinkedIn profile, a link to your website, any of the links you and your go-to-market team.

I’ll put those in the show notes. Eric Maline was on the podcast recently, and he said… And he’s not the first one. But in recent years we’re saying, “No, we don’t have a driver shortage.” What we have is drivers who can drive 11 hours a day who are driving five hours a day. And so we have a utilization [00:51:30] problem.

But we also have a problem with we train a lot of people to be truckers, and then as soon as the economy opens up, we’re starting to do more construction, they leave. They go do… if you’re willing to drive a truck all day, you’re willing to put in an honest day’s work in. So you are in demand in a lot of different places.

But the 11-hour day, which they’re not getting their 11 hours of driving-

Michael Schramm: I think it was four and a half is what he actually used. Yeah

Joe Lynch: Yeah. Yeah, [00:52:00] Eric said four and a half. I’ve heard people say f- 40%. Whatever it is, there’s a t- tremendous amount of waste. If I can have autonomous vehicles… Now, first off, they don’t need to rest because they’re machines. They will need preventive ma- they’ll need preventive maintenance, but that’s about it, and they’ll be able to

Michael Schramm: using Nordean, we can remote over-the-air updates, we can troubleshoot. You may not even need to stop the vehicle, but

Joe Lynch: Yeah, just for new t- when the tires wear out, when it needs new oil. But [00:52:30] probably won’t even have oil.

Michael Schramm: see that? Yeah

Joe Lynch: But give me a sense for what that looks like when when we get to these autonomous vehicles

Michael Schramm: Yeah, so there’s a lot of aspects to this. There’s an efficiency piece. There’s also, and I think the biggest thing for the trucker shortage is, and however you wanna define it, and the industry itself admits to a trucker shortage, but within a very specific characterization of it. It’s the long haul. When you can come home and have dinner with [00:53:00] your family, those jobs, there is no shortage for those jobs. When you go and work an honest day’s work, and you had– you said this, an honest day’s work, which means you go and work during the day, and then you come home and spend time with your family. We don’t live to work. We work to live, and that is also, I would say, generationally something that has been pounded into our minds is this idea of work-life balance, just again, without going off on a [00:53:30] tangent, just how limited and short our lives are, and you wanna make the most of it, and you wanna be able to spend time with your family and show up for dinner, and it’s the long haul routes that are the biggest problem for trucking that are understaffed. It’s the going 600 miles. You’re away from home for weeks at a time

Joe Lynch: And by the way, they’re sleeping on average, we now we know this, five hours in their trucks. That’s, so we’re expecting them get up, be as sharp as a tack after sleeping in a truck where you might [00:54:00] have gotten five hours of sleep

Michael Schramm: Which is an efficiency problem. And so then in those situations, it is they’re going slower, faster and you had, just to dig into the minutiae of it, but you had talked about having to change the tires and the, unnecessarily changing lanes the accelerating or decelerating, and a lot of these aspects of driving behavior and habits, not just a safety perspective but, and then also, just-in-time arrival for the dock unloading [00:54:30] and the…

So when you do work 11 hours, I don’t even think you’re gonna have to work 11 hours. I think we– this really transitions– I think there are two things here, which is why I wanna revisit back where I’d mentioned full autonomy and then human augmentation, and it’s not gonna be either/or. Now look, I’m a huge fan of technology.

I’m not a doomsdayer by any way, by any shape or form. As I really say I think AI is going to unlock immense abundance, opportunities, and quality of life that, again, [00:55:00] historically, the greatest indication is what’s gonna happen in the future is what’s happened in the past. We live like, we live better than kings two, 300 years ago.

It is– You take the average American out of the… it is mind-boggling the quality of life and amazing world that we live in today, and all this was done through advancements in technology, and I would actually say we’re gonna stay on this trend. And but it’s getting shorter whatever, without going off.

But let’s just say in five, 10, 15 years, I think quality of life will be [00:55:30] insane. But my point in kinda going back to human augmentation versus full autonomy, and I think hu- full autonomy is going to replace the places where humans do not wanna live in a truck. I don’t think humans should be living in a truck.

