Embracing Spatial Computing with Trifork’s Karan Yadav

This is Techron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel, and we're back here for another Techron TV interview. I always love having a first time CEO.

Well, not that I don't know if he's a first time CEO, but a first time guest, as you know, a CEO on our, on our show. And I'm happy to introduce you to Karin Ov. Karin is the CEO of a company called Tri Fork, and he's gonna tell us all about it.

But first, let's welcome him. Karen, welcome to Dextro team. It's great to have you Ont here.

Thanks, Alan. Delighted to be here. Thank you.

So Aaron, we're gonna get into Tri Fork and we're gonna get into spatial computing, but let's, let's take a moment to just talk about you for a second. Mm-Hmm. You know, if you don't mind, give our audiences that stuff, kind of your journey.

Yeah. It's been, uh, uh, it's, it's been a long journey, but a but a quite, quite an interesting one. Uh, I'm an engineer by training and, uh, you know, through my work in the world of engineering and, uh, and actually starting to work in the world of business, I, I really started my career with SAP about, uh, um, in around 2006, 2007 timeframe.

And, uh, and I spent a lot of time at SAP about 10 years, uh, working through different parts of the organization, especially their customer strategy team called Value Engineering. And then, uh, and then as luck would have it, if you remember when, uh, SAP bought sase, uh, for, for its data platform, uh, I jumped right into the, the mobile platform side of things with, uh, with Sase and SAP and, and, uh, and we built some very early initial enterprise apps, uh, at that time on all different devices. And, and of course, iPhone was, you know, slowly cropping up as, as a device, uh, of choice, um, for the enterprise.

And then, um, you know, of course, cloud was big in, uh, and massively growing at that time. So, so I, I, I, you know, I spent time at Workday as well. At that time.

It had recently gone IPO much smaller company than what it is today, but I was leading their industry strategy for technology, media and telco industry. Um, uh, got got some great insight into the world of product strategy and, and go to market from an industry standpoint for a, for a fairly small organization. So it was a lot of fun.

And then, um, before joining Tri Fork, I spent five years at, at Apple, uh, leading their enterprise strategy, uh, for their partner ecosystem in the enterprise. And, uh, so I was running their acceleration hub, which was a team of designers and developers really helping, uh, companies, uh, build better on the Apple platform. And, and lo and behold, tri Ffo was one of those partners I worked with.

And, um, and, and then, then Opportunity presented itself to be the CEO for Tri Folk North America. And, uh, and I always admired Tri Ffo as a company, as I worked with them more as a European partner than as a US partner. So, so I saw this opportunity of growing this business here in North America to be really valuable.

And I just finished my one year at Tri Folks. So it's been a, it's been a, it's been a wonderful combination of, you know, uh, meeting the right people, happy coincidences, working hard, and, and, uh, just having a lot of fun. You know, sometimes life's like, I tell, I tell my children this, you know, they're done with college now, and they're going out into the world.

Sometimes you just gotta walk the path and see, you know, where it takes you. And if you make a left here, there's a reason why you make that left. And if you make a right there, there's, you know, that's a whole nother path, if you will.

And, uh, but that's what makes it interesting too. It's good stuff. So congratulations on that.

So, tri Fork sounds, and I, I have to admit, I'm not familiar with Tri Fork, but, uh, sounds like it's a company that's been around for a while. It sounds like it's primarily European based until, or Europeans entered until recently and, and you're now running, I, I guess Tri Fork Us, I guess, is the subsidiary here in the States, but give us the Tri Fork story then. Yeah, uh, I, I came to know Tri Folk through my, my Apple Lens, um, and, uh, you know, we were always looking for partners who are building just wonderful solutions on the Apple platform.

And, and you know, as you know, the world of enterprise is so complex, really building, you know, design-centric, very user-focused application in the enterprise is, is in my belief, a an important part of, should be important part of every enterprise and trifocal was that one company building, uh, great applications on the Apple platform for, for industrial companies, for healthcare companies, for financial services companies. And we always admired because they were a, we as in Apple always admired them simply because they were a great representation of what great looks like on the Apple platform. And, uh, and that was really, you know, the foundation of what Tri Folk did.

Uh, starting 2008, uh, when the iPhone came out, because we took an early bet on, on the platform itself and said, you know, a lot of enterprise workloads will be consumed through the iPhone. Um, tri folk wasn't wrong, right? A lot of enterprise can workloads are consumed on the app on the Apple platform, but not as much as we'd like.

But it is con definitely a dominant platform in the enterprise. And now, you know, as we are kind of coming into this world, we see a similar story play out in terms of spatial computing, right? It's almost like it's 2008 all over again.

Um, and, uh, so that's kind of the Apple side of story for Tri four. But, but as I kind of got into the company, there were just so many interesting layers that I've found out. We are also, uh, a very well known Nvidia partner.

We work on the Nvidia Metropolis platform, especially well known for vision AI work that we do, uh, with our, with our industrial companies. And, uh, and then of course, the work that we do around SAP and SAP transactions and making sure we are able to build great experiences on top of SAP are kind of the core foundations that, that make tri folk what it is today. And, uh, it's been, it's been a fascinating journey kind of representing that here in North America and, and talking to customers and, and working with them.

Mm-Hmm. What's interesting is, you know, you look at your journey Mm-Hmm. And how all of these stops along the way kind of prepared you for this role, right?

Dealing with SAP, dealing with Apple, the whole, you know, managing what the, the, the whole AI and spatial computing landscape right now is, you know, it's old as new. Not that it's not new, it is new. I don't mean to say that, but the idea of, you know, just on wide open vistas, right?

