The Conversation: A hana hou show on local tech

0:00Aloha, this is Catherine Cruz, Mahalo for tuning into the conversation, Hawaii Talks, on this Aloha Friday, April 17th. This hour we showcase recent stories highlighting Hawaii's technology sector. We sit down with the founders of two local tech startups who are seeing dollar signs after selling their businesses. Their advice to others, take a chance. We meet an entrepreneur from Hawaii who is bringing the AI revolution to a parking garage near you. And science is assisting humpback whales during their migration through our waters. We learn more about a new innovation to minimize boat strikes with these magnificent creatures. Plus we look back at the work of a local nonprofit group aimed at encouraging innovation. We catch up with Purple Maya. This is the conversation on Hawaii Public Radio. I'm Catherine Cruz. Welcome back to our Hanahose show highlighting Hawaii's tech industry.

1:03We kick off the hour with two young entrepreneurs, one we featured in 2024 as his family's business, Petland, closed its doors after decades of serving our community's pet's needs. Rich Mitsui reached back out to us to let us know he had just sold his startup tech firm, KWH Analytics. It happened in the same week that another Hawaii tech CEO Brent Akamini sold his company, called VinoVest, to the private investing platform, Start Engine. The Puneho Alums wanted to share their experience in the startup world and their success in taking a risk. They feel too often people in the island sell them so short. They are examples of how tech businesses can succeed. And during this era of artificial intelligence, they are challenging young entrepreneurs here to take the plunge. Being a startup, it's not for the faint of heart, and there's a lot of ups and downs along their path. These my paths started in 2012 when I started this company, and we started it thinking that we're going to build a database of how these solar power plants actually perform

2:04in the field. Of course, as with any startup, you think you're going to do X actually end up building Y, and so over time it became the largest independent provider of insurance for solar wind and batteries in North America. And so that was the business that got acquired by big British insurance company. And then the company that you founded? I was KWH Analytics. And you come from a different background also, right? Because they know your family as being part of Petland. That's right, we're the Petland family. And so yes, growing up, I always thought I was going to run the pet store and just turns out that life had a different calling. And so I know that my grandfather started Petland would not have necessarily wanted me to have taken over the pet store. I think he would have just wanted me to have just done the best I can with whatever talents I had available. Yeah. And the fact though that you've stuck with this company and the message that you have is what, believe in yourself. Yeah. I think that in particular in Hawaii, of course, we have the sense of, look, we've tried tech before and perhaps it wasn't successful in the past, but I do think that many things are different now, not just from a mindset standpoint, but also a couple of key things

3:06that have changed. Like one is that five years ago, looking in order to build a company, you probably have to be talking to your customers and your employees on the mainland. Now we all have Zoom, right? So that's one thing that's changed. Another big thing that's changed is AI. And so it used to be that to build a tech company, you need someone who could write software code. That's not the case anymore though. Like now, myself, Brett, both of us don't know how to write a single line of code, but we write thousands of lines of code now to give them a week using these AI tools. So there's still a lot that's changed that makes it so anyone Hawaii can start building these tech products and tech companies. And Brett, jump in here because you're dabbling in what wine and whiskey, explain to our customers. So my company is called BenoVest and we started in 2019 and we started as an investment platform for fine wine and whiskey as an asset class. And that's grown to over $100 million in assets on the platform. And like Richard, our company got acquired last week. So we've been on the same trajectory, same timeline for a lot of things. Our kids, for example, go to the same school, we have three kids each.

4:10But yeah, in general, I've been on the entrepreneurship journey for a while now and in fact, for many years prior as well. For example, I was at a startup that was acquired by by dance, which owns TikTok. And then I ran design at TikTok for a couple of years. And so what did those experiences teach you? I think for the most part, resilience in general, running a business is hard and tech startups are competitive and hard as well. But a lot of those values, I think I learned growing up here as well and problem solving and a lot of these different traits I think were developed as a youngster here. And so did you folks and mentors who just said go for it? Yeah, I think there's definitely been a lot of mentors and coaches over the years. And I think in general, it's just been the mentality of believing that I could do something bigger than myself and outside of my comfort zone.

