Blind Navigation and Robotics Breakthroughs

Welcome to another exciting Auki community update. We've had a productive week filled with significant milestones and strategic developments. Here’s a recap:

Hackathon Success: Navigation for the Blind Without an App

Our team recently returned from a successful week-long hackathon in London at Zappar's office. The highlight of this event was developing navigation for the blind that requires no app. This innovation not only enhances accessibility but is also strategically important due to upcoming legislation in the UK and Europe. As Nils noted: "Through spatial computing, we can make the world accessible to AI, and then AI makes the world accessible to people."

This breakthrough significantly lowers the barrier for widespread adoption, since after all no one wants to download another app on their phone. Now they won't have to.

Robotics Milestone: Integrating Competitor’s Robots

Phil and his team achieved an impressive milestone this week by integrating a competitor’s robot, previously thought impossible, onto the Auki network. A competitor initially struggled for days, even flying in technicians from China, just to demonstrate basic robot navigation. In contrast, our team accomplished the integration efficiently, significantly surpassing previous limitations.

"It took them days... We've got them beat by a lot now. It is incredibly exciting."

Demand for Auki-Made Robots Growing

We received our first major Letter of Intent (LOI) for a large number of Auki-manufactured retail use case robots, potentially scaling to hundreds or even thousands for a single customer. This demand illustrates rapid progress toward becoming a key robot distributor.

Strategic and Community Developments

• Conferences Confirmed: Key conferences for the year have been confirmed, promising further exposure and networking opportunities.
• New Investor: We brought on a new investor, enhancing our strategic and financial resources.
• Proof of Compute: Progress was made on methods to verify computational tasks performed by community nodes, essential for the integrity of the network.
• Upcoming Hackathons: Another hackathon is scheduled for early February in Hong Kong, further integrating Zappar’s powerful immersive tool, Mattercraft, into our offerings.

Collaborations and Partnerships

• peaq collaboration: Discussions are ongoing with peaq, aiming to establish practical collaborations beneficial to both ecosystems.
• Accelerator program: We're finalizing preparations for our accelerator program, partnered with Outlier Ventures, featuring five hand-picked projects expected to rapidly scale.
• NATIX partnership: A potential collaboration with NATIX, focused on real-world AI accessibility, is gaining momentum, underscoring our shared vision.

Ambassador Program and Community Engagement

Our Ambassador Program continues to grow, encouraging community involvement. Additionally, our COO Santeri, newly arrived in Hong Kong, will join a strategic mountain hike per Auki tradition.

Robot Development: Upgrades and Innovations

We acquired a robot arm for our robot dog, opening new possibilities and use cases, including potential pet robots and interactive AI companions.

"One of the things I want to prove we can do… is to make the robot point at something in the real world without using computer vision."

Final Thoughts

This week marked crucial progress toward making the physical world more accessible to AI and thereby enhancing human experiences. Nils summed it up perfectly: "Don't bet against Auki. It's just not smart."

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Watch the whole update on X.

About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: away for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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