Navigating the Complexities of Roaming for IoT Devices

Tom White:
Welcome to the IoT Podcast Ben.

Ben:
Hi, nice to be here.

Tom White:
Good to have you here. So for those that don’t know you, just gonna dive straight into it. So you haven’t always been in IoT, Ben. Originally worked at a business called Food Panda. Could you explain a little bit about that and what that is to our listeners?

Ben:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, so I think it’s probably just a good opportunity for me to sort of explain how I ended up doing this. So Food Panda is an online food delivery business. When I started there, which I guess was probably over 10 years ago now, you know, we opened up the Singapore market, started expanding through Southeast Asia. And, you know, part of what we needed to do was be able to have really efficient operations. And that meant directly to the restaurants without having a call center. So we built a little GPRS printer and this used cellular connectivity in order to do it. You can imagine like a little credit card terminal looking thing that would print out in order. And I just remember it was really challenging to build, really challenging to get connectivity, really challenging to get it to work across multiple geographies, limited software and tooling. And so I kind of didn’t think much of it. time, but filed that away in the back of my brain and eventually moved back to the United States where I looked to start a business. And that was, you know, around 2013 or so when IoT was really kind of like a much talked about thing, you know, big in the hype cycle. I felt that folks, you know, were missing the thread a little bit in the sense that there was a lot of focus on And that’s certainly has panned out, you know, there’s connected devices everywhere in your home. But really what we’re talking about is this idea of, you know, when the internet started, you’re connecting computers to computers, then you’re connecting mobile phones and tablets, and then finally you’re connecting the physical world. In order to do that, you need cellular connectivity. And that’s how we ended up building Hologram. So, you know, remember, put two and two together from my experience, seeing the challenges at Food Panda. and then ultimately decided to do something about it and build a unified way for folks to connect devices anywhere and do so with really, really good software and tooling. So it’s really suitable for building IoT applications at scale.

Tom White:
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. It’s such a lovely story. And I remember talking to you about that off air when we were doing our discovery call. And I think that’s for me, the definition of an entrepreneur is to work in one industry, to spot a problem, a big issue, and to use that as a segue into a new market. And that’s exactly what you did, right? And you had an issue with Foodpanda, as you said, about being able to get real-time updates to the drivers without having to go through system and did that kind of spur on and was that the main kind of precursor to building what is now Hologram then?

Ben:
Yeah, more or less. I mean, you know, look, it was definitely, yeah, I mean, more or less, you know, I think I’ve also always been a really big believer in, you know, building businesses in really big markets. And I think that, you know, when you think about the connected device market, it’s something that is likely to, you know, continue growing just kind of forever. There’s really never going to be a point in time where we’re not connecting more things to the internet. So those were some of the key decision points around deciding to start holograms.

Tom White:
Excellent. Yeah. And for our listeners then, so kind of boilerplate kind of version of what hologram is and what it does. How long have you guys been around? What’s the mission statement of the business?

Ben:
Yeah, so we’ve been around since late 2013, so about 10 years or so. And our mission is to empower innovators to build the future anywhere. And we do that by providing cellular connectivity for devices and software for the people who build those devices to manage them. If I was to explain it to someone who had no familiarity with IoT, I would say we provide phone plans for things that aren’t phones. And

Tom White:
Thanks for watching!

Ben:
that’s sort of the simplistic version, right? But at its core, we’re really making sure that you can have performance connectivity anywhere in the world, increasingly with our new launch of next generation of our HyperSIM, giving you access to native tier one carriers with native fallback and things like that. So it’s a little more complicated than just phone plans for things that aren’t phones, But at its core, the connectivity is the DNA of what we do.

Tom White:
Mm.

Ben:
And making sure hardware is online. And making sure that your hardware is always online. And then we’ve built a lot of software and tooling around that to manage your deployments, which becomes increasingly important as you scale.

Tom White:
Yeah, it’s funny when you gave that example of providing phone plans for things that aren’t phones, it always reminds me of kind of chat GPT because there’s so many prompts out there at the moment where it’s kind of like, you know, explain this if I was a five-year-old or explain this if I didn’t know anything about anything. And I actually think there’s a real art to doing that, you know, to explain stuff in so simple terms.

Ben:
Thanks for watching!

Tom White:
But it always makes me smile when someone explains it, something in that manner. So, Hologram, obviously, cellular provider for IoT, for the benefit of our listeners and for myself as well, can you explain a little bit about the technology and why that is different or not readily accessible from traditional cellular providers, Ben?