5:11And then what about you? Yeah, I think that growing up, at least I always felt like, oh, the mainland is a big scary place. You know what, it took going to the mainland and realizing, actually, we can do this. And I know that oftentimes the narrative around children from Hawaii moving to the mainland is viewed as a bad thing, brain drain, what happens to our children. But to some extent, look, these kids, if we raise them right, will always have the values and the desire to come back to Hawaii. And so there can be nothing more powerful than having those kids with the mainland experience with the networks, the capabilities, experiences, taking that and then bringing back home and just making good on it here. Yeah, we often hear folks say, go away, see what you can learn and hopefully you'll come back. And I've heard, oh, go away for at least 10 years. But I don't know. I mean, were there particular teachers that just said, go for it, go to the mainland. Yeah. So for me, actually, I think about my mom. So my mom is an immigrant from Taiwan. And so you moved here in her 20s. Her English wasn't so good. So her first job was selling sun rail stationery, door to door.

6:12And for my screwing up, it was always very clear. A couple of things were very clear from my experience. But one was this idea as Brent just described, you've got it. You've got to try it your best, right? Whatever Brent and I do, they may be cool, but look, I'm never going to beat what my mom did. I'm never going to beat what my grandfather did with starting pet land. These are some people who have much tougher experiences than we've had. And so I think it was for me at least, it's very hard to beat, so that firsthand experience of witnessing what they've accomplished. And then you both have children. So how do you look at raising them and keeping their mind open to what's possible? I think that's been changing quite a bit for me, especially as I dabble in the AI tools and kind of understand, you know, where the technology is heading. You know, I think for them, it's valuable to learn how to learn, right? And on their own and to be able to adapt quickly. So that's some of the things that I hope for them over the coming years is to really just get a sense of learning on their own, not necessarily needed to be taught by someone,

7:17but to understand how to kind of learn for themselves. Maybe the surprising fact that I learned is that for my friend, Olden Lagon, is that MIT, no longer offers computer science as a standalone major. Because computer science has now become so commoditized, the act of writing code has become such a commodity thanks to these AI tools. You know, anyone can do it. As a result, probably one of the schools that invented the concept of a computer science major no longer offers it standalone. So I think there's a tremendous opportunity here for people like us who don't know how to code to take up these tools and just build things with them. Okay, but we often hear with AI that it gets it wrong or can we get some guardrails on ethics? So I don't know. How does that factor in? I think this is where it comes back to, you know, this core point around the local values. I think you do want people who are grounded and with care and who really do feel a strong attention and affiliation with people here so that those tools are used correctly. Did you ever think with either of your businesses where you got to a point where like, oh, man,

8:19I need to hang this up. I made a mistake. I think that happened daily, definitely. Definitely. It's a lot longer and harder journey. I think then people realize like when you start and there's different challenges that come up weekly, monthly daily. Would you have considered yourself a risk taker when you were growing up? I think so. I mean, I was always interested in business and creating things. So I definitely think I had the risk taker component, but I also saw it as even more of a risk. If I didn't do these things and didn't try and then what about you, Richie? Oh, that's so funny. I am the opposite of a risk taker. I don't like risks at all. But I do agree with the last thing that Brent said, which is that I do feel that to some extent, not taking that risk for me was going to be the bigger risk, especially when I was in my 20s. Yeah. I bet I'm thinking, oh gosh, you had a family's business, right? And you could have maybe taken that route, but you didn't. Yeah. I just felt like, you know, it's still my father's business, still never my business,

9:22right? If you're going to take your own destiny to your own hands, this would be the opportunity. Right. So you made it mine. Yeah. You got it. So what advice would you give folks out there when it comes to our economy, because things are a bit shaky right now, and we're trying to figure out what's going to work. We can't rely just on tourism, and we need a diversifying. We've been saying that forever, but how do we bring the next generation up and keep a white you white, but yet make a white you successful? So Brent is going to have a great example of this, but I would say there's one thing that I would love people to try is to download Cloud for Desktop and spend it one Saturday afternoon just building things with it. I think what you realize is very quickly is that we've all have superpowers now available to us at the tip of our fingertips, but 99% of us haven't tried them yet. I definitely agree. The example that comes to mind is I have a friend who's family owns a dental practice here, and I showed him the power of Cloud over a weekend, and the following weekend he

10:29did a project with his son, and they re-architected all of their dental practice software, and they were able to eliminate $1,500 worth of costs to the dental practice per month in a weekend, just by using this tool that costs $20 to $100 a month. Okay, maybe we should take a few steps back for folks who do not know what Cloud is. So Cloud is a software tool that you can download for free now from a company called Anthropic. So there's the folks that made the headlines for the DOD, but there's a reason why the DOD was so contentious about the software. It is extremely powerful, and any one of us can download it for free today. Okay, so we need to just play with Cloud over the weekend. Absolutely, and then I think each one of us, we all have our unique experiences, our unique insights around what the problems are that we, as a family face, as a society face, and we can start easily seeing where these software tools can plug in, and applying our values in these applications. But we've got to try these superpowers first. If we don't try them, we'll never be able to do the build things here.

