Last Friday, we had the great pleasure to join Krypto Sherlock Club for another exclusive AMA. We joined the Russian community for a 1.5 hour long ask-me-anything, where nearly 2,000 members of the community had an opportunity to learn more about Kambria, ask questions to our CEO, Dr. Thuc Vu, and our community manager William Ryan. We were offering rewards in KAT-7BB for the five best questions. So, without further delay, we will dive right in!
Sherlock Club:
Kambria CEO with us! We're glad to see You here! It's quite a pleasure and honor to be here with the Sherlock Club today
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
My name is Thuc Vu, and I'm the CEO and Cofounder of Kambria.
Sherlock Club:
Let's start with a few questions! And than we open the chat for community!
Question number 1:
How did you even get to know each other and the team? And who initially decided to create Ohmnilabs and then Kambria ?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
I first met our CTO, Jared Go, at Carnegie Mellon University. He was my roommate actually. We were both taking our computer science degrees there and did a lot of research projects together, especially in robotics. It was a lot of fun! We both then got into Stanford for the PhD program. Jared then later dropped out to work on his first startup, while I stayed back and finished my PhD (in AI and Game Theory).
Our CPO, Tingxi Tan, worked with Jared previously at the networking startup Hobnob. And we recruited him to join us as well since he is the world expert in cloud and backend system.
I started Katango, my first startup, in 2010, and got acquired by Google in 2011. I stayed at Google for 3 years but I got bored. So I left Google, met up with Jared and wanted to start a company with him. We brainstormed different projects to work on, and we saw a huge void in the consumer robotics space. Robots have the potential to help improve the quality of life for many people. But right now its only limited in manufacturing and industrial. So we decided to make something different. That's how we started OhmniLabs.
We then started Kambria in 2017 as we saw a huge opportunity to build out an AI/robotics community to help accelerate the development of new and advanced technology in this area.
Sherlock Club:
Brilliant! Time for question 2! Where did you come up with the name Kambria?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
We have an interesting backstory to share about the name
Our goal has always been to revolutionize how AI and Robotics have been developed and commercialized in the world! At OhmniLabs we had successfully brought a low-cost high-value robot to market by practicing our philosophy of ultra-lean, fast and agile manufacturing. We have been able to enhance the entire process, overcome existing shortfalls encountered in the industry. And we want to share this with other people, to jump-start a revolution in robotics, and hence, Kambria project was born.
Being able to foster an open collaborative ecosystem, where every contribution can easily be shared, manufactured, and implemented, is revolutionary. Companies can benefit from the collective contribution from the community to build custom applications without having to employ teams of PhDs. End users can enjoy a higher quality of life potentially afforded by more available robot products and services. We believe that for the next decade or two, we will see a Kambrian explosion of robots with very specific use cases.
And that's where the name was coming from, the Cambrian explosion, when life became abundant on earth 😂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
I think we are living in a super exciting time guys! Lots of technologies coming together at an accelerated speed as well
Sherlock Club:
Yeah, that's really cool! So my next question is: What is the meaning of the project now? Do I understand correctly that you have something like DeFi to finance robotics research and accelerator?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
You are correct, one of the arms of Kambria is focused on AI and robotics research and acceleration, but we are far more than that. We are building the world’s first open innovation platform where developers, roboticists, enterprise companies, and researchers can collaborate and share technologies.
You can think of Kambria as the Linux of frontier technologies. We aim to build the first 90%, so that you, as a company or developer, can come in and build the last 10%. So, if you are building a robot, then you will have the autonomous features, firmware, motors, telepresence platform, and many other features already built. This allows developers to create their robots to fill a specific need, without having to develop the entire robot from scratch.
Research and development process for a new robot are often overwhelmingly difficult and can sometimes cost millions of dollars to create. This is unsustainable for a large majority of companies who lack the resources to develop new technologies. With Kambria’s platform, they can quickly create, prototype, and deploy new innovative ideas in a fraction of the time and cost.
Additionally, enterprise companies can host bounties on our platform to outsource development work, allowing developers to collaborate and build your technology for them. Previously developed technologies on our platform can then be licensed and monetized, so that other innovators can utilize these technologies. Why build something from scratch when someone else has already perfected this craft?
Sherlock Club:
Is it depends on region? Or it doesn't matter where I came from to You? Maybe You're focused on Asia startups only)
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
It actually does not matter where the developers or use cases coming from. We will welcome any region. The reason why we are focusing more on Asian startups is because we have a really strong network there, with large corporates, governments, and existing communities so this allows us to grow a lot faster and at much lower cost. Haha funny story, I used to do a lot of programming competitions, like Olympiads and Vietnamese and Russians teams are always among the biggest rivalries!
