The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
Joe Coldebella:
Hello. And welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Joe Coldebella, and we are at the SCTE Cable-Tech Expo in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Joining me, is Jim Starcev. Hey, it’s great to have you guys here. Really want to dig into the KC Digital Drive story. But before we do, I would love it if you could give our audience a little bit of background on yourselves. Just so we get some context. And then, we can dive in.
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. So my background has mostly been in actually, the FinTech space. I’ve been a long-time entrepreneur. Started my first company 22 years ago. Have had at this point, 4 different startups that I’ve been involved with. Four that I helped found to do. About a couple of years ago, I made a little bit of a pivot. And started wanting to really give back. So went to work for a nonprofit. So KC Digital Drive is a civic nonprofit in Kansas City, and I became the Solutions Lab program manager for them two years ago.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome.
Doug Hohulin:
And I’m Doug Hohulin. And I started my career 33 years ago, with Motorola. Working in cellular telephone systems. Transitioned to Nokia, when our division got bought. I was working at Motorola, by Nokia. And last year, I retired from Nokia. And now, working with immersive technology. I’ve been volunteering with KC Digital Drive for the last eight or nine years, working on various activities. I’m now also on the advisory board and a volunteer faculty member for the KU School of Nursing.
Joe Coldebella:
No, that’s fantastic. And it’s really awesome when folks like yourself do the pivot like you said, Jim. And give back a little bit, to your community. Because it’s one of those things where experience is invaluable. So really appreciate you guys doing that pivot.
I would love it if we start with… I guess, this journey for the city of Kansas City started about 10 years ago. In terms of, Google made Kansas City the first in the nation, as a fiber community.
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. The first Google Fiber community was Kansas City. It was… Back in 2010, they did a competition basically. Had over 200 cities applying, and making the case for why they should be the first Google fiber community. And Google chose Kansas City. So in 2011, they launched their first Google Fiber service.
Joe Coldebella:
Competitions. I see a theme forming here. And obviously, a year later, you guys started the KC Digital Drive. Could you give a snapshot in terms of what that organization is all about?
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. So when Google Fiber came in 2011, it became clear that this is an issue. It’s a great opportunity, but it also is going to present some challenges. How can we really make this an inclusive offer for the entire city? Not really leave anybody behind. Because everybody’s aware… And even today, we still haven’t solved it… There’s a digital divide. Really wanting to close that.
So in our case, it was really the two cities. If people know Kansas City, we’re bordered. We have a state, two different states around. So the city of Kansas City, Missouri, and the city of Kansas City, Kansas came together and helped form KC Digital Drive. So we were formed as a civic nonprofit. Representatives of both cities still remain on our board today, to do that. Even though all of our funding is now outside of that. Most of our funding is a grant and philanthropic. Some, are project-based and driven by that.
So for the last decade, we’ve really worked on not only help close the digital divide. But then really looking at a bigger picture of, how can we really help digital transformation occur in Kansas City? And that’s been our goal. And as I said, I came on really more the whole innovation and entrepreneurship part of what we’re doing.
Joe Coldebella:
And it’s an interesting question or I guess viewpoint in terms of, you’re supposed to help the city of Kansas City. But I also see it as a… You guys are a lighthouse if I can use a horrible metaphor. In terms of a city in the middle of the country. But as a beacon for other communities that may not have the resources Kansas City does, to create similar programs.
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. That’s a really good point. And we’re involved in a couple of national networks. I’m part of the metro lab, which is a university civic organization. US Ignite, which is the smart city community. And our executive director, the person that founded it, Aaron Deacon has really built a national reputation. So we serve on a lot of work groups in those, on different… As I said to you, we talked about the theme of challenges. I serve on a challenges and committee work group as part of US Ignite, nationwide. So we’re helping a lot of other cities to do that.
