Episodios

  • LoRa, entrepreneurship, and there's something about IOT and the Netherlands with Wienke Giezeman of the Things Network

    LoRa, entrepreneurship, and there's something about IOT and the Netherlands with Wienke Giezeman of the Things Network
    Dec 14 2020

    In this episode of The IoT Unicorn podcast, Wienke Giezeman, CEO & Co-founder of The Things Network, discusses his work with LoRaWAN and IoT solutions across the globe.
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    37 m
  • Going Carbon Neutral Using Azure IoT with Remco Ploeg of Altius

    Going Carbon Neutral Using Azure IoT with Remco Ploeg of Altius
    Nov 30 2020
    In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Remco Ploeg of Altius discusses the challenges and opportunities of creating carbon neutral homes powered by Azure. Download Transcript Here Episode: 00:00 Pete:  Welcome to the IoT unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft. And this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So let's get started. Thank you, Remco, I appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us here. So you're actually based in the Netherlands, and I'm here in Bellevue, Washington, and through the magic of... I'm actually using the Squadcast platform right now to connect and record this, but... Welcome to the IoT Unicorn.   00:16 Remco: Thank you, Pete, for having me.   00:18 Pete: Great, so you're based in the Netherlands, and I've been there a bunch of times. I used to go there actually, when I would go to Barcelona for NWC, there was always like a flight at the crack of dawn from Barcelona, and I would transfer in the Netherlands to get back to Seattle. And then one year, I kinda got smart and I said, you know, I'm gonna go to Amsterdam the night before, get a good night's sleep, and then I'll take the 10 AM Direct to Seattle. So I've spent a bunch of those kind of layover nights in Amsterdam, so it's an awesome, awesome place, but... Are you from there originally?   00:52 Remco: Yes, I'm from Rotterdam, so that's the other big city in the Netherlands so that's south of Amsterdam.   00:58 Pete: I see.   01:00 Remco: And I was a lot I think also on the same plane as yourself, so I had to do a lot... To Seattle with the direct flight in the morning. So... And also coming back with the flight early in the morning in Amsterdam again.   01:12 Pete: Yeah, yeah.   01:14 Remco: So I'm based at the moment in Utrecht, in the middle of the country.   01:18 Pete: Okay. So you've been at Altius for about a year or two, a couple of years?   01:25 Remco: Yeah, a little bit, a little bit more than a year. And the beginning of this year, there was an acquisition of Altius by Avanade...   01:34 Pete: Yes.   01:34 Remco: So, I'm joining formally Avanade from the first of January, the coming year 2021. But already, I think for 6 months, I'm working side by side with my Avanade colleagues.   01:45 Pete: And so I know you've been... I know another thing, I did a little research is you were... Altius was named Microsoft's AI Partner of the Year, so that's a big deal. So tell me more about that. What is Altius in AI? What is the... Do you consider Altius an AI company or more of an IoT company that's using AI or how would you describe it?   02:08 Remco: Yeah, so if you look at Altius, we are at the moment, with 400 people in the UK, Netherlands, and India. We've got a full focus on data and AI, so that's also our focus. So IoT is more or less, no side-job but we saw that...   02:21 Pete: A means to an end.   02:23 Remco: A means to an end, exactly. And then started when I joined Altius so that's one and a half years ago with also combining AI with IoT, 'cause I think that that's a great combination that we have there.   02:36 Pete: Yeah, for sure. A lot of times that we've had folks from Qualcomm and other... More telecom-related, I think we had BT on here recently, and it was like the 5G plus AI plus IoT or pick your network that certainly becomes kind of a game-changer for what you can do with a little bit of data, over a large number of sensors or a lot of data... [02:58] ____.   02:58 Remco: I think, already at the moment, even without 5G, 5G is of course already rolling out, we can already do a lot with IoT.   03:11 Pete: Yeah, so actually interesting on that topic. You talk about IoT, so how much do you think with AI and IoT are you seeing on the Cloud versus the Edge, and how much experience are you getting now, are you seeing in a more of an emergence of Edge AI in addition to the cloud AI or what are you seeing there?   03:31 Remco: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know, 10 years ago, we were moving everything to the clouds, but now we see some of our clouds going back again, so I do a lot of projects around connected buildings. I think that's a great example with Edge computing, is the amount of sensors, especially in new buildings and smart buildings, it's so enormous that moving every data point to the cloud, it's sometimes technical, not possible, and the second, it's too expensive.   04:00 Pete: Right.   04:01 Remco: So we see there are movement back putting Edge devices in the building itself again, and also doing AI on the Edge device itself because of course what you don't want to do in a building is controlling lights in the cloud, for example, you want to control locally, if the internet connection is out there you want to still put on your lights on. And since a couple of years, we are also doing AI on the Edge and AI on the cloud, of course already a little bit longer, and we ...