Ben:
Yeah, so, you know, there’s really kind of two key ways that you can connect in the IRT world. And really, this is true for consumers as well. One is, you know, what you’re probably most familiar with, which is you’re going to have a direct sort of line to a singular telco. So, you know, where the United States is going to be, you know, T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, cellular, you know, there’s a bunch of regional carriers, some M&B&Os like Cricket that, right? And, you know, if you’re elsewhere in the world, it’s going to be different carriers, but either way, you’re going to have sort of, you know, one operator that is your primary home operator. And that’s going to give you really good performance sort of where you are. Generally speaking, you know, a lot of times, people will pick that operator based on where they live and whether, you know, coverage is strongest. When you travel, they’re going to have some form of roaming agreements, which are going to be, you know, have varying you know, varying degrees of good, I guess, for what you need. But that’s, but at the end of the day, it’s really kind of meant for someone who’s like kind of in a fixed area, right? And now importantly, you get really, really good performance like that. And you get really good pricing too, generally speaking as a consumer. But when you think about IoT devices, not only are they moving around, either they’re moving around or they’re being deployed to fixed locations and you don’t necessarily know what coverage is going to exist when you get there. to have access to multiple operators. Now you can do that through roaming. And so one of the ways that, you know, you probably see them like, if you’ve traveled around, right, you probably see like travel SIMs or things like that, right,

Tom White:
Thanks for watching!

Ben:
which are really indexed on through that roaming market. It’s like, oh, well, if you’re gonna be in Greece and then you’re gonna be in Spain, you know, you can use this SIM card and it’s gonna provide you with good rates. Roaming is gonna be useful. Roaming tends to be more expensive, less performant, you coverage kind of wherever you are, which is really,

Tom White:
Hmm.

Ben:
really helpful. And so what we’ve done, and especially with what we’re sort of rolling out now, we’ve kind of combined the best of both worlds here. So we’re giving, with some kind of proprietary technology, both on SIEM and throughout the stack, we’re able to kind of give you access to sort of that performance and latency of native operators and also do so in a way that gives you fallback onto multiple carriers. So you have redundant coverage and you know if the device is moving around, it’s going to have access wherever it needs to be. So

Tom White:
Mm.

Ben:
that’s sort of the core difference between what you’re seeing in something like Hologram versus just sort of going directly to your local operator and buying a SIM card for your phone.

Tom White:
Yeah, yeah. And it’s really topical for me personally, and then to bring this back down into into telling, telling it to a five year old by chat GPT terms. I was in Florida. And I had to buy some data, the five bundle and the price I paid was offered was like $60 for a gigabyte from my from my UK network, right? I bought it at a fraction of the cost, right? And you’ve got to think from a consumer point of view, that was okay because it was on a phone, but from a device, a device can’t necessarily make that choice, right? And the device

Ben:
Yeah.

Tom White:
could be there, as you say, the device could be in situ for a number of years or could be constantly roaming or could be

Ben:
Mm-hmm.

Tom White:
elsewhere. And so this is the necessity for this in order to have this to happen. updates and kind of agnostic really to where it roams and where it goes. So absolutely critical for the success of IoT and critical for cellular on to IoT to enable this to happen.

Ben:
Yeah.

Tom White:
So it’s a great introduction and a great business model. A lot of talk out there online around iSim, eSim, different versions etc. In your own words, what’s the and an eSIM pen.

Ben:
Great question. So, you know, the terminology for this stuff can kind of be messy sometimes. Like folks tend to, people will say ESIM when they really mean EUICC, or, you know, ISIM when they really mean ESIM, whatever, et cetera. So like, the way that I see it, and you know, the way I see it, and I think this is accurate at least, is that EUICC what we talk about when we talk about having multiple profiles on a single SIM card. And that’s sort of the technology that underpins what people typically are calling eSIM. So that means you have a single SIM card that’s capable of accessing multiple operators programmatically. And there’s specific standard, specific GSMA standard around that. Multi-MZ is a different thing as well. Multi-MZ is not eSIM. And the core difference is Multi-MZ is sort of like programmable and it’s a basically your profiles versus having sort of like a true native operator SIM switching paradigm.

Tom White:
Yep.

Ben:
And so MultiMZ tends to be, it can work for redundancy, but it’s tricky and it has trouble with devices, with certain devices it’s not going to be consistent performance across devices. And that can result in downtime. So there’s, so I would split it into kind of like MultiMZ EUICC, we feel personally that EUICC is kind of the superior paradigm if you can have the software around it to enable redundancy, which is one of the big benefits of MultiMZ. ISIM now is really kind of my understanding of it, and I think it’s kind of still nascent and evolving. It’s very similar to ESIM or EUICC, except it’s now being embedded on a module. So a physical

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
SIM card. You have just the code snippet that it… because each SIM card is running like a little Java applet basically. So you’re actually

Tom White:
Mm.

Ben:
running code on the SIM card. Instead of running that on a SIM card, you’re running on like a secure hardware module that is embedded within the SIM. And that’s my understanding. Like when I say iSIM, that’s what I would refer to. And so that’s interesting because you know I think it kind of… a minute ago, which was, you know, a SIM card or a device can’t really make decisions about purchasing coverage in certain places. And that’s one of the key differentiators, I think, between, you know, again, sort of a consumer facing application versus something that’s built for IoT is, you know, we’re able to programmatically make decisions or give you tools to basically programmatically make decisions around network selection. Over time, and right now you need a

Tom White:
Eh.