We’ve helped multiple cities kick off programs similar to ours. We formed a new partnership a year ago, with seven different cities. Including Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, Illinois, and Phoenix, which are all similar organizations to us. That we can all help build, and work a bit. Yeah. I think your description of being that lighthouse, and really being able to not only work with… And we support a lot of different organizations in Kansas City, as well as across the country.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. Because I know that it’s one of those things as well is that the Midwest is a very rural area as well. And so sometimes, the technology lag isn’t always there. And so it’s one of those things where it’s a great… I would assume it’s a great resource as well.
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. It serves both. I mean Kansas City itself, the metropolitan population’s about two and a half million. So I mean we are a fairly mid-size city, I would say.
Joe Coldebella:
Football city.
Jim Starcev:
A football city. We definitely… We have a football team. The Chiefs have helped really…
Joe Coldebella:
Be careful, we’re in Philadelphia.
Jim Starcev:
We’re in Philadelphia. Yeah. And we took Andy Reid from The Eagles, so always had that respect. But you’re right. But then really, surrounded by us is just thousands and thousands of square miles of really rural area. So we get to serve… The project we’re going to talk about later today crosses over both. We’ve got a Kansas City element. And then, we’re serving one of the smaller communities in Kansas as well.
Joe Coldebella:
And it’s one of those things. As I was doing the research for the podcast, just diving through your website, which is phenomenal, by the way. Is it kcdigitaldrive.org, correct?
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. That’s correct.
Joe Coldebella:
I’ll put that in the show notes as well.
Jim Starcev:
Thank you.
Joe Coldebella:
But I thought there were three pillars that I thought were a great area of concentration. And Doug, I was just going to ask you in terms of… The three are closing the digital divide. Building Kansas City’s digital reputation. And then, the third one being driving digital innovation. But my question to you Doug is, how important is it for a city like Kansas City to be a city of innovation? A city of adoption?
Doug Hohulin:
Well, it’s incredibly important. I mean, innovators solve problems. And so, we want to create innovators in Kansas City. One of the challenges in the Midwest is, people think of innovation on the East Coast or the West Coast. And so, we want to be Silicon Prairie. Where we have innovators coming in, doing amazing things. And so, Kansas City Digital Drive is a hub for this innovation.
I’ve been involved with them for over eight years. And looking at, how do we create innovators that encourage innovation? One of them being, connected to the unconnected. Digital equity is another key area. We work closely with the universities. Both Jim and I are volunteer faculty members of the KU School of Nursing. We’re also on the University of Central Missouri advisory board. There’s a Gigabit Lab. Working on, how you help students become great innovators? And hopefully, that innovation stays in Kansas City to grow and grow. And so, Kansas City is a growing community of innovators doing amazing things. And so, that’s what KC Digital drive’s all about.
Joe Coldebella:
No, I love all those points. And I especially love the, you called it the Digital Prairie?
Doug Hohulin:
Yeah.
Silicon Prairie.
Joe Coldebella:
Silicon Prairie. Excuse me. But no, you know what? I think that’s one of the great opportunities we have in front of us with the expansion of broadband and high-speed internet. Because I think you’re exactly right. It’s like, we now don’t have to rely on the coasts for innovation. A great idea can come from anywhere. And it’s also one of those things where instead of drawing away talent, keeping it in the area is supercritical.
Doug Hohulin:
Yeah. One comment I would say is in Kansas, we’re… Kansas is people at the south wind. So about 40% of our energy comes from sustainable wind energy. Because it blows so much. And so, people are coming to Kansas City because of the lower-cost energy systems. Panasonic just announced a new EV plant. Again, because of the low cost of energy.
So while we’re not having some of the things on the East and the West Coast, we have key assets. Low-cost energy, sustainable energy. That I think, we’re going to be doing amazing things with innovation because of that.
Jim Starcev:
A lower cost of living, and a championship football team. Yeah.
Doug Hohulin:
Yes. Exactly.
Joe Coldebella:
And here I thought it was the barbecue.
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. Well, you know.
Doug Hohulin:
That too.
Joe Coldebella:
No, those are awesome points. And I think that it also highlights, in terms of getting adoption throughout the country as well. Because I did an interview a few months ago, with a woman who focused on the heartland of America. And it’s like, hey. Listen, we got to make sure that we bring everyone along. We’ve got to make sure that everyone is connected. Because when we’re pulling everyone together, we just grow as a nation.