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    28 m
  • Technology Leadership, Seagull Management, and the story of Project Pink with Robbie Bach

    Technology Leadership, Seagull Management, and the story of Project Pink with Robbie Bach
    Nov 16 2020
    In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, independent civic engineer and former Chief Xbox Officer at Microsoft, Robbie Bach, discusses teamwork and leadership in the tech space. Download Transcript Here 00:00 Pete Bernard: Welcome to the IoT unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft. And this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So let's get started.   [music]   00:23 PB: On this episode of the IoT unicorn, I chat with Robbie Bach, former Microsoft executive. He was there for about 22 years, he was the chief Xbox officer and drove that program for a long, long time. We talk about Xbox, Xbox Revisited the new book he wrote, we also talk about some other projects like Zoom and Microsoft Kin or what we call Project Pink, and just in general leadership principles and techniques for leading through ambiguity with a ton of technology, especially in the IoT space. So great Robbie, thanks a lot for taking the time to join us here on the IoT unicorn. First off, kind of disclaimer, the topics typically are IoT-oriented, [chuckle] but we're gonna take a little diversion today, but I think it's still gonna be germane and... So anyway, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to join us.   01:20 Robbie Bach: Happy to do it.   01:22 PB: Good, good. I don't know if there's a phone ringing there or something...   01:24 RB: Yeah, that's mine. [chuckle] We can start over if you like, that's a phone that I have no control over, it's actually the house phone ringing in my office.   01:34 PB: Oh, okay. That's alright. Don't worry about it we'll... It's part of a sincere authentic nature of the conversation, [chuckle] but I think one of the things... And I read your book, Xbox Revisited, which is cool, and I thought for today, one of the things that I thought was really germane was just talking about technology and leadership, or just leadership in general, and it was really fascinating to kinda read through your journey with leadership and the pluses and minuses and what you've learned about it. And I think in the IoT space, we're sort of like awash in technology. Before we started recording, I was explaining how I was futzing with my system and just too many pieces of tech, and a lot of companies, they have a tons of technology, there's no shortage, now we got 5G and LPWA and all these AI. But how do you take that ambiguous technologies swamp and actually provide some kind of leadership and guidance and structure or framework around thinking about things, so you can get things done and you can get organizations, especially big organizations, you can imagine, moving in the right direction. And I thought there was a lot in your book around Xbox Revisited that resonated with probably what a lot of companies are thinking about today, is like how do we navigate through some of the tech?   03:01 RB: The thing I always respond... I talk a lot about innovation, and I talk somewhat about that in Xbox Revisited, but I do a lot of it in the public speaking I do. And I talk about creativity and how do you come up with new ideas, and technology ends up being third on my list of things not first. And the things that come first are ironically, business model, because it turns out a huge portion of innovation actually happens in business models, and the second thing is experience and sort of how people interact with the technology, and then comes technology. And when something is technically lead, maybe it has a good sustainable business model and maybe it has a good experience, but maybe it doesn't, and that's why the first person to market with the technology doesn't always win. And my experience has been that a sustainable business with a great customer experience will beat somebody who has a great technology without a good experience, and so we tend to focus on those first two, first.   04:14 PB: Yeah, so when you... Probably you were going through this with the Xbox, was like, talking about the purpose, principles and priorities. I think I got that right?   04:27 RB: Yeah.   04:28 PB: So you manifested that with Xbox, are there other example you've seen where companies have been able to snap to a framework like that and get them moving in the right direction?   04:37 RB: Well, think about... One of the other companies I work with, is a company called Sonos, and they're really a great company, and they have amazing technology, they've got one of the best IP portfolios in the industry, they've done some very cool tech things, but they do not lead with technology, they absolutely don't. They lead with the experience, if you have somebody who has a Sonos system, they don't talk about the cool networking architecture that it has or how it makes sure to sync audio on a big TV screen and do surround sound easily. They talk about, "Oh God, it was so easy to set up and the music played and it sounded great." That's all ...
