The Exchange for Entrepreneurs™ Podcast

Anthony Brown on Computing the New Digital Era | #HashtagFinance

September 10, 2020 CSE - Canadian Securities Exchange Episode 148
The Exchange for Entrepreneurs™ Podcast
Anthony Brown on Computing the New Digital Era | #HashtagFinance
Show Notes Transcript

CSE's Anil Mall chats with Anthony Brown, CEO of AMPD Ventures Inc. (CSE:AMPD), about his company's ambitions in providing high-performance cloud and computing solutions for low-latency applications, including video games and eSports, digital animation and visual effects, and big data collection, analysis and visualization.

Here's an overview of what Anil and Anthony cover in this edition of the #HashtagFinance podcast:

0:35 - Catching-up with AMPD CEO Anthony Brown.
3:10 - What does it mean to be a "Next Generation Digital Infrastructure" company?
4:45 - High Performance Computing vs Commodity Computing.
6:00 - The potential of the global eSports, virtual reality, and digital effects sectors.
8:55 - Recent announcements re: AccelByte and Versatile Media.
13:06 - The financial impact on the film and television industry.
16:15 - Being the company that provides the picks and shovels for the gold rush of virtual production.
20:15 - The Supercluster Project w/ an airline manufacturing plant.
24:20 - How Anthony’s passion comes from his 30 years of experience in the industry.
27:15 - What Stephen Hynes brings to the AMPD team.
30:15 - The Waterfall Building and how it illustrates urban efficiency.
33:35 - Outlook for the remainder of the year.
35:35 - The coming Virtual Reality metaverse aka Ready Player One.

Related links
https://thecse.com/en/listings/technology/ampd-ventures-inc
https://ampd.tech

A legal disclaimer for AMPD Ventures Inc. can be found here: https://ampd.tech/legal/general-disclaimer/

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Speaker 1:

