SXSW 2017 –– Talking Tech w/ Newseum, American University, EU startups & more!
Host Brian Wesolowski took his show on the road, heading to Austin for this year's SXSW 2017 Interactive Festival. We chatted with the Newseum, American University, the Charles Koch Institute, a variety of EU startups and CDT staff. Listen to get the scoop on what's happening at the cross-sections of tech!<br><br>FULL LINEUP:<br>Jeffrey Herbst – President & CEO, Newseum<br>Mitch Gelman – Senior Fellow, Media & Tech, Newseum<br>Lindsay Grace – Associate Professor, Founding Director of AU Game Lab & Studio, American University<br>Jordan Richardson – Senior Policy And Research Analyst, Charles Koch Institute<br>Jorge Gomez – CEO & Co-founder, Canard Drones<br>Andre Ramos – Founder, Tripaya<br>Olivier Plante – Co-founder & CEO, Thingthing Keyboard<br>Michelle De Mooy – Director, Privacy & Data Project, CDT<br>Elizabeth Weingarten – Director, Global Gender Parity Initiative, New America<br>Ifeoma Ajunwa – Fellow & Assistant Professor, Berkman Klein Center At Harvard + UDC School Of Law<br><br>More info on CDT's events @ SXSW: cdt.org/sxsw<br>More info on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT. Tea. Welcome to CDT's tech talk where we dish on tech and Internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski, and it's time to talk tech. Last week, we were at South by Southwest interactive. CDT's team was part of five different sessions on topics ranging from Grace online to workplace privacy. We also co hosted a happy hour with the R Street Institute. In this episode of Tech Talk, we share the chats we had with some interesting people that we met out in Austin. It's always an eclectic and entertaining time at South by. I'm here with Jeff Hertz, the CEO of the Newseum, and Mitch Gellman, the CTO of the Newseum. And why don't you go ahead, Jeff, and tell me about the Newseum, the mission of it, and what brings you out to South by Southwest?
Sure. So the Newseum is the preeminent national institution that promotes, explains, and defends the five freedoms of the first amendment and the right of free expression. We're here at Southwest because, how technology is changing journalism, the media, and our our understanding of the people's relationship with government is absolutely critical to us, and there's no better place to see how all those trends are moving than to come to Austin.
And, of course, now is a pretty interesting time for defending the the First Amendment. What are some of the the programs the Newseum is doing right now kind of in the the change of tenor around the First Amendment?
We really have, three parts. So the building attracts about 800,000
visitors a year, and, many of our exhibits talk about current challenges to freedom,
talk about current challenges to freedom, across not only United States but around the world. We have programming where we bring together people of different, attitudes and ideologies to talk about our foundational liberties. That's why I'm here. I'll be talking later today with the general counsel of the FBI to talk about security, privacy, and the first amendment. And then our museum education program that reaches about 200,000 kids in the building building and about 7,000,000 through digital outreach in The United States and around the world. And we release programs around freedom, elections, and digital literacy also, how to try to tell what's real and what's fake on the Internet, especially important for young people.
And what are some of those things that you're you're what's some of those curriculum that where you can help them understand what's real and what's fake? Because obviously, this is grabbing headlines.
Sure. We tell them first, look, it's always been an issue. Go back to Yale journalism in the eighteen nineties, or concerns before then. But we try to teach them in a world where the information ecosystem is flat. What looks like what's from the New York Times and what's from Joe's homepage on something looks the same. Here's what you should ask yourself. Are there sources cited? Do you know who's writing it? Do you know who owns it, perhaps? Do you know if they print retractions? The basic questions of editorial legitimacy and control. And then we ask them, is this ratified by other sources? The kind of analysis, that journalists have been doing and that people have to start doing because what we've seen in the information system is the gatekeepers have been taken down, the Walter Cronkites, the New York Times of the world. Anyone can enter and produce news. In a lot of ways, that's great, but anyone can produce news. And there are some people who want to pollute the information ecosystem, put out fake news, and the consumers are gonna have to be much more intentional and deliberate about the news they consume than when you could kinda trust the New York Times and CBS
to get it right. And that term fake news is just totally loaded, and it just makes my skin crawl when I hear quality journalists, you know, yelled at and be told that they are fake news. So you're you're doing great things there. I also love your gift shop, by the way. Everyone should go to the museum. It's my favorite one in DC. They have a great gift shop. So let's let's go to that wonderful Newseum and talk about the technology you have there. I know you're doing some things around virtual reality and augmented reality. Mitch, tell me a bit about the technology that you're using at the Newseum.