Ben:
really interesting that you can start to move to a place where more and more of this can be software. That’s a really, really cool thing, especially because I think it makes it easier to embed connectivity into things if more and more of it can be software.

Tom White:
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you. And I also think that, you know, the emergence of removing the hardware nature of a SIM card is a good one, the world’s moving more software defined for an actual device, you know, not needing to actually physically have a card in there, which as you say, runs on a Java app anyway, kind of makes sense, right? And I think it’s only a path and continue to evolve it, especially from a kind of agnostic point of view and being able to switch carrier quite quickly and from a software context as opposed to it being locked into anything physical. It brings me on quite nicely actually to the current state of IoT global connectivity. Lots of opportunities, some challenges. What are you seeing at the moment with both of those key topics? you see more challenges at the moment within the confines of hologram.

Ben:
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, look, I think it’s, I see a lot of opportunities in general. I think that, you know, as the market has evolved over time, people have gotten much more comfortable building their own connected hardware, which I think is a huge, huge part of this. And when we first started, right, you know, we actually used to build hardware ourselves. We had kind of a developer platform. And that was kind of necessary because it was still very much, it was kind of a nascent space where people just didn’t really even know how to build connected devices or that knowledge wasn’t widespread. You had certain companies that were better, maybe companies that have been in the vending machine space or the POS space or something like that have been doing it forever. Like ATMs are connected, IoT devices, right? People don’t really think about that.

Tom White:
Hmm.

Ben:
But it was still kind of a rarefied skill set. Interestingly, as we’re seeing people embrace the ability to create devices that will impact your business in really meaningful ways, whether that’s driving efficiencies or new product lines or customer experiences. We’re seeing that there’s a lot, it’s easier for folks to get a device off the ground. And that I think is ultimately good for the IoT and the connectivity space. I mean, some of the challenges I think we’ve had in the past, we’re just around customer people connected. You know, look, I think navigating, you know, we’re talking about the connectivity landscape in general, you know, I think navigating that is always challenging, right? You know, there’s, you know, you know, there’s a lot of operators in the world. They all have networks of varying quality, and varying coverage. The economics are always changing. You know, sometimes there’s political factors, depending on what country you’re in, especially, you know, in challenging countries, broad. And that means that it’s up to us to make sure that we always have a solution for our customers that works, that’s redundant, and we kind of take the pain out of that. So I think insofar as there are challenges just around being able to provide really good connectivity anywhere in the world at a good price that’s very, very performant, that’s space. The opportunities there though are every network, to some extent at least, that we work with is continuing to upgrade their networks and moving more towards 5G. And I think 5G is a huge opportunity for IoT in the long run. I think we’re still a couple years out before we start seeing the modules that are going to… Like right now, all the 5G modules are going into phones. We still They use a lot of power and they’re expensive, so they’re not going to be right for every application. But I think what’s really exciting is you can start to imagine a world where cellular is providing connectivity full stop. It starts to become devices that you would normally use Wi-Fi, you’re starting to use cellular.

Tom White:
Hmm.

Ben:
I think that’s pretty exciting for us. bread and butter.

Tom White:
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I think, I think that’s a good overview. And we see that a lot in terms of, we talk about use cases, that the connected printer prints, that’s right. You know, so, you know, that used to be on a wifi network and now you kind of see some printers actually on cellular networks and they’re actually being

Ben:
Thanks for watching!

Tom White:
a little bit easier to have a private cellular network than on wifi. A lot of, a lot of people talk about, and this is a really interesting point that you made here around emergence of 5G devices. So traditionally speaking, IoT devices are low cost, low power devices sending small amounts of information, but could be mission critical, depending on what it is that they’re sending. Given the fact that 5G is able to transfer significantly higher levels of data quicker, potentially more reliably. Can you foresee any other big use cases that are resolved by the emergence of 5G more into IoT rather than just the phones as we see it today.

Ben:
Yeah, so the… I think that what we’re starting to see is just more applications that consume more data. It’s hard to… And that’s a generic answer, right? But

Tom White:
Mm.

Ben:
it’s sort of hard to predict is what we found.

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
No one would have predicted, for example, micro mobility coming on e-bikes in the way that they did. You start to see… I’m particularly intrigued what will happen as you start to see the ability create devices that have much higher data throughput, much better latency that’s similar to Wi-Fi. And then you combine that with some other nascent technologies like AI and so on. And so, I don’t know specifically off the top of my head exactly which devices or which applications are going to benefit from it. their devices as it becomes more accessible to push higher

Tom White:
Hmm.