Jim Starcev:
Right. Yes. Absolutely.
And as I said… And you get into the heartland… I mean as I said, Kansas City’s a great city. But also Nashville, and Columbus, Ohio. And Denver, if you want to lump them into the Midwest. And everything else. So there’s a lot of innovation coming out of a lot of different areas in the Midwest.
Joe Coldebella:
Jim, that’s a perfect segue to the driving digital innovation aspect of your organization. If you could unpack that for us, that would be awesome.
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. So for us, it’s interesting. I mean, we are very open-minded. So looking at all sorts of different ways that come into effect. As we said, we decided earlier this year that we wanted to do an augmented reality/ virtual reality developers challenge. But we also lead data science for Good Group. We lead code for America Brigade. The code for KC is hackers. I’ve got a meetup group on the AR/VR side. Got a meetup group for the Web3 group. We lead a meetup group on digital media, that meets together. So we try to pull different areas in, and look at that.
We’ve been toe-tipping a little bit into blockchain and crypto, looking at those as technologies that can really help transform and do things. So it’s… We’re very flexible in looking at, what we think are areas that really have the potential for growth.
And then you get into Kansas City too, where we’re looking a lot into the biologics as an area. We do a lot in animal health science. Do that. We’ve led a health innovation group for over a decade, that brings in most of the hospitals and universities. So we tend to be… Which confuses a lot of people. Because you see most organizations have a really strong theme. And our theme is much broader, but it allows us to move in and out of different spaces. And really help see what we can do to help make as we said, Kansas City a digital leader.
Joe Coldebella:
No, that’s great. I mean, just in terms of… It’s just… There’s so much there for you to draw from. And it must be gratifying. Because I think that you’re… What you’re doing is, you’re building a future for Kansas City through connectivity.
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. Absolutely. A 100%. And as we said, and connectivity for us as we said, it’s building it across all the channels too. As we said, we involve… We do symposiums with our university and our city partners. Trying to bring in the private sector. The AR/VR challenge was sponsored by T-Mobile, to kick that off. So we give a place where corporate, universities, private citizens, and government can all really come together.
Doug Hohulin:
Well, I wanted to emphasize that. Because of the AR/VR challenge, I got to meet Dr. Herlihy from the KU School of Nursing simulation lab, because of that challenge. So KC Digital Drive brings different groups together, to do amazing things. I didn’t know anything about medical simulation, until a year and a half ago. And it’s been an incredible experience learning about that. Learning about these physical mannequins that cost up to $200,000, and only last five years. In fact, I’ve been in medical simulation nursing rooms. It’s scary because you have all these physical mannequins there. Looks like the mannequins of a horror show. But that’s what these students are trained on.
And so, what we’re trying to do is… But it’s not lifelike. It’s very scary and Candy Valley. And what we’re trying to do is bring realistic simulation. And instead of having maybe 10 use cases of healthcare with a very expensive mannequin, we can do it virtually very easily. And have the elderly, the young, different skin colors, different ethnic groups, and different disease states. All this can be done in virtual reality. So that the nurses are ready for whatever comes their way. And that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.
Jim Starcev:
Did you want me to backfill a little bit on that? Dr. Kesa Hurlihy is the third member of our team. She wasn’t able to make the trip to Philadelphia. But part of… And she is the clinical director for the simulation lab at the University of Kansas School of Nursing.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay. And just phenomenal information, in terms of the simulation lab. So this is a competition you began earlier this year? Or…
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. So the backstory as we said, we decided to do an augmented reality/virtual reality developers challenge. And for us, that was going in and starting with workshops that we had to define. Here are some ideas for a weekend hackathon. To bring teams together, to start building. And come up with projects. And we ended up with about five or six different teams that came out of it. As Doug said, Dr. Hurlihy came too. As actually, to one of our contracts through our metro lab. Another person at the University of Kansas said, hey. This would be a great person to get in this. And started off, which is the interesting evolution of where a project would go. She really came in saying, hey. We’ve got all these mannequins. They were really expensive. But we’d like to make them more lifelike. She’s very much into teaching soft skills in nursing.
