Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Predicting news and runs for big % gains -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scouser who wrote (59)	7/31/1999 10:23:00 PM
From: freelyhovering	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2182

John--CJMT--You misprinted it. This is the correct designation. I couldn't find it on BigCharts or ClearStation until I respelled it. Myron

To: scouser who wrote (59)	8/1/1999 7:58:00 AM
From: CIMA	Respond to of 2182

KAZ.AL - August 1, 1999 HILLS OF CASH Winter sports equipment taken to a new frontier By GLEN WHELAN -- Calgary Sun From goggles with heads-up display to snowboards sporting full-motion computer graphics, the future of winter sports is alive and well inside Bill Morton's head. Fuelled by a love for the mountains and a decidedly over-active imagination, Morton is taking the technology behind microprocessors, space-age composites and active pixilation and putting it where industry giants never dreamed it belonged. And while his gizmos and gadgets have yet to hit the North American marketplace, Morton's hi-tech vision of the ski and snowboard industry has already become one of the hottest new plays on the Alberta Stock Exchange. Calgary's Kazz Industries Inc. (ASE: KAZ) has emerged as a market darling since hitting the public markets in April, with its stock price tripling from its initial public offering price of 80 cents. Not a bad performance for a company whose most talked-about products are still on the drawing board. But Morton insists there's a ravenous appetite for his brand of technology among what he calls some of the most forward-thinking athletes anywhere. "I'm not talking about tweaking the graphics on a pair of skis each year, I mean a real sense of innovation," says Morton, a 41-year-old businessman and ex-treme skier-turned inventor. "The big players in the industry are slow, they're antiquated, they think in mechanical terms when the rest of the world is thinking in terms of electronics," he says. "Snowboarders want something different. We're here to capitalize on that appetite." According to the U.S.-based National Sporting Goods Association, snowboarding is the fastest-growing sport in the world, with over one million snowboards having been bought in America alone last year. And if it's innovation consumers want, Morton's got it in spades. Take his first product, for instance: A pair of ski poles that retract to just 14 in. in length with the push of a button. Or the company's ski goggles -- which are still in the development stage. They'll use active pixilation to provide a heads-up display of temperature, time, speed and pitch of terrain. "It uses inexpensive, miniaturized technology that's already available," Morton says. "We're just fine-tuning it and applying it in a way no one else has thought of." Morton admits his biggest challenge is to convince consumers that Kazz is a serious snow sports company that's not just creating novelties. To that end, he's put his retractable ski poles on the shelf for a few years to focus on flogging his wide range of snowboards. Although they've only ever been sold en masse in Japan, his top-of-the-line boards have already earned a loyal following among some of the world's elite snowboarders. And several U.S. team members have forsaken lucrative sponsorship deals with established manufacturers to use Kazz brands for free. At the lower end, the company is actively pursuing contracts with large toy store chains to sell its entry-level composite boards, which are significantly cheaper to build due to the company's unique injection-molding process. "It's a market that hasn't been exploited," says Morton. "For the price, they're by far a higher-quality board than anything else on the market."