November 30, 2009
Sensors are a theme we return to often for two reasons; 1) photonic components are an important part of novel sensor/spectroscopy solutions and 2) this is a large addressable market for optical component manufacturers.
The grand theme is that in a modern networked society, sensors are needed to provide the data for solutions to any number of societal ills such as pollution, security, traffic congestion, energy consumption and public health. Over the past year, this theme has increasingly gathered attention as practical sensor solutions for broad deployment have emerged. Building upon the biochip solution we highlighted last week, this week Jeremy Hsu at LiveScience.com has a great article discussing just such a broadly deployable solution. Jing Li of NASA’s Ames Research Center has created silicon-based sensing chip containing 64 nanosensors capable of sniffing out low amounts of ammonia, chlorine gas and methane. Added to commercial cellphones, these microsensor’s data are then broadly available through the existing communications infrastructure.
Bright ideas such as this are taking us one step closer to solutions to the identification and location of public hazards.
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Technologies, Topics on Our Mind | Tagged: Optical Components, Sensors, Spectroscopy | 
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Posted by Dennis Gallagher dgallagher@gtadvisors.com
November 24, 2009
As reported last week, an Arkansas police officer was suspended, not because he used a Taser on a ten year old girl (reportedly with the permission of the child’s mother), but because he did not record the incident with an attachable video camera. The report stated that the girl in question was ”violently kicking and verbally combative” when the officer attempted to intervene in a domestic dispute between her and the mother and the adults decided that a short shock from the stun-gun would be preferable, because forcefully trying to restrain the girl was more likely to result in injury to someone. Accordingly, the officer applied “less than a second” of shock to the girl, handcuffed her and took her away.
According to the local police chief, stun-guns can help safely subdue people who are endangering themselves and/or others. ”We didn’t use the Taser to punish the child — just to bring the child under control so she wouldn’t hurt herself or somebody else,” the chief said. The officer was suspended for seven days, with pay, for violating the department policy requiring use of a video camera when operating a Taser. The girl is being cared for in a local youth shelter.
We mentioned in an earlier post that Taser International recently introduced the AXON (Autonomous eXtended On-Officer Network), a video recording system that could be worn on the body and discussed how a pilot program in the United Kingdom that used video recorders in conjunction with stun-guns resulted in reduced claims of abuse against law enforcement officers and increased numbers of guilty pleas. Recorders not only serve as a deterrent to stun-gun abuse, but also provide evidence that proper procedures were followed throughout the incident.
Mobile video systems have made strong in-roads into the transportation market, with a large number already installed in police and first-responder’s vehicles. This article demonstrates the growing trend to push these technologies into man-portable, wearable systems as they become smaller and less expensive.
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Technologies | Tagged: Public Policy, Security | 
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Posted by Peter Yu ptyu@gtadvisors.com
November 20, 2009
It was announced last week that GE had selected a buyer for its security business. United Technologies agreed to purchase GE Security for $1.82 billion, where it will be integrated with UTC’s Fire and Security business. The sale, approved by both boards, represents a multiple of 1.5 times GE Security’s revenues, which are expected to reach approximately $1.2 billion in 2009, and nine times EBITDA. According to President and CEO Louis Chenevert, the acquisition will be neutral to earnings in 2010 and accretive in 2011 and beyond, after restructuring and integration will enable UTC to take advantage of synergies.
With this acquisition, UTC continues its strong push in the security and life safety industry and greatly expands the company’s geographic footprint. UTC has traditionally had a strong presence in Europe, having previously acquired Chubb, Marioff and the Firex Safety Division of Invensys. The takeover of GE Security gives UTC a much stronger presence in the North American marketplace. In addition, when combined with the previously mentioned acquisitions, and Lenel, Carrier and Otis, this transaction continues UTC’s push to become a “one-stop-shop” supplier of building automation equipment.