And it’s one of those things. It’s hard. So it’s like, could you put a face on a mannequin? So that’s where we started. Augmented glasses, and do that. So that’s where that was going through the challenge. But then she started getting more and more involved. And looking at well, what are the different possibilities? And we really went from just animating a mannequin, to whether could we do full immersive education as part of the sim lab. Including clinical. So instead of having nurses having to train on actually either real patients, or even in the lab on mannequins, could you put them in a headset and have them learn those same skills in that? And we were then, fortunate. We got actually a grant from Meta. So Meta had a program going out. Again T-Mobile looked it up with it. And Meta provided us with 50 Oculus Quest headsets as part of this project, to be able to roll this out.
And they help provide some of the funding with… Again, with another startup company out of Iowa called VictoryXR, to help build a digital twin. We had teamed up as part of our challenge, with a company called Bundle of Rays out of Australia, which was providing a lot of nursing content and everything else. So we started just bringing this together. How could we do this? To the point that really rapid development. We actually have two pilot classes being taught this semester at KU. With students from… Mostly, the undergrad students are in Salina. Which is a rural… It’s a city of about 40,000. About three hours west of Kansas City. So really, between Kansas City and Denver. And the very rural part of Kansas. We’re teaching these students in headsets from instructors in Kansas City, how to do that. So it’s been a really fascinating project. And really, just a fascinating of how we morphed from… We’re starting with animating a mannequin on this hackathon, we are offering full immersive classes.
Joe Coldebella:
Phenomenal story. And also, I think that it just hammers home the value of KC Digital Drive. Which is, you’re bringing all these disparate groups together. And you’re just firing on all different cylinders. And it’s awesome to hear.
Jim Starcev:
Thank you.
Doug Hohulin:
Yeah. One comment I would say is, one thing we’re learning through this journey and one of the reasons we’re here at the KC Digital Drive… One of the reasons we’re here at this expo is around the 10G challenge. Because one thing we’re learning through this journey is that the communication, technology, and connectivity technology like in Salina, Kansas, these students may only have 50 megabits per second data speeds. They have extremely high latency… Over 200-millisecond latency. So we need this 10G technology that’s being rolled out. In Salina, Kansas, they do have Cox cable. And we’re going to be reaching out to them, and getting gigabit service for these nursing students. So they can have a more immersive experience, so they can be ready for practice-ready nursing.
Joe Coldebella:
Doug, that’s a great segue to the 10G challenge. It’s one of those things where… You guys did a pre-preemptive, or you guys started the ball rolling. And then, there was this national initiative. Could you frame the 10G challenge for us? That the folks at CableLabs are putting together.
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. It was really an awesome opportunity. We love what they were doing. So they came out and put out this challenge. Really, we want to look at innovative solutions that really need expanded connectivity. A 10G type broadband. And they had… The challenge was great. They had four different categories. There was learn, live, work…
Doug Hohulin:
Play.
Jim Starcev:
And play.
I forget-
Joe Coldebella:
Very essential, right Doug?
Doug Hohulin:
Yeah.
Jim Starcev:
I can’t forget the play. And then a grand prize. And the grand prize was a $100 000 prize, which is really significant. I mean as I said, being in the entrepreneur startup world, it’s hard to get that type of funding. To really take an idea to fruition. So a $100 000 prize. And then, a $50,000 prize for each of the four category winners was really a significant commitment on their part, to really help lead innovation and do that.
So we saw that challenge come out. We were thrilled. We thought it was a great opportunity. As we said, we may refer to… We actually had a couple different of projects that came out of our developer’s challenge, we ended up participating in this and winning. So the KU School of Nursing Mediversity was the winner in the learned category. And then, the other team that we worked with was the Meta view Rural Breast Cancer project. Which ended up being the grand prize winner. So we love to… Obviously, being on the winning side makes it a lot easier for us to like the challenge. But we loved the challenge when it came out. I mean even if we weren’t the winners, we were thrilled to see them do this. And the potential that it really has, to help lead innovation.