Ben:
data loads. I mean, one thing we saw in the micro mobility space is there was definitely an appetite for folks to do things like put a dash cam on there, for example, which is very, very high data usage over time. And so that’s just a good example of their business challenges that people with devices facing. And sometimes they’re limiting data because they just don’t have the right, you know, it’s just they can’t access a 5G network or they can’t access that sort of data throughput. And so I think that, you know, you can get richer applications, richer data sets, you know, create smarter devices, as you start to, just generally speaking, as you start to be able to pass more data with more reliability and more speed. I do think that LTE though, 4G is suitable for the vast majority of applications at this stage at least. We’ve yet to encounter, we’ve encountered very few if any applications that can’t run on 4G and need 5G. That being said, I think there are ones that would be more optimally run on 5G and that would be much better. much better for the operators. So I guess it’s a long way of saying, I think that we can’t really predict what’s going to happen, but I think it’ll be

Tom White:
Mm.

Ben:
good.

Tom White:
No, I get it. It was a million dollar question I asked you. I think you answered it really well. But I think reading between the lines, you know, what you’re saying and from your experience, is it the enrichment of the data? So for instance, if it’s video, is it high quality video? Is it quicker? Is it lower latency?

Ben:
Yeah.

Tom White:
Micro mobility? Is it mapping? Is it more in depth mapping? on micro-pubility, things that perhaps are constrained by 4G. But it’s interesting, you should say, and it kind of raised my eyebrow actually, when you said that there’s quite a lot you can do with 4G as it stands, right? So what would be the added advantage of 5G? But I guess we’re also, you know, in ourselves, we’re kind of victims of our own parameters, which we put ourselves in, right? Because we’ve always kind of developed with this kind of 3G, 4G kind of low data mentality, It’s quite difficult actually to really think about where her weight actually, we’ve now got the capabilities of 5G so we can do a lot more with this rather than it just being a pure enriching exercise, i.e. sending more, sending crisper, sending more information. So it would be interesting to see how that unfolds because yeah, you’re right, like micro mobility kind of came from nowhere. You know, who’d have thought that everyone would love to jump on scooters and e-bikes and various things in cities, you know,

Ben:
Yeah.

Tom White:
in Europe is just absolutely prolific. So, and I think that’s another thing about what’s really just exciting in general about the fast moving nature of IoT and in the industry that we’re involved in is how wrong or right we could be if we look back on this in two years time, let alone five years time. So

Ben:
Yeah.

Tom White:
it’ll be interesting

Ben:
And,

Tom White:
to see.

Ben:
you know, the last thing I’ll say on it, right, is, you know, you should have my, you know, CTO, co-founder, and Pat on at some point, he can tell you, you know, sort of the spectrum efficiency differences, you know, between 5G and 4G and 3G, right? And so there’s, there starts to be, there are, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m underplaying it in the sense that I want to emphasize that, you know, you can get a lot done today without using 5G. But

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
there are real reasons. There are real reasons from a spectral efficiency point of view, why you’re going to get way better performance from a 5G point of view, and you’re going to get better economics from a 5G point of view. And that stuff enables applications that we wouldn’t have necessarily thought of. And to your point, can drive efficiencies for new applications. Or if you’ve got V2 of an application, if V3 is 5G, maybe you can do things that you never dreamed possible on 4G, for example. So don’t want to underplay it, but I lot there. It’s definitely a very interesting topic from a technical point of view. So, you know, I think I would yield to my co-founder Pat on that one.

Tom White:
Yeah, no, no, absolutely. It’s an interesting topic, right? Moving on back to what moving on and also sort of slightly backwards to the iSim, eSim roaming capability, I think it’s worth exploring that a bit more. So obviously, in layman’s terms, IoT devices often need to roam across different networks to maintain the connectivity as we spoke about. How is an iSim seamless data roaming today? Do we have standardization issues? And whatever kind of regulatory or technical challenges can you face with this seamless data roaming using ICIN spend?

Ben:
Yeah, so I kind of split it into two or three things. So I think the first one is the device or module itself. Second one is how it’s being implemented at the SIM. And the third one is any sort of certifications that are necessary around networks. So on the device side, that’s getting better, especially because eSIM, iSIM is all using sort of an EUICC GSMA standard. modules that are coming out are all complying with that standard, which means that, you know, generally speaking, if we’re trying to switch between profiles, it’s going to be much more performant and generally speaking have a really, really high, you know, really, really high success rate. You know, with hologram as part of onboarding, you know, we do all that testing up front to make sure it’s all, you know, that your device is going to be suitable.