We think this transaction is positive for the M&A environment in security and life safety. While GE had significantly backed off its rate of acquisitions after the Edwards Systems Technology transaction, UTC has continued to be an aggressive buyer. Furthermore, the announcement of the agreement to purchase GE Security signals bullishness on the part of UTC executives, who expect to see growth and profitability in this segment positively impacting financial performance in the near future. Although they will undoubtedly take some time to integrate the GE business, we believe UTC will nevertheless continue to make selective acquisitions to fill in strategic niches in the security and life safety industry.
As a final note, this story may may not end with the closing of the GE Security purchase. There is some speculation that UTC may seek to divest certain portions of the acquisition such as the video surveillance piece.
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Transaction News | Tagged: Security | 
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Posted by Peter Yu ptyu@gtadvisors.com
November 18, 2009
Among the more attractive non-telecom applications for photonic components on the come for the past few years has been spectroscopy and bio-sensing. This morning on the Seeking Alpha web site, Larry Dignan highlighted advances in biochips at IBM. In relation to this, we think it worth noting that the commercialization of biochips and microsensors will likely prove to be a boon to the leading edge of novel photonic devices.
IBM Biochip: Reference Luc Gervais and Emmanuel Delamarche, Lab Chip, 2009, 9, 3330 (www.rsc.org)
The fundamental needs of portable and rapid analysis leads to the conclusion that photonic systems capable of chip-scale measurement will be part of the commercialization for chemical detection, blood diagnostics and other health oriented sensing applications. Put another way, if you’re going to broadly adopt lab-on-a-chip capabilities for speed, sensitivity and portability, you’re not going to be using a large separate spectrometer to read the results. That defeats the purpose.
While some applications can succeed with electronic sensing, many applications will require chip-scale interfaces for portable spectrometers or perhaps even wafer-level optics for sensing. In the example cited above, the lab-on-a-chip outputs to a fluorescence spectrometer. In the future, that fluorescent spectrometer will need to be of a similar scale to the biochip itself.
This dictates miniaturized photonic solutions. One example of this is being developed by seed-stage company NanoLambda. Their ”Spectrum Sensor” chip is a plasmonic device, selecting predefined wavelengths to construct usable spectra for sensing.
Alternately, systems may utilized fiber optical sensing solutions targeted at specific wavelengths of interest. Among the photonic companies capable of supplying compact optical channel monitors today are BaySpec and Aegis Lightwave. BaySpec in particular has made significant progress as a provider of spectrometers.
1 Comment | Technologies | Tagged: Optical Components, Sensors, Spectroscopy | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Gallagher dgallagher@gtadvisors.com
October 23, 2009
Even though the exhibitor list had thinned substantially from prior years, it was hard to give up on attending SUPERCOMM 2009 after more than a decade of making the rounds. I guess it’s like any conference, if you come away with one or two decent opportunities to pursue then it was a worthwhile trip. We achieved that, so mission accomplished.
Yet we did ask ourselves afterwards whether this conference has a raison d’etre. The exhibitor list is something that seems to have been in flux for the past five years. CEOs no longer view it to be worthwhile being there for more than a day; kind of like us. If you pick the wrong one, you’ll miss that meeting. I guess most of the people we met were there on the chance they would encounter someone that be helpful to triggering a business opportunity. That’s why we should be there, but the show seems to be reaching a point where more of us are asking ourselves why we are there. An industry as substantial as the global telecom business should command more of your time, and send you home with more than a couple of leads.
Leave a Comment » | Tradeshow Recaps | Tagged: Telecom | Permalink
Posted by Kevin C. Slocum, Managing Director, kslocum@gtadvisors.com
October 20, 2009
Wired Magazine’s Autopia column this week featured “Go to the Dark Side With BMW Night Vision”. This article discusses BMW’s use of far-infrared thermography to help interpret what is being imaged; because it scans for heat, it can identify people or animals to warn you.
Example of BMW Night Vision (Source: Wired Magazine)
This brings up themes we have touched on multiple times, such as the use of disparate imaging technologies and wavelengths simultaneously for greater information, and the need to incorporate multiple informatics capabilities (such as GPS or data gathering) for practical benefits. While your BMW may be able to warn you of a deer in the road up ahead, we look forward to the day when your heads up display will apprise you of fast food in your path.
