Nexxus Labs interview with Mac Saltzman at the 2024 Collision Conference

all right I'm here with Leo from Nexus Labs at Collision conference 2024 how's your show going so far Leo it's doing great yeah great opportunities everywhere and like it it really fits the name Collision really meeting everybody and colliding and uh seeing how we could collaborate yeah love that fantastic please tell us what Nexus Labs is all about yeah so at Nexus we focus on developing decentralized traffic databases for municipality specifically uh we work closely with uh the municipality of Richmond Hill in order to see how we could take traffic data and really bring it online because right now we're really if we look at Transportation it is is pretty bad in terms of like traffic um but especially when we're talking about the 21st century and emerging Technologies we're looking at a really paradigm shift in terms of like technology such as autonomous vehicle that could provide radical change to uh how we transort how we commute around the city um specifically we're looking at like synchronized flow of traffic in uh roads such as like the DVP where it's like commonly congested but before then we really do need a good foundation for high quality high frequency real-time traffic data and that's what we're trying to provide awesome I was going to ask you if it's real time and if so uh how are you monitoring traffic how are you measuring this yeah so uh our idea is to focus on v2v connection so vehicle to vehicle communication so we within a uh like a space uh vehicle communicates with the vehicles around it in the vicinity and then they kind of submit their own information relative to their position and then they then vote in a consensus way and then later on they the data kind of merges to form the final uh copy of the data and that is what's submitted onto the database and what this allows us to do is that now instead of the processing power being at a centralized Source we're really talking about a more scalable and sustainable way of looking into collecting traffic data where now when a vehicle is added Network they're more as like a processing unit and just grows the network in general so today being 2024 most of the millions of cars in Canada are not smart cars they don't emit data that can be shared with another vehicle so how do you get to where you like in a perfect world uh for your startup sake where this v2v is is a real thing so one of the main things we're looking forward to is implementing a test net within Richmond Hill and that means looking at the fact that on the market right now a lot of vehicles are not actually smart but they do provide something that's crucial which is diagnostic port data uh there's protocols such as OBD2 cus where we could just plug in a uh add-on and then pull high quality so the engine the direction of the vehicle the speed and all this could be added on to like adding like a low dash cam on the camera on the vehicle front and what that provides us is essentially turning a vehicle into a smart vehicle where the data could then be used towards uh the traffic database that we're creating awesome so you can retrofit older vehicles through the OBS Port basically okay got it and uh what is it about York Region that attracts you to the region and why you want to stay there as a as a company MH so uh initially we came in as the cic program and um going through the whole program made me realize that uh actually comparing Toronto to York Region York Region has been doing a great job in terms of adopting uh sustainable Smart City techn ology compared to Toronto if you really look at the York Region uh data collection is more prevalent compared to Toronto and what we see here is that York Region is more um like more supportive in terms of bringing on these Technologies and that is why we kind of want to work with the York Region space compared to Toronto even though Toronto has where all the traffic is at but um we really do want to focus on a small municipality space and kind of work together with the government to see what we could do to provide them with that traffic data awesome and then where can we learn more about Nexus Labs yeah so you can find Nexus laabs at Nexus labs. org um or you could come to Collision and see our Bo even though this is the last day but uh oh well if you get in contact with Richmond Hill U we could always set up a meeting through that all right so that's Nexus with 2x's Labs uh.org you said okay thanks so much Leo it's great meeting yeah thank you