Fowler explaining his company's Totem, an offline mesh-network device for finding friends at festivals and big events. Each extra device acts as a relay, so the network gets stronger as crowds get denser.
Yeah, something like that. And so that's why it's so important that this mesh network works completely offline. It's an autonomous, self-governing network. It automatically manages usage across the mesh to maximize utilization while also preserving battery life and bandwidth for everybody.
…phone, limited number of towers, limited number of connections, limited amount of bandwidth. But a mesh network is designed to actually scale with more users. So it has kind of the inverse setup in that the more of these you have out there, the smarter and more accurate the totem compasses get.
Correct. Yeah. So essentially how I like to explain it is it basically works the opposite of a cell phone, right? The more cell phones you get in an area, the worse they all work. The more totems you get in an area, the better they all work. So with every additional totem in the area, each one acts as a relay. Even if you don't know those people, they're still helping you connect to your friends, your family, no matter what, passing your message along. So for example, you mentioned Lost Lands earlier in the conversation. That was one of our highest adoption events of the year so far. We had over 10% of attendees with totems out there this year. And we got our absolute max. We got to
help people here. How many people went to Lost Lands? Because someone out there is thinking 55 people and you sold five devices and it's gone best. So put some numbers on this for me.
Yeah. So Lost Lands this year, I believe they had somewhere around 50,000 people on site and a pretty small area, right? This is very dense, dense crowds. So we had over 5,000 users on site. And that was when we recorded some of our greatest mesh stats of all time. We had 35 hops across the entire…
So if you had had only 500 of the devices on site, so let's just say, you know, like 1% penetration versus 10, would the mesh network still have worked?