Hey, it's James here welcoming you to this presentation of the hashtag finance podcast. This is just a reminder that if you like video, all of our CEO and expert interviews are featured on the hashtag finance playlist on CCTV, including the show that you were about to listen to remember that a CSC space TV on YouTube. And finally, this is just a friendly reminder that the views information or opinions expressed during the podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of the Canadian securities exchange and its employees. So happy listening, and now enjoy the show. This is hashtag find it presented to you by the Canadian securities exchange the exchange for entrepreneurs with your host Neil mall.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for tuning into another edition of past tech finance brought to you by the Canadian securities exchange. I'm a Neil model. And today I am talking to Anthony Brown. Anthony is the CEO of ad technologies, which is listed on the CSC. We had a chance to talk to Anthony about a year ago when the company had just listed with us. So welcome back to hashtag finance Anthony. Oh, thanks very much for having me. Of course. How are you? How are things? Oh, I'm doing great. I see you here in sunny, Vancouver, humble Island at the waterfall building. Yeah, well of course this is a virtual background, but that is the waterfall building where DC one is hosted. That's where, uh, amps first data center. First green data center is hosted here in Vancouver. That, that waterfall feature you see behind me, incidentally, um, that is, um, a, uh, that's water that's generated by the air conditioning systems inside the data center and in the summertime on a nice sunny day like today, uh, we pull the, uh, ambient air from outside from beside that waterfall. So even in the summertime, the air we pull into the data centers. Cool. So it's, it's just part of how we build green data centers. You you've built a whole green ecosystem around your data center. Oh yeah. Well, we, we capture the heat. Like this is something that happened fairly shortly after we went public. I'm not sure if we'd been able to discuss it back on our previous call. Um, but the, the data center, uh, is, is green. It captures the heat generated by all the servers, the heat, that whole surrounding building. Uh, so it's full of shops, condos, restaurants, uh, and in the winter time, that's all heated by the servers in the, in the data center. And in the summertime, we generate clean drinking water and use that as part of the waterfall feature behind me, uh, and, and pull in ambient air from the it for cooler air. So, uh, we're, we're looking at all the different ways that we can make it possible to bring our high performance computing to the edge, to the urban center and do so Greenland. So you guys say you're building a next generation infrastructure company. That's the kind of the next, well next generation, next generation digital infrastructure company, digital infrastructure. Thanks for that connection. Why don't we begin off Anthony? There might be some of our viewers who didn't catch you the first time you were on here might not necessarily know about your company. Why don't we begin by you giving us a brief intro into technologies and what you guys are doing? Sure. Well, actually, you know, what we were just discussing about is really what it's all about. It boils down to our tagline, high performance computing at the edge. Now, what that means is that there's been an evolution of digital infrastructure over the years. We start off with telephones back in the day is kind of the first digital infrastructure. We then moved to television and cable. We've got co-ax cables, and eventually the internet comes out and we have ISP guys like AOL and Comcast. And the current generation we're in right now is cloud. And that's where companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon, and many others, by the way, those are not the only three, uh, contrary to popular belief. Uh, the cloud is actually serviced by a lot of different companies. Um, uh, but this commodity cloud, which kind of evolves from e-commerce and YouTube and video streaming and that sort of thing, really isn't ideal for running things that are latency sensitive. So things like e-sports, um, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, all the great stuff that everybody's excited about coming down the pipe from a digital technology perspective, just doesn't run as well as it should on commodity cloud. So what they need is something called high performance computing at the edge, and that's what we do. So high performance computing versus commodity computing. That's the first part of the tagline, uh, is really because we do everything in hardware. So we're, we're hardware switched and hardware, firewalls were array based, blazing, fast storage. In fact, we just recently made an announcement around a partnership with Intel where we're developing their Intel Optane NBME over fabric. I know that all sounds very technical, but what all that means is super blazing, fast access to data, right. Um, and, uh, we put all of that together and then we put it right in the urban center and directly dark fiber connect our end users to the data center. So they're not accessing it over the internet, they're accessing it through their own private fiber connection. When you combine those two things, the high performance compute architecture, and then putting it at the edge, putting it in the urban center, you mitigate latency, you get relate and see, and that's what allows you to be able to run all those fantastic applications. And that's, that's really what it boils down to. That's the next generation of digital infrastructure. Got it. Um, I think why don't we, we jump a little bit, let's talk a little bit about the overall global, um, gaming computing space that you guys are in. Do you want to maybe give us a briefing on that and how big the potential is in that market? Absolutely. So this is, this is actually quite simple to, to describe what we do this high performance computing at the edge, uh, infrastructure applies across a lot of sectors, multibillion dollar sectors. So video games and e-sports are certainly one of those areas. And that's a multibillion dollar sector. I think it's sitting at around one, 120 billion somewhere in that range. You'll have to do some fact checking on me on that, but it's somewhere, somewhere in that range. Um, virtual reality is now not only being adopted from an entertainment perspective, but it's also being adopted by companies to do things like digital twinning. So for example, one of the, one of the, um, uh, projects that we announced is where we built out a digital twin of an airline manufacturing plant in virtual reality using our platform. We did that with the Canadian digital technology super cluster, uh, and, and, uh, so, so industry 4.0, um, video games and then another big sector animation and visual effects. So when it comes to, uh, you know, rendering, when it comes to doing things like virtual production, and that's another recent announcement we made, uh, with our partnership with, uh, versatile media, uh, versatile, and it can't be underestimated, virtual production is a huge paradigm shift for the industry. The impact of virtual production is I'd say as big as you know, is the biggest change to, to movie making. Since the advent of the computer, we're really changing everything on how production is made. We're using virtual reality motion capture real time, render to capture real life things and put them into this metaverse that can then be used to shoot the scenes for the movies or the television shows can be used to, to create virtual reality environments concerts. You know, the, the usage of it is, is, is absolutely immense, but when you apply all of those things together, virtual reality, content creation, artificial intelligence, we're using, for example, um, our, our GPU compute platform, uh, VR with a variational AI to be able to do research into COVID-19 therapeutics, uh, and they're using new AI technology with our platform to be able to, to define new drugs, to help treat COVID-19 the, the sectors that this address addresses is immense. Each one of them is multi-billion dollars, and we're doing it with kind of a single product set, uh, that currently is not being provided to the market by the, the existing hyperscalers, the big cloud providers.

