The Importance of Data Ownership with Amir Husain

What is up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Divi Crypto podcast. And today I am joined by Amir Hussein, and he is from Navigate. How's it going today, Amir? It's going very well. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to dig into Navigate. I got a chance to read around and learn a lot about what you guys are doing. But before we get

into everything that is Navigate, let's talk about you. Let's hear your origin story and how you got into this space. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I'm one of those kids that saw Commodore 64 at the age of four and fell in love. So for me, software is my sort of ultimate expression of creativity and just being immersed in this field, knowing that these are systems that

can allow us to conjure up any reality and any future that we choose. That to me has been the driving force that led me through my career. I was pursuing a PhD in computer science back in 2000, 2001, a QT Austin, here in Austin, Texas. And I dropped out of that to found my first software company, ran that, sold it, did another one, sold that. In

2013, I launched an AI company, CornSpark Abmission, which has grown quite rapidly and became a unicorn just earlier this year. And in addition to that, I've also been the Founding CEO of a joint venture that we did with Boeing, a company called SkyGrid with Spark Abmission. So I have a deep entrepreneurial background. It's basically everything that I've done through my career. I haven't really worked for

a large company, if you will. I've always built things and scaled them. And the other piece is that, again, my love for computer science has been the one constant thread through life. Now, to be very specific, the two areas that I focused on most through my career have been distributed systems and artificial intelligence. So, for example, even when I was doing research at UT, one of

the papers that I published with a set of colleagues was focused on distributed communications and communication induced check pointing in processes for failover. So these types of questions of how you can make distributed systems more reliable, more scalable, more automated and handling failures that might occur have been at the back of my mind and even in my work now for well over 20 years. When Bitcoin

came around, I was very, very interested. I got involved early on as a plaything as something that was an ability for me to learn. And then when we launched our joint venture, most recently on the aviation side, it was underpinned with blockchain technology. So I've got a lot of work to do with this. Quite a lot of background in this field. And I now feel that

what Web 3 and blockchain-based systems need a practical use cases. I'm a huge proponent of bringing crypto technology to the real world and creating liaisons of this great technology with things that can change life in the real physical world. That's what Navigators all about. Okay. Got it. Very cool. And I dug into a lot of what you guys are working on with the data side. And

this is a problem that a lot of people have been advocating for with Web 3 and controlling your own data. And Web 2, as we all kind of have learned that it's aggregated and you are the product essentially. Like the fine print, you opting in basically everything in the kitchen sink is provided to these people with your personal data. And you just can kind of use

the product for free. And I think there's a lot of work to do with this. A lot to be said about controlling what level of privacy you choose to have and what data you would choose to allow someone else to have access to. And there's just not much education happening right now on that front as to the importance of your personal data. The value of this

sort of oil of the century. I think there's a lot of gaps there with education. It could from a high simplified level for everybody that's listening, what is Navigate and how are you guys trying to address the data. Steve, it all starts with, look, we're far more valuable than we think. Then we give ourselves credit for, you know, the one piece that drives the global economy

is human attention. Yes, money, money can be printed. Yes, automation and the productivity gains from that. Once you go past a certain level of technology, you know, as Buckminster, the fuller said, back in the 70s, we already had the technology to automate the world and provide people with everything they need. So in this economy, which is sometimes called the attention economy, the single most valuable thing

is the human mind paying attention to something. And a lot of the web to business models essentially trade the human attention, which is undervalued in our minds and in our society, because we're making this shift from, you know, a few thousand years ago, we were hunting the feathers and up until 200 years ago, 70, 80% of the workforce was just producing food. We didn't really think

of attention as an asset. But now in this digital economy, attention is an asset. And that asset is being bought for very little. It's being bought for, give me a free email account with a one gig folder. And, you know, I can buy your attention for hours a day. And is that fair? Also, if I participate in the launch of a project, by the way, which

