Welcome New Readers!

Hey everyone,

Well, it's been quite a day! MVIS traded over 5.6 million shares which is a new record for volume, double the prior biggest day in company history, in early November. Traffic on MVIS Blog has also hit a new peak, and with a little while to go on the clock, I should also get close to double my biggest day ever for traffic here.

I can tell you that the excitement in our building is palpable -- after a lot of hard work and long hours by an incredibly talented product team, we're ready to share our new "thin mint" candy-sized projector with customers.

It's pretty well established that Microvision has always been a leader in MEMS-based display technology. But until recently, we haven't had the miniature green lasers we needed that could meet the size and power requirements for consumer devices. Earlier this year, the company decided to 'take greater control of our destiny' and fund the development of a laser light source that would be designed specifically to meet the market requirements for an embedded laser projector. By leveraging this laser development effort and collaborating with one of our high-volume manufacturing partners, we've created what we feel is truly a breakthrough device with real market potential -- a device that we believe can help resolve the visualization bottleneck of small screens on increasingly powerful mobile devices.

So, welcome new readers, and thanks especially to long-time longs. Here's a roundup of some of the news around the web about today's release:



Microvision Unveils Tiny Digital Projector

Microvision today announced that it will unveil at CES an ultra-miniature full-color digital projection display approximately the size of a Thin Mint candy, designed to be embedded into handheld electronic devices such as cellphones, PDAs, or multimedia handhelds.

While having the ability to play videos on your cellphone is cool, who really wants to watch anything longer than a few seconds of video on such a tiny screen? Being able to project the image onto a nearby surface, such as a wall, whiteboard, desktop or your friend’s face, would make it much more watchable and easy to show to others.

Microvision Soars on Product Launch Expectations

Microvision Inc. (NASDAQ: MVIS) shares are up 17% this afternoon after it announced that it plans to unveil during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas an ultra-thin, miniature full-color projection display that is small enough to be embedded in hand-held devices. The stock is breaking out past its December highs. This move is coming on very strong volume after the stock drifted on low volume for the past few weeks. The stock has been accumulated since the October lows and the balance of power has been green almost the entire time. The upswing confirms an ascending triangle breakout. Early in December Microvision Inc. got a boost after analysts at MDB Capital Group initiated coverage with a "buy" rating citing new products as a cause for the upgrade. Contributing to the up tick in price is the sizable short position. Microvision has a float of 39 million shares and a growing short position of 2.89 million shares that has increased by 25% since the summer.

Thursday's Tech Winners & Losers

Shares of Microvision (MVIS - commentary - Cramer's Take - Rating) jumped 18% after the company said it plans to demonstrate an ultra-thin color projection display for mobile devices. The company said the display could be embedded directly into mobile phones or be used as a stand-alone accessory. The product will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. Shares of Microvision were up 58 cents to $3.65.

Microvision Pico Projector

Sure it’s cool to have TV and movies streaming to your phone or PDA but since most of that content starts out as an HD-size image you’re really missing out on a lot with that 320×240 pixel screen. Even surfing the web on a mobile device requires a bit of compromise to squeeze everything onto those relatively tiny displays.

While increasing the resolution is an obvious first step you can only take that approach so far before you reach the limits of what the human eye can see. So another clever approach is to increase the size of the screen via a built-in projector. Microvision is apparently developing the PicoP or Pico Projector that is small enough to be embedded into a cellphone or similarly sized device. The PicoP will be able to project a laptop screen-sized full color image onto any surface and will remain in focus at any distance which is important given these are destined for handheld devices.

I have no idea what the resolution, color-depth or contrast level of these embedded projectors will be but at least Microvision has announced they’ll be officially unveiled at CES which hopefully means we’ll see actual working prototypes.