So the Newseum traditionally has been, built around its artifacts and its incredible video presentations. In fact, what few people know is that it is a state of the art broadcast facility with two amazing studios, the night studios on Pennsylvania Avenue and within the building in which some of the, top broadcast shows have been produced, over the years including, ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday mornings in the past. But now what we see with these, 800,000 visitors who come to the Newseum each day is that they're looking for more immersive experiences. And while it's wonderful to be able to go and see the incredible artifacts we have, the Berlin Wall and a guard tower that existed just a mile from Checkpoint Charlie. The Unabomber's Cabin as part of the FBI in the Age of Terror exhibit. These are fantastic artifacts but what we're able to do now with virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, is to give people the opportunity to travel to and be transported into these environments through the power of technology, the HTC Vive, the Oculus Touch, and Samsung Gear VR. So we're doing three things right now. One is we have, a selection of the top ten three hundred and sixty degree videos each month that are produced by news and, entertainment and cultural organizations around around the country and around the world. We highlight those in an exhibit in which people can go and experience 360 degree video on touch screens in our kiosks or in a Gear VR look around VR experience. Kids love it. People who have never had VR before, many of them get their first experience, with a substantive and engaging piece of content, which is very important as they're learning the value of these new technologies. The second thing we're doing, and this is gonna be opening in June, is we have created immersive environments for walk around room scale VR that will take the visitors to East And West Berlin during the heart of the Cold War. They'll be able to travel to the top of the guard tower into the basement to try to find the right components that they can physically move with the Vive controllers in order to escape to the West and participate in history as it happened. Many of the people who come to the museum, particularly the middle school and the high school students, weren't even born in 1989 and don't have as much of a sense of the difference between the freedom of expression and the confines of oppression that the divide between East And West Berlin represented. We're going to be able to give them an emotional connection to those worlds through these experiences. In addition to that, we're looking to create a spherical theater that will allow people not only to experience the video and the room scale VR in a headset, but will give them a chance to walk around inside the equivalent of a headset with positional sound in a 360 degree environment with 49 of their closest friends or classmates. These are cutting edge ideas that help us continue to take Jeff's vision for informing, educating, protecting, and promoting the five freedoms of their first amendment and making them tangible for the young men and women who are coming to the museum, both to learn but also to have fun. I mean, Mitch, I am sold. I'm gonna buy some tickets. That sounds fantastic.
So, before we wrap up here with Jeff and Mitch, why don't you tell me what your favorite South By experience has been so far? I mean, Jeff, you already told me, you know, you're having a great time out here and what the museum has done, but what have you learned since being out here? Well, I always love going through trade shows to see,
you know, the creativity of the human spirit knows no bounds these days. And I think what's interesting, complicated, floor, but I think what we saw was VR entering the retail realm in a really serious way. That this is not something that's beyond the scope of the amateur now. Very important. And second, just the personalization of everything, that food, clothing, kind of on a Warby Parker level, is going to be increasingly personalized. And I think that's great and has a lot of advantages. And it's also gonna have a lot of consequences, as we think about how much of our social lives are tied up with group activities that may be individualized. And I think it has a lot to say about democracy too. What does it mean when consumers in other realms are getting so much more information, have such high expectations? But our political system kinda works like it did two hundred years ago. And I think that that's a moment for pause, you You know, what does it mean, in this age when we still relate we relate to every other organization, company, like, differently, but we relate to government the same way. I think that's something to think about. Wow. You took a lot more from South by than I did. That's amazing. Mitch, what about you? Wow. My my reactions are far more pedestrian.
I love I love when experiences are created out of, out of ideas. And I'm a, big fan of, of great television and great narrative storytelling. So I watched Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. And when I walked by El Pollo Hermano, where they had actually built the brothers' chicken shop, right over there on the corner of, I think it was Fourth and, I don't know, in San Jacinto the, the other day. And, you know, got to got to see that. I thought it was just some of the most brilliant marketing also. And now I know Better Call Saul starts on, April 10.