monetizes my attention. And that project, I think, is a very important thing. It ends up being very successful, typically a product launched by a large company. Should I have absolutely no say or no participation in the economic success of that project as an earlier doctor when I took a risk? Should I have no say in that? Now, typically, you know, when a company buys from another

company, you know, I've launched startups, many of them. A large company comes to you when you're early stage. And they say, look, you're early stage. I'm an earlier doctor. You got to give me a great deal. You got to give me the ability to invest in your company. You got to give me warrants. There's all sorts of economic structures that are large buyer places on a

small, you know, a party that they're dealing with to try and get a little more than just the service. But yet, when our attention is given in this way to a new product, we don't get any of that. We get no warrants. We get no equity. We get no huge discounts. So that, I think, is also just economically unfair. Why should it work for a certain

type of large enterprise and not work for the individual when the individual actually carries the most valuable asset in the modern economy attention? Navigate attempts to fix that. Basically, what we're saying is very simple. We're saying, look, you people individuals all over the world can contribute data. That data can be anything. We're starting off, for example, with drone imagery. You fly a $253, $300 drone for

recreational purposes. As long as it allowed to capture images. It is in a certain area. Go capture them. Put them on navigate. When you do that, you have essentially staked data. That data can be used by app builders to create next-generation mapping applications, next-generation analytics applications for identifying consumer behavior. Tons of stuff can be done with data like that. But you are an owner of that

data repository. You will fully chose to share the data. We will compensate you for that data forever more. And of course, it doesn't just have to be drone footage. It can be a whole litany of different types of data. As you go read more about Navigate, you'll see what all of that is. So for us, this is the first large multi-media, any kind of media, image

graphics, radio frequencies, personal health data, whatever you want to contribute. You can do so. And now, you have a community-run system that guarantees that as the ecosystem becomes larger, the economy of data becomes larger, you become an economic winner in that situation. And you become an early adopter that does have a stake beyond what you gained as revenue in that early transaction. Your tokens become valuable.

So we think this is just fair. And we think this is just a way data should be gathered as much as we want. As much as it can be so that next generation applications can also be put together. Yeah. I'm curious because the mapping, I guess, the mapping of the physical world, is it going to be kind of like a Google Maps rendering? Or is it

going to be a virtual experience? Can you walk us through that? Sure. So think about how a lot of that Google Maps data is obtained today. It's basically satellites. Investments required to launch a constellation of satellites that will be taking all these images. There's hundreds of millions of dollars. They have very high end optics. There's a risk factor in a launch working or not working. And

then you have to provide coverage all over the world. So there are large companies that charge you a heck of a lot of money to obtain satellite imagery. The other thing that you'll notice is that there's also a disparity in the coverage of those images. For example, you go to New York, Manhattan. You look at images that, let's say, Google Earths shows you from Manhattan. And

you'll see relatively high quality images. And they're updated relatively frequently, maybe every few months, every few weeks, because that's Manhattan. But what about Nicaragua? What about Zimbabwe? What about some in a part of Mongolia? Those are not updated frequently. So there is a disparity in how even this asset, this resource of satellite imagery, is distributed throughout the world. And in some sense, it's unfair. With drone

footage, what you can do is, first of all, you can enter as a participant without making those hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. You don't have to own or have the capital to launch a satellite company to be able to create these data sets. You can just start with a drone number one. So it's democratized. And the price of entry is lowered dramatically, which is

one of the classic disruptors whenever you're coming into a new space. The other thing is that if you want to document your community, if you want to document your country, your province, your state, your city, you are empowered to do it. You don't have to wait for a satellite company headquartered across the world to make decisions on how well your part of the world will show

up on a map. So it's fair. And the third thing is that these companies went and took pictures of the world, including your home and including your agricultural field. By the way, how much wheat you were growing on that agricultural field being a poor farmer in Myanmar or in Punjab. They actually took that imagery. They converted it through AI into insight about how much wheat, let's

