Mobility Innovators

 

Jaspal Singh [00:00:04]:

Welcome to the mobility innovators podcast.

Jaspal Singh [00:00:10]:

Hello Boyd. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Boyd Cohen [00:00:15]:

Thanks for the invitation. I’m excited as well.

Jaspal Singh [00:00:18]:

Looking forward to learning from you. So today I’ll be spending time getting to know you about Iomob, which is an internet of mobility, and your thought on application of blockchain and mobility.

And to begin with, I would like to ask you to share with our listener a little more about yourself also, are there any interesting fact about your career that are not on LinkedIn?

Boyd Cohen [00:00:41]:

Okay. So I’ll make sure that anything I share, even if it’s unknown is not something that shouldn’t be shared. So I think one thing, you know, professionally that’s interesting is as I reflect on my career, you know, a lot of people in the last few years have been talking about like three of the most recent in the history of humanity, sort of technological disruptions. Yeah. And then thinking about my own role in each of them. And it’s probably not obvious on my LinkedIn, but people talk about the “.com” boom of Web 2.0 yeah. Interestingly, I was in that space. In my PhD at the University of Colorado and I was one of the first researchers studying the dot coms as an academic in the entrepreneurship space. And I was curious at the time if any of you recall the craziness around all these initial public offerings that pets.com were doing with no traditional fundamentals.

Boyd Cohen [00:01:44]:

So I was trying to get under the hood and understand what factors of legitimacy influence evaluation of startups in the “.com” space. When they went public. And I had like three categories, I looked at the founding team, I looked at the company itself and I looked at the industry there trying to disrupt. So in, in that boom of Web 2.0, I was a researcher observing and publishing research.

The second boom is mobile. And in mobile, I actually had now made the transition from a pure academic to a hybrid academic entrepreneur. And one of my first companies was a company called “Third Whale”. And we were to my knowledge, the very first company in the world to build mobile apps for green consumers. So, our core app was like a Yelp for green consumers in North America. So, we acquired a database of sustainability and fair-trade businesses around north America.

Boyd Cohen [00:02:43]:

And we created a mobile app at that time. Blackberry was still important. So, we had an, a native app for Blackberry iOS and Android. And this was like 2009, right? When the app stores were released. I remember I did a pitch of my startup in Silicon Valley, and it was funny because my PhD’s an entrepreneurship and I studied Silicon Valley my first time ever going there. And I was there as an entrepreneur, and I was academic pitching my startup out of 45 entrepreneurs. And we are chosen top five, which got me all excited. And we rented a space in Silicon Valley and all the rest, the project didn’t get that far. We did license the technology to a US company because we are based in Vancouver at the time. So that second boom, I was involved as an entrepreneur. I always all my entrepreneur activities been in a sustainability space and low carbon.

Boyd Cohen [00:03:32]:

And then the third huge wave. That’s probably the biggest tsunami way we’ve seen in the history of humanity around technology and what it can do for us and, and society in the planet is Blockchain. And again, I’m back in that one. So, in 2016, I started writing a book about how blockchain could change the way we interact with the economic activities and startups and how there’s ways to coordinate in a different kind of way. I called it post capitalist entrepreneurship. And as I was writing that book, I got invited by a venture fund to say, Hey boy, you should start blockchain startup in the smart city space, because that’s where I’ve been a lot of work and long story. I found my co-founder Josep Sanjuas in 2017 and we incorporate Iomob in 2018. We have gone through iterations, which we’ll talk about now. But, the summary point I’m trying to make is I’ve had kind of a front-row seat either as an observer or an actor in three of the biggest technological transformations of our time.

Jaspal Singh [00:04:34]:

That’s amazing. I love the story. You mentioned about three waves and moving from Web 1.0 to mobile and now blockchain. And I think every time the tide and wave are getting bigger and bigger and more powerful. So you are getting more trained to deal with these waves. In fact, in 2009-10, there was company like WebVan, which was doing online delivery of stuff and all, which is quite popular these days. I think that company was ahead of their time and couldn’t able to sustain, but now we are seeing technologies. Adoption has increased. People are more used to it and, and things are getting better. I’m pretty optimistic about blockchain. It’s going to change thing.

Now my second question is about your career and I must say that I’m really inspired and loved your journey so far.

Jaspal Singh [00:05:28]:

You started your career as a change management consultant center, but quickly joined the academy and, work in various position in university in three different continents. It is amazing because you met students and entrepreneurs from three different world. You started your journey as Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Sustainability in Spain in 2001 and then moved to Canada later to Argentina later to Chile and come back to Spain. And the most impressive thing is that you taught entrepreneurship and sustainability in all these places.

So it’s amazing because people don’t get chance to live that kind of a life. And finally, you mentioned you launch Iomob in 2017 as a co-founder in Spain. So why this move in the carrier? I mean, when you are teaching and moving across the world, why did you decided to come into the arena? What motivated you to move from the role of a coach to player now?

Boyd Cohen [00:06:25]:

The funny thing is, so when I first got my PhD in 2001, I was teaching sustainable entrepreneurship. As you said, I was one of the first professors in the world teaching that. Now it seems so normal, but this was 2001 we’re talking 21 years ago. So I was teaching it and I was excited about the topic and my students were, but at some point, I came to realize, I didn’t know what I was talking about. Like I was, I started to feel bad for my students because I was professing teaching. I wasn’t really a very lecture-oriented professor. I was always kind of focused on hands on, learned by doing and moving away from textbooks and like being, trying to be an entrepreneur, but I’d never tried to be one myself

Boyd Cohen [00:07:11]:

So I started in 2002, no, 2004 I think was when I started playing around with trying to be an entrepreneur while I was an academic, which I don’t recommend for anyone. That’s really hard

Boyd Cohen [00:07:25]:

After like three years of being a founder, I realized I had gotten like a new PhD in the real world of what it means to actually start up a company. And then I really felt bad for all my prior students who had to listen to me, explain from books, what I knew about being an entrepreneur. So I went back and forth between being an entrepreneur and being an academic in sustainable entrepreneurship over really two decades almost. And then in 2015 after having well, I moved to Barcelona. I took the position of Dean of Research at a Business School in Barcelona and a couple years in, I got the entrepreneurship bug again. And at first, I tried doing both yeah. Realized I couldn’t do both. And by 2018 I was like, okay, if I want Iomob up to be successful, say goodbye to academics, which for a lot of people is kind of scary. Because you have this stable sort of tenured income and security. And we had a nice house and all these things, and it was like. Thankfully, my wife is really supportive and she’s also ambitious and believes in me and believes in taking risks in life. So, she supported me all along and here we are. I haven’t back to academics since 2018.

Jaspal Singh [00:08:43]:

Which is great. So, it means things are getting better and bigger.

Boyd Cohen [00:08:48]:

For sure

Jaspal Singh [00:08:48]:

In fact, this remind me of my personal story. So, when I quit my public sector job in 2010 and, was about to get married and I told my family that I’m quitting my stable job and starting a company and they were shocked. They were like this guy has gone insane and doing these kind of stuff. But somewhere I think getting to start a business is the best way to learn about it. You can read books, you can join courses, but if you really want to enjoy entrepreneurship, just start something and you will learn.

Boyd Cohen [00:09:20]:

What is by doing

Jaspal Singh [00:09:21]:

And learn by doing

Boyd Cohen [00:09:23]:

Think, you know, in recent times we’ve seen a lot more cultural awareness and acceptance of taking the risk of being an entrepreneur. And it seems like every day, every year around the world is becoming more and more accepted or even encouraged. Like I remember when I was visiting Singapore, maybe 5-6 years ago, they were just in that transition where all the parents in Singapore always wanted their kids to go to the NUS and NTU top universities, like world class universities. And they wanted them to go and work at HP and IBM and all these global companies that had a headquarter in Singapore. And it was like, what are you doing? Like leaving your great degree. And then going to start a company that was like, seen as a failure, but in the last several years, it’s changed a lot there and, and around the world. And now it’s acceptable and it’s the cool thing to do. Even parents think it’s cool that their children are becoming entrepreneurs. So that helps as well.

Jaspal Singh [00:10:20]:

Oh yeah. There is much more acceptability in especially in the developing part of the world because where there are a lot of these arranged marriages happen, and then you need to convince the bridegroom family that you are working. So, when you say you are having your own company, sometimes they look like you’re jobless. So, there is acceptability of that. Thank you for sharing that backstory and, and I fully agree the lesson you share, it’s learning by doing otherwise you will never learn.

Now the story of Iomob, which is internet of mobility. I mean, I really love this term because it tried to capture in one word, you tried to capture the whole spirit of what you’re trying to build. And you founded this company in 2017 with a vision of creating a global interoperable decentralized internet of mobility network. You started with a very global vision of decentralized world and all, but then you saw that the market is not ready at that time. And you pivoted to build the centralized application. And in 2022, again, you decided to shift Iomob toward decentralization and tokenization. So I really love the way you are converging diverging converging diverging, because you’re seeing opportunity in that way. So I’m curious to know about the backstory of Iomob and which user and problem do Iomob serve.

Boyd Cohen [00:11:41]:

Yeah, no, thanks. So start with the name, as you said, it sort of tries to convey in one name a lot. And, I come from a smart city space where IoT – Internet of Things is huge. And the idea in IoT is that you can have an unlimited number of sensors and data collectivity across static or mobile devices or things in cities. And you can aggregate that data, have big data and make better decisions that improves quality of life. Yeah. So the idea is that you have IoTs about like capturing data from objects and things that allow for improved quality of life. And they could be a range of things in cities and regions that could generate data around air pollution, contamination, congestion, temperature, crime with video surveillance as an IoT component.

Boyd Cohen [00:12:42]:

And so we wanted to apply that same idea to mobility and say, look, there’s a billion and a half privately owned vehicles in the world. Yeah. There are tens of thousands of shared mobility fleets in the world that each have their own wall garden apps. So, you talk about a scooter company or a bike share company or a taxi company, and they all have their own apps and they all have tons of thousands of vehicles. And then you have of course, thousands of public transit services around the world. They are all disconnected right now. And our idea was kind of like with IoT that you can actually connect devices and have a mechanism to access all that data and make things more seamless and better for everyone. Our idea is the same thing with vehicles, why not connect vehicles and services like parking and EV charging to an open network i.e. internet and mobility, and then let different stakeholders access those services to offer to their users, their employees, or whatever.

Boyd Cohen [00:13:39]:

So that’s been the fundamental vision of Iomob from day one that any user of any interface connected to Iomob could discover combined in multimodal routes, book, or unlock and pay for any mobility service or vehicle that’s connected to the Iomob. So that’s been the vision from day one, as you said, we started with a decentralized vision. The world, the markets weren’t ready for that. I have, you know, people think this might sound good, but it’s not always good. I have a tendency to be too early. Like when I talked about Third Whale, which we built green apps for green consumers in 2009. And that sounds cool but take that for a second. In 2009, when the smartphones, when apple and Android and Blackberry just started opening up for third party developers. Yeah. Ask yourselves these questions. How many people in 2009 had a smartphone?

Boyd Cohen [00:14:37]:

Okay. How many people had a smartphone and cared at all about greed? All right. How many people had a smartphone cared about greed discovered and downloaded it. And it was like a minute number. We were too early and being too early. I heard someone say not too long ago, being too early is just as bad as being too late. If you’re too early, you can’t make it. It won’t work. It’ll fail. It fails because you’re too early or it fails because you’re too late. Well, I have a tendency in my career as an entrepreneur, I think because I come from academics and I’m good at identifying trends and where the world is going. I can sort of see it before a lot of people do. And then I’m like, I want to act on it, but I’m too early. So, Iomob as a decentralized global interoperable blockchain network and token based in 2018 when we really incorporate and we’re trying to make this get started was just too early blockchain tech wasn’t ready.

Boyd Cohen [00:15:36]:

So for those of your listeners who are familiar with “Layer One” and “Layer Two” in blockchain, there’s these ways now to basically enable data and transaction to flow through a layer on top of the core blockchain layers, because the core blockchain layers are too expensive and timely to process. Lots of transactions. Like millions of transactions of mobility. So layer twos are about solving that problem. They didn’t even exist when we started Iomob and there was no way we could ever scale Iomob all decentralized in 2018. Similarly, investors in blockchain were not ready for investing in this sort of application layer, if you will, because they knew better than I realized that the underlying technology wasn’t ready for this kind of use case. And you know, as you can imagine in all your listeners, very well aware of the, what the legacy operators in transportation and some of the sort of bureaucratic resistance to innovation and change, right?

