Excerpts from interview with Martin Holleran last month in Northwest Airline magazine "World Traveler":
Q what are your future licensing plans to other manufacturers?
A. we don't intend to be an rca or sony or to take on those companies head on.
in fact our sales goal for this year is modest only 20,000 units.What I believe will happen is that this product will be so compelling the big manufacturers are going to want to have it. so we could set up some alliances with them, and they would be the ones to take it to the masses some day.
Q.what would projectavision do from that point?
A. we basically can become their r&d and testing arm.we will stay on the leading edge with proprietary technologies . It will work for us and them, and it will work for our key partner texas instruments. This is why we put together the whole OEM alliance to manufacture our product.
Q.Yes, projectavision is using outside contractors to build the product,why?
A.There are two ways to take a product to market. one one way is to try to build everything yourself. you can get so mired down in trying to do that you forget why you came to the party.
we chose to do the opposite. we talked with a number of manufacturing companies about the concept of the product and it's future potential in terms of cross licensing.and in the end we made an alliance with two key manufacturers.
Skipping...
Q.so is your business model to develop the technology ,market the product,grow the initial market,then cross license for volume growth?
A.that's right . we ahve 12 people in our company. it may grow to 15, but beyond that it just isn't necessary.there's just too much capability out there you can source. so we have somewhat of a virtual company here. it makes us a lot more agile,and we'll continue to develop. we're already working on the second stage design of this product to make it smaller and more compact.
Q.Speaking of investments, the US is about 2 years away fromhdtv broadcasts.will the digital home theatre be able to handle these?
A.It could be upgraded for hdtv because this is a 100 percent digital product.HDTV is a digital transmission standard,just the way direct broadcast satellite signals are.
skipping....
Q.Will you build a satellite reciever in the digital hame theatre?couldn't you feed the signal directly to the display in pure digital form?
A.Absolutely, we could even build in a computer or a lot of other functions such as a home security system. there are a number of things that we would like to do as we move forward ,but e'll take it one step at a time. One of the dangers I think for a small company with a product that has so much potential
is that if you're not careful you're doing a little bit of work everywhere and not
enough work on the fundamental product.you have to stick to your knitting in the first yearand get a great product out there. then you can buil much more effectively from your base of success. |