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
But But generally speaking, if you have a super old device, it’s like 15 years old or something, it could be challenging or it could work. If you have a newer device, it’s highly likely that it’s going to work really, really well just because it’s going to have that standard built in. And when I say newer, I mean like within the last five years or so. And so that’s one piece. So devices can be challenging sometimes in that sense. custom firmware to kind of deal with it. The, because it’s certainly not an intractable problem. The second one is around sort of how it’s implemented at the SIM level. So you know, if you’re, a lot of this depends on who you’re working with and how they’ve actually done the operator integrations. And there’s a lot of nuance to that, as well as sort of any sort of software that’s sitting the sim itself and that standard. So that standard is almost like, as it stands, is almost like a CD player, right? Like you kind of like pop the sim in, you pop the profile in, you pop the profile out. And you do that via software and over the air. But it’s sort of like one in, one out. What you really want is you want the ability to have like an mp3 player or something, right? Where you can just kind of queue up the network programmatically, build a playlist, or if And that’s a big part of what we’ve built with our hyper platform is the ability for you to sort of, you know, optimize between different networks and do so in more of a software driven seamless fashion. So we’re taking that standard, and then we’re taking it one step further. And that is going to give you a lot better performance versus just having, you know, to your point around like, you know, a device can’t necessarily make a choice around which You know in the paradigm for like an iPhone or something that makes a lot of sense because you where you just have through the CD Player paradigm makes a lot of sense because I am setting up my phone. I’m gonna pick an operator But if you need to switch programmatically on the fly, you need some software on that So you have more like that mp3 player type idea And then the third piece of certification so as you you know, that’s this is just general across the board whether we’re talking about you Same I said, you know direct carrier or multi MZ roaming whatever You know, I think it’s it’s just something that folks need to be aware of right is, you know, just whatever operator you’re on Certain operators are gonna require certain certifications and that’s again a completely solvable problem Something we have a ton of familiarity with and a ton of familiarity, you know walking customers through But it’s just something that you know, you have to go through to make sure you’re compliant there definitely folks out there who will underplay that and I think that that that can be That can be, I think that’s not always the best strategy, is my point of

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
view. We always wanna make sure that people are compliant on networks. So those are the three things to think about, especially when you’re switching operators a lot and you’re using this eSIM, iSIM paradigm. Overall, it just requires a little bit of thought. I think

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
as part of building a connected device, doing a pretty complex thing anyways. And so this is just a small piece of it. This is a big part of what we try to make really, really easy for folks, stuff that’s on our mind all the time. And so I don’t think these are intractable problems or challenges by any stretch of imagination. They’re just kind of like cost of doing business, normal stuff.

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
But definitely stuff to be aware of.

Tom White:
Yeah, yeah. That’s really, really good insights, especially around the compliance as you mentioned as well. It’s really, really important to do that. It can be a very political situation with this and making sure you get it right for the first time is really important. Touching on satellite versus cellular, I guess there’s pros and cons for each depending on an IoT deployment. Is it sometimes cost prohibitive to move towards a satellite model over Is that why perhaps Cellular has more interest at the moment, Ben, in your opinion?

Ben:
Yeah, I mean, I think they’re complimentary, right? You know, same thing, same way I feel about sort of narrowband. It’s all complimentary

Tom White:
Thanks for watching!

Ben:
stuff. You know, you kind of have narrowband on one spectrum and you have satellite on the other and then you have, you know, cellular taking the big swath in the middle. And there’s of course, the Venn diagrams and stuff, but and then some overlap. But really, I think where you know, satellite is, you know, narrowband, narrowband is going It’s going to be really like spending tiny packets of data back and forth, low power. It’s not going to have a lot of security built around it because it’s so lightweight, so

Tom White:
Thanks for watching!

Ben:
not necessarily a lot of encryption or anything. But that can be really useful for certain things. If you’ve got like 10,000 sensors on a farm, you might have a single cellular gateway and 10,000 sensors talking to it. totally possible. Cellular is going to be probably your probably your kind of your workhorse right primary backhaul to the internet for all devices. It really hits the sweet spot between battery consumption, cost, both of hardware and of connectivity. And just kind of like accessibility in terms of being able to build with it.

Tom White:
Mm.

Ben:
You know, you can go, you know, cellular module or you can go like, you know, you can go all the way up to 5G, right? And you can be, you know, with a big beefy cellular module. So you have a lot of options there. Satellite is gonna be stuff where, you know, you really don’t have coverage.

Tom White:
Hmm.

Ben:
You know, it’s got big power considerations because you’ve got to stick in a big antenna on there that’s gonna talk all the way up to space. And it’s gonna be expensive because there’s only so many satellites and, you know, It’s a pretty limited resource. And so it’s expensive from a PowerPoint of you. It’s expensive from a hardware point of view, and it’s expensive from a connectivity point of view. But, you know, if you need connectivity in, you know, the middle of a rain forest or, or there’s a, there’s a customer who worked with a long time ago that was using satellite that was literally making drones that did security for, for Brazil and so like you know and they had

Tom White:
Well…

Ben:
to worry about like they had to worry about like modern-day bandits like essentially raiding these trains you know like like a like an old Western except they probably had like humvees and said you know horses

Tom White:
Thanks for watching!

Ben:
and so they had to use satellite and it made sense because you know if you’re trying to prevent someone from stealing a bunch of gold off of a train you know you’re kind of willing to pay whatever but but that that’s those are the key differentiators right and maybe over time you know So people are doing interesting things with some of the low Earth orbit satellites and stuff and so maybe the costs have come down a little bit, but I still think there’s just fundamental physical limitations around, you know, look, you’ve got to get a signal all the way up to space and back. And so there’s always going to be a big power consideration there. So I think they’re all complimentary, basically.