Boyd Cohen [00:16:33]:

Like imagine in 2018 going to a transit agency and say we’re tokenizing this mobility platform and you need to stake tokens in the Iomob network to then have your services available. Like forget it. And we tried and it was like, man, this is not working. So we postponed it. And then we just started with a centralized approach, as you said, and we always, especially Joe set my co-founder and we always wanted to come back to the decentralized vision because we are always convinced it was the superior way to deploy this at scale. Yeah. You either have, if you will, the Uber example of like a walled garden and you own your services and, and they’re starting to offer other third-party services or you take an agnostic decentralized approach and say we’re creating an open network of mobility services. We, as I am all have no skin in the game regarding which service a user chooses.

Boyd Cohen [00:17:31]:

Yeah. And therefore, we surface through our journey planner, the optimal journeys and, vehicles for that users for that journey at that time, without any bias in our own regarding. We make more money if they choose our own branded vehicle. Cause we don’t have it. So, we always knew you either go Uber raise billions of dollars, have a walled garden approach or you go decentralized and agnostic. And so it was always like bugging us that we weren’t doing it. And finally at the end of 2021, so a few months ago we had a coming together of all the executives and Joseph. I made the pitch that it was time to go back to our roots, our real core vision. And we pretty much got unanimous buy in from the executive team to say, okay, yeah, it’s time. Let’s do it. So here we are.

Jaspal Singh [00:18:18]:

That’s great. And what problem exactly. You’re serving with Iomob? How are you trying to bring these mobility together?

Boyd Cohen [00:18:27]:

Yeah. I mean you just said it. I think, you know, the fragmentation in the mobility space is really insane. Like we talk about choice as a great thing for users. I mean a good example before COVID, there were 22 companies who had a license to operate scooter sharing services in Madrid. Okay. that’s 22. Now that’s awesome. From a choice perspective for a user. But what about from a user experience perspective? When you walk on a street, I want a scooter. I don’t see one on the street. What do I do? Do I have to have downloaded all 22 scooter apps open each one independently, find out which one is closest onboard myself with my credit card and user profile. I mean, that’s just insane now. What if I’m the same user in that city? And I know I want to go from, I don’t know park, recall this beautiful park in Madrid to some part in the north of the city and maybe the best way for me to do that is to actually take a scooter to the public transit service.

Boyd Cohen [00:19:38]:

And then the last part of my leg, I can take a moped or I can walk or depends on the distance, right? Yeah. While combining these disconnected walled garden services, whether it’s public transit, one of the scooter companies, a bike share company, a moped company and figuring that out myself and you know, what happens to users when they have to figure all that out, it’s too much friction. So, what do they do? Call an Uber that just sign my problem because I know where I’m leaving, and I know where I need to go and Uber will just get me there. Well, I’m not saying Uber is evil. I am not saying we should never take Uber or taxis, but maybe it’s even better for the user. If they knew to take the scooter to the train, like there’s traffic and it’s going to take you longer. Oh. And by the way, it’s going to cost you eight times as much money to go that distance in Uber than it would to do this other journey.

Boyd Cohen [00:20:27]:

So there could be really tangible reasons why from a user perspective, this is awesome to have this multimodal experience, but until you make it easy for them to do it, they won’t. So that’s the challenge we are taking on, but there’s another layer behind this because we decided from day one, we are going to be an enterprise solution. And that means we support public and private entities who want to offer this seamless mobility experience to their users for whatever purpose. So, yeah, there’s another pain point. We’re solving this, not just for the end user. And that is, imagine if you are a public transit agency or you’re a rail operator or you’re a travel agency or you’re an airline and you want to support door to door mobility for your employees, your customers, whatever. There are tens of thousands of mobility fleets around the world. There are all these privately owned vehicles.

Boyd Cohen [00:21:16]:

There are all these public services. You’re an airline. You’re good at optimizing butts in seats for your airline. But do you have any knowledge about how to go out, recruit and integrate a bunch of disparate mobility services all around the globe and then support journey planning for it and all the rest? So, the extra pain we solve is for enterprise organizations, public and private who have a motivation to offer this door-to-door experience, or maybe even less than that, we have clients who are thinking, what if we just add scooters to our airline app? So, when you arrive to a new destination, we can offer you a destination mobility service package. We are going to offer you a hundred minutes of scooter service for your three-day trip to Paris. And guess what? Because I am a integrates the range of service providers. It’s not like a partnership with one operator. Yeah. I could make that available where if there is eight operators, a micro mobility in Paris, they’re all available to you. When you’re a hundred-minute package, you can choose any of them, which you can optimize you’re for the one that’s closest to you when you need. So, this is the pain that we’re solving.

Jaspal Singh [00:22:27]:

Thank you so much for putting in this way, because now it’s became much clearer. And I agree with you. It’s hard for agencies to deal with so many different players. So, it’s always good to find a player who can deal with everything, and they don’t need to create standards or APIs or integrate business model with all different kind of player. And I think every year what we are seeing – two new modes are being added in mobility sector. There will be urban air mobility, which is exciting too. But at the same time, challenging. Like for user, how many apps you need to download. And, there was a study done with say that on an average people have 30 to 40 apps on the phone, but they use only 3-4 and rest, all are just idle in your phone. So, does it make sense to download so many apps or you create this kind of integration? In fact, we discuss about this, that they’ll be in future aggregators. So, for travel, you will have one app for food. You will have one app rather than having hundreds of apps. So, thank you.

Boyd Cohen [00:23:32]:

One comment on that I think is really interesting because our vision is aligned with that, but slightly different. So our view is that a lot of enterprise organizations that have millions of users of their existing app, whether it’s an airline, a travel app, a taxi app or whatever, a transit app, and there are reasons users use that app. Yeah. Our vision is to empower enterprise organizations to offer seamless interoperable, global mobility roaming to their user. And what I mean by that is like, let’s say you’re someone who takes the train a lot as a commuter, but also for other purposes. And you’re loyal to the train company because, you get loyalty points when you book through them and you get free train tickets when you book through them. Now, if we can supercharge that train app so that you can use that to travel door to door on the train, that’s powerful.

Boyd Cohen [00:24:34]:

Yeah. But another step, which I am all enables by default is that any user of any interface connected, I am a can discover route book and pay any mobility service, connected Iomob anywhere in the world. So, you downloaded this app in Toronto for your Via Rail app, because you use it a lot. If Via Rail authorizes this, the user could cross into the US, roam around the US, engage in rail and scooter services and taxi services that don’t exist in Canada, that don’t exist in the VIA rail territory. But you could do all that inside the Via Rail app. And if Via Rail wants you to, you can also get loyalty points for that because maybe they want to learn more about their customers and how they travel when they’re in and out for a range of reasons. So what I’m saying is we don’t believe at Iomob there’s going to be, I mean, that that’s Uber’s play.

Boyd Cohen [00:25:32]:

We don’t believe that there’s one app that people will use to travel the world. We believe for a bunch of reasons, there will continue to be fragmentation of transport apps. Every transit agency wants their own app, right? Every rail operator wants their own app. Every airline wants their own app and there’s arguments. They all should have their own app. Well, if they all have their own app, why can’t they all be supercharged by a global mobility network so they can connect to our network and turn on this capability so that whatever app you prefer, because you’re a rail customer, an airline customer, a delivery service customer, and they give you benefits. You like, and you use it a lot. You can turn any app into a seamless global mobility, roaming app powered by Iomob all. So that means over time, our vision is there could be thousands of apps around the world that all allow the user for whatever reason, that makes sense for the user and the enterprise to travel freely around the world, without having to download a new app every time they travel somewhere else.

Jaspal Singh [00:26:36]:

That’s amazing. It’s basically giving people more localized and personalized service at the same time. They don’t need to from one app to another. So, they use what they’re using, but in the back end you make changes. So, on the front end, they don’t see all these things changing. But on the backend, you can power the app. You can integrate those option. So, on the front end, if they’re using like Via Rail app, so they will keep using Via Rail app, but they can access to many more services when they move out of Canada, when they go in state or go in Europe, but they can still use their app. So, at that time they don’t need to change their payment method. They don’t need to change their, like you said, mobility points and all. So you keep running. That’s powerful. Thank you so much for sharing.

That’s why I ask and spend a little more time on this because it’s important to understand what Iomob is trying to solve and what is the feature of. I really love what you said about IoT and Iomob. So I think in future, everybody will using this term as a Xerox. So for copy, we use Xerox.

Boyd Cohen [00:27:39]:

If you or your listeners are remember this, there used to be a big campaign from Intel called “Intel Inside”. And it was their effort to sort of differentiate computers, built with an Intel chip as there were more AMD and some of the other competitors came to the market and yeah, the average user buying a computer had no idea which computer was better and what Intel did. And so, they try to really make it stand out that if you have an Intel inside that it’s a better computer. Yeah. So, our vision is the “Iomob inside” that, okay.

Boyd Cohen [00:28:11]:

Thousands of different organizations for different reasons will plug mobility into their app. And the apps that have plugged mobility from Iomob in their app have these advantages for the user, that global mobility roaming, the one user ID, as you said, and many other benefits. So yeah, that’s the direction we’re going.

Jaspal Singh [00:28:32]:

Great. Looking forward to that and wish you Good Luck in your journey.

So now I want to discuss about blockchain and crypto, which are the hot buzzword. Like you mentioned in technology right now, everybody’s talking about blockchain with three crypto. So, technology is not new. Bitcoin was launched in 2009 and became more mainstream during pandemic. And I’m curious to know what has changed now. Like why in last two-year things suddenly changed and it became more mainstream. And why do you think there is no going back sometime what happened? We see a lot of these trends coming in like dot.com boom, but then suddenly they disappear. Personally, I became very curious about blockchain and while doing some research about blockchain gaming. I never thought, the blockchain can be used in gaming, but when I learn about it,  I blown away by the, the use of technology. but I’m curious to learn from you is like, how do you see that the blockchain and this distributed ledger technology will change the mobility sector?

Boyd Cohen [00:29:32]:

Yeah. So definitely there’s no going back. You know, some people say Web1 was about read, Web2 is read and write. So you can like post blogs and stuff. Web3 is read, write, and own. And even if you go back to the gaming example, you just brought up like one of the disruptive things blockchain has done to gaming and I’m not a gamer, but it’s really curious is, you know, the whole NFT thing in that you can own an avatar, but you can own things the avatar possesses. Yeah. Well that in itself doesn’t sound that exciting. But when you start thinking about the ripple effects, instead of like my daughter who uses ROBLOX and she buys stuff all the time. She is like a monthly subscription, but she doesn’t own any of those things. If she starts another game in the metaverse or in another blockchain, she can’t bring that stuff with her.

Boyd Cohen [00:30:26]:

If those things appreciate in value somehow, because there’s more demand for them. She doesn’t get any benefit of that value. Whereas in blockchain gaming, you do. You own these things, they become yours and you get to actually benefit from the value appreciation, and you also get to take them with you yeah. To other platforms that’s totally new, so when you start thinking more broadly about why is blockchain starting to become so disruptive to so many industries, it’s changing the way we govern our economic systems, it’s changing the way we distribute ownership of those systems. And, you know, if you have a chance to be a co-owner of something and app. And appreciation of the value accrues to you as a contributor of value, if you get a chance to influence how the ecosystem is developed, because you are part of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization DAO for that ecosystem and you get to vote with your tokens or whatever it’s super empowering.

Boyd Cohen [00:31:31]:

I mean, going to another example that I love is like what we’re starting to see in art and music where like, you know, people like make fun of NFTs as just this, like, glorified graphic files. But there’s some really fundamental differences around NFTs for an artist, right? Like the most fundamental goes back to this rewrite and own thing. Like if I’m an artist and I contribute an NFT to an open sea marketplace and I can put into the sale process that I receive 10% of royalties every time it’s sold again. So, the artists can sell at once. But as we can think about in the history of men and women, very few artists have been really respected and valued in their time. And historically they’re valued really accrue after they’re gone or at least over time.

Boyd Cohen [00:32:27]:

And they have much more of a brand and they are more well known, right? Like the very first Banksy when it first came out and no one knew who he was, and it was probably worthless to most people. That’s not true anymore. So, the point being, if you can build in these sorts of royalties indefinitely, it could be empowering for the artist. So, it’s the same kind of thing across every industry.