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    30 m
  • The Past, Present, and Future of 5G with Matt Chatterley and Tom Bennett of British Telecom

    The Past, Present, and Future of 5G with Matt Chatterley and Tom Bennett of British Telecom
    Nov 2 2020
    In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Matt Chatterley and Tom Bennett of British Telecom discuss some of the benefits and challenges of implementing 5G. Download Transcript Here  00:00 Pete Bernard: Welcome to the IoT Unicorn Podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft, and this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So let's get started.   [music]   00:21 PB: On this upcoming episode of the IoT Unicorn I have a great conversation with Tom Bennett and Matt Chatterley, both of British Telecom. And they explain to me what the term hospital pass means, we talk about some great British beer and all things 5G, past, present and future, and not just for iPhones. So please join us.   00:44 PB: Thanks, Tom and Matt, I'm gonna... This is actually an interesting milestone for us, this is the first time I've had two guests at once on the IoT Unicorn, and I think when I originally was thinking back about having you guys on the show... I've had lots of conversations with each of you individually, and also some really good conversations together and I thought, "Well, let's just get everybody on the horn here and talk about some things around 5G and stuff like that" so I appreciate you guys both making the time all the way from the UK to pipe in here and join us on the Unicorn, so thank you very much.   01:19 Tom Bennett: Thank you for the invite, yeah.   01:21 PB: Sure, sure. So maybe before we get into lots of acronyms and Telco stuff, well, maybe just give us a little bit of a back story. Maybe Tom and Matt about sort of... We're talking about BT, British Telecom, so that's quite a storied institution, and I know that you had worked at EE before that and stuff, maybe just give us a little bit of background about how did each of you get here to this point in time.   [laughter]   01:47 TB: How far back are we allowed to go?   01:50 PB: Oh, you know.   01:50 TB: 25 years, maybe not. So yeah, I joined this thing called 2G, it was a small company that started, anyway, that was 25 years ago. Matt and I, we started a little bit of history of space to EE. So EE is the largest and best mobile operator in the UK and it was formed 10 years ago from the merger of what was then the third and fourth place operators, so it was Orange and T-Mobile. Now by forming that merger it created not just a company, but great assets, and in fact it is number one by customer number. It also had the opportunity to go on to be the best from a network perspective and we did that, we were... In fact, Matt and I started to meet yourself, Pete, was eight years ago when we launched 4G and we were a year, year and a half ahead of the competition in the UK.   02:44 PB: That's right.   02:44 TB: And the rest is history from there. We launched 4G first in the UK, launched our new brand, EE and the rollout was phenomenal. From there, we hit top 10 cities, and then right now, I think our 4G coverage is just pushing 85%, 86% of the geography of the country, not just people, geography of the country, and that's kind of phenomenal eight years after launch. In fact, our launch anniversary is this November. This first week in November we launched. And yeah, that's where we started and then obviously BT, which has no mobile assets, BT originally was just the fixed operator. I've looked at this new EE upstart with its phenomenal 4G network and said, "Yeah, we want some of that." And four years ago Matt? Four years ago they bought us.   03:39 Matt Chatterley: [03:39] ____.   03:41 TB: We all moved in to BT and really that was very much a both commercially strategic and technologically kind of architecturally strategic decision because...   03:52 PB: Wow, that's cool. Something happened.   03:53 TB: Because as you roll forward, I'm sure you know, really it's about running forward with the best 4G and now 5G network, and it's a converse plate, it's how you leverage both assets together for the fixed and mobile network, and that's a very, very, very brief snapshot of where we started as third and fourth place operator and now we work for the largest Telco in the UK.   04:15 PB: Right. And how long have you and Matt been working together?   04:18 MC: It's far too long...   [laughter]   04:20 TB: Way too long, I mean we have counselling, it's a bit like a marriage.   04:24 PB: Good, good, with an HR benefit.   04:25 TB: [04:25] ____.   [laughter]   04:27 MC: At the start of the JV, I was actually in Deutsche Telekom, working for DT International, and then they wanted someone to go into the JV and the Clean Team where if it didn't work out, you get six months pay not to work and then, unfortunately, it did work out. So I've had [04:40] ____.   [laughter]   04:40 MC: Yeah, so I think we started right at the very beginning, didn't we Tom?   04:45 TB: Yeah, we did.   04:45 MC: When we figured out what the right approach would be to go to make devices work ...