Tom White:
Yeah, I find that absolutely fascinating. Fascinating about the drones and the gold mine. It’s just things you would never even think of. I think satellite has its place. I was flying across to the East Coast recently and I was able to get full Wi-Fi connectivity on the plane via

Ben:
Yeah.

Tom White:
sat and it was great. There was hardly any data limitations.

Ben:
Mm-hmm.

Tom White:
I thought there would be a fair use wasn’t and I could actually stream video in pretty pretty good speed

Ben:
Mm-hmm.

Tom White:
41,000 feet in the air and I think probably that’s where satellite will remain you know in these circumstances where it has to because cellular just won’t reach or

Ben:
Thanks for watching!

Tom White:
there’s no plans for cellular to take over or to grow into those areas and I think over time perhaps it will start to disperse and find its own feet longer use case actually around the gold miners you say. I bet you’ve got a couple more stories like that, have you? A bit of other customers or quirky use cases like that. I guess that’s got to be one of the favorites though, right?

Ben:
Yeah, that’s definitely one of my favorites.

Tom White:
Yes.

Ben:
I don’t know if I, that’s definitely one of the best ones.

Tom White:
Yeah. And going on to the value of all of this and Ben, so in terms of businesses, so, you know, really, really quickly, how can a business and a general organization leverage global IoT connectivity to gain a competitive edge, you know, using an eSIM or an iSIM? And why would they be interested in doing it in the first place?

Ben:
Yeah, look, I mean, you know, I’m a product guy first and foremost, right? And so like, I think that, you know, I would just start with, you know, I think I would just start with like, what, you know, what kind of problems can you solve? And, you know, there’s, you know, I should have a better framework for this as we’re talking about it. But like, there really are, there’s a couple of different categories of problems in my view. Like one is sort of like, I mean, I guess there’s really two that come to mind off. I’ll say there’s three that come to mind, it’s not in my head. The first

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
one is sort of like, you know, the business intelligence and data collection. So like, what are things about your business that you would love to know, but you just can’t understand today for whatever reason? See this law in supply chain, right? You know, hey, I really want to know real time inventory of XYZ thing, or I want to know exactly where this thing is, or whatever. You know, that’s something that, you know, or I really want to know how my customers this product that is in the field? Whether it’s a bike or a coffee machine or a car or whatever, what kind of data can I… Or a basketball, who knows, right? How are my customers using this product? I think that’s especially interesting when you combine it with stuff like, when are they going to need to purchase one again? Or are they going to run out of this thing? Maybe going to buy something else instead. Um, so I think there’s just a broader data collection and I don’t, you know, I think this is again, this is again, one where like my imagination will fail me. Like I, you know, I’m sure there’s someone listening to us who runs a business who’s like, oh yeah, I would really love to know XYZ thing about my business very specifically, but the only way I could do it is if I had a physical sensor on a thing, um, and that’s a great application for, for IOT. Uh, second one, um, is going to be anything that kind of requires like control. And these can be combined, right? So we think about, we worked with some customers that do propane tank monitoring for residential and commercial applications that are in really remote rural areas. So essentially what the business model was prior is they would be sending trucks out there on a schedule. And sometimes they would get there and they wouldn’t what they move to is a model where they now are getting, they’re able to track exactly how much propane is in each tank. So they’ve got that sort of data sensing component and then they’re able to take action off that, some sort of command and control action. And so that can be automatically dispatching a truck roll to go out there and do a thing. In other cases, it can be, you actually want the device itself to do something. It’s a failure in here, right? But you can imagine scenarios where, oh, hey, we just received this input. So now the device is going to take x, y, z action.

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
That’s a second-grade application. The third and last one would just be around sort of enriching customer experiences and just building completely new products. See this a lot in the telehealth and medical space. So like hospital at home has been a really interesting one. Um, where, you know, in the past, you know, someone sent, you know, someone goes in the hospital, you know, maybe they have a chronic condition, whatever. They get, um, they get sent home and then there, you have to like, kind of follow up with the doctor, doctors calling them, uh, maybe they have to come in for additional visits. What they’re able to do now is, you know, essentially give them a medical device that is going to send all of those readings back to the doctor, um, as though they were at the hospital, right? And then they’re able to have a lot of those conversations with their doctor, you know, via telehealth So they can you know have treatment for chronic conditions with a lot more dignity and a lot more You know a lot more success Well, well, you know a lot more comfort from being from home So so those are some kind of examples I would bring it down to like three key things You know, those are the areas that I would look inside your business say can I get more data? Is there something that I’m doing today? That’s pretty manual. That was actually what we did a food panda, right? We had a call center. Instead of having a call center, we built a little device. And then the third one is what kind of new customer experiences can I build? What kind of new products can I enable that are going to maybe just going to make my product better and

Tom White:
Mm.

Ben:
have more value? And then presumably you can potentially charge money for them too, which is always great. So those would be my recommendations.