That's brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me, Jeff and Mitch. I'm here with Lindsay Grace, an associate professor at American University. He's also the founding director of American University's GameLab and Studio. Lindsay, welcome. And why don't you tell us what you're doing out here at South by Southwest? Great. So we did a session with,
some of my former students around games and journalism. So, essentially, we've, been funded about 30 or $50,000 from the Knight Foundation to try and improve both the consumption and production of news through game design. Basically, game design thinking, trying to apply playful designs and engagement strategies from games to, improve basically improve the way that games work. I'm sorry, the news works. So what would you say are some of the challenges that you're trying to address with games that, you know, we have with the news right now? Sure. So one of the challenges is essentially if you look at the time that people spend on their mobile devices, they spend, almost 10 times as much time on games as they do with news content. Although, they they actually look for news content very frequently. So what we're trying to do is actually increase the amount of time that people spend with the news and, help be people become better news consumers. That includes, we made a game called Factitious where we're trying to help people, identify fake news from a non fake news. And we also have some engagement strategies that are actually about, converting long form, traditional sort of news articles into playable experiences. And we did one for NPR's, WAMU affiliate, and we also did one for Vox Media and Polygon.
Oh, very awesome. So tell me so this is what you came out here to do. What are you doing? Like, what's your main job at American? Because it sounds like you have great titles. You do a lot of great things. What what are you researching now? Sure. So basically, I, helped start the American University Game Lab and Studio about three years ago, and the main focus is applying games in non game contexts. So the idea is that we try and do interesting things around, particularly engagement strategies.
And we run a studio that actually works with third party, organizations. So our mainstay clients are education testing services, ETS, the standardized test folks, Deloitte Consulting. We've done some work for the World Bank. We've done some work for the National Institute of Mental Health. And essentially what we do is we try and create a variety of games that solve sort of real world problems through playful experiences. So for example, in the NIMH project, the National Institute of Mental Health Project, what we did is we actually created a kind of clinical treatment, a substitute for medication, in stress and anxiety as a game. So instead of taking a medication, you actually go through this treatment, called attentional bias modification and you play this hidden numbers game that actually drives you towards, better sort of stress management and anxiety management. Cool. So what's an I mean, you just highlighted one. What's the favorite game that you've created so far? So I actually have a a favorite game out of my own history. So I made a game called Big Huggin'. The way Big Huggin' works is it's a lot like what we call a platformer, Super Mario Brothers. And what you do is you control the game with a giant teddy bear. So you actually have to hug this teddy bear. He accepts about 12 different degrees of hugs, to help him pass his obstacles in each level. And it's a six level game. It's been a big hit in in sort of fairs and festivals. I mean, that sounds adorable and just fun. What's you've been here now for how many days? A couple of days. What have you learned by being out at South by Southwest? Well, the thing I always like about South by Southwest is the energy. And, one of the things that we actually talked about in our panel was this notion of engineered collisions, bringing all kinds of disparate disciplines, anti siloed organizations or, activities, and just mashing them together to see what happens. So in our projects, we had a psychologist, journalist, a programmer. And what was great is just a lot of the sessions I've gone to have actually been doing a lot of this. So it's a great environment for cross pollination and, getting a filmmaker in the same room as a journalist and talking about how they can actually make a great documentary together. That's great. And are you optimistic about the future of news? Can your game save the news industry? Well, I wouldn't do anything if I weren't optimistic about its future. So I am optimistic. But there are a lot of challenges ahead of us. We talk a lot. I was actually on, FedTalk Radio the other day explicitly talking about how to help out, fake news.
And, it's a it's a big challenge, and it's only getting more challenging. Well, I'm glad that you're doing it, and I'm glad games are part of the solution. Thanks so much for joining me, Lindsay. Thank you. I'm here with Jordan Richardson from the Charles Koch Institute who came to South by Southwest to talk about criminal justice reform and technology. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Of course. So tell me, you brought you had a whole day on this almost. What are the topics that you talked about today?
So I talked about the intersection between technology and criminal justice. What we find in our criminal justice system, it's broken. We see a prison system across The United States with over two point two million people in prison. And a lot of times we have to figure out what's gonna happen to people once they come out. Ninety five percent of everyone who's in prison is gonna be released back into society at some point. So we need to be setting people up for success. Unfortunately, we don't. You have the high recidivism rights of people going in and out. It's a revolving door. I think what we can do is we can use technology not only to enhance their lives to equip them equip, former offenders to be, active once they come back into the market, but also to try to prevent, unnecessary incarceration in the first place. We can use that with policing tools. We can use it with, privacy, protections. But I think there's an amazing intersection between technology criminal justice where we have the tools available. It's just figuring how to use them to solve our problems.
