Timber Barker

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. And it's very rare that I have a guest come back on the show, not, not because I've upset anybody, I think, but just because most people's stories are great. But my guest today, his story was so brilliant that when I had the opportunity to have him back and explain what he's done with Boom Interactive in the last 12 months. I was desperate to have Timber Barker come back on the show. He's agreed to come back today. Timber is joining us from Las Vegas where they're charging him to store his own water in the fridge. So I gotta speak quickly because he might get dehydrated and run out of water and money. Timber, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jim. Thanks for having me again. Love to see you.

Well, it's lovely to see you because you've made so much progress. You blew us away with your Bubbles Interactive, which is sort of a 3D for making digital twins, an AI-based platform. Tell us the product that you've launched now for the future of school safety. We're going to hear about the product, but I'm also going to ask you to explain how you can market an AI product into a very, very regulatory environment. So, Timba, tell us a little bit about what you've now built.

Yeah, so thanks for that, Tia. I appreciate it. So yeah, as you know, last time we talked about, you know, how our AI creates digital twins just from flat floor plans, and we're using that in the design world. And, you know, that's where we started. And, you know, we looked at the film industry. You know, you can do stage design, set layout, things of that nature. And I was talking to one of my investors and said, this would be really good for, you know, You know, schools to just share floor plans with first responders, you know, before and maybe even en route, just because it's so simple and easy to use. And they said, okay, let's put your money where your mouth is. Let's get you in front of a school district. I was like, oh, okay, do you know one? And they did. And so we're working with a pretty prominent school district in Arizona and showed them our technology and said, you know, Here's what you can do with it. And they really, really loved it because it isn't just about sharing a flat floor plan. It shows your blind corners. You have it in 3D. You can put your density in, so you can put in all your furniture and things of that nature. You can update that, so you can update the usages of a room. For example, they had a whole wing in one of their buildings was converted from what the original architect designed.

Right.

And so they have the ability to update that in real time and, of course, share that out to, you know, first responders. So whether that's, you know, police officers, SWAT, fire, EMS, EMT, can now have the layouts of a school. And then we took it one step further. We're able to add in other sensor data and information that, you know, the building has. So you can provide crucial building information in the form of, you know, whether that's an IoT sensor or a security camera. For example, we can bring in the actual CCTV or security camera footage, but on a 3D plane, we can show you where those cameras are placed. And then, when you see where the cameras are placed and you tap on a camera and you can see the live feed, you now understand where that's at in the building. And so, if your mind has gone there, we can help get first responders to where they need to go faster than anybody else because now they have that data at their fingertips. It works on every device, shareable across devices.

Wow. Timba, as I say, I was amazed when you showed me what you were doing before, and this is amazing. But you're also one of those entrepreneurs that's having to cross the chasm because you're introducing something that really hasn't existed before, but also you're having to overcome, I'm sure, sort of almost a cascade of regulatory and sort of statewide, citywide, schoolwide. Tell us, how are you building the marketing and getting the product known in the schools?

That's a good question. I get that question actually quite a bit. And we do that by not just going to one audience. Like, for example, you know, we go to a superintendent and we talk to the superintendent's team. So it's a team effort. And then they get the local PD involved, right? And then we show them what we're doing. We've even had a pretty major meeting last week in LA and talking to Glendale City. Very impressed with their leadership over there, and they want this in every one of their official buildings in Glendale. And so we're talking about that. And so it's not about just going to one group and saying, schools, you need this. It's it's about getting the community involved from various angles. And that's just me picking up the phone sometimes and calling. I have a lot of friends that know a lot of people, and I mean, we're all neighbors. And so somebody knows a superintendent, and I'm like, yeah, we should have a we should have a conversation. And they get their security. Or facilities manager involved. We show them how it's not just a single tool for one thing, but it can help them with many other things to save time and save money, like maintenance, right? So we can do maintenance mode in 3D. The digital sticky notes that we use, they aggregate data. So you can drop one in, drag it up a wall, take a picture of an issue, type in what it is, and then instantly share that with with a service provider coming in to repair that. So now they can geographically see where that's located. That just naturally saves time and money when they show up. And so to answer your question in a really long-winded, roundabout way, we go to all leaders, right? We go to city officials, we go to superintendents, and there is some regulatory things that we have to go through, and that's okay. You know, we go through those. You know, we talk to private schools. They have a much different process. They don't have to go through this big, RFP and, you know, request for proposals and quotes and, you know, going out and getting bids. The fact that we are the only ones providing this type of solution in 3D is good because it allows us to get through a couple of those little red tape, little barriers.

