MVIS Blog Week in Review 9/11/2004

This week the company secured $10M by selling convertible preferred stock to Satellite Strategic Finance Associates, LLC.

The company also announced several new contracts:
a follow-on MicroHUD development contract with a 'Tier 1' automotive supplier
a contract with an unnamed customer to develop a voice-enabled version of the Nomad System
a contract from the US Army to develop a full color version of the Nomad that uses phosphor-based photo luminescent materials
a modification of an existing contract with an unnamed branch of the US military.

Also this week, the Nomad received recognition as a 'Top 20 Tool' for 2004 from well-respected automotive technical publication Motor Magazine.

For a short week, this is a lot of action. In the coming months we can look forward to updates on progress on the Laser Printer Engine, the 2D Bar Code Scanner, the Canon Electronic Viewfinder/Microdisplay, as well as our various military contracts.

In the meantime, Honda is promoting Nomad to its dealers and chances are good that this effort will result in orders before too long.

2005 is starting to come into focus -- here's an interesting excerpt from the Q2 conference call regarding some opportunities for Nomad outside of the auto service tools market:

RICK RUTKOWSKI, CEO: One of the more interesting things that we have seen is we've been contacted by two Fortune 100 companies, one a major semiconductor company, the other a major consumer packaged goods company, with reference to the Nomad. We wanted to qualify these opportunities to see if we were going to require modifications to the system or whether these were potentially nearer-term than that. The good news is that, in both cases, there appears to be application for the system as currently designed and configured. We're not counting on any particular sales volume for 2004, but I would not rule out that all that, in 2005, these could become part of the mix. Our initial approach to this would be to approach them as large strategic accounts and not allocate enormous resources to those. Our phase 2 market development program for Nomad does include a business development activity that would partner us with integrators-- systems integrators who would focus on customers in markets like these, and so this is a good early indication of that potential.

And Steve, I think you attended one of these meetings just in the last couple of days, and were quite enthused by it.

STEVE WILLEY, PRESIDENT: Yes, I was very much intrigued. I think this interest is not surprising, as the Nomad's more general applications beyond auto maintenance is really being recognized by the broader market, and these large and global manufacturers, particularly domestic plants, are somewhat threatened by the move to offshore facilities, and they're looking to gain any benefits in productivity, quality, worker safety, etc., that they might. So, the parties that I have met with recently are very much intrigued with Nomad, and, in fact, barcode, our BlueTooth barcodes. They believe that we could really make a difference. But we've been defining for them how the Nomad solution specifically can impact every facet-- practically every facet of plant operations to include the maintenance, process monitoring, process control, materials handling, training. As Rick said, these are large accounts, large strategic accounts. Any one could take 1,000 or more Nomads quite easily.

It was very interesting to see Qualcomm's decision to purchase the 86% of Iridigm that it did not already own for $170M. This puts their total value at somewhere close to $200M. By this move, Qualcomm is acknowledging that mobile displays need to be improved in order for them to achieve their growth objectives for the CDMA market.

I also think this move demonstrates just how astonishingly undervalued Microvision is -- MVIS' market cap is just $146.9M, which includes the company's $33.5M worth of Lumera stock. So...Microvision with a transformational platform technology that can enable laser scanning cameras, bar code scanners, eyeglass displays, cell phone microdisplays, laser printers, heads-up displays and on and on, is worth roughly half of Iridigm, not counting our Lumera stake? Umm, OK. Stuff like this makes me wish I had $14M to buy 10% of the company...

Also worth a second look is Intel's announcement of the development of a 'Planetary Services Layer' in conjunction with industry and academic partners. This is really mind-blowing stuff and goes a ways to illustrating that the personalized, mobile, always-on, context-aware Internet is coming fast and is backed with billions of dollars in development resources.