T-Mobile’s Business Push, Technology Advantages, and 5G Slicing with Daryl Schoolar

Full Transcript

0m10s Speaker 0

Hello, and welcome to the two hundred and thirty first episode of the week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Antner. How are doing, Roger?

0m22s Speaker 1

Hey. I'm great.

0m23s Speaker 0

So, Roger, this week we have with us Carsten Krauss, founder and CEO of Casablanca dot ai. Carsten, welcome to the program.

0m31s Speaker 2

Hello. Thank you for having me.

0m33s Speaker 0

So Roger, I think you and Carsten go way way back. Do you wanna tell us the story of how you guys met?

0m39s Speaker 1

Yeah. No. We we met more than forty years ago. I was still in high school. Costen's business partner was a high school classmate of mine.

0m50s Speaker 1

Costen at that time, they had the fastest, best basic language module for the Atari ST, And that saga is worth an episode by itself of how success sometimes has the kernel of of a really hard time buried into it. But and I had my first company together when I was like, yeah, forty years ago literally. And and I have stayed in touch ever since then. And Kosten is one of these savants when it comes to technical innovation. He's currently has this new company called Casablanca dot ai, which does some of the coolest things that I've seen in quite some time.

1m36s Speaker 1

And it is practical, transparent AI. And maybe, Karsten, you can explain to us what Casablanca dot AI is doing and what you're solving.

1m47s Speaker 2

Yes. Certainly, can. So normally, when you have a video call, what happens is that you look at the person on screen, but they don't see that you look at them. Because the camera is somewhere else than their eyes, it means that there's an angle, and you look normally down depending on where your camera is, sometimes up, but you never look eye to eye to the other person. And what Casablanca does is it's an AI that corrects this.

2m13s Speaker 2

So we put the camera virtually behind the eyes of the person you're talking to, and so you have real eye contact. It's completely authentic. So we change all the picture in a way that it is correct. So somebody said it's correcting back to reality, as if you had a mini camera on your screen, but without the disturbing mini camera because it's all virtual, it's all AI.

2m34s Speaker 1

Yeah, and, you know, we've been trying it here at Recon, and it's been quite impressive. It takes telecommunication, AI, and improves the customer experience, because as you said, it's always annoying or unsettling when you look at the person on your screen, and it's not where the camera is, and so people are always off. So can you talk a little bit of how you started the company, and and how you came up with it?

3m7s Speaker 2

So actually, I mean, I'm an AI geek, so I do AI for quite a time. I registered 25 patents, and I have started 12 companies so far. So Kadablanca is my twelfth company, and did some very good exits also. But we suddenly had these lockdowns, and in Germany, they were quite strict. And suddenly, I couldn't meet the people.

3m28s Speaker 2

I had to meet them online. And it just looked very weird to me because I didn't get eye contact. I said, we need to do something against this. I checked my AI ideas, and after about two months, I found a solution which should probably work, register a patent, and open a company. But then I had to find more researchers and so on because I knew it was a tremendous amount of work to do this.

3m49s Speaker 2

And it actually took us, with five researchers and me, it took us four years now to finally have a technology that really works, that is fast enough to run on a normal current PC or a Mac with an M1. So it's a very difficult speed issue, turning the full face and the eyes in real time. So it took us quite a long time, but we developed a lot of core technologies underneath so that we made it as fast as it is.

4m14s Speaker 1

Yeah. So, you know, it's one of these examples where overnight success is based on many years of hard work.

4m21s Speaker 2

Yes.

4m22s Speaker 1

Right? So what kind of a machine do you need to run this?

4m26s Speaker 2

Actually, nothing very special, but old machines don't work. So right now you can use a 2023 or '24, '25 Pentium I five, I seven, or you can use the current AMD, also a Mac with an m one, m two, m three, m four. So they all will work. Currently, we don't have an implementation on Apple iPads, which would be nice, but it's difficult to get this installed on Mac because we install it as a camera driver. So it combines with all the different types of video call software you have.

4m57s Speaker 2

So whether you're using MS Teams, it works. With Zoom, it works. And also with all these open source whatever systems, it works. But that's because we are a camera to the computer or to the system. So you just select in Teams, you select Casablanca camera instead of standard camera or whatever external camera you have.

5m15s Speaker 2

Just select Casablanca camera. It works with all these different video call systems. But that requires that we install as a camera, and that does not work so far on the on the iPad. But we would love somebody from Apple to take up contact with us.

5m29s Speaker 1

Well, maybe somebody from Apple is listening. Who knows? But what we found, it's like it's really transparent. What's also cool is on your website, and we will put the website in the show notes, people can download this and try try for free, if it works. Right?

5m46s Speaker 2

Yes. There is the possibility to download it for free and just test for yourself.

5m51s Speaker 1

Yeah. And and then, you know, if it works with your machine and and that. So, you know, you said like it's every video conferencing software it works. What are some of the industries that you think are most likely to benefit from this?

6m6s Speaker 2

The most interest we have from sales oriented companies, so there are several insurance companies who are currently talking with us on a higher level. Insurance is something where you typically need sales, and video calls don't work so well because you need trust to sell an insurance. And you don't get trust without eye contact. Eye contact is very relevant for trust. That's proven by many studies.

6m26s Speaker 1

And can you talk about, like, some of the studies that you have worked with about this topic?

