This article was in local Albuquerque newspaper. You can view article at this URL:
abqjournal.com
Thursday, August 10, 2000
Sign Can Put Your Firm in Lights
By Aaron Baca
Journal Staff Writer
Advanced Optics Electronics in Albuquerque has something it wants people to see — tens of millions of people eventually.
It is tucked away now in a workshop in the back of the company's offices at 8301 Washington NE. It is small enough to escape immediate notice; but big enough, the company believes, to turn conventional billboards into advertising antiques.
It is a programmable flat panel display custom-made for outdoor advertising.
Advanced Optics, or ADOT for short, is preparing an announcement that its patented display is ready for the commercial market.
"We've finished the prototype stage," says ADOT executive vice president Leslie Robins. "We've already got three companies coming into Albuquerque that want to take a look at this."
In addition, the company already has six orders on the books, Robins says.
The announcement couldn't come sooner. Shares of ADOT have dropped in value steadily since earlier this spring. The company had missed a self-imposed deadline for completing its prototype display.
Robins acknowledges the company was late. But he said the delay allowed the company to incorporate better technology.
Some shareholders of the relatively quiet, publicly traded company have been clamoring for news — especially in the past few months as development of ADOT's prototype has been running slightly behind schedule.
A few have traded thoughts and barbs on Internet bulletin boards looking for news and expressed doubt over whether a working prototype would be coming at all.
One, indeed, has been finished.
The panel is ADOT's stake in changing outdoor advertising from the paste-up billboard you see along interstates to the glossy, fluid look of television.
The company has been listed in Forbes magazine as a piece of Albuquerque's growing technology pie and is getting second looks from investment analysts in Europe as a company with a bright future.
All of that, of course, rests on the success of its flat-panel advertising display, which until recently was the stuff of drawing boards and test circuits in a lab.
As the company prepares to announce that it will ramp up a production line for the panels, ADOT hopes investors will put their doubts to rest and buyers will start lining up.
Shares of ADOT stock, which had traded for up to $1.68 per share in the past year, closed Wednesday at 32 cents.
"We're ready to go," Robins says, summing up his reply to doubters.
Work on the prototype was supposed to be finished in the spring. But it was held up because of design changes and the incorporation of some new technology, Robins says.
After a little more than two years of research and development, the model now sits on a workbench next to an older digital display.
The old display has the ability to generate dot-matrix images in a few basic colors, but mostly in red. The ADOT display, while it doesn't look like a TV, puts on a show with full-blown, computer-generated color and motion video.
"That's the way you used to see electronic displays," Robins says, pointing at the older display, which he calls an antique.
ADOT's prototype display stands 1.65 feet tall and 3.3 feet wide and looks different from any billboard anyone's ever seen beside a freeway or back road.
It is a miniature of the panels ADOT plans to produce, but the technology the company has developed is scalable, Robins says, and will work in just about any size.
"We can go up to fit just about anything, and the only difference is the size," he says. "The image is the same. It's simply enlarged on a bigger board."
Production models will come in two sizes — roughly 7 feet by 10 feet and 10 feet by nearly 26 feet.
For demonstration purposes, the company has loaded a variety of images and video to show off the panel's color capabilities and intensity.
"The LEDs we use set this apart from the panels you might see on hotels in Las Vegas," said Mike Harmon, an engineer with ADOT.
"We can make a board with more intensity and with 10 times the resolution you'd see on boards now."
Harmon says the goal is to achieve near-photo quality on ADOT's boards.
ADOT plans to begin building the panels at its Albuquerque headquarters later this year in an expanded manufacturing space.
The company has 14 employees and plans to add up to four more by year's end. By the end of 2001, ADOT plans to have nearly 30 workers.
To generate its images, the ADOT panel uses advanced LED technology.
Thousands of the LEDs are mounted to circuit boards, which are then sandwiched together to form a panel.
A full-size board would have more than 2 million LEDs.
The company already has one patent for technology behind the panels. It is applying for two more, one of which would be for the data-transmission equipment used to feed signals to the boards by wireless remote.
The remote ability would mean companies could change the boards instantly from central offices.
The company's plan, at present, is to remain a technology company, Robins says. ADOT has no plans, he says, to become an outdoor advertising company.
"That's for those guys," he says. "That's their business."
If all goes according to plan, large outdoor advertising companies would spend up to $1.7 million for each of the large displays and hang them on billboard sites or on buildings.
The panels aren't cheap — billboards rent for much less. But the ADOT displays are millions of dollars less than jumbo TVs sold by companies such as Sony and Mitsubishi, used for similar purposes.
Financing a panel from ADOT may soon be possible thanks to GE Capital, Robins says. The company has taken an interest in ADOT's panels and has offered to help with financing for potential customers.
John Marlett, a vice president at GE Capital, says he has talked with ADOT.
The panels will allow companies to change ads instantly and sell time on them much the way TV stations do for commercials.
An analyst at Weston Partners in Connecticut last year said the company had strong growth potential.
"Now you have billboards that display a single advertisement," Weston's Eric Landis said. "With flat panels you can have a billboard that can have several ads. A company could sell time slots on a single board throughout a day." |