Yeah.

And we're going to go through that. We have to go through that.

And one of the things you've got on your website, and let's— we're going to play a video. For those people listening, there is a voiceover. So you're going to hear this. It's just 50 seconds video. And for those people watching, you can see this. So, Timba, it's just a 50-second which explains the, the new product, the future public safety for schools. The reason I want to show is because on your homepage you've kept it very simple, but first and foremost you've got a video. So let's just play that and let people hear it.

This 3D technology is being used for school safety, assisted by advanced AI. The technology rapidly generates 3D scenes from just floor plan images. Any skill level can edit, add furniture layouts, annotate room usages, and keep an up-to-date, accurate digital twin. Here's the best part: share these 3D floor plans to anyone on any device at any time, which means superintendents, facility managers, and security teams can share these with first responders and incident managers in a time of crisis and use this information to provide more accurate directions View camera feeds, chat with multiple users, and access information oftentimes not available. Speed is the key to saving lives. Welcome to the future of protecting our kids.

Timba, what I love about that video is in 50 seconds you managed to articulate such an amazing value proposition, and that is that time is saving lives. When you're going in a meeting the various different kinds of stakeholders, really, what reservations could they possibly have to adopting your digital twin for their built environments?

Yeah, great question. I mean, there's a few. I mean, let's be honest, there's a few. Like, one of the very first ones in talking with the school district, you know, they don't want to give security camera feeds to anyone outside of the school, right? It's their fiduciary responsibility to protect the kids and their employees, so the teachers and stuff. And the first thing they said was, well, is there a way to shut that off, right? So can we share the camera feeds for just a short time, like an hour, and then can we shut those off? And we already built that into it. And so I was able to kind of squash that concern of theirs. And I completely agree with them, right? And so that's, you know, kind of why we built it. So they have the ability, just like Google Docs. So think of this as like a Google Doc, but a 3D environment that you can easily share out, give somebody just view-only or edit rights or owner rights, and then take those away just as quick as you invited them. So that's a very important piece is with those camera feeds. The second is, you know, it came up, they're like, look, We don't want to get— what if a bad person gets a hold of the floor plans and whatnot? And the simple fact is they can go down to the city and they can get floor plans whenever they want. They can also walk through the halls with their phone and use a scanning app. I won't mention the names of those scanning apps, but they can just use a scanning app and scan the whole entire thing and have what's called a 3D point cloud or a NeRF. And they can, uh, they can have all that, so they can get a lot more sophisticated. And so my whole point was, well, look, if kids can do that right now with their phone because there's a LiDAR scanner on the new iPhones, then we have to train and teach leaders, uh, you know, local leaders, school leaders, city officials, etc. We needed to train them on what that technology is and, and how they can use it to, uh, you know, have the same kind of data and information that obviously is readily available. So So it's not really a pain point when they say that. They're like, hey, what if someone gets this? They can get it whenever they want to get it, right? So how about you are in control of your floor plan, you're in control of how it's updated, and that's what you share privately with, say, like a first responder and whatnot. So those are like some 2 barriers that we've been able to overcome. And then we listen, right? So the city of Glendale had some great Great feedback. And they had some questions and things we would've never thought of, right? We're a bunch of nerds sitting in a closet coding, right? We're making AI and we think it's all cool. We go talk to everyone and we say, how do you want this? Right? This is your product as much as ours. You know, consider us a little dev team in your pocket. And if you're like, you know, it'd be really good if you were able to archive it in this way, or it'd be really good if we can access it or do this in this way. And we listen like, you know what, you're the professional, you're right. Let's now go provide that. And so we're able to get through those barriers and those concerns by just listening and saying, you know, okay, we can do that or we can't.