And, of course, law enforcement agencies use technology at at all levels and all, you know, different approaches from the arrest to, you know, while they're in jail to on the way out. What are some ways that, you know, technology can be there in the the whole process and create positive outcomes that you you want?
I think it's both, for the police and for citizens as well. So police are now experimenting with body worn cameras. They'll have these, devices on that record what they're doing in their shift. And what we've seen is actually a lot of positive results. There was a test study that was done in Rialto, California. They did it for about a year and they they they looked over the results and they found that after the police put on these body worn cameras, there was a 59 decrease in the amount of officer involved shootings and 88% decrease in the amount of citizen complaints. So the idea that, you know, want you behave differently once you're being watched is it stands up to reason. But on the other hand, you have, citizens who have their cell phones with incredible video footage, and we're actually able to hold, officials accountable in saying this is the real story. Like, the shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina, at first, the officer said, you know, there was, there was nothing wrong with what I did until we saw the videotape taken by someone's cell phone. Because technology is a powerful way of telling a story, and I think we need just need to figure out how to use it responsibly. Part of the problem that I see is that if we over rely on the technology instead of the training, it's it's like having an amazing car like a Corvette or something. It's a beautiful engine, but unless you know how to drive it, it's worthless. You don't know where to go. So it's about using technology responsibly.
So, another piece of technology too is things about around sentencing and and parole. And, sometimes, you find, you know, mandatory minimum sentences are, of course, something that we we've all heard about and have plenty of of views on. But it for some cases, you know, especially on the parole side, people are using algorithms to figure out, should this person be released? And some of the stuff that goes in there, like existing racial biases and whatnot. How do you get the benefits of having kind of these, you know, algorithms helping you make helping inform decisions, but still not, you know, have those inherent biases in?
The the the challenge here is it's either the algorithms or it's human, decision making. And so, the the the algorithms are only as good as the data that we put into them. And part of that is just making sure that we check our biases. That we check to make sure that we're not distorting that kind of data that goes in. You know, and I've seen, you know, judges make the same kind of decisions on a day to day basis, which, we trust them to do their jobs. And, presumably, we trust them to put the data incorrectly. But, I think it's all about challenging our assumptions. You have to make sure that what you're doing actually, lines up to your
standards. So one of the, most important parts of South by Southwest is obviously to meet new people, learn new things. You had a full two days here or so and a full day on this topic. What are some of the things that you learned or different perspectives that you gained by being here? One of the biggest challenges
that, that I've seen that confronted head on by the tech community here is, look, we've got, a huge workforce that are trapped behind bars right now and they're gonna come back out. And I've seen amazing work by people in the tech community saying, we wanna equip equip these people for, when they come back into the workforce, we're gonna give them the tools they need. Let me give you an example. Amazon is actually working to help prisoners, who are currently behind bars. Now, if you wanna do training for someone in prison, it's it's kind of hard because you can't have access to the internet. It's a security risk. You don't want, you know, violent people contacting their victims or something. So, a lot of training that goes on for testing is really hard to do without the internet. But, in Angola, prison in Louisiana, there was, a group of prisoners there who were trying to take their GED, trying to get, their tests passed. And, you know, the normal procedure for them was that they had to wake up at four in the morning. They had to be shackled, put into a van, driven to the test center. You know, six hours before the test even began, you know, they had traumatic experience and then told take this exam, which is gonna give you this the result that's gonna determine your future. And they had such a low passage rate. But Amazon stepped in and tried to work with, with companies to try develop a software that's not connected to the internet, but allows them to take the test and the GED right there in prison. And what they found is a ninety four percent or higher success rate. And so it's using that technology to help people where they are. And I think that's, one of the most exciting things about South by is people coming up with creative solutions that says, if we can't, solve the problem where we where ever everyone is looking at, we're gonna create a new pathway and go down that. Great story to leave on. Thanks so much, Jordan. Thank you very much.
We're still at the EU House at South by Southwest, and I'm now joined by Olivier Plante, who has a company called ThingThing, and he's gonna tell us all about it. Tell me about what ThingThing is and why people should love it.