Speaker 3:

Interesting. So you guys are, are, are well positioned there. Um, you also mentioned a little bit about, you know, obviously your recent developments, the, the partnerships you're you guys have actually just come out with two major, uh, big news releases, I should say, uh, earlier this month, one was, um, a partnership with Excel bite, and then the other was the signing of the letter of engagement with versatile media. Why don't we respectively jump into each of those? And you, you give us a little bit about what those partnerships mean, um, not just for your company, but how they would translate to your shareholders.

Speaker 2:

Sure. So, um, well, let's talk about an XL like first, um, uh, so Excel by what they do is they offer a live game services to video game developers and publishers, to be able to bring their games online and run them. Now, part of doing that, uh, is a service that they call our motto where, uh, they can, they can automatically spin up the game servers where the end user is to be able to mitigate latency for those customers, right? So when you're playing Fortnite or, or whatever the case may be, uh, if it's, if it's on a, an Armada game server, it's going to be spun up in, in your local territory. And amps is one of those providers that are providing them. So we've joined the light, the likes of Amazon and, and so on. And now app servers are in that our model lists now, obviously because we are high performance computing at the edge, we would tend to think that we're a little bit faster and a little lower latency. Uh, so our servers will basically get automatically picked, uh, more often. Um, but the it's a new partnership. So the proof will be in the pudding, but you can now access games that are run on our motto with, with Xcel byte on the, uh, on app servers. Uh, so that's, that's really what that boils down to. It's a partnership. We bring customers to them, they bring customers to us. Um, so now versatile media, that's, that's a little bit more complicated because versatile media represents, uh, this, this big paradigm shift that I mentioned earlier around, uh, virtual production. So if people are seeing, uh, maybe the Mandalorian, um, uh, from, from Disney, the new star Wars television show, uh, maybe, uh, they've seen, you know, the lion King things like this,

Speaker 3:

Those, those shows are now

Speaker 2:

Using this new virtual production technology to make animation and visual effects. So basically what they do is they use the, they, they, they bring together gain technology, things like unreal engine realtime render the use of GPS, graphics, processing units, uh, into the animation and visual effects pipeline. And what that allows them to do is they can broadcast this real time rendered environment on big LCD screens surrounding the, the, the actors and the actors are placed right in the environment. So when they're shooting it, the special effects, the background, wherever they could, they could be on any planet at any time is all there. It's all being captured in real time. And the director can sit there and go, you know what? Let's, uh, let's move that mountain over there to the left a little bit, uh, you know, put a tree right over there. Let's see how that looks. It let's change it from five o'clock in the afternoon to 6:00 PM. They can have an hour long, you know, they can have a six hour long magic hour shoot, you know, at that perfect lighting and everything else. That is something, go ahead.

Speaker 3:

No, no, I was just going to say, I, I'm sorry to cut you off. I just got excited there, but I was going to say it's a lot better than the old days when, you know, you're, you're, uh, when you were making animation animated movies or trying to do this kind of stuff, you'd be, the actor would be sitting there talking to either a puppet or a sock or an orange that would be a place of alert. So it's really interesting to see how they can change things around in real time. Um, but I'll let you continue on. I apologize to get,

Speaker 2:

It really is a giant leap forward in how they're going to make these movies the impact. I mean, as you know, don't get me wrong. I can talk about the tech all day. It's super cool. You know, they can actually put on a virtual reality headset and shoot the scene with a virtual camera, like in virtual reality, things like that. I mean like, how cool is that? I mean, how much fun would that be to do, but putting that aside, the impact of the industry from a, from a financial perspective is, is huge as well. It costs a lot less money to make a movie or a television show in this way. It's a lot more iterative. They can do a lot more things with it. So that the way it used to work was, as you say, they'd have the green screen and they, you know, have a bunch of people wearing, you know, black leotards, little ping pong balls on them. And, you know, they, they they'd have a little, you know, placeholder for the, for the dragon they were talking to or whatever it might be. And, and, and they would shoot the scene that would then go off to all the artists that will go and make, you know, the, the, the, the dragon and make the environment and everything else based on the description given by the director, but three months later, or so they come back and they hear you go, what do you think of the scene? While at this point, the director goes, well, that's not exactly what I was thinking. I need you to change this or that. And then again, it goes away, you know, a few weeks later he can come back and see the scene again, right? That's not with this technology. They shoot the scene, the director and the cinematographer are right there that capturing the scene, the scene live, they can make those iterations on the flop. So the, the, the, the amount of iterations they can do the speed at which it takes to get these products to market. Like. So if you had a project that would take two or three years, it might only take one year to actually get done. So this, this is a huge step forward. And actually the one last step, the one last kind of impact with it is it takes a much smaller team and a lot less travel. And so the impact of COVID on the industry, uh, really, really does. Um, you know, this really lends a lot of solutions to the problems associated with. COVID

