Steve Statler: 0:03

The Internet's a pretty powerful thing. And we feel like we've only been using a fraction of its power, even though it's been massively disruptive, but you start connecting it to the things around us, where we work and where we play, where we live and the possibilities are just mind boggling

Tom Raftery: 0:21

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the digital supply chain podcast. The number one podcast, focusing on the digitization of supply chain. And I'm your host Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to the digital supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Steve, Steve, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Steve Statler: 0:45

Hey there, Tom. Great to be on your show. My name's Steve Statler and I run marketing and ESG at Wiliot.

Tom Raftery: 0:54

Oh, okay. So for people who might be unaware, what is Wiliot?

Steve Statler: 1:01

We are a semiconductor designer and cloud software company. And our technology is enabling a computer, the size of a postage stamp, which powers itself, not from batteries or being plugged in, but by harvesting energy from radio waves. So we. Broadcast an encrypted Bluetooth packets to any Bluetooth device that works with Wiliot. And we get our energy by harvesting it from other Bluetooth signals. And we can actually harvest energy from many frequencies, but always Bluetooth and often some other ones that are are, are increasingly common in our enterprise and home environments.

Tom Raftery: 1:48

For what?.

Steve Statler: 1:49

Well, essentially we're lighting up the part of the physical world that's currently in the dark. So, only about 1% less than 1% of physical things are connected to the internet. The internet of things is really the internet of expensive things. So we're all used to cars being connected and sometimes appliances and gas, meters, and things like that are basically what has been on the internet of things. With Wiliot IOT pixels, which is the name we give our stickers sized computers we can connect the other 99% of things. So everyday things like packaging for food, and medicine ,and clothing, important documents. So the, cost of connectivity is going from hundreds or tens of dollars down to pennies and that will allow us to bring the full power of the internet to the rest of the world and the applications are really broad, but we believe this can play an important role in fighting climate change. It can bring massive efficiencies to the supply chains that are being disrupted today. It can make significant, step forward in terms of improvement of food quality, drug regimen, adherence. I mean, the Internet's a pretty powerful thing. And we feel like we've only been using a fraction of its power, even though it's been massively disruptive, but you, you start connecting it to the things around us, where we work and where we play, where we live and, and the possibilities are just mind boggling.

Tom Raftery: 3:30

Indeed indeed. And just, I, I mean, we had a prep call about this a while back and you showed me one of the, the sensors there. And so I've got an idea of what we're talking about, but for people who are listening, I know this is an audio only medium, but could you describe the kind of size of the devices you're talking about? Because you know, it blew my mind when you showed me.

Steve Statler: 3:54

Yeah, well, the chips are tiny of course as is, is common. So the, the, the bit that we actually design and we make, you know, via fabulous semiconductor processes, the same as apple and core common folks like that. They're less than a millimeter big, the tags that they power and enable, are literally the size of a postage stamp. They can be smaller. You know, one of the things that I'm waving around now that folks can't see is a tiny vial of COVID vaccine. And our tag is integrated into that. and this was done. This was a project that was commissioned by one of the biggest makers of vaccines in the world. And what this does is it gives a unique serial number, a serialized identity, a digital passport for every single vial, of vaccine, but it also measures the temperature of that vaccine. So you don't want to get injected by something that's been sitting at room temperature for too long. Having spent probably a bunch of time in cryogenic freezing. It would be a shame to get your jab. And not have the protection that you thought you were getting and, and that's what can happen if the cold chain is not monitored and maintained, but this sticker actually does a couple of other things. It, it also manages and monitors the fill level. So it knows if the things empty or full. And it can detect whether the vaccine has been diluted or not. And obviously this is a very specialist application to, to vaccines, but having connected medicine can pay huge dividends in, in terms of just the basics. You can put these tags on bottles of pills and, and that can be a mechanism just to make sure that people are taking their meds. And, it seems ironic that we are making massive strides in biotech but one of the biggest issues with the efficacy of drugs is when people don't take them, they forget, or they change their mind and, you know, what's the doctor to do. This also goes beyond medicine. You can apply these things to food containers. So, if you think about your pantry and your fridge, how many of the things are out of date? How, how do you keep track of that? in Japan, one of our partners, a company called Sarto, they're kind of an auto ID specialist. They make the, the printers that print, R F I D tags and other similar things. They did a project with the Japanese government, the met the ministry of economy, trade and industry. And they were tagging, bags of lettuce and other perishable things in the fridges of Tokyo residents and presenting recipes to remind people, to use the things before they're wasted and that kind of gets us back to this incredible opportunity that we have both around sustainability supply chains and, and efficiency, which is cutting waste. And food waste is a massive problem. And some of us get glimpses of it, but the UN tells us 40% of food is wasted before it even gets to our table. And then we all know. Have a sense of what we waste through forgetting about stuff or portion control or whatever. So, huge carbon footprint from food production. What if we could cut the waste of that? and, and, and the waste issue is pervasive. It goes beyond what's in our fridges. Supply chains at the moment. with a reality of kind of blindness. We, the manufacturers, we we're all used to getting that little postcard where with a plea to register that this is their attempt to get visibility of who's bought the product, let alone who's using it, how often they're using it. With this technology, then suddenly the people that make things can see where they are, not just in the consumer's home, but throughout the supply chain. And, and our current approach to supply chains is kind of a brute force blunt instrument, where over production is part of what you have to do in order to make sure that you don't run out. But if you have visibility of everything, that's in the supply chain in real time, all the time, then you can basically make a lot less stuff. And you can dynamically route it and deliver it so that there are less out of stocks, but a lot less, capital's tied up in that. So we see this as a real opportunity where we can help the planet. But also it's more likely to happen because we can help profitability of companies that adopt this technology. And at the end of the day, we'll only get the opportunity to do this if it helps people and they allow this level of connectivity to start to permeate, the way they live their lives.