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    28 m
  • Exploring the 5G + AI + IoT Wave with Rene Haas of Arm

    Exploring the 5G + AI + IoT Wave with Rene Haas of Arm
    Oct 5 2020
    In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Rene Haas, President Intellectual Property Group at Arm, discusses the development of edge devices and the 5G wave. Download Transcript Here 00:00 PETE BERNARD: Rene, thanks again for joining us here on the IoT Unicorn. I was trying to remember the last time actually we saw each other face-to-face. That's something that we do these days. I think it was Barcelona 2019 or something. It was a while ago. But again, thanks for joining us today. 00:23 RENE HAAS: You are welcome. I wasn't sure if it was CES of 2020, but... 00:28 PETE BERNARD: It could be. 00:28 RENE HAAS: Gosh, you might be right. Barcelona, 2019. My gosh, over 18 months ago. 00:32 PETE BERNARD: Yeah, that was a long time ago. Well, CES 2020 was our last... It was kind of the last hurrah for events, although going to Vegas always has its potential infection rates of all sorts of things going on there, but... Not in that case, but... Cool, yeah, no, it's good to see you again, and we've known each other for a little while and worked on some interesting projects, so it was great to have you on the show, and obviously very timely with the DevSummit coming up and some recent news that we'll talk about as well. But maybe you can give us and the listeners a little background on your journey to where you're at as President of Arm IP. 02:07 RENE HAAS: So my role at Arm is I run the IP products group. Our acronym is IPG, Intellectual Property Products Group, and that's the sales marketing development of all of our products, GPUs, CPUs, NPUs for the markets that we serve, the client market, infrastructure market, automotive autonomous and IoT. I am in the Bay Area now, but I've had a fun journey at Arm. I have spent seven years at Arm, but only a few years in the Bay Area. I was in Shanghai, China for two years, and I was in the UK for three, living in London, commuting to Cambridge. And I just came back to the Bay Area at the beginning of 2020, and... 02:50 PETE BERNARD: Are you an original California person or what's your... Where is your home base? 02:54 RENE HAAS: I'm originally from Upstate New York. Yeah, I'm, originally from Upstate New York. 02:58 PETE BERNARD: Wow, cool. 02:58 RENE HAAS: My dad was a Xerox guy, so I was a son of a Xerox guy working in... He was working in Rochester, New York, which is where I grew up. And then I came out to California in the mid-1990s, and I've been here ever since. 03:12 PETE BERNARD: I'm a New Jersey person myself, so that's something we have in common, the Tri-state area. Although Rochester is pretty far up state there. 03:21 RENE HAAS: Serious snow country. 03:22 PETE BERNARD: Serious, yes. Good, good. Excellent. So you've been at Arm for a while then, and you also spent a little bit of time at Nvidia. 03:31 RENE HAAS: I did, I did. I'm gonna pre-fetch probably your next set of questions, but before I spent... 03:37 PETE BERNARD: No pun intended. 03:38 RENE HAAS: Seven years at Arm I was with Nvidia for seven years doing a number of different roles there, but primarily in the notebook graphics space, GPUs, as well as Arm-based CPUs that went into all different types of laptops including the very first Surface that was running Windows 8 on Arm. 04:00 PETE BERNARD: Yes, those were the days. I had one of those. A lot of us up in Redmond had one of those. [chuckle] Unfortunately, not a lot of the other people had them. That was the problem. [chuckle] But, so cool. So now sort of full circle, just to touch upon that topic, Nvidia and Arm. For you, it's kind of break out the old badge, I guess... 04:20 RENE HAAS: Yeah. It's something that came live last Monday. Obviously, the rumors had been out for a number of weeks, so some people were surprised, but some people were not so surprised when it finally was announced to everyone actually last Sunday. It was supposed to be on Monday, and then we pulled it forward to Sunday. We're actually very excited about it at Arm, we think it's a really, really amazing opportunity. Nvidia is an amazing company, has done some fantastic things over the years obviously. And Arm efforts around client and data center, autonomous and such. When we think about what's going on in the next wave of computing where everything is gonna be touching something that is around artificial intelligence, I think the opportunities for the two companies to be a combined entity in this new area of computing, the opportunities are somewhat limitless. 05:17 RENE HAAS: So we're quite excited. Me, on a personal level, sometimes when these M&A things [05:21] ____ talking to the company on either side, there's a lot of questions of, "Do I know these folks? And can we really understand what their language is?" But for me, having spent equal amount of time in both places, I feel very fortunate to be in a position to be where we are on this, and it should be very exciting. And someone over there even pinged me not long after the announcement and said, "Hey, your ...