11:31What do you think is the biggest barrier to us constructing a more resilient economy? I think that we oftentimes have a feeling that we can't do it. And I remember those a wonderful piece that was written in Civil Beats, a 10 years ago, that talked about how YKQ, once upon a time, was not AB Tourist Mecca, obviously. And so someone had to create the political world to create the all the way canal, which then, of course, made the swamp line into usable land. Right? That took vision and some guts, and not to mention a ton of resources to build. But from a societal standpoint, look, Hawaii at that point was mostly agriculture, which, you know, some, anyway, those were not the easiest jobs to be working. And to transition from an agricultural-based society to a tourism-based society, yes, tourism has its problems, but certainly it's enriched our, I think, our islands quite a bit to have tourism as part of that portfolio of our economy. And so if we think about that next step we need to be taking, I think that's where it gets interesting, but I do think that these AI tools have a tremendous potential in helping

12:32us to get there. Yeah, because, you know, we've heard calls from folks throughout the community that we need to believe in ourselves. We need, we're out in the middle of the Pacific, but we just need to nurture the talent and get it, I guess, the first time and not do the same thing over and over again. Yeah, I think that's where the AI leverage comes into play here. Every person has unique experiences, and they probably have a problem in their daily lives that they can solve leveraging AI. And I think that's where a lot of these new small businesses or tech-enabled businesses might come from. It's the little problem that you have that you're repeating every day that you can build a small tool for, and maybe based on that, that can actually be turned into a small business. I'm going to try to sell you on this, Kathy, because I think it's all you on this. I'm not going to sell the other people here. So I'm imagining on any given day, you might have five interviews with folks. So like, what you could do if you have cloud is you plug it into your calendar. Every night at 12 a.m., it's going to look through and see if five different interviews

13:35are going to do, and then it can research for you all the different people and then even generate some questions that might be relevant. And then you wake up to your inbox in the morning at 7 a.m., there's an email for you with five different documents for you to open up that has all of the background plus some questions for you to think about. And like, that's the sort of thing cloud can do that for you in an afternoon if you want to build that. Does my homework at least for now and then you know, you can test it. OK. Well, what's next for you, gentlemen, since you've reached this point in your careers, you're young. You guys are young. I think it's a moment of reflection. I think that there is an opportunity to examine where is it that we can be most helpful to Hawaii. Right? It's going to be from an energy standpoint, from a tech standpoint. I like Brent and I both strongly believe that from at least in the tech world, Hawaii is that a, I guess we all are at a very unique moment where there's a tremendous amount of opportunity, but there's also a tremendous amount of threat. Right? For every one of those dental practices that Brent's talking to that's figured out how to use AI to make their business better, there are 500 of those on the mainland that are

14:38figuring this out and realizing, hey, actually, if I can do sport my own dental practice, maybe there's the one down the street I can sell this to. Maybe I can do the sale to next date over. And if we are not able to keep up with this in Hawaii, I worry for what this is going to mean for us economically, because there will be a lot of competitors in the mainland who are going to be coming in very soon if not already. So we're going to fall behind. We are. All right. Anything else you want to leave our listeners with? I would say just, just get out there and try things, right? So take the first step, you know, down on the software, open it and tell it your problem and have it solve it. I think it's as easy as that to get started. That was Rich Matsui and Brent Akamini talking about the recent sales of their startup tech businesses to national companies. Their startups were KWH Analytics and VenoVest, the interview originally aired March of 2021-26.

16:00Part of official intelligence coming to a parking garage near you, you may have noticed that parking garages around the state are going ticketless. Chances are you've been paying on your phone instead. The push to revolutionized parking with AI is being led by a company called Metropolis. Co-founder Courtney Fukuda is from Hawaii. Her company has quickly become the largest parking network in North America and secured more than a billion dollars in funding recently. Fukuda spoke with the conversations Maddie Bender about what her company does and her visions for an AI integrated future. Describe for our listeners what Metropolis is doing on the ground, what problem is it solving? For sure, I would say first and foremost, or at least most handgobly, we at Metropolis, we use artificial intelligence and computer vision to eliminate the friction of parking. When you park at a Metropolis garage, you just drive in, you drive out, it works, there's no tickets, there are no gates, there's no cash. That's the experience that we've enabled.

