On this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, the CEO and Co-Founder of Deeyook, Gideon Rottem, joins Ryan to talk about the future of tracking assets and people. They begin by discussing Deeyook and their role in the industry and the use cases they focus on. They also talk about the challenges companies in IoT are encountering before getting into a conversation about how Wi-Fi fits into indoor asset tracking. Gideon and Ryan wrap up the podcast with a high-level conversation around the future of asset tracking and exciting things to be on the lookout for from Deeyook.
Gideon Rottem co-founded location-technology startup Deeyook in 2019 and has served as its CEO ever since. He has more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and CEO of Lucid Voice, Extricom, and Allied Telesis. Before that, he worked in a law firm in Washington, D.C., and served for four years as Deputy Antitrust Commissioner. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a master’s degree in international economics from The Fletcher School in Boston, and a J.D. from Georgetown University in Washington.
Interested in connecting with Gideon? Reach out on Linkedin!
About Deeyook
Deeyook offers precise location through its patented wireless-based firmware solution that is self-learning, ubiquitous, ultra-precise (~10 cm), passive and low power, allowing absolute indoor and outdoor position determination. Deeyook’s solution, based on a proprietary, patented angle-measurement technology, won first place at the HiStart Innovation Forum by Toga Networks. It also won 1st place at the Ruhr Summit Corporate Challenge pitch. A new absolute measurement location sensor enables the solution in firmware, which is based on patented direction ascertainment technology. The mobile unit sensor is at the core of a cloud-based Machine Learning positioning solution that passively utilizes the direction data from over a billion existing APs and base stations and operates everywhere worldwide infrastructure-free. Deeyook’s ultra-precise location as a service is a first-of-its-kind in wireless tracking technology. It can track every box, asset, or employee, both indoors and outdoors, without environmental interference. The firmware can be installed in any WIFI/4G/5G radio access technology, and it works by measuring the angles of wireless transmissions.
Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:
(02:15) Introduction to Gideon
(03:28) The role of Deeyook in IoT
(04:48) Where did Deeyook fill a need in the market?
(08:57) Use cases of Deeyook
(11:58) Challenges companies are facing
(19:14) How Wi-Fi fits into asset tracking
(25:47) The future of asset tracking
Transcript:
– [Voice Over] You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.
– [Ryan] Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the IoT For All Podcast. I’m your host, Ryan Chacon and on today’s episode, we have Gideon Rottem the CEO and Founder of Deeyook. He has more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and CEO of different companies. Deeyook offers precise location as a service through its patented wireless based firmware solution that is self-learning and ultra precise down to about 10 centimeters, passive and low power, allowing absolute indoor and outdoor positioning determination. So it’s a pretty hot topic these days, indoor outdoor location tracking. So if you’re interested in that, definitely check them out. But besides that, our conversation day is a good one. We talk about the challenges faced with precise tracking of assets and people. What are the current technologies being used? What are the shortcomings of each of those technologies to help you kind of decide which technology is best for your potential use case and problem you’re trying to solve. We also talk about what makes indoor tracking so difficult for the foreseeable past. We’ve really been in a situation where indoor tracking, was not an easy thing to do. It’s becoming more and more popular and more and more solvable with all these different technologies and that’s kind of what we focus a lot of this conversation on and then we wrap up talking about key technologies that make indoor and outdoor tracking viable these days, and also the future of precise tracking of assets and people, and what that looks like, kind of where we’re going, what direction we’re headed in just to kind of show you what is possible, not only now, but also into the future and why now is a really good time to be considering adopting IoT if you haven’t already done so to solve those indoor and outdoor tracking problems you may have for different assets, different people within your organization or your customer’s organization. So a lot of good stuff today. I really think you’ll get a lot of value outta this episode, but before we get into it, if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable IoT market, but don’t know where to start, check out our sponsor Leverege, Leverage’s IoT solutions development platform provides everything you need to create turnkey IoT products that you can white label and resell under your own brand. To learn more, go to iotchangeseverything.com that’s iotchangeseverything.com and without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All Podcast. Welcome Gideon into the IoT For All Podcast. Thanks for being here this week.