Sherlock Club:
I see! 👍 So Russian Guys if You Have something to show Mr. Vu, you're able to!
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
YES!!!! We would absolutely love to have Russian developers to join hand with us. you guys are the best developers/hackers in the world! 🙏
Sherlock Club:
🙏 So the next question: What are you working on at the moment? What are the future plans for launching the ecosystem?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Currently, we are fine-tuning the Open Innovation Platform which we released earlier this year. Our bounty and hackathon platform is already complete, so now we are working on bringing additional functionality to our codebase and platform so we can offer a full-featured development platform that includes both hardware and software.
We are also enriching our ecosystem by launching these open innovation services as well as building our strong token economy:
- The Kambria Global Innovation Fund facilitates collaboration between researchers and companies worldwide.
2.The Kambria Open Innovation Hub is a global network of physical R&D labs that provides organizations with world-class solutions to accelerate their AI and robotics innovations.
- Hackathons and K-prize Challenges bring together companies and innovators to create advanced technology solutions through K-prize bounty challenges on our platform and in-person hackathons.
- Kambria eduKATion will offer expert-led courses with cutting-edge training in AI, Robotics, and blockchain development.
Sherlock Club:
Lots of cool stuff!
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Recently, we launched our first multi-city AI hackathon with the goal to build the ultimate AI virtual assistant. With over 180 teams and about 700 participants, the hackathon was a huge success. Lots of applications with commercial potential came out of the hackathon.
Here is a recap of the Vietnam AI Grand Challenge:
Sherlock Club:
What was the project you like most on that hackathon?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
That's a tough question, too many to choose from. I'd say the project that was building a robotics assistant to assist the elderly (older people). That's something we have been passionate about at Kambria and OhmniLabs. To really help the people who could not provide for themselves adequately anymore. We actually saved one life through our robot already! Made the whole journey quite meaningful to us.
Sherlock Club:
Great! Will check these guys!
I noticed that your github has changed a lot since writing our review. What are you working on there in short? In addition to the kambria-wallet repository, I also noticed another capsule-wallet. Are these different wallets for different purposes?
William Ryan ¦ Kambria Community Manager:
I can take this one!
Currently we are working on 1) multiple governance functionalities like revamped voting, rewards distribution and karma allocation, Integration of BEP-2 so people can use both BEP-2 and ERC20 KAT seamlessly on our platform, and project and team tools for devs to manage all aspects of their bounty participation, eg team management, code submission, application to bounties, etcetera.
The Kambria wallet is the wallet implementation on our the Kambria Platform. The Capsule wallet is the backend implementation of the Kambria wallet. Anyone can take this backend and implement their own frontend to integrate with their dapp site!
Sherlock Club:
Yeah! A lot of important things for the platform as I see
Maybe the most important question: In the past this year You had a program to exchange tokens for company equity. What are the results of it? Do you plan to make it once again? Do you have any buyback or burn plans?
William Ryan:
We are always listening to our community. The community is a priority. Our community suggested that we offer additional options for token holders to participate in our ecosystem, so we launched a token buyback program in exchange for equity in Kambria International.
The buyback was very successful, with over 100 million KAT exchanged for equity. These tokens were subsequently burned. Additionally, we burned another 1.2 billion KAT from unsold tokens from our pre-sale, which further reduced our supply from 5 billion to 3.7 billion. (and its not going to end there. We will have another significant token burn in the near future. hint: it will be monumental)
We will likely have more of such events in the future, so keep an eye on our public channels for future updates. We welcome you to join our Telegram community so you can stay “in the know.” Here's a link to our channel: https://t.me/kambriaofficial. Also there you can find a lot of cool articles about AI, robotics and innovations! Always check the channel for the latest trends in technology.
We are serious about our content. We spend a good part of our week creating new content for the community. We are establishing ourselves as thought leaders in the industry. It is priority #1. To bring real users to the platform, and true adoption.
Sherlock Club:
And the next I believe the most important!
Recently, you've been listed on Binance DEX. How real is listing for the main binance from dex?
William Ryan:
It's definitely possible. Our goal has always been to get listed on Binance.com. That is part of the reason we decided to migrate tokens over to Binance Chain. This is a first-step to developing a long-lasting and fruitful relationship with both Binance and the Binance community. We hope that our listing on Binance DEX will continue to develop positive feedback from the community.