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    25 m
  • Lessons Learned on a Submarine, and the Heroic Internet, with Rob Tiffany from Ericsson

    Lessons Learned on a Submarine, and the Heroic Internet, with Rob Tiffany from Ericsson
    Sep 7 2020
    In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Rob Tiffany, VP and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson explores the development of 5G and LPWA technology for IoT solutions, what it looks like for Telco’s to be successful in the IoT space, and how the Internet is playing the hero during the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic. Download the Transcript Here   00:00 Pete Bernard: Great, so Rob, thanks for joining us today on the Unicorn, and really appreciate you taking the time. I was going to start by asking you a couple things about what your role is currently at Ericsson, kinda how you got there. I know that you and I did work together at Microsoft years ago back in the Windows Mobile days.   00:24 Rob Tiffany: Woo hoo.   00:25 PB: Good times, good times.   00:25 RT: Those were good times. Yep, absolutely. [chuckle]   00:28 PB: Yes. I thin, I think you were... Let's see, when did you stop working for Windows Mobile, like 2008 or something? Or is that...   00:38 RT: Yeah. And certainly by 2010 or around that timeframe I took an architect role in another group and probably started spending more time on Azure. I was at Microsoft for 12 years and so the first half was Mobile, Windows Mobile, CEE, Windows Phone. Second half was Azure, Azure IoT. And you know what? We had some good times in the Windows Mobile days when it was just us and BlackBerry slugging it out. We were making... When things like Exchange ActiveSync was a big deal to people.   01:21 PB: That's right, that was a big deal.   01:24 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then no doubt, when we rebooted and did Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 and all that, I used to do so many EBCs for mobility and you noticed a difference and you had to get really thick skin. [chuckle]   01:42 PB: Yes, yes, yes, I know. Well, I peeled off after six... I think, so I went on to Zune incubation, I did Kin and I did all kinds of weird phone things and went off into the wilderness for a while on that while everyone else finished up with Windows Phone, but...   02:00 RT: Oh my gosh.   02:01 PB: And I also noticed on your LinkedIn profile. So you went to SUNY Albany. Are you from that area originally or...   02:07 RT: You know what? I finished college on board a submarine, so when I was in the Navy driving subs I had what, maybe 30 or so hours to go to graduate, and so I've actually never set foot on the SUNY Albany campus...   02:26 PB: Oh, wild.   02:27 RT: But the military has programs with lots of different universities around the country and to show how old I really am, I was able to take college courses underway on the submarine using Pioneer LaserDiscs.   02:42 PB: Wow.   02:43 RT: For college instruction, if anybody remembers what that was. [laughter]   02:47 PB: Yeah, that is old school, that's old school.   02:50 RT: That is fully old school.   02:52 PB: I actually just dropped my daughter off at Bard, which is a little south of Albany, so I was just there like a week ago, so that's why I asked.   02:58 RT: Oh, okay.   02:58 PB: I saw that on your profile and I was like, "Oh, yeah." It's a cool area, the Adirondacks, the whole upstate New York thing is cool.   03:04 RT: I know. Absolutely. Yeah, I just dropped my daughter off at Arizona State last week.   03:09 PB: Yeah.   03:10 RT: It was a little warm down there.   03:11 PB: Yeah, I could imagine, I could imagine.   03:14 RT: To say the least. But you know what? I think everything started back then with submarines and teaching myself how to code and do databases, and when you think about IoT, you're just remoting information that you had on these local sensors and we were surrounded by sensors on the submarine. There's the obvious things like sonar and things like that and this higher frequency one to see what your depth is below the keel, but inside you had CO2 radiation, all kinds of gas sensors and things like that to make sure we were still alive, which was kind of a thing. [chuckle]   04:02 PB: Yeah, it's kind of important.   04:04 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.   04:06 PB: That's interesting. So you did the Microsoft thing and so you joined Ericsson a couple years ago, I think?   04:13 RT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did the Microsoft thing. I was recruited out of the Azure back when we were doing incubating Azure IT. There was that time... And actually Microsoft IoT stuff started in the embedded team with Intelligence System Service, but then I went to Hitachi actually to build an industrial IoT platform called Lumada, which was really interesting. But yes, I joined Ericsson a couple years ago. Up until recently, I split my time between Seattle and Stockholm. Normally I'd be in Kista, the Ericsson headquarters with the rest of my team. So yes, certainly disconnected these days.   05:00 PB: Yeah, interesting.   05:00 RT: And what Ericsson is doing in IoT is very different than my background both at Microsoft and Hitachi for sure, which was more data-focused, outcomes, analytics. Ericsson manages...