Tom White:
Yeah, fantastic recommendations. I think the first and the third could be linked as well, right? You know, with more insights on the data that you collect, you could give a different product offering, but you don’t necessarily know that unless you’ve looked at the data. And that’s why I think data science is such an interesting and big proliferation at the moment when it comes to IoT, because the more we have, the more we can understand, the more we can create, the more that we can sell. I love the example that you gave around connected health. In the past, I gave a talk on connected health, part of Mencap here in the UK and Vodafone. They were talking about IoT being an assisted living, right? Being able to, exactly as you say, be able to get that information straight back to the hospital really, really quickly in order to make decisions there and then. Because you can think about the cost of call-outs and whether they need to happen or not at that time. So I think examples and again it never fails to amaze me just how how esoteric and not IoT is right so on the face of it people think oh it’s you know it’s a really it’s a really small focus area but it isn’t it’s everything and everything and I think that’s a really important thing to understand

Ben:
Mm-hmm.

Tom White:
but yeah some some fantastic examples there. Ben I think it’s been absolutely fantastic today you speak so And I love the journey. I love how you come on into this field from that example that you gave at Food Panda and been doing such fantastic work, various use cases. And to be able to interpret this at a high level really well, it’s a real skill, right? You know, to be able to do that has been absolutely fascinating. As we come towards the end of the show, there’s always a couple of questions that we asked our guests. And I find this part particularly interesting to see what people’s thoughts are on it. pressure. Predictions for this year, obviously we’re coming to the end of the first quarter of the year, always an interesting one. Where do you think we’ll be near the end of the year with IoT? Is there anything that’s a kind of dead cert or anything that you believe that will happen that maybe should have happened already?

Ben:
Oh man.

Tom White:
I ask some tricky questions, it’s what I do, man. Ha ha ha.

Ben:
Yeah, no, I know. I should’ve, you know, man, I wish I had a good one for this. You know, I don’t know. I think my prediction, look, my prediction, you know, I’m biased is probably just that you’re gonna see, well, okay, so my prediction that, my biased prediction is that you’re gonna see more and more cellular use cases to see Wi-Fi. But my other one is I think that you’re going to start to see, I think by the end of the year, you’ll start to see AI applications, which are obviously super, super hot right now,

Tom White:
Mm-hmm.

Ben:
start making their way into connected devices more and more. And I can’t really, I would love to be able to predict what that’s going to yield, but I think that’s going to be a bigger part of the IoT story moving forward.

Tom White:
Yeah, I agree. I can’t wait to see that happening. AI on the edge. And you know, to the arms race that we have with AI at the moment, going into the IoT world and the coalition of those two technologies. I think that’s going to be absolutely fascinating. Thank you for that really interesting insights. And Ben, we’ve got a question actually from our audience. And I think this is a particularly pertinent one, and perhaps hopefully a little bit easier to answer for you, being the entrepreneur that you are. What advice, spend would you give to entrepreneurs and businesses that are just starting to explore the potential of IoT having seen the Gartner reports, listened to our show, but don’t quite know how to get into it? What advice would you give to them?

Ben:
That’s a good question. I mean, I think I will err more on the side of just general entrepreneurship advice, which is, I think, just be fully committed. I think the, you know, look, as it relates to IoT, I would say, you know, continue to iteratively learn. I think make sure when you’re selecting partners that you are selecting partners that understand what it means to work with companies that are smaller and nimble, partner, especially, there are different companies that are right for different life cycle parts of your journey. Right. hologram, we aim to be one that can be part of your journey from device one to device one million, right. But there’s definitely times to use a certain module that’s going to be easier to purchase at low volume versus going with the ones where you’re not going to get the time of day or good pricing, unless you’re buying tens of thousands hundreds of thousands. And so I think think about it iteratively, just as you would anything else in startups. And I think just be fully in, you know, there’s my favorite, my favorite startup advice is, is a great Paul Graham article somewhere that was written like, I don’t know, maybe like, I think it was written like 2007 or something. But it’s, it’s called How Not to Die. And it basically just talks about how startups don’t die when they run They die away, no, you know, I’m going to go back to school part-time while I’m doing this. Or, you know, I’m just going to maybe start consulting a little bit on the side. And, you know, that is, I think that’s completely true. You know, if you just have the grit and the perseverance to just keep going, good things happen. You stay alive long enough and you start making real money. And that’s my best advice.

Tom White:
Yeah, that’s really good advice. I guess I guess it’s difficult sometimes for founders, right, given their mercurial nature. It’s difficult sometimes for a founder and entrepreneur. And I’m sure this resonates with you because to actually go out and do something, and actually create something and you’re back against a wall requires a special set of skills, right. But equally, the kind of double edged sword with having that within you is that perhaps you might get bored a bit easily. forces that play here but I think that’s fantastic and I’ve written that down as we’ve been speaking How Not To Die by Paul Graham right I think that’s really really interesting because yeah I think people need to take their own advice as well and and they really see it through so that that’s great. Quick fire around couple of questions for you Ben if an actor was to play your life in a film who would that be and why?

Ben:
So this is just like someone who looks like me maybe?