– [Gideon] Thank you Ryan it’s a pleasure to be here.
– [Ryan] Yeah, it’s great to have you. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I wanted to kick it off by having you just tell us, tell the audience a little bit more about yourself. Any background experience information you think will be relevant and exciting for them to hear?
– [Gideon] Well I think, you know we’ve been involved in the technology field for over 20 years. My partner Eran Shpak, this is our fourth company together. So even that is a good story because, you don’t usually find these, founders that work together for 23 years through company after company and company, it’s lasted longer than my marriage. So that’s something for all your listeners to think about and it’s going in, from one endeavor to the other. So we’re very proud to be here with Deeyook. Deeyook was founded in 2019, so going now for two and a half years, 25 employees, most of them engineers, and we have a lot of great technology in the location sphere to tell you about.
– [Ryan] So yeah, so let’s dive in there for a second talk a little bit more about kind of the offerings and the role you all play in the IoT space.
– [Gideon] Right, so the concept of Deeyook and what we’re trying to push hard into the IoT space is location as a service based on Wi-Fi. Okay so there is kind of like when you’re thinking location IoT, you’re thinking cellular, you’re thinking GPS, maybe you’re thinking Bluetooth, maybe you’re thinking UWB. You’re not so much thinking Wi-Fi, but Deeyook is coming out and saying 2 billion out there covering the whole globe, definitely covering everywhere in the U.S., Europe, East Asia, et cetera. So lot of Wi-Fi infrastructure there let’s use that for precise location. That would be number one about Deeyook. Number two would be saying it’s IoT there’s a lot of things we need to know about the things that we’re looking after, the things that we’re getting the input startups, but what about precise location? Can we do all those things without having precise location? So on one hand, there’s a 2 billion access points on the other hand, we need precise location. That’s where Deeyook comes in.
– [Ryan] Gotcha, okay and tell me a little bit about to this takes a few steps back here, but when you founded the company with your co-founder, what was the kind of opportunity that you saw and kind of in the market that maybe wasn’t being addressed by others, and which ties into obviously what you just described, which is the role you play and kind of the offerings that you have in the market. But I’d love to hear a little bit more about, that sad story behind that kind of identifying that problem, and finding the fit here with Deeyook.
– [Gideon] Right, so great question. So Extricom which was sold to Allied Telesis Japanese networking company. We did quite a lot of hospital deployments, enterprise deployments, and the issue of them always came up. So for years and years and years, we knew that there’s a caveat there, there’s a chasm there, there’s something there, those locations you have on the one hand, you have GPS on the outdoor, you have multiple technologies, RSSI or time of flight and Wi-Fi, cellular, UWB, BLE, a lot of attempts to solve the indoor location issue, nothing that kind of puts them together and no really solution that solves the issue in a way that, I would say is needed when you’re looking at IoT. So it was kind of like the challenge, what happened? What did we find? Basically what we’re doing and we’ll dive into that obviously in a second, is we’re doing a term in physics called interferometry. Now, interferometry, if any one goes into Google, they’ll find two major use cases. They’ll find lasers, a lot of interferometry and lasers, and they’ll find geospatial stations. When you kind of want to look to the sky, how far is this star from us? You take one ray of light, a second ray of light transmit at the same time, calculate the phase differential between those rays of light and now you know that star is 65 light ears from earth, okay? So where does Deeyook come in? We’re looking at OFDM, OFDM the technology behind Wi-Fi from 2007 LT 5G, a modulation scheme for wireless communication and we’re saying the human eye can’t get it, but anything at five gigahertz, anything at six gigahertz, anything at 2.4 gigahertz is still light, it’s light. So the fact that I can’t see it as light doesn’t mean it’s still light. So we’ll take the same rules an interferometry on OFDM communication and that’s what we did. Okay and that’s kind of like the source of innovation you’re looking into in every time zoom, when you tell somebody what’s the innovation? That’s the innovation. Okay, so we do phase differentials between phase of coherent transmissions in wireless and then there’s that this whole developed last 10 years of machine learning the AI, because we just have a physical measurement, how do you really transfer to a geographic position? That’s where we came in with the geographic position.