Now, let’s talk about mobility and why we believe blockchain is appropriate in mobility right now. So going back to a point we discussed earlier around the wall garden model versus the sort of decentralized agnostic model is if you were, let’s say a scooter company in Toronto, and I came to you as some major taxi company with an app with tens of millions of users. And we have our own scooter service as well.

Boyd Cohen [00:33:24]:

But we want to add your scooters in, we’re a web to wall garden company. How comfortable are you connecting your scooters to my app? I have tens of millions of users. That’s great. We can optimize your fleet utility by giving you exposure to our users. Okay. That sounds good so far. All right. We are doing an open introductory offer. We are only going to charge 2% of every transaction we generate. Oh, wow. That sounds great too. Okay. So far so good. All right.

Now, if I’m that operator, what protection do you have as a small scooter operator startup that I won’t  increase the transaction fees later after you have kind of gotten sucked into my service because we are driving all this revenue and now you don’t want to disconnect your service because you’ve got all these users using it that way. So, what protection you have, zero is one answer.

Boyd Cohen [00:34:19]:

And what about, what if I am this big taxi company? And I have tens of millions of users. What if I didn’t even have a scooter service yet? Yeah. But I learned from all the data I’m getting from your scooters book through my app and I’m like, wait a minute, there’s a great business here. I’m going to come in and undercut them. And guess what I’m going to do. I’m not just going to like to increase the cost. I’m just going to remove them from my network. I don’t need them anymore. Cause I’m going to replace them with my own. So, our vision is the only way this works at scale is decentralized where there’s no single monopoly entity that can do this, that can remove your right to operate or can impose extractive fees on you. So, underlying everything is that there’s another element here, which goes to this point of co-ownership, which is that as a scooter operator in Toronto, you could get tokens, you could earn tokens in Iomob, and that allows you to have governance influence over decisions that are made in the Iomob ecosystem that could benefit your business and the ecosystem.

Boyd Cohen [00:35:23]:

So, you know, going back to like a taxi service let’s any ride, ride hail operator – Lyft or Uber and all the rest, we’ve all heard the stories that they sometimes have sort of extractive fees on users and on drivers. And on users, we could talk about both surge pricing and what that does. But on drivers, for example, they don’t have a voice in the fees they pay. If Uber decides to remove them for whatever reason they can. They can charge a higher fee and Uber can do that. Uber can pull them off the platform. What if, and this isn’t to pull out Uber because this could happen from any of these companies, right? What if they make an investment in autonomous vehicles as they all are looking to do? And some of the drivers go on strike.

Boyd Cohen [00:36:18]:

Well they’re not organized labor. And in many markets Uber could just, or Lyft or Bolt or Careem or whoever could just like, let them go. They are gone. In fact, most of them aren’t even employees because by law and many markets, they’re not even employees or contractors so they can just let them go whenever they want. You know? So the point is the Web2 economy has really been extracted and has exacerbated income inequality for the participants of these ecosystems. And what decentralized approaches enable is more read, write and own so that the people, who contribute to the value creation of the ecosystem, have influence over governance yeah. And ownership over the ecosystem. And that can be fundamentally different.

Jaspal Singh [00:37:06]:

Well, that’s a great point. You mentioned about the ownership and in fact we will be discussing some of these point in more detail, but I agree with you. That’s a worry with a lot of these public transport agencies is, what will happen if I share my network and open up my network with other players, my passenger will go away or, I will lose control over them and all. But I think with decentralized technology, they can continue to have control over their data, and they share what is required. So nobody needs to fear because it’s done in a transparent way. It’s done in open way. So you don’t need to worry what’s happening in the back-end because everything is open to all the player in the front and nobody can take away data from one to another for their advantage or disadvantage. So, I agree with you. I think with the decentralized world or blockchain, it’ll try to bring more transparency into the system and reduce complexity in the front end. So, they’ll be more complexity in the back end, but in the front end, it will be easier for everybody, for user, for operator, for player to work seamlessly in the back end, they can manage stuff.

Boyd Cohen [00:38:18]:

Agreed,

Jaspal Singh [00:38:19]:

Great. Now I want to discuss about MaaS Mobility as a Service because that’s what you are looking to build. You are looking to build this Mobility as a Service application with global roaming and all, to be honest. We haven’t seen any major success in this area till now both from adoption side, as well as funding side. Total funding and MaaS application, including big one like Moovit is less than $200 million. And similarly, there are not even five applications that can be labeled as a true MaaS. Most of them are journey planner at all. They haven’t able to kind of break that like the volume mentioned. They haven’t able to do that, to bring everything together. So recently I was talking with the MaaS expert. He said, you can’t even count five app, which has all the features – the payment and integration and all. Why are you more optimistic about this decentralized MaaS? Like why you feel that’s the future and that’s where the world will come together?

Boyd Cohen [00:39:19]:

Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why we haven’t seen a scale yet. I would say, you know, it’s also worth recognizing that we are in the early days of a transformation of an industry, right? Yeah.
And it’s an industry that has a history of not being super innovative, especially when you bring the public sector in. And you’re trying to encourage collaboration across an ecosystem. Who’s distrustful of each other. Private operators don’t want to share data with other public operators. Public operators don’t like private ones because they feel like they’re taking users away from more sustainable shared public transit systems. Private operators don’t trust their other private operators because they compete, and they don’t want to be on the same platform. I mean, there’s a bunch of friction here that has to be resolved. You have all this fragmentation as we’ve discussed already, which means to make a seamless experience across a growing number of modes, as you already talked about.

Boyd Cohen [00:40:17]:

I mean soon we’ll have urban air mobility in places. Whether we think we should or not. Scooters, bikes, mopeds, carsharing, peer-to-peer are sharing, so as dynamic DRT systems. You have traditional public transit, then you add in parking and EV charging and you have car leasing. You have all these different things that are happening that are all different ways of thinking about new mobility and legacy mobility and how they seamlessly integrate. So there’s so many complexities around this technologically. I don’t feel, you know, having been doing this for four years now, I don’t think the technology is the biggest barrier to making MaaS scale. I think it’s more resistance from different stakeholders it’s buy in from them. It is a bit on user experience, right? Because you got to get that right to actually make it worth the while of users. Yeah. I will also say this is our opinion and it’s why we did our company this way from the beginning, you know, building a MaaS company on a global scale takes billions of dollars. Like a year ago I looked at the data on Uber and I think they spent something like $2 billion a year on user acquisition.

Boyd Cohen [00:41:30]:

Yep. So if you’re trying to build a MaaS company at global scale as a B2C play, you have to deal with all these challenges. I just brought up around the fragmented ecosystem and distrust and all the rest. And then you have to find a way to attract billions, not the millions you already named in the start of this question in terms of how much money’s flowed into this space yet. Yeah. To actually acquire customers and get them to change their behavior towards a seamless multimodal app. So what we decided is, as I’ve discussed earlier, but I didn’t address this point of it, that we were going to go after the enterprise market that already has millions of users of an app. And what we’re going to do is supercharge their app or their web or their kiosk with a middleware solution that can be plugged into their existing offering.

Boyd Cohen [00:42:18]:

Whether they’re an airline, a travel agency, or a transit agency, or a taxi service, who wants to offer multimodal doesn’t matter. Our vision is the way to make this scale is to not impose a B2C wall garden MaaS vision, but instead, an open agnostic network of mobility services that enterprise customers can pull on for whatever reason. Going back to an example I gave earlier, we’re having discussions with airlines who are interested in like offering a hundred minute package of micro-mobility in your destination. Yeah. If you book your plane. And so in fact, some of them are looking at the idea of offering it as like a free thing. If you book your flight through our web or mobile, we will offer you 60 minutes of micro-mobility in your destination. Why would they do that? Well, right now airlines pay healthy fees of commissions to travel agencies.

Boyd Cohen [00:43:16]:

And when you book through a travel agency, the airline doesn’t get to know you as a user. And they don’t get to monetize more services on top either. How can they sell you, booking a rental or a hotel if they don’t even know who you are, guess who’s monetizing that the travel agency, the intermediary? So there are reasons why an airline might say, you know what, we’re going to offer 60 minutes of micro-mobility. All right. So why am I giving this example is airlines have millions of customers. Yeah. Airlines have their own use cases. And therefore, is what I just described. 60 minutes of free micro-mobility. How you and your listeners define MaaS? MaaS is seamless multimodal mobility with public transit at its core that you can discover out book and pay the services that are inside it. and I support MaaS.

Boyd Cohen [00:44:09]:

I’m not opposed to MaaS. We’re very active in MaaS. My point being part of the reason MaaS hasn’t scaled is there’s this very black and white view of what is and isn’t MaaS. And it creates problems because that’s not what every user wants or every enterprise who might benefit from some of these same kinds of tech technologies expect or want for their user base. So, I think the industry needs to be more agnostic and more flexible about how different customers enterprise will use this or end users will use it.

I’ll give another example – Brightline trains is a new commercial deployment of Iomob in the States. They’re owned by SoftBank. They’re a really interesting private rail operator, amazing rail experience. And they want to offer this seamless mobility for their users for a bunch of reasons, but they also noticed they did research and discovered 40% of all their bookings happen from people who have a car and want to drive and park.

Boyd Cohen [00:45:10]:

Well, tell me a public transit agency. Who’s totally opposed to supporting park and ride. I mean, that’s a very valid use case, but in the MaaS industry, we have this dichotomous thing that cars are evil and you can’t have private cars in a MaaS deployment, because that’s not what MaaS is for. MaaS is supposed to be about getting everyone out of cars and into multimodal. Well, I’m all for that too. But you can’t like to impose your values on everybody and assume they’re just going to on their own change. Some people for whatever reason, want to drive their car to a train station. Well, that’s way better than them driving their car from door to door. They’re driving a train station than they’re taking sustainable mobility. So, I am all incorporates the use of a private car in multimodal door to door journey. So, with Brightline, you could take your car.

Boyd Cohen [00:45:59]:

We will tell you how much it would cost to park. You can pay for parking in advance, you park at the station. You take the train; you book that in advance. And maybe you didn’t book your last mile yet because you think you’re going to do micro-mobility and you don’t know which services available at the time. You’re going to get to the train station. So, you pull out the app and you can dynamically book your last mile scooter. And you can do that whole thing in a seamless experience. My point being we can impose a single definition and a binary view of what is and isn’t MaaS and then assume, and, and then challenge why MaaS is not succeeding at scale. If that’s what we define as MaaS, it isn’t succeeding at scale because it’s too inflexible and is imposing too many value assertions on users and assuming they’ll change everything they do. And what we need to do is meet users where they are and make it easier for them to engage in model shift, but in ways that accommodate what they want, not what we want them to do.

Jaspal Singh [00:46:55]:

Yeah, that’s an amazing point. You mentioned about changing behavior and it’s not easy tasks and you cannot force people to change their behavior. What you need to do is you can nudge them, but you need to adjust and adopt to what people are looking. In fact, one MaaS application in Australia, they have included the fuel station information within the application because they feel like those who are using public transport also own cars. So they want to know where I can find cheaper gas. So it’s their option. And, and to be honest, a lot of MaaS application now incorporating the parking feature. And I think it’s MaaS, you cannot just tell people not to use their car, but, but you can encourage them not to use more. You can encourage them to use less. Thanks for sharing that point. I agree with you.

Jaspal Singh [00:47:45]:

We need to be much more flexible and today’s world, we cannot be rigid and inflexible saying, if you are not doing this, you’re out. If you’re doing this, you’re in, because then you are creating a very black and white world. And I don’t think we are living in a black and white world. We are living in a much livelier world.

So now in fact, my next question is following up to what we just discussed. So we are seeing emergence of white level MaaS application, which are offering API and SDK to other players, which is make it much easier for people to create an integrate services. In fact, I think you have a largest API links. You are providing 7,000 MSP, which is Mobility Service Provider across 8 modes in different parts of the world.

What is MSP? So, I want to understand what do you define as MSP and what will be the role of these MSP when this deployment will happen? How will these MSP keep working? You gave some example about, how the different scooter companies and then can work together? But when you are including 7,000 MSP, how they will work together with each other?