To celebrate this move and increase adoption of the token, we actually have a promotion going on right now. Now through Oct 15th, we are offering our community a 10% increase on their tokens for swapping from ERC20 KAT over to KAT-7BB! We are encouraging our token holders to swap their KAT to Binance Chain and trade on the DEX. This will assist us in our goal of getting listed on Binance.com. You can read more about this here: https://blog.kambria.io/kambria-token-swap-bonus.
Sherlock Club:
Sounds great
William Ryan:
There's no maximum you can swap, just a minimum of 1000 KAT. I should note, this is not increasing our supply. We are paying the bonus directly out of our team allocations.
Thank you for all the great questions! Looking forward to hearing what the community wants to know as well 😀
For more information on how to swap your KAT, please visit this tutorial!
Sherlock Club:
Glad to see how the team is worry about the community! It's honest step to share team tokens with those who support you!
William Ryan:
Right, and it doesn't end there 😉 Thank you 🙏
Sherlock Club:
So guys! Are You ready for community questions?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Yeah bring it on!
Note: Here, the moderators selected a number of questions to answer, the following questions were asked and answered from the community by Kambria.
Community Question:
Hi Thuc! Nice to see you. What are you working on now, and how do hackathons play a role in your development?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Nice to see you as well. We have several projects that are underway. Our focus right now is more on building out virtual assistant for different business verticals. Something that can help you navigate and do your work better/easier, or improve the quality of services. These projects will have real-world potential immediately. We already have several corporations who are interested in incubating and investing into these projects, and adopting the technology once it's polished.
This will help Kambria on several fronts:
- Grow the codebase and the technology that we can offer to developers.
- Have real-world applications and hence revenue to sustain our growth.
- Attract more developers and corporations who want to look for projects.
And I want to answer to some of the questions on the Hackathon as well. The hackathons we ran were to seed these projects! Lots of really interesting teams and projects came out of the Vietnam AI Grand Challenge. So it's a fantastic way to bootstrap the projects that can be developed on Kambria.
Community Question:
What do you need to do to increase brand awareness to attract users?
William Ryan:
You know, as a start-up this is one of the most challenging hurdles to overcome. We are attacking this from multiple angles.
Firstly, we are leveraging our partnerships with corporations and top universities to host major events, hackathons, bounty challenges, and PR pieces to increase exposure. I feel we are in a unique position in that a) we are not competing with a lot of companies. Our platform is unique. There aren't many hardware and software development platforms that any researcher can take advantage of in such a way as Kambria. By utilizing our relationship with top universities, we have a very large and visible stage, and once researchers figure out that they no longer have to build every single piece of a new technology, and can share the work (like Linux), it's only a matter of time before our name becomes quite recognized as an industry leader.
Secondly, similar to Linux, it is the only platform I'm aware of where developers from across the world can come together and collaborate to build new technologies (and also earn a living).
Thirdly, our multi-faceted approach includes not only hardware and software, but training, education, high-level content, our Global Innovation Fund, and many other resources that only benefit the space as a whole.
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
If you look at what Lehigh University did with our technology, they built a robot that has voice activated controls and facial recognition in about a month https://blog.kambria.io/gif-lehigh-university-research-update-facial-recognition-integration/
We need to push on multiple fronts:
- On the general user/community front, we are launching hackathons, training workshops, events, to create a grassroot movement of AI and Robotics. This will help us get our general public brand awareness.
- On the developer community side, we are launching educational courses, so that they can get trained and improve their skills. We launch bounty programs to get some interesting projects going.
- On the corporate sides, we have a really strong network with many large corporates in Asia. We talk to them regularly to understand their needs and also offer what Kambria can solve for them.
- On the university side, our teams are in touch with many research labs to follow their research works, and provide financial and technical supports as well when needed.
These are all part of the initiatives we have been launching.
Community Question:
On your white paper you talk about a equilibrate between a fee for the miners and reasonable fee for usage by any company, How you calculate the best fee value to that cases?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Great question. This is more of an art than a science. It's all depending on how much we can negotiate on behalf of the developers. Right now we are exploring the model of a fix royalty/licensing fee. I'm sure as we go along, we'll make modifications to optimize it.
Community Question:
As a developer, which programming languages am I able to use to build dapps on your platform and may I have information about the reward system for developers?
William Ryan:
It is very important for us to grow our developer community. We would definitely like to invite you to join our growing community. Rewards on Kambria depend on the event that you are participating in; however, for the most part, you would probably be interested in our Bounty Platform. Bounty platforms work from the top-down, or the bottom-up.