say, will be produced next year. What did you get paid for that? What did you get paid for the fact that they took a picture of your wheat field and extracted from that actionable intelligence that made them money on the markets? So that's another piece, which is that if you are an agricultural citizen, if you are a farmer, you can with a very small investment start

to document your holding, your ranch, your farm, and start to share those images much more frequently than a satellite could. Because a satellite has limitations on how often it's able to come into your area. You can be the provider of the highest resolution, the most highly updated feed for what you own and directly make money off of that. That to me seems fair. And by the

way, it's also a higher quality data set. Because like I said, it's more frequent and it's higher resolution. So if you are, in fact, a climate scientist or an agriculturalist or a company that provides products for farmers and you want to use that imagery to do something, why wouldn't you use the higher frequency, higher fidelity imagery. So it's a massively disruptive play, which starts off with

this notion of fairness and democratizing access, not letting people's hard work just be pictured and taken and sold as derivatives. They should have a say in it as well. Yeah, agreed, agreed. And I like the cost comparison of something like launching a huge satellite infrastructure and what that takes in order to actually create a map. So let's go into the marketplace and where you guys are

at right now. I know I did some reading on like actually what's live and what not, but I'd love to hear from you. There's going to be a marketplace where people are kind of exchanging. The builders can actually get access to state data. Can you walk us through what the marketplace is going to be? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, where we are in the project,

I think for your listeners, it would be a good thing to establish where we are. We raised sort of in a free sale, we raised some money. From very, very trusted investors that we've had long relationships with. And so we're hard at work now. The team is hard at work building this product out. In a couple of weeks, there'll be an initial mint for our early

investors. And then after that, our data upload functionality, which is the first important part of our roadmap will be up by the end of this month, by the end of September. So at that point, you'll be able to go connect your wallet to our data upload engine. And you'll be able to start taking, for example, drone footage and our drone vault will be the first one

that will open. But for all types of data, very quickly, you'll start seeing what show up. You'll be able to start to simply uploading imagery. There's automated systems that we've built that validate that imagery. And if those images are approved, you are now in line to earn navigate tokens. So you need to start making navigate tokens as soon as that imagery is uploaded. Further, when your

images are actually used by a third party developer that comes to the marketplace, the marketplace has an API and SDK. So if I wanted to build, let's say, an application for ranchers, where you could have, you know, the pictures of a particular ranch. And I wanted to identify heads of cattle and even categorize them by what type of cattle they were. I would insert a little

bit of machine learning, do an app, have an API tie in back to the navigate data store. And I would essentially as a developer be licensing or using your image stream, you would get paid again. So there's an ongoing revenue model that goes to the participants of this ecosystem that are staking that data, that are providing that data into navigate. So that's how the marketplace works.

And the very first app, the decentralized app that we'll be launching on top of the marketplace is called nav maps. And the alpha of that data, that will be coming out in October. So you'll be able to see side by side what, you know, high quality drawn footage, exciting footage taken at some 400 feet, how that compares with traditional satellite footage. And you just see just

a huge change in resolution. And more than that, when you think about how easy it was, how inexpensive it was to source this better imagery that's going to get updated a lot more frequently. And you sort of, your mind goes ablaze with all the different possibilities of apps that could factor in this footage. You know, we've talked about, for example, looking at urban areas and being

able to find shifts in product buying patterns. You know, what cars are getting less popular and more popular because you've got that level of resolution now, you can decipher the exact thing that you're looking at and not just a fuzzy little border around thing. Yeah, I like that. The high resolution is very exciting. I've been following some of the camera innovations that have been going on

with 4K and beyond. And I'm very excited to see some of this really high res and hyper realistic things happening in virtual as well. So very, very excited to see what you guys pull off here because it is quite an ambitious mission here to map everything with drones, iPhone footage, everything. Yeah. Yeah. Putting it together. So what you said October, the alpha was rolling out. What's