Boyd Cohen [00:48:59]:

Yeah, to be clear, we have probably even more than that, but a lot of those 7,000 for example, are like part of aggregated APIs we have. So we work with taxi aggregators that aggregate thousands of fleets, so each one is technically an MSP Mobility Service Provider. So if they’re a taxi fleet in Berlin and they’ve been aggregated by a taxi aggregator and we’ve integrated them. Then they’re part of our ecosystem, our network. But it doesn’t mean that we have independently integrated 7,000 of those it’s part of a global network of suppliers. Some are direct, like we have Bolts and Tier and VOI, and some of these other big players, especially in Europe that are directly integrated into the network. But some, many of the others, especially in the taxi space are part of an aggregated API that we’ve received from taxi aggregators.

Boyd Cohen [00:49:55]:

There’s a bunch of them like Karhoo and The Good Seat and many others around the world and we’ve got several of them. So for us, a mobility service provider is an entity that has vehicles or potentially services like parking can be an MSP, a mobility service provider as well. So an MSP is a service provider within the mobility space that can deliver us an API that allows us to integrate them into our network so that they can be discovered routed, booked, and paid for, by any user of any interface connected to Iomob. So what’s in it for MSPs to connect to Iomob is something we talked about before. It’s about optimizing fleet utility. And if so, think about that. Like, if you’re a small taxi operator, there’s some really cool, like underlying impacts of this example. I’m about to get. Imagine the company – Sue has a fleet of 10 taxis in Barcelona. You fly to Toronto from you fly to Barcelona from Toronto.

Boyd Cohen [00:51:04]:

You pull out whatever app, when you get to Barcelona. And whatever app you pull out, what are the probability you would ever discover Sue’s taxis. Now, what if, whether Sue has a taxi app or not is a different question. Even if she did, you’re never going to find it and download it and onboard it for a three-day trip in Barcelona. It would be like, who would do that? But realistically, you’re not going to discover it. Now, imagine Sue’s taxis are plugged into the network of Iomob and you’re using any app Via Rail. Let’s go back to that example and you get on a plane to Barcelona. And because our technology’s interoperable by default, you take your Via Rail, you get to Barcelona airport. It says welcome to Barcelona. Did you know we have 18 mobility services at your disposal in Barcelona?

Boyd Cohen [00:51:56]:

You’re like, wow. How does Via Rail do that? Whoa, Via Rail’s a Canadian rail operator, how would they even pull that up? Well, they didn’t, Iombo did for other reasons, but all our customers get the benefit. So if Sue’s taxis are in Iomob and you’re now, I don’t know at the stadium, the Barca stadium and you’re going to leave and you’re looking for a taxi and there are none, because it’s crazy. After a game it’s a hundred do same seats. A hundred thousand people. What if Sue has a taxi available, two blocks from you, Uber or Cabify – Uber’s big competitor in Spain has the nearest one 20 minutes from you. Odds are you have Uber on your phone and you pull out Uber and you’re like, well 20 minutes I might take it as well. I don’t have a choice.

Boyd Cohen [00:52:45]:

What if the Via Rail app exposed for you that Sue has a taxi, two blocks from you? What didn’t we just do? We just created inclusive economic opportunity for Sue and her drivers that they wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. Because they could never afford to spend the money to try to acquire you as a user when you’re coming for three days, that’s insanity. It’s not going to happen. Okay. So that’s one thing. Secondly, we just optimized the transportation ecosystem in Barcelona because instead of you calling an Uber that’s 20 minutes away and going to add to congestion on their journey. You optimize your journey for a vehicle that’s near you. So, there’s no congestion contribution. And thirdly, we saved you 18 minutes instead of waiting 20 minutes for the Uber, you’re waiting two minutes for Sue’s taxi. So there’s all these ripple effects of benefits by creating a seamless open agnostic mobility ecosystem. I would even argue for Uber. It was better for Uber that you took Sue’s taxi. And why is that? Because Uber doesn’t monetize much of the journey that driver’s taking by himself. Getting to you 20 minutes away and probably 30 seconds later, somebody else is going to call an Uber when Uber is the best vehicle for that user. So, it’s just better for everyone. And that’s the tackle. That’s the task we’re tackling at scale.

Jaspal Singh [00:54:12]:

Yeah. I mean a lot of blockchain advocate talk about this. And I also believe in that is real democracy and level playing field for everybody. So making exactly everybody equal in the nodes and giving everybody equal opportunity. Like you mentioned about this example, and I love your example because it’s a perfect way to explain what technology should do rather than creating these monopolies. In fact, these monopolies are also bad. Like you mentioned, the driver is not monetizing his trip. He’s running 20 minutes empty ride because he will reach there. He’ll not feel happy because he’s not getting for those 20 minutes. In fact, he can stay there and probably get a ride in next second, which will be much more economical for him. So, thanks for putting that example. And I, I agree with you, It’s much better now to use these technology, to giving equal opportunity everybody in the market.

Jaspal Singh [00:55:08]:

Now my next question is that you mentioned about these App and Super Apps. So, recently there was a news by Uber that they are going to integrate, many more options in their app – train tickets, public transport, flights, hotel, food, etc. They will become like a super app. We already know there are super apps in Asia, like Grab and Gojek and all. Do you think these super app as a threat or opportunity for public transport as well as for Iomob? Do you think they will control the market or they will actually help other players in the market?

Boyd Cohen [00:55:46]:

I think it depends on the super app and the ambitions behind the company that’s driving it. I think it’s a little risky for transportation operators like Uber in terms of the potential they have. And we’ve seen that with data to go reverse on the modal shift. We’re aspiring to and get more people to take taxis for three minutes. What I think I’ve seen some data, not too long ago than in the US. Something like the average Uber trip was like less than three miles. And, you know, that’s within range of almost all kinds of shared mobility services, whether it’s public transit or whether it’s scooters or mopeds or many other things that are much greener options for users and less impact on the congestion and contamination in the rest. Whereas I think for other, and part of the reason I say it’s a little more risky when it’s a transportation operator, is that they are by default.

Boyd Cohen [00:56:48]:

If they’re Web2 venture backed, they’re profit seeking by nature, and that’s fine. That’s what they’re supposed to be. So if they make more profit on you taking an Uber than taking a train, and if they get more and more people like you and me to use their app instead of the transit app and they present journey plans for me that are biased for their profit, not for the benefit of the ecosystem or the planet or whatever. It could be that over time they actually facilitate more reverse model shift because they incentivize and encourage you as they suck you into their app to use their app for more and more things. And you’re less likely to actually choose the more sustainable and shared mobility option because it’s not in their best interest that you do. So, I think that’s a risk with them.

Boyd Cohen [00:57:39]:

Whereas with other types of super apps where they don’t have skin in the game directly because they don’t operate a transport service directly, or they don’t offer competing ones. Like an inner-city rail company, like Via Rail or Amtrak or Brightline our client. If they want to add first and last mile services and the rest, I see less risk of that type of super app being a challenge to our objectives as a society and as transit agencies. It’s more likely to get more people to take transit and shared mobility. If those are the types of super apps or super apps, like again of delivery services or FinTech companies, or, you know, a range of other companies who might want to offer mobility as an extra service. If they don’t have a direct skin in the game to convince you to do motor shift to something that’s not maybe the most desirable, then I think that can be a good outcome.

Boyd Cohen [00:58:35]:

And that ties into in the sense that the terms of do we see what Uber’s doing as a threat or an opportunity. We see it as a direct opportunity for at least two reasons. One is our clients are trying to create their own type of super app. And one of the reasons they want to be, they want to better know their customers and find ways to monetize them more and offer them a better service. And when they see Uber doing that, they’re like that’s a threat to us. If we want to own the users and they want to own the users, and they’re starting to sell my services, my rail service on their app, how am I going to get to know my customer and better offer them better service? I’m not going to, so it’s encouraging them to come to say, how can we be competitive with this kind of offering from Uber? So that’s one thing. And I think, you know, there’s, there’s several others, but I’ll leave it at that so that we can move on to the other questions.

Jaspal Singh [00:59:29]:

Yeah. Thanks Boyd. Thank for sharing and I think this actually remind me of example of Amazon. So Amazon has control over their stores. So they are using third party data to actually promote Amazon basic product and all, so you’re right. If you’re a seller as well as a platform, there is kind of a very thin boundary where you can play both the roles. So, I agree with you and we need to see,

Boyd Cohen [00:59:56]:

Yeah. Sorry, one quick comment about this. When you also pose a question from the perspective of a transit agency. One thing I think is interesting is most transit agencies. There’s a big black box around multimodal. What I mean by that is if they don’t offer MaaS like experiences, they have often zero knowledge about what modes people are taking to go to and from public transit stations. Yeah. Often zero.

Boyd Cohen [01:00:24]:

Unless they do surveys or something. And even though those aren’t very trustworthy and they’re not the most efficient way to figure that out. And this goes even back to the question of profitability. So if you measure MaaS. If you think of modes more classical way, like a public transit driven multimodal system, one of the reasons to do that has nothing to do with profitability, which of course in the public transit system is rarely a big motivation anyway. It’s to better understand the transportation ecosystem and system and to improve it. So, if we discover through having our own transit MaaS like experience that, you know, 35% of all journeys on our, Metro are actually combined with a first and last mile micro mobility service. That’s really interesting. And what if we discover that I don’t know, 18% of users are doing this insane journey to get to certain transit hubs because there’s clearly not enough provision of alternative ways to solve first and last mile. Maybe we should even encourage or subsidize. I know this sounds crazy, but I don’t think it is subsidized private shared mobility services to come and fill the gap so we can have more sustainable journeys, get more people to choose transit as part of their core journey, because they don’t have to take the car the whole way, because we’ve solved a big pain on their first mile. And I do think what’s coming in our bet. Most of your listeners are well aware of this point, but account-based ticketing models.

Jaspal Singh [01:01:59]:

Yeah.

Boyd Cohen [01:01:59]:

With fare capping, where a user under certain conditions could be subsidized. Their first and last mile in private shared mobility services could be subsidized in Barcelona. Last I knew the city spends something like 3000 Euros a year per bike in their public bike share system. Well, that’s a lot of money. And what if some of that money they spend on public bike share could also be offered to subsidize private shared mobility services. For example, in areas where bike share is not the best service or doesn’t exist or whatever. And under a fair capping system with a ABT you could make that happen. All these kinds of use cases for a transit agency powered with a MOS type experience, have nothing to do with profitability, but they have a whole lot to do with improving the functioning of the transport ecosystem and enabling more inclusive mobility for everyone. So I think there’s a lot to uncover here.

Jaspal Singh [01:03:00]:

Yeah, I think what the point you mentioned, I know a couple of agencies which are doing that in Europe, especially that they’re combining the last mile and they’re actually subsidizing the last mile trips and tying up with these private players and providing that system. So basically, with this, model of not only spending money on maintaining a huge infrastructure, but you’re also partnering and sharing revenue with others and making it’s more inclusive as well as more sustainable. And I think that’s what more important is you cannot spend billions of dollars, especially after COVID when the budgets are low, and you have to be innovative and all. Thanks Boyd. I really enjoyed what you’re mentioning and the examples you’re giving because that’s giving me a real-life perspective rather than thinking just from the theory point of view.

Jaspal Singh [01:03:49]:

So I love how you’re putting your theories into practice and, and now I want you to share something which is a difficult topic for a lot of people because it’s very new, it’s called DAO Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Because, especially in public transit world, I don’t know, many people are aware about what DAO is and how it works and all? But it’s becoming more and more popular. And it’s also gaining a lot of traction because you see as an opportunity that all stakeholder has stay in the organization. So like you mentioned, the user can tell, or the driver can tell whether we want more commission or we want less commission? And how much is that?

So can you share a little more about what DAO is in simple word, because I know you can put things in a very easy way. And what do you think is the potential of DAO in mobility sector? Do you think DAO will be important for decentralized MaaS?

Boyd Cohen [01:04:44]:

Yeah, I love this question and I think this might be the first time or one of the first times anyone in a podcast will have ever asked that question or heard an answer to it. Because DAO mobility has not really been discussed in public forums yet. Same with NFTs, which we might talk about and Metaverse which we might talk about as well. So, there’s a lot of fun places we might go. But on the now a Decentralized Autonomous Organization is basically an entity. It’s like a Co-operative with a smart contract supporting it. In the sense that a DAO is basically owned and governed by the members. And in this case to be a member of a DAO, you normally have to have a token. And the token is usually a native token to that ecosystem. So Iomob will have our own token called the IOM token internet and mobility token.

