From a College Student’s Perspective at CES 2024: Reminiscing about the Demand for DePIN Storage Server
Introduction
Felicia (VP of Fog Works Inc.): Today, we are very pleased to introduce our guest Yi Long, a recent graduate who attended CES 2024. He will be sharing his discoveries at the beginning of the meeting.
Our meeting attendees include William Entriken, the lead author of ERC 721, the fundamental document for NFTs as we know them, and a very visionary person.
Xinlu Lin, our CEO of Fog Works, the dapp ecosystem of Data Mall Chain. Foggie Max is the proof of concept of the world’s first DePIN server for decentralized data storage and verification.
Victor Chen is the chairman of Data Mall Chain.
Zhicong Liu is the chief engineer of the civil fs protocol and the lead author of ERC 7585.
Perspective on CES 2024 from a new Graduate
Felicia: Let’s start with Yi Long. I know you attended last week. I’m very happy to see you here. We’d love to hear your perspective on CES from the viewpoint of a new graduate. What caught your attention? What impressed you most during the conference?
Yi Long: Thanks for having me here. I recently went to CES. It was my first ever CES experience. I was caught off guard by how large everything was. I think my first day was at the convention center, the main convention center. The things that caught my eye were the really large TV screens, display screens, spherical ones, flat ones, transparent ones, and even ones that displayed on fans. That was very cool to me.
On my second day, I spent my time at the Venetian Center. What was cool about that was they had an innovative awards area, and they also had a startup zone in the basement with thousands of startups grouped by countries. Walking around there, it felt like I was at a science fair where each booth was like a really small cardboard box, which contrasted largely with my first experience.
Some cool booths I saw in my two days there, one idea that stood out to me was drone soccer. I saw a booth where South Korea was having a drone soccer worldwide competition. That was cool. The transparent TV screen, I think everyone was impressed by that. And also, all the futuristic-looking cars in Honda and LG. That was cool. And cool ideas I saw in the Venetian with the startup stuff, there was one company called ZK Voting that was planning to do blockchain-based voting. I think that is relevant, especially because this year is an election year.
The last time it happened, a lot of voting fraud occurred. If voting happened on the blockchain, it would be instantly verifiable. Another thing that I saw was steam leggings, which are leggings you wear that when you move, transform micro currents. They transform the movement into microcurrents to stimulate muscle recovery. I thought that sounded like something straight out of a comic book. Also, Retard, which is renewable plastic that is made with starch. So it is also decomposable. Some negative things that I did see at CES were that, because it is such a large event, there are a lot of companies that are just, I feel like, over-engineering. They’re making something first and then addressing a problem. There were a lot of AI products, in my opinion, like AI chairs, AI pillows, and AI sex toys that were just not necessary. And there was even a product that helped you track where you walk your dog. Yeah, anyway.
Felicia: Cool. Maybe dog lovers would love it.
Victor: Why do you need AI to help you walk your dog?
Yi Long: No, it wasn’t AI to walk your dog. It was an app to record the routes that you walk your dog with and at which location your dog played or took a shit.
Victor: And is that uploaded to the cloud?
Yi Long: I think so. I think, in my opinion, that is an example of over-engineering.
Felicia: Thank you very much for your sharing.
DePIN Storage Server — Foggie Max
Victor: I went to the CES as well. Because I’m a web3 builder, I paid more attention to Web3-related shows.
One thing I realized, just like Yi Long said, is that there are a lot of smart devices around people right now. There’s one problem that is a pain point for both the user and the manufacturer of the product, the merchant as well: where to save the data collected by the smart devices. Those data should belong to the product owner, right? So, you have a dog collar that collects the route, and if the dog barks or poops, that’s your private data. If you upload it to the cloud, who’s going to protect that data?
And for the dog collar producer, I think it’s their pain point as well. They don’t want to. It’s not their main business to maintain dog-walking routes for their customers. Say if you have 10 million people using your product. Fantastic. But how do you keep those 10 million sets of dog-walking data safe? I think it’s going to be the dog collar producers’ nightmare. So that’s why I think it’s another target market for our DePIN device. That’s the Foggie Max. Those data should be stored, controlled, and owned by the product owner. So those data should be saved to their home. There should be a device at their home and that device. And that data should be online, accessible, and controlled by the owner.
I think that’s a great target for the DePIN Web3 server for Web3 users. That’s the Foggie Max. That’s all I’ve seen and that’s not only for the dog collar, right? I’ve seen mattresses that collect your sleeping time, your sleep position, and everything else. And that’s also personal data that should be saved at home. And another specific area that I paid more attention to is the home security cameras. The data collected by security cameras. I asked them, and they said, hey, this security camera comes with one-month free cloud storage.
Most of the customers will use it for a month and enjoy having their security camera data stored on the cloud. After that, they just don’t use the storage anymore. And so, they can only rely on a small percentage of the camera footage that is stored on the device.
I think that’s another great target market for Foggie Max. So, after that, I talked to several exhibitors at the show. We decided we had an agreement that we should set up a DePIN alliance to have all sorts of these types of smart devices or IoT devices. There, they should be able to save their data on the DePIN storage network.
Editor Note
To learn more about Foggie Max, the world’s first DePIN storage server, please click here. Thanks for reading!
