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

Full Transcript

Don Kellogg 0m10s

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 Entner. How are doing, Roger?

Roger Entner 0m22s

Hey. I'm great.

Don Kellogg 0m23s

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

Guest Speaker 0m31s

Hello. Thank you for having me.

Don Kellogg 0m33s

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

Roger Entner 0m39s

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.

Roger Entner 0m50s

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.

Roger Entner 1m36s

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.

Guest Speaker 1m47s

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.

Guest Speaker 2m13s

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.

Roger Entner 2m34s

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?

Guest Speaker 3m7s

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.

Guest Speaker 3m28s

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.

Guest Speaker 3m49s

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.

Roger Entner 4m14s

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

Guest Speaker 4m21s

Yes.

Roger Entner 4m22s

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

Guest Speaker 4m26s

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.

Guest Speaker 4m57s

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.

Guest Speaker 5m15s

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.

Roger Entner 5m29s

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?

Guest Speaker 5m46s

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

Roger Entner 5m51s

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?

Guest Speaker 6m6s

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.

Roger Entner 6m26s

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

Guest Speaker 6m32s

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.

Guest Speaker 7m21s

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.

Roger Entner 7m32s

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.

Don Kellogg 8m6s

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.

Guest Speaker 8m14s

Definitely. Going in

Don Kellogg 8m15s

the other direction. The head turn actually

Guest Speaker 8m17s

Yeah.

Don Kellogg 8m17s

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

Guest Speaker 8m22s

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.

Don Kellogg 8m36s

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.

Guest Speaker 8m49s

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

Roger Entner 8m53s

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?

Roger Entner 9m22s

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

Guest Speaker 9m29s

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.

Roger Entner 9m46s

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.

Roger Entner 10m1s

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

Don Kellogg 10m7s

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

Roger Entner 10m9s

trying to say.

Guest Speaker 10m10s

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.

Roger Entner 10m28s

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.

Guest Speaker 10m38s

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.

Roger Entner 11m2s

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

Guest Speaker 11m5s

Oh, okay.

Roger Entner 11m6s

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

Guest Speaker 11m12s

So that's all Germany again.

Roger Entner 11m14s

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,

Don Kellogg 11m40s

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

Roger Entner 11m44s

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

Roger Entner 11m49s

We shut down three gs.

Guest Speaker 11m50s

Wow.

Roger Entner 11m51s

Everything is gone.

Guest Speaker 11m53s

Okay.

Roger Entner 11m53s

Even two gs is the shutdown too, right?

Don Kellogg 11m56s

Yeah. Well, three gs, of course.

Roger Entner 11m58s

Alright. It's the world. Okay.

Guest Speaker 11m59s

So anyway, thank you very much.

Roger Entner 12m1s

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.

Don Kellogg 12m11s

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

Roger Entner 12m16s

out.

Guest Speaker 12m16s

Great. Thank you.

Don Kellogg 12m18s

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

Guest Speaker 12m21s

Thank you, Don. Thank you, Roger.

Roger Entner 12m23s

My pleasure.