And it’s like, “Oh, Michael, but they need to make an honest dollar. They need to be able to…” It– The problem that these jo- that AI and robotics are going to replace the jobs that humans do not want to be doing. And it’s, “Michael, how do you know they not want to do it?” Because we just talked about the driver shortage. [00:56:00] And anyone doing it, it’s because there aren’t enough opportunities, and again, multifaceted. But I think automation will replace the long haul, 600 miles, sleeping in your truck four and a half hours a day. I haven’t seen my family in two weeks. It is n- There, there is no reason to be living that life.

And what it’s going to do is it’s going to make the short-haul, last-mile problem more attractive. You’re gonna be able to pay more for those particular things, and there’s going to be a human [00:56:30] augmentation component to it. They will be using all the aspects and inputs that you have with full autonomy, but you’re still gonna have a human operator. Now, what the human does as far as touching the steering wheel or for me, now on 35 when I’m driving up to go see the grandparents my vehicle will… And it’s not a Tesla, but I put it into, it’s su- like slight autonomy mode. I don’t have to touch it, and I can just drive on 35 for 45 minutes, and I’m still [00:57:00] there operating the vehicle.

But I actually think we’ll start to see that

kind of go

. Now, going back to the thing of kind of the driver shortage thing is I think the quality of life of these truckers are going to improve significantly with human augmentation.

So I think it’ll be AI augmented, and it’s going to be… And again, this could be an application or product that someone builds on top of Nordian, in that what we do is we provide the tools and the software where it’ll instruct and nudge you how to drive [00:57:30] better, safer, or, “Hey, you go this speed limit,” so that when you arrive at that dock, they’re ready for you. And down to just even they know what the load is, they know what the traffic patterns are. Again, all this feeds into a model of being able to, when you are driving the truck eight hours, you’re getting eight hours of value. And I actually would argue you don’t need– You’re gonna be able to accomplish in two and a half, three hours, or, in Eric’s point, four and a half [00:58:00] hours what you were able to do in a, what, you took 11 hours of your time.

You’ll be able to do that in four and a half hours. And I think just you’re gonna see these wild efficiencies everywhere.

Joe Lynch: We covered a lot of ground and I’m not so sure I understand every last thing we talked about. But talking to my friend Michael Schram, and he is the is the founder, co-founder, and CEO of Nordian. And what Nordian is it’s a positioning and connectivity platform for physical AI.

So as we start to move to this [00:58:30] autonomous future, yeah, there’s companies that are gonna build their own autonomy, but I think what we’ll see as an industry that it’s going to be… it’s just like Apple. Apple created everything in the Apple ecosystem, but most everybody else said, “We will use components that are best practices across the industry.”

You guys are gonna be that foundational piece of can I… You tell me where it’s at, which is the positioning, and can I make sure it stays connected, and can you help me manage this stuff? And we’re already [00:59:00] starting to see… We’ve started to see autonomous stuff in our world. Yard management is a big place where I think we’re gonna see this first just because no one’s, for the most part, gonna be in a bad accident w- with a forklift or a tugger out in the yard.

But it’s a very difficult am- work and somebody’s gotta do it, and if I can have it done autonomously, hallelujah. We touched on a whole bunch of points the connectivity gap problem. We talked about the s- a centimeter level positioning. You [00:59:30] can’t be, “Oh, yeah. We got this satellite. It’s miles and miles above the earth, and we’re just a few feet off.”

Few feet off is a disaster in many scenarios. Can’t have it. And then we also talked a little bit about these, the OEMs, whether they’re a yard management software or a trucking companies or trucking… I should say truck, I guess the OEM, trucking OEMs, or the farm implements and the agriculture that you guys are already [01:00:00] working on.

And I think when we finally do get to this place, we’re going to be able to address this truck driver shortage, and I think it’s not necessarily coming for your job. It’s gonna give you a better job. That’s the reality. And oh, I didn’t mention this, but I should have. There’s a podcast I did a while ago, Project 61.

Project 61 is going after the problem that we have in this industry. The average truck driver is dying at 61 years old, which is shocking for someone [01:00:30] who is older than 61 years old.

