Will the cost of data make smart cities economically feasible?
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So the value there is marketing, instantaneous marketing.
But Simon, you're doing exactly the same thing in a different way. And here's what we didn't have: we didn't have your Edge devices, your Edge data centers, we didn't have anything proximal. We were charging back each of the franchises a fee to have all the infrastructure and everything else. But this to me is why I say, what we need to do is filter better on the streaming and on the ingestion side to really make a better decision about what data to keep. I'm doing that at the front side of the analysis, and then I'm intermixing that with my historical data, and you can do the math and the business modeling that would go along with that. But that's where I'm seeing this notion of how we would project for infrastructure on the Edge and the cloud, how we would look at a continuous insight and continuous intelligence and how this is going mainstream over a very short period of time, because the need is there.
Given that you're in Las Vegas I'll tell you this, Swim predicts ahead, the four looking two minutes for every single intersection in Vegas in real time. And that information, or those predictions are streamed to customers like Uber and FedEx and so on. You know how much I get paid for that? 25 cents per intersection per month. It's not good. It may go up in time, but it's not a great business to be in and it takes enormous effort to get there and it's expensive too. And it'll take a long time to turn into a retirement fund.
Well, actually the question that I would have is, is it also not being sold to the weather channel to track the CO2 that's being emitted at each intersection?
Actually when you combine public transit information from many locations with weather, and you know the velocity of all public transit, you can predict what CO2 or NOx pollution is in the vicinity. That is more valuable and that's sold to insurers.
I tried to do this previously with mobile software. Think about the number of Starbucks that there are in the U.S. and how many corners there's a Starbucks. We engaged with them to say, if we can write the code that will give you a way to redirect a person walking down the street who wants coffee, and pre-orders it off of our app and we know that the backup inside the Starbucks that they're closest to would be an extra six minutes of their wait time, we could offer you a coupon system, a reward system, an incentive, to redirect them the next half block away to the next Starbucks who has less customers in their queue and so forth and so on. And we actually got uptake on that, it was one of our first customers, they were trialing it. We collected almost $50 million in revenue in our second year.