Sam Rubin: Yeah, absolutely. All of them share a commonality of being really photonics technologies most of all. Right, without photonics they would not happen quantum any part of the quantum whether computing a quantum sensors on is essentially optics. So it’s very interesting that as we talk about optics taking more of a center stage, enabling more applications, enabling more industries, those are two great examples of that. But I also want to touch on something you briefly mentioned and Scott becoming the chairman of the board. Last quarter we went through, I think the completion of a transition on our board of directors, scaling down the board to a size that is much more matches, much better the company’s strategy and the direction.
The board of directors now stick people, five independent and myself, we have a new chairman of the board, Scott Ferris, who exactly, as you mentioned, really is very active in the industry, has built and done quite a few companies and based successfully. And we feel this is a significant part of, again, alignment of the company over the last three years that I’ve been here, nearly three years. We’ve gone through many different aspects of that and now we can safely and comfortably say we’ve really gone through all aspects of this from the very top of the board of directors through the structure and strategic focus and operationally.
Gene Inger: I think you make a good team, all three of you. By the way. I am curious other than what you can’t discuss. You’re involved with youth and defense, battle management and that involves AI. I know that’s a buzzword of the moment, but artificial intelligence, don’t you have a role in all of these applications and products?
Sam Rubin: A product like Mantis really lends itself to be used together with artificial intelligence simply because it brings so much more data that to really make best use of that and especially if you put it on drones hovering around collecting data, you have to have some artificial intelligence to. Identify and signal to you when something important is happening. You can’t anymore have soldiers sitting there and looking at Google all the time or looking at screens, trying to decipher all of that. So I think artificial intelligence, just like in LiDAR, the power of AI has really enabled a lot of great things in LiDAR. I think the power of AI is going to enable things like our Mantis to really be deployed in much larger scale than ever before.
Gene Inger: Could you touch for a moment on the state-based aspect of what you’re doing? I realized that a lot of it is classified and even corporations don’t want to talk because like Starlink and its competitors become competitive as time goes on. And I wonder because there’s talks of new cellular systems that won’t need a cell phone, that any cell phone can use without specialized satellite linkage. And I wonder whether you’re involved in the type of infrared linkage between these global encircling birds that would be involved.
Sam Rubin: I’d say to some degree, yes. But of course, as you can imagine with the type of companies involved where we signed or would be signed on, very powerful NBA that prevent us from being able to talk too much about it, but I would say that I believe optical communication and infrared in particular is playing a major role in enabling the satellite based internet.