Michael Schramm: conversation, Joe, I think it has to do with their sleeping habits. It’s the, the food supply. They stop and eat at these truck stops. And again, another conversation, but that may not have to do with kind of this. I think these are another problems, and I think autonomy and these applications are going to solve our food shortage problems and provide higher quality food as well specifically with this glyphosate problem we have and,

Joe Lynch: oh yeah, we’ve talked… you hear it every other thing on the internet seems to be [01:01:00] about Roundup or glyphosate, and I’m sure it’s not good for us. We’re healthier than

Michael Schramm: Heavy metals and yeah I, I think that’s another podcast for another time, but yeah

Joe Lynch: A- anyway, put a big old bow on this one. Final thoughts on the topic and t- touch on who, what problems are you solving and who are you solving it for?

Michael Schramm: Yeah. So right now with autonomous freight or physical AI, it is– the– we are no longer facing an AI constraint problem. And there are a lot of examples of, I [01:01:30] don’t know why w- everything’s not fully autonomous now. It’s because we have a connectivity and an intelligence on the edge problem. And so when you factor in Nordian of precise positioning, connectivity, and edge intelligence, we are solving the gap of taking autonomy from demos to full-scale

production

Joe Lynch: And when you say edge, that means to the edge of the connectivity. So like right to [01:02:00] the truck as opposed to… the edge issue is I’m not connected to the truck this one minute and I have to make a decision

Michael Schramm: Yes. So yeah, so it you have to make split-second decisions. This is not just from a safety perspective of being able to work offline w- by ingesting LIDAR sensors, camera sensors, and this isn’t just in agriculture, in vehicles, in drones, in robotics. You have a, a robot, like an actual h- humanoid and then you want to be able to ingest that on the edge without [01:02:30] having to rely on an internet connection or latency

Joe Lynch: Is that why we’re using, is that would, why I would use, say, in embedded systems in those robots or in a drone?

Michael Schramm: Yes, you have to have some level of embedded intelligence or edge compute. And so this is also like the processing constraints and power constraints that you see also with AI. So latency is really driven by a number of different problems. But when you move core mission critical aspects of your application technology or machine to the edge [01:03:00] and in order to do that, you’re gonna need precise positioning, connectivity, and edge intelligence all combined into a single form factor like Nordian plug and play on the factory line, ready to go for every OB- OEM regardless of industry.

Joe Lynch: I love it. I love it. What conferences will we see you and the fine folks from Nordian at? Do you get to some of the logistics and transportation conferences?

Michael Schramm: Yeah, so we’re now transitioning a bit. We’ve had a lot of pull, so we’ve aggressively moved into the ag space, but we’re feeling a lot of pull from transportation and logistics [01:03:30] now. You can’t have tomorrow without today, and today we wanna be the absolute best technology provider for ag OEMs globally.

But we’ll be of course Farm Progress Show in Iowa, we’ll be there in September. Agritechnica, it’s the show there in Hanover, Germany. You’ll always find Nordian there. And then of course, Agrishow in Brazil is one of the biggest in South America, so you’ll find us there as well. But when you think about CeFi, and you’re probably gonna– into Manifest and some of these other transportation logistics adjacent.

Joe Lynch: you be at [01:04:00] Manifest?

Michael Schramm: I’m not 100% sure yet, but if we do, Joe, I’ll definitely ping you, and first coffee’s

Joe Lynch: Yeah I’ll see you there. I I always say it’s the Super Bowl, but just ex- and usually it’s the was it last year? It’s usually the day o- of Super Bowl is when you start

Michael Schramm: Yeah, I guess it’s in February or something. And then it’s actually where we do a bunch of security conferences with Echo54 there at IC West. So it’s there at in the same place, same location. Man, they just really churn out those conferences there in Vegas.

Yeah,

Joe Lynch: Yeah, so [01:04:30] I’ll make sure I put a link to your LinkedIn profile, link to your website, any other links. If you have case studies or videos or anything, we’ll put those in the show notes so people can reach out and talk to you guys

Michael Schramm: Of course. Yeah. And then at nordian.com, learn more about all the different solutions and we do

Joe Lynch: Whatever you give me, I’ll put a link in the show notes so people can follow you guys. Michael, thank you so much. I know we covered a lot of ground here, and I know I went over my time with you, but thank you so much for taking the time

Michael Schramm: Joe, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure

Joe Lynch: You’re most welcome. And thank all of you for [01:05:00] listening to my podcast, just for it’s very much appreciated.

Until next time, onward and upward