Alright. So ThingThing is a is a third party keyboard. Right? And so we're revolutionizing the way people interact with their devices because nowadays, you have several problems. One is during a messaging conversation, you need to switch between apps to access things that are in other apps. Right? Now the issue with this is the back and forth is not natural. And from a user experience point of view, it's very frustrating for users. Right? So we're solving this. But on the other side, we've learned also that service providers or app developers who have services like Yelp or Foursquare or Airbnb, they're struggling in being present in messaging. Right? So they are fighting against real estate of the screen time. Right? 45% of the time on the screen, we spend it over messaging. Right? So this is pretty impressive. So how can you act ax give them access to billions of other users is by creating a keyboard as a platform. Right? So the platform, what it does, it gives the the the service providers the ability to be at the fingertips of the user, and the user is able to search and share whatever he needs in whatever app he wants to use. So if he's over email, he wanna share some Airbnb places with some friends, he can pull that from the keyboard, tap three things, and share it, and then add add his message thanks to the keyboard. We're replacing the keyboard on your device, and we believe that this is what a keyboard a mobile keyboard should be, connected, unified, and it's also very private. So we have a very strong privacy statement on our website. Our company is very private and transparent. Everything that you type is local on the device. The algorithm is local on the device, doesn't use your personal data,
which is hard to make, but we believe it's the right thing to do here. I love hearing a company that is your so new and that cares about privacy so so much. And also, it sounds like something that I would love to have. Anytime you're in WhatsApp and you have to toggle between the different things. So how's it going? How new is this product? How far how much out in the market is it at this point? Yeah. So, we've been on the market since,
since last two years March. March two years ago, launched launched alongside the Mobile World Congress. In one year, we at that time, we were bootstrapping. Right? Hustling and bootstrapping. It was great. And then after that, we raised a round of 350,000 with amazing investors that in our long term vision, how the post app economy is changing, so how people use less and less apps and only core functionalities of of those apps. And, and now, we've progressed, and our next objective is to be on Android and become the main keyboard of, OEMs, smartphone manufacturers. Right? So I'm looking here at Sal Buy for investors and also partners. It's very interesting to see a big mix of of people here. There's a lot of different profiles that are very interesting, but all of them are saying, like, wow. I don't know how this couldn't exist before. Right? It's just awesome. This is the feedback we have. That's when you know you've got something that's gonna work. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And it's working. We're progressing. And we're doing interesting moves in the market. And, yeah, we're very proud to be here selected by the EU. Well, I will be sure to check it out. Everyone else should think thing. Thanks for joining us. Thanks a lot, Brian. Cheers.
I just heard a great panel, wellness or else, privacy and workplace wellness, and I have three gorgeous panelists here with me. They're gonna tell me what it was about for all our listeners and a little bit about, the main points of it. Michelle?
Hi. This is Michelle Desmoy with the Center for Democracy and Technology, and we had an awesome discussion today about the privacy implications in workplace wellness programs, which a lot of people are enrolled in. And so what we tried to do was describe to people the data that's collected, how it's shared, what laws laws apply or don't apply, and what they can do to be active if they care about protecting their privacy in these programs.
Hi. I'm Elizabeth Weingarten. I'm with New America, the cybersecurity initiative there. And one of the things that I did on the panel was kind of go through an employee wellness program that I, took part in, through my, organization and kinda showed, just how invasive some of the questions are that you get with some of these programs. So for instance, I was asked, you know, if I'm currently in therapy, if I'm currently pregnant, if I was depressed yesterday, if I'm taking mood altering drugs. So these are just a few of the questions that you get in some of these programs. And all the answers were yes. Right?
All of them. The the CDT will not be asking those questions. I won't be answering them. So good points.
Hello. My name is Ifeoma Ajingwa. And, what I focus on for the panel was really what are the legal protections, for employees, who are part of these, programs. Because I think for me, a concern is that these programs, these workplace wellness programs are serving as proxy and runs, really, to get around anti discrimination laws that would otherwise protect employees from being discriminated against, on the basis of their genetic profile or their disability or, even pregnancy. So we really, need to,
ask whether the questions being, asked as part of these wellness programs is really resulting in data that can ultimately be wielded in very discriminatory ways. Right. You also saw a big line of folks asking questions at the end. What was the most resonating question or the question that you thought is like, wow, that's an awesome question?
Go ahead. I think one of the questions we got was about consent. And I thought that was a really important question because I think there is, sometimes a misunderstanding that, as long as the employee says yes, that means they've given consent. Actually, I feel that wellness programs should be put to the same standard as other, health related, procedures which require actually informed consent. So it's not just about saying yes, but actually about knowing exactly what you're saying yes to and getting the full information of what your data will be used for and how it will be used.