Opportunity, wherever you look at the, there's opportunities there, much like there has been consistently over the last, you know, certainly in my 30 plus years in technology, um, you know what, there are people out here in our audience like current who maybe are not, even when we say spatial computing, uhhuh, they've heard it, but they may not be sure what it really is. Mm-Hmm. When we talk about spatial computing, how do you describe that to people?

Yeah, I think the most, more, well-known terminology for that Alan, is augmented reality and virtual reality. Uh, that's, that's really been kind of the moniker that's been used more often, uh, in the world. Unfortunately, both augmented reality and virtual reality are seen more from a gaming mindset, especially virtual reality.

Um, you know, the reason we believe Apple used a different terminology for spatial computing, because if you think about us as human beings, we are spatial in nature, right? We, we work and operate in a 3D environment, but it's such that we've been forced into this two dimensional world, which is a pixel constraint world of, you know, of interacting with technology, whether it's our phones or our desktops or laptops, uh, and such. We, our belief, uh, is that, that the world of computing over time will, will, will inherently be spatial, and which means we should inherently be, you know, very naturally occurring as in terms of how we interact with our, with our physical world.

And, and that's why this spatial computing, which can also easily call as extended reality, virtual reality, augmented reality, uh, will be a dominant computing platform, not just in our personal lives, but also in the world of enterprise. And, and what we are seeing is a version one of that story play out with the launch of the Apple Vision Pro. And, uh, and this journey is going to be, you know, multi-year long.

But, but we are deeply invested in it. And, uh, and we want to just make sure that we are, we are seen as an early innovator in this area. Absolutely.

Um, you know, with, with the advent of generative ai, right? We've never seen internet time compressed so tightly as it is two years change. It's changing everything.

How much of spatial computing and things like vision ai, how much of it is real today real in the next six months? Real further out? Yeah.

So let's take them one at a time. Um, spatial computing, you know, the, the product itself, uh, apple Vision Pro is about five months old. Um, in, in, in, you know, as it's been released into the marketplace.

And, you know, from a lifecycle perspective, it's probably in a, we have very early innings of its journey and, uh, the conversations we are having with customers is actually quite interesting. Uh, we did, we did work with Porsche, which is well known, which is on Apple press rooms and, and other, uh, public media was a representation of what the potential of this device is. And what we built there, uh, is an early indicator of what we built for them from, from a retail standpoint, from a, from a manufacturing training standpoint and from a command and control standpoint.

We also delivered for them some great use cases for the Lamont, uh, Lamont endurance rates that happened last weekend. And we actually probe out some technologies around streaming that were relevant. Um, we are having conversations with customers across financial services, across manufacturing, across pharma, across retail, on, on different use cases.

It's fair that these are not large projects, these are projects where the customers are trying to prove an idea out, and we are helping them, supporting them, do that in a very quick fashion so that they can then make a decision on what the next stage of that looks like. Vision AI, on the other hand, is more on a production scale now than it was couple of years ago. We have worked with customers in various settings to help them identify quality problems in their assembly line, help them identify invasive species, uh, plant species across, uh, around, uh, the roads, help them really identify manufacturing the defects in, in maintenance areas, uh, and maintenance and repair.

And, and our fundamental belief is that as far as vision is concerned, what you, what we see has still not been converted to data yet. So vision AI will be an important pillar of productivity for industrial companies. And we also think generative AI becomes better because of vision AI because you have now a data point that you can leverage in your generative AI models.

So you'll be, we will be soon talking about large multimodal models, not large language models, because you'll be consuming data, vision and all other aspects of knowledge to make better decisions. You know, I mean, some days I, I, I have to remind myself when I'm driving to work, it's a great time to be alive in some ways, right? And, but I wonder if everyone said that, uh, you know, in different eras and times, but there's just so much thought that's on the cusp of as it comes together, right?

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, right? And as think, you know, that's really, I mean, just game changing. Game changing, yeah.

And, you know, you sit here and get older as I am and you just like, can't happen best enough, right? I just want it to happen faster and then faster. Um, but it's excellent stuff for people who wanna get more information about Chi four around.

Oh, it's, well, we have a worldwide audience. These aren't just us people. So what website would you send them to?

com or our website, and I would also have them follow our LinkedIn channel, um, because we have lots of new updates coming out on our customer successes, the things that we are doing, because we are, the, the world is so rapidly evolving, Alan, the, it's, uh, it's, it's just fascinating how, how, you know, we almost need a real time update on our website at times to get things moving. But, but we use LinkedIn as, as that proxy channel today. But those are the best places to do that.

And, um, and we are, as, as we said, we are across 15 countries, um, both across Europe and North America. We have teams, uh, of, you know, fif 50 different nationalities. So while we are a Swiss headquartered of Danish origin, we are of very diverse and multicultural company.

And, uh, and you'll see that when you, when, when folks follow us on LinkedIn and, and also look at our website. Fantastic. Around, I know you have other appointments.

I want to thank you for coming on here on Sunk TV and educating us a little bit about Tri Fork and Vision ai Spatial Computing. Much success. And do please keep us posted.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time, Alan. I really enjoyed this Convers.

Thank you. It's a pleasure. Alright, Karen Ya CEO Tri Fork here at Text Drug tv.

Who knows? Maybe we'll do a text drug TV version in, uh, in a spatial computing kind of environment. We'll, okay.

Hey, we're gonna take a break here on extra. We'll be back in a moment. I.