Doug Hohulin:
And it gave us a vision of what could be possible. What’s in the near future? In fact, Cable Labs had some great videos of what the near future would be. And they learn category, they had an 11-year-old girl walking around saying, this is the future of education. The near future of education. And the great… And that was published exactly four years ago.
And what we’re showing is that we’re going to be ready with this technology that they were demonstrating in this hypothetical world of the near future. We’re bringing the future today, using 10G technology of low latency, high bandwidth, security, and reliability.
Jim Starcev:
And I was going to say, and the other thing I thought they did really well with the challenge was, they brought together a lot of corporate partners. They had different judges. Mayo Clinic was judging the live category. Zoom was judging the learning category. You had Intel and Corning. And so, really bringing in some really powerful, large companies to help be part of this process.
And so, it’s a great opportunity for us to have Zoomed to see what we’re doing. As we said, even if we didn’t win, they still got to judge and look at this. And having Mayo go through all the submissions on the live category and see that, I think was a great part of this challenge.
Joe Coldebella:
And I think similar to your organization, it’s an opportunity to inspire. Because at the end of the day, it’s like… Someone could see a small town in Kansas City. I’m sorry, in Kansas or elsewhere. It’s like, wow. I was able to… Using this stuff available to me, was able to win a little bit. Something to get my startup up and running. Which is… Seed money is the hardest thing. That first series.
Jim Starcev:
100%. It’s so difficult to do that. And as we said, one of the winners of the other category we got to spend some time with yesterday, is a really young kid. Just out of college. Has been trying to start a business on his own. Funding it himself. Not really have any access to it.
So winning the $50,000 is just a huge boost to really help take what’s some really interesting technology that he’s been trying to build. Yeah. Seed money, it’s hard to find in the Midwest. It’s hard to find anywhere in the country. Missouri’s a show-me state. Lots of people in Missouri want to show success before they put that money into the company. So sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge, to find that seed capital. So challenges like this are great to help drive innovation.
Joe Coldebella:
Just out of curiosity now, have you guys used the VR sets themselves? Is it one of those things where, as you guys were judging your contest and moving forward?
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. So Interestingly enough, Doug is really the technical advisor. I wasn’t much. When we started this AR/VR challenge, it was funny. I was probably with a lot of the country. We did this challenge 18 months ago and I thought well, isn’t VR just for gaming? And why… And I had really not… So I’m not much of a gamer myself.
I had really not spent any time. So obviously through these last 18 months, I’ve become far more immersed. I’ve really seen the opportunities for what both AR and VR can do. And really, the enterprise level of workforce development. And training and education, to really innovative solutions. And that-
Joe Coldebella:
I think that’s the magic right there, right?
Jim Starcev:
Yeah.
Doug Hohulin:
And I’m also in the Virtual World Society organization. And actually, another person on our team is Dr. Angelina Dayton. She’s out of Oklahoma, at Cherokee Nation. And she’s put 50,000 students into virtual reality. And she’s an anthropologist. And she just has a love for education, and a love for helping students just become lifelong learners. And just enjoy this.
So two years ago is when I met her actually, in virtual reality. At a hackathon for high school students that was actually put on, Jim and I are part of as well. Kc rocks is another organization.
Jim Starcev:
I was going to say, VROKC. Which is the Virtual Reality Of Kansas City. So VROKC. But they do weekend hacks… So I’m actually helping them right now, organize their next one. Which will be in December. And putting on that. But again, that’s all tied to middle school and high school teams that come for a weekend hackathon.
Doug Hohulin:
But Dr. Angelina Dayton, she’s out of Oklahoma. And actually, for a year, we just met in virtual reality. And then, on Zoom. In fact, I joked. I said you’re my virtual friend. I hope you’re real. But we had just a meeting of the minds. And she has really helped educate me on what it means to have these immersive learning experiences, to just have this joy of learning and innovating.