In the future, vision systems will provide you with USEFUL information
Leave a Comment » | Technologies | Tagged: Imaging, IR Cameras, Sensors, Thermal Imaging | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Gallagher dgallagher@gtadvisors.com
October 12, 2009
Today’s EETimes describes work at IBM’s Watson Labs that demonstrates graphene may work as a photodetector for optical communications. In the article, the lead scientist, IBM Fellow Phaedon Avouris, describes the physical phenomena “When you shine light on graphene, you generate electron-hole pairs, which ordinarily just recombine. But near electrode contacts, there are built-in fields generated, and these fields separate the electron-hole pairs generating a current.” This is extremely far from commercialization; questions such as sensitivity, robustness, thermal stability, packaging and optical sub-system design and costs would take years to work through, assuming it proves appropriate at the wavelengths of interest.
This is another example of exogenous factors that impact communication component companies and the current generation of compound-semiconductor photodetectors may not prove immune to disruptive innovations, like graphene based devices. And though such advances may be years away, as we are really only beginning to commercialize 40 GHz optical networks now, continued advances in materials may be exactly what is needed to pave the way to economical 100 GHz components.
A final point; rapidly advancing materials technologies usually affect many disparate technologies simultaneously; in this case we would note that while the incubation time for new materials to migrate into communication components can seem like eons, the underlying advances and infrastructure can hit the market much faster. In this case, graphene may also prove viable as sensors for terahertz and other optical sensors as well.
Leave a Comment » | Technologies | Tagged: Graphene, Materials, Nanotechnology, Optical Components, Sensors | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Gallagher dgallagher@gtadvisors.com
October 8, 2009
With global markets continuing to extend their gains from the March lows, largely glossing over the bad news and focusing on the good, can it be long before the flood gates open for IPOs and secondary stock offerings? About half my career was spent as an equity research broker calling on professional money managers with what I believed were my employer’s best ideas. That portion of my career started in 1981 at L F Rothschild Unterberg Towbin. I was a rookie so in late ‘81 and early ‘82 I was calling on the people he didn’t wish to call in his account base. I began to get some of my own accounts in early ‘82 in places where Rothschild seldom called with any consistency. I was anxious to pull in commissions from these accounts that had seldom done business with the firm and the only way I could imagine that would happen was by making the research calls. I didn’t appreciate that I was flying into the teeth of a recession, but it frankly would have been like being a broker calling this past winter with buy recommendations for clients. Six months later and you look like a genius.
GDP Declines in seven largest recessions
Image Source: Christopher Dodds, Eleutherian, September 18, 2009
The bull market ensued later that summer and Rothschild became know as one of the original “four horsemen” of the technology investment banking world. The bulls ran, stocks began to get stretched in their valuations so the bankers said let’s give them new merchandise. The IPOs began coming as a few are today. So did secondaries for companies that had an interesting story about what the proceeds could do for their prospects. Eventually the quality of the IPOs and the stories behind the secondaries began to either become less compelling or they just reached to point of soaking up the last dollars out there to support the market.
To make a long story short, I saw this cycle repeat itself in the next twenty five years and one lesson that I think I learned is that the bull run isn’t over until Wall Street has its chance to make a pile of money peddling a whole lot more equity offerings than we have seen coming off the March lows and a recession that most now believe has passed its bottom.
This recovery will be different than many before it for lots of compelling reasons, but we are in a recovery and the equity and debt markets will become more a more substantial source of capital growth than they have been thus far. From Greenwich Technology Advisors’ perspective that means management and their boards should be open to mergers and acquisitions if they do something meaningful for the future prospects of the company because investors will likely have the appetite to invest in a well conceived plan.