Yeah. So you have some compliance things that you're overcoming. You've got, I think you said about 130,000 schools in America. Which is, which is a lot. Um, is the, the new product from Boom Interactive, this new future of schools, uh, safety, is it available only in America? Um, or is it a platform that could be taken to other markets?

It's a— it can be taken to other markets. Like, you know, and it's, it's— I know we're talking about schools and school safety right now. This is for any building. So if a property manager, a security company, you know, managing and handling security for multiple, multiple clients, you know, we are, we're in a user interface. So any data that you want to bring into that user interface and have that custom to you and your clients, that's also one of our paths. That's actually one of our services is like, you know, for example, we're working with a hospital and There's a potential just to build them a white-label version of our technology, you know, for their own uses and use cases and other features that they may want. So it is for all buildings and for everyone around the world. Like, who wants to use this? And the beautiful thing here is it's so fast to set up. We can scale. It doesn't take a professional 3D artist or modeler. No offense to—

No, no.

to those professionals because they can also use this technology and export any 3D model that they have to speed up even their own processes or processes. And so speed is the key also to get this technology out there. I mean, if every school called me tomorrow and called us tomorrow, we could have accounts set up and running instantly. It's a self-service piece of software as well. You know, they don't have to keep calling us over and over and over. They can actually manage this and set everything up on their own.

So Tim, it sounds as though you've done, you know, the ideation and then, you know, the validation and you're getting, you know, the Geoffrey Moores across the chasm, right? You're getting those early adopters coming on board.

Yeah.

From a distribution perspective, what's your strategy in terms of, for example, partnerships? Is the plan to only go direct to do self-service or to work with organizations that already have, for example, distribution channels into your existing and future markets?

We have a strategy for both, right? I'm going direct. Sales team, we're going direct and talking to groups. But at the same time, you know, we're talking to, you know, a big security company that has clients already. And getting that out there and maybe even being like a sales partner in that kind of partnerships. And then distribution on software is, there's a couple ways to do it. We are single code base. We built our own engine, our own 3D engine, and we can distribute that through iOS, right? So Android, Mac, and Windows. So on every, any single device. So you can be on your phone, you can scan your room right now, invite me to your scan, and I can be on my Windows or my Mac in the same scene with you at the same exact time. So it's cross-platform capabilities and communication capabilities are what we've really focused on is the utility of software like this. You know, if these kids are growing up with Roblox and Minecraft, 2 games I, you know, 2 platforms I love, Uh, you know, this is Roblox for adults, right? But it's tied to real decisions in the real world.

And Tim, but you are running a company, Boom Interactive, which has got now, I think, 3 different lines of business.

Yep.

Um, how difficult is it to, if you like, get a balance in terms of the portfolio and the marketing? And what are you doing to, if you like, build the corporate brand of Boom Interactive and the different product lines you've got?

Another good question. Yeah, I mean, we started off just wanting to, you know, be nerds and just create an engine and just go license that out to a bunch of people and then they can be the creators. And so when we started talking to people about the capabilities of the technology, you know, they're having a hard time understanding what we were saying. And so we were like, oh, we'll build a feature, we'll build a little prototype, we'll build a demo for you. And so, doing that 100 times, we ended up just making a whole product. And I was like, oh, this is a whole product. Let's make a few products. And so, we did. So, we have 3 products. And the beautiful thing is it's all the same underlying foundation technology. So, putting different lipstick on a pig, right? You've heard that term quite a bit. We can actually reskin our engine to you know, for any industry, a new brand. We can again white label this for other companies as well, and they can have their own internal version of this that is, you know, close to their network. And we can do that really quick, and we can do that quick because of the way we've built this. So I don't know if that answered your question.