Top-down allows corporations to come in and ask the developer community for assistance building the technology they are trying to build. Think of it as crowd-sharing development, in exchange for KAT. This will allow you, as a developer, to work on new innovations, and earn additional income for your hard work.
The bottom-up allows you as a developer to join Kambria with your ideas, and crowdfund the necessary capital to fund what you are trying to build. You can create a proposal, and go to the backer community and try to get your idea funded so that you can hire additional devs, utilize our manufacturers alliance, or any number of other tools that we offer. Additionally, you would be able to integrate any of the other technologies open-sourced on our platform so that you can focus on building the last 10% rather than everything from scratch. Saving you a ridiculous amount of time and money.
You can also participate in our hackathons, which will always have high-dollar value, and offer an array of additional benefits such as incubation, access to investors, partners, mentors, and even other developers.
For more information on Kambria, please read our Kambria Business Model Master Plan!
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Right now we actually open to projects of any languages. The idea is to grow out our codebase quickly with different applications. We however are developing something called KNDA, to help standardize how people specify how hardware products could be manufactured. This way people can share and build on top of each other’s work a lot more quickly.
For the reward system, developers can either win the bounty that was set out for the projects or receive a share of the revenue. We will have multiple-round tournament-style competition to choose the best submission that can win the bounty. And once the technology gets commercialized by corporations, developers will enjoy a share of the revenue coming from the licensing fee.
Community Question:
All tokens go down in price even with great partnerships, hype, marketing, and working products, etc, Kambria is good project but the same problem . So, what are the challenges you have, and how do you plan to make KAT strong again?
William Ryan:
This is true. I've personally been in blockchain since 2015, and as I'm sure many of you have seen, there are a lot of low quality projects in the space, as well as very innovative projects in the space, many of which have failed to take off. Again, to reiterate, I do strongly believe that we are in a very unique position. One of the problems with a lot of projects who have suffered over the last 20 months is that there is a lack of real, actual users for the platforms. Sure, there are token holders, but how many people are actually using the token for its intended purpose? I think its quite low. That is where we shine. We are bringing real people into blockchain, utilizing our token. and not the same people that were here before. That's what the space desperately needs. New users outside of the echo chamber. Indeed it has been challenging, but we are well on our way to achieving this goal. We only launched our token 8 months ago, and we've accomplished so much since that time. We're only just getting started.
Community Question:
Would it not be an option to make the value capturing and developer engagement in tokenomics based on stable coin rather than on volatile KAT to improve further development process?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Yeah that's definitely a possibility we keep in mind as well. One nice thing about having KAT not as a stable coin is that as the technology base and the applications on Kambria grow, this will help to facilitate the growth of KAT and will attract more developers in return. Think of it as a currency of a country right? The stronger the economy of a country is, the higher value its currency should be.
Community Question:
I read that the Kambria’s Open Innovation Platform was inspired by widely popular open source operating systems like Android and Linux. So how do you plan to secure such a platform? Could you tell us a bit about the security part of the Kambria’s open innovation platform?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Security is absolutely one of our top priorities. The funny thing is open-source operating systems often actually enjoy better security quality than others. The reason is they get a lot of eyes scrutinize their code. We hope the same will apply to the projects on Kambria. We ourselves will also bring in internal support and 3rd-party experts (paid through KAT of course :)) to help polish off the code/design on Kambria to improve the quality of the projects, including security aspect.
Sherlock Club:
Thank You for you answers! We’re at the end. If You have something to add, please share with us. Any news, or insights?
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
I just want to thank you guys and community to have us here. It's been a fantastic AMA. Lots of interesting and insightful questions from the community. We believe AI/Robotics and Blockchain are still at a very early phase. There are a lot of things we can do together to really advance the frontier technology, and more importantly, bring value and positive impact to society.
William Ryan:
As far as news, we are just now transitioning from our first major hackathon, where developers competed to win $40,000, so we aren't quite ready to share our next major announcements just yet! However, you should join our Telegram and Announcements channels so that you can stay informed about all things Kambria. We will have updates in the coming weeks/month concerning our token burn, which is something you probably don't want to miss! and as a reminder, we have our token swap bonus going on, where you can earn and additional 10% for all tokens swapped. We hope we have earned your vote of confidence, and we hope to see you again in soon! Make sure to give us a wave when you join.
Sherlock Club:
Amazing! Thank for Your time! You were quite busy at the moment! And it's great that you find a couple of hours for us!