Leave a Comment » | Thinking About M&A?, Topics on Our Mind | Tagged: Alternative Energy, Hardware, Imaging, IPOs, M&A, Markets, Nanotechnology, Optical Components, Security, Software & IT Services, Solar Energy, Spectroscopy, Telecom, Terahertz | Permalink
Posted by Kevin C. Slocum, Managing Director, kslocum@gtadvisors.com
October 2, 2009
One of the interesting companies we visited at ASIS 2009 was applying technology to the age-old problem of personnel tracking. SEER Technology’s NAViSEER uses GPS technology to determine the location of a small device to very high accuracy, typically within a couple meters or so. In addition, integrated dead reckoning hardware allows the NAViSEER to determine location in areas that are denied GPS access, such as indoors, or in tunnels, caves and mines. The NAViSEER weighs only a few ounces and is designed to be worn on the belt and precise location is continuously transmitted using a built-in encrypted radio, enabling the wearer’s location to be constantly monitored by commanders and/or rescuers.
NAViSEER personal tracking unit
SEER executives that spoke with us at ASIS said there was keen interest in their products from several categories of customersranging from mining to law enforcement and first responders, to aid rescue efforts in the event of on-site disasters such as a cave-in, injury or building collapse. In addition, the military would like to use such devices for “Blue” (friendly) force tracking in battle. The NAViSEER enables commanders to instantly determine the location of all of their personnel and modify their actions to take the best advantage of their force deployment or focus a rescue effort.
SEER’s business prospects are very impressive. Earlier this year SEER announced its first major contract to provide NAViSEER and AccuSense (a chemical detection device) hardware to International Golden Group (IGG), a Middle Eastern defense contractor. The contract is reportedly worth $150 million and calls for the delivery of products over the next 5 years. The executives we spoke described a number of additional opportunities that they were working on, each representing potential multi-million dollar business for them.
Although we did not see technology similar the NAViSEER offered at ASIS, the concept of personnel locators are not new. Other technologies used to track people and assets include:
- RFID: This technology is used to track inventory at the pallet level and, as prices decline, there is promise of individual product tracking.
- Access Control: Tracking of badge swipes can record who is in a given area; using proximity (RFID) badges and ubiquitously placed sensors can significantly refine location.
- Newer Technologies: A recent article in Technology Review discusses some research results from the University of Utah that analyzed variations in radio signals from a network of IEEE 802.15.4 wireless “ZigBee” transmitters to locate moving objects to within about a meter.
Each of these potential alternatives requires the pre-installation of a sensor network and thus has serious drawbacks in the military/mining/first responder applications that SEER is currently targeting.
We see the SEER personnel tracking solution as uniquely well-suited for their focus applications. If they can take advantage of economies of scale and continue to lower the price of their products they will be able to gain access to a number of additional high-volume markets. We plan to keep an eye on this company to see how well it is able to capitalize on the many large opportunities that are appearing in front of it.
1 Comment | Technologies, Tradeshow Recaps | Tagged: Hardware, Security | Permalink
Posted by Peter Yu ptyu@gtadvisors.com
October 2, 2009
Traffic at ASIS last month in southern California seemed light to us, especially on Monday before lunch and Wednesday, the last day of the show. We attribute the thin crowds to a few circumstances:
- The State of the Economy – We heard from many executives at the show that companies were sending many fewer attendees.
- Competing Conference – The Facilities Decision Conference and BICSI Fall Conference, concurrently held in Las Vegas, siphoned off a number of potential attendees from ASIS.
- Monday Start – Because they wished to maintain their weekend time as their own, the Monday start date caused many attendees to use all or part of the first day of the exposition for travel.
We did see traffic increase noticeably by mid-afternoon on the first day, supporting the Monday start hypothesis and attendance seemed to be fairly healthy on Tuesday but was exceedingly light on Wednesday, when it appeared many companies decided to pack up early and leave. We also noticed some empty booths and a larger-than-normal number of coffee break stations placed where exhibitor booths would normally reside.
Despite the perception of low attendance, we heard a decent amount of optimism from the executives we spoke to. For example, it was repeatedly pointed out that those who were in attendance were decision makers, so the quality of the leads was good, even though the quantity may have fallen relative to the previous year. Additionally, many executives mentioned that the U.S. government finally seemed to be back in buying mode after spending much of the first half of this year waiting in the wings.
Leave a Comment » | Tradeshow Recaps, Uncategorized | Tagged: Security | Permalink
Posted by Peter Yu ptyu@gtadvisors.com
