Happy 2nd Birthday MVIS Blog

When I first started this blog on April 1, 2004, I had no idea that it would take on a life of its own the way it has. Since then, there have been 750 posts on MVIS Blog -- it's kind of amazing.

I've really learned a lot. My own ideas about technology and the relentless, ever accelerating pace of change have come into focus. I've gotten a lot of perspective on the world and where we are in the process of its transformation. I've met some really outstanding people through writing this blog, some of whom of have become good friends.

So it has definitely been a really positive experience. Over the last two years, I have generated a lot of content and attracted a fiercely loyal audience that comes to the site every day, and often feeds back with their own insight into the topic I'm discussing (more often through email than via comments, for whatever reason). This last March was a record for visits, with over 7,000. Not huge by internet standards, but respectable when you consider the advertising budget!

I am grateful to everybody for their continuing readership and participation in making MVIS Blog the #1 Independent Resource for MVIS Investors.

I truly believe that Microvision will become a big, successful company. Maybe bigger than (most) people can even imagine. Every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth can benefit from this company's technology and the products that it can uniquely enable.

The company's technology has inherent advantages over any other kind of information display -- probably most easily expressed by the statement that 'there's no screen'. There's no flat, 2D plane with pixels arranged on it, as in literally every competing technology. Just the scanner, the light sources and the electronics to drive them -- and maybe some glasses to wear them on.

I believe that the technology itself has a fundamental value that absolutely dwarfs its current price. What these guys are doing is so much more elegant than anything else out there. They are creating displays which are basically illusions. But they are beautiful illusions. Anyone who has seen the company's full color Spectrum SD2500 display could tell you that.

About a month after I wrote that review of the Spectrum in May of 2005, the company was granted a 12-month, $4.4M contract from General Dynamics to shrink the SD2500 down into a wearable form factor:

The previous phase of the program, with Microvision contracting directly with the Army Aviation and Missile Command, culminated in the delivery of a prototype full-color, daylight-readable helmet-mounted display [the SD2500]. The new contract is expected to result in an upgrade for that display that will be ruggedized, miniaturized, and soldier-wearable in a package similar to Microvision's Nomad Helmet-Mounted Display System.

In 2004, the Spectrum had a refrigerator-sized control box. In 2005, that control box was shrunk to the size of a toaster. In 2006, Microvision will deliver a Spectrum to General Dynamics that is ruggedized and ready-to-wear with a lightweight belt-clip control box, with the same astonishing image quality as the unit I saw last May ("The images are simply amazing" was Tokman's comment on the new wearable Spectrum during the last conference call).

It's not hard to follow that curve of progress and miniaturization and take a stab at where the company's technology will be in 2007, 2008 and beyond. We are rapidly approaching the point where full-color, see-through electronic eyewear is realistic and feasible.

Microvision's full-color, high resolution Picoprojector is already a reality, in two-cubic-inch demonstration unit form. There's a clear path to embedding these Picoprojectors into cell phones, to complement the digital cameras and camcorders that are already inside most of these things anyway. It would certainly make it much easier and more fun to share your videos with friends. And maybe, we'll find out that showing off pictures of your grandkids is the killer app, after all.

I've spent a lot of time documenting the march of progress of the company's technology, and have focused equally on the ecosystem in which these electronic eyewear products will participate. The mobile industry, with its astonishing leaps in wireless data transfer rates, is now able to deliver data throughput on par or exceeding cable and DSL broadband rates.

The infrastructure to support 'information everywhere' is being put in place. A lot of money is being spent. Billions and billions of dollars are being invested to create the ability to zap huge amounts of data back and forth across the world, while on the move. Ultimately, the return on these investments is constrained by the mobile devices themselves and their fixed-pixel display interfaces -- which can't get any larger, but are already too small to convey the content and value that these networks can enable.

Ultimately, every piece of evidence I've assembled here at MVIS Blog has pointed in the same direction. It's told me that exponentially increasing computer power and wireless bandwidth both need a paradigm shift on the user interface of the mobile device in order for their value, functionality and content to be unlocked.

It's told me that Microvision's technology is the simplest, most elegant solution to delivering digital images to the human visual system. That using illusions that appear to be large-sized displays but come in packages about the size of a few dimes can enable new capabilities and new revenue streams, not just for Microvision shareholders, but for the rest of the mobile industry as well -- or anyone who owns content and is targeting mobile users as a potential market.

It's told me that the business of operating Microvision can be rapidly transformed to productize this technology and deliver breakthrough products that meet significant unmet needs in the marketplace; benefiting consumers, content owners, service providers and network operators.

It's told me that the problems of yesterday are already in the rear-view mirror and are fading fast. And the view through the windshield is bright, clear, and full-color.

It's a new day for Microvision and it's a new day for me as well.

Thanks again to everybody for coming by and hanging with me over the last two years on this site. It will be an amazing thing to see the transformation of this company into an indispensable source for illuminating information and a profitable enterprise with sustainable double digit growth.

To achieve this vision, Microvision will necessarily become a global technology juggernaut. It won't happen overnight. But sometimes, amazing things happen. Companies and new technologies can come seemingly out of nowhere to become an indispensable part of everyday life. It's happened before. It will happen again.

From everything I've learned through two years of Microvision blogging -- I like our chances.

All the best,

Ben