next, what's the next 12 months, two years kind of look like? I know that's a million years in the web, three space, but I'd love to get a picture all pun intended of what the next year looks like. Yeah, look, what we're trying to do is to build the world's largest decentralized marketplace for data where contributors of that data are individuals who are empowered to earn

continually from the data that they provide. And the other end of this marketplace is that we want developers, the most innovative developers in the world, to come in and leverage through clean SDKs, clean APIs, all of this amazing data that's been collected to create applications that the world has never seen. Think about, for example, inexpensive infrared cameras that are available on commercial drones. Not very expensive.

We're talking a few hundred dollars much cheaper, for example, than a GPU minor, right? If you think of a drone as a minor, this is a much cheaper minor than anything else out there. And with that infrared camera, you can go and look at a city and do a heat map analysis. Are there leaks? Are there environmental problems with large buildings? Are there, you know, inefficiencies

with how heat and cold is being exchanged with the environment? In the current, you know, in the current world that we live in, where climate changes such a huge thing, this application doesn't exist. But we, the people can go fly our drones, create infrared maps of our cities, do the analysis, we're working with app partners and solve environmental problems in our own cities. It doesn't exist.

It can exist with navigate maps. So coming back to your question, what lies in the future? What lies in the future? Is more and more types of data, more varts that we will very rapidly start to enable on navigate? And then on the other hand, partnerships with developers, giving developers, the right tools to be able to develop apps that have never been seen by the world

before, that make a difference in the real world. We've already started talking with a bunch of software companies, a bunch of independent developers that really like this idea and want to be able to be the first amongst the first that launch apps on top of navigate. And of course, through your wonderful forum here, I'd also like to extend an invitation. Do any developers listening? And please

come talk to us. I think the kinds of data sets that we can enable for you will allow you to create and to build things that literally haven't existed in the world that solve real problems. So that for us is it. Adding more and more data, creating a very secure marketplace, obviously, with great validation using AI techniques for validation. And on the other hand, a developer

ecosystem that takes that fundamental data and creates tons of value all the while rewarding the contributors and fairly treating the ecosystem. Nice. Nice. So that kind of brings us to the finale question outside of navigate you as, you know, an entrepreneur for many years now. What are you excited about? Like when you get up in the morning, what is it that you're super excited to see

going on? Steve, you know, I am excited that I live in the moment, a time when technology and tools are as developed as they are. Because to be honest with you, when I look at the world with my, you know, with the lens of, let's say philosophy, which I have always enjoyed my whole life, I look at a world that has many disparities, that has many

things that are fundamentally unfair. And then when I look at history, I find that the tools that have a lot of those disparities to disappear, more so than ideology, more so than some magical miracle has always been science and technology. With science and technology, we've been able to create cures for illnesses that no amount of, you know, anything else has helped us address, with science and

technology, we've been able to create abundance and taken down to 2% the amount of the population of the world that is now focused on producing food. It used to be 67% of the world. So, to me, I am a student of science, a student of technology. That is all of my interests. I want to advance from where we are into a world that looks a lot

better. Now, we get to decide what better is. My life, I've dedicated to artificial intelligence, to computer science, distributed systems, things like this. When you listen to them perhaps being outside of the field, you look at these as esoteric, unrelated, like what the hell does this have to do with the world? The better world, you know, how does this make me smile? It does make me

smile. The truths within computer science, the enablement through science and technology, the changes that an investment in these things can drive in the larger world, does make me smile. That's what I live for. I live for the future. And everything I do is essentially tied to that in some way, shape or form. Well said. Well said. Well, those are all the questions I have for you.

Me or where can people go and learn more? So, just go to the website, start there and you'll find all the links. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story. All the links for everybody listening on iTunes. There's Spotify. We'll be in the show notes that I will be sharing with you. I'm here to get your attention. Once again, thanks for

coming on. Steve, thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to speak to you.