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    29 m
  • Powerful Lessons for Building a Scalable IoT Business with Lou Lutostanski from Avnet

    Powerful Lessons for Building a Scalable IoT Business with Lou Lutostanski from Avnet
    Aug 24 2020
    On this episode of The IoT Unicorn podcast, learn from Lou Lutostanski, VP of IoT at Avnet, as he discusses the evolution of IoT including the need to partner on solutions, especially at scale, lessons learned from years in IoT, and the ways IoT and AI can be leveraged specifically within the healthcare industry, including with remote telemedicine. Download the Transcript Here Pete Bernard: Welcome to the IoT Unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft. And this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So, let's get started. Pete Bernard: This week we are talking with Lou Lutostanski, who's the vice president of IoT at Avnet. Lou’s been in the business a while and he’s going to be talking about his journey there and also reflect a little bit on the lessons learned that he sees over and over again. And how can we work together to help mitigate some of those things. We’ll also talk a little bit about how things like national emergencies like the pandemic accelerate existing trends.  This was recorded actually only about a few weeks into quarantine back in March so an interesting perspective there. So please enjoy my conversation with Lou. Pete Bernard: So Lou, thanks again for taking the time to join us here on the IoT Unicorn. I know that we've been working together for a few months now, I think we met last June at the NXP Connects event for the first time. And, maybe you can give us a little background as to what you're currently doing at Avnet and maybe we can chat a little bit about how you got there and what that journey looks like. Lou Lutostanski: Sure. Well Pete, thanks for having me, I'm excited to be on your podcast. It was last year at the NXP event that we met and we've been working together quite frequently here over the last few months. But I'm currently the VP of IoT at Avnet. We're traditionally come from a historical industrial distribution business and we realized that the next wave in technologies was all around IoT. So I'm doing that now. But to go way, way back, my formal education was in electrical engineering at Purdue University. Pete Bernard: I see that, yes. I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile as we speak. Lou Lutostanski: Yeah. And I quickly discovered that my area of interest wasn't really in hardware and moles and electrons migrating across a PM junction, but more interest in software, all kinds of software. So there was a new technology in electronics when I went to school sweeping the land called microprocessors and I kind of fell in love with the 8080. So by the time I graduated college I had taken classes in computer system design, which is the equivalent of computer engineering before there was a name for it. I did a lot of embedded programming. I had written two pass assemblers for the PDP-11 processor in   C and wrote disk allocation systems for mainframe resource management. And I actually worked summers for my dad's company writing applications around accounts payable or accounts receivable, inventory management and work orders. So, I kind of loved all kinds of programming. Pete Bernard: Sure, sure. Cool. And yeah, it's interesting. I've had some guests on here, it's okay to refer to IoT as embedded systems because that's what we used to call it. But now it sounds a lot cooler. But it sounds like you had a lot of hands on experience with that through your career. So you ended up at Avnet, it says 2013, was that when you started at Avnet? Lou Lutostanski: Actually, I ended up at Avnet in earlier than that. 1987. Pete Bernard: Holy mackerel. Lou Lutostanski: Yeah. I came off a brief stint at IBM out of college went to work for my dad's company. He had a company that did industrial equipment and so I sold for him for a while before I moved back to Austin, Texas, where I had started with IBM. Love took me there, I married a girl from there, and got involved in the wonderful world of distribution. So, my first job was with Hallmark Electronics and I was a sales manager, or actually a system sales manager selling storage terminals, PCs, monitors, motors, and printers. And I did that job for about a year before I figured out all the action in industrial distribution was in the semiconductor world. So, I converted over to become one of the first field applications engineers in distribution for the Motorola line. And later on, I moved up to sales management in Dallas and moved back to Austin as branch manager. Around that time Avnet bought us. So that's where I became a member of the Avnet family, even though I started in '87, 1993 was when the acquisition happened. Pete Bernard: Wow, okay. You put your time in there. That's good. Lou Lutostanski: I did. And I floated through the ranks of VP area director until 2000 and that's when I went on my, what I'll refer to as a sabbatical. So I left for Motorola and after serving as a VP of global sales for both the HP account and later ...