17:01Fundamentally, we're building artificial intelligence for the real world broadly. We use computer vision as the basis to power these frictionless personalized experiences. We started with parking because it's ubiquitous and it remains honestly, pretty hopelessly analog. Now, we've become the largest operator of parking garages in North America. We managed about 4,500 locations and recently, as you experienced, expanded to Hawaii, which has been super special. We do salt at Kakakako in January in partnership with Hawaii DOT. We actually deployed our technology to Hilo and Kona airports and so their travelers can just drive in, drive out. We've had almost 100,000 visitors since we've taken over and I think folks seem to be liking the experience. We said it's 85%, and we're bringing on about 10,000 new Metropolis members in Hawaii every single month. So, it's a thriving expansion geography for us for sure. CSAT customer satisfaction.

18:02I feel like people are familiar with the analog system of you drive into a parking garage, you press a button, you take a ticket, and then you cross your fingers and hope that nothing goes wrong with that machine. When you talk about computer vision, before our eyes glaze over, I really want to dig into what that actually means. There are these little cameras as you're driving into a parking structure, and how does that recognize who you are and link up to a payment account so that you can just seamlessly drive in and drive out? For sure. At its base, we have built camera technology that we install to your point at the entry and the exit of every parking garage. It recognizes unique features of your car. An obvious point would be your license plate, of course, but actually, even if your license plate is obstructed and you have a bike rack or there's mud on your license plate or something else, it can recognize your vehicle more holistically.

19:04It takes what we call a vehicle fingerprint, if you will. And if you've never parked at a metropolis garage, you would still just drive in. You might see signage that says, we're a little different here or just drive in. And when you park, you would probably see signage in the garage with a QR code that says, is this your first time sign up? Admittedly, you do need to create a profile where you scan the QR code, you put in your license plate, your credit card number, and a phone number. Once you do that the first time, you can then go in and out of any metropolis garage anywhere without having to do anything, which is the nice thing. So I would say the experience from visit number two onward is special. The first one, yes, there is some friction involved. But at the end of the day, we are just essentially triggering in our system an entry event when you park and then an exit event when you leave. And because you have payment that you've associated with your vehicle, you've essentially turned your car into your wallet. And so when you drive out, the gate automatically bends, and by the time you get to the curb,

20:06you get a text message receipt with your charges. And then when you come back and visit a different metropolis, you'll enter, you'll get a text message that says, welcome back to Metropolis, you just park, and then you drive out what you're done. And where is some of this vehicle recognition data stored? Because people in the consumer privacy space, the tech privacy spaces have raised concerns with companies like Flock or Ring, which do impart this camera surveillance and identification using AI tools. Ring had a ad during the Super Bowl, which scared a lot of people about, you know, they're tapping into your doorbell camera to find a lost pet. What do you do with the data of people's vehicles? It's a really important question. And actually, I think that there's an important differentiator between a company like Flock and a company like Metropolis. In our view, surveillance watches and recognition serves. And so from our perspective, everything is opt-in, it's permission-based, it's privacy

21:09first. And the objective is to eliminate the friction points in people's lives so that they can go on and do things that matter, right? Nobody's actually going to a parking garage because they want to experience a parking session. They're going because they're going to meet their friends at the restaurant or they're going because they're going to their kids' recital or they're going because they have to go to the dentist appointment or whatever it might be, parking should be a piece of the journey that doesn't create all of the frustration that you typically associate with a parking experience. And so because of that, we're not doing it as surveillance. We're not taking some sort of video feed. We're recognizing an entry event and an exit event. We don't sell any of that data. All of this, you know, we take security so seriously. We've built it into every step of our engineering system. Of course, we're fully compliant with all of the federal and state privacy laws, but more importantly, we don't collect this data to sell it. We do it so that we can train our models to better recognize vehicles and enable the

22:09seamless experience first in parking and then anywhere else where there might be a retail transaction from your car. So you can imagine we're starting to work with partners to deploy our technology in quick serve fast food, right? So think about an experience driving at any fast food chain. You typically stop at one window to order your food, a second window to pay for your food, your third window to pick up your food. If you can just deploy our technology, you've already connected payment to your vehicle, you can just skip those two steps, pick up your food and go. The same is true at a gas station or a car wash or a tool booth. You know, these are not areas that work live today, but it's the natural extension of our technology with the core objective of making people's lives better, not to surveil, if you will. Sure. I appreciate that clarification. I do have to ask a follow up on what you just said, though, and that's the replacement of human jobs, right? So if you see this natural extension of your technology in drive-throughs or at car washes, those are places that are currently staffed by workers, what happens to those

23:15people? It's a really real and important question, I think broadly speaking, automation, in my opinion, shifts jobs more than it eliminates them. You know, obviously there are different roles that would be impacted more or less with artificial intelligence and with technology broadly. But one line that's one of my colleagues said recently is like, your job is not going to be replaced by AI. Your job might be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI. I really think AI and technological advancements are enabling greater productivity and enabling us to do more and contribute more as opposed to just focus on cost cutting or eliminating jobs that are necessary. I would say at Metropolis, specifically, as we think about growing our presence, it's absolutely our goal to create value locally, not just to deploy our technology and leave. And so that's a conversation that I'm personally actively a part of today.

