What is the long-term vision of the LightGrid
LightGrid will democratize the creation of video and still photography production in the studio and more casual environments, making it easy for businesses of any size or ordinary people with limited production budgets to produce high-quality imagery.
Further, we intend to analyze, structure and deliver that visual content in ways that transform it from being a long-form view-only medium to a fine-grained, interactive, and conversational one. This makes a video more compelling and effective for individuals to learn from and supports communities who can develop and refine complex ideas in video discourse.
What problem are we solving and for whom? Who will benefit?
The media landscape is rapidly changing and transforming how we transfer knowledge. AI and specifically NI (Narrative Intelligence) plays an integral role in this transformation as it grapples with what Stanford philosophy professor Ken Taylor calls “the other” — that is, how cultures experience and sort out their differences. Doing this well, aided by advanced technologies that our company is developing, helps evoke empathy and better communication and learning. Communication and connection are at the center of how we begin to solve humanity’s problems over the next century. It is a big problem and everyone should benefit.
Who is our first target customer? How is their problem being currently addressed or solved?
We envision the company’s system as an integrated ‘intelligent” rich media capture appliance that will allow our customers to quickly and efficiently record and distribute advertising, educational and training videos and more effectively engages in knowledge transfer. Our media capture and management system, enhanced with robotics and machine learning, plays an integral part of their vision. Our R&D efforts in automatic content indexing and narrative intelligence to create richer exchanges of media content is a key differentiator in their messaging and streaming strategy.
What is your current business model?
We are testing three different revenue streams, including direct sales and franchising our successful prototype deployment. Once a LightGrid is in a customer’s or operator’s hands, there will be opportunities for various sorts of usage-based licensing and expanded services for ongoing revenue. In our deployed prototype, we have been successful by billing hourly with menus of value-added services. As our content structuring matures, our software infrastructure indexing and threaded playback will become an important value for our customers.
What future trend, technology or market conditions make it the right time to build this company and how does our product tap into this trend?
The current trends towards 4K video content and high-quality streaming over IP (and emerging 5G) networks, coupled with AI, IoT, Industry 4.0, and the burgeoning knowledge transfer and educational technology marketplaces. Our smart platform for content capture, automated indexing and editing, flexible and right-sized distribution, and analytics sits squarely in the center of opportunities across these markets. Use cases for us at this early stage with Singularity University and YouTube will lay the groundwork for the company as we evolve with these emerging growth markets and more.
What are the top 3 milestones the company has achieved in product and customer development and how long did it take to reach them?
1. Acquisition of extensive library (from 10,000 customer engagements and hundreds of thousands of media assets gathered with our prototype system) of meta-data from image capture provides us with a solid foundation for our software, fodder for big-data analysis, and an understanding of customer needs.
2. Working, robust, field-tested and financially viable lighting system for photography (and, later, videography) with zero failures over approximately 20000+ hours and counting.
3. Implementation of virtual director “eye-gaze vector” system to allow for remote interviewing of subjects in the system. First live-tested with a survivor of the Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooting on July 28, 2019.
How many paying customers does the company have to date?
Over 10,000 as of July, 2019.
Clarifications on the values of active users or paying customers above
There are two levels of “customer” for LightGrid, purchasers/operators and end-users. We have had thousands of end-users (image-makers paying for time in the LightGrid), for the prototype grid, but there are still only two LightGrids in existence.