Tom White:
So this is the story of you, Ben Fogan, this is your life, this is your biopic, which actor would it be that would play it and why would they play that role?

Ben:
Oh, geez. This is gonna sound totally self-congratulatory or whatever, but I think that, well, no, maybe it’s too old now, but I think Javier Bardem would be a good fit for me

Tom White:
Okay.

Ben:
when I get really tan, you know?

Tom White:
Yeah, yeah.

Ben:
But that’s it. It’s just my own sort of like,

Tom White:
Heh.

Ben:
I feel like I try to embody that vibe sometimes of just

Tom White:
Okay.

Ben:
you know, being cool like Javier Bardem. So like that’s the one I’ll pick.

Tom White:
It depends what film he’s in as well, right?

Ben:
Yes, it’s true. Maybe not No Country for Old Men, even though that’s a great movie.

Tom White:
I was thinking that, yeah, yeah.

Ben:
Maybe more like, yeah, I don’t

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
know, man. These are, yeah, I feel, you know,

Tom White:
It’s a cool

Ben:
vulnerable

Tom White:
answer.

Ben:
answering this question.

Tom White:
Ah, it’s a cool question. It’s a cool answer to a cool, well, I don’t like to think a cool question. Biggest tech fail that you’ve ever seen. So, you know, something that’s been heralded as a massive potential success, it’s gonna change the world, but didn’t actually manage to do it.

Ben:
Oh, geez. I don’t know. You know, I think that most of these, I think that most of these things actually do ultimately end up, you know, changing the world in some way, shape or form

Tom White:
Thanks for watching!

Ben:
in their in their own way. You know, I think the one that like, you know, I think the one that the people would say, yeah, I don’t know, you know, Sometimes these things manifest in ways that are different than the way people thought they would be.

Tom White:
Everything happens for a reason, right?

Ben:
Yeah, and so in that sense, folks might… I think, I don’t know, so far augmented reality is probably the biggest one that I would point to. That sort of like people… Yeah, now that I’m kind of thinking about it, so far augmented reality is… But again, there are applications out there that really make sense. And it’s again one of those things where it’s hard to tell where technology is. technologies are on their curve of sort of adoption. AI is actually a great example of this too, right? Where like everyone’s been talking about machine learning and AI and so on and so forth. But now you’re just kind of seeing, presumably it’s hitting this sort of S curve, or sorry, this sort of bent the elbow in the exponential curve, right? The same may be true for something like VR augmented reality, where applications may become far more widespread gaming or whatever

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
as the computing power catches up or as the hardware catches up or whatever. So, but so far, yeah, if I had to pick one, that would be it.

Tom White:
Fantastic. And lastly, favorite tech entrepreneur.

Ben:
Um… I don’t know. I don’t know if I have one. At least not one readily available. I’ve always…

Tom White:
Who have you admired the most?

Ben:
So, you know, I… I try to draw from a lot of sources, right? And so I don’t think there’s any one person that I’ve ever looked at and I’ve been like, yeah, I wanna be exactly like that person. You know, maybe, you know, I think that, I think that for me, it’s always been about taking the best pieces of a lot of different folks, right? So, you know, I’ve always really liked the idea. I guess actually, you know what? I’ll say Naval Rabakhan. You know would

Tom White:
Okay.

Ben:
probably be yeah would probably the person that I admire the most in in tech from from his You know his sort of like philosopher You know entrepreneur style resonates a lot with me

Tom White:
nice.

Ben:
And you know, there’s a lot of people in and around sort of that discussion That I also really admire. I also just admire people with like great, you know who just kind of get it done And there’s some interesting juxtaposition of ideas there around being really efficient versus just working really, really hard or being high leverage versus just getting things done. Patrick Collison of Stripe as well is

Tom White:
Mm.

Ben:
a really, really thoughtful entrepreneur, I think, from what I can tell.

Tom White:
Hmm.

Ben:
come to mind most immediately. But yeah, you know, look, you know, pull things from you. You read someone, you read a tweet from someone and you know, or you read a Paul Graham article and you know, ten years ago and it ends up being really really important. So I don’t

Tom White:
Yeah.

Ben:
think there’s any one person that I really have tried to model myself after. I just try to learn as much as I can from people who are, you know, doing it better.

Tom White:
Yeah, excellent. What a lovely way to put it. Ben, it’s been absolutely fantastic having you on the show today. Thank you so much for all your insights and for telling us more about Hologram. Great business. Where can people find out more about that? Socials, LinkedIn, Instagram, perhaps other places?

Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, we’re on all the platforms. I mean, hologram.io is our website. And, you know, all of our, our social is at hologram. The or that’s Twitter. And LinkedIn, you know, you can just find us on LinkedIn hologram. And yeah, that’s pretty much, pretty much it. You know, we’re, we’re around. Don’t be. Don’t be shy. If you’re building a device, we’re happy to help.

Tom White:
All right, fantastic. Ben, thank you very much for coming on to the IoT Podcast Show.

Ben:
Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been really, really fun.