6m32s Speaker 2

Yeah. So there is a study from Humboldt University, which has proven that Casablanca indeed improves social contact or contact via video calls, improves not only trust but also the perception of competence, also sympathy, and some other great factors. And they have done two studies at Kumboldt University, one of the most recognised German universities, and they tested it with Kathar Blanca and found in both studies that it's statistically significantly better. There's also a lot of previous research on eye contact in general, which all says eye contact is very, very relevant for sales, for recruiting, for almost everything. And Jave University Joy Hirsch has made a great study end of last year, and she proved that the attention goes up quite a lot when you have eye contact.

7m21s Speaker 2

And there's also a YouTube video about that. And she says it's not the pixel resolution that's important. We need to focus on eye contact. Eye contact is the most important factor for attention.

7m32s Speaker 1

Well, we all know that when we interact with people one on one, in person. And you know, one of the challenges with video conferencing is that the nonverbal communication that is so critical in any interaction is very often missing. Or misdirected and misguided due to our technological shortcomings of separating the camera from the screen. Mhmm. We try to be polite and focus on the the eyes that we see on the screen instead of the camera, and then that happens.

8m6s Speaker 0

But Well, I think it's more than the eyes too because you guys also do a head turn. Right? So it doesn't look like you're looking at somebody through the corner of your eyes if you're No.

8m14s Speaker 2

Definitely. Going in

8m15s Speaker 0

the other direction. The head turn actually

8m17s Speaker 2

Yeah.

8m17s Speaker 0

Makes it feel like you're looking straight at that person, which I think also makes a really big difference.

8m22s Speaker 2

Yeah. There is something from NVIDIA which turns just the eyes. It turns only the eyes and not the face, but also it requires an NVIDIA GPU of a certain strength. So we are about 20 times faster even though we turn the full face.

8m36s Speaker 0

Wow. Yeah. I think it's NVIDIA broadcast, I played around with it. And my my reaction to it was it just looked like I was looking at somebody out of the corner of my eyes the whole time, and it didn't feel like true kind of focus and contact.

8m49s Speaker 2

Yeah. And you've seen that Casablanca does it really in the correct way.

8m53s Speaker 1

Yeah. And so, you know, we have the highest respect for NVIDIA here, but here you have a small elite group of programmers out of Germany beating the number one AI company in the world, right, in an implementation like that. I thought it was like absolutely fascinating what you were doing and and are doing. And you know, I thought the intersection between what you do and the telecom sector is inescapable. Right?

9m22s Speaker 1

Because we communicate through telecom so much, and this is this is going over it. So terrific.

9m29s Speaker 2

Yeah. So I think we are going to save quite a lot of carbon dioxide also, because some people will probably not travel that much if they have really good video calls. So it's also good for the environment, while at the same time it emphasizes how important telecommunication is.

9m46s Speaker 1

That's greetings from Germany, which is very green. Here we look all about efficiency, right? If this if this helps sell, you know, we we travel. I've I've traveled for dinner to the West Coast. Yeah.

10m1s Speaker 1

You know, dinner and came back, and I didn't mad an eye.

10m7s Speaker 0

Roger has a very large carbon footprint is what he's

10m9s Speaker 1

trying to say.

10m10s Speaker 2

I mean, I absolutely understand. And sometimes a face to face meeting in person is really necessary. I absolutely agree. But then also if you would do as many real life travels as you did in the past, probably you couldn't do as many meetings per day. So video calls are just also enhancing your productivity quite a lot.

10m28s Speaker 1

Yeah, no, it's when you can't travel. Yeah. This is making a imperfect solution, is video conferencing, just a whole lot better. Yeah. Awesome.

10m38s Speaker 2

Great. So it's actually quite interesting that when we started, we were much too slow, and we improved, improved, improved just by inventing new core technologies. And with the core technologies we have invented, also a lot of other possibilities are given. For example, when you have only an edge connection on your mobile phone, so less than three g, you could still do video calls with a compressed model we have.

11m2s Speaker 1

We don't have that in in The US anymore.

11m5s Speaker 2

Oh, okay.

11m6s Speaker 1

We shut down the three g and two g networks. Only in Germany I encountered two g networks.

11m12s Speaker 2

So that's all Germany again.

11m14s Speaker 1

It's all Germany again, you know, welcome, you know. Every time I'm back, I feel like I'm back in the stone ages where we have like, have like edge, you know, I have like edge coverage, I'm like, where am I? You know? Seriously, this is a country that prides itself of technological leadership, I have technology was shut down here like ten years ago, and it's my only way of connecting. It's like,

11m40s Speaker 0

There's there's still three gs networks here, but they're just all machine to machine, right?

11m44s Speaker 1

No. They shut down the three gs network. It's gone. Okay. Everything is gone.

11m49s Speaker 1

We shut down three gs.

11m50s Speaker 2

Wow.

11m51s Speaker 1

Everything is gone.

11m53s Speaker 2

Okay.

11m53s Speaker 1

Even two gs is the shutdown too, right?

11m56s Speaker 0

Yeah. Well, three gs, of course.

11m58s Speaker 1

Alright. It's the world. Okay.

11m59s Speaker 2

So anyway, thank you very much.

12m1s Speaker 1

No. Thank you for for being on the show and telling our audience about a really exciting solution. And you know, maybe somebody tries it out. I hope so. And we'll we'll make their transaction better.

12m11s Speaker 0

It's really cool stuff. We'll put we'll put a link in the show notes for folks at the gate that they wanna try it

12m16s Speaker 1

out.

12m16s Speaker 2

Great. Thank you.

12m18s Speaker 0

Alright. Alright. Thanks, Karsten. Pleasure. We'll talk to you next week.

12m21s Speaker 2

Thank you, Don. Thank you, Roger.

12m23s Speaker 1

My pleasure.