Yeah, no, I think it does. So what you've managed to do, a bit like some of these car companies where the core competence is the engine, And then the application is, is different as well. Timba, if there was something that you wanted to give as guidance to, if you like, a fellow entrepreneur in building out and going across the chasm as you are introducing a brand new technology into an existing and fairly regulatory-bound industry in, in public infrastructure, schools and so on. What would that be? What are you thinking is really working for you where you're getting the brand known for Boom Interactive?

Getting everybody involved. You know, I'll go back to that. You know, I'm talking to police chiefs, right? Talking to superintendents, talking to city officials, talking to parents. You know, when you're talking to all of them and they have an input, into something like this, that's worked really well for us or for me. It's— that's it. Like, this isn't easy, right? None of this has been easy. And getting it to this point was really difficult, you know, but it's been fun. It's been exciting. It's been great to see people light up when they see it and they're just like, where has this been? You know, I mean, I have a good friend out of Virginia who was, um, uh, he was the police chief for, gosh, I don't know how many years, 30 years. Um, I should say he's now a good friend. Uh, his name's— I can, I can— he, he said I can, I can tell everybody who he is. His name is Mike Jones, and he's a security consultant for the government, also for the state, and for many, many companies. He does a lot of, uh, uh, school assessments on their security and, you know, post-incidences and whatnot. Really great guy. And he's like, we've been asking for something like this on the, you know, on the police force and the fire department. We've been asking for this for 20 years. And he's like, I've seen everything come across my desk and people want me to sponsor their stuff, or not sponsor, but, um, what's the word? Uh, uh, he backs it, I guess. Not sponsored, but whatever.

Sort of co-invest almost.

Yeah, yeah, whatever that word is. And, uh, it'll come to me after the fact. But so he's He's seen a lot of things and he says to— he said to me, this is, this is the best thing I've ever seen. I want to help you. I want to help get this out there because I know this will save lives. And that's a really big compliment. I mean, that's why we're doing this, right?

And Timba, you know, you have so many things going on. I'm hoping that we're going to be able to come back to you and explore more of the products and more of the implementation over time. If people want to find out more about you, Timba, and Boom Interactive and your new school safety program, where would they find you?

So you can go to the website. We're on LinkedIn. So Boom Interactive Inc. Our website's boominc.ai. Of course, we have the Bubbles product, which is a very creative product and very fun. It's actually— there's a free version of it. You can You can download it now and start, you know, playing around with it and seeing the capabilities. That's designwithbubbles.com. That's that website. And then the property management version is called Corespec3D. So property or building management, and that's the one that we use for school safety focus. And so that's cs3d.ai. That's where the website's at. And you can reach out on the contact form there and Let us know if you'd like to use our software to, to, for public safety, right?

Let's— yeah.

And many having— yeah.

Look, hey, I'm sure many people will, uh, want to do that. But of course, don't worry, I will put the links in the show notes. Timo Bock, I must let you get back to the minibar. Yeah, because there you are in Vegas. Um, well, water's the new gold, isn't it?

I, I know. I just came in. I was like, most places I go to, they give you, you know, 2 or 3 bottles for free or whatnot. Not here.

This is Vegas. Life's a gamble. Um, but you're living it and you're playing the game. Tim O'Barker, thanks again for joining me.

Thanks, Jim.

Yeah, you too. And hey, so thank you for listening to Tim O'Barker and I, and I will put links, and I've tried to show some of the videos, but doesn't really do it justice until you spend some proper time on the websites. In the meantime, if you've enjoyed this, do please share it with someone that you know, especially if you know anyone in the school or public safety areas in the country that you live in. Do please share this show and go to the video to watch as well. And until we meet again, I just do encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks to Timba for sharing his latest innovations and how he's crossing the chasm. Thanks for listening.