Speaker 3:

Definitely, I mean, uh, the pandemics, something that has affected all of us in the last, uh, I mean, it'd be even fair to say all of 2020 now that we're going into September here. Um, you know, so it, it's great to see that companies will still continue using this technology to be able to make movies, make games, all the other industries that it's applicable to, to, to be used in, but also stay creative at the same time and not, not lose out on that front.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. You know, and, and if you did a look at the stocks and so on, um, uh, video game companies, uh, animation companies, uh, content creators are doing very well because, you know, that's what a lot of people have to do. You're stuck in your house. What are you going to do? Well, I'll play video games and watch movies. Um, so, you know, I mean that, that industry is going to continue to grow and, and, and being, being the company that supplies, the picks and shovels for this new gold rush of virtual production is a really good place to be.

Speaker 3:

I love that analogy.

Speaker 2:

Oh, well, I mean, actually, it's pretty obvious analogy, and I know it's an old one, you know, I think it was my father who actually first told me, you know, based on don't be the guy going out, getting them going for the gold rush, be the guy selling the picks and shovels. And that's, you know, 30

Speaker 3:

Applicable to all industries.

Speaker 2:

It is. But I mean, you know, when you, when you're in an industry that's really content driven right. And hit based. Right. So it's, you know, the, they, they go out and make tons of video games. They go out and make tons of movies and some of them are good and some of them are bad, but in our case, it doesn't matter whether they strike gold or not. It, they, they, they have, they, they, they have to pay the bill, uh, content, uh, you know, it's a good place to be. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3:

So, so Anthony, those two, um, that we just talked about, Accella by the letter of engagement with versatile media, those were two of the most recent news releases.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. They just came out in the last week or so. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Were there any more points on versatile or did you touch on all of those? Cause I kind of wanted to talk about some of your other partnerships as well, because since we've chatted with you about almost a year ago, you guys have been very busy. There's been a lot more and not just these two. So I kind of wanted you to touch on some of those as well. And let us know in the audience, know where you're at, how, how those

Speaker 2:

Have come about. Sure. I mean, look, I could spend all day talking about virtual production. It is just so super cool. Um, and, and it's a great deal with first tile. Uh, you know, we're basically building the, the, all of the infrastructure for the studio, all of the remote render, all of that sort of stuff. So it's, it's, it's uh, and it's one of the first ones being built in Canada. So it's, it's, it's, it's exciting, but you're right. There's Nick Hoover right over here.

Speaker 3:

How many square footage was it? It's huge

Speaker 2:

Thousand square feet. That's right. That's right. Yeah. It'll have to, to, I think it's, I'm a little over 4,000 square foot sound stages that will all be motion capture virtual reality. I mean, again, I can't wait to play with the thing. I mean, this is going to be so much fun.

Speaker 3:

I remember it was in late 1999, maybe 2000 when Vancouver film school was one of the first ones that had opened up their school out here, I should say. And after that, it just

Speaker 2:

Blew up. Yeah. I know. And actually, as, as, uh, is illustrated by the MOU that we signed with, uh, Capilano university, um, we're seeing an adoption of these sorts of things. I mean, that's the, the announcement we made was around the creative technology community, the CTC, uh, a building, which they're, they're basically donating for us to build a joint, um, uh, academic and industry, uh, partnership, uh, of a, of a studio. And it now looks like it's pretty likely it would involve virtual production. Um, and, uh, and so, yeah, I mean the, the, the, the schools are also, uh, uh, you know, somebody who we're working with to help bring in the talent and help develop that technology. Um, you know, there's been a lot of stuff that's happened since, since we spoke, uh, it has been awhile. Um, you know, we announced the opening of our first data center, DC one, uh, here in Vancouver, this, again, the waterfall building behind me, um, we announced the Bardel our first render client. Uh, so this is the, these are the guys that make brick and mortar. Uh, they, they render, um, dragon prints on, on our, uh, on our servers and actually dragon Prince just won a daytime Emmy. Um, so, you know, uh, pretty cool stuff to be actually, you know, helping to create that kind of content. Um, we announced a, a, um, a supercluster project where we're doing digital twinning of an airline manufacturing plant, uh, using virtual reality simulation tools to actually take a full digital twin of an airline manufacturing plant. That's a, that's a Canadian digital technology supercluster project that also runs in DC one. Uh, we announced variational AI, uh, where we, where we are, uh, have a GPU platform that they use to do artificial intelligence research. And in their case, right now they're doing research therapeutics drugs that can have a, it can help treat COVID-19. Uh, and so that, that sort of research is going on in DC one. And it, you know, that feels pretty good to be able to try and do a little something, uh, to help with, with the current situation. Um, you know, it's been, it's been busy, that being said, you know, generally speaking, we're dealing with fairly large deals, you know, um, in, in most cases, multimillion dollar deals that, that, that the client signs up with for multiple years in, you know, annual or three year contracts. Uh, and so it takes a little while to close those deals down. There's a fairly long sales cycle. It's worth it because you end up with a very big deal. That's very impactful to the company and lasts for up to three years. Um, but they take a little while to close. So sometimes there's a little bit of a delay in getting more news out. And, uh, so it's great to have an opportunity like this, to be able to, you know, talk about the latest releases and, and reiterate some of the things that are going on and, and just make sure people understand that, you know, we're very active, the company's growing very quickly, uh, and, uh, you know, as we announce more and more of these deals on a more and more regular basis that people get to see it, but, you know, there's a lot that goes into that. We used to be a company prior to going public that primarily just, you know, sold that infrastructure. We didn't host it. We didn't run a data center, we just sold it directly to the end user. So we retooled the company prior to going public to be this monthly recurring revenue company. And we increased our monthly recurring revenue, as we announced fairly recently, uh, tenfold. Uh that's uh, that's, that's pretty good growth. I'd have to say

Speaker 3:

I was going to say that that's great value for your company, right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So, so, you know, it takes time to do those sorts of things, uh, to, to launch a data center, to, to bring on a new sales team. We announced our new VP of sales, Chris best. We announced our new, uh, representative for Montreal peer culture. We just recently hired another rep, uh, Jeff O'Donoghue, uh, to, to focus on the digital media market. Uh, you know, we we've been building up that you got to go and see the new website. Um, you know, the, a ton of work's been done on that. We have a whole IRR section, uh, our, our, our, uh, social media is now up and running. We're on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, uh, the, the, we have a whole IRS section, uh, on the abs website. You can sign up for the news, uh, get all the latest announcements, um, you know, slot going on,

Speaker 3:

Speaking of the website, why don't you let them know where they can go find out about you guys,

Speaker 2:

The media channels? Well, you're going to, you're going to put down that right there, or I'm pointing, right. You're gonna write down on the bottom of that. Okay. There we go. Yeah. The show, the link to the website, social media links, all of that stuff will be on www.app.tech, www dot[inaudible] dot T E C H, and a, and all kinds of information there. Uh, just go to the investor section and you can sign up for, to get the news. You can download our latest investor deck, see the financials, all that fun stuff. Awesome. Um, I, you touched a little bit about on your team there. Um, but I wanted to, uh, obviously talk a little bit about your team members. Um, but before we get into that, Anthony, let's talk about your background because you're so passionate about this industry. You're so knowledgeable about it. How did you get into this? Well, you know, I'm knowledgeable cause I'm old. I've been doing this for a long time. Uh, like I, I may not look at,

Speaker 4:

But I I've been, I've been doing this

Speaker 2:

Somewhere close to 30 years. Uh, and, uh, amped is actually my fourth multimillion dollar company. Uh, and it really kind of starts, you know, as far as technology is concerned, but the company that I started way back in 2000, uh, company called seven group, uh, and seven group, uh, very quickly took over the digital media market. We had almost 70% market share for supplying all of the, the technology, the digital infrastructure for, for making video games, movies, and television shows. You said 70%, 70%, yeah.

