Luminar Technologies, which is an autonomous vehicle technology company that I have written about before, just hosted its first ever "Studio Day" in New York City this week. And at the event they announced two new technologies.

The first is called Iris, which is a small lidar device that is intended to be integrated into regular consumer production vehicles -- on the roof just above the windshield. And supposedly the company is on track to have these into full production and available to their OEM partners by the end of next year (2022).

The second technology is something that they are calling Blade, which is a lidar system that can offer a 360 degree field of vision and is intended for use in robo-taxis, trucks, and other consumer vehicles. It's called Blade because it's kind of like a blade that wraps around the tops of these vehicles.

We've been talking about autonomous vehicles for what seems like a long time. And it is now clear that this is not an easy problem to solve. But from what I have read, lidar seems like the promising technology and something that will become necessary for full autonomy. So I am now long $LAZR. Whether this is the right move is still to be determined.

The full Studio Day video is embedded at the top of this post. If you're reading via email subscription and can't see it, click here.

I liked the bit (just after the 9 minute mark) about how headlights were first introduced and how it took some time before they were fully absorbed and integrated into the design of cars. Today they are now a signature design element for most car brands. It's a clever parallel for what Luminar is trying to do with Iris and Blade.

A good friend of mine, who is also in the industry, once described real estate development as a three-legged stool. In order to develop, you really need three things: expertise, capital, and a site (i.e. land). This probably seems fairly obvious. I mean, you need to know what you're doing, you need the money to do it, and then you actually need a place to build. But as simple and as obvious as this may seem, there are barriers to entry. Real estate is a capital intensive industry. And despite what the general public seems to believe about the pockets of developers, most are raising outside capital.

The thing about this three-legged stool is that you don't necessarily need to have all of the legs at once, and in many cases you won't. If you have two of them in place, it's usually feasible to figure out and get the last one. For example, if you know what you're doing (expertise) and you have a site (owned or "under control"), then presumably you have a development pro forma that makes some economic sense. And with those things, you generally should be able to find the capital that you need to execute on your project.

I've also met people who have managed to build this three-legged stool starting with only one leg. They didn't have much development experience or capital connections, but they learned enough to figure out how to value development land. They then went out and started knocking on doors, eventually putting together a development assembly. They then took this assembly to developers (people with expertise) and the stool eventually got built. Starting with only one leg just means you're going to have to work harder to fill in the others.

A one or two-legged stool won't stay upright on its own. But hustle will hold it up temporarily while you figure out a creative way to attach the missing leg(s).

Photo by John Boatile on Unsplash

Sidewalk Labs is currently building out a platform called Replica that will support them in their development plans here in Toronto. Replica is: 

“a user-friendly modeling tool that uses anonymized mobile location data to give planning agencies a comprehensive portrait of how, when, and why people travel in urban areas.”

Here is a preview of the Replica dashboard showing a section of Main Street in Kansas City. I hope the animated GIF shows up for you.

The platform uses a combination of mobile location data (~5% of the population) and on-the-ground checks, typical stuff like manual traffic counts and transit boardings.

The goal is to understand in real-time who is using a street, as well as how (driving? cycling?) and why (going to work?).

Their introductory blog post obviously stresses the importance of personal privacy, but I am curious how they determine where people are going.

I suppose if they pair journeys with destinations (and the durations at those destinations) they can make reasonable assumptions around the why.

I think the benefits to all of this are clear. But does any or all of this worry you from a privacy standpoint?