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    28 m
  • Working Together to Intersect Technology, Healthcare and COVID-19 With Dr. David Rhew from Microsoft

    Working Together to Intersect Technology, Healthcare and COVID-19 With Dr. David Rhew from Microsoft
    Aug 10 2020
    In this episode of the IoT Unicorn Podcast, Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer & VP of Healthcare, Worldwide Commercial Business, from Microsoft, shares his experience navigating through today’s pandemic and the digital transformation of healthcare. Download the Transcript Here 00:00 Pete: Okay, well, we're here with Dr. David Rhew from Microsoft. David, really appreciate your time. We have a lot of things to talk about today, we're gonna try to squeeze it into the allotted time period, but thanks again for joining us. 00:14 Dr. David Rhew: Thanks, Pete, it's a real pleasure to be here. 00:16 Pete: Good, good. Yeah, and full transparency, something happened in the first conversation I had with David where it didn't record properly, so we're actually going through this one again. So it should be nice and well-practiced. So live and die by Teams, I guess. But anyway, David, so we, as I mentioned, chatted a couple times now, and you're actually fairly new to Microsoft. I think before we get into a lot of really interesting topics I think listeners wanna hear about around digital transformation of healthcare and what's going on with COVID-19 and Microsoft, maybe you can give us a little run-up to how did you end up here at Microsoft, and you've been here almost exactly a year now, so you can give us a little bit of background on yourself and your journey to Microsoft. 01:07 DR: Sure. Well, first of all, I'm a physician, I'm a healthcare researcher, and also a technologist. And really the combination of those three have evolved rather organically throughout my career. It's been remarkable how those three have converged to allow us to be able to start thinking about how healthcare can be used to improve health outcomes, or I should say how technology can be used to improve health outcomes, and really excited to be a part of that program here at Microsoft as we start launching technologies, predominantly cloud-based solutions with artificial intelligence to drive that. 01:45 DR: My story, I guess, begins when I was in college. I was thinking quite a bit about different types of ways that I could help people, and I guess my initial thought was helping people would probably be best served if I went to medical school, so did a curriculum, a pre-medical curriculum. And as part of that program, I think I gained a lot of the basic skills needed to be a doctor, but one of the things that I did also was I was curious about other types of activities and other types of skills. Technology was always a fascination. This was around... In the 1980s, and video games were pretty popular then. These are the arcade video games, not the ones that we typically use... 02:28 Pete: Yeah, the good ones. 02:29 DR: The classics, the Space Invaders, the Pac-Man, Mario, and I was fascinated by that. I just felt, what an incredible way for us to be able to start thinking about how we can not only spend our time, but also how we could use technology to create new experiences. And I started doing a lot of programming, in fact, I became a computer science major as well as a cellular and molecular biologist. And then I went to med school, and in med school there's not a whole lot of opportunity to use computers apart from a word processor, so I felt in many ways that that part of my career journey was put on hold. And it was on hold for a while because what I ended up doing is after I graduated from medical school, I went down a path of exploration in healthcare, specifically looking at ways that we could reduce variation and improve access to care and improve the overall quality of care. And it was done predominantly through what we referred to as guidelines. Turns out that if you were to go to a doctor in... Probably your local doctor, and you were to go to maybe survey the same type of... Ask another doctor across the country or even the globe how they would treat the same type of condition, you'll get a lot of different responses. 03:54 DR: And in fact, when they've done analyses, they've found that variation in care is pretty dramatic, even for things that have been proven to be beneficial. And what we learned in some of the investigations that I was a part of and others have been actively looking at is that a lot of that has to do with just the fact that we don't have mechanisms to remind clinicians to provide that right information at the right time. And I started building basically programs that would provide that right information at the right time. It was very manual. In many cases we had nurses and other clinicians run around the hospital, identifying patients, giving pieces of paper to doctors, saying, "Oh, by the way, your patient fulfils low-risk criteria, you could switch him from an IV antibiotic to an oral antibiotic and send them home," when traditionally, they might have stayed for another few days or maybe even longer. And we ran these programs, we found that it was highly effective. And not only did it reduce the ...
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