– [Ryan] Gotcha, wow that was super fascinating, yeah.
– [Gideon] Now Ryan, it took a while obviously.
– [Ryan] I bet, yeah.
– [Gideon] Just came okay let’s sit that. So, we worked for the Japanese company that bought Extricom for Allied Telesis, founded a subsidiary here in Tel Aviv called Allied Telesis Wireless and doing startups we left them they’re great people and everything, but we were looking for what else, what’s new, what’s the area of score for this track.
– [Ryan] Definitely. Yeah, I mean, the demand for asset tracking, especially when it comes to indoors, which we’ll get here too in a second is massive. It’s one of the hardest problems I think companies are trying to solve when it comes IoT use cases. Speaking of use cases, are there any use cases that maybe able to kind of bring the technology full circle for our audience to kind of showcase, what you’ve been able to do and deploy out there?
– [Gideon] The nice thing is that anything that is part of IoT, the minute you’re touching and that’s the beautiful thing of IoT, internet of things, okay? Those things need to be located and every one of those things and it’s much wider than you think, it’s every mobile asset, but it’s also every portable asset and it’s every non portable assets think about it. Let water meters, you’ve just put in a building water meters, you connected them everybody’s familiar with the use case that why send the metering guy to check the meters, right? But now 50 metering, IoT connected meters in a building, and one of them is busted. If you don’t have their precise location, how are you gonna find it? How are you gonna save the technical time? The technical time of just needs to fix that goes into every type of asset, whether it’s permanently located, whether it’s portable, or whether it’s mobile, you need its location. Everybody, we freely in the industry we use this thing called digital transformation, right? It’s the core of everything a lot of us are doing. How do you daily transform your business without knowing precisely where your assets are?
– [Ryan] Sure, yeah, absolutely I mean, I think now go ahead.
– [Gideon] Specific use cases in industry, just everything that goes into the manufacture. And logistic tracking of the, everything that you’re moving around, pallets, boxes, AVS, the people in the distribution center, in retail, the employees, the assets, the customers, in hospitals the patients, the equipment, anything you need to, within your IoT scheme and within the operation of the business, you need to know it’s precise location in order to automate it because what do we do today? We scan them. We create a gate and what want to know, we loosely use this term Ryan real time location systems. It’s real time if you need to scan. Real time means I’m mean 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, where is it? Press a button, right? Get it.
– [Ryan] Yeah.
– [Gideon] Real time. And that’s the vision that Deeyook is bringing here.
– [Ryan] Okay, so talk to me a little bit about the challenges companies currently face. This kind of ties into your comment there about going from scanning to what we’re trying to do now, but what are the challenges companies face when it comes to the precise tracking of assets in people just like high level it for me.