Boyd Cohen [01:05:41]:

So any user, anybody who’s acquired tokens will have the right to vote and govern. And co-own the Iomob ecosystem. Now you can go into much more depth than we probably want to today on for example, voting mechanisms. So in the DAO world, there’s a lot of debate around, should it be one token, one vote? which is called token weighted voting, or should there be another model? And the reason people are wondering about that so much lately is because the one token one vote feels a little bit too much to many people. The current economic system, which is flawed because it biases the whales. Whales in blockchain are those who have very large stakes in a project. So it biases towards them because if you do one token, one vote and you have a hundred thousand tokens and most people have no more than 10, then clearly you’re going to dominate the governance and the voting and the ownership of this ecosystem.

Boyd Cohen [01:06:40]:

So there are models emerging to sort of change the way votes eligibility for voting there’s things called Quadratic voting and other things I won’t go into detail on this, but your listeners might want us to look it up more, because there are ways to make it more inclusive and democratized. At the ownership level. basically, a Dow is an entity that governs the economy and the token and the distribution of that token of an ecosystem. So in the case of Iomob, and this is really fascinating, what we will have. By the end of this year, a trust that manages 50% of our token allocation, which means we are removing our ability to dictate how the ecosystem evolves and what are the next elements of our roadmap. And we’re saying, you know what, we’re going to believe in the community that collectively the community will come up with better ways of solving challenges than we will.

Boyd Cohen [01:07:44]:

I’ll give a real quick example of how this could be reality. We have one investment we’ve been talking to for a long time. He’s really interested, but he’s like, you know what? I don’t like that you haven’t solved what happens around incentivizing different actors for journeys booked when the journey crosses jurisdictions and there could be more than one way to share revenue or token incentives across those jurisdictions. I literally just told this investor a couple days ago. I hope he doesn’t listen to this podcast, but I said, you know what? We’ve decided you’re not the right investor for us right now. And the reason I said, he’s not the right investor for us is he wants us to pre-bake all those decisions in right now. And we don’t because we’re incapable of coming up with a decision that is how should revenue share happen across jurisdictions.

Boyd Cohen [01:08:38]:

But because we don’t think we should, we think it should be the token holders, which will be ecosystem actors who have skin in the game and have their own viewpoints on this and will let the community make the best decision for how this should happen rather than us impose it. And that’s what a DAO is supposed to be for. It’s co-owned by the members who have influence over governance, who can make recommendations for how to improve the system and who can influence the system in very important ways.

That’s what a DAO is for, and one other like because to your second question was and its role in mobility. Okay. So how is Iomob going to do it? And we, to our knowledge are the first project of any kind, not just in mobility of any kind in the world to design our ecosystem this way, which is Iomob going to have a DAO, I’m putting it up at the top, but maybe it really should be underneath.

Boyd Cohen [01:09:30]:

There’s going to be an Iomob DAO that governs the global ecosystem that will be made up of global token holders of the Iomob token. And then we’re going to have an auction. There will be auctions for DAO, you could call them sub-DAOs, territorially constrained sub-DAOs. A city like Toronto might have its own DAO. What does that mean is that we’re further delegating governance and ownership of the ecosystem to low system, to local and regional actors who are way better adept than we are to govern that system, to animate that system with local and regional suppliers, to engage the local community and what this will actually be is like a global network eventually of thousands of DAOs where each sub-DAOs has an influence on the global internet and mobility DAO. But has almost exclusive governance over their local DAO. When I say almost exclusive, is there still a role for the Iomob global ecosystem?

Boyd Cohen [01:10:54]:

I’ll give you a quick example. Imagine we have a DAO, there’s a DAO auction and your organization wins the right to govern the local Toronto Iomob ecosystem. And you decide you’re going to open it up to other stakeholders and there’s some other people who also now own your own token. So, you can, as a DAO or as a sub-DAO owner, you can have your own token, which allows you to do nudging. Maybe you want to use your token to encourage end users in your community to choose more sustainable substitute. But what if you delegated inside your DAO some power to an entity that is starting to do things that are unacceptable to the global internet and mobility community. I don’t know. They’ve changed. They have managed to distort everything, and they are now getting people to take Urban Air Taxis everywhere.

Boyd Cohen [01:11:51]:

And they’ve eliminated scooters from visibility in the platform. So you, you kind of need to take their Urban Air Taxi because like the only thing that you can use in this system. There’s a mechanism that we’ve designed that the Iomob token holders can choose to basically withdraw your rights. To operate your local DAO would basically kill the DAO and then have a new auction for someone else to operate it because it’s not being operated consistent with the values and expectations of the global ecosystem. So that’s a super cool concept. We’ve never seen anyone do, which is that there’s a global DAO. And then there will be all these subsets all around the world. And we designed it that way specifically because we spent four years engaging with the global transportation community and realizing that imposing a top-down governance model where even though it’s decentralized and the world could own the tokens and all the rest.

Boyd Cohen [01:12:54]:

I live in Barcelona. I’m from the states. I’ve lived in Canada, as you said, I’ve lived in lots of places. What, so what that I’m CEO of. I am all in all Barcelo. What do I know about the transportation ecosystem in Toronto and who the best actors are to join and govern the local system and what the latest regulations are and how you might want to nudge behavior in Toronto, that could be different than in Barcelona? So that’s how we came up with this model is that for this to work at scale, we need a decentralized governance to territories. Because we all know transportation is this kind of hybrid global local kind of thing, right? There are times when you cross jurisdictions and there are many times, what is it? 90% of most journeys don’t cross the jurisdiction they’re local. So we’re trying to make the best of global and local and decentralization and end outs.

Jaspal Singh [01:13:43]:

Well, Thank you for sharing. Like you said, it’s a very new topic and people are still figuring out how to use it. And, and I love what you mentioned about creating a global entity, but at the same time, giving power to the local jurisdiction, because then they can decide what is good for them. That’s a problem I see with the more globalized companies, because they take the lessons from one place, whereas the reality in the local city or local place, very different. So probably you have a different discount mechanism, probably you have a different fee structure. Recently somebody tweet to Elon Musk saying you can charge $3 per month in developed countries for Twitter, but for developing country that’s too much. And he said, yeah, it has to be different. It should be on the paying capacity of that local region and all.

Jaspal Singh [01:14:37]:

And I think with these DAO, you actually can do that. Which is not possible in a centralized model, but much more decentralized way. So thank for sharing that.

And now you mentioned like we are going deeper into some of these interesting topics with Web3, Metaverse and NFTs. And what I love is because you are not only sharing what these are, but you are actually doing some work in these technologies. And I would be very curious to learn some of the practical life examples.

So my first question is what is Web3? You briefly mentioned about its read, write and own, but I want to go a little deeper into it because Web1, usually we say it’s basically user of early web consumer information, primarily in the passive way. Like you said, just read, don’t do anything, just read. And Web2, we allowed people to create. We allow people to interact with content like social media and all, but in Web3, the main concept is you allow people to get back the control, like own your stuff. So own your material, own your paintings, own your design and all. So how will it affect the, the transit sector, if at all? Because a lot of people don’t know what is the difference of web one web two web three. So how does?

Why you think Web3 will be an important area for mobility player, as well as, for rider? Can rider own their data and monetize it? Like how you see Web3 will change the whole equation and game?

Boyd Cohen [01:16:06]:

Yeah, I mean, I think, we’re so early, we’re really fairly early in blockchain, Web3 as a society. We are only really recently over the last couple years, starting to see applied use cases of blockchain to industries and, ways that might actually improve people’s lives. Because you know, the early use cases have been these layers one and layer two blockchains and they’ve been worth a lot of money. But they’re like core building blocks for the later application, layers that people will interact with. Then you started seeing decentralized finance, DeFi be the big thing. And that’s still for a lot of people, very esoteric. It’s like, you know, trading models and liquidity pools and things that the average user doesn’t ever experience. And then we saw the boom of NFTs and the NFTs is probably the first sort of mainstream use stream use case of blockchain technology in the sense that you’re seeing more people come into blockchain who never were in it before, who don’t know what DeFi is and don’t know what layer one and two is, but they know what an app looks like and this cool thing that I can own it.

Boyd Cohen [01:17:14]:

And, it’s a digital art and whatever. So, we’re still early, which is awesome because I think the future, you know, I heard in a podcast not too long ago, I love this, I love this description. So, woman, a CTO of a company. And she said, “history is immutable, and the future isn’t written yet”. So, you know, we don’t know where the future’s going, but I can tell you some things based on your question that I think around mobility. We’ve already discussed at length, our vision of a decentralized Web3 internet and mobility network. So now I think the use case and the value proposition of that over a more centralized Web2 has been, you know, I think fully discussed by us, but then you ask about identity. So decentralized identity is an another Web3 tool.

Boyd Cohen [01:18:05]:

That allows people not just about maybe monetizing their data, which is one thing that you can do with your identity in a Web3 model, but also control how your identity data is used by whom for what purpose and when they have access to it. So, and you can have that identity carried with you wherever you go and port it to whatever Web3 interface you use. So, I could have a single tool for capturing my identity and my identity could be everything I wanted to be. It could be my PhD diploma. It could be,  my driver’s record, by the way, I don’t have a driver’s license, so I don’t have it. It could be online activity, how many Twitter followers I have, it could be economic bank records. It could be all these things and all these things are stored in my private identity file that I can carry with me wherever I go and plug into whatever I want. But it doesn’t mean let’s say did have a driver’s license. It doesn’t mean that okay. I’m using an internet and mobility enabled platform and there’s a car sharing service that car sharing service needs to know. I have a driver’s license and I’m least 25. Now I know a lot of your listeners, if there can see me would be, wow, he’s not 25. He’s got to be younger than that. But no, I’m,

Boyd Cohen [01:19:35]:

I’m definitely older than 25 years okay.

Jaspal Singh [01:19:37]:

So now you look younger, you look younger.

Boyd Cohen [01:19:41]:

So my point being, I could have all this data about me. That doesn’t mean that this car sharing service needs to have all that data. I have all this aggregated data about my person in a decentralized ID and I can choose what data that carsharing service can see about me to enable me to get that car, to unlock the car. They need my driver’s license, but I’ll say something else. That’s interesting. You could have a decentralized ID where there’s a third-party attestation that you have a driver’s license that you’re over 25 years. And therefore, when I go to Toronto and I want to unlock a car, share service with an Iomob powered app, go back to Via Rail as an example. Okay, I’m using that app. I want to unlock a car sharing. It’s quite possible that the car sharing service doesn’t even have to see my driver’s license.

Boyd Cohen [01:20:42]:

They need to see the attestation from a recognized third party that says, yes, this person does have a valid driver’s license. And yes, they’re over 25. So it’s possible the car sharing service never even saw my driver’s license. They just saw evidence that I have it and that’s all they needed. So decentralized ID is very powerful as an example of a Web3 tool, and you brought that one up and it’s not just about monetizing my user data, it’s about controlling my data and taking it with me and expanding what my personal data can be. So that’s a powerful thing that could be very useful for mobility as we just described. I think we’re going to see more NFT use cases in mobility and you and I have talked about that off the record, we might talk about that here.

Boyd Cohen [01:21:31]:

For a range of things, one of the coolest things I’m excited about we’re going to do at Iomob around NFTs. So I mentioned early in the call, there’s at least one and a half billion privately owned cars in the world. Yeah. I believe the future of an internet and mobility network is not just plugging in APIs from public and shared vehicle fleets. It’s allowing private vehicle owners to connect their vehicles to the internet and mobility network with a smart contract that allows them to say, okay, I only allow people who are over 25 who have a driver’s license, have not had an accent in two years. You know, whatever my requirements are, an NFT can enable that I can easily access an NFT plug in the terms I want in a smart contract online. And I just turned my car on when I want it to be turned on at an airport or whatever, and I can turn it off when I don’t want it on.

Boyd Cohen [01:22:26]:

And so when you ask about like the power of Web3, another thing for me, it’s not just the NFT, but it goes back to sort of the ethos of decentralization and some of our other discussions on optimizing the transport network. You know, we know this, your listeners know this 95% of the time cars are parked. That’s just stupid. And 25 to 30% of congestion in cities is people trying to find where to park. So, I mean, we have a lot of inefficiencies in our system, if you can enable privately owned vehicles and this doesn’t just mean your car in your garage, it could be like, what about all the used cars on a car lot that are for sale? Yeah. And just sitting there wasting they’re depreciating in value and underutilized wasting land a wasted resource. Why not plug those in with NFTs?