24:15We have about 100 employees in the state. I'm excited to continue to bring on more employees as we're able to expand our presence to more and more garages and potentially outside of garages. And so I think, you know, to your point, there will be a meaningful shift in the types of work that people are employed to do. But I fundamentally think that AI creates more capacity for people to do things they couldn't have otherwise done, as opposed to saying, because in my opinion, it's very much science fiction that robots are just going to take over. I do, though, as we wrap up, want to ask two sides of one question, which is what is Metropolis doing in Hawaii? And then what could Metropolis do in Hawaii? What do you see as the vision for Metropolis in, say, a couple years time? I think back on, you're saying, this is the largest operator of parking facilities in North America. That is wild. And that happened really quickly.

25:17It did happen really quickly. And we certainly feel very lucky for how all of that has come together. As I think about Hawaii, I think there are unique infrastructure challenges to Hawaii, right? There's the geography, sustainability pressures, tourism, dependent economy. I think those are the constraints that make technology like ours more important, not less. I think about the hospitality sector and how can we use technology to make our state even more inviting to folks who are visiting? How do we make sure that we are using it to actively make the lives of the people who are from and live in Hawaii better? How do we think about employing them at places like Metropolis? We're not homegrown in Hawaii, but now that we've been able to expand there, we're able to hire more locally. So those are all things that I'm very excited to do, and I think are relevant. I think Hawaii needs to invest even more in technology than it has, not to suggest. I actually don't think it's necessarily so far behind. I think the pieces are there, and we just need to get the flywheel spinning.

26:21And so what can Metropolis do specifically? I think we can operate at the state and local levels at the state level. We are already partnering as a Department of Transportation. That's been a very positive relationship for ours, and how can we think about making this more accessible to locals who are parking their cars in order to go and live their lives? But on the very local level, we can try to engage in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. We can work with the accelerators. We can bring the talent that we've been able to foster and develop across our almost 20,000 employees, or I guess slightly above 20,000 employees, bring that back to the state and figure out ways, you know, I think there are a lot of people who've been successful in technology that are looking for, that have deep roots or connections to Hawaii that are really looking for meaningful ways to give back or to reconnect. And I think that having dialogue like this, recognizing the real impact that technology

27:24companies are having on the way locals live their lives and allowing them to participate in building that would be really valuable and it's something that I'm looking forward to. Courtney Fukuda, thank you so much for taking the time today. Of course, thank you for having me. That was Metropolis co-founder Courtney Fukuda and HPR's Maddie Bender. Metropolis currently manages parking at locations including the Hilo and Kona airports and salt at Kaka-Ako. The next launch is at the former Goldbond building, 677 Alamwana in Kaka-Ako. If you're just joining the conversation, we're airing a special broadcast about local tech innovation in Hawaii. Stay with us, we'll be right back after a break. Support for HPR comes from the Kim Coco Fund for Justice of the Iwo Moto Family Foundation,

28:30partnering with Hawaii Ulo Co-operative, local farmers strengthening food security through production methods designed to be environmentally sustainable. Aloha, this is Meredith Artley, the CEO of Hawaii Public Radio. Since becoming 100% community supported, your Aloha continues to amaze us. About 1,000 of you helped us meet and beat our goal of $550,000 during our spring campaign. Mahalo to all of you who gave and to those who still may, go to Hawaii Public Radio.org. Let's move forward together. Support for HPR comes from the Honolulu Museum of Art, presenting Ley Day with Raya Taya Helm and Friends, a night of music, hula, art, and food may first. Tickets at HonoluluMuseum.org

29:45Welcome back to the conversation I'm Catherine Cruz. Today's Honolulu Show showcases stories about Hawaii's technology industry. Marine Conservation and Hawaii is getting some help from artificial intelligence. Whale Spotter does what it sounds like. It's a way for ships to avoid hitting and killing whales. Last year, Madison announced it would be the first container shipping company to use the technology. And 10 years ago, some of the key testing of Whale Spotter was done off the coast of Hawaii. HPR's Bill Dorman sat down in February with Daniel Zitterbart, one of the inventors of the technology that offers hope to quite literally save the whales by reducing whale strikes. How much of an issue are whale strikes these days? Whale strikes are one of the largest or the largest factor for death of large boolean whales worldwide.