– [Gideon] Okay, so challenge, I think there’s first two separate challenge that our emphasis in Deeyook is that it’s a single challenge, but it should be addressed initially as two separate challenges and that is outdoor location, indoor location. Okay? So you have two spheres outdoor location, indoor location. The way I would like to address it is first note why I believe there’s a challenge called location, not indoor location and outdoor location and that is really at a change of your mindset today because I meet a lot of companies that are telling me, okay, we came to you to talk to you about our location problem and I always start with why indoor location, why not location? Because us as people and therefore our assets, we move indoor and outdoor, right? You’re moving something on a truck, you move it into a distribution center, it moved from outdoor to indoor. Now you’re taking it to the store, you’re taking it again from indoor to outdoor at the store, back to indoor, the whole breakup between indoor and outdoor is not natural to the process of moving goods, assets and people around. So that will be my first point. The first point is unify those two, the problem is precise location, meaning tracking of assets and people. The problem is not outdoor or indoor, but we’re not there yet. So there’s a problem outdoor and there’s a problem with indoor. On the outdoor, which is really what you wanted me to highlight here, every what we do, right? We do GPS the world does GPS. What’s the problem with doing GPS one it’s not accurate enough. Two it’s prone to spoofing attacks, you’ll hear of that, with what’s going now on now in the Ukraine, Russia quality of the GPS, who’s fit to the GPS, et cetera. Three, it’s not available in very urban centers. It’s not available, obviously indoor, but even when you’re driving a truck, you’re under a bridge, you’re going to a tunnel, going to even in the mobile world that GPS available. So GPS has issues of availability, it has issues of spoofing, it has issues of accuracy and last but not least, it has an issue of power consumption, especially when we’re talking about IoT and different tags and wearables, et cetera. So GPS think where those satellites are, the amount of power you need in order to connect to them and you’re now in a situation where you’re consuming tremendous amount of power to get that GPS location. So those are the problems that us in Deeyook one are doing at GPS, okay? On the indoor. Nope, yeah, please Ryan.
– [Ryan] No, I was gonna say, I would argue, I guess the only thing with GPS accuracy, it really, I guess depends on the use case of how accurate it needs to be. But for when we go to like, when we get this precision and really want to be precise, you’re right, there are times where it is not accurate. Like I we’ve seen somewhere, they’re looking for cars on a lot and they can get it within, two or three parking spaces kind of accuracy, but is that consistent across all areas? Probably not. So I think it really is use case dependent, but I understand kind of where you’re getting at for sure.
– [Gideon] And I agree with the use case, but the nice thing is what are you willing to live with? Maybe you’re willing to live with two, three parking spots. I would say knowing the parking spot is what you need to know. I’d say the train companies, they will tell you, in most cases, probably with GPS, you can live with 30 feet, right? Yes back it’s driving, but and what happens when it’s in the yard and there’s 10 trains standing next to each other now in the yard. And you’re the train operator and you just agreed to 30 feet, within 30 feet, you have five different trains, where do you want, who’s move, where do you need to go? There’s no reason to agree to that limit of accuracy that’s what I’m simply saying.
– [Ryan] I understand, okay.
– [Gideon] So a lot of what people are telling use case, they know what they can get. Okay I can live with that, but, and should they live with that.
– [Ryan] Right okay all right and onto indoor, you were getting into that.
– [Gideon] Right, so indoors the second case and I think you mentioned that really that indoors is the big Kahuna, that’s the problem, right? And there’s two reasons for that. One it’s a more, three reason for that, one is the solution provided for free by the U.S. government initially to the world exist. So one, we don’t have GPS so we start from that simply it does not work inside because you cannot see inside when you want. Now two the problem itself is more built because of what is called multi-path with everything bouncing off walls, creating therefore a much harder physical domain, it’s much harder to get to establish a precise issue. So it’s much more difficult going back, to issue one because there is no upon infrastructure you need to deploy infrastructure and the world is so big and there’s so buildings and there’s so much greater to cover and now you need to deploy infrastructure. The cost is tremendous, is it worthwhile, considering quality that you receive with multi-paths et cetera. So, which obvious to my first point, which is 2 billion Wi-Fi access there waiting to be used location 2 billion Wi-Fi that we’re deployed there because we wanna deploy our Instagram because we wanna connect to Facebook because we wanna do our TikTok. Because whatever, not for location, nobody put those 2 billion access points for location. They’re just there and they can be used for location, which is the nice flavor of what we’re giving in here. So overall issue, location runs deep.