And that’s what virtual reality can be. Yeah, there’s the gaming aspect of virtual reality. But I like the immersive learning aspect of virtual reality. In fact, yesterday we had the headsets here. And we have this anatomy 3D organon. Where you have a 3D skeleton or a 3D muscle structure. And people can take out the different muscles, and learn about them. And look at the disease states.
In fact, one of the people on… She spent 20 minutes playing around with this app. And so, she was learning anatomy. But she was just having a great time. Just this joy and this smile on people’s faces. So, so often when these students are in class, they’re bored. They’re tired of learning. They’re not learning. And with this immersive technology, we take something that’s a pain to learn, to a joy to learn. And that’s what this technology’s all about.
Joe Coldebella:
Well, no. It’s funny because I totally agree. It’s one of those things where you’re giving the medicine with a little honey. And they’re learning, and they don’t know their learning. Because it’s… In terms of the adoption of the VR world, it’s going to be interesting. Because I think that it is going to be the young folks who have been living with it their whole lives, who can adapt to it. Who will ultimately be the ones who really take it to the next level?
Because I think one of the biggest problems that VR is going to have is adoption. What I could say to the listeners is, try it. Because once you put on the headset, the world literally changes in front of you. So I think that’s… But it’s going to be an interesting next few years.
Doug Hohulin:
Yeah. Go ahead.
Joe Coldebella:
I was going to say, we think we’re going to have an evolution of the hardware in the next few years too. So right now, we are still… The headsets are a little bit clunky. They’re a little bit heavy. They get hot. There are some challenges with them. But we think that we’re going to see improvement dramatically. And we want to be at the forefront of that.
If we’re on now, and doing that… And we’re not anti-gaming, as we said too. We love the games in VR. Even the nurses. As we said, we have 37 nurses that we’ve put in. Most of them would never put a headset on. So we’re encouraging them to go play Beat Saber and test… Just to get comfortable with the technology. So then, they don’t have to think about it when they’re then learning.
Doug Hohulin:
In fact, we have a digital twin on our campus. Both the outside campus and then in the actual simulation rooms. But what we did is, we brought the students there. And they can just see this brand-new world of experiences. And in fact, we now learned how to fly around on campus. So we have… It’s about a mile. It’s the size of the campus. The medical center, and the hospital system. As well as the school of nursing as well.
And you can actually go around, and fly around that campus. And you can fly with birds. And it’s just an incredible experience. Just like… If you remember in the movie Aladdin, they had a magic carpet. Well, we can do the same on a hospital bed.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay. That’s awesome. So as we begin to wind down this awesome conversation, really do appreciate your time. It’s been great just learning about KC Digital Drive and all the things that you guys are doing. About the 10G challenge. But one thing that we like to ask all our guests is, whether we are a Back To The Future question.
So if you could hop into DeLorean, go back to the start of the KC Digital Drive. And whisper something in somebody’s ear, that will maybe make the journey for the organization a little bit easier, what would you tell them?
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. It’s a great question. Especially when Google Fiber came in, I think everybody thought that’s just the magic bullet. Suddenly everybody’s going to be connected, and know what to do. And I think it was harder to see that longer-term vision. Not only were there still some people being left out of being connected. But just because you’re suddenly connected, doesn’t mean that you really have the skills that you need to really survive in the digital world. Which is what we’re becoming.
So really, it was way more than just being able to connect with people. You really had to start training them and giving them opportunities. And creating innovations for them then to be able to become a part of, and to participate in and do that. So it was really… Suddenly it’s like, yes. We need a much bigger view of what we have than just let’s get everybody connected. Getting everybody connected is critical. I don’t want to underscore that. It’s extremely important. But it’s like, well then what happens? Where do you go with that?
Joe Coldebella:
It was literally, only the first step. When everyone thinks, oh. We’re here. Ta-da. But in fact, it was just the start of everything.
Jim Starcev:
It was just the start of everything.