30:45What kind of numbers are you talking about? This is very estimated. It's really difficult to measure how many whales are struck by vessels every year. The estimate is around 10,000, more than 10,000 per year, on a global scale. On the west coast of the United States, the estimate is about 80 per year, with a fatally struck by a vessel. And in layman's terms, what your invention really does is figure out a better way to tell where whales are around a ship. Yes, so Whale Spotter is what the name says. It spots whales. It's a camera system combined with an AI, but you can put on a vessel, you can put it on a construction side, and it looks out at the ocean, and it looks for surfacing whales and measures the apparent temperature contrast between a whale spout or its body and the water surface. And the most prevalent use is on whale strike itself, as we put it on boats, on large vessels, on small vessels,

31:47and it can detect the whale ahead of the boat in several nautical miles distance and alert captains in time about the animal being there so they can take evasive action if the whale is in the path of the vessel. You were talking about the distance involved in that, because again, this is not steering ships like this is not like running a sports car. You need some time and you need some distance to make that judgment. Yes, one of the key factors of the whale spotter technology is that we can do those detections very far out. For such a technology to be useful, you need to detect the whale at least in about half to one mile distance, ideally further, which gives you a few minutes to make a course correction of a few degrees. With that distance, that's fine. If you would detect the whale at 600 feet ahead and your vessel's 300 feet long, the moment you touch the steering wheel, you're already on top of the whale, right? That wouldn't be helpful at all. So one key part of it is that it can work and works reliably in such long distances that is actually the technology is useful for navigation and mitigation purposes for captains.

33:01And you're a research scientist. You worked through Woods Hole Ocean Graphic Institute, World Renowned Institution, but you did a lot of work on this in and around Hawaii. Talk about that a bit. So after the first couple of years where we trial this technology in cold waters, mostly in the Antarctic and in the polar oceans, we wanted to see, is there an impact of water temperature on the efficacy of the technology? Hawaii was a great location. You have humpback wheels around in spring. It's just 10 years ago where we actually have been here doing those studies. And so we spend about three weeks in two locations on Hawaii, where you had a great view onto the ocean from the coastline, measuring whales moving in and out of the field of view of our camera, adescent with marine mammal observers, people like me looking out at the ocean and seeing, okay, there was a whale. And then we compared, did the camera system and the AI detect the whale, the human did, and vice versa. So we knew how well can the technology work, and we did it in two locations to actually get the different weather.

34:04Right, you had beautiful weather and poipu and then much rougher weather on the north shore of Hawaii. And so we would get impact of waves, impact of wind, all those covariates which need to be studied to see if that technology can actually work on every day use on a boat. You talked also about how whale watching, which folks know, differently done for your technology, technology you were working with in a migratory setting, then it is in a spawning area. Talk a bit about that. So before we came to Hawaii, we actually were in Australia. We thought, okay, I thought, okay, where's the East Australian humpback whale migration. So you have about 30,000 animals passing by an observation location we chose, and we thought that would be the ideal place to be. But it turned out that if you want to do what we call a double blind survey, trying to figure out the efficacy of human versus machine and vice versa, and the human knows where the animals are coming from, they don't keep scanning the entirety of the ocean around them.

35:08They just know to look exactly around the migratory part of where the animals are moving into the field of you. One spot, it's a narrow field division. Exactly, and they don't have to look anywhere else. So the humans saw everything and of course that was not representative of reality because in reality, if you're on a vessel, the whales are all around you, especially if you use that technology for noise impact mitigation and not just for vessel strike. And this is something that is now beyond the theoretical, this is in use. Matson now uses this on its ships and the efficacy has been proven. Yes, so the research phase ended at about, I would say, three, four years ago, when we then have done all the tests, and since then, and Matson was instrumental in that, we went from having a prototype to having a product. That is manufactured by a contract manufacturer that is repeatable, that can be operated by a captain, that can be installed by the people on the vessel.

36:08It doesn't need the expert scientists behind it anymore. It's marine grade, it can survive many, many years on a vessel, we tested that. We have had one on a vessel for six, six, four years, I think, so far. And Matson helped a lot in that process of getting it from being a prototype to actually being a product. And so they are the very first large scale adopter of that technology. And we see them use it whenever we wear a whale in front of their vessels. The use of AI and the speed with which you're able to determine, yes, that's a whale, this is the distance. Talk about how that has played such a crucial role. So the system generally works like there is a computer model, you can call it AI or machine learning doesn't matter. Analyzes the video stream for whale blow like signatures, which we trained it with. And when it detects something, it might be a whale blow or it might be a false alert. And because we want to detect whales very far out in the distance, we tune the AI to be optimistic.