– [Ryan] So tell me a little bit about, since any time, I’ve spoken with individuals about indoor tracking Wi-Fi really hasn’t been mentioned that much as an option. So tell me a little bit about how you kind of see it as, we talked about the access points, the availability there, which is a big part, but from an accuracy standpoint, from a infrastructure standpoint, from just general execution of that precision and accuracy, why is Wi-Fi a good fit when and the reason I ask you is ’cause it is usually, ultra Y-band it’s potentially Laura, even it’s different kinds of tech, Bluetooth depending on the use case. But Wi-Fi hasn’t always been the thing that’s been brought up in the conversations I’ve had, so I’m curious from your perspective, why and how well Wi-Fi works in that indoor setting?
– Great question. Wi-Fi works, just wait, Deeyook Wi-Fi works because existing limitations on Wi-Fi that were there before are not applicable to, now what’s the biggest limitation? The biggest limitation is that when you come with a Wi-Fi solution before Deeyook, you need to be on both sides of the network, okay? You need to associate, you need to authenticate, you need to be a part of the Wi-Fi network. That always means if we’re trying to an IoT, what you imagine with GPS, you wanna move across the city, move across an airport, move across a place. How are you gonna, you’re not connected to all these people, you’re not connected to all these companies, right? So basically limitation on what Wi-Fi could do is a passive technology work on the physical layer so we can get readings and measurements from every access point with never associating to it or authenticating to it. So we’re bringing back Wi-Fi, that would be one. You can use the network, in the past I would’ve said there’s 2 billion access point and you would’ve said great, but my office only has five, So why would I bother with the other, 1 billion, 999 million et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, exactly you don’t need to bother with them. They are part of the network there for you as long as you’re a passive network, that would be one. Two would be, what is your precision that you can get? When you’re talking RSSI based Wi-Fi networks, which was everything the industry had until 2, 3, 4 years ago and what people therefore got used to, you were talking 50 feet, 100 feet, and obviously UWB or Bluetooth beat you there. Now it’s not that UWB, not the Bluetooth gives you a good result, or UWB that can give you good result, it costs a lot of money and need a lot of infrastructure but the fact that you are 100 foot solution, you need 100 feet what you’re gonna do with it, outside maybe it can help you. An address the way Google do, identify what house this Wi-Fi is coming out, the value. But if you’re looking for precise location, no value, okay? So first you can’t use the network, two the precision level. Now the industry has tried to solve that with time of flight. Time of flight will improve you to about 10 feet in an optimal setting and, but you still need to be on both sides of the network, okay? So you need to be in the infrastructure and on the client side, a big limitation. That’s why when you bring a passive technology, that’s very precise and obviously your next question will be, is it precise? And I’ll dive into that, but that is very precise. You can now bring Wi-Fi back and that’s why I think we’re in, we should be very interesting to everybody in the Wi-Fi industry and everybody that is pushing Wi-Fi into the market. So why are we precise? Well, I made you ask the question so I apologize for that, but-
– [Ryan] No, that’s okay.
– [Gideon] Why are we precise? We’re precise because we are measuring angles. We’re not measuring RSSI. We’re not doing time of flight. We’re doing a phase differential between a coherent transmission. That means two antennas at least transmitting at the same time and that phase differential is very precise. It is not impacted from changes in the environment and it’s not impacted from the fact that there’s no line of sight. Think about this, of the issue of line of sight, which is crucial here. When you’re doing RSSI, let’s say, and you’re getting a certain power measurement, you do not know if you’re getting that number because you are 100 feet from the transmitter or because you’re five feet from the transmitter, but there are three walls, right? You don’t know, you’re just getting a measurement. Considering you don’t know that you really don’t know where you are. You’re assuming something about that RSSI measurement. When you do a differential in an angle measurement, like what the wall creates, it just decreases the DBS and as long as the number on the other side is still a number we can use, the angle does not change. The angle does not change because you’ve just crossed walls. It’s the same angle.