Tom Raftery: 8:52

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it's fascinating because just to clarify for people listening when Steve held up the bottle there, the, the, the vial for the vaccine, the tag that he was talking about was just the sticker that you'd normally see on the vial anyway. It was no thicker than that. It just, it just happened to be that the, the sticker you'd have on the vial also happened to contain the sensor and the tags or the tag that Steve was talking about. So it looked like a, a standard vaccine vial that just happened to be connected through this technology, which as you say, harvests radio waves as its power source, how does that work Steve??

Steve Statler: 9:30

Well, we're surrounded radio waves kind of as a, a thought experiment that we, we used to do, when trying to get people to understand this technology was imagine you've suddenly got this superpower where you can see radio waves and, and think what you would see. And the reality is your whole room will be full of a rainbow of color because you have wifi. You have cellular you have television, you have radio but there's also a whole bunch of other radios, your security camera doorbell. all of the most appliances now shipped with Bluetooth and and wifi, and then the ubiquitous smart speaker. So they're all pushing out radio waves and, and, and so this is what we've learned to capture the energy from. It's, it's been an amazing opportunity, just waiting for someone to grab hold of it and designing a, IOT pixel a tag that can do this is, is super challenging. Um, the strength of these radio signals is actually pretty weak. Otherwise we'd all be like cooking, like we are in a microwave. so, but so what, what we've done the technology behind it for anyone that's a computer scientist, electrical engineer is just really fascinating, but. The essential things are capturing very weak signals, very efficiently. Once you've done that, you don't actually have very much energy. So you then have to run a full arm system on chip on a fraction of the energy that you would normally have. And then, um, there's the whole packaging issue. How do I do this in a way that's low cost? So we've figured out how to create a a computer. That is glued is, is constructed by gluing to an antenna. And then, is, created using essentially printing technology to mass produce at the cost of pennies and in the volume of billions and trillions. So that the form factor uh, required a bunch of technical breakthroughs. Our radio doesn't have a crystal. Anyone who has a grandfather or is as old as you, or I may remember, you know, experiments when we were in the boy scouts, girl guides trying to building a radio and there's a crystal and that's what you use for tuning, but that is a component. It's a physical thing, but we. Have developed not only a battery free Bluetooth tag, but a crystal free radio. And it goes on I'll, I'll, I'll stop there, but there's like a, it requires, system-wide thinking reinventing whole bunch of stuff. And, and, you know, when I got an opportunity to join, Wiliot I jumped at it? Even though there wasn't product at the time, I was just so odd or I was so inspired by the brains of the founders. Who who set up the company that I just wanted to be around when all this was was happening.

Tom Raftery: 12:26

And how long has the company been in place?