37:13It means we have false alerts, but captains don't like false alerts. If you provide a captain, even a one false alert per day, they will say, oh, that thing doesn't work and turn it on. Not reliable, not reliable, correct? We want to be reliable, but we want to be reliable in both directions, right? Not missing any whale, because that couldn't fatal if somebody thinks there is none, but there is one, but also not providing false positives. And that's actually, that's basically impossible with one model. What we do is we use a human expert to verify every single detection before we show it to the captains, and we do that very fast in about 30 seconds. So every whale detection that is made is being sent to the cloud, where one of our, we call them, sporters or expert verifiers. Look at those, say, yes, there was a whale or, oh, no, there was a false alert. And then if it was a whale, it gets sent back to the captains and the round trip time for that is about 30 seconds. The good thing about that is every single time that happens, we use that new data to train and make our AI better and better and better, so that we will not have to scale the number of people looking at screens overall.

38:23The computer model gets better, and it allows us to detect whales even further out, because we can reduce our detection thresholds. Interesting. So 10 years ago, you were in Hawaii doing research, now you're back in Hawaii, what's brought you back this time, right? We're actually having a meeting with Madsen this week to present the data we collected, and we're having the board meeting of our world's broader company also here, because it's close to them. So that brought us all here to Hawaii, and it's always, it's always nice to be here. What comes next or what would you see to me and to us, I think next comes scaling. So we know the technology works, what we need to achieve is not have it on 110 or 50 vessels, we want to have it on 1000 or 2000 or 3000. The more ships that carry that technology, the more impact we have. We welds borders, a mission-driven company. Our mission is to protect whales while making the coexistence between whales and vessels possible. We need vessels for our economy, so both have to work together. And they were both best together, if the largest majority, the largest number of vessels is a Kipelva technology, because then they can also share that information amongst each other, allowing us to create something like a real-time well-distribution map in the ocean, so vessels could no even further out.

39:45Oh, there's a big group down here. Let's just make the turn right now, so we give them ample space. That was HPR's Bill Dorman talking with Daniel Zitterbart. Zitterbart is the co-inventor of the whale spotter system. It uses artificial intelligence to help avoid hitting whales in the open ocean. Matzen has invested a million dollars into the development of whale detection cameras, and the technology is now being used on some Matzen ships, on routes in Alaska and Hawaii. We close out our Hanahose show today highlighting purple Maya. For the last 12 years, the local nonprofit has worked to empower the next generation of Hawaii's technology problem solvers.

40:47Next month, it hosts the A.O. Ho Fest, grounded in culture and innovation. Purple Maya began in 2014 with the program to teach youth how to code. Since then, it's built programs around entrepreneurship and design for local businesses. Its mission also includes a workforce training program for entry-level tech careers. We Hanahose interview where HPR's Russell Subiano talk to co-founder and CEO, Donovan Keeloha, about its first 10 years blending emerging technology with cultural values. If you look at our history, we were quick to adopt new technologies, whether they be the printing press or other kinds of things, right, and made it uniquely our own. And so I think we have a legacy history of adopting new things in order to serve our needs. And so I think there's no different with technology and technology advances rapidly. But the mindsets, I guess the world view that we bring the lousies to look at those technologies a little bit differently, and figure out how they could help to amplify what we're doing.

41:57If they're not necessarily the end all be all right, they're just a means to help serve communities, LaHoui needs, oi needs, my background and my career has always sort of been in tech, but also kind of growing in community and having been brought up that way. I don't know, I kind of always thought as not being sort of two separate things, but just being, you know, an additional identity that we carry. And so, you know, try to keep a low profile and not pay too much attention to like a chatter that's going about, because our intention is to serve, right, our intention is to empower, educate, serve and help advance. Now, that said, you know, we do look for and like enjoy collaborations with number of Hawaiian organizations, right. And so in that way, that kind of acts as guardrails, if you will, to just help make sure that we're not advancing too far out.