– [Ryan] Okay, I hear you.
– [Gideon] Basically, we’re not talking about Faraday cages here. We’re not talking about metal walls. If there’s a metal wall, there’s no angle there’s no problem. If I cross the wall angles, the rays cross the walls I am able to receive them, I am not impacted by the decrease of DBS. I’m still precise. So it’s the physical phenomena that we’re measuring, literally the physical phenomena that we’re measuring that allows us to be more accurate and bring Wi-Fi back to the center of the scene in terms of location.
– [Ryan] Very exciting, okay, great. Well, I appreciate you breaking that down, that kind of answers a lot of my questions that I already had, which is great. As we kind of wrap up here, I wanted to ask you one last thing, just where does the future of this, of the precise tracking of assets and people kind of go, like, what are you seeing? How does this evolve to, continue to improve and continue to be better and more viable of an option?
– [Gideon] Well, the part I did not talk about in our solution is the fact that since it’s a location as a service, it’s a cloud solution. We’re building a database and since we’re building a database, crowdsourcing allows us to continuously improve the precision of location that we’re providing. So while a single asset being tracked in a specific area will give you sub-three foot accuracy. The more and more assets are tracked within that area the better accuracy you will have for everybody, which is the essence and power of crowdsourcing. So what I’m saying is, unlike other activity solution, you come to a certain situation it’s like, I’m sure you’re familiar for it from, going to a basketball game. You’re there in the beginning of the game, you’re using Wi-Fi, you say great Wi-Fi. Some people are coming in great Wi-Fi. Everybody is in the game, Wi-Fi’s dead. Okay, that’s connectivity issue. That’s not what happens with location because we’re passive, what you get with location is the more users you get, the better location you get for everybody. So what I’m saying is my point is where is it going? It’s granting for better and more precise location and when you have better and more precise location, you are able to utilize location in a better way. Now, the one thing, nice thing we have, we always see as a location company is that, anybody in his business case knows better than I, why he needs location, he or she needs location, okay? Anybody, if you are in the logistics space, if you’re a manufacturing company, you know why you need location and I can’t tell you what you need location, but I can provide you that precise location and that’s what Deeyook is about, it’s about providing everybody that precise location.
– [Ryan] Gotcha, okay, fantastic. So I wanted to ask you and anything new and exciting kind of coming out from Deeyook that we should be on the lookout for and if our audience has questions and wants to follow up, what’s the best way to do that?
– [Gideon] Okay, so the one thing I would greatly enjoy repeating is our announcement from CS. Which was, just 6, 7 weeks ago that we are partnering with Infineon and our technology is available on Infineon Wi-Fi chips. Infineon is a leader in the IoT market and Wi-Fi for our IoT market and we’re very proud to partner with them and have availability of our solution on anybody that has an IoT chipset in their solution. That was our first big announcement in terms of partnership. It was a major milestone for the company and, before and after, it’s not the same company and we’re really excited about that.
– [Ryan] That’s great.
– [Gideon] That’s the first thing to do. Anything to approach us info@Deeyook.com, D-E-E-Y-O-O-K.com, is the place to go. We’re very alert, we’re very responsive to people’s need and use cases and willing to talk to anybody and especially anybody that listens to this podcast.
– [Ryan] Fantastic, well Gideon this has been a great conversation. Thanks so much for taking the time. Anytime we can talk about not just asset tracking, but indoor asset tracking and how this is going to improve and make this a viable thing for people. It’s a challenge that so many are trying to solve so the insights you shared have been great and I think our audience is gonna get a ton of value over this. So thanks again for taking the time.
– [Gideon] Okay, it was a real pleasure being here. Looking forward to talk again, thank you Ryan.
– [Ryan] Absolutely thank you. All right, everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the IoT For All Podcast, if you enjoyed the episode, please click the thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as it become available. Other than that, thanks again for watching and we’ll see you next time.
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