Steve Statler: 12:28

Five years now. So, back in 2017, I'd just written a book called beacon technologies. The hitchhiker guide to the beaker system. I was on a lecture tour giving one day lectures on Bluetooth, beacon technology and. I went to the R F I D conference, R F I D journal live to give a one day workshop on Bluetooth beacon technology. Apple had just started shipping them and putting them in their stores to give more precise, welcome to the store messages. That was kind of the main use case for that technology at the time. Proximity and location in retail environments. So I was kind of nervous about this whole thing because I was in an R F I D conference talking about Bluetooth. Is anyone gonna turn up? Are they gonna be really hostile? But I shouldn't have been because the room was full and people were super nice. And at the end of a very tiring day, this Israeli guy came up to me and he said, We're thinking of developing a passive Bluetooth beacon, would you be interested in consulting? And I kind of took a breath and said, no I actually don't know what you're talking about. And I'm kind of embarrassed. Cause I just spent a day lecturing on this and I wrote a 500 page book on the subject. I've never heard of passive Bluetooth which is basically another word for battery free Bluetooth. And then when he told me they hadn't actually gotten anything working, I'm like, no thanks a lot. But long story short, I did end up taking that consulting engagement. And after just a few days, my eyes was just bulging out of my head. And a month later they offered me the job to kind of set up their field operations and I just. Assumed they could do it. And, and, and, and the reason why I assume they could get this technology working is the, they were the same team that had pioneered a technology called millimeter wave, which is the radio technology that makes 5g faster than 4g. And they had commercialized that built standards around it and sold their company to Qualcomm for hundreds of millions of dollars. So I'm like, if anyone can do this, it sounds impossible. But if anyone can do it, these guys can. And, and they, they, they did. And it's been just an incredible ride. We've had the most amazing companies, sign up to get early access to the technology. Some of the, the largest pharmaceutical fashion companies, logistics, CPG companies, and retailers. So it's been like going to the Oscars of you know, the business world where you, you get to hang out with these incredible. Companies and the use cases, you know, every day, there's something new that we didn't, hadn't thought of. And, um, and now, you know, the latest thing that's happened is, you know, our, our project is is gradually maturing. We've got version two of the product where, um, Opening offices in places like Bentonville to kind of support large deployments of the product. But the thing that's really a game changer that has recently happened is, the, the folks that are defining the, the sequel to 5g 60. Have decided recently the ambient computing will be part of that new standard. And essentially what Wiliot does is ambient computing. And so I'm excited because I think you know, even though. What we do is scales really well that the infrastructure to read these tags is like a hundred times cheaper than, than what you required for previous similar technologies like R F I D it still requires a bit of thought effort and planning to put it in place, but the opportunity we have with six G embracing. What they call both massive IOT and ambient IOT, which is, you know, essentially these battery free devices is for every wireless device. That's part of that standard to, to work, not just with our technologies, but you know, competing technologies that doubtless will come along and that. Really, I think will allow us to go from an internet, which is currently probably 30, 40 optimistically, 50 billion devices to trillions of things. You know, the whole world around us can be safer you know, more efficient, more timely, and more sustainable. And that's kind of what motivates me to get outta bed and come into the office every day.

Tom Raftery: 16:57

And I mean, you mentioned receiving devices and you said earlier that any device that has your software on it, that can receive Bluetooth. So does that mean you've got, for example, an mobile device software, an app, for example, that could. So

Steve Statler: 17:13

Yeah. Good question.

Tom Raftery: 17:15

any, anything like that?

Steve Statler: 17:17

Yeah. So if you go onto the apple app store and you go onto the Google. Placed or you'll see, there's a Willyard app. We, we're not really in the app business today. Um, we are, um, we are kind of a platform. Sometimes we think of ourselves almost like an app store. We have APIs and people build applications on top of that. So we're building an ecosystem of works with Wiliot partners, which is getting pretty big now. and so, most of those applications are, are actually not consumer applications today. We're focused in on the enterprise market because it's just a lot. A, we don't really understand the consumer market and B this is where, you know, a company can decide, it wants to have online, realtime inventory. It wants to have realtime visibility of its supply chain and they can, they can do it. But we do have an app which can read our tags which is on the the app store. There is a project. I'm not sure if I should talk about it or not, but, um, we are experimenting with an idea of something which will be a, an, a direct and consumer app. We've not talked about it before publicly which is, called living web. And, and the idea there is these tag. Will be, you'll be able to pair them up with a web address, the URL, and then people with phones that, that will offer an open source browser. And one browser should be able to read webpages that are linked to by these tags, which means, you know, you for, for not very much money at all, you could walk into a restaurant or a cafe. It would broadcast a URL to your phone. If you'd said, oh, I want to get notifications about living web content in. In eateries, you could click on it, see the menu order ahead and hopefully get served straight away. When you get to the end of the end of the queue. If they're in in a, a zoo or a museum, you could browse the content from that is linked to paintings or exhibits. Those URLs would be broadcast your phone and. It's sort of similar to a QR code only. It's a push technology where you subscribe to things that you are interested in. And that's an idea that we are just doing some testing on. and we're actually finding a bunch of really interesting applications to do that. And what we are doing with living web is the idea is we've taken the cost out of the, the, the computer, the, the radio, the broadcaster and the infrastructure is, especially with six G almost becomes free, but you know, what do you do about app development and creating a good app is a long, expensive process, but anyone can create a webpage. So if we link tags that are related to a web address, then that can really unlock the potential and, and democratize this content that spans the, the, the digital world and links it to the physical world.

