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.
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Tradeshow Recaps | Tagged: Telecom | 
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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
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Technologies | Tagged: Imaging, IR Cameras, Sensors, Thermal Imaging | 
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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.
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Technologies | Tagged: Optical Components, Sensors, Materials, Graphene, Nanotechnology | 
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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.
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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
September 30, 2009
Corporate blogs reflect not only the interests, but also the psyche of the writers. It has been a little over a year since the launch of GTalk, and pondering that year, it struck me that the blog is nothing like I expected. To some extent, Peter and I have perhaps gone a tad too far off the technology deep end (Peter less so because his industry pieces have been among our most popular). Perhaps the closest to the original target – what we do for our clients – has been Kevin.
Ruminating over our writings, I decided to try Wordle, an online toy for generating “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source and I chose just Kevin’s writings for analysis.
Image Source: www.wordle.net
Some things stand out that reflect the past year:
- Business is more important than technology. Market sits at about an equal footing.
- Transaction has not stood out as much as we would like.
- Public company, valuation and environment stand out too much, but reflect reality.
- Time appear frequently – It is important to our clients.
- Opportunity trails more than it should; it is a word we have been using more frequently of late.
Over the next year, we aspire to shake this up a bit and increase the frequency of works such as position, process and strategic to where they belong.
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Posted by Dennis Gallagher dgallagher@gtadvisors.com
September 30, 2009
Graphene appears to be moving towards industrial relevance at a greater pace than other recent materials breakthroughs. We think it is because graphene and nanotubes carry a couple of inherent advantages; a low barrier to entry and a broad technology base. Low barrier to entry – nearly any laboratory in the world can afford to do cutting edge research when it is not dependent upon exotic tools. A broad base – significant contributions are not just coming from materials science and solid state physics fields, but also a vast number of chemists, electrical engineers and even molecular biologists. While startups like Graphene Energy, Vorbeck Materials and XG Sciences are already commercializing the material and/or applications of graphene such as ultracapacitors; it seems we are just scratching the surface of potential applications as a lubricant, to enhance strength or as an electronic material.
The fall meeting of the Materials Research Society beginning December 1st will feature a session on the “Large-Area Electronics from Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene, and Related Noncarbon Nanostructures” with more than 125 submitted papers on these materials and their applications. Besides ultracapacitors, talks include the use of graphene in membranes, gas sensors, field effect transistors, and transparent electrodes.
One such example of progress, which seems to be coming at an increased pace, was featured yesterday in the RSC Chemistry World Blog. It reports on a paper by Professor R. Kitaura et al at Nagoya University on how to create single atom metal wires inside double-wall carbon nanotubes.
Carbon nanotubes with metal wires. Credit: Kitaura et al and Wiley-VCH
The process offers the potential to create devices with novel hybrid carbon nanotube and metal electronic properties, as well as the obvious creation of three dimensional nanoscale electronics.
Also note two new dedicated blogs that have been hatched to focus on graphene: Graphene-Info.com and Graphene Times.
Leave a Comment » | Technologies | Tagged: Graphene, Materials, Nanotechnology | Permalink
Posted by Dennis Gallagher dgallagher@gtadvisors.com
September 25, 2009
Some quick thoughts that have come out of our visit to the ASIS 2009 expo this week:
- Relatively light traffic on the exhibition floor, especially before 1 pm on Monday and on Wednesday.
- Several executives mentioned that U.S. Government money was finally starting to flow in the second half of this year.
- We heard rumors that GE Security may be split up in order to sell it.
- Schneider has completed its assimilation of TAC and has changed its name; the Pelco brand apparently still carries enough market value for Schneider that it is remaining distinct.
- SCM Microsystems, which acquired Hirsch Electronics at the end of last year, announced on Monday an agreement to acquire Bluehill ID an investing firm specializing in RFID technology. In the combination, SCM shareholders will own 60% of the surviving entity.
- Although many have said that video surveillance has had a rough time, several booths in that segment appeared quite busy at the show.
- Several companies, such as ShotSpotter, SEER Technology and AOptix, brought sophisticated technologies to bear on some age-old problems and seemed to be on the cusp of significant business. We’ll have to keep tabs on them to see how they live up to their initial promise.
In an interesting anecdote, K&G Spectrum, told us about a potential customer who wanted to track animals and was very concerned about any possible harmful effects of millimeter wave radiation. The executive who spoke to us mentioned that other customers wishing to detect humans never had such concerns.
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Posted by Peter Yu ptyu@gtadvisors.com
September 19, 2009
On Thursday, March 5th, the Department of Labor reported initial unemployment claims for the weekend February 28th at 639,000. This came on the heels of 670,000 the prior week and a string of increasingly bad numbers in the prior weeks. With each week economists would talk about unemployment rising to 10% or more. With each crippling prediction would come another crushing blow to the stock market. The difference for me that time around was that I said to myself how many times are we going to discount 10% unemployment. This was getting ridiculous and I felt I needed to start building a list of stocks to buy.
With the market rising on March 10th, I made the plunge and bought eight stocks from a variety of sectors. While I would like to brag about my timing, about two months later with all of the stocks up, I began selling them off with a 16% profit that at the time felt very good. Yet I have kept track of those stocks since I sold and if I held them all today the return would have been over 50%. Fortunately I came to my sense weeks after selling and put some money back to work, but through out this bull run I have left a lot of money on the table and remain nervous about how sharp the rebound in this market has been.
I read the WSJ this morning and focused on an aritcle by James Grant titled “From Bear to Bull”. While I don’t know Grant well, I do know he is regarded a voice of reason, which sometime is synonymous with bear. He made a well reasoned case for a very strong recovery, that made me look at my own nervousness about the market being ahead of the recover seem like it could be misplaced concern.
We are seeing a continuation of very cautious behavior by our potential clients, a cautiousness that for me has felt like squandered opportunity. What if the recovery that springs from the fiscal and monetary stimulus of the past year does not produce the tepid, jobless recovery that so many are predicting? Would you you be acting the same way? Perhaps you should be considering a different course than the one you are on.
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Posted by Kevin C. Slocum, Managing Director, kslocum@gtadvisors.com