Boyd Cohen [01:23:13]:

Because a used car dealer doesn’t have an API for their private cars on their fleet. Allow those to be exposed. Why not a corporate fleet? Corporate fleets are not used at all on the weekends. Why not plug those into the IM with an NFT when you want? Um, and there, what you’re doing is you’re adding all the supply to the IOM network so that they can all compete and collaborate to offer a more seamless user experience where the best vehicle for me right now is available to me might be your private car. It could be the corporate fleet car could be a car share, could be a train, could be a carpool whatever’s best for me. I will see the best options for me. And the better we can get like a global supply network to be connected to this, the better it is.

Boyd Cohen [01:23:55]:

And one last example that would probably blow you away. I think in 2024ish, we’ll start seeing these use cases with the Iomob network. If you are a last mile logistics company, all right, your vehicle, your drivers have usually one vehicle – have a bike or a scooter or a car. They don’t have everything. What if they don’t need to have any car or vehicle? And what if Iomob network delivers to them the best vehicle for the journey they need to take? They need to go eight blocks to deliver Chinese food while there’s a scooter right outside. And maybe that’s a fleet scooter, or it’s my private scooter that I leave out there with my NFT. It doesn’t matter. Then that same driver in the next journey, they need to go all across town to deliver big box of heavy books. Well, they might need car share for that, but they only need it for an hour so they can pull on a local vehicle for that. So, if you think about this at scale, if you really do seamlessly connect the world’s mobility services to a decentralized network of mobility, you can empower so many amazing use cases that will make the planet greener, improve our quality of life and improve our transport ecosystem.

Jaspal Singh [01:25:10]:

Thank you so much, Boyd. I really loved all the three example you mentioned, and I never thought in that way. So thank you for sharing. And I think you likely mentioned with this technology it’s possible, which was not possible. I mean, I remember I launched the first booking services, a car sharing, not car sharing, a ridesharing service for passenger in Delhi with one of the guy. And we use telephone, and we use some device. We never thought the smartphone will come and then you don’t need all these things. And smartphone will take away everything. And I think with blockchain now, what you mentioned, the delivery guy don’t need to own any vehicle. He can pick his vehicle depending on what kind of thing he needs to deliver. So, you don’t deliver only food. You can deliver logistic packages, you can deliver cottons and you can also deliver the small packages depending on the stuff and you can pick your vehicle.

Jaspal Singh [01:26:02]:

You can, you can draw from that and all. So thank you for sharing. I mean, it’s really powerful. I mean, I can keep asking you to share more and more example because it’s giving me a very different perspective and I like you said, future is not written yet, so we don’t know how it will be, but what it looked that there will be a lot of these things will turn into reality. And I’m looking forward to that.

Now let’s talk about NFT. You briefly mentioned about that, I recently was talking with one of the transit agencies and I mentioned to them that probably the transit agencies can sell NFTs to make money. And I got a very weird look and I know why, because they still feel it’s a crazy idea on the surface, like you mentioned, NFT seems to be just a glorified image.

Jaspal Singh [01:26:51]:

We heard news of people paying millions for Boring Ape photo, you know, rock photo. They are charging millions of dollars. I would say you are the first one in the industry who has already launched NFTs with Brightline Train, with the public transit agencies. And it’s already live on Open Sea platform. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. This is the one you are already selling these mobsters. I would love to know what the mobster story is all about and selling hundred NFTs for them. But you have planned to hire local artists in hundred cities around the world and planning to profile local scenes. And like you did for Brightline Train and all.

I am keen to know more about this project, what kind of response you are getting right now? And how did Bright Line Train react to your idea initially? Like when you talk to them and say, Hey, I want to sell NFT of your system. What was their reaction? And what is your overall vision for this idea? How you want to convince other agencies to do it?

Boyd Cohen [01:27:58]:

Yeah, no, it’s fun. We’re talking so seriously about very important things in the world. And then now I’m popping up some images of some mobsters in Miami, but that’s part of it too, right? Like injecting some fun into transportation, into mobility, and also engaging a younger audience who are more sort of adept at NFTs and all the rest of it. There are several reasons why we came up with this campaign. We call them mobsters it’s mobility monsters. And what we’re doing is drawing on local and regional animals. So, first deployment is Miami because Bright Line is based in Miami. So local and regional animals, local and regional vehicles highlighting our clients’ vehicles when our clients have their own vehicles. Because as I mentioned, not all of them do, when they have their own vehicle service.

Boyd Cohen [01:28:55]:

Yeah. highlighting local scenes, trying to play off the sustainability image and using a local artist in each of the cities where we’ll do this in which as you said over time, it’s a hundred cities, a hundred NFTs per city. That’s 10,000 NFTs over time. Probably going to take us at least a few years to do this. Because we want to tie it to deployments where the Iomob network is being deployed around the world. We engaged Bright Line and you know, you asked what the reaction was. I think what I would say is it depends on who I asked at Bright Line. There was one of the people I love at Bright Line. He’s one of our primary sort of collaborators. He said, don’t talk to me about NFTs. Like, okay,

Jaspal Singh [01:29:39]:

didn’t want to talk.

Boyd Cohen [01:29:40]:

He’s done with NFTs. He’s heard about them enough. He’s not interested in them. Didn’t see the value in it. But then other people in the organization were like, yeah, this is cool. Like, would this make us the first rail operator in the world with our own NFTs? Which I think it does. Which is another reason we’re doing it is to sort of help our clients gain prestige and brand and cache by being early in the sort of blockchain and NFTs space. There is going to be benefits of which I’m not allowed to entirely say publicly, but owners of these NFTs will get an airdrop later this year. And an airdrop for your listeners who are less familiar with them is a way a blockchain project can deposit something of value or not, could be a benefit like for example, access to in blockchain. All the blockchain projects use something called discord.

Boyd Cohen [01:30:36]:

Discord is like slack for your node users if they know what slack is. But it’s for community engagement. And what’s common with an NFT and an airdrop is that if you own an NFT, you get some kind of exclusive privileges to get inside information about the project before others do. So, it’s like the NFT can be used as a ticket of entry to a privileged club by having one. So, these are all the reason we want to celebrate our deployments. We want to celebrate local sustainability, celebrate mobility and incentivize adoption and use by younger generations and, and help our clients tap into that. Sort of new ethos around NFTs and the excitement around it. So those are all the reasons why we have done it. And you know, the response has been very positive. As you say, I think we’re the first company and mobility to do this and we like being first. We are going to continue to do being first. Our next first is the first mobility company in the Metaverse. So that’s coming soon too.

Jaspal Singh [01:31:43]:

Yeah. That’s my next question. So, that’s coming. For NFT, I love what you mentioned because I see a lot of these transit agencies, like I’ve been in London and in Singapore, in Hong Kong. They’re getting a lot of these station art. I mean, if you go to some of these stations, they have such a rich history and they have created a lot of local arts, which is in a physical world exists. I really see the value. They can monetize it by converting into a digital world. And I think this is just a first project, but I see more and more adoption will happen and people will see the value because sometime they don’t see it, so they don’t believe it. So now if they see this, and they can believe it easily, that it’s possible, it’s workable, people are buying it. And it’s interesting. It’s like how to engage the younger population into the system. So younger population, like I have a habit to collect the mobility smart card from all the transit system I visit. So I have this habit, I have more than 50 cards right now, but in future that’s my, so I already bought one. But this is my future collection going to be the NFT from around the world of transit network.

Boyd Cohen [01:32:58]:

Awesome.

Jaspal Singh [01:32:59]:

Now let’s talk about metaverse that’s the topic, which again, I get a very weird look because people think metaverse is about virtual gaming and it’s nothing to do with the real world and all which is true, but at the same time it’s changing. So what would be possibly have to do with internet of mobility? What do you think metaverse will play a role and because your focus is a real life transportation ecosystem. You don’t want to push people in the digital world. I must say, during my research, I learn a new term, which is called MTA Metaverse Travel Agency. I never heard about this term. I’m so curious to learn more about it because it’s a term, if I hear for the first time, I think many people who are listening to this, they would have never heard about this.

Jaspal Singh [01:33:50]:

So Iomob is looking to enable MTAs in metaverse. So you are trying to create more and more metaverse travel agencies. Can you share how it’ll work? Also I want to share like I’m a big time podcast listener and the big fan of Balaji Srinivasan, and he’s a blockchain guru. And he recently shared that how metaverses will change immigration policy as people can travel in virtual words. So like in real world, you need visas, you need work permission to travel in different countries. Like you work in different countries. So you know how difficult sometime it is to get those permission, but in metaverse you don’t need any immigration permission. You will be tomorrow teleport to USA or, in UK or in Australia. So how will you manage those digital crime in the space? I was thinking about the ticketless traveler and virtual TTC network. How will people control things in better or Worse?

Boyd Cohen [01:34:46]:

Yeah. there’s a lot to unpack here. I mean, I think underlying some of your questions and probably your listeners questions that are emerging is like, what does real travel even have to do with the metaverse if the metaverse, as you said, is a virtual environment of made up worlds and, and the whole idea of the metaverse is you can freely travel around the world or around virtual worlds without actually getting out of your seat. That’s one view of the metaverse, but I think, you know, there’s growing, I don’t think I would call it consensus, because I think there are people that are even very deeply active in the metaverse that would not have the same view I do, of what the metaverse is kind of like what we just described about MaaS. Like a lot of different DeFi definitions. I love gray  so I believe entrepreneurship is all about managing in gray, not black and white, that there is almost nothing that is black and white in the world of entrepreneurship.

Boyd Cohen [01:35:47]:

You ask, I mean, look at my example, I go pitch to 10 venture funds and I’ll get 10 different responses to, could we become a massive global internet of mobility or not, and 10 different reasons why we will or won’t and 10 different strategy suggestions. And none of them would be aligned probably. So that means there is no black and white in entrepreneurship, which is why I love it. And I don’t think there’s black and white MaaS and there’s not black and white the metaverse is for me. The metaverse is a digital technology that allow humans to engage with each other and other objects and things potentially just for digital lives or that benefit their real life in the real world or IRL as we talk about. So if you think about like a metaverse that’s like just a virtual world, like Sandbox is one of the best decentral land.

Boyd Cohen [01:36:51]:

Those are two really big metaverses that are virtual worlds only at the moment. And the only things you can buy in those metaverse, that’s not true. I was going to say the only thing you can buy in those worlds are digital goods, but that’s not true anymore. You can now go to sandbox and see a sneaker on somebody’s avatar, but it looks like a real sneaker. It’s a Nike. And you can click on that Nike and say, I want that as an NFTs for my avatar. And I want that as a physical shoe sent to my house and you can pay a hundred bucks or whatever it is, you earn the NFT for your avatar and you literally get a physically, the physical shoe to your size sent to your house. In a virtual metaverse of foreign lands that don’t exist.

Boyd Cohen [01:37:41]:

So, we’re already seeing the blending of bricks and mortar commerce and Web2. And metaverse even in the virtual versions of the metaverse. But I’m going to share with you my favorite recent discovery over the last month. It is a, metaverse called, the Next Earth. The next earth is built to scale with satellite images of the real planet earth. I’m zooming out now. That was actually my house in Spain and as I zoom out, you see that I’m in Spain and I can travel anywhere in the world with this bringing in travel. I’m going somewhere. I am not going to put your home address in, I don’t know what it is. You probably don’t want me to put it in on you. You can see all these squares and the ones that are untaken can be bought is virtual.

Boyd Cohen [01:38:35]:

Yeah. so the next earth sells virtual land ownership over real satellite images of the earth. And their vision is to turn this into a platform as a service. And what they mean by a platform as a service is this becomes a digital layer of a metaverse that can then be used to enable Web2 and bricks and mortar and Web3 companies to engage with users in their metaverse to offer new kinds of goods and services or existing ones, and use it as a new distribution channel. So let me show you something. So they have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I think it is eight different what they call screen modes. So if you go satellite street mode, you see the street names and, and the points of interest and things like that. And then you can click on this one. It looks a little bit more like a Google or Apple map it’s actually built on Mapbox.