Tom Raftery: 20:57

Okay. And I mean, you mentioned that are that you're coming across lots of use cases, and this is the digital supply chain podcast. Are there any interesting supply chain use cases you can talk to that you've come across.

Steve Statler: 21:12

Yeah. Yeah. some fascinating stuff, which I think, I think we're breaking new ground. So one is, a cold chain application with real time, continuous visibility of what's in the cold chain. And, you know, you can build a tag into anything. It, it takes some time and money to do a customized design. So, you know, where do you start in a world where you can connect everything to the internet? Well, We're actually starting with supply chains and putting tags on reusable, plastic crates. The reusable plastic crates are really taking off because of sustainability and predictability and the, you know, better protection for what's in them. But most of them are offline and obviously one of the problems there's a lot of advantages of reusable transport items, returnable, transport items, plastic creates and pallets, but there is a downside, which is, they cost a bit more upfront. And, you know, one of the things that's holding back, the scaling of this more sustainable way of, conveying things in the supply chain is, the cost of buying the crates and then the fact that they get lost. And especially when you go direct to consumer. Then the loss rates can be like up 40%. If it's enterprise closed loop, then maybe it's 10, 20%. But what we found is if you put a Wiliot IOT pixel on a plastic crate, first of all, you can have a smaller pool of crates and pallets. So rather than buying 5 million, maybe you only have to buy 4 million. And then because you're not losing them, you're saving money every year. And that's the kind of use case that people can get their heads around the, you know, the vaccine vial case sounds simple. But's actually super complicated because you have to get all sorts of different parties, hospitals, and distributors involved, but, you know, pallets are kind of simpler to manage and that is frankly, a no brainer use case. You know, there's no reason you sh if, if you're buying an RTI, then you should be connecting it to the internet cuz you can buy less of them and you won't lose them. But actually the real, big return is, is much bigger than the the 20% saving on the capital in the in, in, in the number of crates and the, expensing of lost crates, it's actually optimizing what's in the crates, what's on the pallets. So we recently published a case study with Israel's largest retailer, a company that many of us wouldn't have heard of here, but they're called shoe for sale. And their grocery stores are ubiquitous over in Israel. The, the startup nation, where our headquarters is, and we started tracking, produce from the farm through the packing sheds distribution centers into the store. And that was fascinating. And the bottom line is you can cut a couple of days off the, the supply chain from farm to store, which gives you two days of extra shelf life, which means you're wasting less product, which means the product looks better. You sell more and you retain your customers because they don't get that horrible experience that I think we've all had, which is when you take the produce home and it's either bad or it goes bad really quickly. And so this is amazing for sustainability. It's great for customer acquisition and retention. It's, there's so many benefits. So that's actually the use case that we we've decided to focus on because it's just so simple but it goes beyond that for supply chains where, which are, you know, that's kind of a closed loop supply chain. They shift for sale have relationships to all their farmers. Wholesale supply chains where say I'm making, car parts. We have a, a customer. One of the companies that made an early investment in our early access program they have a hundred thousand retail locations. The only way they can find out inventory levels of their product in those retail locations is phoning them all up. And that's just not acceptable. You can't phone up all those locations every week. So, you put a Bluetooth three there, I'm holding one here, but this is kind of the size of a small hockey puck. And it costs a few tens of dollars. Attach that to the display rack. Suddenly I've got a real time view of every item of inventory in all of those locations. And the impact of that is phenomenal. It means you can take these huge delivery vehicles. Make them half the size. You can actually have less delivery vehicles. They only go to the places where there's an out of stock and I have a much less capital tied up in, in making these parts. So that is, the supply chain jargon for that is, is basically demand chain it's it's taking a supply chain that was previously organized by a forecast, an estimate let's face it a guess as to how much you needed to produce to getting real demand signals from the store and, and seeing in real time what the inventory levels are. But, you know, the, the thing that is really mind boggling is what if your car could read that tag that's on the, the component. It can see when it's about to expire. Then you've got a really interesting demand signal. That's not just about how much I ship out the shipping dock of the central warehouse. It's about forecasting production and buying materials to meet that. And, you know, this can apply to everything from herbs and spices car batteries. The clothing, you know, our clothing at the moment, we have a very simplistic supply chain. We it's, it's an ownership system. You know, in some parts of the world and in some categories, rental is acceptable. If you are maybe a tuxedo you would rent. What if your a large part of your wardrobe was actually rented? And it was organized based on what you actually use. At the moment people that make garments have no idea what you actually like. They know maybe what you buy but how often have you bought something and you wore it once and it either didn't fit or you actually don't think you look very good in it, or in my case, you put on a few pounds, it doesn't fit anymore. So we, we. Many of us have wardrobes that are stuffed full of things we haven't worn for years. What if we could take that back, give you money in exchange that you could then spend not on fast fashion, but on sustainable fashion, something that was made with real craftsmanship that that lasted longer. And when you bought it, maybe you would consider buying something that's vintage or a premium product that's been previously owned. If you knew how many times it had been worn, who wore it, how often it had been washed. So there's a new business model around clothing. I mean, that's just one category for where connectivity can revolutionize it. And, um, you know, a lot of people will think that's ludicrous but I'd love to have a a wardrobe that's less full where I don't feel guilty about it and I actually can wear stuff that looks better, feels better is better quality stuff. So I'm hoping that that's, you know, one of the many ideas that could catch on. And, and, and that's one of the things that connecting the digital and physical ends up yielding.