Speaker 4:

Grant you that that's an estimate. I honestly would

Speaker 2:

Never ran it. But I mean, you know, now we're talking about my old company, uh, and I'm mentioning customers from them. So this, you know, just so you know, but back with, with seven groups, we had everybody, we had Technicolor, universal Disney, uh, EA Ubisoft, Activision, you, you know, pretty much anybody you can think of was a client of, of, of, uh, seven groups. And so that experience of being able to understand what was involved in building out the digital infrastructure for those studios really helped us to, to, to do what we do today. And then the other thing we did is we kind of got on the other side of the glass and became, uh, our own video game publishing company. We actually rolled seven group into a company called infinite game publishing. And we published a very popular game called mech warrior online. Uh, Macquarie online was actually one of North America's first e-sports games. Um, triple a, you know, high end quality content. Uh, it was on the cover of PC gamer, like three or four times, uh, rated number 19 and the top 25 shooters by a PC gamer. Um, you know, we, it was a very successful, successful game and ant is kind of the culmination of those two experiences, having supplied digital infrastructure to help create content, and then having actually run a live latency, sensitive e-sports platform for a popular AAA e-sports is really what enabled us to create what we have today. Yeah. So, you know, I got into this at, you know, at a pretty young age, I've always been interested in technology. Uh, I've always been an entrepreneur, uh, and you know, basically you combine tech with a little bit of entrepreneurship and, and you get me well, Hey, I know you guys are doing an excellent job. Um, I know we talked or you touched on a few points of some of your key team members. I see the announcement you guys added onto your advisory board. Um, a gentleman by the name of Steven Heinz. He's a real estate developer. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, let me, let me give you a little bit of background on that. Um, and also, you know, if I could, for a second, I just, you know, I'm, I'm so tremendously proud of my team. Um, we have such an incredible team that, that has kind of been there and done that before across the board, right? So, uh, you know, our CTO, Don bustin, he was a CTO over an infinite game publishing, uh, you know, he was the guy who helped architect that platform. Uh, it, you know, he's worked for fortune 500 companies. He's worked for startups. He's, you know, always been that kind of paratrooper that you, that tech paratrooper that you send in a tech commando, uh, to go in and solve the really tough problems. And I've known him from, you know, coming on 30 some odd years now. So to have him on our team, uh, is, is just fantastic. Our CSO, James Harris toes, um, you know, he's, he was the most recently, and he was one of the executive directors, or he was the executive director of Digi BC, the local industry association for digital media. Prior to that, he was the CEO of a pretty large, you know, I think about 160 person, a video game developer here in Vancouver called Roadhouse. And back in 2004, he actually started a company called online game services, inc. That hosted some of the first multiplayer online games. So, you know, these guys, you know, have been there, done that and to have people like that on the team is immense and, and, and Steven is another one of those gods. So Stephen is a real estate developer that building that's that's in my background. Um, that was a building that he designed and built 20 years ago with the intention of having a data center at the heart of the building to supply the heat and do those things, you know, that that was absolutely visionary. Uh, now it's only, it's only once amps came on board and, and kind of took over the data center to work with, uh, Steven that we've really been able to fully utilize that green technology. But, you know, this guy really knows what he's talking about when it comes to, to building these types of buildings. And so when it comes to a next generation digital infrastructure company, it's not only the servers that you're looking at, it's only all that compute. It's also where it's housed. And with Steven, we have the ability to build data centers like DC, one, uh, across the world, uh, and, and continue to build out this, this kind of resilient high performance compute infrastructure at the edge, and do it in a green way, a sustainable way, and be able to really be that core of a smart city. And, and Steven is, is really a key enabler for that.