Boyd Cohen [01:39:42]:

So it’s Mapbox mapping tools. All right. So I’m dropping on this podcast. What would be called in blockchain? An alpha is giving your listeners first access to something. No one else knows about yet. Yeah. And I’m only doing this now because I believe by the time this goes live, the news will be official. It can be public. I hope so. I hope we’re going to partner with the Next Earth to add a new layer to this and it’ll be the transportation layer. So it’ll be an extra what they call screen mode. You click on transportation and what you’ll end up seeing is something more like this which is built by Iomob, which is our map of the earth. Okay. With transportation ecosystems embedded. So we use, GTFS, GBFS all these different sort of classical standard API or, data sharing tools for public transit and rail service. The blue you see is public transit and the red is rail. So these are like real networks, for example, in Europe. So what is this look.

Jaspal Singh [01:41:03]:

Amazing? This can be sold as an art.

Boyd Cohen [01:41:07]:

You know what? You should see our team is done. That’s super cool. It looks even cooler almost. Yeah. Is we have heat maps and we’ve never seen anyone else do this before? We can do heat maps that can show you from a point on the map to another point on the map, how long would it take a user to get there using multimodal mobility? So we’ve seen heat maps for like public transit or for cars. Yeah. But multimodal heat map, like well maybe the fastest way is a scooter to a train rather than being stuck in an hour-long traffic. And because we have all these vehicles connected, we can actually do a heat map that can model in real time, like waves of how far you can go in the 15-minute city or 30-minute city combining different services, rather than just relying on one mode.

Boyd Cohen [01:42:02]:

So my point, going back to what we’re going to do with the Next Earth in the metaverse is we also have our journey planner in this thing. So, you can like pick out points on a map and then our journey planner will automatically generate routes for people right now. Our journey planner only does inner city within the same country, but for the next earth, we’re going to enable global journey planning. So you want to go from your house in Toronto to my office in Barcelona, you’ll be able to put the origin address and destination address, see a range of options. Okay. And the metaverse travel agency. So because Iomob is always enterprise digital layer of the internet, a mobility network, we don’t offer this to end user direct. We empower enterprises do it. So, we will enterprise web. We will enable web three metaverse travel agencies, as well as airlines and other travel companies and other transport.

Boyd Cohen [01:42:58]:

And whoever wants to offer a real booking experience where you can as a user, visualize your journey in their metaverse before you book. It’s like preview before you pay. And one of the most exciting things I think that we want to do together with them because the Next Earth and I am all share a passion for climate action is if you think about it. Let’s say, I’m going to go from Barcelona to Paris. My inclination is I’m going to go to an airline booking site and book a flight. But if I go to the next earth and I have the option of different modes of getting to Paris from Barcelona, and one of them is a high-speed train, takes five hours. The flight takes an hour and a half, but I still must get to the airport. I have to wait at the airport.

Boyd Cohen [01:43:48]:

I have to go through immigration. I have to do all this crap. You know, most of the time airports are not near your urban area. So you have this travel to, and from two different airports, which then adds more money because they got to pay for taxis. And because Iomob can enable a door to door journey plan, we can show you the whole cost of taking that journey. And the time it takes the whole journey door to door. And if we could show the CO₂, which of course a lot of people are doing one way or another to try to nudge your right behavior. That’s fine. But what about the next step? What about, I see that it would actually really take me four hours door to door in the plane. It’s going to end up costing me 200 euros. Yeah. Because of the taxis and all the rest.

Boyd Cohen [01:44:31]:

I could take the high-speed train takes me five hours, but I get to go door to door. I have internet access and well, let me see before I buy, what stops, what will I see along the way? So in the Next Earth, because it’s a satellite image of the real earth, what we can do is send in the geo-coordinates of every train station that you stop in on this high speed train along the way and let the user like virtually go past each of these stations in the satellite version of the world. And we believe that visualization of that journey and the cool towns you might see. And another way of seeing the carbon impact and the full journey time and the full cost of the journey, not just the plane, it could help nudge people to make more sustainable choices.

Boyd Cohen [01:45:29]:

So the idea is an immersive preview of a journey that you can book in a metaverse and there’s one last that stopped to this journey, at least that we’re going to do together. Iomob already has this thing. We called a companion app. The companion app allows a user to book a journey in a third-party interface could be a travel agency. It could be a separate app, could be a website, could be a kiosk wherever you book it, you can pull it into this companion app. And now the companion app has your origin and destination, station or airport information. So we now know that you’re going to depart at [10:00] AM at this day, from this train station or this airport and arrive at this station or airport at this time. And then we can help the user assemble their first and last mile around that and then solve their destination mobility service when they get there.

Boyd Cohen [01:46:25]:

And by doing this as a companion app, you can book in the metaverse. I mean, I’m using literally my laptop for this, right? Like if I booked in the metaverse, I can’t bring my laptop and have the scanned my ticket scan from my laptop very easily at the train station or the airport. So you can pull the journey in whether your QR code or whatever into your phone and then manage your whole mobility journey in the phone because it goes with you and with Next Earth. They want to collaborate with us to make those journeys, um, carbon negative. So carbon offsets in other ways. And there’s another cool thing. I’m sorry. I’m probably going too long.

Boyd Cohen [01:47:08]:

This is super alpha because nobody knows this yet. So hopefully it’ll be known, able to be known by the time we go live. If you own virtual way, imagine you own in the Next Earth – Sants train station Barcelona. Any revenue that is generated by Iomob from transaction revenue from you, booking a journey from somebody else booking a journey from Sants in the metaverse. So, we get a small transaction fee. We will be sharing that transaction fee either in the form of tokens or revenue with the virtual landowner of the train station in Barcelona. So, it’s this totally cool hybrid mixed reality, real world meets virtual world and the metaverse where revenue bookings and user experiences can more seamlessly travel between the metaverse and the real world and have hopefully real world climate impacts on top of this.

Jaspal Singh [01:48:14]:

That’s amazing. What you describe it’s sounds so amazing to me and I would love to see when it’ll be coming live and see like you can now own the stations. Like in real world, I can’t, but in virtual land I can, I want to own a Union Station in Toronto. So, and anything coming in the virtual world, you can make use of that. And I think that’s a real way of making it owned by people rather than owned by one institution and one agency and all. And I think one other use case I see is in future people can, and we discuss about this point many more time in the past is about having those carbon credit miles. Like if you can show that you, instead of taking a trip by plane, you must have emitted this much of carbon. Now you took that trip by more sustainable mode. So it validate that you earn those carbon credit and in future you can tie up and you can monetize those carbon credit as well. So to me, it’s looked like,  people actually will make money by traveling and making those journey so they can make more money than taking planes and all,

Boyd Cohen [01:49:24]:

Hopefully,

Jaspal Singh [01:49:26]:

No, that that’ll be great. And I wish you good luck with their, with the Next Earth launch like you said, by the time we’ll be in public, it’ll be available, and I’ll be the first user to check it out and see how does it look? So now I want to discuss about digital currency. You talk about that point quite numbers of time. You mentioned that Iomob tokens. So a lot of people think that, Bitcoin is the original currency or is the only currency in blockchain world. But I think right now there are more than 5,000 cryptocurrency and I’m probably I’m wrong because there’ll be many more. So I want to learn about the token economics. You mentioned briefly earlier about that Iomob token and how it’ll be owned by people, not by Iomob. It’ll be owned by the people who will be participating in this network. So how does this whole economic model will work and how can one transit agency pick one over the other? So like there are so many, these tokens and application will emerge, what choice the transit agencies can have to pick one over the other?

Boyd Cohen [01:50:37]:

Yeah. So crypto is exploding, the diversity of options that are available to retail investors in terms of investing in crypto and tokens. And of course, as you say, I think there’ll be a growing number of options for transit agencies and the transportation community regarding tokens that are directly tied to the transportation mobility ecosystem. Ao, first of all, crypto is not, there are some sort of very passionate people who are like die hard about a particular currency. Like you find a lot of, they call them maximalist or maxes. So, Bitcoin maxi or Ethereum maxi who are just die hard about their currency and sometimes for good reasons, but in the end, there’s no requirement that a transit agency tries to pick one winner. There are certainly ways they could collaborate with more than one. And I think, you know, the word collaboration in the context of crypto is so profound by default, the crypto world is way more collaborative than you would find in most traditional tech industries.

Boyd Cohen [01:51:50]:

It’s more likely that there will be ways to build off each other to combine currencies, to leverage tokens interchangeably. If you look at the emergence of wallets for people to buy and sell and trade and use crypto, increasingly those are becoming more interoperable across currencies and across token networks. So you can sort of more fluidly as an end user engage with any token you want. So I think that will happen regarding transit agencies, how they should proceed forward with a token model. Yeah, I think, you know, it’s tricky because you said it earlier, they tend to be when you brought up how they react to your NFTs idea. It’s not easy to get a transit agency to get their minds around what’s happening with tokens, token economics, and how to engage in that.

Boyd Cohen [01:52:45]:

And I think early on in the case of Iomob, you asked about our token economics model. There’s no requirement that the public or private agencies who engage with Iomob actually have to be savvy around blockchains or tokens at all. We can sort of hide the complexity of blockchain and crypto from partners in the ecosystem who aren’t ready for it, they don’t have, they can just carry on their businesses. They usually do settle transactions as they usually do over time, there will be more on chain settlement, which basically means that when you have transactions aggregating between supply and demand partners and end users over time, more of that could actually be resolved on chain, which you know, increases trust and has a lot of benefits for the ecosystem. But if they’re not ready, they’re not ready and that’s fine. And a transit agency in the current version of our token economics model has no requirement to acquire tokens or be engaged in the token economy in a meaningful way.

Boyd Cohen [01:53:50]:

We think over time, they will. and they will also accrue token benefits because we have this thing called Proof of Mobility Services POMS, and that’s around validating that ecosystem partners have actually contributed to the growth of journeys being booked in the Iomob ecosystem. And if you’re contributing because you’re providing services to the network, you’re providing transit and people are booking them in the network, then you’re helping contribute to the growth of the network. And that’s great for everybody. It’s a true network effect where the more supply is in the better it is for the demand partners, the better it is for end users. And it keeps going in a virtuous circle. So we want to encourage that and that will include token benefits. So, a transit agency will actually accrue token incentives just for having their service available in the network. That doesn’t mean they know how to handle the tokens right now.

Boyd Cohen [01:54:44]:

Like, do they have a wallet yeah. That they can receive those tokens? How do they handle it on accounting and auditing and reporting? So it’s going to be a while until I think we see that kind of use case go mainstream where the transit agency is proactively engaged and involved in a token economy. But I think we’ll start to see this year whether the transit agencies know it or not, that they’re actually involved in token ecosystems and they’re involved in blockchain based networks like Iomob. So it’s coming to a city near them and a community near them, whether they’re aware of it or ready for it or not.

Jaspal Singh [01:55:19]:

That’s a good point. You mentioned about that it’s their choice, whether they want to get involved and go deep into that, or they want to see little bit before moving forward. And they need to create a basic infrastructure like for currency, you need bank account, but for tokens, you need a wallet. So, you need to have that kind of infrastructure ready before even you move into that area. In fact, my next question, and, this is my last question.

We, we had so much of fun in, in discussion so far, but I know it’s going very long. But this is my last question. And actually, it’s about, you’re already working with many partners around the world. like you already mentioned about your launch and NFTS collection with Bright Line Trains in Miami, but can you share more detail about other key partners, which you’re working and also from a transit agency point of view, what should be the first step, if any transit agencies want to move into this area?

Jaspal Singh [01:56:22]:

Any suggestion on the process, because it’s not like tomorrow I’ll wake up and say, okay, I want to do something. There must be some process and there should be some work to start in blockchain. Why I’m asking this question because a lot of agencies tell me that they are open to experiment. They want to experiment and do pilots, but they want to make sure that they can go back and revert back to the original situation quickly.

They don’t want to create any dependency, if something doesn’t work or if nothing works. So in short, they don’t want to get stuck because for example, if they launch a blockchain wallet and they do it for two to three months, and then suddenly they say, there is no blockchain wallet anymore. So, what will happen to the users who adopted and all? So how one can ensure that if they move, decided to move forward, there is an option for them to get back or there is no option to get back.

Boyd Cohen [01:57:17]:

I could see why transit agencies would feel it quite risky to go all in on a blockchain model early on. And they’re used to doing, as you say, pilots and staging in transformation, digital transformation. You also asked initially in your question around who we partner with already. So, you mentioned Bright Line as a, you know, our first us commercial client. We did an initial project, like a trial with Ford in Pittsburgh, this was a few years ago. We did a trial of Wellington in New Zealand. Okay. We see ourselves as a born global firm, so we’re based in Barcelona, but you know, we have team in Dubai and London and, a few other markets as well, but we’re mostly based in Barcelona. This is going public very soon. I think I can say it here anyway, but another commercial client of ours – Northeastern Rail, which is a UK rail operator, goes from London to Aberdeen, Scotland.

