Processing Data at Warp Speed with David Knight, President & CEO of Terbine

This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and David Knight, President & CEO of Terbine, a data exchange for the physical world that has built a highly scalable system enabling wider use of data to inform and radically reshape many industries and everyday life. 

David is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, filmmaker, and experienced startup executive with a history of innovation and market development. He has a background in core technologies, including multi-spectral sensing and communications, messaging, enterprise software and distributed systems. David has founded, co-founded and held leadership roles in tech companies with exits including two IPOs, two M&A buyouts, and two recession-triggered meltdowns. He now leads Terbine, a big data & AI startup.

In this episode, David talks about his journey from working on ham radios to being a pioneer in the early days of digital entertainment. He also discusses his involvement in the beginning of online storage, helping to launch the private space race, and dedicating himself to dealing with, analyzing, and processing the overwhelming amount of data that comes out of everyday life. David explains how all of this led to founding Terbine, and how the company has partnered with the City of Las Vegas to help propel the world to prosper through insight, communication, and emerging technologies. 

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Key Quotes:

“They really want to make Vegas a place where they work on smart city technology and next generation communications. And, they're really investing in it, but more importantly, they're inviting startups and large companies to work together. And, so if you’re thinking of a city as a platform, which is not a normal way to look at a city, we are really trying to help the city itself become smart and also sustainable. You don't necessarily think of Las Vegas as a sustainable city, but if you think about it with things like the water shortage is coming up, it's a place that really needs to be sustainable.”

“The most interesting applications, which absolutely are going to be dependent on very rapid edge processing with low latency communications, are going to be in things that move. And, it could be a human moving. It could be commercial things. The first applications that we're actually looking at, and we will be doing very soon are in the commercial world.”

“What we're trying to do is say, look, we've already said, we're going to take the pulse of the earth, so now we're going to wire the physical environment into the digital twin and then collectively you can now navigate around it.”

“The more we can help the cities learn about the past, the present, and then extrapolate into the future, the better. So, it's not just the hedge funds that are going to make future bets. It'll be the cities themselves.”

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Show Timestamps:

(02:45) Getting into technology

(03:30) Arc to current role

(05:55) Working with new computing technology 

(02:43) Early days of email / Start of Click to Send

(08:30) XPrize Competition development and execution

(19:17) What is Terbine?

(21:10) Breaking apart the problem space

(22:10) Looking at issues in 3D

(25:15) Breaking down data silos

(26:10) Dealing with fear and greed

(27:06) Motto - ‘Take the pulse of the earth’

(29:30) There are sensors everywhere

(32:30) Mobile Edge Computing

(36:28) Processing data and storage

(41:48) Compression algorithms

(43:15) Sharing data

(44:40) Solving business and technology problems

(45:30) Tech Startups in Las Vegas

(49:30) Las Vegas Smart City Showcase

(52:00) Terbine and Las Vegas partnership

(53:30) Las Vegas as a privately funded smart city

(54:30) How Las Vegas conducts business

(56:30) Vegas loop

(57:30) Brightline rail fr