Doug Hohulin:
And I would say, there’s… If I was talking to my 10-year-old person, I would say there’s going to be some incredible technology in the next 10 years. Focus on the use cases that can make the world work better. And there’s going to be incredible… There are going to be a lot of challenges in our world. But there’s a great opportunity with using technology to make the world work better. And that’s what 10 years ago me, today me, I want to be focusing on. Is making the world work better. Working with amazing students, who want to make the world work better. So that’s why I’m excited about working with KC Digital Drive, and the KU School of Nursing.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. And then just would like to ask, the converse, the crystal ball question. So if you could look three to five years into the future… And I think we’ve covered a lot of it. But where do you guys see either KC Digital Drive going? VR? Augmented reality? I’ll leave it as an open-ended question.
Jim Starcev:
I think if you look at really, the whole world of digital computing, et cetera, it tends to make bounds. Not baby steps. Things change really fast, and really quickly. I mean even when we talked about going from 50 megabytes to a gig. I mean, that’s huge… It’s a 20-fold change, from 4G to 5G. And you see these big jumps. We see that particularly in AR/VR, you’re just going to have some monumental jumps. It’s not like well, this hardware’s just a little bit better to use. We see that jumping. I mean things like, as we said, autonomous vehicles. I think will suddenly go from they’re barely here, to… It’s like, oh. We didn’t have that two years ago? Nobody notices. And I think that that will become an integrated part. And we had someone on the keynote speaking yesterday talking about basically, virtual reality contact lenses.
Joe Coldebella:
Oh really?
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. He was mentioning that, that you could have a digital screen on your contact lens. That’s hard to phantom right now. But I think in a few years, it may become a standard place. Which is why we love being where we’re at. Because we love to be at that forefront. If we catch on and really start developing the content, and getting people comfortable when the hardware makes a jump when the connectivity… When we suddenly have 10G available instead of 1G available, all the problems that we struggle with today, suddenly go away.
Now, sure there’ll be new problems to face and everything else. But I do see that there’s going to be a rapid evolution in this area. Particularly, the AR/VR. And hopefully, as I said, KC Digital Drive will still be there to connect and bring everybody together. And now, be chasing what the new technology is.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. Terabyte.
Jim Starcev:
Terabyte.
Doug Hohulin:
And I would say, there are 80,000 nursing students who wanted to be nursing students, but weren’t able to get in because of limited access to nursing schools. And so with this technology, we can add more and more nursing students to our programs. And so, that’s what I’m really excited about. That we have more access to nursing education. So more of those 80,000 students who wanted to be nurses, can be nursing students.
And then also that when these students get through their school of nursing programs, they’re practically ready. That they’ll be ready for the nursing environment. That they’ve experienced a whole bunch of use cases virtually. So that when they experience them in the real world… The difference between a brand new nurse and a nurse who’s 10 years old is one that has seen it all. And so, they’re not panicking when things are happening. Because it’s like, I’ve seen it. You go X, Y, and Z. And then, this is how you solve the problem. And so the more you practice simulating the technology virtually, you’ll be ready to do it in the physical world. And that’s what I’m excited about.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s awesome. So Jim, where can people find out more about KC Digital Drive?
Jim Starcev:
Yeah. So obviously, the best place is our website. Kcdigitaldrive.org. And we have all sorts of… Including the projects that we talked about. The two challenges. We both have project pages for there, that you can find more about. And we have a lot of different stats, as Doug was talking about all of the students that weren’t getting in. And just the massive nursing shortage that’s coming. The rural breast cancer, the risk of regional hospitals closing. And people really getting better treatment, and stuff too. So a lot of information is available. But Joe, appreciate your time today. So it’s been great chatting with you.
Joe Coldebella:
Hey, that’s my line. No. Jim, Doug it’s been an absolutely awesome time chatting with you guys.
Thank you so very much.
Jim Starcev:
Thank you.
Doug Hohulin:
Thank you.
Joe Coldebella:
All right. Well, that’s going to wrap up this episode of The Broadband Bunch. Until next time, we’ll see you later.