42:57Right. And so I think just being embedded in the community, having good relationships and collaborations with other Hawaiian organizations, I think help provide additional sets of frameworks, rails, if you will, that help guide the work. But then at the same time too, right, we got to be, I think just the challenges that we face today, we've just got to be bold in our thinking about how we can, again, leverage technology for the purposes of serving our community. What are some of the examples of how your organizations programs have impacted Kanaka Maoli and other Hawaii people since its inception. Do you have like a story about someone you were able to help or a company you were able to help take to the next level or someone that was able to incorporate your curriculum successfully. Yeah, there's a bunch of different stories and I enjoy these right because like we've gone from one school to many schools, a bunch of different programs and just hearing stories in the wild just makes me really happy.

43:57So in our workforce training program, we had a young man who was at a time for time homeless. He had heard about the program, came through, applied himself and was able to graduate and then go on and pick up a hundred thousand dollar, you know, a job that paid him over six figures. Wow, into this day he still sends us nice complimentary notes about how it's changed his life and he's doing well now. So pretty stoked about that there are a number of those kinds of other stories to in that program of folks who were maybe in services hospitality industry who had heard about the program, came through, did the work, got their certification and made the transition into tech and are doing well now, working remotely, working in tech. In our youth education program, you know, we had a young woman who came to us started working with us. I think when she was a sophomore in school, she was like an intern, learning about entrepreneurship and she stayed with us along the way. She became a junior, who helped in the teach classes.

44:58She eventually taught her own classes as part of a team of girls who wanted to teach robotics in their own way, which I thought was cool. So she had her own class. She went on to study computer science at USC. We helped her think in a way land internship at Apple by connecting her with resources there did well. She got picked up again for a second summer working as an intern at Apple and you know, we just finished a couple of months ago. We took a group of our scholarship winners, including her on a trip to the Bay area mainly to just provide more networking opportunities to expand. Build their social capital and just see what kinds of companies and like careers there are out there feel like the future is really bright with her. And then, you know, on the entrepreneurship side, we have a number of companies that we've helped grow, hire more people, you know, create more positive impact in the community.

45:59And it may be one that's really interesting and maybe speaks to the ambition, future ambition organization, combining culture and tech and impact. You know, we helped incubate a company called Hohonu. So it was actually spun out of the university and when we had met the company, they were working with local EU practitioners to help them become more quantitative with taking care of their local. So we worked closely with the founder, actually helped to define his co founder first engineer. And so the company became a proper company raised venture capital financing and has a product that they're marketing and selling their sensors are up and down these post generating environmental data that governments, news, municipalities, even the federal government are using in helping to understand what is happening at a particular location. And the cool thing is that it continues to still be tied to community. And so when we put that company together, we made it a point that community should be a co owner of the company.

47:05And so there's a who either represents a number of the fish ponds there, an actual owner of the company sitting on the cap table. And so yeah, that company is doing well. It's growing as the threat of climate change just continues to grow right companies like this is just going to be more in need to help. So I feel like again, the way that we brought up in Hawaii, I think we just have a natural orientation to like solving problems locally using some ingenuity, some tech tools are focused on taking care of this place in our people. And that can just turn into incredible economic opportunities. And so that's an example of a company that's the big things that we hope to do more of that in the future. Can you give our listeners some details about how future fundraisers, how future funding investments will help you guys achieve your vision in the next 10 years? Yeah, this is our 10 year anniversary. And so to commemorate it, we are putting on a big party. I think we use this as an opportunity to just showcase all Ike, if you will, the past year.

48:10And in this case, the past 10 years of progress and growth of the programs and our participants. And so I think it's a unique opportunity to see how the organization is developed and kinds of programs and different kinds of programs that we operate across the range of learners. You know, it is an effort to raise money to fund those programs. But I think more importantly, it's just to show a light on what's possible if you just start small and just keep building, keep serving, and then just good things happen. That was Purple Maya's Donovan Keeloha talking with HPR's Brussels Subiano. This segment originally aired in 2024, marking the nonprofits 10th anniversary. Purple Maya Hose A.O. Fest, 2026, which runs May 1st through the 3rd. We'll share the link for information and tickets on HawaiiPublicRadio.org after the show. And that does it for today's special showcase of innovation and technology in Hawaii.

49:24We would like to hear from you, color chalkback line in, leave us your comments. Here's that number. 808-792-8217. You can also email us at talkback at HawaiiPublicRadio.org. You can listen back to our shows on the conversation page of our website, HawaiiPublicRadio.org, and you can find us as a podcast on Spotify or Apple. Our program is produced by Maddie Bender, Lilian Song, and Kevin Allen with support from Savannah Harrowman Poat and the HPR Digital Team. Our backward quiz theme written for us by John D'Amello are theme music courtesy of Gypsy 808. I'm Catherine Cruz, Join us on Monday, pick up the conversation. We'll see you on Monday, pick up the conversation.