Boyd Cohen [01:58:20]:

We go live with in May, so end of may, early June, so it’s coming soon. Then as we talked about earlier, we have, you know, quite a few new projects emerging, like the Next Earth, which is a global project. We also have several suppliers as we talked about, like Bolt and Tier and Voi, and many other big national, regional or global suppliers connected to our ecosystem. And we also have, now I’m not at Liberty to say the names, but we have one of the world’s largest automated fair collection companies as a partner. They operate in dozens of cities, maybe hundred cities, more around the world. A very large company as a partner. And I think in the next few months that will be public. And we have another partner, which is one of the world’s largest system integrators.

Boyd Cohen [01:59:15]:

That partnership is currently constrained to a one national, RFP request for proposal opportunity, which is really exciting because it’s a very large country, where the national rail operator is looking for a solution, like what we offer. And the partnership is for Iomob to work with this global system integrator to deliver this sort of door-to-door rail experience for a whole very large nation. So that’s another example of a partnership we have with respect to moving forward as a transit agency with baby steps, I guess. And experimentation, certainly playing around with NFTs is a very lightweight of, as you’ve tried, is a lightweight that doesn’t necessarily impact core operations. It’s an experiment that you can do kind of in isolated way. I think connecting your service to a company like Iomob where you’re not required to necessarily go deep in blockchain at all to be part of it.

Boyd Cohen [02:00:22]:

But then you learn one of the things that, you know, everyone in blockchain says for people that want to learn more about these projects and crypto and everything. One of the first recommendations you always hear is find a project you’re interested in and engage in that project. So go into their discord channel. I mentioned discord before as like the main community engagement management tool that all blockchain projects use. I have gotten deep in the Next Earth discord channel and I’m really engaged with our community. And it’s been a way for me to learn more about their community, but also just learn more about blockchain from different use cases in this case. Metaverse, and what’s possible for my company just by understanding better their community and what they want. Yeah. So my point would be, for example, a transit agency could come to the Iomob discord channel and just start kind of tracking the conversations and engage in conversation.

Boyd Cohen [02:01:19]:

That’s super low hanging fruit that doesn’t require anything but some time. So there’s got to be somebody at almost every travel, a transport agency in the world. That’s interested in blockchain, that’s studying its impacts and trying to figure out what it could do for them. Come visit our discord channel and dive in, and you don’t have to make any commitment. You don’t have to have any tokens to be involved in the discord. And you can start asking questions of the community and engage and learn without doing anything as far as like going beyond that to actually like taking a step more concrete in the blockchain world. I would say again, the first thing would be maybe do it at an arm’s length where you’re participating as a transit agency, providing services into a blockchain project, whether that’s one around data could be a blockchain project just around mobility data and how you can monetize and capture or transportation data and do stuff with it in blockchain.

Boyd Cohen [02:02:11]:

And that’s a super safe thing, right? Because you’re not changing your transportation offer to users. You’re just experimenting with a new data platform. There is another step, for example, that can happen in the Iomob journey, which I think would be, I’m really excited for this to happen. Sometime, we had a conversation with a national it’s actually a ministry that has transportation within it. It’s a national one in Europe, and they are interested in maybe trying to have governance rights of a national level on Iomob for their country. So there are national transportation agency, their interest it’s super early exploration, but one idea is that they could basically operate that sub-DAOs in the Iomob network. And they could choose to offer co-ownership rights to that DAO to private transportation companies to private citizens who can now co-own their local, their national transportation ecosystem and have influence over the governance. So basically there’s a whole range of things that could be done depending on the commitment level of the transit agency. But I think, you know, in most cases there are some very accessible baby steps they can do without any meaningful commitment at all.

Jaspal Singh [02:03:40]:

Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Boyd. I really love the way you structured it. It’s always getting involved in the community, which doesn’t cost any money and it’s a way to learn. And in fact, there is a funny thing like in this new technology, blockchain, metaverse and NFT, you don’t have anybody with 10 or 20 years of experience. You know, people who has experiences probably two years or one year because these technologies are so new. So nobody can claim that I have 10 or 20 year of experience in Metaverse or NFT, because it’s so

Boyd Cohen [02:04:16]:

You don’t believe them, they’re lies.

Jaspal Singh [02:04:18]:

They don’t yeah. Don’t believe them. So the only way is to learn. And that’s sort of, we are seeing like a lot of venture firms are hiring young people as a partner for crypto and Web3. And I think for transit agencies as well, probably their young employee can be one getting involved in the discord channel and in Telegram. And I’ll be happy to put the link of Discord channel of Iomob so that if people are interested, they can join that the conversation and be part of the conversation. And I think that’s a way to learn collaborate, which you mentioned earlier, too. Collaborate, collaborate, and collaborate.

Boyd Cohen [02:04:55]:

I agree.

Jaspal Singh [02:04:55]:

So thank you so much. We, we learned so much about the blockchain, about technology side, but now it’s time to learn more about you. We got a little bit glimpse in your career, but I want to now know a little bit more of your personal side. What you love to do? So we have this Rapid Fire question round, and generally we have this five questions and we ask people, and today I added a new question for you because, I want to give you a bit surprise. So my first question, if you’re ready, I’ll start.

Boyd Cohen [02:05:28]:

Let’s go.

Jaspal Singh [02:05:29]:

Okay. So my first question, if you were not in education or blockchain sector, what other profession you would’ve selected?

Boyd Cohen [02:05:37]:

Probably be a venture investor. Probably leading an investment DAO where I would work with a community of people with a aligned interest, for example, around blockchain projects that have an impact on climate and invest in the ones that we like most, because I’ve not always had the most fun experiences with investors. And I feel like I know I could be a good one that would actually, it’s funny. Every venture fund always promises. They’re like very founder friendly, but very few of them actually are. Oh yeah. And I believe I would be because I’ve experienced the pain of being on the other side.

Jaspal Singh [02:06:14]:

That’s important. And that’s what I feel is. You should always have empathy for founders and entrepreneur. It’s not easy, man. It’s not easy to start something, even if it’s a stupid idea. But still they are taking the first step and whenever you’re starting your fund, let me know. I’ll be first person to join.

Boyd Cohen [02:06:33]:

Sounds good.

Jaspal Singh [02:06:35]:

So regarding your question, and you mentioned you already traveled so much around the world, you’ve seen so many cities and all which is your favorite city in the world.

Boyd Cohen [02:06:44]:

This will probably sound like I’m biased, but I don’t think I am Barcelona. So I live in Barcelona now, but you know, the backstory. The backstory is I actually lived in Madrid 20 years ago and then 15, no, 13 years ago or so, I met my future wife and, early in our interactions, I asked her a question. I said, if you could live in any three cities in the world, which ones would they be? And we had two of the same three cities, which is really strange because she’s from Venezuela, I’m from the USA. And we overlapped in two of the cities and they were – Buenos Aires and Barcelona. And we actually lived in Buenos Aires and now we live in Barcelona. Barcelona was our number one choice. As you say, I’ve lived in many cities and countries in the world and I’ve traveled to many more. And so we chose Barcelona because it was our favorite city. So that’s why I’m

Jaspal Singh [02:07:43]:

Whatever your wife say is the best answer. So if your wife is happy, your life is happy. In fact, I’ll be there in Barcelona next year. So will be great opportunity to catch up, definitely in person and, and see the city. And, and like you mentioned, you lived, you spend time in a lot of the city and you also mentioned you don’t really have a driving license. I mean, you have, but you don’t use it too much.

Boyd Cohen [02:08:09]:

No, I don’t have one.

Jaspal Singh [02:08:10]:

Oh, you don’t have one. So you are the best user of public passport network. So my next question is which city has the best transit network in the world.

Boyd Cohen [02:08:19]:

So this might surprise you and your listeners, because I think I might be inclined to say Amsterdam. And the reason I would say Amsterdam, isn’t so much for the public transit network, which is pretty good, but because they embrace what an old head of urban planning for Buenos Aires ones told me in his office in Argentina. He said because we were debating this very question for an event we were hosting around. Like if we were going to invite someone from a city to discuss best practices in transportation, who would we invite? And he said something to me that stuck with me ever since, which is Boyd, the best transportation policy is the best urban planning policy and whatever city does urban planning, the best that reduces the need to travel in vehicles or even in public transit is the best public transport best transit city. And I lived in Amsterdam for three months when we were in Techstars, which is accelerator for tech startups in Amsterdam a couple years ago. And as CEO, I had to be the one who suffered and  spent three months living in Amsterdam and I rented, they have this big famous company there now called Swapfiets, which is a monthly bike rental service.

Boyd Cohen [02:09:46]:

And I, I signed up for that right after moving there and yeah, I just explored the whole region on bike, never, almost ever got in a car and didn’t need to, because everything is so accessible by bike there. And you know, every year they’re making it harder and harder to drive a car there. I think it’s over like a five-year plan, they’re going to reduce something like 15,000 parking spaces in the core of the city. So, you know, the best transit city is the one that doesn’t need transit because you can get around without it, you can go on a bike and their transit system is quite good, but you know, the ability to bike in Amsterdam of course is insane. And so that’s why they get number one from me.

Jaspal Singh [02:10:28]:

I will not forget this line now is like the best transit city is one which has the best urban planning. So this line will now remain with me. And now my next question is, which is unique for you, is what are you most excited about this or next year? What, what do you think will kind of change?

Boyd Cohen [02:10:52]:

I mean, if you think of, if you’re referring to sort of things that directly relate to Iomob, I would certainly say the adoption of blockchain and the mainstreaming of blockchain into more IRL in real life applications, including mobility. I think, it’s really starting to take off now and I’m really excited about that because I really believe there’s this term that I’ve embraced called, regenerative crypto economics, which is this idea that you can bake into token economic models and crypto regenerative, economic and ecological benefits to society. So positive externalities baked into blockchain and baked into the token economics. And I believe we’re going to start to see a lot more of those use cases. Like Iomob go mainstream and get attention and, buy in from ecosystem stakeholders. And I’m very excited about that because that poses the potential for us to transform our society and our economies in a much accelerate our path towards a low carbon and more inclusive society, which is something as long overdue.

Jaspal Singh [02:12:06]:

That’s a great answer. And I’m too looking forward to that how these new technology will change the world this and next year, because last two year were remarkable. And I think the pace will now further accelerate in next couple of years. So I’m also looking forward and, like you said, seeing this internet mobility thing becoming mainstream. It’ll be, will be fun.

Now my last question is, and I don’t know, because you are at a very good position right now. You have fun in life. If still you can change one thing in, in your life, what would it be?

Boyd Cohen [02:12:45]:

Change one thing in my life. What would it be? My son lives in Canada and I would want him to be living with us. He’s of age to live, where he wants he’s just out high school and I miss him.

I would, I would change the Geographic physical location of my son from Vancouver. No offense. I know you live in Canada.

Boyd Cohen [02:13:11]:

To the Barcelona. So he could be with us and his sister on a regular basis. I know you’re probably thinking of something more professional, but no everything else. That’s the thing I would change.

Jaspal Singh [02:13:23]:

That’s great. Being a father too, I can imagine what you’re saying. It’s, whenever I go away on a trip, that’s the thing you miss is the family. And, and I think that’s more important. That’s why I hate when people say metaverse is just living in a virtual world because I think life happened in IRL in real life. Yeah. So you can’t escape from that.

Thank you so much, Boyd. I would say that in last one and a half hour, we had such a learning session. I learned a lot of new terms and all it’s like a power pack session. I couldn’t have collected this knowledge in three months or three years, which I learned in one and a half hours. So thank you so much for your time. And I really appreciate and wish you good luck with a lot of these upcoming project.

Boyd Cohen [02:14:09]:

Thank you, Jaspal. I hope we didn’t bore your listeners and they don’t fall asleep halfway through such a little long session.

Jaspal Singh [02:14:15]:

No, they will be awake and they will be more energetic and probably you will receive more email for questions from them.

Boyd Cohen [02:14:23]:

I hope So.

Jaspal Singh [02:14:24]:

Thank you so much.