There was also a question about data aggregation, and whether, you know, that, allows us to sidestep some of the discrimination issues that we're talking about. And I think something interesting, that came up was even with data aggregation, if it's a small company, you can still identify some people, based on that data. So for instance, you can probably tell if there are only three women working at the company, you know, if if somebody says that they're pregnant. Well, that's not gonna be too difficult or, you know, they're they're trying to get pregnant or something like that. Pregnant or something like that. But, I feel now also brought up that, de identifying data is also a really, really hard thing to do. So we can't just get, caught up in thinking, oh, well, if we just, you know, get this data, aggregated, that that will solve all our
problems. Interesting topic. People should learn more about it. Thank you so much, and hope you enjoy the rest of your South by. We are here at the EU House at South by South Southwest, and I'm joined by two of the wonderful entrepreneurs that are being featured here. I have, Jorge Gomez and Andre Ramos. So first, I'm gonna hear from Jorge Gomez with Canard Drones. Jorge, tell me about your company, what you're doing, and what brought you out to South by.
Well, thank you, for having us today. What we do is, we work with drones to calibrate navigational aid systems. The nav aids are the visual and radio beacons that airports use to make sure aircraft land safely. And those systems are checked and calibrated from the air using executive aircraft with very bulk and very expensive onboard sensors. So we use drones with onboard sensors to substitute the aircraft. We save airports and hundreds of millions of dollars on maintenance throughout the year, and we do the operation a lot faster, a lot cheaper, a lot better. That's great. So have you you've broken into the European market. You wanna be in The US market. How how's that going? Is South by making you meet interesting people? Yes. We last year, last October, we went to Silicon Valley. There's, an event. It's called the Airport Innovation Forum. We won the best award, the best prize award. So that opened a lot of doors here. We're already, in conversations with, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Jackson Hole International Airport. Here we've been able to meet a lot of very interesting people, mainly, airport advocates or people doing, some point, everyone knows somebody who's also connected to the airport, so it's been extremely helpful.
We definitely love our our drones and our laws and our regulations here. Do you think you can crack that that code and and get into the market then?
Yeah. That's one of the main issues here. There's three main points. One is the tech part, which we already solved. Then is the, operational part, which we already solved too. And the regulations is the third, main issue here. The FAA, the Federal Aviation Authority, released last year something called part 107, which allows to operate drones within certain areas, certain, things you need to comply with. So we do comply with everything. So we're technically allowed to operate, which we're very excited
with. Well, good luck, and I look forward to seeing Canadr drones in The US very soon. Yeah. Very different company now, Tripaya. Andre, tell me about Tripaya.
So Tripaya is a new travel site with a completely new rationale. So what we what we figure out is that every travel site are focusing on helping those who know exactly where they want to go, but no one is helping those who don't. So we create this site with completely different, ideas. So everything you need is to set your budget and your interests, from, beach, romance, culture, family fun, nightlife. And then we will suggest the best places with flight and hotel to go within your budget and interests.
So just hypothetically, if I have a low budget and I'm someone who loves traveling for food, what are some of the places that I might end up? Yeah. Actually,
our site is really for the low budget, traveler. Because sometimes you you think and you we made a, a survey on the street with our customers, and, people say that they don't travel more because they think it's expensive. But nowadays, with the rise of, low cost airlines and the the Airbnbs, it's really, really, not expensive to to to travel. So, for example, we see this a lot, people with, $100 for a week and get away. It's possible to go outside your city. Very, very cool.
So that's great. You're not in The US market yet, but you'd like to be in The US market. You're gonna make a play out here soon too? One of the we we are from Portugal,
and, our main incoming source traffic is from Portugal, but the second is already The United States. Although we never did anything specific to The United States, it was only word-of-mouth. So, but, my presence here is to be to hear the the the real, opinion feedback of our clients because one thing is, showing them. Other thing is, having the the the direct feedback. So, today and yesterday, I was presenting Tripay to some of our, target,
clients, people between 18 and 25. And it was really good hearing their opinions, their feedback, their suggest suggestions to improve our solution. So it's it's been very good here. Well, in The United States, a bit of a mess right now, so I wanna travel a lot more these days too. So I will check out Trobaiya. Everyone should. Thanks so much for joining. Thank you. That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. I'd like to thank our friends at the EU delegation to The US for letting us use their house at South by Southwest for a fair number of these conversations. Hopefully, you enjoyed hearing from some of the awesome South by Southwest attendees just as much as we enjoyed talking to them I'm Brian was a lousy thanks so much for listening