Tom Raftery: 28:36

Fascinating fascinating. We're coming towards the end of the podcast. Now, Steve, is there any question that I haven't asked you that you wish I had, or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important to highlight?

Steve Statler: 28:50

I think it's been a great conversation. I, I certainly appreciate the opportunity to talk to your audience, especially given who your audience is. You know, what I would say is, um, if people wanna experiment with this, it's become a lot easier to do that. In the old days you know, our earlier access program costs like 50, a hundred thousand dollars to get into. And, and that was fine if you were the largest maker of CPG products. But, if people are interested then do visit our website. You can actually do Wiliot Academy 101 course for free. Uh, You can actually start doing some development for free. You can just create an account and then if you decide that you want, to play with the actual tags and the Bluetooth devices that, that, um, provide a reliable source of power and, and read them. Then we have starter kits for a few hundred dollars. In the future, we're hoping to bring that cost down. So, it becomes even more accessible. Do visit Wiliot.com to, to check out that those resources and we're, you know, doing our best to meet the demand from partners and developers and there'll be some really interesting things coming in the future. Uh, We actually have a battery assisted pixel. So what happens if you're on a desert island and there's no radio energy to harvest? Well, we have a printed battery version of our product, which, um, you know, typically Bluetooth, beacons and tags cost small tens of dollars. This will cost between one or $2. It'll be the size of a very small business card. and we're hoping to make those available in small units so that basically school, children can start to play with this, and it'll be the, even cheaper than a raspberry pie in terms of the development platform. So that's kind of where we're going in the future. And I think other than that, it's been a really great conversation. I think we've covered a lot.

Tom Raftery: 30:45

Lovely lovely. My, my last question is typically if people want to know more about yourself or any other things we talked about, where would you have me direct them? You've already mentioned wiliot.com or is there anything else you want to, to mention?

Steve Statler: 30:59

Wow. It's very self-serving. But if you wanna learn more about this ecosystem, as well as continuing to listen to your podcast, um, um, the Wiliot has allowed me to keep on doing the podcast I did when I wrote the beacon technologies book, it's called Mr. Beacon. It's a really silly name and. It wasn't one that I came up with, but Mr. Beacon was something, someone I used to go to all the Bluetooth SIG meetings and someone wanted me on stage and they were like, Hey, where's Mr. Beacon gone. And I thought, I need to use this name, listen to your customer. So we have a podcast and it basically covers. Actually not a huge amount on Wiliot, although we do cover it occasionally. It's more about this ecosystem of everything from privacy sustainability. Um, we have, we've had folks from Cisco and Google on and no one from SAP actually but,

Tom Raftery: 31:52

I'm sure we can fix that.

Steve Statler: 31:53

some great guests. Yes. I'd that would be wonderful. That would be wonderful. So yeah. Mr. Beacon the Wiliot website. And between all of those places, there's, there's a, a treasure trove of information and, and a lot more coming.

Tom Raftery: 32:07

Fantastic. Fantastic. Steve, that's been really, really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Steve Statler: 32:13

It's been a pleasure and a privilege, Tom. Thank you.

Tom Raftery: 32:17

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you like the show, please, don't forget to subscribe to it in your podcast application at choice to get new episodes, as soon as they are published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.