Speaker 3:

Got it. It's very strategic placement then. Um, obviously I'm here in Vancouver and our viewers that are in Vancouver or local would definitely know that this is the waterfall building that's in Granville Island or just outside Granville Island, but why don't, why don't you talk to us about why this building is so important and, and, and the whole sort of, um, concept behind it? Well,

Speaker 2:

Okay. First of all, just on an aside for a second, cause it's cool. Um, if you're a Battlestar Galactica fan there's, I don't know something like 20 scenes from Battlestar Galactica that was filled in film with this building, that, that little kind of pyramid looking thing in the background keep an eye out for it. It's, it's, it's, it's in battle star Galactica, so there's a little bit of a gold factor there. So, uh, what really makes it important though, is that by again, and I've, you know, I have kind of covered some of this already in our, in our conversation today, but by capturing the heat, the heat this round and building by creating clean drinking water, by using control systems, to be able to manage the environment very minute lead very granularly within that data center, we make it possible to be able to run efficiently while in an urban center. And you know, what you're seeing a lot of the big cloud providers do is they, you know, go and buy data centers that are way out in the middle of nowhere next up near the biggest power source, right? How can we get power cheaper? How can we do those sorts of things? And what that does though, is it creates latency. Cause you have to, you know, uh, reach out into the, into the boonies to, to access these data centers. Our data centers being at part of the urban fabric really is, is what makes that at the edge part of our tagline work. And to me, able to make that work, we need to be extremely efficient with the power, with the, with, with, with the resources required to run those servers. And so we've made our data center so efficient through this technology that is perfectly reasonable to be able to get very similar kind of hosting costs in an urban center as to what you would have, what you would get out out in the boonies. And so that's what really makes it important. It's going to be part of our fabric moving forward. You know, I mean, think of it this way. Let's say you're going to buy a condo and you're going to buy a condo downtown and you find out that, Hey, listen, the game servers for Fortnite are in the basement. Like, you know, you're, you're gonna get, you're gonna get a 10 gig internet connection. Right. Does that sound like a good place to, to, to buy a condo if you're a millennial, if you're a gamer. Yeah. I would say, yeah, yeah. Listen, you're going to be able to run virtual reality with all your friends, uh, in, in, in your, in your new condo, because you've, you're in this new wired, you know, high performance compute at the edge environment, uh, you know, you're going to get things like augmented reality glasses that are using AI to, to do facial recognition. Things like, I mean, the, the amount of applications for this are just so ridiculously immense, uh, and it's, it's, it's such an obvious path to undertake, uh, that we're really pleased to be kind of at the forefront of it. Got it. So you guys have had a strong start to 2020 going into September right now. So what, what can we expect for you guys to close the year off all come on. I can't, I, well, there's only so many things I can say on that front. Um, you know, um, what can I say, that's not going to be, you know, talking about, uh, forward looking statements. Um, well, I can say that the pipeline is very strong. Uh, we have, we have a lot of projects that we're working on, uh, across multiple sectors. So we're, we're increasing to focus more and more on the digital media, uh, virtual production render, remote workstation sector, sections sectors. Um, we've, we've, you know, we're running a lot of R and D in our lab. Um, and, and, and coming up with newer technologies to, to address things like remote computing for COVID, uh, AI research, uh, and being able to increase the power for that. Um, you know, we're, we're looking at building more data centers. There's a lot of things that are, that are, you know, without, you know, and, and, and I'm hoping you'll be able to edit this later, if there's anything that I say that I'm not supposed to, but, but, you know, uh, there's a lot on the go. And I would say, just keep your eyes out from the news. Uh, and, uh, and, you know, as those deals come in, as those new initiatives kicked off, as those new products get launched, uh, you'll be hearing more and more about us as we go forward. I don't mean to be getting, getting anyone in trouble here with, with any info that's not public and can't be out there, but I think you covered most of the basis to anybody watching. I definitely encourage you to at least go visit the amp technologies website, take a look at some of the stuff that, that been working on and have worked on, uh, follow them on all their social media channels and feel free to reach out to them through their website. If you have any questions or are looking for details. Um, Anthony, I want to, I want to close off a case. So we've talked about a lot of cool things in this, in this, uh, podcast of ours. Um, I want to talk hypothetically

Speaker 3:

About, you know, obviously we see so much happening within not only the gaming space, virtual reality, augmented reality, give us, give us some tidbits on what are some of the things that are being worked on, not specifically from amp, but in the, in the, in the general space that, that are kind of gonna blow our minds off

Speaker 2:

That, you know what I love talking about that stuff. And, and, and, you know, I've, I've been known to bring this up in multiple conversations. Um, but there is this kind of a concept of a virtual reality universe that everybody can plug into and interact in. It's it's really well described by, by a movie, in a book called ready player. One, the movie was done by, by Steven Spielberg, uh, the, the, and in that movie, and in that book, they have this place called the Oasis. And this is a place that everybody can dial into a can, can basically, you know, Jack into whatever you want to call it, uh, and interact with a completely, fully realized photorealistic digital universe. Uh, yeah, well, I, you know, and, and this is going to come out, this is going to actually happen. Now it does require high performance computing at the edge to work just saying it, but the, the virtual production that we were talking about earlier, that's kind of an interesting step along the way, because they're already now capturing real world people and creating full photorealistic, 3d environments that they can display. So, you know, we're really just at the beginning of the creation of this, this whole metaverse that human beings are going to be able to interact with and not just play games, but do business have relationships, uh, watch concerts, uh, you know, and, and, and think about how much this has accelerated because of the impact of experiencing a pandemic as, as, as a society, right? We have to do this social distancing. Now, you and I are right now talking on a video conference, um, you know, you're sitting across the, across the room from me and your couch. I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, virtually in front of the waterfall building. Um, you know, this even, even a few months ago, chances are, you know, I would've come down to a studio or, you know, something conference or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Right. And everybody's experiencing this now. So the acceleration towards the building of this metaverse of this, of this interactive virtual reality way to communicate and interact, uh, is, is, is absolutely huge. And virtual production is only the first step along that, that train you video games,

Speaker 3:

You know, are, are really one of the leading forefront technology creators on that front. Um, Elon Musk, you know, he's, he's kind of famous for wanting to hire video game quarters cause they don't know what, what what's impossible. Uh, I think that's pretty close to a direct quote from Milan. Uh, and, and, you know, we're, we're really seeing, you know, folks that are in that, you know, video games industry and, uh, in the digital media industry as a whole bringing technology that applies to things like digital twinning of factories and self driving cars and, you know, visualization of buildings. And it's pretty exciting times, but something like that in the technology that's out there, you know, if you can imagine it, someone out there in that space can create it. Yeah. And all we need now is, is the tools that we need to be able to create the content and a place to run it all so that people can actually access it in a way that is that, that gives them that full experience. And, um, I happened to know a really good company. That's kind of a kind of building that that's right. And you can check out technology's website, if you want to find out more details. And Anthony, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Um, thank you so much for the insight, not only to the general, um, industry, but also with what you guys are doing thanks to you and your team, uh, for all the work that you guys put into. It wish you guys nothing but success for the rest of the year and beyond, um, to anybody watching, if you find conversations and podcasts like this informative, please hit the like button. If you haven't subscribed already, I would definitely encourage you to subscribe. And, uh, again, thank you so much for taking the time to watch, not only myself, but mainly Anthony Brown, who is the CEO of amp technologies at the, I look forward to our next chat where we can find out what else is happening in the space and see how much more you guys have grown. Thank you very much. We look forward to it. Cheers. Thanks again. Have a great weekend. You too. This has been

Speaker 1:

By the Canadian securities exchange. Please feel free to hit, like, and share this content.

Speaker 3:

Hey, it's James here.

Speaker 1:

Mind you that if you just enjoyed this episode of hashtag finance, there's a lot more, make sure you subscribe to this show available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google podcast shows coming up at least twice a week. So please do not miss out. Oh, so if you're on Instagram, please, don't forget to follow us at Canadian exchange. That's all one word Canadian exchange. We're hosting live daily content with great guests, discussing the capital markets, entrepreneurship, investing, and much more. And finally, if you like video, please subscribe to CSC space TV, that CSE space TV on YouTube. You can find more great stuff, including exclusive series content like cannabis month, 2020, and our new series investing in psychedelics as always. Thank you for listening.