Community! We will collect all the questions and send them to Kambria team. And they will answer as will be able! Also we will choose 5 best questions with team, and send you the airdrop! Wait for the announcement!
Thuc ¦ Kambria CEO:
Thanks everyone! See you next time.
William Ryan:
Thanks guys. We'll update you with the winners soon.
End AMA
After the AMA, the Crypto Sherlock group asked us to choose five winners to receive a reward for asking the best questions! So, here are our winners!
- Velitura - As a developer, which programming languages am I able to use to build dapps on your platform and may I have information about the reward system for developers?
Answer: It is very important for us to grow our developer community. We would definitely like to invite you to join our growing community. Rewards on Kambria depend on the event that you are participating in; however, for the most part, you would probably be interested in our Bounty Platform. Bounty platforms work from the top-down, or the bottom-up.Top-down allows corporations to come in and ask the developer community for assistance building the technology they are trying to build. Think of it as crowd-sharing development, in exchange for KAT. This will allow you, as a developer, to work on new innovations, and earn additional income for your hard work.The bottom-up allows you as a developer to join Kambria with your ideas, and crowdfund the necessary capital to fund what you are trying to build. You can create a proposal, and go to the backer community and try to get your idea funded so that you can hire additional devs, utilize our manufacturers alliance, or any number of other tools that we offer. Additionally, you would be able to integrate any of the other technologies open-sourced on our platform so that you can focus on building the last 10% rather than everything from scratch. Saving you a ridiculous amount of time and money.You can also participate in our hackathons, which will always have high-dollar value, and offer an array of additional benefits such as incubation, access to investors, partners, mentors, and even other developers. - Joxes - Has your location in Santa Clara helped you stay in touch with AI and the latest technologies and what other ubications could help? Thanks!
Answer: Our location in Santa Clara has proven significantly beneficial, as we are in the epicenter of technology innovation. It has allowed us to have close relationships with top schools such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Lehigh University. Additionally, we partnered with Silicon Valley Robotics, the largest cluster of robotics and AI technology innovation and investment in the world.
We will continue to leverage both our close proximity to the Silicon Valley tech hub and partnerships to build a strong developer and corporate network with the aim to lead the next generation in technical innovations in AI and robotics. - Platocratus - Do u plan to make the voting system more fair, more equitable? As far as I know, one part of your community would like it to be less oligarchic.
Answer: This is a fantastic point that you mention. We are always listening to the needs of our community. We are absolutely going to be taking this in and thinking of ways to create a more fair voting system, perhaps based on not only the number of tokens alone, but also in our reputation system, Karma. We would like to consider strong contributors to the platform to have a heavier vote, as they are perhaps more vested in the future of Kambria. - Pratim - How does organising Hackathons and K-prize Challenges help you as instead that amount of money can be used for research and development of Kambria itself?
Answer: We believe that we can build better together, and for that reason, rather than develop all of our own technologies in house, we are creating a platform for others to build their innovations. If we just do all of the R&D “-in-house,” then we are going to be no different than any of the other 1,000s of new companies who are developing these technologies. That is a part of the problem. When innovation is exclusively done in silos, innovation is stifled, slow, and expensive. By creating tools that allow people to work together, we are promoting an environment of collaboration, which has significant benefits for the space as a whole. That is where we want to be: the Linux of robotics and AI. #OpenSource and #Decentralized. - M4Y4L3K - I read that the Kambria’s Open Innovation Platform was inspired by widely popular open source operating systems like android and linux. So how do you plan to secure such a platform? Could you tell us a bit about the security part of the Kambria’s open innovation platform?
Answer: Security is absolutely one of our top priorities. The funny thing is open-source operating systems often actually enjoy better security quality than others. The reason is they get a lot of eyes scrutinize their code. We hope the same will apply to the projects on Kambria. We ourselves will also bring in internal support and 3rd-party experts (paid through KAT of course :)) to help polish off the code/design on Kambria to improve the quality of the projects, including security aspect.
Congratulations to the winners, and thank you for taking the time to read through this AMA! We'd like to thank Sherlock Club, ICO Analytics, and Crypto Lamer for supporting us by having us in the channel. We will have more upcoming events in the near future, where you will have another opportunity to contribute, ask questions, and earn rewards! Don’t forget, that our token swap bonus is open from now until October 15th. You can earn an additional 10% for swapping your KAT from ERC20 to KAT-7BB. For more details please visit our blog!
If you would like to learn more about Kambria, please visit our previous AMA recaps with Binance DEX and CryptoDiffer!
