First of all, wow. There's a lot of people from all over the world reading MVIS Blog. Thanks for coming. I'm going to change up the format of my CC Executive Summary a little bit here and just share some initial thoughts on today's call.
I think that this is the beginning. Today's call was so different in character and tone from the numerous other MVIS CC's that I've transcribed that I was really pretty surprised as I was typing away. Unless I missed it, there was no revenue guidance given for the fourth quarter. I guess we're guaranteed to beat our estimates then!
GE Comes to MVIS
The signficance of the change that is underway at MVIS under the leadership of Alec Tokman can not be overstated. Microvision appears to be reshaping its commercialization efforts around the idea of customer centricity. This means building out a customer service team and a having real focus on taking the time and effort to ensure that each customer of Microvision is happy with their purchase and with their support from the company. This customer focus also manifests itself in a new emphasis on content and applications which I'll talk a little bit more about below.
One thing that I am very curious about is the 'multi-generational product plan' that Alec mentioned. I hope this means they will start work on an eyeglass form factor version of Nomad for integration with smartphones as soon as possible. I've gone on and on about the gargantuan opportunity enabled by Microsoft's Mobile 5.0 operating system and its push e-mail capabilities. Marry that phone to a low-cost eyeglass Nomad and we are just blowing up.
The other thing that struck me was when Alec mentioned that he has given people "realistic but stretch goals", and that MVIS will "hold everyone accountable to achieve these goals."
And I am eager to learn about the "Business operating plan for 2006. Transplanting it from General Electric, implementing it at Microvision. Strategic roadmap and vision for the next 5 years."
The next 5 years takes us to 2010, which is the date Kurzweil has pegged for ubiquitous retinal scanning displays. The multi-generational product roadmap and the strategic roadmap and vision will have to get us there.
More emphasis on Picoprojector on this call. Sure sounds awesome.
One really important thing on this call was the emphasis placed on content and applications for the head-up display. On the military side, this probably means transforming the overhead map view into a full on augmented reality battlefield application. On the commercial side, it's about ensuring that the customer is wowed by the product and can immediately see the tangible benefit of ownership -- once the guy puts his Nomad on, you want him to say, 'Oh yeah, I'm never taking this thing off!'
This then is about software, content (i.e., applications) and network infrastructure. All of these pieces have to be in place for Nomad to be a must-have item. So clearly work needs to be done on the software side to really flesh out what kinds of apps are integrated with Nomad and demonstrate an immediate value to the customer. The wheel alignment app with Hunter certainly seems like a good start. I'll be very interested to hear about what kind of progress we can make on that front over the rest of this year.
The new green laser light source. This is huge and should be integrated into Nomad, the HUD and the Picoprojector platforms, unless I'm totally mistaken.
I'm gonna grab some Zzzs. Take care, folks!
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